To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell

by Anthony Powell

To earn the reputation of a literary giant within the generation of Waugh, Orwell, and Greene is no mean feat. To do so with the grace and genius that characterized Anthony Powell—whose twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time is possibly the only English-language work to match the majestic scope of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past —is nothing short of spectacular. Yet Powell himself remains absent from his writing; he was, said the New York Times , "a writer of mordant succinctness who rewards the reader while revealing little of himself."

Powell did eventually reveal himself in four volumes of memoirs, published between 1976 and 1982. This edition of Anthony Powell's Memoirs is an abridged and revised version of those volumes, a version that has never before been published in this form in the United States. The result is not only a fascinating view of Powell as a man and an author but also a unique history of British literary society and the social elite Powell lampooned and moved within from the twenties through the eighties. From Eton and Oxford to his life as a novelist and critic, Powell observes all—the obscenity trial sparked by Lady Chatterley's Lover ; Shirley Temple's libel suit after Graham Greene reviewed Wee Willie Winkie "with even more than his usual verve"—and paints vivid portraits of Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and countless others. Most importantly, Powell's lively memoirs banish all thought of the man as a relic of the British gentry. He was a modernist, a Tory, and more than a little interested in genealogy and peerage, but a man who, according to Ferdinand Mount, "miraculously knew what life was like."

Genres: Memoir, Biography, Autobiography, Nonfiction, Classics, 20th Century

472 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

People best know British writer Anthony Dymoke Powell for A Dance to the Music of Time , a cycle of 12 satirical novels from 1951 to 1975.

This Englishman published his volumes of work. Television and radio dramatizations subjected major work of Powell in print continuously. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "the fifty greatest British writers since 1945."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony...

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this memoir by the novelist Anthony Powell, but then i am a sucker for anything written about the British Bright Young Things between the wars. At over 450 pages of dense but superbly written pages To Keep the Ball Rolling is for Powell enthusiasts only but it delivers for those who revel in that era. All the legends of the British intellectual class seem to have met and drank/dined with Powell. Affectionate and acerbic portrayals of Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Robert Byron, Waugh and even a great vignette on encountering Scott Fitzgerald at a Hollywood Commissary left me wanting to read the entire 4 volume unabridged memoirs . Powell is a marvelous writer and great storyteller as one would expect from the author of A Dance to the Music of Time I would love to have had the opportunity to meet him.

[David]

The condensed version of Powell’s four volumes of memoirs. A lot of information related to generating Dance, and a huge number of anecdotes of varying interest about an enormous range of people and places.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure that Powell was enough of an egoist, as he might say, to really satisfy the reader's craving for personal details as a memoirist. But this is a wonderful collection of sketches of his widely various acquaintance, with the narrator largely revealing himself, so to speak, through the back door. The consideration of Shakespeare at the end provided a fascinating window into his thought processes.

[Dale Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talks of the Bete Noir Club - whereby all memebers have to add a name to the list, and no matter who they are whether brother wife or best-friend, all other members of the club must persecute them mercilessly.

[Hester Furey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun and engaging, a chatty who's who of the 1930s and 1940s in the English literary world. I was sorry when it ended.

[ErnstG · Rating 3 out of 5]

A densely-written autobiography of a classic upper-class English life (Eton, Oxford, married an aristocrat). I bought and read this book to understand more about ''Dance to the Music of Time'' and gained it by a different route from that anticipated. On the one hand I don't think I have come across an author's biography that says so little about books or writing, on the other it is clear that the 12 volumes are derived from life.

He must have been quite a private person, so little is told of his private and family life. On the other hand there are any number of fascinating insights into his contemporaries, and delightful snippets.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this book up from the free bookshelf in the ticket office at Bramhall train station. I’d never heard of Anthony Powell, but thought I’d find it interesting - which it was, but ultimately too literary for me. I’ll return the book to the bookshelf when I’m next passing.