To Keep the Ball Rolling by Anthony Powell (review)

Book Reviews157 ANTHONY POWELL. To Keep the Ball Rolling. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. 456 p. This is a one-volume revision and abridgement of Powell's four-volume memoirs already published: Infants of the Spring (1976), Messengers of Day (1978), Faces in My Time (1980), and The Strangers All Are Gone (1982). It acquaints the reader with a number of facts that illuminate the fictional world of this twentieth-century English novelist, who is probably best known here for his twelve-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time. But it is more valuable and interesting as a personal record of modern English literature, art, and social history. In Infants of the Spring, Powell writes, "in the field of self-revelation the altogether uninstructed can produce a masterpiece of apt expression; the seasoned writer, at times a cliché. I can find no literary explanation other than that only certain personalities are appropriate to dissection; others not" (61). His own autobiographical writings suggest a person not altogether sure which category he falls in and humble enough to accept either. Since Afternoon Men (1931), Powell has written several novels in addition to those that comprise Dance, some plays, and a study of John Aubrey; he has worked as a film scriptwriter in Hollywood, a novel-reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement , and Literary Editor of Punch. But his place among "appropriate personalities," especially modern English writers, is not clear, and he seems prepared to acknowledge that. Powell is a person for whom writing is a remonstrative, though goodhumored act of civilized, artful behavior against the big questions of life and death. And his memoirs come not from "mere egotism and selfishness," but from quiet "true interest" (61) in a self whose life has touched the borders of Bloomsbury, of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, and many others of interest. Whether his is a personality striking enough to carry us is hard to say (although this book shows one that is admirable and engaging), perhaps because Powell deliberately underemphasizes himself and his accomplishments. "One of the basic human rights is to make fun of other people whoever they are" (415), he says, and he is quick to laugh at himself as well; more significant than his explicitly self-directed humor is his refusal to take himself too seriously. Powell is a member ofthe generationjustone too young to have experienced personally the shock of the Great War but old enough to witness and participate in the tempest of moods and events that followed it. He is careful to point out the utter seriousness, the humorlessness that accompanied the despondency and brooding of those ahead of him. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, doing moderately well but antagonizing his mentor, Maurice Bowra, for the next 35 years by his honest admission that he "little liked Oxford, and . . . longed to get it over and go down" (106). Once down, he immediately took a job with the London publishing firm of Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd and set about trying to do something with his life, primarily by writing novels: "The best I could do in the way of Balzacian (or Stendhalian) ambition was that of every reasonably literate young man of the period; vague intention to write a novel myself one of these days" (117). Gerald Duckworth was a step-brother of Virginia Woolf and published her first two novels. Powell uses the occasion to mention in his off-hand way the dislike he felt for the group: "my own generation regarding Bloomsbury as no 158Book Reviews less elderly, stuffy, anxious to put the stopper on rising talent, than the staunchly anti-avant-garde Duckworths" (119). Working in a publishing house gave him a not inconsiderable advantage in "picking up the rudiments of'writing'" (158), and he worked at it until he was interrupted by the Second World War and his enlistment in The Welsh Regiment. His competent, if undistinguished, service as a soldier suggests someone with multiple talents that moderate each other. One of his long-felt realizations is that he has been something of a soldier, something of a scholar (430). Powell reveals that for some time after...