A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (Heinemann, 1962; a Halesworth, Suffolk Score), plus Kingsley Amis on Powell

NB: Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

The third and final book I bought at Ann Green Secondhand Books in Halesworth – not including little Edie's books; she came away with a good three or four herself – I didn't actually spot until our last full day staying in the Suffolk town, when during an amble down the Thoroughfare I decided on a whim to pop back into the shop. And noticed this:

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell. Published by Heinemann in 1962, it's the first British omnibus edition of the initial three books in Powell's twelve-volume (as it would eventually number) A Dance to the Music of Time sequence – A Question of Upbringing (originally 1951), A Buyer's Market (1952) and The Acceptance World (1955) – and is really rather uncommon in this edition: there are just two copies on AbeBooks at present, both jacketless, both offered by American sellers, priced at £35–£60. Whereas this copy does have its dust jacket (albeit a little chipped and sunned at the spine) and set me back just eight quid.

According to one of those American AbeBooks sellers the Heinemann omnibus was "Published in an edition of 3,000 copies, on Dec.3, 1962, eleven months after the US [Little, Brown] 3-in-one. Powell credits the US omnibus volume with the commercial success of the Dance. The British omni, however, never took off and this is the only one published by Heinemann." That's as maybe, but my research suggests it did well enough for Heinemann for them to issue a reprint in 1964. Still, it's a scarce volume, and one to treasure.

The little-seen dust jacket was designed by James Broom-Lynne, who designed all twelve of the wrappers of the original Heinemann editions of the Music of Time novels (among many others, including Adam Diment's The Dolly Dolly Spy, to take an example from my own book collection), and utilises Poussin's 1634–1636 painting A Dance to the Music of Time – from which Powell got his overarching title. It's an attractive treatment, and certainly good enough to take its place in my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery.

I've been meaning to try Powell's Music of Time sequence ever since I learned that Donald E. Westlake was a fan – as indeed are Westlake aficionados Ethan Iverson and Levi Stahl, not to mention the author of the previous Ann Green Secondhand Books score, Kingsley Amis, who was friends with Powell and who devotes a chapter to his fellow author in his Memoirs (1991). Amis states that the first Powell novel he read was the author's third, From a View to a Death (1933), in 1941 or '42, and "immediately recognised a talent and a way of looking at the world that were utterly congenial to me, even though the bit of the world being looked at, with its butlers, country houses, etc., was quite outside my experiences". He calls the Music of Time sequence "a great roman-fleuve" and makes note of "the individual volumes being like novels, each with a distinguishable theme or subject – entering the adult world, marriage, the coming of war, etc. – while the sequence as a whole was more like life, in a way more realistic, than its components, with for instance characters such as the painter Barnaby coming and going haphazardly". Unfortunately, despite being an evident admirer of the sequence, Amis also inadvertently soured himself on the novels:

When the Music of Time sequence was complete in 1975, with Hearing Secret Harmonies, I wrote and read a huge lecture... on the thing as a whole. Putting it together involved, of course, slow and careful reading of each volume and the taking of copious notes. This had the distressing side-effect on me of making the books unrereadable, so far at any rate, though I mean to return to the charge in the not-too-distant future. I ought to have foreseen this, having published a short book on the works of Ian Fleming, The James Bond Dossier, in 1965, with a roughly comparable amount of work required and the same lasting result. But most people will think this a less lamentable deprivation.

That sly last line made me smile, but I wonder if Amis, who died in 1995, ever did revisit the sequence.

Anyway: that was the last of the books I bought in Halesworth. Next in this prolonged account of mine and Edie and Rachel's summer holidays we'll be heading to the seaside, and thereafter, slightly incongruously, to church.

Suffolk Score – Halesworth: Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (Hutchinson, 1991)

Continuing the showcase of the books I bought at Ann Green Secondhand Books in Halesworth during our (as in, my, Rachel and little Edie's) Suffolk summer holiday, we have this:

A 1991 Hutchinson first edition of Memoirs by Kingsley Amis, jacket design by the Senate, photograph of Amis by Lord Snowdon. Regular readers of this blog – of which there must be at least four or five by now – will know of my enthusiasm for a good many of Amis's novels, in particular The Anti-Death League, The Green Man and Ending Up, but I'm just as happy to read his non-fiction. His Memoirs are unusual in their structure, consisting, as Amis puts it in his introduction:

...not of a connected narrative but of a series of essays or sketches. Most of them are about individuals I have known more or less well. Most of the others are about self-contained episodes of my life, like my time in the army or my trip to Prague in 1966, though here again I have tried to focus on others rather than myself. I have done so not out of self-effacement but for several other reasons. Most writers lead dull lives whether or not those lives may be fun to lead, and are likely to be boring to read about in any detail. Writing directly about my own would anyway not appeal to me, even if I had a good memory for that kind of thing and had kept diaries with any persistence.

Even so, Amis goes on to admit that:

...there is probably quite enough about me in these pages, more than I intended or realise. And I have already written an account of myself in twenty or more volumes, most of them called novels. Novels they full are, too, and those who know both them and me will also know that they are firmly unautobiographical, but at the same time every word of them inevitably says something about the kind of person I am. 'In vino veritas – I don't know,' Anthony Powell once said to me, 'but in scribendo veritas – a certainty.'

All of which means that the Memoirs probably don't contain the episode where Amis fell down drunk in a ditch outside Anthony Price's house. Shame. On the plus side, however, there is this:

This copy is signed by Amis. Huzzah.

Amis mentions Anthony Powell above, and devotes a chapter of his Memoirs to his friend and fellow writer – and quite by chance Powell is the author of the third and final book I found in Ann Green Secondhand Books, actually during my second visit to the place (I missed it the first time round): a highly scarce volume of Powell's celebrated A Dance to the Music of Time sequence...