To Keep The Ball Rolling. The Memoirs of Anthony Powell. Volume II (Two 2) Messengers of Day

To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell #2

by Anthony Powell

To Keep The Ball Rolling. The Memoirs of Anthony Powell. Volume II (Two 2) Messengers of Day

Genres: Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction

221 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1978

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

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

More charming apercus from Powell. This is a better read than the first volume simply because the people are more interesting, and you get the sense that life is really happening to him now (he publishes his first novels in this volume, for instance). Again, totally meaningless if you don't care that Powell wrote ADTTMOT, but absolutely charming if you do. The interesting thing about the memoirs so far, for me at least, is that you get the same 'empty eyeball' feeling from the narrator as in ADTTMOT. Just as in that novel the narrator's falling in love and getting married warrants about half a paragraph of "by the way, I got married about five years ago," so here, even though Powell is ostensibly discussing his own love life and occasionally mentions how he went to certain pubs because that's where the girls were, it's pretty clear that what's interesting to Powell is the pubs and other people's love lives.

Also, how he remembers all his friends' one liners from the remote past of his own youth is beyond me. I can't even remember them from two nights ago.

PS: Powell's discussion of it here has convinced me to read The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. I hold that against this volume, because I'm starting to think OGP will ruin Waugh for me.

[David]

Powell moves through his 1920s/1930s London days, chronicling a wide variety of acquaintances, from Evelyns Waugh & Gardner, through Basil Hambrough, to the sundry Sitwells. Much of this memoir material is foundational to Dance and fascinating to a long-term fan such as myself. In 2005, I stood on the corner pictured on the dust jacket and tried to visualize the old ghosting under the new. Again, the older I get the more I find AP's memories of his 20s in London's 1920s intriguing.