Essay

At Lady Violet’s


Violet Pakenham was twenty-two years old in August 1934 when Anthony Powell first set eyes on her, and there’s a picture of him doing it. He was staying at her family home in Ireland after a casual invitation at a party from one of her sisters-in-law whom he barely knew. Almost as soon as he got there, he wished he hadn’t come. He didn’t know or like his host, didn’t fit in with his fellow guests, and worst of all, he was expected to sit still on an upright chair for hours on end while one of them painted his portrait. Powell proved such a fidgety sitter that the youngest of the available Pakenham siblings had to be fetched and told to make him sit still. The portrait by Henry Lamb (married to Violet’s sister Pansy), now in the National Portrait Gallery, shows the sitter with both eyes swivelled to his right, trained firmly on Violet herself, who must have been stationed just beyond the picture frame out of the viewer’s sight.
 
Many years later she wrote her own account of what happened next when he read aloud to her from the novel he was writing, and she took him for walks by the lake where surroundings she’d known since childhood suddenly shone fresher and brighter “as though I had been given new spectacles of a magical clarity.” When a nippy northern Irish wind whipped up the waves, it seemed, in Violet’s words, as though “the white horses on Lough Derravaragh had never before galloped so dazzlingly over the steely blue water.” The pair retreated to the library indoors where shelves of ancient crumbling leather-bound books had “never glowed so golden in the morning sun” as when she sat by the window listening to the opening chapters of the half-written typescript of Agents and Patients.
 
Violet said that those first sessions in the library at Pakenham Hall marked the start of a conversation that lasted for the rest of their lives. They had spent roughly three weeks together when they decided to get married, which they did shortly afterwards with minimal fuss, throwing a boozy party for their many friends the night before. Parties were Violet’s natural element. She was a connoisseur of all their forms from the grandest West End society ball to the sleaziest Soho nightclub, and she liked nothing better than dancing all night until dawn. Hard up, unorthodox, always a daredevil, she rode to hounds on borrowed horses, swam regularly in ice-cold Irish loughs, played polo for the first London Ladies team and trained as a volunteer with the Port Authority’s ambulance service on the river Thames.
 
When she married and moved in with Tony, Violet abandoned her sporting career in favor of the more raffish reaches of literary London, starting as she meant to go on by opening their small attic flat at the unfashionable end of Great Ormond Street to a steady stream of visitors. Friendship was one of her specialties. She had an insatiable interest in people, and the friends she made wherever she went were diverse and often surprising. “No one was dull in Violet’s company,” said her niece, Antonia Fraser. She liked bringing people together, listening to their stories and seeing them interact. One of the first things she and Tony did as a couple was to decorate a folding scrap-screen: a companionable Victorian pastime that involved collecting, cutting out and pasting disparate images (or scraps) into a composite whole, a premonition perhaps of the strange surrealistic collage with which twenty or thirty years later Tony covered the basement walls, ceiling and boiler pipes of their house in Somerset.
 
Before they moved to the country, the Powells had lived in London in a tall narrow house crammed by an opportunistic commercial developer into a tight space behind the Nash Terraces fronting Regent’s Park. Number 1, Chester Gate, was a shabby spot in the late 1930s, its paint peeling and its fabric in urgent need of repair, nothing like the highly desirable residence it has since become with a blue Powell plaque affixed above the front door nearly a century later. In Violet’s day the house was damp, drab and decaying. At one point festoons of dry rot blocked the hall, reminding her of Arthur Rackham’s Sleeping Beauty illustrations and preventing anyone from getting in except through the basement. Soon after the move, she fell pregnant with Tristram, who was born in the early months of World War II. Five years of disruption, separation and evacuation followed. By the time the family reconvened at Chester Gate towards the end of the war, Tristram was about to start school. His brother John was born in January 1946.
 
This kind of Georgian house—seven smallish rooms on five floors—was designed to be run by at least three domestic servants, a species more or less obsolete by the end of WWII. Violet had a charwoman who came in to scrub floors, and a succession of mostly foreign, more or less temperamental auxiliaries to help with cooking and childcare. By her own account she spent her days running upstairs and down between the kitchen in the basement and the nursery on the top floor, a crazily inconvenient setup that she sometimes feared might be the “death of her.” In the dining room beside the front door, Tony earned their living as a jobbing journalist, reading and reviewing up to forty books a month besides taking on any editing job he could find and, in his spare time, working on the opening instalments of his own serial novel which had not yet acquired its definitive title, A Dance to the Music of Time.
 
Both time and money were in short supply, and the space for accommodating visiting friends and relations as well as an expanding family was growing increasingly cramped. “Number 1 Chester Gate . . . appeared to be getting ever smaller,” wrote Violet.[1] The first two volumes of the Dance came out eighteen months apart, and Tony was nearly halfway through the third book in his sequence by the time the family finally moved in July 1952, to a house in the country. The Chantry[2] in northeastern Somerset had been built in a vaguely Italianate style more than a century earlier by a family of local ironmasters, the Fussells of Mells, who turned their abandoned mine-workings below the house into a labyrinth of underground passageways, ruined arches and elegant Regency grottoes. But by the time the Powells arrived, the house itself was run-down and decrepit, the garden and grottoes choked by ramparts of bramble, elder, unpruned laurel and uncut grass so dense that people passing by on the main road found it hard to believe there could be any kind of house there at all.
 
Tony set to work with sickle, scythe and axe, felling trees, clearing boulders, slashing and burning undergrowth in a campaign that paralleled the need for wholesale literary clearance and renewal confronting him and indeed any other ambitious novelist of his postwar generation. Perhaps on some profound, even unconscious level of intellect and imagination, he was tackling the problems of structure, strategy and tactics posed by a project on the scale of the Dance. It took a full year of working in the garden and grounds more or less flat out before he was ready to return to the typewriter and complete his third novel, The Acceptance World, a key consolidating work in the sequence.
 
Violet meanwhile faced practical problems in a house that had been occupied before the Powells moved in by successive wartime evacuees, including a bombed-out girls’ school and a chocolate factory that never really got going. The interior walls had been painted ointment pink throughout. An extension originally tacked onto the east end as an improvised Mass Centre for local Roman Catholics had been inexpertly made over into a thoroughly inconvenient kitchen with a crucifix and a bell still hanging above the door. There was an unreliable elderly electric stove and a prewar refrigerator discarded by Tony’s parents, which developed an ominous scream on reaching the Chantry along with a tendency to emit blasts of toxic gas. Violet hired a woman from the village to help in the house, but the 1950s was not an easy decade for a whole generation of women like her who found themselves responsible for housework and childcare with few if any of the electric appliances that eventually appeared on the market: no plug-in kettle, toaster or coffeemaker, no blender or mixer, no dishwasher, more often than not no washing machine or dryer, and almost always no central heating.
 
The Chantry had piped running water, but when mains water failed as it was liable to do in rural areas in those days, a water supply had to be pumped up from the lake below the house by the kind of antiquated iron pumping machinery that meant bathwater in country houses often ran cold or rust-red from the taps. Visitors came down every weekend from London, and Tony still worked there two or three days a week running the books pages for Punch. The Powells acquired a venerable Humber Snipe for trips to and from the station as well as for fetching supplies from Frome, Warminster, and on serious shopping expeditions from Bath fifteen miles away. Tony’s father helped with school fees, which meant that Tristram started his first term at Eton in the spring of 1953, and John left home for prep school. “Suddenly, with no child in the house. I felt like a mare whose foal had been taken to market,” Violet wrote long afterwards.[3]
 
She plunged into local affairs, becoming a shrewd, wily and effective political operator. On arrival at the Chantry she’d been immediately co-opted by a neighbor to sit on Frome Rural District Council, which met in an unheated corrugated iron hut just over a mile away at Whatley crossroads. Another neighbor, only too happy to delegate her own duties, promptly handed over the running of Chantry Women’s Institute, the Mother’s Union and the local branch of the Conservative Association (the last more of a social than an overtly political commitment in rural Somerset then as now). As Parish Councillor, Violet successfully opposed the indiscriminate demolition of traditional stone cottages and thwarted the rector’s plan to rip out his choir stalls. An early and indefatigable conservationist, she fought running battles for twenty or thirty years with commercial developers, whose aim was to concrete over the countryside and, in Chantry’s case, to ravage it with ever expanding stone quarries.
 
Slowly and patiently over that first decade and more, Violet transformed the house itself, which cannot have been easy at first when money was tight. Long familiar with auction rooms and junk shops, she became adept at spotting and securing unexpected trophies from local house sales. An early find was a set of small marble busts of Victorian railway engineers picked up as a job lot for one pound. Ranged above the books in the library-cum-drawing room on the ground floor of the Chantry, George Stephenson and his colleagues peered down from the top shelf, presiding over the long low table holding magazines, books and papers beside a bright fire in the grate. By the time I started visiting in the early 1970s, the Chantry had evolved a highly distinctive character of its own as part writer’s workshop, part family home, part hospitable haven for a continuous flow of neighbors, relations and friends.
 
Institutional pink-painted walls had long since given way to extravagant wallpapers, the wildest of them all in the drawing-room: a nubbly black, brown and white design by Edward Bawden in stripes of what looked like coal, asphalt and bitumen. Overtones of construction site or engine room were countered by deep comfortable armchairs, a big soft squashy sofa and floor-length velvet curtains at the south-facing bay window. Michael Pitt-Rivers’ wife Sonia, a neighbor more outspoken than most, asked how on earth anyone in her right mind could have chosen a wallpaper so utterly unsuited to relaxation or rest, let alone entertaining guests, and received a reply she never forgot. “Because I love my husband,” said Violet.
 
Tony himself reclined full-length in the afternoons on a hard, high-backed, eighteenth-century chaise longue dating back to a time before the invention of comfort. It took me a long time to realize that this pleasant book-lined drawing room was a workplace, and even longer to understand that Violet’s part in the making of the Dance was critical. Initially I thought of her only as social secretary and telephone receptionist at the Chantry. The first time I heard her voice was in the summer of 1969 when I was running the books pages of The Spectator and Ivy Compton-Burnett died, so I rang the Chantry in search of an obituary. I’d read my first Compton-Burnett novel as a schoolgirl of fifteen or sixteen, and for years after that I couldn’t stop laughing at her one-liners. In my first term at university aged eighteen, I discovered Powell and fell almost immediately under the spell of the Dance. So far as I was concerned, Compton-Burnett and Powell were the two greatest English writers alive, an eccentric view at the time—though in retrospect I’m pretty sure I was right about one of them.
 
But in 1969 I was still in my twenties, and I’d screwed myself into a state of such extreme nervous tension before I could get up the courage to dial Mr. Powell’s home number that, when he seemed baffled and politely refused my request, I lost my temper. I told him what I thought of them both, adding that if he’d died, I’d have asked her to write his obituary. There was a long silence. In the end he said rather lamely that he didn’t know if they had any of her books in the house, which was a flat lie given that his wife was already working on her mighty Compton-Burnett Compendium. I’d have asked her if I’d known, but I didn’t, so I applied to her husband instead, assuring him that everyone of my generation recognized the Dance as a masterpiece, which was of course another flat lie (in fact the opposite was probably nearer the truth in those days).
 
Anyway he wrote the obituary and accepted an invitation to lunch at The Spectator, presumably in order to refresh his memory of the London literary scene which he’d abandoned ten years earlier and was now re-creating as the background to his current work in progress, Books Do Furnish a Room. That first meeting was followed in the autumn by an invitation from Lady Violet, asking me and my husband down for a weekend at the Chantry. The place itself was a shock. Nothing had prepared me for its singularity. I’d never come across any house remotely like it, nor one that so powerfully reflected its owners’ personalities. The atmosphere was overwhelming and quite indescribable but somehow familiar to anyone who knew the Dance well.
 
The impact was collective, generated not just by the fierce wallpapers, or the many busts of all sizes indoors and out, or the countless portraits—painted in oil or water color, sketched in charcoal, pencil or pen, etched, engraved, reproduced in photos, prints, chromolithographs, black-on-white Victorian silhouettes—or indeed any of the multitudinous things coming at you from every side like advancing armies. In our bedroom we had whole regiments of lead soldiers in the uniforms of various British imperial campaigns drawn up in a glass case, with drawings, cartoons, medallions and miniatures hanging frame to frame on the walls. I made a list of the myriad contents of this one small spare room in handwriting, which got tinier and tinier the harder I tried to cram everything onto a single small blue sheet of Chantry writing paper. The list was lost long ago, but I still remember that crowd of miscellaneous faces. Dating back presumably to an earlier phase of the Powells’ marriage, they provided a kind of pictorial counterpoint to the great company of fictional characters—four or five hundred of them in the end—that people the Dance.
 
Violet’s contribution to the production process was multifarious and many-layered. On a superficial level the narrator’s in-laws in the Dance—the large Tolland family with their casual intimacy, their shared history, their long-running feuds and rivalries—owe something perhaps to Violet’s innumerable Pakenham relations. She herself certainly contributed elements to the character of Jean Templer, later Jean Duport, whose passionate affair with the narrator in The Acceptance World follows the basic outline of Powell’s own premarital fling with Marion Coates. But the electric atmosphere of that encounter came according to Violet from her own first brush with Tony in Ireland. Looking back nearly half a century later, she said that, out of the twelve volumes of the Dance, The Acceptance World remained for her always especially moving. She also pointed out that, structurally speaking, Jean supplies one of the binding threads that run right through the whole sequence:

 

The Acceptance World . . . begins with a prophecy of a love affair, and ends with the ominous prospect of a break-up between the lovers. The first stitch of this pattern had been sewn in the opening chapters of . . . Dance, and threads of the same romance would suddenly glitter in all but one of the later volumes.[4]

 

In the 1970s my husband and I fell into the habit of stopping off for lunch at the Chantry on the way to stay with my parents in Bristol. These visits always followed the same routine. After lunch, we two would go for a walk round the lake, returning around four o’clock to find Tony installed on the chaise longue, and Violet seated bolt upright with a tea tray on the sofa beside the fire. They were engaged in the long conversation begun four decades earlier in Ireland, which had become a highly polished double act by the time we caught up with it in the drawing room at the Chantry:

 

Here they capped and recapped each other’s stories, checked dates and sources, bounced ideas, jokes and memories off one another. Their antiphonal exchange was so unlike anything I’d ever heard before that I jotted down a random scrap of dialogue:

 

TONY: Is it Ella Wheeler Wilcox?
VIOLET: Or Robert W. Service?
TONY: Certainly not Robert W. Service.

 

It wasn’t always easy to tell if the characters darting in and out of the Powells’ lifelong conversation were real or imaginary. It was often just as hard to say if Tony agreed with Violet’s view, or if she were voicing his. He would start an anecdote which she corrected and he then continued, incorporating her twists, embellishments and polishings as he went along.[5]

 

That account comes from my life of Anthony Powell (published nearly ten years ago now), and the last sentence strikes me as probably a pretty accurate description of the way the Powells worked together on the Dance. Tony drove the novel forward, writing alone upstairs in the mornings at a small camp table in a spare bedroom. Next to his table stood a rising pile of earlier volumes of the Dance, which served him as a kind of reference library so that he could check up as he wrote on characters and events that had gone before. The books were small red-cloth hardbacks supplied by the publisher, William Heinemann, who regularly sent replacements as the originals fell to pieces, their pages thumbed, dog-eared and scuffed, their cloth bindings faded and spines cracked from constant heavy use.
 
Shortly after I’d first met the Powells, the new proprietor of The Spectator sacked the editor, so I resigned before he could sack me too. From then on I earned a relatively precarious living as a freelance book reviewer, a hard-up, hand-to-mouth existence as Tony knew better than most. He did what he could to help when he finished Hearing Secret Harmonies, the twelfth and last volume of the Dance, by asking me to make a book-length index to the whole series. “Indexers do achieve great power,” he said encouragingly, although the job sounded more like drudgery to me, but I had two small children by then with a third on the way, and I badly needed the money, so I agreed. I’ve often wondered if it was Violet’s idea to ask me to do it for the sake of the publisher’s advance. My Invitation to the Dance took a year to finish, coming out in 1977 as the thirteenth book in the sequence. Tony said that the whole enterprise would have been easier if only he’d had it on hand from the start.
 
Instead, he had Violet, whose memory was phenomenal, and who had acted throughout as a kind of human index or copy editor to the Dance, conflating, correcting and ironing out inconsistencies. I asked her once if her role was something like editing a film. “More like continuity,” said Violet. As soon as the draft of each new section was finished, she read it and picked it to pieces. By her own account, she was a first-class nitpicker. She compared herself to Ada Galsworthy, whose husband John read aloud to her each fresh instalment of his own inordinately popular serial novel, The Forsyte Saga, over a period of fifteen years. Galsworthy boasted that his wife was the best natural critic a man ever had. “I was the WORST natural critic a man ever had,” Violet said grimly, describing the process to me.
 
She also published a dozen books of her own, including four volumes of autobiography (five if you count her life of her grandmother, the Countess of Jersey), the Compton-Burnett Compendium, a similar handbook for Jane Austen, a pictorial album to accompany the Dance, and four biographies of little-known or forgotten women writers.[6] All but the first three of her books were written after completion of the Dance, which suggests the extent of her continuous involvement. John Powell told me that once he accidentally interrupted his parents at work. He’d opened the door of the drawing room to find his father taking one of his mother’s books apart with such methodical brutality that their son was shaken and shocked. “That was ferocious,” John said to his mother afterwards: “I never heard anything so excoriating in my life.” “You wait until I get going on your father,” said Violet.
 
It was the extraordinary power, energy and extreme subtlety of Powell’s imagination coupled with what he himself described as a cold, hard, almost mathematical intelligence that drove the novel forward. I was amazed by a glimpse of his makeshift writing room with its inadequate little table standing in the small empty area between the bed and the door, but in fact this apparently provisional arrangement perfectly suited the capacious, accommodating, open-ended nature of the Dance with its fluid perspective that enabled the narrative to contract and expand, moving forwards and backwards through time and space.
 
Violet was the pragmatic one of the two: humorous, skeptical, highly perceptive and inexhaustibly curious about human affairs. She also possessed very considerable reserves of energy that must have been called on to confront and contend with what her husband called accidie or “my awful bag of gloom.”[7] It was his constant lifelong companion, and Violet acknowledged as much in a passage describing how André Gide coped with his own recurrent overwhelming sense of “boredom, emptiness, monotony”[8] by somehow summoning the energy to write a book. Similar defenses “may sometimes have protected Anthony Powell during the writing of Dance,” Violet wrote without specifying “the emotions against which he had need to build the barriers adumbrated by Gide.” She meant presumably the onset of sloth and apathy, a state often rather glibly termed clinical depression today, suggesting a narrow medical diagnosis rather than the imaginative condition exhaustively explored in one of Tony’s favorite books, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621.
 
The Chantry stands in a depression or dip on the Somerset levels, an area regularly flooded, surrounded in winter by vast stretches of watery low-lying land under a rainy grey sky. Chantry lake, initially a muddy pool dredged and cleared by Tony himself, remained when I knew it always so marshy and treacherous in its further reaches that you could not even try to walk round it without rubber boots, preferably a billhook as well. The path down from the house became slippery and stony as it descended, bordered by patches of nettle, bramble and bog, twisted roots, rabbit holes and rocks. More than once I remember the rank smell of a fox. In my view this setting matched something at the deepest level in Powell himself, a kind of creative depression, which he partly exposed and brought to light in the monstrous human scrimmage pasted onto the walls, ceiling and pipework of the Chantry basement. Perhaps the black silt and sludge round the lake was another metaphor for that creative sludge, the deep dark inchoate recesses of intellect and imagination that fed into and powered the Dance.
 
Any typescript her husband produced alone upstairs in the morning, Violet scrutinized in the afternoon under a bright clear light. Long after his father’s death, Tristram Powell warned me not to underestimate his mother’s part in this process, insisting that his parents had worked on the Dance together and summing up what he meant in a phrase I didn’t fully understand at the time: “Her memory was the right arm, as it were, of my father’s imagination.[9]

 

[1] Violet Powell, The Departure Platform (London, 1998), p. 4.
 
[2] For a more detailed account of house, garden, and grounds, see Hilary Spurling, Anthony Powell (London, 2018), pp. 323–326.
 
[3] Violet Powell, p. 46.
 
[4] Violet Powell, p. 18.
 
[5] Hilary Spurling, pp. 417–418.
 
[6] A Substantial Ghost: The Literary Adventures of Maude ffoulkes (London, 1967); Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India (London, 1981); The Constant Novelist: A Study of Margaret Kennedy, 1896–1967 (London, 1983); The Life of a Provincial Lady: A Study of E. M. Delafield and Her Works (London, 1988).
 
[7] Hilary Spurling, p. 218.
 
[8] Violet Powell, p. 146.
 
[9] Hilary Spurling, p. 409.