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.