Muted Memoir

By Melvin Maddocks

FACES IN MY TIME

by Anthony Powell

Holt, Rinehart & Winston

230 pages; $14.95

After twelve volumes of his justly celebrated sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, 75, has established himself as the reigning novelist of British understatement. In this third volume of his autobiography, the master whisperer so thoroughly muffles the barbarous yawps of the mid-20th century--from Dylan Thomas to World War II--that they emerge as discreetly as the sound of one teacup cracking.

As this most seemly of chronicles begins, Powell, 28, is about to marry Violet Pakenham, 22. An opportunity, surely, for a passing brushfire of emotion, recollectec in tranquillity? Not at all. Whatever might be hot or sweet is buried in the cool shade of 13 pages devoted to Violet's family tree. Fervor, by Powell's standards is reserved for Siamese cats and the young couple's cook, a Mrs. Clara Warville, who in a passage as heartfelt as any in the book, is recalled as "an admirable exponent of the art at its simple English best."

Pain, as Powell readers know, gets registered no more sharply than pleasure. There is, however, a good deal of subliminal throb. While his wife is writing for the press "on horses and equitation," Powell's career as a largely unread novelist goes nowhere. He works for Warner Bros, near London, hacking out scripts about messenger boys and Victorian philanthropists. None are produced. In 1937, at the suggestion of his agent, Powell journeys to Hollywood. The high point of his stay in Celluloid City is a lunch at the MGM commissary with Scott Fitzgerald, who draws a rough map of North America for the English visitor, diagramming with arrows the directions from which culture has flowed into the U.S.

Reversing one of those directions, Powell returns to London to make the rounds as an all-purpose book reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator--whoever will have him, whatever the tome. In England, as in the New World, Powell seems to be on the outer edge of every circle--a well-bred failure in frayed shirts from Harrods.

Faces in My Time can be read as one humiliation after another, swallowed with barely a twitch. When his fifth novel, What's Become of Waring, sells exactly 999 copies, Powell records the figure in the tone of a conscientious bookkeeper. When World War II comes and his colleague Evelyn Waugh flies off to serve as a commando in Greece, Powell goes to the War Office, enlists--and gets assigned to posts in England and Wales, where there is little to do but read Kierkegaard. When George Orwell dies, Powell is left to choose the hymns. In every Powell book somebody has to play the misfit schoolboy who wears the wrong kind of overcoat. In Faces the author takes the role.

For his memoirs, as his novels, Powell provides a mat finish, graying the colors on the premise that only by downplaying life can its shining horror be brought under control. And so the scene of purest Powell occurs when the author celebrates V-E day by reading the Cambridge History of English Literature in bed.

Is British understatement the ultimate modesty or the ultimate snobbery? A reader's answer is a fair test for dividing those who love Powell from those who do not. But what reader can help admiring a man who, in the face of Judgment Day, would score the last bars for the piccolos?

--By Melvin Maddocks

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