Agents and Patients

by Anthony Powell

Unsavory artists, titled boobs, and charlatans with an affinity for Freud―such are the oddballs whose antics animate the early novels of the late British master Anthony Powell. A genius of social satire delivered with a very dry wit, Powell builds his comedies on the foibles of British high society between the wars, delving into subjects as various as psychoanalysis, the film industry, publishing, and (of course) sex. More explorations of relationships and vanity than plot-driven narratives, these slim novels reveal the early stirrings of the unequaled style, ear for dialogue, and eye for irony that would reach their caustic peak in Powell’s epic A Dance to the Music of Time.

Genres: Fiction, 20th Century, British Literature

272 pages

First published January 1, 1936

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

[John Reis · Rating 4 out of 5]

“He that is not free is not an agent, but a patient,” John Wesley.

We meet Maltravers and Chipchase who have ideas and goals but no money to pursue them. Then we meet Blore-Smith who is well-off, unfocused, without direction. Maltravers has decided to leave his wife Sarah, but then doesn’t. They have a friend Mrs. Mendoza, who owns a flower shop.

They both decide that they must keep Blore-Smith around so they can mooch off of him.

Chipchase decides that he must psychoanalyze Blore Smith and takes him to Paris to break him from his timidity and indecision and dependence. Blore-Smith disappears one night when they visit a bar and in the morning cannot recall what he did. Although he has lost his wallet.

Chipchase and Blore-Smith go to Berlin to meet up with Maltravers. Blore Smith spends some time with Mrs. Mendoza, who has followed them to Berlin and agrees to run back to London with her.

He begins to lose interest in her but at the same time would like to avoid Chipchase and Maltravers.

He is aware that they are trying to make a living off of him but he does not have the courage to just say no.

Chipchase and Maltravers show up at their cottage and says they must tall go to Broadacre to get started filming their movie.

Mrs. Mendoza had abandoned Commander Venables when she ran off with Blore Smith. He comes after her when they are all down at Schlumbermeyer’s country house for the filming. Venables makes a scene which Gaston tries to extinguish. Gaston challenges Venables to a duel; he is rebuffed, as Venables says “This is England; we do not duel here.”

Maltravers films the entire scene. It is as if he had contrived to make this happen.

Blore-Smith decides that he must get away from these people, so he leaves and returns to his old apartment. Several days later Maltravers and Chipchase show up and present him with some bills which he pays. They announced they are leaving for America.

Blore-Smith had acquiesced and joined their circus but, in the end, went right back to his lonely barren apartment.

This novel was more farcical than Powell’s other early work. The writing was quite good.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘So in every possible case; He that is not free is not an Agent, but a Patient.’
Wesley: Sermon lxvii

Having enjoyed the 12 novel sequence “A Dance to the Music of Time”, I am gradually reading my way through Powell’s non-Dance novels.
The primary agents of the title are Chipchase, a psychologist with theories but no patients, and Maltravers, who works in film in a not entirely clear function (his screen credit, if he received one, would probably be Associate Producer), but who has ambitions of becoming an auteur. Their patient is Blore-Smith, a young man with adequate money but little sense of purpose; Chipchase and Maltravers set about to relieve him of the former and perhaps eventually provide him with the latter. A number of comic incidents ensue with an eccentric cast of characters in London and its environs as well as Paris and Berlin in the very last days of the Weimar Republic. In this novel one can find, if one wishes, a meditation on free will and personal responsibility, but Powell keeps his touch very light and does not insist on the reader contemplating any serious themes beneath his entertaining surface.

[David]

As with much of Mr Powell's work, Agents and Patients grows funnier with each re-reading. Blore-Smith seems in many ways an early version of Widmerpool, but without the menace. I still find it amusing to think that, in the roman-a-clef fashion, Oliver Chipchase is somewhat based on AP himself. Peter & Sarah Maltravers, too, have real-world counterparts, and the whole Berlin of the 19030s with its film industry and its emergent Nazis is effectively drawn. The concluding chapter, short as it is, is particularly effective.

[Cecily · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little like Evelyn Waugh, but nowhere near as good. Set just before WW2, amongst the opportunistic not-quite-rich. The agents are cinematic and artistic; the patients are psychoanalytic. The would-be film maker plans a prototype reality TV documentary (though he imagines it won't make any money): filming a bunch of intellectuals holed up in a big house together and seeing how they interact - and justifying it as practical psychology.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, Powell, you're the best! This felt somewhat slight along the lines of his first novel Afternoon Men but marvelous nonetheless. I enjoyed Maltravers's relationship with his wife and the state of their home, and the drunk Marquis in chapter 5 was kind of the best.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a reviewer for the TLS in 1947, Anthony Powell wrote a piece on the British novel as it appeared between the wars. They were melancholy and satirical with 'lively dialogue and bare descriptions.' Agents & Patients, written in 1936, fits the description. Maltravers and Chipchase, two 'post-war types, already perhaps a little dated' (based incidentally on the author and his friend John Heygate, the man for whom Evelyn Gardener left Evelyn Waugh) are hard-up and in need of somebody to exploit. Along comes the cashed-up ingénu Blore-Smith, son of a deceased midlands businessman with a print of van Gogh's Sunflowers on his wall (perhaps Powell should simply have named him Room-Temperature). A series of amusing scenes occur as the knowing pair escort Blore-Smith on expensive and educative romps to Paris and Weimar Berlin. Ho-ho.
There are amusing lines, but the situations themselves are never quite as funny as their author seems to think they are. Or they have simply aged, and one is no longer titillated by the advent of an unknowing young man's presence in a brothel - though it does prompt him to conclude that it must be quite warm, because all the women have their frocks pulled up rather high.
Love his opus as I do, I think it might be time to put aside rummaging through Powell's non-Dance fiction for a while.

[Richard Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of all the prewar Powells, this is the one that's seen the least reprint action during the past half century. Many "Also by" lists on the backs of half-titles fail to mention it. This seems to me a bit odd as it's a good deal more digestible than, say, the distinctly chewy From a View to a Death. Perhaps it's the chapter set in late Weimar Germany that did the damage. The Nazis appear only briefly and, it's implied, are little more than a bit of a nuisance. By 1945, any writer of Powell's generation would have been embarrassed to have got it so wrong and would have regretted steering a lightweight bit of decadent fluff into such sinister places. Still, it remains an enjoyable 200 pages.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a really fun read but not especially awful either I suppose.

[Cera · Rating 2 out of 5]

My least favourite Powell so far, in part because the deliberately cinematic style is so distancing that I just didn't care what happened next. I also find the disillusionment of the innocent more sad than funny.

[Elizabeth Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

gave up. Sad!