Here again, reading that deceptively dense sentence, one is reminded of what it is to be molded by a very highly evolved and somewhat stratified society. In such a system courage is neither a sufficient nor even in the strict sense a necessary condition for the high calling of arms; a force that depended on mere bravery would be merely a militant rabble—subject to mood swings, perhaps, and indubitably depriving its officer corps of opportunities for understatement. Such almost invisible writing about the most palpable of questions is a continual distinction of Powell’s work and an unending reward for the reading of it.
Powell chose the hymns for Orwell’s funeral, in 1950:
The Lesson was from Ecclesiastes, the grinders in the streets, the grasshopper a burden, the silver cord loosed, the wheel broken at the cistern. For some reason George Orwell’s funeral service was one of the most harrowing I have ever attended.
As I say, Powell knew when and how to write sparely. He also had some sense of the gold standard as applied to people. The fact of his having helped out liturgically at the funeral of that determined atheist calls attention to what I think is the inescapable conclusion that Powell, too, had no use for religion per se. He didn’t flaunt the fact, but the absence of religion as a subject—an absence also very large in his fiction—eventually obtrudes itself. Consider this statement of his cherished values:
It is better to remain calm; try to remember that all epochs have had to suffer assaults on commonsense and common decency, art and letters, honor and wit, courage and order, good manners and free speech, privacy and scholarship; even if sworn enemies of these abstractions (quite often wearing the disguise of their friends) seem unduly numerous in contemporary society.
Hard to imagine leaving “faith” out of that taxonomy unless on purpose.
Writing of a close and admired wartime friend, Alexander Dru (a relative by marriage of Evelyn Waugh’s), Powell wondered (as one so often does about newly made friends) how it was that he had never met Dru before. Later on he supplied a clue by observing in passing that Dru was “a Roman Catholic of profound—though incessantly searching—belief, he was on the whole inclined to frequent Catholic circles (no doubt one of the reasons we never met).” Something more was being said here than that Powell was not himself a Catholic. As the memoirs scrolled out in four “movements”—childhood, youth, maturity, and late middle age, mirroring the subdivision of Dance into the four seasons—Powell began to strike the note of “melancholy.” (A word search—not that he would countenance such a thing—would disclose an increasing reliance on the term.) This is interesting in two respects: Nicholas Jenkins is represented as working on a biography of Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Powell decided to face the problem head-on in, so to speak, real life.
Even after reaching one’s early sixties letters start to arrive from insurance firms and the like opening with the words: “You will soon be sixty-five, etc., etc.,” causing the recipient to reflect: “Well, it’s been kind to allow me to stay so long.” As the eighth decade gradually consumes itself, shadows lengthen, a masked and muffled figure loiters persistently at the back of every room as if waiting for a word at the most tactful moment; a presence more easily discernible than heretofore that exhales undoubted menace yet also extends persuasive charm of an enigmatic kind.
Death is the mother of beauty, hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment of our dreams
And our desires
Anyway that was what Wallace Stevens thought; others too. Again—as with loudly decrying the world and its ways—a tranquil approach is probably to be preferred, rather than accept too readily either Death’s attractions or repulsions … better that the dual countenances of the ubiquitous visitant should not cause too prolonged musings on either the potential relief or potential afflictions of departure. Better, certainly, not to bore other people with the subject.
Again, in this masterly harnessing of the stoic to the limpid, a brisk coda ensures against any languor or, indeed, longueur. Try reading it in combination with the arm-wavings of that other Welshman Dylan Thomas, all about rage and dying and light, and see which holds up best. And then, just as one thinks that must be the old boy’s final word (the term “bore” is designedly the most annihilating in the English vernacular), there is this:
All the same the presence in the corner—whose mask and domino never quite manage to keep out of sight the ivory glint of skull and bones beneath—seems to imply, even if silently, something of that once familiar cadence, harsh authoritarian knell of the drinker’s passing day … “Last orders, please—time, gentlemen, time,” in this case the unspoken sanction: “Last conclusions, please.”
Such a nicely subliminal evocation of The Waste Land gives a polite nod, in passing, to the faithful while helping to demonstrate that Powell himself declined their invitation.
The reflections of successful writers on other writers, and on the craft of writing, can be astonishingly banal. On the whole, Powell preferred to make very vague and general and lenient remarks about his fellow authors, especially if they were contemporary. But many readers, I suspect, would be surprised by his lack of enthusiasm for P. G. Wodehouse—a lack that, although not elaborated, is explained in part by this mild but firm judgment on Evelyn Waugh.
He really did believe in entities like a “great nobleman,” “poor scholar,” “literary man of modest means.” Of course, in one sense, such stylized concepts may certainly exist, but at close range they usually require a good deal of modification …
The “high-life” of Decline and Fall is mostly depicted from imagination, hearsay, newspaper gossip-columns. Later, when Waugh himself had enjoyed a certain amount of first-hand experience of such circles, he was on the whole not much interested in their contradictions and paradoxes. He wished the beau monde to remain in the image he had formed, usually showing himself unwilling to listen, if facts were offered that seemed to militate against that image.
In Powell’s understated terms, this ranks quite high on the scale of condemnation. (He was elsewhere at some pains to praise Waugh as a man, to sympathize with him in his troubles, and to defend him from some accusations of rudeness.) The position he was championing, it must be emphasized, was that of realism. Waugh may have fancied himself a Tory modernist, but Powell intuitively knew that the claim was somewhat phony. He was also implicitly defending himself as the chief claimant while indirectly rebuking the critics who lazily arraigned his work for Waugh’s sins of snobbery.
In his youth Powell spent some time in the Baltic and in Finland, where his father was en poste as a military attaché. (The experience led to one of his early experimental novels, Venusberg.) I do not know whether this conditioned him to an interest in Russian writing, but in a paragraph so brief that one might almost miss it he did say roundly that for him the chief author was Dostoyevsky, whose “characters and situations have one of the qualities I prize highest in a novelist, the ability to be at once grotesque yet classical, funny and at the same time terrifying.”
This struck me forcibly when I read it again, because these memoirs do consent, every now and then and with a certain resignation, to identify certain minor characters in Powell’s Dance, the detection or unmasking of whom is a long-established parlor game in English literary circles. Yet Powell never ventured the least discussion of his most finished and fearsome cast member, the Dostoyevskian Kenneth Widmerpool. There are multiple and variegated achievements in Dance, but this creation is Powell’s certain ticket to literary immortality, an evil figure of fun whose crass, obtrusive, unstoppable visage we are all doomed to confront at some time or another. I apologize for quoting myself on Widmerpool, but the effort it cost me to summarize him when reviewing Dance is one I could not bear to attempt again.
The shortest way of capturing the essence of this grotesquely fascinating and repellent figure might be to say that he is a monster of arrogance and conceit, but entirely wanting in pride. Bullying to those below
him, servile and fawning to those set in authority, entirely without wit or introspection, he is that type of tirelessly ambitious, sexless, and charmless mediocrity that poisons institutional life, family life, and political life. He is the perfected utilitarian and philistine.
You’ve met him, all right. He would be recognizable in any culture. But he has never been traced to any “model,” and Powell disdained to play the game anyway in this instance—for the excellent reason that Widmerpool belongs with Falstaff and Raskolnikov and Uriah Heep, and not in the pages of Who’s Who.
American readers inclined to regard Powell as too insular might be surprised, and not unpleasantly, by his selection of Hollywood and American encounters: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Erich von Stroheim, and Paul Robeson.
“Fitzgerald,” he wrote, “—that rare phenomenon, a ‘bad’ writer who made himself into a ‘good’ writer—had lost much of his former appeal simply because he had begun to produce immeasurably better novels than his early work.” The two men lunched at the MGM commissary during Powell’s rather disappointing stint in Hollywood in 1937. His description of the meeting contains one of the best encapsulations of character on short acquaintance that I know of. It is rounded off, from the memoir point of view, by Powell’s being acute enough to notice, from later reading, that the date of the lunch (July 20, 1937) was the day on which Fitzgerald had his fateful dinner meeting with Sheilah Graham.
Powell met Stroheim more glancingly, some years later, at a festival of Stroheim’s films in London. Stroheim was evidently in a “profoundly melancholy” mood, from which he was roused only by Powell’s recollection of the group of military attachés on Monteblanco maneuvers in The Merry Widow. (During the war Powell had been a liaison officer with the exiled military staffs of Hitler’s victim nations.) Stroheim kindled at this compliment to his sense of detail—or sense of realism—but lapsed back into melancholy, saying, “I no longer look like the Oberleutnant I once was.”
As for Robeson, Powell met him during a KGB-supervised lunch for the hack Stalin-era novelist Mikhail Sholokhov. The following vignette gives one a sense of missed opportunity.
I mentioned to Paul Robeson that I had been fortunate enough to see his Othello which he had played in London a long time before. I would have liked to discuss with him the Black WPA Macbeth watched in Los Angeles [in 1937], but new introductions had begun to take place. In fact, Robeson’s Othello had been interesting rather than impressive. He had seemed to tackle the role with a sense of grievance alien to Shakespeare’s self-confident Moor. The Black WPA players had been infinitely less tense.
Again the dry sting in the tail; it would have been something to witness the scheme of this conversation as played out in a Soviet Embassy drawing room. (Powell passed on a tip from Gore Vidal about attending workers’-paradise writers’ conferences in the old days: “I always sit next to a man in a turban. You get photographed more.”)
As for the writerly life itself, Powell gave occasional guidance throughout, much of it rather conversational but none of it trite, and some of it, it seems to me, positively lapidary. There is more than meets the eye in this memory of adolescent reading:
One day in School Library I came across a magazine (I suppose The Criterion) which contained a long account of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I was very interested by what was said, but this interest seemed quite separate in itself; causing, so to speak, no conversion or repentance as to middlebrow reading matter. Such forms of intellectual double-harness are perhaps characteristic of literary self-education.
When this boy was a bit older, he applied the same pragmatism to the design of an extraordinarily ambitious literary project:
I had been turning over in my mind the possibility of writing a novel composed of a fairly large number of volumes, just how many could not be decided at the outset. A long sequence seemed to offer all sorts of advantages, among them release from the re-engagement every year or so of the same actors and extras hanging about for employment at the stagedoor of one’s creative fantasy. Instead of sacking the lot at the end of a brief run—with the moral certainty that at least one or two of the more tenacious will be back again seeking a job, if not this year or next, then in a decade’s time—the production itself might be extended, the actors made to work longer and harder for much the same creative remuneration spread over an extended period; instead of being butchered at regular intervals to make a publisher’s holiday.
There were many objections to setting out on such a hazardous road, chiefly the possibility of collapse, imaginatively speaking; simply dying (something bound to happen sooner or later) before completing the book.
These memoirs open with a very young man who began to frequent an antiquarian bookshop run by an indigent admirer of Oscar Wilde’s. They conclude in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain (the closing volume was published in 1982, when the author was indeed alive to see the vindication of his project), in a long meditation on the authenticity and the sexual character of William Shakespeare. The raw material of life interested Powell, as it had to; its slow refinement into the finished product of culture and society and language absorbed him far more. The suggestion in that last excerpt, of all the world’s being a stage, contains a very bold insinuation: a parallel between this diffident and subtle novelist and that inspired, panoptic but ultra-practical Elizabethan actor-manager, who was always ready to write a new scene at need, or to raise an appreciative laugh from the cheaper seats, but who was able to capture both pity and terror in a delicate verbal noose. The implication strikes me as less profane than it might once have done. Powell (even by his choice of a Bardic title for the closing volume) wisely left it latent; but as I say, he did have a sense of the gold standard.
(The Atlantic, June 2001)
John Buchan: Spy Thriller’s Father
Review of John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, by Andrew Lownie.
THERE IS A DRY WIND blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark.” I can remember the frisson I felt when I first read that line, as I can recall the faint sense of absurdity that accompanied the thrill. People don’t really talk like that, as I half understood when I was twelve, but then, they don’t really talk like Kipling’s believable soldiers either. The words—which occur in the opening pages of John Buchan’s Greenmantle—are uttered in a secret office near Whitehall, in London, as Sir Walter Bullivant briefs Richard Hannay on the extreme hazard and implausibility of his upcoming mission to save the empire. Even at that age I preferred Bullivant’s style to the affected gruffness of “M” as he summoned Commander James Bond to a confidential session on the newest Red Menace supervillain.
In several respects Buchan is as different from Fleming as chalk is from cheese. The hero Hannay is uninterested in sex, revolted by all forms of cruelty, and ill at ease in the modern world of cleverness and greed and deceit. He is a late-Edwardian version of the strong, silent type that upheld chivalric values while playing “The Great Game,” and he is doomed to see most of his friends immolated in the trenches of the Western Front. But Buchan spanned the gap between Kipling and Fleming, and his stories furnished a crossover point for beginning readers between the straightforward “adventure” book and something resembling the adult novel. I like to think that they still do, and this in spite of their occasional preposterousness (“There are some things,” Hannay reflects near the beginning of Mr. Standfast, “that no one has a right to ask of any white man”).
Buchan’s following in America probably derives chiefly from The Thirty-nine Steps—the first of the Hannay tales, and the one that was famously transferred to celluloid by Alfred Hitchcock. Here one has a very well-shaped thriller, with many vertiginous shifts of plot and scene, a dastardly set of foes, and a game played for exceedingly high stakes. The reliance on coincidence or the fortuitous is often questionable, but the results at the same time are never quite incredible. And the hero is, as I hinted before, more of an innocent abroad than a calculating agent. He is actuated principally by
loyalty, either to friends or to country, and when he meets sheer evil, he is often baffled as well as repelled. This innocence may or may not be the counterpart of his creator’s rather alarming sense of integrity. What is a modern and wised-up reader to make, for example, of Hannay’s encounter (again in Mr. Standfast) with the lovely Mary Lamington: “I didn’t even think of her as pretty, any more than a man thinks of the good looks of the friend he worships”? Since Mary is also described as having a boylike grace of movement, even the least jaded attention is inevitably drawn to what is apparently being disowned. We do not nowadays think of the British Secret Service as a place where the polymorphously perverse was unknown.
One of the merits of Niall Ferguson’s recent work on the British Empire is the reminder it provides of how Scottish that empire was. Not only did the Scots provide a vast proportion of the soldiers and miners and ship’s engineers of the system (I have seen it argued that Scotty on Star Trek is a tribute to this grand tradition), but several colonies bore a distinctly Caledonian stamp. Even today a visitor to New Zealand or Canada is bound to notice the influence of Scottish architecture and of the Scottish educational and religious heritage; and in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, and the city of Blantyre, in Malawi, the imprint of Scotland is to be felt in numerous distinctive ways. The battle flag of the Confederacy, indeed, displayed the cross of Saint Andrew; and I recently read an account of the revolution in Texas in which one of the proclamations under discussion featured a stirring line from the poetry of Robert Burns—the more impressive because it was unattributed and assumed to be familiar in the context.
Scotland, Christianity, and empire were the air in which Buchan moved. Born to a struggling minister of the Free Church of Scotland (a congregation that had seceded from the established local church and stood for a flinty Calvinism), he revered the epic story of David Livingstone as a missionary in Africa, went out to serve as a member of Sir Alfred Milner’s governing team during and after the Boer War, was elected to Parliament as a Scottish member (on a liberal Conservative and Ulster Unionist platform), and ended his days in 1940 with the title of Lord Tweedsmuir and the office of governor-general of Canada. In his fiction Highland and Lowland dialects are employed in almost every chapter, and there are recurrent allusions to Scottish vernacular poetry and song.