Review/ New York Times/ Graydon Carter
“It can reasonably be said that “A Dance to the Music of Time,” Anthony Powell’s monumental 12-part novel about English manners, society, politics and power, still begs for an American counterpart. Lush and majestic, the book traces the years from 1921 to 1974 — pretty much the period we like to romanticize as “the American century.” But if no novel over here quite tracks Powell’s course, the life of George Ames Plimpton, impressively recorded in this glorious new biography, “George, Being George,” offers a potential substitute. Powell, in his novel, described four types of men: the artist, the romantic, the man of will and the cynic. The first three were embodied in our boy George. And the parallels reach farther. For one thing, Powell and Plimpton both began their WASP parables in the Jazz Age. Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, goes from Eton to Cambridge and then on to the war. Plimpton went from Exeter to Harvard, the war and Cambridge. And just as Jenkins becomes a writer and biographer, Plimpton does too — of Edie Sedgwick and Truman Capote. And like Jenkins, he makes his inevitable way to Paris. In Plimpton’s life, as in Powell’s novels, there are all manner of collapsed romantics like Charles Stringham and available beauties in the mold of Pamela Flitton, as well as debutantes and dinner dances. Alas, there is no ambitious, climbing Kenneth Widmerpool in the Plimpton saga, unless it’s Plimpton himself. As to the professional heights he ascended, one detects wonderment not only from his chums and detractors, but also from Plimpton.“ George Plimpton’s Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals — and a Few Unappreciative Observers,” the subtitle of this sprawling, hugely entertaining oral history of the man who all but invented the genre…”
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