The Strangers All Are Gone is the fourth and final volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, collectively entitled To Keep the Ball Rolling. This fourth volume, like its predecessors—Infants of the Spring (1976), Messengers of Day (1978), and Faces in My Time (1980)—draws its title from William Shakespeare. Irritatingly, the American edition has omitted the epigraph, in this case from Romeo and Juliet, act 1, scene 5, lines spoken by Juliet’s nurse: “Anon, anon!/ Come, let’s away; the strangers all are gone.” The series title is taken from Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance (1913):
To keep the ball rolling I asked Marlow if this Powell was remarkable in any way.
“He was not exactly remarkable,” Marlow answered with his usual nonchalance. “In a general way it’s very difficult to become remarkable. People won’t take sufficient notice of one, don’t you know.”
Powell began his memoirs after completion of his twelve-volume roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, the last book of which appeared in 1975. The Strangers All Are Gone covers the period from the immediate postwar years (thus overlapping slightly with Faces in My Time) to the early 1980’s, with an emphasis on the 1950’s and the 1960’s.
At the outset, Powell distinguishes this concluding volume from its predecessors:
Hitherto a comparatively sustained chronological narrative has been achieved, but the last twenty or thirty years are not always tractable to continuity of design. As one picks one’s way between the trees of Dante’s dark wood of middle life its configuration becomes ever less discernible.
Instead of continuing the chronological approach of the previous volumes, Powell explains, he has compiled “a kind of album of odds and ends in themselves at times trivial enough.” He follows this disarming admission, however, with a characteristic throwaway line: “In the course of my own reading I have often found the trivial to be more acceptable, even more instructive in the long run, than some attempts at being profound.”
This wickedly underplayed defense of the “trivial” points to the heart of Powell’s great achievements as a writer while at the same time suggesting his liabilities. Powell is simply one of the finest writers of his time—not only in Great Britain but also in the English-speaking world. The failure of the critical establishment to recognize his stature is a complex affair, to a certain extent, extraliterary (witness the charge that Powell’s art is “elitist”), but it surely can be attributed in part to his refusal to pay obeisance to the gods of high seriousness.
To say that there is a deeper purpose to Powell’s comic vision is not to underestimate the pleasure of laughter for its own sake or the gift required to evoke it in others. In Faces in My Time, Powell observed that John Aubrey, the seventeenth century antiquary and biographer (himself subject of a biography by Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends, 1948), was a
writer in whom a new sort of sensibility is apparent, the appreciation of the oddness of the individual human being. Aubrey’s real originality in this respect is often dismissed as trivial observation, dilettantism, idle gossip, by those who have skimmed through his writings superficially.
The same may be said of Powell. His memoirs, like his fiction, evince a superb “appreciation of the oddness of the individual human being”—and, by extension, the oddness of human life in general. In writing, there is no royal road to the full truth of human experience. All approaches are in some ways inadequate; what counts is that the work be informed by what Czesław Miłosz calls a “passionate pursuit of the Real.” The Strangers All Are Gone is indeed an “album of odds and ends,” an album that transmits to the reader an extraordinary range of experience.
Powell begins with a chapter largely devoted to two British writers who will be unknown to most of his American readers: Julian Maclaren-Ross and Jocelyn Brooke. In this opening chapter, many of Powell’s finest qualities are evident: his gift for portraiture; his unusually wide sympathy, both as a reader and as a friend; his rare ability to pass along, offhand as it were, invaluable observations on the novelist’s craft. For readers of A Dance to the Music of Time, there is the added interest of seeing in Maclaren-Ross the prototype of X. Trapnel, one of Powell’s most memorable creations. Finally, there are the infallible pleasures of Powell’s comic genius and his supple prose style.
That style, like Powell’s humor, can be treated properly only in extensive quotation. It is distinctively British English yet hardly typical of English-as-it-is-written in Great Britain in the 1980’s. Elliptical, stylized, Powell’s manner occasionally recalls that of Wyndham Lewis, acknowledged in Messengers of Day as a considerable influence; no other analogue presents itself. Many reviewers have remarked a Proustian fondness for labyrinthine sentences, yet Powell’s language is as often clipped, epigrammatic. A paragraph from the first page of The Strangers All Are Gone gives something of the flavor of his style, although it cannot represent his range:
Drastic changes are by no means essential to a novelist. They can hinder as well as help. It is sometimes naively thought that novelists need to taste every cup, but there is no absolute necessity to be, like Dostoevski, kept for several hours wearing only a shirt in temperature under freezing expecting to be executed. What matters is an individual appreciation of life’s contingencies in those or more humdrum circumstances; capacity to apply the result of that understanding in a novel.
The piling up of modifying phrases in the paragraph’s third sentence, used to comic effect (and dangling participles be damned), is a good example of the confident idiosyncracy of Powell’s style. Also worth noting is the close resemblance between Powell’s prerequisites for the exemplary novelist (“individual appreciation of life’s contingencies . . .”) and his definition, quoted above, of the “new sensibility” apparent in John Aubrey. It is that individual tone that Powell seeks, and thus among the passages of acute, informal literary assessment scattered throughout The Strangers All Are Gone, one finds discussions of Maclaren-Ross, Jocelyn Brooke, the Austrian writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia (1897-1976), and other relatively esoteric figures as well as more familiar names.
In the course of this last volume, Powell sketches personalities as diverse as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Erich von Stroheim; recounts his experiences as a reviewer and literary editor for several periodicals in postwar London; describes the notorious Chatterly trial (which leads to a more general consideration of erotic literature and pornography); offers his impressions of America and Americans and of Japan and the Far East; and provides a marvelous account of two literary conferences, the first in Venice, the second in Sophia, Bulgaria. Whatever the ostensible subject of a chapter, there is no telling what sort of curious anecdote it will lead to—the story of the Vicar of Stiffkey, for example, who, “in due course unfrocked for relations with prostitutes, earned a living by appearing at fairs in a coffin being consumed by the fires of Hell, and finally succumbed to a circus lion.”
The concluding chapter, however, “Grave Goods,” is a disappointment, highlighting the unsatisfactory aspect of Powell’s defense of the “trivial.” Powell’s refusal to come to any “general conclusions” is at once coy and irresponsibly casual; observing that for “many years now acquaintances have been standing conclusions generously in the all too crowded bar of this masquerade,” he implies that those who confront life’s ultimate questions are guilty of a lapse in taste. As an alternative, he chooses to answer (with some irony) a Japanese professor’s question: “What do you think of Shakespeare?” In this choice, which leads him to explore the question of Shakespeare’s sexuality as revealed in the Sonnets, Powell is at his most perverse. Still, he concludes this final chapter with a fitting image of his art, understated and supremely self-assured, lyrical and funny. In answer to his own question—“if the consolation for life is art, what may the artist expect from life?”—Powell relates an “incident mentioned quite casually in Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors, an incident which provides him with his exit line:
Vasari says that on a winter day in Florence, when snow was deep on the ground, one of the Medici sent for Michaelangelo to build a snowman in the courtyard of the Medici palace. Notwithstanding those . . . who dislike the High Renaissance one can scarcely doubt that the finest snowman on record took shape.