Anthony Powell on his time in Finland

Emma Fielding as Lady Isobel Tolland and James Purefoy as Nick Jenkins in the television series. 

The other night, when I had finished watching the excellent 1997 eight hour television adaptation of Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time", I remembered my brief correspondence with the novelist in 1991, when I lived in London. In one of the letters Powell reminisces about his two Oxford vacations, 1925 and 1926, which he spent in Finland. (His father was in the autumn 1924 sent to Finland as staff-officer to the major-general heading a British Military Mission, requested for an advisory role by the Finnish Government):

In another letter, Powell recalled that the article about his time in Finland - of which he did not have a copy - was probably written in 1925/1926 for a magazine called "something like The New Quarterly, which "lasted, I suspect, only one number".

In late June, 1925, Finland's minister of defense organized a reception in honour of a British naval visit to Helsinki. The youngish British officer in middle of the picture (immediate left from the door) could be Anthony Powell's father. 

In his memoirs, Powell gives some interesting glimpses of his time in Helsinki, and also mentions that his second novel Venusberg (1932) "recalls some of these Finnish interludes, though much of the novel's background, especially the political circumstances, are altogether imaginary, with no bearing on what happened in Finland at the time, nor for that matter in the neighbouring Baltic States, not yet overrun by the U.S.S. R." "The town described in Venusberg is a mixture of Helsinki and Reval (as Tallin was still apt to be called), the Estonian capital across the Gulf of Finland, where I spent a weekend."

A photograph of the Northern Esplanade in Helsingfors (Helsinki) in the mid 1920s.

There are two interesting descriptions of social life in Finland in Powell's memoirs:

During his stay in Finland, Powell also visited Viborg, Finland's then second largest city (which Finland had to cede to the Soviet Union after the Winter and Continuation Wars):

Powell also touched upon his time in Finland in an interesting reply to a question by Michael Barber (who later wrote a Powell biography), which was part of an interview, published in the Paris Review in 1978:

Coincidence plays a large part in determining the pattern of the Dance—too large a part, according to some critics.

POWELL

Well, I think in human life it happens a thousand times more than I would ever dare bring it in, and I could mention the most extraordinary coincidences that have actually taken place in my own life. But yes, I think one does have to be careful about not using it too much simply because people do think it is unconvincing.

INTERVIEWER

Can you give an example of coincidence in your own life?

POWELL

Well, yes, this is a perfectly straightforward one: When my father was sent in 1924-5 on a military mission to Finland, I went out there for two Oxford vacs. And there was a family we knew there whose daughter I used to dance with occasionally. Well, about ten years ago, when our younger son wanted to go to Spain and learn Spanish, the Spanish wife of a friend of ours recommended a place which we wrote to, and they wrote back and said No, they couldn't take him, but they could recommend somebody else. Well, when he went there it turned out that the head of the family was married to this girl I used to dance with in Finland. It's not a bad one, is it really? But if you put that in a book it would be considered absolutely absurd. I mean, there's no particular tie-up in it: You can't say, Oh well, naturally everybody was interested in books or paintings or something . . . It was just sheer, extraordinary coincidence  . . . I mean there was no earthly reason why she should have married a Spaniard.

In his book "Finland in the New Europe" (1998) the Finnish diplomat, writer and journalist Max Jakobson makes a reference to Anthony Powell:

"In the major capitals of Europe, the entry of the sovereign republic of Finland into the international community was received with a degree of skepticism. A Finnish diplomat who complained to the editor of London Economist that the paper persisted in printing out-of-date maps showing Finland as part of Russia was told that the Economist took a long view of international affairs without letting transient phenomena lead it astray. To people used to a world ruled by the great dynasties, the new states that emerged from the ruins of World War I seemed artificial creations, not to be taken seriously."

"This attitude was caught by Anthony Powell, the British author, in his novel Venusberg (1932) in which a lady representing a fictional newly independent small country - presumably Finland - tells a British diplomat: "We are only a little country. A little new country. You must not be surprised if sometimes we do not seem to do things so well as you big countries who have been big countries for so long. You big countries do not know what it is like to be a little country ...."

While in Helsinki, Powell must have visited the Academic bookstore, already then the largest bookshop in the Nordic countries.