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.