![]() Why did Afternoon Men-Powell’s 1931 debut, written two decades before the Dance began-leap out at me?Īny good opening sentence is an emblem of the story to follow. Now I am a devout Powellite, one of those possibly slightly annoying people who insist on pronouncing his surname as “Pole.” (Still, as Powell himself sensibly pointed out in his memoirs, “like the Boston family of Lowell, I rhymed it with Noël rather than towel.”) Back then, in that store in deepest Montana, I only knew A Dance to the Music of Time, his twelve-volume British roman-fleuve, by reputation. ![]() I was losing hope when I spotted a spine that would change my life just as much as Burton’s Anatomy had: Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men. I had ten dollars burning a hole in my pocket but the shelves held the dregs of passing tourists. Cowboy hats and ranch-themed trinkets dominated the place, mini-license plates with kids’ names on them, but I headed straight to the small book section as a heat-stroked nomad would to an oasis. One evening, we stopped at a souvenir store on the main drag of West Yellowstone. Thus I brought no reading material on a family trip to Yellowstone National Park, thinking that some undivided time with nature was the cure for whatever ailed me.Ī couple days in, of course, I was itching for something to read. One of the myriad subcategories Burton identified was the melancholy of scholars, which I thought I had, partly of course from studying the Anatomy itself. I took reams of notes, which I printed out at the office. Melancholy itself was a metaphor for the human condition. For Burton, practically everything was a symptom of melancholy, and practically everything-from love, to solitude, to gambling, to cabbage-was listed as a potential cause. It was like an anything-goes version of that medical handbook of psychiatric disorders. When I wasn’t writing, I could usually be found wandering the pages of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, the 17 th-century tome that I likened to a proto-DSM-IV. It was set in a made-up New England town, shaped like a hand, you see, and consisted of eight interlinked tales and one larger fiction that-never mind. ![]() I worked on a newspaper copy desk by day, and in the mornings and evenings I would write my second unpublishable novel. I first encountered Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men when I was about the age of its narrator and lived in a small studio in Manhattan that I eventually shared with a mouse. This essay is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “Afternoon Men,” by Anthony Powell, which will be published by University of Chicago Press in November. In “Afternoon Men,” Anthony Powell translates interwar high bohemia into a floating world of garrulous, witty, vain, often acid yet strangely agreeable young people. ![]()
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