Powell's Piano Exercise

WHAT'S BECOME OF WARING (236 pp.) --Anthony Powell--Little, Brown ($4).

Few young authors would let a character say without irony or bitterness: "Only in the publishing business is authorship considered important." What Author Anthony Powell thinks of the publishing business is apparently symbolized by the enigmatic figure of T. T. Waring, one of those writers whose major talent is for adroit personal publicity, and who is the big purse winner in the spavined stable of literary hacks owned by the dim publishing house of Judkins & Judkins.

Waring is the pseudonymous author of unusually bogus travel books, whose disappearance sets in motion an intricate clockwork of social comedy in prewar literary London. When this book was written (in 1938), Powell had just abandoned a novelist's apprenticeship as an employee of a London publisher. What's Become of Waring is thus a young man's gibe against his job. But the joke wears well, though its first U.S. publication is obviously based on Powell's present status as the author of The Music of Time, the series of books (six to date) that comprises one of the major enterprises of contemporary fiction.

Powell fans--a small but besotted class of addicts--will be enchanted by this early piano exercise before he developed his small but sure range of chamber-music orchestration. The action of the book moves about the peeling off, in successive layers, of Waring's false colors. His reported death causes the commission of a quick biography. This reveals that Waring's books on Ceylon, Tibet, Spain, etc., have been largely lifted from forgotten, out-of-print books by genuine travelers. He had never been anywhere farther flung than a pension on the French Riviera. His name was sometimes Robinson, but as a last resort, Pimley. Then it transpires that even his death was phony. He is very much alive, a slightly hangdog young minor spiv and con man who has happily dropped the burdens of authorship in favor of marriage to a sprightly American divorcee with silver hair and a white and gold yacht. Powell has a truly English wariness toward women, whom he seems to regard, at best, as dangerous domestic pets always ready to slip their leash.

Waring is not the work of a young man trying to find his way: Powell is already the detached, well-informed, amused observer, a masterful mimic and the most shameless juggler of coincidence since Dickens.

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