Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time

While the biography is well written, I found it disppointing. A connection between the reader and Powell was missing and there seemed to be a hesitancy in the writer's approach to the subject (the discussions of some of Powell's friends and colleagues were much more interesting). I found that the book just ran out of steam toward the end. Powell's memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling, covers many years in his life in a much more entertaining and informative fashion than this biography.

Hilary Spurling is a great literary biographer -- her life of Ivy Compton-Burnett proves that. Anthony Powell is a great English novelist -- Dance to the Music of Time proves that. For whatever reason, though, this biography is disappointing. The facts are there and Spurling's connection of the life to the Dance is fine -- no overstating. There is simply a spark missing.

The book is readable, detailed, but if you have read Powell, much of it would be of the no-big-deal category. BUT, if you have read Powell's novels, especially his twelve volume Dance to the Music of Time, then this book becomes almost a companion to the books. Places, people and events fall into place as you pass through Powell's life. This biography is sending me back to the sequence again. These novels entranced me, drew me into the lives to the point when one character killed in the Blitz of WWII, I was shocked as though she had been 'real.' The biography shows us how Powell could write this way about a group of people whose lives shifted around and about each other, pushed by events.

Learned so much about Anthony Powell that I never knew from his books or his 4 volumes of memories. Liked all those back stories of his life and who his characters were based on in real life--if only a little.

Excellent bio by skilled author. A great read for fans of the Powell/Waugh era

Thanks!

A book I expected to liked - I loved. The man came alive, as did the world he lived through, in all its complexity. So many names, familiar and otherwise, linked in a gavotte of relationships. Spurling's command of this huge challenge is complete, not least because she knew Powell.It is always worth risking a different kind of book. It takes you somewhere fresh. This one rewards the brave in many surprising ways. I know the period; if you don't you could get lost. But not for long.

Fabulous book!! Loved every minute of it!

My sixth form English teacher recommended 'A Dance to the Music of Time' to me (thank you, Mr Crook!) and since then it has been an inextricable part of my life. Up until my mid 30s I read it over and over again, like painting the Forth Bridge. Since then it and I have rather lost touch, but this book has sent me back to it like an old and trusted friend re-encountered by chance with whom one can pick up just where one left off (much the sort of thing that keeps happening in 'Dance').I found the early chapters rather overwhelming; they seemed to be little more than a series of guest lists for parties. There was not much sense of Powell's interior life, and he came across as somewhat superficial and shallow. I liked him more once he got married and moved to the country. His struggles with depression, his often painful fallings out with friends and the almost miraculous synergy of his marriage humanised him. And the account of the writing of 'Dance', harvesting in tranquility the fruits of his hectic youth, made me realise what a work of genius it is.This is not the most psychologically penetrating biography I have ever read, but then that is rather the point given the subject. Powell, like his hero Nick Jenkins, is simply the vessel through which we receive the world just as it is.

I started reading A Dance to the Music of Time as a distraction to revising for Finals in 1977 and the sequence has meant a lot to me and led to an interest in Constant Lambert, who was a close friend of AP. I have collected all the novels, even the very slight final ones, and the memoirs, also pretty weak. I found this biography disappointing; rather like Evelyn Waugh the knowledge of the author's life rather detracts from enjoyment of the literary works. I felt the author was holding back, probably because of her close links to the Powell family. The photographs and artworks were often too tiny to decipher, and there were few new insights to anyone steeped in Powelliana. Lambert's affair with Margot Fonteyn is barely mentioned, he was a truly tragic figure, whereas Powell comes over as rather tiresome. I am hesitating about passing the book to my son, who is also a huge fan of the Dance.

Having read Powell's novels, plays, memoirs and journals, I hesitated before buying Hilary Spurling's biography: could there truly be anything that she could write about Powell's life that would add anything worthwhile to what Powell had written himself? I'm glad that I overcame my doubts. This is a book that most Powellians would enjoy, I think.Ms Spurling comes to her task eminently well qualified for it. Firstly, her biography is authorised, so she had full access to the Powell family's archive. Secondly, she was herself a friend of Powell's for more than thirty years. Thirdly, she shares something of Powell's own sensibility; like him, she has a keen appreciation of absurdity and an aesthetic that majors on literature and painting - her earlier books include lives of Matisse and Ivy Compton-Burnett. And fourthly, she is a biographer who researches diligently and writes with great skill - she has won several important literary prizes.I wouldn't claim that her biography is quite as absorbing as Powell's own work. In essence, what she gives us is the raw ingredients that Powell used in the great banquet of his fiction, and it was, so to speak, the genius of Powell's cookery that made his art so delicious. But there's no little fascination in learning things about Powell's life that his own books omitted, and also in glimpsing something of the alchemy that turned the material of his experience into the gold of his stories. If there's a degree of superficiality about Ms Spurling's blizzard of names, holidays, parties and romances, that's not something that I'd reproach her for - Powell himself was, I think, a man more absorbed by the surface of things than the world's mysterious depths, and no biography of him could be other than rather gossipy.Penguin have done a fine job of producing Miss Spurling's work. Her book's 510 pages include 56 pages of source notes and a 22 page index. Fifty-seven black and white illustrations are integrated into the text (some, admittedly, ridiculously small), and thirteen coloured plates bring us some Powellian art, including, of course, A Dance to the Music of Time. Coloured endpapers reproduce some of The Chantry's boiler room collage: a phantasmagoria of photographs, paintings and drawings that nicely sum up Powell's vision of the marvellously variegated tragedy and comedy of human existence..

Just as Nick Jenkins, the narrator of 'A Dance to the Music of Time', remains an elusive figure, so, as others have noted, Powell often seems almost on the periphery of his own biography. Perhaps this reflects reality: a rare subject genuinely more interested in other people than in himself, or perhaps driven to unusual self-effacement by his peripatetic childhood and extraordinary father. As Jenkins might put it: ‘who can say?’I found the early chapters, with their breathless parade of friends and acquaintances, rather exhausting: I enjoyed the book more once Powell had married and his life became more boring. But the book’s great virtue was in prompting me to re-read 'Venusberg' and 'A Question of Upbringing'. My enjoyment of both was enhanced by knowing more about how far they did and didn't reflect Powell’s own experience of Eton, Oxford and of relations with women as a young man. And for that I shall remain very grateful to Hilary Spurling.

If you have never read Powell's magnificent work of twelve novels then read no further. Spurling has written a biography of Anthony Powell (pronounced the posh way: 'Pole') which does justice to this relatively unregarded author. This biography provides an illuminating background to the writing of 'Dance to the Music of Time' and to where Powell drew his characters from. If you have read 'Dance' then Spurling's biography is a 'must read'.

written after the longest gestation period ( 20 years?)I found it slightly disappointing. Excellent portrait of Violet though!perhaps Hilary Spurling knew him too well . The diaries give a much better and more interesting picture of him. Curious silence on the sons and grandchildren too.

After reading it, i knew little more about his character and personality than before.A will of the wisp.Introverted?Who knows? So much effort and time gone into writing this biography and so little understanding of the man for the reader.

I bought the Anthony Powell biography on the reputation of Hilary Spurling as a Xmas present for my brother. He has read it and really enjoyed it so I expect that any fan of Anthony Powell's work would also enjoy it.

I struggled with this. I'm a fan of A Dance to the Music of Time and enjoy literary biographies, but this didn't quite do it for me.I think the main problem is that Powell just remained opaque to me. Although the biography is interesting in revealing the ways Powell's life supplied material for the Dance sequence, I didn't find it revealed much about the mind that deployed that material.It was also rather heavily weighted to the earlier part of Powell's life. The first 9 chapters cover the years 1905-1959 (average 6 years per chapter). The remaining 40 years are consigned to one further chapter (covering 1960-75) and a Postscript. This no doubt reflects in part a greater quantity of incident and documentation relating to Powell's earlier years. But I also got the impression, perhaps unfairly, that the author's interest and/or energy was flagging. (Perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings: I wasn't altogether sorry about the rather cursory treatment of the older Powell.)I also noticed a couple of factual errors.It's stated that Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis were Oxford contemporaries. But Conquest was at Oxford from 1936 to 1939 while Amis went up in 1941. (In any case, they did not meet until 1952, and then not in Oxford.)Also it's stated that "in 1988 the Heath government made him CH, or Companion of Honour". Of course the government in question was Thatcher's not Heath's.Neither of these errors is a big deal, but the second of them should surely have been picked up by a competent copy editor. The unfortunate consequence of errors like this surviving into the published text is a diminution of the authority of the text as a whole.Perhaps I've been a bit unfair. It's certainly worth reading if you're at all a fan of Powell.

An excellent biography, with far too much attention to the "Dance" cycle and far too little to the five earlier novels and the one later one. This is best seen as an adulatory homage with little literary criticism.

Attention ! J avais mal lu et croyais commander le roman d Anthony Powell. Je me suis retrouvée (le nom de l auteur de la biographie est en tout petit, celui d Anthony Powel en grand) avec une biographie d Anthony Powell...

An excellent description of a very long, but surprisingly uneventful life

A good informative read.

Christmas gift to my husband. he was surprised and pleased.

Very enjoyable book by a very knowledgeable author at a very acceptable price