Anthony Powell's Messenger of Day (1978)

Slight, sallow, among other accomplishments an expert skier, [Arthur] Waley always spoke in a high clipped severe tone, as if slightly offended, quiet, but essentially smacking-down.  He habitually refused to make the smallest compromise in the way of momentarily lowering intellectual standards in the interest of trivial conventional courtesies; demeanour that could produce in a room an extraordinary sense of social discomfort.
----Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day (Heineman, 1978)

This is the second volume of Powell's memoirs and describes seven years in London --1926 to 1933-- from the time he graduated from Oxford to his marriage.  During most of that time he worked at a publisher, Gerald Duckworth & Co., where his father paid half of his salary while Powell learned the business and wrote his first three novels. We learn a great deal about London at that time, from the writers and artists to the various neighborhoods, though not a great deal about what Powell was feeling and thinking.  And the annoying habit of sprinkling French throughout the book --in one paragraph alone there is faux-naif, monde, les deux sexes et autres, tete-montee -- does not convince one of sophistication.

Many of the people Powell mentions are unknown to me but their portraits are still vivid in this volume, as are those of the clubs and bars.  Those whose existence I am aware of come very much to life, personally and artistically, in Powell's book:

Ford Madox Ford's leaning toward modern forms might have been thought to militate against him with Gerald Duckworth, but Ford's own clubman pretensions, even if a trifle precarious when closely examined, were held to excuse a too insistent modernism.

Hitherto I had thought of [Wyndham] Lewis as a Vorticist painter.  Now his luminous prose 
[in Tarr], blocked in with a painter's eye, was at once immensely exciting.

[Augustus] John never took hold of himself, intellectually speaking, in a manner of which he should have been capable in the light of his own talents.  On the one hand he was a man who could meet anyone on equal terms; on the other, a kind of shyness, an almost startling personal modesty about his own attainments, undermined him, pointing the way to easy self-indulgence.

At the end of this volume Powell is wondering if, after publishing three moderately successful novels, he has anything left to say.