Books
On the margin
Simon Raven
Infants of the Spring: Vol. 1 of To Keep the Ball Rolling Anthony Powell (Heinemann £5.00) The Novels of Anthony Powell James Tucker (Macmillan £5.95)
Anthony Powell was born on 21 December, 1905, with a silver-plated spoon in his mouth, his father being a regular officer in a dim regiment of the line and his mother a Wells-Dymoke (of the Lincolnshire family Which supplies the new Monarch's Cham!Non at coronations). From the time when he was first old enough to assess these circumstances Mr Powell has accepted them, as he has accepted all others of his life, with quiet, well informed and ironic amusement, unperturbed by envy on the one hand or guilt on the other. What is given is given, in this world as in Euclid's, and it is very silly and perverse to fret oneself a bout it.
This is one message of Infants of the Spring. The second is that such uncomplaining acceptance does not amount to passivity. Civilised acceptance implies civilised understanding, the latter of which teaches one, not indeed to attempt to change the given circumstances (for this, though sometimes Possible, is a messy, time-consuming and Pleasure-spoiling business), but to change or modify one's position in regard to them. It is all a question of angles and attitudes. Thus, I could not have been more fortunate,' writes Mr Powell, 'in my Eton house. A.M. Goodhart's was not merely a "bad" house, but universally agreed to be far the "worst" house in the school.' A fool would have tried to deny that Goodhart's was a bad house, a puritan would have upset everyone by trying to reform it; Mr Powell merely accepted it, in the same spirit of 'tolerant scepticism with which it accepted him, and set about remarking the entertainments to he derived from it, not the least of which was the eccentric character of Mr Goodhart himself'.
But all this is to anticipate. Before further examination of Mr Powell's philosophy as revealed, or hinted at, in Infants of the Spring, I should state that this book is the first volume of Anthony Powell's memoirs, TO Keep the Ball Rolling; that it comprehends some foggy Welsh genealogy (going back to the ap Howels of the sixteenth century and even to the ap Gruffydds of the twelfth), some diverting sketches of the author's more immediate forebears, and an account of his first twenty odd years from hirth to leaving Oxford with a Third in History —an account distinguished by that Sly and mocking brand of common sense Which has already been illustrated above.
This Operates, first, at the expense of
institutions and is instructively exemplified in Mr Powell's loving elaboration of his own formulae for surviving in them. Nowhere, of course, is there the faintest advocacy of change or amelioration, for the great points to remember are these: if institutions were sanely and happily run, then, firstly, there would be nothing left in them to tease or satirise, which would make them deucedly boring, and secondly there would be no excuse for shifts and evasions, the devising of which gives Mr Powell (and his readers) so much pleasure. It is, perhaps, unfortunate if boys are whipped for things they haven't done: but doubtless they deserve whipping for something else (undiscovered) which they have; it is, furthermore, salutary for boys to be early acquainted with injustice (which is. at bottom, what their parents are paying for). In any case, when the first and the last has been said on the topic, it will never be Master Anthony Dymoke Powell who is undergoing the whip. He is sitting there cross-legged and very fetching, in the photograph opposite page one hundred and sixteen, at the feet of A.W.A. Peel (later the 2nd Earl Peel) and R.W.E. Cecil (later the 2nd Lord Rockley), for whom it is his duty and privilege to fag. Fagging is rather a chore, needless to say, but there are several less pretty boys in the photo who will be doing most of the work, and anyhow if one must be a fag (as for a time one must) there is a lot to be said for obliging acknowledged grandees who will protect one here at Eton and may well be of service hereafter. This is grossly unfair to Mr Powell; I fear 1 have gone much too far. But I have, I think, conveyed an idea—albeit crude and exaggerated—of Mr Powell's technique for coping with the given realities of institutions and of the manner in which he himself describes the process. Let us now consider how he applies this shrewd, compliant and elusive ROMS' of his to dealing with people. People, like institutions, are given. It is not one's business to reform or deplore them, but to put up with and if possible enjoy them. This is best done by responding to the worst which they may say with a light and well-bred laugh, and to the worst which they may do with disapproval so civilly modulated as almost to pass for appro
bation. They will then do and say a lot more things even worse than before, from all of which one may make entertaining calculations about what finally makes them tick. This method not only elicits such incidental gems as Robert Byron's remark that he : would love to be, of all things, an incredibly beautiful male prostitute with a sharp sting in his bottom; it also leads to Mr Powell's. profound conclusion on the character of Cyril Connolly, that he suffered, not from the common disease of mere egotism (or selfish desire to push his own fortunes) but from that rare and horrifying condition, a passionate interest in, and even love of, himself as such.
Having noted Mr Powell's diagnosis of Connolly, one should add that, from time to time, Mr Powell comes perilously near to making, or rather unconsciously disclosing, the same diagnosis of himself. Among the many fascinating comments made by James Tucker (in The Novels of Anthony Powell) on Powell's narrative method, we find the following: that much of A Dance to the Music of Time is not about what the narrator, Jenkins, observed or deduced, but about the gifts displayed by Jenkins in observing or deducing it ; that for each detached and philosophic account of such or such a spectacle there is another and selfcongratulatory account, in palimpsest as it were, of Jenkins being detached and philosophic. It is something the same in Infants of the Spring: Mr Powell, while amusing us with his bland and indifferent acceptance of everything from the moral hypocrisies of A. D. Lindsay to Sir Maurice Bowra yelling 'Fuck', is clearly not at all indifferent to the spectacle of his own admirable indifference. What saves him from the infatuated interest in himself of which he accuses Connolly is this: Mr Powell, who can never resist deflating other people's pretensions, is in the end far too fair, too decent, too modest a man not to deflate his own.
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