Infants of the Spring by Anthony Powell

One learns in due course (without ever achieving the aim in practice) that, more often than not, it is better to keep deeply felt views about oneself to oneself.
---Anthony Powell, Infants of the Spring (1977, Holt, Rinehart and Winston)

I first read Powell's wonderful 12-volume work, collectively titled Dance to the Music of Time (from a Poussin painting), in the seventies (the volumes were published 1951-19750) and recently decided to re-read them.  But now I am reading, for the first time, the four volumes of Powell's memoirs, starting with Infants of the Spring (a reference to a speech by Laertes in Hamlet about holding on to youth and virtue), which covers Powell's birth in 1905 to his graduation from Oxford in 1926.  The style is rich and elegant, with a vocabulary ranging from "ablation" to "puissance" and beyond.  It's an effective evocation of a particular upbringing in a particular time and place.

It would be rather a fool's errand to try to relate the people Powell knew (many of whom are unfamiliar to me) to those who populate his novels, and I never understood why such a game appeals to people, but his portraits of the many people he knew, especially the writers, are sharp, fair, incisive.

On Henry Yorke (who wrote as Henry Green):  "He has a deep interest in the eternal contrast between everyday life's flatness and its intensity."

On Evelyn Waugh:  "When not suffering from melancholy, Waugh had extraordinary powers of improvising -- and carrying through --- antics on so extensive a scale that a great professional comedian seems to have been lost in him."

On George Orwell:  "Orwell's gift was curiously poised between politics and literature.  The former both attracted and repelled him; the latter, close to his heart, was at the same time tainted with the odour of escape."

Infants of the Spring tells us a great deal about the students and Oxford dons that Powell knew but little about Powell himself, though when he does talk about himself -- such as when he picked up a girl without knowing that she was a tart -- it is both moving and amusing. I am, of course, looking forward to Hilary Spurling's forthcoming biography.