Editorial

Amongst the calvacade of characters who populate the 12 volumes of Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels entitled, after the painting by Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time (published 1951–1975), one, Russell Gwinnett, who appears in the last two novels, undertakes a biography of the writer X. Trapnel. ¹ Reflecting on this, the books’ narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, reports (in the 11th book of the series, Temporary Kings):

Gwinnett’s approach, not uncommon among biographers, seemed to be to see himself, at greater or lesser range, as projection of his subject. He aimed, anyway to some extent, at reconstructing in himself Trapnel’s life, getting into Trapnel’s skin, “becoming” Trapnel.

We also have, in the final book of the series, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Trapnel’s views on biography:

Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.

This interplay between biography and fiction is further illustrated by the interrelationship of Powell as novelist and Nicholas Jenkins as fictional narrator. Powell himself was also a biographer, of John Aubrey (1626–1697), ² himself one of the first biographers. Nicholas Jenkins, like Powell an author, produces one (fictional) work of non-fiction, entitled Borage and Hellebore, a study of Robert Burton (1577–1640), the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a work which informs particularly the tenth book in the Dance sequence, Books do furnish a room, and also the penultimate paragraph of the whole novel sequence.

Amongst the calvacade of characters who populate Anthony Powell’s own biography, ³ most were writers, journalists, or artists, but at least one was a doctor: Wyndham Edward Buckley Lloyd. He was best man at Powell’s wedding to Violet Pakenham in 1934. The firm for which Powell then worked, Duckworth’s, published a number of books under the title of the “100 years series”, one of which was by Lloyd, A hundred years of medicine. ⁴ It first appeared in 1936, with a revised edition in 1939. An American edition, co-authored with Cushman Davis Haagensen, appeared in 1943 (New York: Sheridan House), to somewhat mixed reviews.^5–7 One review describes Lloyd as a specialist in public health. ⁶ The epigraph of the book is from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, presumably a shared interest of Powell/Jenkins and Lloyd.