Header overlay

What Became of Waring

I can’t remember when I discovered Anthony Powell, but I do know that what caught my attention about his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), was somebody’s description of it as ‘the party novel to end all party novels’. The young Powell, it turned out, was a party animal whose spiritual home was the Twenties, when art got mixed up with life. Hence his disdain for the Thirties when, as he put it, ‘the artists and good-timers’ gave way to ‘the politicians and the prigs’. And yet the novel of his I return to again and again, What’s Become of Waring, was written in 1938, long after the public’s appetite for frivolity had waned. So although you suspect that his narrator, like Powell himself, is a good-timer at heart, the only party he attends is a low-key affair at the remote south London depot of a dowdy Territorial unit.

But there’s another way in which Waring differs from Afternoon Men and Powell’s three other pre-war novels. It is told in the first person:

I was sitting in the Guards’ Chapel under the terra-cotta lunette which contains the Centurion saying to one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to his servant, Do this, and he doeth it. The occasion was the wedding of a girl called Fitzgibbon who was marrying a young man in the Coldstream . . . There was a wait while the photographers did their business; and the crowd began to struggle towards the doors of that extravagant Lombardian interior, which always seems like a place you are shown round after the revolution, the guide pointing out celebrities among the carved names, rather than a church in regular use. The congregation hung about for a while among the sad, tattered colours and glittering Victorian blazonry, until they were disgorged at last from under the massive pediment on to the barrack square.

We never learn the narrator’s name but his tone of voice – cultivated, speculative, ir

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

I can’t remember when I discovered Anthony Powell, but I do know that what caught my attention about his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), was somebody’s description of it as ‘the party novel to end all party novels’. The young Powell, it turned out, was a party animal whose spiritual home was the Twenties, when art got mixed up with life. Hence his disdain for the Thirties when, as he put it, ‘the artists and good-timers’ gave way to ‘the politicians and the prigs’. And yet the novel of his I return to again and again, What’s Become of Waring, was written in 1938, long after the public’s appetite for frivolity had waned. So although you suspect that his narrator, like Powell himself, is a good-timer at heart, the only party he attends is a low-key affair at the remote south London depot of a dowdy Territorial unit.

But there’s another way in which Waring differs from Afternoon Men and Powell’s three other pre-war novels. It is told in the first person:
I was sitting in the Guards’ Chapel under the terra-cotta lunette which contains the Centurion saying to one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to his servant, Do this, and he doeth it. The occasion was the wedding of a girl called Fitzgibbon who was marrying a young man in the Coldstream . . . There was a wait while the photographers did their business; and the crowd began to struggle towards the doors of that extravagant Lombardian interior, which always seems like a place you are shown round after the revolution, the guide pointing out celebrities among the carved names, rather than a church in regular use. The congregation hung about for a while among the sad, tattered colours and glittering Victorian blazonry, until they were disgorged at last from under the massive pediment on to the barrack square.
We never learn the narrator’s name but his tone of voice – cultivated, speculative, ironic – could be that of Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s magnum opus, A Dance to the Music of Time (see SF No. 16). Almost immediately there is a further link with Dance in the person of another wedding guest, a raffish ex-Guards officer called Eustace Bromwich. Bromwich, known for his ‘enormous histrionic gifts’, is the prototype of Dicky Umfraville, the much-married gentleman rider and self-styled ‘professional cad’ who has some of the best lines in Dance. It is also worth noting, given the importance that Powell attached to time and chance, that a few years later the ‘extravagant Lombardian interior’ he evoked was demolished by a flying bomb just as the Sunday morning service had begun. Morbidly, I’ve sometimes fantasized that the bride and groom, plus some of their guests, were among the hundreds of casualties. Powell’s plot hinges on the demise of the author T. T. Waring, the jewel in the crown of his narrator’s employer, Judkins and Judkins, a mildewed publisher based upon Duckworth’s, where Powell worked for several years. No one has ever met the mysterious T. T., but to Hugh Judkins, one of the partners, he is their Peter Fleming. When T. T.’s sudden death from a chill is announced a frantic search ensues to find a biographer while the trail is still warm. The choice falls upon Captain ‘Tiger’ Hudson, who is marking time as adjutant to the Territorials. Reared in the same tradition as Kipling’s ‘Brushwood Boy’, Hudson hero-worships T. T., so imagine his chagrin when it transpires that his idol is a fraud who cribbed all his books from obscure nineteenth-century tomes. I say ‘is’ because T. T. has faked his death as well as his books. Now hitched to a rich widow and so absolved of the need to write, he turns out to be someone with whom Hudson was at school and, even worse, the brother of his fiancée, Beryl, a major-general’s daughter. As part of his research for the book, Hudson meets a vamp called Roberta Payne, as mysterious in her way as T. T., to whom she claims to have been engaged. Like the writer Inez Holden, on whom she is based, Roberta is pretty, witty and at home in a variety of London circles, some quite exalted, yet without any visible means of support except her journalism, which can’t bring in very much. Despite being averse to ‘cosmetics, painted finger-nails and equivocal conversation in women’ Hudson is smitten by Roberta, who is such a contrast to his wholesome, but really rather humdrum, fiancée. Then just as he is about to propose to her she casually announces that she is going on a cruise with someone else. Despite his rather limited view of the world Hudson is a sympathetic character and it is fitting that he and Beryl should eventually make it up. The gulf between him and the urbane narrator is summed up by this exchange:
‘I’ve found an iron Beryl lent me. I don’t exactly like to send it back without saying anything. Equally I don’t want to have to write to her. I wondered whether you could take charge of it and hand it back when you get the chance.’ ‘A flat iron?’ ‘A golf-club, you bloody fool.’
Powell was inclined to be dismissive of Waring, which was written faute de mieux after he had failed to land a job screenwriting in Hollywood. But it happens to be one of my favourites, not least because of a passage like this, which is not only very vivid, but also a reminder that as a boy Powell thought he might become a painter of huge ‘subject’ pictures in the manner of Frith:
At Toulon there was a lot of sun and a breeze from the sea. The interior of the railway station appeared neatly arranged for the opening act of a musical comedy. Sailors with white trousers and red pom-poms in their caps wandered about pointing at Cocteau’s latest on the bookstalls, or watched the engines puffing up and down the line. Some Tonquinese infantrymen were entraining for the Buddhist temple at Fréjus. Overgrown blacks from Senegal, with their waists pinched in by red cummerbunds and wearing high tarbooshes on their tiny heads, leant against the wall, finding perpetual amusement in the antics of the French. A Captain of Spahis in a scarlet tunic, baggy trousers, and a long cloak strode up and down as if he were about to sing the first number of the show.
The chapter Powell devotes to Toulon, where Hudson and the narrator join Bromwich for a holiday, and where T. T. is unmasked, strikes me as quite unlike anything else he ever wrote. Just as Hudson is ordered by Bromwich to throw away his tweeds and dress like a matelot on shore leave, so Powell loosens his collar and even bares his chest. Perhaps he was unconsciously aware that places like Toulon – ‘our dream town, naughty and cheap’, according to a louche friend of his – were living on borrowed time, like the Third Republic itself. A final point concerns the origin of Powell’s title. You would think he got it from Browning, whose lines he quotes on the frontispiece. But according to an early draft of the novel it was originally called What’s Become of Stokes. This lends weight to a theory I heard some years ago, the gist of which was that my informant, or someone he knew – I’ve forgotten which – inherited Powell’s desk at Duckworth’s, on which the ‘Waring’ was missing from the ‘Waring and Gillow’ trademark. Since the novel depicts publishing as, at best, a pretty ramshackle trade, I like to think that Powell’s desk deserves the credit and not Browning.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 41 © Michael Barber 2014


About the contributor

Michael Barber has recently written a brief life of Evelyn Waugh for Hesperus.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.