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.