Anthony Powell: a huff to the music of time
You’re in the index, but not in the book. It’s a ghostly sensation. Yet this has been my experience since 1990 after I commissioned Auberon Waugh to review Anthony Powell’s Miscellaneous Verdicts for the Sunday Telegraph.
Waugh’s verdict appeared on 20 May. Next morning, Powell resigned in a celebrated huff from the sister paper – to which he had contributed for 50 years; Miscellaneous Verdicts was essentially his collected pieces for The Daily Telegraph, of which I happened also to be literary editor. “Top Novelist Quits in Shock Review Drama” was Private Eye’s headline.
When, seven years later, Powell published his second volume of Journals, I was intrigued to read how he dealt with this incident which had caused acute distress and which I continued to regret. The index directed me to page 40, but my name was not there. Nor was there an entry for 20 May 1990; nor any entry for Auberon Waugh, as promised, on page 49. As Bevis Hillier wrote in his Spectator review: “Of all this great literary-world brouhaha there is no mention in the book.” The absence hinted that some legal counsel may have been at work.
Then, in 2007, I myself was compelled to issue a legal threat upon receiving an early proof of V.S. Naipaul’s A Writer’s People. In his posthumous assassination of Powell, his friend of 40 years, who had died in 2000, Naipaul claimed that I had been sacked as literary editor owing to Waugh’s review. Actually, I had stayed on for another 15 months, before leaving at my own volition – despite the entreaties of the editor, Max Hastings, for me to remain – to pursue a career as a novelist. Naipaul’s remaining proofs were pulped as a consequence of my protest. When his book was published, my name had been erased – once more – from the text.
In the hope of learning what Hilary Spurling had to say about this episode in her recent authorised biography of Powell, I read “Shakespeare, Nick, 423” in the index and flicked to the page. Yet again, my name, though flagged, mysteriously fails to appear.
So what on earth happened in May 1990 to cause these vanishings?
Anthony Powell divides opinion more successfully than any of his contemporaries. It has become routine to observe that he is a form of literary Patum Peperium: you either relish him or you don’t. He himself divided the world into Fans (the word appears on virtually every page of his Journals) and Shits. Fans were those who had read and admired his work – to the exclusion of all else in the case of Miss Nancy Cutbirth of the AP Society, Kalamazoo – and were embarked on a bibliography, biography, thesis, or twelve-part adaptation of his work. Among the Shits were those journalists and bearded photographers who arrived, invariably late, to interview him about it.
I fell somewhere in the middle. I was guilty of not having brushed up on my Shakespeare lineage when I first met him in April 1985, for a BBC Arena trilogy I was making on Evelyn Waugh; and I did sit in slight amazement as, stroking his cat, he talked of Graham Greene as “a third-rate detective writer” and pronounced the novels of Gabriel García Márquez to be “rot”. But I admired Powell’s own novel sequence and the seriousness with which he approached his craft. In our subsequent encounters, after I became the Telegraph’s literary editor in 1988, he perceived me as “quite agreeable, reasonably intelligent”. In other words, neither a fan nor a shit.
For the next two and a half years, Anthony Powell was my chief reviewer. In his fortnightly notices he was happy to dispense bouquets – for instance, to Joan Collins, whose neighbour he once had been – but also brickbats, not unlike the “pasting” he had earlier given to Geoffrey Grigson, “for which I am not at all sorry, most other reviewers lacking the guts to do so.” His refusal to review contemporary novelists like Salman Rushdie (“characteristic of particular sort of bad writing”) or Julian Barnes (“can’t quite see the point”) was a source of professional regret, but, generally speaking, his name at the top of the page was a mark of distinction. I did not share the opinion of my predecessor David Holloway, who had allegedly told Naipaul: “I would pay to stop him writing.”
All went swimmingly until the maladroit decision in 1989 to merge the Daily and Sunday papers. In this new pantomime beast, I was asked by Max Hastings to take over the Sunday books pages from Derwent May – a literary editor I greatly respected – so saddling my team with the preposterous duty of running two sets of books pages on successive days. As part of the contract that he negotiated with Auberon Waugh not long afterwards, Hastings asked if I would take on Waugh as the Sunday’s chief reviewer. This I was pleased to do. I had interviewed Bron for the Waugh Trilogy. I admired his writing. I had no knowledge of any history of antipathy towards Anthony Powell. Nor was that antipathy apparent when I telephoned to ask if he would kick off our arrangement by reviewing Miscellaneous Verdicts – although admittedly in retrospect his response was somewhat constipated.
“Oh, do I have to?”
“Yes, you do.”
In a thin week, there was no other obvious contender – the only alternative candidate I recall at this distance was an anthology of the French Resistance. Anyway, what could be more apposite than the new chief book critic of the Sunday Telegraph reviewing the collected book reviews of the chief critic of the sister paper? Plus, I had already commissioned for the Daily Telegraph a reliably favourable review by Powell’s most passionate fan, Hilary Spurling; and, in the Sunday Telegraph, a long and enthusiastic interview with Powell by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, arguably his second greatest fan. In all honesty, I had no idea what Waugh would say about Powell, but I was confident that it would be well-written, lively, independent and interesting. The review was certainly not commissioned, as Hastings later wrote, “in a moment of madness”. On the contrary, asking Bron to do it seemed to me at the time, without the powerful binoculars of hindsight with which shortly everyone seemed to be equipped, quite in the natural order of things. I then went off on holiday.
I was on a camel in the Moroccan desert when the fateful piece arrived. My estimable deputy, John Coldstream, printed it without alteration. “I remember thinking, ‘This is not only a spanking piece of writing, but also a pretty good instance of our policy of showing no special favours to our own contributors!’” As I lay under the stars, unsuspecting and uncontactable, the shit, as it were, hit the fan. Among other insults, Waugh (who later maintained that his piece was merely “jokey”) criticized Powell for his “abominable English” and likened A Dance to the Music of Time to “an early upmarket soap opera” which had enjoyed a cult among ex-patriate Australians. Promptly, Powell resigned from the sister paper.
Immediately on my return from Morocco, Max Hastings asked me to report to him, keen to determine if I had deliberately engineered Powell’s resignation. Conrad Black, the proprietor, was hopping, he said. Surely everyone knew about Waugh’s long-standing hostility to Powell?
“Well, I didn’t know,” was my slightly defiant response, “and I made three films with these people.” I pointed out that the review had not appeared in Powell’s own paper, and that Waugh had been Max’s appointment. Still, this unfortunate turn of events had happened on my watch, and I had to accept the blame. “Do you want my head?”
Max was sanguine – to a degree to which, given his crusade to enliven the pages, I felt he might even have been relieved. “No,” he said. “Tony’s probably perched too long on the branch anyway.”
Moments after I returned to my desk, the phone rang. At the other end I heard a high-pitched chuckle. Bron. “Have you been sacked yet?”
I wrote to Powell to apologise, but received no reply. A propitiatory bust was commissioned of him which lurked for a while on a filing cabinet in the corridor. In 1991, when the two titles re-separated, I handed over the Sunday paper’s books coverage to Miriam Gross (a fan), and the daily paper’s coverage to John Coldstream. Even so, for the next few years, I was curious to know what manner of man it was who could dish out pastings over the course of half a century and yet be affected so inordinately by adverse criticism. When his journals were published, securing him, in John Carey’s words, “a reputation for vanity and pomposity”, it wasn’t merely my name that I found had vanished, but my curiosity too.