Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy six, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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Our castaway this week is one of our most distinguished novelists, Anthony Pohl.

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Mr. Pearl, could you adjust yourself to a long spell of loneliness? Well, I don't mind being alone as such. I don't think I'd like to settle down for the rest of my life never seeing anybody, but I don't mind being alone for comparatively long periods. Are you an optimistic person? Not at all. No, deeply pessimistic. What would you be happiest to have got away from? That's very difficult. Uh I think general rush and noise and people and um above all um

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lack of discipline, I think.

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Does music play a a big part in your life? No, not an enormous part. What was your plan for selecting a record?

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Well, I think chiefly if I were on a desert island, I think uh nostalgia. I think that um one would like to be reminded of one's past life, and I think that probably

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Affected me most in choosing the records I have chosen. Where did you start?

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If you were the only girl in the world, which I suppose I heard when I was about

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Oh, about ten, I should think. One of the very early reviews I went to. Not the first. And the name of the show was The Bing Boys Are Here. That's right.

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and it was sung by George Robi and Violet Lerone.

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We're the only girl in the world.

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And you are the only one.

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Nothing else would matter in this world of ordain.

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We could go on loving in the same old way.

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George Roby and Violet Lorraine. What's your second record?

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Where I laid on Greenland's coast from The Beggars' Opera, which I suppose I saw when I was about fourteen or fifteen, and I think must have seen at least three times. It the whole show made a deep impression on me. It had the wonderful Lobert Fraser decor, which Lobert Fraser, his art was so immediately pillaged that, of course, it now seems rather cheap, but I think it was very original.

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And there were many.

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wonderful tunes in the Beggars' Opera, but I think this particular one had an extraordinary emotional, not to say erotic, bearing when one was young.

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Were I laid on Greenland's coast, And in my arms embraced my last, Woman meets eternal blast, To fuller up his night would pass. But I swore on Indian soil, Soon as the burning day was closed, I could warm my soul to each oil When on my

Anthony Powell3:21

Uh

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I must promise to be home. I would love you more than every night would kiss my hand.

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If we would have wondered stray Over the hills and far away Where the hell in my life

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And even me was close, but he won that so

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Where I laid on Greenland's coast from the Beggars' Opera,

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And in that case, the Polly and MacHeath were L T Morrison and John Cameron.

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Mr. Pearl, you're from a Welsh border family and the son of a regular soldier.

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And you were at Eton and Baylor College, Oxford. During those formative years, had you already

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started to write.

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No, I don't think I really began to write at all, apart from uh a certain amount of undergraduate journalism, until I came to London. And then I

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began at least one ineffective novel, but I don't think got more onto more than a few pages.

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But in Radba

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The early part of nineteen twenty nine I started a novel, and then really wrote that straight off.

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which appeared in 1931's novel called Afternoon Men, and it was an outstanding first novel.

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What were you doing at that time? What job did you take when you came here? Well, I worked in a publisher's office. I used to clean the ink pots out and compose the ads and that sort of thing.

Anthony Powell5:04

Will I work

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You had a spell writing film script.

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Well, I did, yes, but every young man who produced a reasonably successful novel in those days aspired to be in films. And I, for a very unhappy six months, I did write film scripts. And then I went to America, hoping to get a job there. And was in Hollywood for two or three months.

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Uh but um failed to get a job.

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Are any of the British films that you wrote still extant? Do I remember?

Anthony Powell5:40

I don't think

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in um uh in the celluloid at all.

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Were you writing in the British equivalent of writer's row? I mean, were you sort of a salaried employee? Yes, I was indeed. In fact, I think many convicts are better treated. One was expected, one was on the mat if you arrived later than five past ten in the morning or left earlier than five to six in the evening. And you were expected to work all Saturday afternoon too, though occasionally you were not forced to.

Anthony Powell5:53

Yeah.

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Ha ha ha.

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I would infinitely rather be in the army.

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Well, you you soon were, because the the war started. Yes. You joined the Welsh regiment and afterwards the Intelligent Corps. Did you have any opportunity for writing while in uniform? No, not at all. I never had a moment to myself to do anything of the sort. But I did r uh read a certain amount of um tremendously heavy books. For the

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biography of John Aubrey, the seventeenth century antiquary, which I planned. And I read all sorts of um books when I was on leave or sometimes in the evening, which I think would have been

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Very heavy gang if one had been in any other circumstances. They were a tremendous relief, if you were in the army, to suddenly retire to the 17th century. And you wrote that book about Aubrey when you were eventually out of uniform. When I was demobilised, I sat down, worked extremely hard, and managed to get it out by 1948, I think.

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Let's have your third record. What's that to be? That is Rigoletto, which I thought would be rather corrective to the view of love expressed in if you were the only girl in the world and um where I laid on Greenland's coast. And of course also it does represent Eau Fert opera, which I rather enjoy too. And this is going to be Woman is Fickle? That's it, yes. I think it's hard to deny that um view, don't you?

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Bunny Panzio.

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Sempre le chadroiso viado riso perennzoñero.

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I won't give it for you but I hate

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La Donore Moble sung by Luciano Pavarotti.

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Now the war was over.

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You had written your book about Aubrey.

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Did you take a job? Because I know that for most of your working life as a writer you've liked to have a steady job in the background.

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Yes, I was on the TLS for a time and I did a lot of other reviewing. The Times Literary Supplement. Times Literary Supplement, yes. And various other reviewing jobs I did. Yes, you worked for Punch for a while. I was literally editor of Punch for some years, indeed for about six years, I think. Now, you decided not to go back to writing novels, but to write a novel. Yes.

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Now did you have a clear idea of just how many volumes this novel was going to take?

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No, I knew it was going to take a great many, and I didn't really know how many until I really got within sight of the war, and I knew that I would want to write at least three volumes about the war. Which years does the sequence cover? Well, I suppose that it really begins when the um the narrator is about uh about seven or eight and uh takes him on until he's about um

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Well, in his late sixties, that is about the the spread of it.

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But the the first one came out in 1951 and the last one appeared in 1975 last year.

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You called the work The Music of Time. Now there's an echo of of Proust in that title, although neither your intention nor your style owes anything to Proust.

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Yes, well I would quite agree about that. It it is simply a chance that there is this picture by Poussin which is called A Dance to the Music of Time which did seem to me to cover very much what I was going to write about and it shows the seasons dancing to time who is playing while they dance and it was really purely a chance which I never thought about at all that it that the title resembled Proust in any way. Each book is quite separate. It can be read on its own. It can, it can, although of course preferably I like to think of it as a long novel and of course it does all link together.

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Now in that vast work there are hundreds of characters. Do you think visually, do you know what all the characters look like? Well yes, I think I do really. I think I do see them visually. And I always remember my old friend Constant Lambert saying he always liked characters to be described. He liked saying he's a middle-aged man with a chestnut moustache. He then felt that he knew what the character looked like.

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Well the work turned out to be twelve volumes long.

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It was

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Well, it virtually does finish last year, wasn't it? Its conclusion must have left a great hole in your life, twenty-five years' work.

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That was it too.

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Well, it hasn't really, you know, because one's always interested in the book that one is writing at the moment. And I'm now writing these memoirs and I really find I'm interested in them. And I put the um I put the novel entirely behind me.

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You also published two plays, The Garden Gard and The Rest I'll Whistle, which have never been staged. No, both were quite near being staged, and both last moment um uh failed to um

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Fail to make it.

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Disappointed feeling? Not in the least, because I made up my mind when I wrote them that I would have all the fun I could out of them. And I was slightly stuck at the moment in writing novels. And of course, it's a totally different technique. And I found it was a wonderful purge to turn to this other form of writing. And it didn't really worry me at all. Record number four. What's that? That is Tales from the Vienna Woods. Why?

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Do not

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Remember Vienna, which I've always enjoyed whenever I've been there very much, and of course all this wonderful fantasy life of um the old sort of pre-war Viennese life, I think that would chowen up one's solitariness.

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Tales from the Vienna Woods, Ville Boskowski conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Now you mentioned that you were writing some memoirs, an autobiographical sequence to keep the ball rolling. Now your twelve volumes of The Music of Time is told in the first person by a character named Nicholas Jenkins, who's a writer who went to Eton and Oxford, who served in the war as a liaison officer. To a considerable extent, hasn't your autobiography already been written in the novel sequence? Well, I like to think that it hasn't, because I think there are certain things you can say in a novel, which I don't think you really can say in autobiography. I think that everybody approaches autobiography in a different way, and I feel very much that there are certain things which I can only express by way of a novel.

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And I can only hope that people will not feel a severe duplication. But of course, I don't think it's for me to say. I think it's for the reader to say it. The first volume of To Keep the Ball Rolling takes you to the age of twenty. How many volumes will there be? Well, again, I don't really quite know yet. I will have to decide as I write them. And of course, it also depends how long I'm spared. I may not, um one doesn't know if I write another twenty volumes. Clearly, um uh I should have to be very old to to do it. You're going to stay with the autobiography, with the memoirs. You're not likely to be sidetracked by the memory. I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I think it would be very unlikely.

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I think

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You live in the country nowadays. You're you no longer have one of those uh steady jobs with magazines. No, no, I no, I I live in the country. I still do I still do some um steady reviewing. I d I do fairly a couple of rather tough books a month for reviewing for the Daily Telegraph.

Anthony Powell15:23

No, no, no.

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How do you like to work? Do you start every morning at the same time? Oh, yes, but half past nine, work till lunch time. You work very slowly and carefully, don't you? Yes, I do indisc copies on the typewriter. A great deal of revision.

Anthony Powell15:41

Yeah.

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Yes. I think we've got now to record number five. What's that? Uh it's it's borrowed in Spolovtsen dances from Prince Igor. Insofar that I have any tastes in music, I always like Russian music very much. And I think the um the Polovtsen dances are very characteristic. I rather like this feeling of um Central Asia and the um sort of dry steppe and so on. I think it's c brought across very well very well.

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The Pelathian dances from Baradine's Price Ego.

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The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karigan.

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Let's go straight into the next record. What's that?

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That's Constant Lambert's Rio Grande. You said that he was a friend of yours. Yes, he was a very old friend of mine. And of course also, I knew the Sitrals well, and it is a poem by Sassy Sitwell from the Thirteenth Caesar, and it very much brings back that particular period of my life. And I think on the island it'd be very pleasant to contemplate the Twenties by way of that.

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Constant Lambert conducting the Halley Orchestra in the opening of his own The Rio Grande.

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This desert island dilemma, in a practical sense, how well could you cope? I think St. Francis preached to the birds who brought him food, didn't he? I think my only hope would be to um um talk about the novel to the monkeys in hopes that they might bring me coconuts or something of that sort. Would you try to escape?

Anthony Powell19:11

Yeah.

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Yeah.

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What

Anthony Powell19:14

Uh

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Well, I d shouldn't do anything at all risky. I might uh fly my shirt from one of the trees or something to try and attract attention, but I don't think I should try to um go off on a raft or anything, because I'm sure I should be drowned if I did that. Let's have record number seven.

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That is Darius Millo's Creation du Monde, which rather follows up the twenties line of thought and I think brings back that period very much with the general noise and a curious mixture of cynicism and yet enjoyment which I think very much characterized that period.

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Paris

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Darius Milo conducting his own The Creation of the World. And now your last record. What's that? Well, the final one is uh from Tubicius Iberia.

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which I think would be for rather gloomy moods on the island.

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It's got a wonderfully bleak side to it.

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Part of De Bussy's Iberia, Ernest Onsome conducting the orchestra of the Suisse Romande.

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If you could take just one disc of your aid, which would it be? Well, I think I would have Lambert's some Rio Grande, which I think would.

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have most of the um characteristics which I like, the chow and up. And one luxury to take with you. Well, my luxury would be a bottle of wine every day, of red wine, and I would drink a third of it

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at lunchtime and two-thirds at dinner.

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We will arrange enough for you to to cover the length of your sojourn. That'll be very kind. I don't mind perfectly ordinary rough red wine with the money.

Anthony Powell23:01

What the

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Not too rough.

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Well, no, not too rough, because um uh to recall

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Constance Ambert again. I remember he and I once bought a bottle of wine called Tawny Wine Port Flavour one afternoon, and it is one of the few bottles of wine I have been unable to drink. I think there are only two others as far as I can remember.

Anthony Powell23:23

Yeah.

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And one book apart from the Bible, Shakespeare and big encyclopedias.

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Yes, well I should like A Hero of Our Time by Mikael Lamontov, which although it's quite a short book, has an extraordinary number of facets to it. And I think that if I had the Bible and Shakespeare to ponder over all the time, I should always be finding new things also in Lamontov's book. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lamontov.

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And thank you, Anthony Pearl, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Anthony Powell24:08

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.