To earn the reputation of a literary giant within the generation of
Waugh, Orwell, and Greene is no mean feat. To do so with the grace and
genius that characterized Anthony Powell--whose twelve-volume A Dance
to the Music of Time is possibly the only English-language work to
match the majestic scope of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--is
nothing short of spectacular. Yet Powell himself remains absent from his
writing; he was, said the New York Times, a writer of mordant
succinctness who rewards the reader while revealing little of himself.
Powell did eventually reveal himself in four volumes of memoirs,
published between 1976 and 1982. This edition of Anthony Powell's
Memoirs is an abridged and revised version of those volumes, a version
that has never before been published in this form in the United States.
The result is not only a fascinating view of Powell as a man and an
author but also a unique history of British literary society and the
social elite Powell lampooned and moved within from the twenties through
the eighties. From Eton and Oxford to his life as a novelist and critic,
Powell observes all--the obscenity trial sparked by Lady Chatterley's
Lover; Shirley Temple's libel suit after Graham Greene reviewed Wee
Willie Winkie with even more than his usual verve--and paints vivid
portraits of Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
and countless others. Most importantly, Powell's lively memoirs banish
all thought of the man as a relic of the British gentry. He was a
modernist, a Tory, and more than a little interested in genealogy and
peerage, but a man who, according to Ferdinand Mount, miraculously knew
what life was like.
