Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell

First published: 1931

Type of work: Social satire

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: The Soho area of London

Principal Characters:

• William Atwater, the protagonist, a young museum official who has failed to gain a diplomatic career
• Raymond Pringle, his friend, a naturally bad painter
• Harriet Twining, Pringle’s occasional mistress
• Susan Nunnery, the object of Atwater’s desire
• Lola, a model and frequent Soho partygoer
• Hector Barlow, another struggling artist
• Fotheringham, an unsuccessful journalist
• Undershaft, a young man who has escaped to America and is thus a frequently mentioned hero
• Naomi Race, a patroness of the arts
• George Nunnery, Susan’s father, a bankrupt financier
• Verelst, a wealthy Jew with whom Susan leaves for America at the end of the novel

The Novel

Nothing much seems to happen in this comic novel of semibohemian London social life in the 1920’s; rather than a novel of action, it is a novel of talk. The book is a novelized comedy of manners which focuses on the “bright young people” of the London Soho district and often seems more appropriate to drawing-room stage comedy than to the novel form. The talk is not very stimulating but rather flat and tedious chitchat of bored young people who are bright but brittle and filled with self-conscious ennui. The action, what there is of it, focuses primarily on parties and the exchange of various sexual partners, although sex has no real vitality. Anthony Powell’s satiric purpose seems clear from his title, taken from a passage in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which refers to a “company of giddyheads, afternoon men.”

The social comedy aspect of the novel can be seen in its dependence on several dramatic staged scenes, the most developed being the opening party, which begins the action, and the trip to the painter Raymond Pringle’s beach cottage, which climaxes it (or more appropriately, anticlimaxes it). Minor staged scenes in between focus on William Atwater, the protagonist and on Susan Nunnery, whom Atwater desires, at a boxing match or Atwater at his museum job. The novel does not flow like an seamless narrative but rather creates an effect of being indifferently stitched together with little or no connections between the various scenes—a technique which Powell, by calling the first section of the novel “Montage,” relates to a cinematic device of linking scenes together without obvious interlinking transitions. The title of the second section of the novel, “Perihelion,” refers to a term of astronomy which designates that point when a planet is closest to the sun. Since this section deals primarily with Atwater’s attempted relationship with Susan, it suggests that Susan is indeed his “sun.” The title of the final section, “Palindrome,” is a literary term which refers to a language game in which a line, word, or verse reads the same backward or forward. Indeed, the novel ends with Atwater and Pringle preparing for another party, just like the one which opened the work.

Afternoon Men has no real plot direction but rather seems a comic, ironic version of the lassitude of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or the meaninglessness of his The Waste Land (1922), both predominant poetic images of the time; the closest thing to a single line of development is Atwater’s pursuit of Susan Nunnery, whom he first meets at the opening party. Although he is attracted to her, however, she is too busy to see him, and thus, out of indifference, he begins a sexual liaison with the model Lola, which comes to a climax in her apartment in a scene of sexual boredom and ennui which Powell describes in his usual ironic fashion as “a brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous.”

When Atwater finally gets a date with Susan in a fashionable restaurant, his attempts at intimacy with her are constantly broken up by friends who drop by his table with idle chatter about reducing salons; the result of the interruptions is a fragmented set of non sequiturs in which his lassitude and her indifference are both exposed in a comic fashion. The next attempt Atwater makes with Susan is when he takes her to a boxing match in the slums, but this effort is also ruined, first by Susan’s comment that she likes Jews because of their romanticism, which presages her running off with the wealthy Jew Verelst, and then the meeting with an acquaintance which leads back to the social crowd Atwater has been trying to avoid.

The climactic scene in the novel occurs at Pringle’s rented ocean cottage, where Atwater joins Pringle’s other guests: Pringle’s mistress Harriet, Naomi Race (a patroness of the arts) and artist Hector Barlow and his mistress, Sophy. When Pringle discovers Harriet in a sexual encounter on the sofa with Barlow, he is outraged and thrown into complete despair, although once again Powell treats this with ironic detachment. The next day, Harriet and Atwater go for a walk on the beach and see Pringle undress to go into the water. Thinking only that he is going for a swim, they fall into a rather indifferent sexual seduction scene, unsatisfying to Atwater and somewhat comic to Harriet. When Pringle does not come back, the guests find a suicide note and expect the worst, although they do not seem overly concerned. Yet, in a comic scene that borders on pure farce, Pringle shows up in fisherman’s clothes, saying he decided against suicide after going into the water.

In the last scene, appropriate to the notion of palindrome, Atwater and Pringle are back where they started. Harriet has taken up with another man and Susan has gone to America with Verelst. Undershaft, a young man who has never appeared in the novel but who is frequently referred to because he went to America and thus has escaped the Soho social circle, has returned and is now sleeping with the model Lola. Thus, the social circle has come full circle, and the novel ends with plans for attending another party, which is sure to be like the one that opened the book in the first place.

The Characters

In this novel of “bright young people,” the characters themselves do not strike one as overly bright. Atwater, the central focus, and his foil Pringle, are the dominant figures, just as their dull affairs with Harriet and Susan constitute the central dramatic action. Both are failed artists and failed lovers who also fail to gain much reader sympathy. Atwater is described as a “weedy-looking” young man with tortoiseshell glasses, and Pringle is similarly nondescript. Atwater is somewhat of a lazy parasite who drifts through a series of social encounters in a bored, indifferent way. Pringle, more socially ambitious than his friend, is both neurotic and melodramatic. The two central female characters are only sketchily delineated; Susan is characterized as an individualist, whereas Harriet is depicted as a social clone.

None of these four characters is presented in any other framework than as an “artsy” bohemian self-consciously embracing a superficial social life-style. The minor characters, such as Lola, Barlow, the journalist Fotheringham, are simply more of the same. All of them are drifting in a meaningless world in which whatever potential they have is destined never to be realized. There is no profound philosophical reason for their boredom and ennui; at least, Powell does not provide such a reason or allow the characters to give voice intelligently to such a reason. Instead, the characters seem to drift aimlessly simply because there does not seem to be anything else to do.

Critical Context

Anthony Powell’s early novels, of which Afternoon Men is his first, did not establish him as anything more than a minor writer overshadowed by his more powerful contemporaries such as Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. It was not until he started his twelve-volume series of novels in 1951, entitled A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), that he began to make a place for himself as a writer of power and significance. Afternoon Men was favorably received as a first novel by a minor talent, but critical opinion has always been somewhat divided about its worth. Some have called it a comic masterpiece because of its carefully controlled and understated style. Others have said that it is as meaningless as the lives of the characters it depicts.

One critic has suggested that no one has made partygoing seem so dreary and promiscuity so depressing as Powell has in this book. Whether one sees that opinion as an assessment of the genius of the book in capturing and anatomizing the aimless life-style of the “bright young people” or a judgment on the dreary nature of the novel itself is largely a matter of disputed critical opinion. What is not disputed is that although the style and themes established by Powell in this novel have continued in his later work, A Dance to the Music of Time has made Powell one of the major British novelists of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Bergonzi, Bernard. Anthony Powell, 1962.

Brennan, Neil. Anthony Powell, 1974.

Morris, Robert K. The Novels of Anthony Powell, 1968.

Russell, John. Anthony Powell: A Quintet, Sextet, and War, 1970.

Tucker, James. The Novels of Anthony Powell, 1976.