The observer

Anthony Powell:

A Life

By Michael Barber

Duckworth Overlook, 338 pp., illustrated, $29.95

It's always difficult to discuss the late British novelist Anthony Powell because hardly anyone knows how to pronounce his name. It was decades after I had read one of the early novels in his 12-volume series, "A Dance to the Music of Time," that I learned his surname rhymes with "hole." At least I was in good company. Powell's own countrymen mangled his name at his funeral, and the US ambassador to London, Raymond Seitz, botched it during a 1984 American Embassy ceremony honoring Powell. According to biographer Michael Barber, Powell rose to answer the ambassador that he would "cease to insist on people rhyming Powell with 'Pole' when the 'Lowells of Massachusetts' -- which he pronounced to rhyme with 'bowels' -- 'did the same.' "

Seitz later described this "as perhaps the greatest faux pas" he committed in Britain, "which given my many other faux pas, is a considerable distinction."

Barber is a British man of letters, so he repeats several times that Powell had the misfortune of playing fourth fiddle to his much-better-known contemporaries -- Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, and John Betjeman. But this is the British perspective. I daresay Connolly and Betjeman are almost unknown here in the United States. Waugh is a treasure of the English-speaking world, a certified Big Deal, and deservedly so. But thanks in part to the pre-AOL/Time Warner-owned Little, Brown, which loyally published all 12 volumes of the delightful "Dance" in the United States, and now thanks to the University of Chicago Press, which has kept the novels in print, I would like to think that Powell might place second in Barber's hypothetical four-way race. At least on these shores.

So who was Anthony Powell? He was probably the most skilled chronicler of Britain's 20th-century "tweener" generation, the men and women born when England was perhaps the world's preeminent power, and who lived to see the mighty empire slip beneath the waves. The great paradox apparent to Powell and to his contemporaries was that England was simultaneously very great as a world cultural power, and very small geopolitically.

In Powell's England, and in his novels, much depends on where one came from. Powell, like Connolly and George Orwell, attended Eton, the school that has groomed the United Kingdom's elite since its founding by Henry VI, in 1440. (Barber gets off this wonderful line: "Eton boys wear black, it is said, because they are still in mourning for their great benefactor, George III.") Powell was, first and foremost, an Etonian. He was smart, not brilliant, and not "good at games" and thus condemned to the upper-middle stratum of the British intelligentsia. In this insiders' world, he was a partial outsider. He wasn't rich, he wasn't liberal, and he wasn't homosexual. He could wax astringent on the subject of women: "It is an illusion of every woman that she is less tiresome than other women," he once observed.

Powell was schooled in a world begging to be fictionalized. His Eton housemaster had a fetish for women's shoes. His history teacher later tutored the future Queen Elizabeth II. His "fagmaster" -- an upperclassman for whom he served as valet -- was Lord David Cecil, who went on to become a distinguished biographer and professor of English at Oxford. Powell's extraordinary claim to fame, which few believed, was that he had never been beaten at Eton.

Eton cast its shadow over Powell's long and rich life -- he died in 2000, at the age of 94 -- and across the lengthy "Dance," where many of the characters are launched from a prestigious public school in the 1920s, soldier through World War II, and surface in a radically changed postwar Great Britain. Most of the characters in "Dance" remember the shadowy power-monger Kenneth Widmerpool, who rises to become a titan of industry and government, not as a promising or brilliant pupil, but as someone who wore an ill-fitting overcoat that called attention to itself. So Widmerpool was marked from childhood as someone who would never be quite square with the establishment.

Biographer Barber does not evade the core fact: Powell was a snob. To be fair, he was a broad-minded snob. Although he suffered from the true vice anglais -- an obsession with genealogy -- he once remarked that if there were a Burke's Peerage for plumbers and waiters, i.e., ordinary people, he would consult that, too. (One is reminded of the famous North Shore snob Louis Agassiz Shaw II, who kept a copy of the Social Register hanging next to his phone, and told his servants to ignore calls from anyone not listed there.) One of Connolly's wives remarked that during what was meant to be a scenic drive, "Tony droned on endlessly about [his wife, Lady] Violet's heraldic 'quarterings' and never once looked out the car window." When the author purchased his country home, the Chantry, in 1951, Barber remarks, "Powell had completed his double: a wife with a title and a house with a drive."

There is one other fact that Barber cannot evade: Powell's life was a closed book. While Powell was himself a gossip-monger, he was quite discreet in print. As one critic said of his four-volume memoirs, "He discloses nothing about himself." At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, "Dance to the Music of Time" is quite sexy. Marriage is not a particularly sacred bond in Powell's fictional London, especially not in the artistic Bohemia occasionally penetrated by his characters, and certainly not in wartime. His characters fall in love several times in a lifetime, and act on their emotions. One suspects Powell did the same, but it can only be a suspicion. He and Lady Violet Pakenham were married for 66 years, and little is known about their outwardly harmonious union. When Lady Violet wrote her first book, in 1960, her publisher complained that it was "lamentably lacking in sex, scandal, or bad taste."

Alas, the same is true of Barber's thoroughly engrossing biography.

Alex Beam is a member of the Globe staff.