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JOHN AUBREY & FRIENDS
New and revised edition. 1963. DJ is slightly worn. Interior is clean and unmarked.
- GenresBiography
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
About the author
Anthony Powell
130 books342 followersPeople best know British writer Anthony Dymoke Powell for
A Dance to the Music of Time
, a cycle of 12 satirical novels from 1951 to 1975.
This Englishman published his volumes of work. Television and radio dramatizations subjected major work of Powell in print continuously. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "the fifty greatest British writers since 1945."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony...
This Englishman published his volumes of work. Television and radio dramatizations subjected major work of Powell in print continuously. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "the fifty greatest British writers since 1945."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
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February 29, 2024Not as boring as some people have suggested it maybe, but definitely confirms that biography was not Anthony Powell’s strong suit. Interesting for readers of A Dance to the Music of Time in that John Aubrey himself might’ve been a character in Powell’s novel. There are certainly many similarities with respect to the general observation of “characters” met. Undeniably, very thorough research.
August 13, 2017
In A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell's twelve-book novel sequence, after joining the army Nick Jenkins spends his occasional leisure hours immersing himself in the life and world of seventeenth century author Robert Burton. After the war, before resuming his life as a novelist he writes a biography of Burton, which he gives the unencouraging title Borage and Hellebore.
Like much of Nick's life, this has a parallel in Anthony Powell's, and his equivalent of Nick's book is John Aubrey and his Friends.
I read this as part of an on-again off-again project to read virtually all of Powell's works. I haven't read any Aubrey, though I've owned his best-known work Brief Lives for years. It's one of the many books which sits in my bedside bookcase, as it seems like it would make good bedtime reading, being full of short, self-contained, interesting vignettes. Powell advises that Aubrey's Miscellanies Upon Various Subjects, his collection of supernatural anecdotes, also makes a good bedtime book; it may have been one he found especially diverting when the bombs were falling around him during the war, on those evenings when he wasn't on Fire Duty, standing on the roof of his apartment building with a bucket of sand to put out incendiary bombs, as he memorably describes in The Military Philosophers. The Miscellanies was the only one of Aubrey's books to be published during his lifetime, and sounds like a precursor to the works of Charles Fort.
Aubrey was very interested in the past, and keen to save it for posterity -- mainly, I suppose, for the amusement of future antiquaries like himself. This desire to preserve extended from ancient artefacts like the stone circle at Avebury, which he discovered, to the amusing things people said in conversation. He was a great jotter down of recollections it was worth remembering, but not very good at systematically writing and organising a publishable book, which is why only one was published during his lifetime. His manuscripts sound like a disorganised jumble of thoughts. He laboured for years at trying to organise and transcribe his previous jottings. He saw himself, fairly, as a non-genius who was a catalyst for other people's genius, his conversation and correspondence inspiring great work by his friends.
He was more or less unemployable, which was a problem when, although he was a 'gentleman' in the seventeenth-century sense, he was also usually in debt. He often writes, in his letters to friends, of job offers that seem to be imminent, but there's a sense of relief when most of the opportunities fall through, leaving him free to pursue his researches. For years he lived in hiding from his creditors. His friends were asked to say he was out of the country. A system was worked out where letters to Aubrey would be sent to a friend he visited often, with a mark on the envelope to indicate the letter was for Aubrey.
Much of this book would be incomprehensible to anyone who didn't have at least a smattering of knowledge about life in seventeenth century England, especially of the civil wars. To say I have a smattering would be generous: I had to check wikipedia to remind myself which were the cavaliers and which were the roundheads. Powell's intended audience is educated English readers of the mid-twentieth-century, so he assumes the reader knows all about this stuff.
Anyone writing Aubrey's life today would doubtless make up for the paucity of biographical information by providing an overview of the times, creating a context for the anxieties Aubrey and his friends often express. I was surprised to learn (from wikipedia) that hundreds of thousands of people were killed as a direct or indirect result of the civil wars, a catastrophe that you would never know was going on around Aubrey from this book alone.
The book can be dry at times, especially in those sections before its subject is born and after he dies. It is enlivened a little by Powell's adoption of Aubrey's method, footnoting the text with many brief anecdotes and bits of gossip from Aubrey's writings. But the title of Nick's book about Burton, Borage and Hellebore, might have been more than self-deprecating humour and more a fair self-cricitism.
For someone who was so keen to preserve the past, much of the detail of Aubrey's life is lost. He never married, but his friends' diaires make passing mentions of various girlfriends of whom we know nothing, except the one who sued him.
The book comes alive in the section containing lengthy summaries of and quotations from Aubrey's correspondence with his friend Anthony Wood. A fellow antiquary, Wood is the prototype of many people you see in those parts of the internet dedicated to unpopular enthusiasms. Wood was even more unemployable than Aubrey, lacked his social skills, and published many of Aubrey's Lives as his own work. Worst of all, for a great preserver like Aubrey, Wood destroyed pages of Aubrey's manuscripts while borrowing them.
The conversations recorded in these letters offer a real glimpse into other lives and another world, and justify the occasional hard work of the rest of the book.
Like much of Nick's life, this has a parallel in Anthony Powell's, and his equivalent of Nick's book is John Aubrey and his Friends.
I read this as part of an on-again off-again project to read virtually all of Powell's works. I haven't read any Aubrey, though I've owned his best-known work Brief Lives for years. It's one of the many books which sits in my bedside bookcase, as it seems like it would make good bedtime reading, being full of short, self-contained, interesting vignettes. Powell advises that Aubrey's Miscellanies Upon Various Subjects, his collection of supernatural anecdotes, also makes a good bedtime book; it may have been one he found especially diverting when the bombs were falling around him during the war, on those evenings when he wasn't on Fire Duty, standing on the roof of his apartment building with a bucket of sand to put out incendiary bombs, as he memorably describes in The Military Philosophers. The Miscellanies was the only one of Aubrey's books to be published during his lifetime, and sounds like a precursor to the works of Charles Fort.
Aubrey was very interested in the past, and keen to save it for posterity -- mainly, I suppose, for the amusement of future antiquaries like himself. This desire to preserve extended from ancient artefacts like the stone circle at Avebury, which he discovered, to the amusing things people said in conversation. He was a great jotter down of recollections it was worth remembering, but not very good at systematically writing and organising a publishable book, which is why only one was published during his lifetime. His manuscripts sound like a disorganised jumble of thoughts. He laboured for years at trying to organise and transcribe his previous jottings. He saw himself, fairly, as a non-genius who was a catalyst for other people's genius, his conversation and correspondence inspiring great work by his friends.
He was more or less unemployable, which was a problem when, although he was a 'gentleman' in the seventeenth-century sense, he was also usually in debt. He often writes, in his letters to friends, of job offers that seem to be imminent, but there's a sense of relief when most of the opportunities fall through, leaving him free to pursue his researches. For years he lived in hiding from his creditors. His friends were asked to say he was out of the country. A system was worked out where letters to Aubrey would be sent to a friend he visited often, with a mark on the envelope to indicate the letter was for Aubrey.
Much of this book would be incomprehensible to anyone who didn't have at least a smattering of knowledge about life in seventeenth century England, especially of the civil wars. To say I have a smattering would be generous: I had to check wikipedia to remind myself which were the cavaliers and which were the roundheads. Powell's intended audience is educated English readers of the mid-twentieth-century, so he assumes the reader knows all about this stuff.
Anyone writing Aubrey's life today would doubtless make up for the paucity of biographical information by providing an overview of the times, creating a context for the anxieties Aubrey and his friends often express. I was surprised to learn (from wikipedia) that hundreds of thousands of people were killed as a direct or indirect result of the civil wars, a catastrophe that you would never know was going on around Aubrey from this book alone.
The book can be dry at times, especially in those sections before its subject is born and after he dies. It is enlivened a little by Powell's adoption of Aubrey's method, footnoting the text with many brief anecdotes and bits of gossip from Aubrey's writings. But the title of Nick's book about Burton, Borage and Hellebore, might have been more than self-deprecating humour and more a fair self-cricitism.
For someone who was so keen to preserve the past, much of the detail of Aubrey's life is lost. He never married, but his friends' diaires make passing mentions of various girlfriends of whom we know nothing, except the one who sued him.
The book comes alive in the section containing lengthy summaries of and quotations from Aubrey's correspondence with his friend Anthony Wood. A fellow antiquary, Wood is the prototype of many people you see in those parts of the internet dedicated to unpopular enthusiasms. Wood was even more unemployable than Aubrey, lacked his social skills, and published many of Aubrey's Lives as his own work. Worst of all, for a great preserver like Aubrey, Wood destroyed pages of Aubrey's manuscripts while borrowing them.
The conversations recorded in these letters offer a real glimpse into other lives and another world, and justify the occasional hard work of the rest of the book.
June 30, 2019
This biography by novelist Anthony Powell portrays the troubled life and literary career of an eccentric, but sociable, personality of 17th century England. Powell puts emphasis on Aubrey's connections and friendships with other learned men who made him well known despite the fact that his voluminous writings circulated more as samizdats than in print. Powell's reliance on quotations, footnotes and explanatory remarks in parentheses makes the book a tough read, and not to everyone's taste. An interesting speculation would be that Aubrey may have led Powell to write his masterpiece "A Dance to the Music of Time."
June 17, 2014
Powell has a deft touch with aristocratic circles, as demonstrated in his long cycle of novels, Dance to the Music of Time, and it's put to good use here. Country houses, literate people, legal tangles, antiquarians, gossips, marriages made for financial reasons (and their consequences.) All taking place against the backdrop of the English Civil War and the Restoration that followed.
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August 22, 2018Mentioned in ‘The Shadow in the Garden: a Biographers tale ‘ by James Atlas
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews