Anthony Powell's style and sensibility - Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one

Nicholas Jenkins – I did not register his name at all for the entire first novel, but I know it now – goes to school, gets a job in publishing, writes a novel, gets a girlfriend, gets a job as a script writer, splits with the girlfriend, and writes another novel or two, none of which, except for getting the girlfriend, is depicted in the first four novels of A Dance to the Music of Time.  Instead, in long scenes, four or five chapters in a 200 page novel, Nick goes to parties or lunches or perhaps a bunch of characters pile into a car and drive around.  All of the school and jobs and even losing the girlfriend happens between the parties.

Meeting characters in different social situations is the structural basis of Anthony Powell’s novel, perhaps even its metaphysics, the governing principle of the fictional universe:

He had cropped up in my life before, and, if I considered him at all as a recurrent factor, I should have been prepared to admit that he might crop up again. (A Buyer’s Market, 1, 29)

I had the idea that characters were going to recur in surprising situations, but at this point there is no surprise.

I myself was curious to see what Mildred Blaides – or rather Mildred Haycock – might look like after all these years, half expecting her to be wearing her V.A.D. outfit and smoking a cigarette.  But when my eyes fell on the two of them, it was the man, not the woman, who held my attention.  Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.  This was just such a performance.  The fiancé was…  (At Lady Molly’s, 1, 42)

But I am in the fourth novel here, so the surprise would be if the much younger, much gossiped over fiancé were not “the horribly memorable Kenneth Widmerpool” who has been the “recurrent factor” since the third chapter of the first novel.  I will be shocked if a novel goes by without Widmerpool.  John Banville is the source of “horribly memorable,” and also “in all his egregious awfulness,” but at this point Widmerpool, a narrow, clumsy social striver, is not quite awful.  He strives towards awfulness but does not seem quite competent enough to reach it.  I will enjoy seeing his awfulness increase as the series progresses.  Some people think of him as one of the great comic characters of English fiction, although at this point he is more like Wodehouse’s Gussie Fink-Nottle than Waugh’s Basil Seal.  Now that is a character with some egregious awfulness.

Please search that Banville review for Waugh.  Since I brought up the subject, let’s have some samples of Powell’s style.  This is Widmerpool, from above:

Like a huge fish swimming into a hitherto unexplored and unexpectedly exciting aquarium, he sailed resolutely forward: yet not a real fish, a fish made of rubber or some artificial substance. (ALM, 1, 42)

Widmerpool generally has (we are two full novel earlier) a “piscine cast of countenance, projecting the impression that he swam, rather than walked, through the rooms he haunted” (ABM, 1, 28).  Powell’s metaphors are specific and imaginative, among the greatest pleasures of the novels: “He made a sweeping movement with his hands, as if driving chickens before him in a farmyard…” (A Question of Upbringing, 4, 189).

It is unlikely that many people, writing up their life, would remember such a thing, but that is Nick.  I do not have to suspend disbelief; our narrator is the rare bird who would remember this detail when writing his memoir twenty-five years after the fact.  He is a stylist, a fussy one – I believe some of the fussiness is visible in the quotations I have used – hardly as original as Waugh or his friend Henry Green but attentive.  Some of his aphoristic lines seem blatantly wrong.  But the sensibility is Powell’s own.  The sensibility, and the sentences, keep me reading, and will likely keep me interested through the twelfth novel.

How A Dance to the Music of Time works, so far - I always enjoy hearing the details of other people’s lives, whether imaginary or not

My writing here is often about what surprised me or did not.  So let’s have that about the first four novels of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve volume sequence published from 1951 to 1975 and covering a refracted version of Powell’s life from his later schooldays in the 1920s up to somewhere close to the completion of the series, if not to the narrator’s actual death, although why not, really  (“And now I am a ghost dictating to a terrified typist”).  Four volumes, 1951 to 1957, gets me up to the mid-1930s in the novel’s timeline.  World War II will get going two or three novels later.  That ought to be interesting.

“Interesting” is an interesting word as applied to A Dance.  It is the purest comedy of manners I have ever read.*

For my own part, I always enjoy hearing the details of other people’s lives, whether imaginary or not, so that I found this side of Lovell agreeable. (At Lady Molly’s, Ch. 5, 185)

Like its direct forebear In Search of Lost Time, parts of the novels are patience-testing, particularly some of the party business.  One of the lessons Powell learned from his beloved Proust was the endless novelistic uses of parties:

I can recall a brief conversation with a woman – not pretty, though possessing excellent legs – on the subject of cheese, which she alleged to be unprocurable at the buffet. (A Buyer’s Market, 2, 139)

That line is a good test of Powell’s humor.  Those who find it hilarious may find A Dance to be a favorite book; those like me who find it more amusing than funny will want to keep reading the novels (this party is in the second book); no comment on those who do not see why this might be called humor.

But my point is that the humor, the interest, and I am becoming convinced the point of this sequence of novels is all of the interconnected minutiae.  Writing a roman fleuve, allowing time to pass, in the novel and perhaps in real life, increases the complexity of the connections. The “details of other people’s lives” accumulate.

I suppose, given the debt to Proust, that Powell would have more of a metaphysics or at least aesthetics, but it is not that kind of book.  He does have a metaphysics.  He is searching for truth in some sense:

I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed…  Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.  (The Acceptance World, 2, 32)

A Dance has plenty of irony, but at this point I do not sense much distance between the narrator, a novelist, and author in passages like this.

Not that I know a thing about the narrator’s novels.  Another trick Powell learned form Proust is to skip all kinds of seemingly life-changing events that would be major features of conventional Bildungromans:

I was then at the time of life when one has written a couple of novels, and moved from a firm that published art books to a company that produced second-feature films.  (ALM, 1, 16)

You know, that time of life.

I want to write about that narrator tomorrow, his style and temperament.  By the end of this thing I will have spent 2,500 pages with him.

*  On a hunch, I have begun Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence (1953) to test this idea of the pure comedy of manners.  I’ve never read Pym.  Forty pages in, it is awful pure.

Preface to notes on the first four novels of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

In France, at the Lyon public library, I was surprised to bump into so many romans fleuves, whatever those are.  They were notable on the shelf because these long series of novels are now published in monumental, highly visible, omnibus editions.  The library assumes that you want to take all 2,400 or 4,800 pages homes at once for some reason.  I wish I had noted some of the authors, aside from Proust and Romain Rolland and Roger Martin du Gard.  There were so many others.  French literature went through a roman fleuve craze.

Rolland and Martin du Gard both won Nobel Prizes but the latter’s Les Thibault (1922-40, 8 vols) never caught on in English and the former’s Jean-Christophe (1904-12, 10 vols) has withered.  I remember that thirty years ago the big, highly visible, Modern Library omnibus of Jean-Christophe was in every used bookstore.  I haven’t seen one for a while.  Sometimes literature seems to follow an ecological model, where the most successful species of the type (Proust) starves its competitors out of its ecological niche.  In France these books still have readers; the niche is clearly more resource-rich.

The winner in British literature has been Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75, 12 vols), although this is a matter of definition, I know.  I take the family saga as a different species.  U.S. authors seem to prefer to occasionally revisit a character over time, as in John Updike’s Rabbit books (1960-90, a mere 4 vols), rather than intentionally plan out a long series.  But the river still flows so what is the difference, really?  I guess I do take intentionality as part of the difference, although I remind myself that In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927, 7 vols) was intended to be (1913-15, 3 vols) and in fact would have been if the war had not interrupted publication giving Proust years to “revise” his novel.

And come to think of it, I can only think of two more British romans fleuves, Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose books (1992-2012, 5 vols) and A. N. Wilson’s Lampitt Chronicles (1988-96, 5 vols).  I’ve actually read that last one.  I had a little A. N. Wilson phase thirty years ago for some reason.  No, I know the reason, I read a good review of his novels. 

I read a good review of the University of Chicago reissue of A Dance to the Music of Time which I have remembered ever since – I have never forgotten that the most prominent recurring character is named “Widmerpool” – although for some reason it did not inspire me to read the novels.

But now I have read some of the Dance novels, the first four, which are:

A Question of Upbringing (1951)

A Buyer’s Market (1952)

The Acceptance World (1955)

At Lady Molly’s (1957)

It took me a while but now I imagine I can at least write down some notes on Powell’s books.  Not that there is any hint of that in this preface.  Perhaps in the next post.  I will tack on the Nicholas Poussin painting that, along with Proust, inspired Powell, just to add a little color.

What I Read in April 2025 – Have we cherished expectations?

I should make that the new official slogan of the blog.  It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake, one of the books I recently read.

FICTION

The Sword in the Stone (1938), T. H. White – I for some reason did not read this as a youth.  It is wonderful, full of anachronism and parody and outstanding British nature writing in the tradition of Gilbert White (mentioned in the novel) and Richard Jefferies.  It turns out that the most important thing in the education of a king is to know what it is like to be a fish.

Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce – begin Here and Continue to the End.

The Big Clock (1946), Kenneth Fearing – A jittery Whitmanian poet of the 1920s and 1930s finally cashes in with a jittery multi-voiced semi-mystery.  The “detective” is the staff of the equivalent of Time Inc., making the killer Henry Luce.  The detective is deliberately not trying to solve the mystery.  The single best part is narrated by a cranky painter.  Odd, odd book, but I see why it survives.

The Mountain Lion (1947), Jean Stafford – A Boston writer, but this sad descendent of What Maise Knew is set in California and on a Colorado cattle ranch.

The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Samuel R. Delaney – His first novel, clumsily constructed but stuffed with imaginative conceits.  I’d never read Delaney.

God's Country (1994), Percival Everett – Almost every Everett novel and short story I have read has a similar voice and narrator, a PhD with a savior complex.  James in James does not have a PhD, but might as well.  In this Western, however, Everett’s narrator is an idiot and another, non-narrating character fills the usual role, which is a lot of fun.  Thirty years older, God’s Country is a companion novel to James (2024).  I urge anyone interested to read them together.  It is time to get the James backlash going.  I have seen a couple of interviews where Everett himself seems to be trying to get the backlash going, but it has not worked yet.  I have read eleven of Everett’s books now and hope to read many more.  James is the worst one!

POETRY

Blues in Stereo (1921-7), Langston Hughes – It is like a gift book, a pointlessly tiny volume that could and should be expanded to include all of The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), both of which are in public domain, which seems to be the limiting concept.  But for some reason this book does include the pieces of a never-realized collaboration with Duke Ellington that is a fantasy refraction of The Big Sea (1940), Hughes’s first memoir.  I do not think the theater piece has been published before.  Worth seeing.

Collected Poems (1940), Kenneth Fearing – High-energy Whitman mixed with advertising=speak and business lingo and gangsters.  So sometimes it’s kitsch.

Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) &

Autumn Sequel (1953) &

Visitations (1957), Louis MacNeice

Chord of Light (1956) &

Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), Zbigniew Herbert

What Rough Beasts (2021), Leslie Moore – An earlier book by a Maine poet and artist I read a year ago.  She specializes in prints, and poems, about birds and other animals.  About an hour after reading her poem about grackles invading her yard and establishing a grackledom the grackles invaded my yard and ruled for several days.  That was enjoyable.

MISCELLANEOUS

Lexington and Concord: The Battle Heard Round the World (2018), George C. Daughan – Preparation for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which is another thing I did in April.  Here I am at the Concord parade, the library in the background.

Sound May Be Seen (2025), Margaret Watts Hughes

Lecture on Radium (2025), Loie Fuller

No Title (2025), Richard Foreman – Three little collectible conceptual art books.  I will just point you to the website.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Peregrinação de Fernão Mendes Pinto: Aventuras extraordinárias dum português no Oriente (The Pilgrimage of Fernão Mendes Pinto: Extraordinary Adventures of a Portuguese Man in the Orient, 1614), Fernão Mendes Pinto – The real book is a 900-page semi-true account of a Portuguese wanderer in the 16th century Far East who, in the most famous episode, joins up with a patriotic privateer, or a bloodthirsty pirate.  The book I read is a rewritten abridgement for Portuguese 9th graders.  How I wish I knew how it was taught. 

La femme partagée (The Shared Woman, 1929), Franz Hellens

La Cité de l'indicible peur (The City of Unspeakable Fear, 1943), Jean Ray – I plan to write a bit about these two novels, my excursion to Belgium.

Navegações (1983), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Languages and literature - Finnegans Wake becomes unbeurrable from age

More keys.  As Anna Livia Plurabelle says or thinks or dreams at the very end of Finnegans Wake, “The keys to.”  She is falling asleep so she unfortunately does not finish the sentence.  Some keys to the Wake: languages, literature, and themes.

Languages

In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Menard considers – rejects, but still, considers – the idea of really understanding Don Quixote by recreating the experiences of Cervantes: learning his language, reading the books he read, getting captured by pirates, and so on.  I have the impression that some Joyceans, some Wakeists, have tried to do this, to learn all of Joyce's languages and every detail about Dublin and acquire an Irish Jesuit education of the 1890s.  Joyce was a cognitively unusual person, but perhaps this is possible collectively.  This researcher tracks down the Finnish references, that one egghausts the egg theme.  Who here knows Romansh?  Joyce knew Romansh, and like everything he knew it is in Finnegans Wake.

I read Ulysses and Joyce’s earlier books as an undergraduate but only poked at Finnegans Wake.  I realized that among other limits my languages were inadequate.  But since then I have learned French (hugely helpful) and to some degree Portuguese (minimally helpful) and picked up at least some words in German and a few other languages.  Gaelic and that Jesuit Latin are what I really needed.  But still:

The older sisars (Tyrants, regicide is too good for you!) become unbeurrable from age… (162)

Beurre is butter and fromage is cheese, and Butter and Cheese are Brutus and Cassisus, the regicides of “sisar.”  Beurre and fromage are common French words, menu words, but thirty-five years ago I did not know them.  The joke in the line was unseeable.  And I now know that in German cheese is Käse which gets me to Cheesey Cassius again.  And then I look up the Latin for cheese, which is caseus, which means this is not even Joyce’s joke, but something as old as, well, whenever schoolboys started learning Roman history and Latin at the same time.  Joyce is just spinning it out.  Large chunks of Finnegans Wake are just Joyce having his fun.

He is almonthst on the kiep fief by here, is Comestipple Sacksoun, be it junipery or febrewery, marracks or alebrill or the ramping riots of pouriose and froriose.  (15-6)

I think I knew what arrack was, and I think I knew that the French Revolutionists had given the months goofy new names – Showery and Flowery – so this boozy line I would have gotten.  Maybe.

Literature

Near the beginning of Chapter V of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “[t]he rainladen trees” are making young Stephen Dedalus think “as always” (!) of “the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann,” from which he passes to “the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman” and then on to Cavalcanti, Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Aristotle, Aquinas, and “the Elizabethans.”  I first read this passage when I was 18, in this class; Hauptmann, Newman, Cavalcanti, Jonson, and maybe even Ibsen might as well have been fictional.  I’d never heard of them.  Now, decades later, I’ve read multiple works by all of them, and Dedalus’s intellectual and artistic world is clear to me.

We read more and learn more.  I’ve read Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725), which helped, although my big surprise was how much of the literary stuff of the Wake was childhood reading: Lewis Carroll and Huckleberry Finn; Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.  Lots of mentions of Swiftiana – Yahoos and Houyhnhnms; Stella and A Tale of a Tub.  Plenty of other Anglo-Irish writers, Sterne and Addison and Shaw.  Look, “ghuest  of innation” (414), it’s Frank O’Connor for some reason.  Swift and Sterne and Carroll are kindred spirits to Finnegans Wake but otherwise I do not understand how Joyce uses these references.  If I tracked down the mentions of Swift would a pattern emerge?

I wonder how fair Joyce plays.  The literary references I can see are to titles, characters, and the most famous quotations:

where the bus stops there shop I (540)

The Tempest for some reason.  Now, looking at the page, I suspect everything of being a parody of a quotation I do not recognize.  And I just saw, looking at that page, a reference to Henry Fielding I missed, “Jonathans, wild and great.”  And a reference to Daniel Defoe in the previous line.

Themes

Or motifs, of the kind I associate with Flaubert.  Not that horses or cigars are symbols, but work through the horse theme or the cigar theme in Madame Bovary and interesting patterns appear, deliberate creations of Flaubert.  Ulysses has plenty of this kind of thing, but Finnegans Wake is so overwhelming that I do  not know how to apply the method.

He was poached on in that eggdentical spot.  (16)

The eggs are everywhere.  Humpty Dumpty first appears on the first page, as part of poor Finnegan’s fall from the ladder, “the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends… in quest of his tumptytumtoes” (3), the last on the last page, “humbly dumbly” (628).  The eggs have a mythic, symbolic meaning, as part of the cyclical story of the children reborn as the parents.  Humpty Dumpty is put back together in Joyce’s world.  This symbolic level is so clear as to be banal.  So what else is going on?  The eggs are everywhere.

I see how this book becomes a hobby for some readers.  Gives you a lot to do if you want.  Of course at this point it is all catalogued and interpreted.  Someone else has compiled the concordance.  I can just look up the eggs and Swifts and Romansh.  Is that more fun or less?