The writing of today, in winning an absolute freedom of expression within certain hitherto prohibited areas, has proportionately lost ground where much could formerly be said with effortless grace.
-- Anthony Powell, Faces in My Time: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, v. III (Holt, Rinehart and Winston; 1980)h
This volume covers the years 1934-1951, when Powell published his fourth and fifth novels, married Violet Pakenham, went to Hollywood to find a job scriptwriting and served in WW II in the Welch Regiment and the intelligence corps. During the war Powell also published a biography of the 17th C. writer John Aubrey, whom Powell describes as "a writer in whom a new sort of sensibility is apparent, the appreciation of the oddness of the individual human being." Powell himself delights in such oddness and we get vivid portraits of known (to me) personalities such as Macolm Muggeridge and F. Scott Fitzgerald (whom Powell met in 1937 when Powell was looking for a writing job in Hollywood after working in England for Warner Brothers on "quota quickies") and unknown (to me) personalities such as banker Harry d'Avigdor-Goldsmid and translator Alexander Dru.
Powell also has a great deal to say about the army and the necessity of improvisation when dealing with military regulations and also much to say about literature, high and low. After the war Powell became a regular reviewer of books for a number of periodicals ("self-pity is an all but invariable element of the best seller," he once said) but it seems to be either he does not feel passion or, more likely, does not express it, not for the art he likes or for his wife and children. I suppose this lack of passion is not surprising for an Englishman born in 1905. Nonetheless Faces in My Time is full of sharp observation and intelligent analysis of the period 1934 to 1951 in England.
No comments:
Post a Comment