This essay is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “Afternoon Men,” by Anthony Powell, which will be published by University of Chicago Press in November.
I.
I first encountered Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men when I was about the age of its narrator and lived in a small studio in Manhattan that I eventually shared with a mouse. I worked on a newspaper copy desk by day, and in the mornings and evenings I would write my second unpublishable novel. It was set in a made-up New England town, shaped like a hand, you see, and consisted of eight interlinked tales and one larger fiction that—never mind. When I wasn’t writing, I could usually be found wandering the pages of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, the 17th-century tome that I likened to a proto-DSM-IV. It was like an anything-goes version of that medical handbook of psychiatric disorders. For Burton, practically everything was a symptom of melancholy, and practically everything—from love, to solitude, to gambling, to cabbage—was listed as a potential cause. Melancholy itself was a metaphor for the human condition. I took reams of notes, which I printed out at the office. One of the myriad subcategories Burton identified was the melancholy of scholars, which I thought I had, partly of course from studying the Anatomy itself. Thus I brought no reading material on a family trip to Yellowstone National Park, thinking that some undivided time with nature was the cure for whatever ailed me.
A couple days in, of course, I was itching for something to read. One evening, we stopped at a souvenir store on the main drag of West Yellowstone. Cowboy hats and ranch-themed trinkets dominated the place, mini-license plates with kids’ names on them, but I headed straight to the small book section as a heat-stroked nomad would to an oasis. I had ten dollars burning a hole in my pocket but the shelves held the dregs of passing tourists. I was losing hope when I spotted a spine that would change my life just as much as Burton’s Anatomy had: Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men.
It was July of 1998. Now I am a devout Powellite, one of those possibly slightly annoying people who insist on pronouncing his surname as “Pole.” (Still, as Powell himself sensibly pointed out in his memoirs, “like the Boston family of Lowell, I rhymed it with Noël rather than towel.”) Back then, in that store in deepest Montana, I only knew A Dance to the Music of Time, his twelve-volume British roman-fleuve, by reputation. It wasn’t anything I was dying to read. Why did Afternoon Men—Powell’s 1931 debut, written two decades before the Dance began—leap out at me?
Well, the Anatomy, for one. Powell took his title from Burton’s long “Introduction to the Reader,” a passage enumerating some of the people afflicted with the titular malady: “they are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men . . .” (At this point, in Montana, I am already carrying the book to the register, the equivalent of Jerry Maguire’s “You had me at hello.”) The novel’s first words—that is, the initial salvo of Powell’s long-lived literary career—are tantalizingly ambiguous.
Any good opening sentence is an emblem of the story to follow. This one is a seemingly trivial query that gets answered and dropped, of a piece with the rest of the book’s brilliant sidelong dialogue. It has the quality of being offhand, overheard, yet honed to a curious crispness. It is slightly impersonal; we don’t learn Atwater’s first name for another eight pages, and it scarcely crops up thereafter. And it seems to me that although neither the medicine nor the ailment is defined, the affliction in question that Atwater’s interlocutor tries futilely to treat must be melancholy.
In 1927, Anthony Powell, working at a London publishing house after college, wrote a letter to his friend and former classmate Henry Yorke: “Actually I am recovering from getting very drunk last night, and if I do nothing I feel everyone in the office is looking at me, so I have to write letters as there is nothing on at the moment.”
Replace “letters” with “e-mails,” and this could have been written yesterday: a portrait—call it an Instagrammed selfie—of the artist as a droll slacker. Nearly nine decades haven’t dimmed its familiarity: young people, balancing work and play, awful hangover, vague workplace paranoia, a need to connect with peers. But of course we’d never be reading this, eighty-seven years on, if Powell and Yorke did not exert themselves a bit, becoming, by any account, two of the most important English writers of their generation. At the time of this letter, Yorke—better known as the novelist Henry Greene—had already published his first book, Blindness; Afternoon Men, Powell’s literary debut, would have to wait till 1931, when its author was a comparatively decrepit twenty-five. (Duckworth, the aforementioned publisher, would bring out his book.)
The letter is quoted in D. J. Taylor’s Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age (2007). Not only does Taylor pin 1905 (Powell’s birthdate) as the median natal year for his titular specimens, but he frequently draws on Powell’s writings and, in one caption, dubs him “Bright Young Impresario.” Taylor cites Powell and Green, Nancy Mitford and Ronald Firbank, and in particular Evelyn Waugh as literary chroniclers of this micro-era, which was, Waugh later explained, “a society, cosmopolitan, sympathetic to the arts, well-mannered, above all ornamental even in rather bizarre ways, which for want of a better description the newspapers called ‘High Bohemia.’” Powell was the ultimate insider, and Afternoon Men_ _unfolds in an acutely stylized version of this demimonde.
But you don’t have to like or even know the work of Waugh and his ilk; nor possess any interest in that interwar period of English social history, or indeed of English things in general; you can be an American blissfully ignorant of (or intimidated by) Powell’s decades-spanning Dance, and still find in Afternoon Men a work of great power. Powell’s first novel is one of the pure pleasures of twentieth-century prose. The emotions are as recognizable and the wit is as fresh as in that epistolary snippet. It will feel as alive on its imminent centenary as it did on the day it was published. How did a twenty-five-year-old pull it off?
Though Powell was a graduate of Eton and Oxford (as was Yorke), neither school is mentioned in Afternoon Men. With that simple, telling omission, class evaporates. Or perhaps it’s more correct to say that the social landscape is flattened; Powell translates the high bohemia in which he participated into a sort of fantasy. It is a floating world of garrulous, witty, vain, often acid yet strangely agreeable young people. Most have some connection to the arts: painters and models, editors and writers, museum workers and poster designers. Some are ambitious, others lackadaisical; nearly all of them are failures, depending on which of their friends you listen to.
Money is a going concern for many of these giddy heads. Even something as straightforward as getting drinks is fraught with the pettiness of figuring out whether the bill is split properly. But Powell renders actual wealth absurd, to a Wodehousean degree. The father of the divine Susan Nunnery, Atwater’s elusive love interest, muses sagely on the financial field. “It’s an absorbing occupation,” he says, at a party in the house he shares with his daughter. “It leaves you no time to lead your own life. That was one of the reasons I gave it up. The other was because I had no more money.” We hear of a rich woman who, suffering from nerves, goes to “the man at Versailles,” who makes her scrub floors. “It’s a six-months’ course and prohibitively expensive. Mildred said she felt quite different after it.”
Powell fast-forwards through the financial highlights of Pringle, one of the book’s central characters, who’s as stressed out as his more penurious friends:
That's what passes for depth in Afternoon Men, which is thoroughly steeped in the "ornamental" quality Waugh mentions.
There is a comic harshness to the book’s physical descriptions. Atwater, our ostensible hero (present in every chapter), is “a weedy-looking young man with straw-colored hair and rather long legs, who had failed twice for the Foreign Office.” One fashionable young woman possesses “the look of a gnome or a prematurely vicious child,” while another is deemed “a good-looking girl with an ugly mouth.” On the hilariously self-regarding Fotheringham, who earns his bread as a sub-editor of a spiritualist paper, Powell hangs the immortal tag: “The aura of journalism’s lower slopes hung round him like a vapour.” Prior to a dinner party, Naomi Race (“no one knew how old she was”) runs down the guest list for Atwater: “Then there’s a woman whose surname I can never remember. Her Christian name is Jennifer. You won’t like her. I don’t like her myself.”
All this reflexive bitchiness isn’t just funny but endearing. Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time, is such an exquisite narrator because he rarely passes judgment: he lives life not as moral watchdog but as invested observer, always alert to comedy and coincidence. The close, cool third-person perspective of Afternoon Men follows Atwater, whose lack of gumption makes him oddly attractive. If the sharp observations are his, the overall tone is never condescending. These are, for better or worse, his pals. We laugh at and with them. Observe how he patiently lets Fotheringham unleash an impassioned monologue that seems to carry the force of serious thinking, only to peter out in forgetfulness: “What was I saying? I seem to have lost the thread.” To which Atwater responds: “Friendship.”
Afternoon Men: the title itself perfectly evokes idleness, and in vast stretches this novel recreates, with an effervescent comic imagination, that summery state. Against the flow of banter and grumblings, however, Powell has imposed three rather technical-sounding section titles—“Montage,” “Perihelion,” “Palindrome”—which give him distance and reveal his critical agenda. In the same way he can write, with pure deadpan, “They ate. The food was good,” he says with his titles: These are some scenes. Characters orbit each other, as if by the pure laws of science. This will all happen again.
I won’t reveal the climax and anticlimax here, but will only say that I have never forgotten them. Rereading them recently, I found them even more harrowing, and marveled at the skill with which they are executed. The floating world is at once drained and replenished. The book closes, as suggested by the title “Palindrome,” where it starts. Whether that’s a threat or an invitation to begin again is an open question.
In his memoir Messengers of Day, Powell writes, “The year 1928 was an annus_ _mirabilis of books that made an impact.” Topping the list for him was E. E. Cummings’s autobiographical novel The Enormous Room, which “opened my eyes to a new sort of writing, putting out of date the style of authors like Norman Douglas and Aldous Huxley.” More evident in Afternoon Men is the influence of Ernest Hemingway. Powell writes that he “systematized a treatment of dialogue now scarcely possible to appreciate, so much has the Hemingway usage taken the place of what went before.”
Here’s a tantalizing bit of seduction from Afternoon Men, where we get too much and not enough purely through dialogue:
The shorthand on Powell is that he’s the quintessential British novelist of manners, thanks as usual to A Dance to the Music of Time. The “Tory” label is often applied, which badly downplays the power and universal appeal of his work. I find Powell’s praise of Cummings and Hemingway revelatory because it complicates the stereotype that has calcified around him. As much as Afternoon Men conjures the fizzy world of London’s Bright Young People on the page, the energies behind it are modern, anarchic, and American. (Modernism side note: Powell found Wyndham Lewis inspiring, but not Joyce.)
Indeed, America becomes an ideal. In the book’s opening scene, Atwater and Pringle briefly discuss Undershaft, who is “in New York . . . playing the piano.” Remaining offstage for the duration of the book, Undershaft becomes an almost mythical figure for the crowd in England, as gossip of his fresh surroundings arrives. Two of the book’s important characters will end up there. I like when Fotheringham says, “One of the reasons I want to go to America is that I hear everybody there has such wonderful vitality.”
In Montana, all those years ago, I imagined I was getting one kind of book, an English comedy, some spiritual descendant of Burton’s deliriously overstuffed prose. But it turned out to be something more American than I could have guessed.
