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:
“Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;Mthe heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“I went back to my work, but now without enthusiasm. I had looked through an open door that I was not willing to see shut upon me. I began to reflect upon life rather seriously for a girl of twelve or thirteen. What was I here for? What could I make of myself? Must I submit to be carried along with the current, and do just what everybody else did?”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)