Address at Anthony Powell's
Memorial Service

The late Frankie Howerd -- who personified Anthony Powell's maxim that melancholy should be taken for granted in anyone with a true gift for comedy -- used to preface his patter with "Welcome, my brethren, to the Eisteddfod". It seems not unfitting this morning -- as Tony Powell traced his descent to the Lord Rhys who held the first recorded Eisteddfod at Cardigan in 1176. Indeed the Powell pedigree includes several Bards, such as Llywarch Hen (nothing to do with the Mitfords, but a descendant of Old King Coel, who as Tony pointed out didn't pronounce his name "Cowell'), a knight of the Arthurian Legend -- which so beguiled the great 20th-century Bard, author of 30 immortal books, we are celebrating today. It is unfortunate that anyone keen on genealogy risks being branded a snob, a crashing bore - and probably off his rocker (as Peter Templer in A Dance to the Music of Time would have put it). In his Memoirs Tony recalled that his own father, Colonel Powell, "was not merely bored by genealogy, he was affronted". The Colonel "possessed little or no sense of the past; still less curiosity about the circumstances of other people, alive or dead". Tony, of course, was quite the reverse. Genealogy meant a lot to him -- as I discovered in the 1960s when I was working on Burke's Landed Gentry (perhaps his favourite work of reference) and he pointed out a Lincolnshire connection between us through his mother's family, the Dymokes of Scrivelsby, hereditary Champions and Standard Bearers of England. (I will spare you the details, otherwise we will be here until the evening.) Tony believed that genealogical investigation "when properly conducted" [and Tony always liked to get things right] "teaches much about the vicissitudes of life; the vast extent of human oddness". As for snobbery, Tony argued that genealogy actually demonstrates the extreme fluidity of class in this country. His Journals confirm that he was equally interested in the local Duke, who burped his way through the National Anthem, as in the giggling girls who delivered the Sunday papers to The Chantry -- his home in Somerset, where he lived with his wife, Violet, for nearly half-a-century. The Chantry is bordered by "Dead Woman's Bottom", but this historic name proved too fruity for "the plansters" (as John Betjeman called them) who wanted it changed to the ever so dainty "Chantry Vale". Tony countered by saying he would have his writing paper reprinted to incorporate "Dead Woman's Bottom" as part of the address. Tony's inexhaustible curiosity about other people (and not only people, but animals, whether his cats Trelawney and Snook or the "goat of unreliable aspect" in Sir Magnus Donners's tapestry) was the mainspring of his genius as a novelist. Indeed he regarded an interest in other people as the sine qua non of novel-writing -- an attribute lacking in not a few novelists whose interest in people extends only to themselves. Tony's fellow-novelist Iris Murdoch, herself an only child, thought that his solitary childhood was the key to his all-embracing imagination -- though Tony said that in his experience it was children of large families who tended to exhibit the traditional foibles of the only child. Among the multitudinous family he married into, he noted "the Pakenham habit of contradicting anything anyone else says". But Tony stood no nonsense. Although Tony did not have an easy relationship with his father, they had a bond through the Colonel's rather unexpected admiration for Nineties artists, particularly Aubrey Beardsley -- incidentally, the wonky hour-glass on the front of what Dicky Umfraville might have called "today's race-card" is taken from a Beardsley illustration for a poem by Ernest Dowson (another favourite of Tony's). Tony had a highly developed visual sense and to the end of his life never tired of looking at art books or sifting through his eclectic range of post-cards. Not least among "the all he gave his country" (to adapt a pet catchphrase of his from one of his beloved von Stroheim films) was his stint as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. As an antiquarian scholar and biographer, Tony effectively rediscovered John Aubrey and his Brief Lives. Like Aubrey, Tony delighted in recording quirky anecdotes of his own times. There was, for instance, the story of the Norfolk parson who was officiating at a funeral in a church not his own -- and arrived early to have a look round. Above one tomb he spotted a medieval iron helmet and, as there was time to kill, tried it on. Assuming this head-dress was easy enough; removing it proved impossible. And so when the mourners and the coffin arrived at the church they were (as Tony, with typical understatement, put it) "surprised to be received by a cleric wearing a knight's bascinet". Thus accoutred, the priest duly pronounced the burial service -- but Tony was characteristically exercised by the question of whether or not the helmeted parson had "contrived to lift the vizor" in order to conduct the ceremony. Like all fans coming face to face with their heroes for the first time, I was awestruck when I went to meet the legendary Anthony Powell at the Travellers' Club more than 30 years ago. Here was our greatest writer and most eminent literary critic, whose witty novels had entranced me with their fastidious style, paradox, irony -- and throwaway dialogue that cried out for dramatisation. Indeed in the early 1960s, his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), was dramatised successfully. This, in a sense, was the Bohemian forerunner of Dance. Reading it as a schoolboy, I was very struck by the author's description of an unprepossessing painter whose false nose at a party lends his face "an unaccustomed dignity". Dance itself was not only the finest achievement in fiction of the 20th century, it was the 20th century. Powell's universe seems more believable than the so-called "real world". His intriguingly connected characters live and breathe. One cannot walk through, say, Bayswater without expecting to bump into Uncle Giles sloping out of The Ufford (or some less respectable establishment in Shepherd Market); or Hyde Park without hearing Sillery's cry of "Abolish the Means Test"; or Pimlico without thinking of poor Maclintick, the embittered music critic, gassing himself. That evening at the Travellers' -- which Tony, incidentally, had joined back in 1930 -- I stupidly expected a grand, aloof, formidable presence of chilling authority. Instead, there bustled into the Smoking Room a toothy, chatty, friendly man, full of dry jokes and spicy gossip. I was particularly struck by the Master's charming voice. A measured, mellow, slightly sibilant drawl (redolent of Eton and Balliol), it held out the promise -- unfailingly fulfilled -- of constant amusement, stimulation, subtle, original, often oblique, observation -- so that every minute in his company bucked you up. Above all, Tony was extraordinarily funny, with a humorous curiosity and sympathy peculiarly his own. It was a tonic to hear Tony's bracing views on the absurdity of power, politics and public affairs (so witheringly portrayed through the ambitions of Widmerpool, who yet always manages to back the wrong horse) -- as well as his strictures on the idiocy and incompetence of sub-editors, publishers, journalists and so forth. He took a robust approach to the Arts. True aestheticism called for toughness; discipline. Tony was essentially a practical man prepared to get his hands dirty - whether hacking at the undergrowth around the Chantry grotto; or preparing one of his farmhouse curries; bottling wine from imported hogsheads; or covering the gentlemen's lavatory with an elaborate collage. True to his military background, he was intolerant of sloppiness and had no time for sentimentality or self-pity ("the magic ingredient of every best-seller", as he put it). In his Journals he tells of how he suggested to the dotty fan prone to telephoning at strange hours that he should consult a psychiatrist: "He said he had. Told him to do so again." (Sound advice, which I took -- hold on, it wasn't me ...) Yet there was usually a Bowra-esque element of leg-pulling and self-parody in such astringency -- and, of course, in his famous last paragraph wiggings in Telegraph reviews, correcting howlers. Above all, Tony believed that the only sort of writing worth reading was sympathetic writing. In the last entry of his Journals Tony wrote: "I realise more than ever how much I depend on V, and on the rest of my immediate family". The devoted care given to Tony in his last years by Violet and the family is beyond praise. Special tribute should be paid to John Powell, Tony's younger son (a dear friend of my wife and myself, first encountered on a Dorset cricket-field in 1958), whose selfless commitment and dedication were nothing short of heroic. Anthony Powell died peacefully at The Chantry surrounded by his family. The only child had become the beloved Patriarch of a flourishing dynasty -- his elder son Tristram, the distinguished television director, and his wife Virginia Powell, the artist, have a son, Archie -- also working in what Tony called "the unruly world of television" -- and a daughter, the glorious Georgia, married to Toby Coke. They have a son, Harry, and a daughter, Hope -- Tony's great-grandchildren. And so the Powell pedigree goes on. Tony felt his family motto -- "True to the End" -- was on the feeble side, but, like horoscopes (in which he also took an interest), mottoes can have a facile fittingness. (Hence the old journalistic formula of trotting them out in police reports about disgraced peers.) For Tony was "True to the End". He bore his long years of immobility with great fortitude -- occasionally consoling himself with the thought that at least it was better than being back with his old Regiment. His wartime service in the Army produced what many of his fans would regard as the three finest novels in the Dance sequence (and indeed the best fiction of the Second World War) -- beginning with The Valley of Bones, evoked so strongly in Harold Pinter's reading from Ezekiel and in the closing hymn today. In that book, too, the narrator writes of the inexorable pull of his ancestry towards The Soldier's Art (the title of the second novel in the war sequence). Tony's penultimate words -- typical of his courtesy and concern for others -- were "Help yourself to a drink". And on his final appearance in the library at The Chantry, he noticed Violet seemingly reaching for Burke's Landed Gentry. He said: "What are you looking up'?" On the day of the funeral, spring in Somerset suddenly turned to winter. Hilary Spurling had no doubt that the snow had been laid on by Tony himself. As Tony's ashes were scattered from a boat into the Chantry lake, it was like a vision of the ancient world which so bewitched the author's imagination. Tristram read the dirge from Cymbeline ("Fear no more the heat o' the sun..."). John half-expected a mailed arm to rise up from the water. And everyone thought of the last lines from Dance -- which we are shortly to hear read by Simon Russell Beale -- Widmerpool in Hugh Whitemore's television adaptation of Dance -- which gave Tony (a hardened scriptwriter himself in his time) such pleasure at the end of his life. Indeed my abiding memory of one of my last visits to The Chantry is of Tony chuckling away at Captain Soper's reaction to Captain Biggs's suicide. "In the cricket pav, of all places -- and him so fond of the game." Violet said that Charles Addams's cartoon of a man in a cinema audience roaring with laughter, while everyone else in the house was weeping, represented Tony. The conversation between Tony and Violet began in September 1934 when they first met in Co. Westmeath and happily carried on -- whether over games of slosh, walks in Regent's Park or cultural cruises -- for 65½ years. Anyone lucky enough to have overheard some of their hilarious and harmonious exchanges will know what a blissful fusion of souls this was -- and how much Tony and his work owed to Violet's encyclopaedic knowledge, insight into human nature and zestful love of life. Finally, many of us now echo the feelings of the narrator of Dance when he sees his enchanting composer friend, Hugh Moreland (one of the portraits that even Tony had to admit was drawn from life, in the person of Constant Lambert), for the last time. "It was also the last time" [the narrator writes] "I had, with anyone, the sort of talk we used to have together."