Books in Brief: Infants of the Spring

Infants of the Spring, by Anthony Powell (Holt, Rinehart, 214 pp., $10.95). For fifty pages or so of these memoirs— the first volume of a projected series—I felt that I was reading the work of a oncefine writer gone dotty. Powell’s addiction to the practice of omitting linking and auxiliary verbs approaches the pathological; in some sentences, the antecedents are so tangled as to make it impossible, without prior knowledge, to be certain which of two people did whatever it was to the other; occasionally Powell insists upon an apparently minor point with a vehemence presumably left over from some ancient quarrel, to which the reader, unfortunately, is not privy. But presently the difficulties smooth out—or, at any rate, become less important than what Powell is writing about. The Eton chapters are interesting, though fairly standard for British literary memoirs; more unusual is the chapter on Powell’s brush with the Nineties, through a bookseller who had been on the edge of Oscar Wilde’s circle. The best things in the book, though, are the Oxford chapters and the section on George Orwell. Powell came up to Oxford in 1923; he became a friend of Cyril Connolly’s, met Evelyn Waugh (although they did not know each other well until later on), was for a while a protege of Maurice Bowra. There are good anecdotes here that I hadn’t heard before—e.g., when Orwell learned, early in World War II, that Waugh was serving with a commando unit (Orwell himself was unable to join up, having been badly wounded in the Spanish Civil War), he fumed, “Why can’t somebody on the Left do that sort of thing?” Waugh remains on the fringes of the narrative: unfortunately, because, given Powell’s depiction—acute, humorous, moving—of those complicated men Orwell and Bowra, I want to see what he has to say about the most complicated of them all. Maybe in the second volume?

About the Author

Linda Bridges

Ms. Bridges is the former editor-at-large of National Review.

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Infants of the Spring, by Anthony Powell (Holt, Rinehart, 214 pp., $10.95). For fifty pages or so of these memoirs— the first volume of a projected series—I felt that I was reading the work of a oncefine writer gone dotty. Powell’s addiction to the practice of omitting linking and auxiliary verbs approaches the pathological; in some sentences, the antecedents are so tangled as to make it impossible, without prior knowledge, to be certain which of two people did whatever it was to the other; occasionally Powell insists upon an apparently minor point with a vehemence presumably left over from some ancient quarrel, to which the reader, unfortunately, is not privy. But presently the difficulties smooth out—or, at any rate, become less important than what Powell is writing about. The Eton chapters are interesting, though fairly standard for British literary memoirs; more unusual is the chapter on Powell’s brush with the Nineties, through a bookseller who had been on the edge of Oscar Wilde’s circle. The best things in the book, though, are the Oxford chapters and the section on George Orwell. Powell came up to Oxford in 1923; he became a friend of Cyril Connolly’s, met Evelyn Waugh (although they did not know each other well until later on), was for a while a protege of Maurice Bowra. There are good anecdotes here that I hadn’t heard before—e.g., when Orwell learned, early in World War II, that Waugh was serving with a commando unit (Orwell himself was unable to join up, having been badly wounded in the Spanish Civil War), he fumed, “Why can’t somebody on the Left do that sort of thing?” Waugh remains on the fringes of the narrative: unfortunately, because, given Powell’s depiction—acute, humorous, moving—of those complicated men Orwell and Bowra, I want to see what he has to say about the most complicated of them all. Maybe in the second volume?