Social Life
Upon his arrival in London, part of Powell's social life developed around attendance at formal debutante dances at houses in Mayfair and Belgravia. Without telling his friends, he joined a Territorial Army regiment in a South London suburb.
He renewed acquaintance with Evelyn Waugh, whom he had known at Oxford and was a frequent guest for Sunday supper at Waugh's parents' house. Waugh introduced him to the Gargoyle Club, which gave him experience in London's Bohemia.
He came to know the painters Nina Hamnett and Adrian Daintrey, who were neighbours in Fitzrovia, and the composer Constant Lambert, who remained a good friend until Lambert's death in 1951.
Despite a holiday trip to the Soviet Union in 1936, he remained unsympathetic to the popular-front, Leftist politics of many of his literary and critical contemporaries. A confirmed Tory, Powell maintained a certain scepticism. He was wary of right-wing groups and suspicious of inflated rhetoric.
Read more about this topic: Anthony Powell
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or life:
“Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Take a timber
That you shall find lies in the cellar, charred
Among the raspberries, and hew and shape it
For a doorsill or other corner piece
In a new cottage on the ancient spot.
The life is not yet all gone out of it.
And come and make your summer dwelling here....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)