INVESTIGATING POWELL'S A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME

Investigating Powell's A Dance to the Music

of Time

Isabelle Joyau University of Paris III- Sorbonne Nouvelle

M St. Martin's Press

© Isabelle Joyau 1994 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1994

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First published in Great Britain 1994 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

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Companies and representatives throughout the world

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ISBN 978-1-349-23286-4 ISBN 978-1-349-23284-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23284-0

First published in the United States of America 1994 by Scholarly and Reference Division,

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue,

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ISBN 978-0-312-10670-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joyau, Isabelle. Investigating Powell's A dance to the music of time I Isabelle Joyau. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-10670-6 (hardcover) 1. Powell, Anthony, 1905-- Dance to the music of time. 2. Autobiographical fiction, English-History and criticism. 3. Novelists, English, in literature. 4. England in literature. I. Title. PR603l.o74D3335 1994 823' .912--dc20 93-27168

CIP

'Ce que j'attends seulement de votre entretien critique, c'est !'inflex­ion de voix juste qui me fera sentir que vous etes amoureux, et amoureux de la meme maniere que moi: je n'ai besoin que de lacon­firmation et de l'orgueil que procure a l'amoureux I' amour parallele et lucide d'un tiers bien disant.'

Julien Gracq, en lisant en ecrivant (Paris: Jose Corti, 1982), p. 178.

('All I expect to hear in your critical commentary is the inflexion that will make me feel that you are in love, and in love as I myself am in love: all I need is the confirmation and pride which the lover derives from the parallel and lucid love of an eloquent third.')

Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction ix

1 The First-Person Narrator 1

2 Tune in A Dance to the Music of Time 27

3 Society 48

4 Structure 73

5 Surface and Depth 105

6 The Abyss of Carnality 124

7 The Series and its Generic Affiliations 137

8 Conclusion 155

Notes 164

Bibliography 192

Index 208

vii

Acknowledgements

The author and publishers are grateful to William Heinemann Limited for permission to quote from Buyer's Market; A Question of Upbringing; The Acceptance World; At Lady Molly's; and Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell.

viii

Introduction: An Assessment of

Powell's Popularity

No artist can be critically imposed by argument upon a reluctant and prejudiced public; in order to see the felicities of a work of art, the reader or beholder must approach it with sympathy. There is no evading this incontrovertible prerequisite. It is otiose to a degree to try and convince anybody who has set his heart on not letting him­self be persuaded of the merits of an artistic creation. Sympathy is emphatically needed when one embarks on the study and defence of a contemporary writer who has not yet received the infallible stamp of approval time confers on triumphant fictional accomplish­ments, and who has elicited such divergent critical responses as Anthony Powell has. Yet, one's enthusiasm might, one hopes, inspire others to approach any work of art without prejudice.

Goethe believed that whenever one has to express an opinion on the actions or on the writings of others, this must be done with a cer­tain one-sided enthusiasJ;ll, or a loving interest in them and their work, otherwise the result is hardly worth considering. To him, sympathy and enjoyment in what we see are in fact the only reality. One could not dream of a better way of expressing the spirit in which this work was undertaken and pursued. I am an admirer, if not an uncritical one, of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and consider this work to be a masterpiece of modem fiction.

I am far from being alone in commending this fictional achieve­ment, whose creation spans the years 1951-75. Numerous devotees believe that the series compels respect and, for a quarter of a cen­tury, have been eagerly expecting each new instalment with its 'annual treat of Widmerpool'.1 Particularly striking is the large fol­lowing Powell has attracted among fellow novelists: Kingsley Amis claimed he 'would rather read Mr Powell than any other English novelist now writing'.2 Evelyn Waugh paid him his devotional respects, too: 'I have few reasons to desire longevity. One of them is the hope that I (and he) may be spared to see the completion of the fine sequence which he calls The Music of Time. '3 Frederick R. Karl

ix

X Introduction

conveniently collated the laudatory comments passed by literary craftsmen:

'The most important effort in fiction since the war' (Kingsley Amis); 'the finest long comic novel that England has produced this century' (Anthony Burgess); 'if they are not "great", these beautiful books are as near it as makes no difference for their con­temporary readers' (Roy Fuller); 'a joy to all' (Philip Larkin) .... The paperbacks of Powell's books proclaim his achievement.4

Yet, when examining Powell's work, the question of literary status seems to arise with greater urgency than is normally the case. Perhaps because of Powell's narrative reticences and discretions, criticism is thrown off balance and found groping more than is usu­ally the case. Jocelyn Brooke warns that Powell is 'extraordinarily difficult to assess by the normal critical standards'.5 Indeed, few novelists have made such an iconoclastic impact, few have triggered off such heated controversy. A Dance to the Music of Time has elicited wild acclaim- verging occasionally on the fulsome, gushing and rhapsodic - while simultaneously attracting vitriolic criticism. Edmund Wilson figures among the most adamant detractors of Powell: 'He's just entertaining enough to read in bed late at night in summer.'6 So does John Wain, who casually dismissed the series as a vast· roman-fleuve, 'possibly the most unreadable work of our time'? Richard Jones also launched a spirited attack on the series, rebutting the fascination it exercises on its readership as similar to the appeal attendant on a gossip column, revolving on 'finding out who has just been divorced or bedded and by whom'.8

Such a record of hyperbolically divergent critical reception cannot fail to intrigue. Several tentative explanations might be put forward. The scarcity of whole books of criticism devoted to Powell, as well as the scathing appraisals just quoted, may be accounted for by con­trasting the demands of a busy age and very often of a hectic life­style with the leisure required in order to fully appreciate A Dance to the Music of Time. To the hurried reader, to the mere lecteur, the series will most probably not reveal its delights. One needs to be a leisurely liseur to savour it.

Another crucial step necessary for the favourable assessment of Powell's novel is loyal perseverance. Despite the blurb-writers' claim to the contrary, each of the twelve volumes making up the series is not self-contained, and can be read independently as stand-

Introduction xi

ing in its own right only in a most unsatisfactory way and at the risk of boredom or at least of a considerable diminution of entertain­ment. One can easily enough imagine that economic considerations led to a fragmented publication and the appearance of one instal­ment every other year or so, but the liability of closely interdepen­dent volumes proves detrimental when the original reading order is not respected. This claim certainly did Powell's reputation great dis­service. The pleasure one derives from reading the novel is cumula­tive, an accretionary process, the result of prolonged exposure and of growing familiarity with a personal fictional universe. After the first effort to get in sympathy with the spirit presiding over the series, one becomes addicted to A Dance to the Music of Time. My own initial reaction, corroborated by other admirers' experience, was not enthusiastic. Powell's appeal is not of a facile and immedi­ate kind. I put down the volume I had picked at random after read­ing only a few pages. But for the methodical reader - methodical at least during his first perusal of the work - for the reader wary of succumbing to hasty first impressions and ready to give the series another try, often with increased success, the rewards are immense.

There remains the possibility that some readers may be totally unresponsive to Powell's style, a case the writer himself envisaged: 'When a novelist is doing his job he is presenting you with a view of life. Your reaction to it is much like your reaction to people in real life .... That's a matter of personality. I think it works the same way with books. Some people won't like my books because they don't like my personality.'9 I would like to suggest a more specific poss­ible reason for some readers' failure to find Powell engrossing. In order to respond to Powell's writings, one has to be attuned to his sense of humour; 'secret harmonies' must exist between reader and author. Comedy is universal; humour is highly idiosyncratic and requires temperamental affinity to be delightful to someone else.

Powell has been repeatedly hailed as the king of comedy. If we bear in mind Baudelaire's terminology, Powell's hilarious writings belong to the category of the 'absolutely comic', where laughter is creative and generates joy, rather than to that of the 'significantly comic', where it is reductive and deprecatory, more akin to satire in fact. But Powell is treating us to more than just comedy:

The humorist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to his feelings, and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But the humorist, if high, has an embrace of contrasts

xii Introduction

beyond the scope of the Comic poet. ... The stroke of the great humorist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy in his laughter.10

He is a superbly humorous writer, although not deliberately so: 'I do not myself set out to be a humorous novelist.'11 Contrary to com­edy, whose offerings are likely to be greeted with a reasonable degree of consensus, humour is essentially idiosyncratic. There again, for Powell's series to be judged good, a subtle chemistry involving secret harmonies must be at play, a requirement that of necessity curtails an author's readership. The reader's sensibility, his personal preferences must be attuned to the author's. That period taste might play a considerable role should not be ruled out either. His humour provokes a knowing smile rather than a horse­laugh; it is low-keyed, and has a quiet delicacy, a euphemistic qual­ity which risks being lost on the reader lacking sympathy in the etymological sense. Sometimes humour relies on antiphrasis: com­menting ironically on Trapnel's infatuation after meeting the foul­mouthed, abusive and sultry Pamela for the first time, the narrator teases his friend: 'That stole your heart away.'12 Humour occasion­ally stems from mock solemnity when dealing with trifles, from an affectation of seriousness levelled at Lilliputian topics: 'He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon's part.'13 Alternately, humour can be caused by cultivating incongruity. General Conyers praises his acquaintance Jeavons in the following terms: 'Don't know him well. Hear some people com­plain he is a bore. I don't think so. He lut me on to a first-rate place to buy cheap shirts many years ago.'1 There are innumerable other examples in the series.

Moreover Powell makes ample use of another unobtrusive device: litotes, which can only be fully appreciated if one is psycho­logically attuned. Powell himself draws our attention to the fact that 'understatement and irony - in which all classes of this island con­verse - upset the normal emphasis of reported speech' ;15 he men­tions Lady Warminster's 'obliquity of speech'16 exemplified in the sentence: 'Poor Amy, she has rather some odd friends',17 when she means that they are totally unpalatable. He analyses the illuminat­ing action of time where perception of hidden meaning is con­cerned: 'Nor did I realize at that time the implications contained in the phrase to "hear a lot about" someone of Miss Blaide's age and kind', 18 which phrase refers to a particularly debauched young upper-class woman. He himself speaks of 'moderately distin-

Introduction xiii

guished'19 guests at Mrs Andriadis's party where a disreputable motley crew is assembled.

The fact that the reality described by Powell is so archetypally English has been advanced as constituting an insuperable obstacle to Powell winning a wider popularity abroad. There is no denying that, when it comes to critical reception, affinities or acquaintance with the cultural codes inscribed in the text - the minutiae of class, the subtle variations of accents, telling period details and familiarity with the flesh-and-blood counterparts of the characters described or more generally the mores and moods of the English upper-classes -do shape the reader's response and heighten the vividness of the pleasure derived from reading A Dance to the Music of Time. Yet this difficulty of appealing outside one's own cultural milieu and frame of reference must not be exaggerated. One does not need to be extraordinarily anglophile to appreciate the merits of the series. Powell has been translated into German, for example, and has received excellent reviews in that country. Moreover, any moder­ately educated person would have heard of the class-system, of the old-boy network, of the eccentricities of the English people, or of the importance attached to accent. The feeling of strangeness would be limited and not prove detrimental to a full grasp of the intricacies of the English scene for any reasonably competent reader.

When trying to trace the reasons why Powell has not inspired more agreement, a more convincing reason seems to be the sugges­tion that the series is not geared to a common current trend which favours the shocking or the vulgarly egotistic. Powell does not pan­der to a taste for sensationalism; he does not wallow in a literature of crisis that puts a premium on violent extremes in situations or feelings; he does not relish bloodcurdling, hair-raising or scandal­ous episodes; he feels no compulsion to put on a flashy performance and indulge in sexual or existential stripping. His work is an apol­ogy of temperance and restraint, which values appear to be some­what at a discount at a time when fanaticisms flourish and all-out commitment is so much in vogue.

Powell's choice of narrator is illuminating in this respect. Some readers have stigmatized the latter as being run-of-the-mill and mediocre, and have dismissed the series as 'a novel without a hero'. That he does not adopt a blustering, swaggering attitude, that he refuses to wear his heart upon his sleeve, in no way points to a lack­lustre existence. Jenkins might well live in a quiet, self-effacing way, in a minor key or a petit bruit, but he nevertheless identifies with the

xiv lntroduction

enduring, solid, humanistic virtues of disinterestedness, tolerance, decency, reflection and moderation. Honore de Balzac in The Wild Ass's Skin, expatiates on the various attitudes to life one can adopt; Jenkins corresponds to the wise type who adheres to a set of decent values and avoids the extremes of willpower that lead to mono­manias and ultimately to dementia:

I am going to reveal to you, in a few words, one of the great mys­teries of human life. Man exhausts himself by two acts, instinc­tively accomplished, which dry up the sources of his existence. Two words express all the forms that these two causes of death can assume: will and power. Between these two terms of human action there is another formula which wise men cling to, and to it I owe happiness and my long life. The exercise of the will consumes us; the exercise of power destroys us; but the pursuit of Knowledge leaves our feeble organization in a state of perpetual calm. So desire and volition is dead in me, killed by thought.. .. In short, I have invested my life, not in the heart, so easily broken, not in the senses, which are so readily blunted, but in the brain which does not wear out and outlasts everything. No kind of excess has galled either my soul or my body.20

Jenkins is not meant to come across as brilliant professionally or as first-rate personally, but he definitely stands out as a perfectly like­able honnete homme. In the dance of barbarians and monsters, he rep­resents the saving grace of civilization; in an age of unsavoury excesses and vociferousness, he maintains a degree of decorum and embodies calm and control.

Also unpalatable for some is Powell's style, deemed by censors to be heavy-going and tediously pedantic, but thought of as being deliberately and delightfully laborious by supporters. Powell's prose has been reviled as over-referential and cluttered with its wealth of recondite cultural allusions, pictorial, literary or historical. But to advocates of the series, these alleged shortcomings turn into virtues. They are viewed in terms of aristocratic and mandarin dis­tinction, as the result of a really cultivated mind. Such classical com­parisons as the following do not appear to us to be far-fetched or artificial in any way. On the contrary, by triggering off a rich train of recollections, by setting the reader's imagination working, they add to the vividness of the episodes described:

Introduction XV

Barbara now tipped the castor sugar so that it was poised verti­cally over Widmerpool's head, holding it there like the sword of Damocles above the tyrant.21

... the terrible suspicion even suggested itself that, night after night, he danced his life away through the ballrooms of London in the unshakable conviction that the whole thing was a sham. Was he merely stoical like the Spartan boy - clad this time in a white shirt - with the fox of bitterness gnawing, through stiff shirt, at his vitals.22

Powell's sequence-novel is couched in the impeccably controlled and well-bred idiom of a gentleman. The author is a consummate Apollonian - as opposed to Dionysiac - and disciplined writer. Every sentence is strictly kept in check, any potential emotional out­burst carefully curbed, any tug of passion resisted, any angry or passionate move simply not accommodated, thus lending an air of cool, detached formality and of unruffled, if slightly stiff elegance to the writing. The impression created as a result is a far cry from the crudity, the raw vehemence, the inflammatory anathematizing and militant tone of pamphlet-like literature often very much in fashion today. Powell's effects are too subtly toned down to satisfy those inclined to enjoy hyperbolic styles and violent extremes.

The leisurely rhythm of Powell's text has also incurred criticism. One can easily imagine his sentences being described in tum as cloying, ponderously contrived, laboured, convoluted, bloated, stodgy; the pace of his prose being inveighed against as heavy­footed, sluggish or plodding. Conversely, one might choose to resort to phrases such as elaborately serpentine, beautifully winding and meandering, superbly intricate or deftly twisting. Such an andante, such a largo, are in fact ideally suited to a ratiocinative, analytical, meditative, reflective, ruminative mind. Such involutions should not be vilified as orotund; they are apposite to a halting semiological quest, to consistently tentative exegeses since Man's epistemological aim is constantly up against evidential gaps and the absence of war­ranted assertability in a world immediably replete with obscurities. What Powell gives us to see is the complex process of a mind at work, a searching aloud involving the tentative suggestion of a pos­sible explanation, added rectifications, and constant checking one­self before embarking on another track. Hence the impression of circumlocution due to a meticulousness, to a praiseworthy concern

xvi In traduction

with rigorous exactitude. The parturition of unassailable - as much so as possible at least - ideas is a jerky and difficult undertaking. This painful process is adequately reflected in the use of long sen­tences partaking of Latin syntax, well-balanced, highly structured and often resorting to a ternary rhythm. It also shows in the multi­ple interpolations of relative clauses, in the ample use of qualifying parentheses, in the resorting to a complex punctuation of colons, semi-colons and dashes which introduce explanatory passages, greater specification, restrictions, all of these with an overarching view to ensuring an ever subtler tracking down of truth. The purple patch that the opening of the series constitutes illustrates this grop­ing, tentacular process:

For some reason, the sight of the snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world - legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea- scattered, un-coordinated shapes from a fab­ulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical pro­jections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men them­selves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortal­ity: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recogniz­able shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giv­ing pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. 23

It is not easy -perhaps not even desirable- to judge other people by a consistent standard. Conduct obnoxious, even unbearable, in one person may be readily tolerated in another; apparently indis­pensable principles of behaviour are in practice relaxed - not always with impunity - in the interest of those whose nature seems to demand an exceptional measure. That is one of the diffi­culties ... : because some characters and some deeds (Uncle Giles's, as I have mentioned) may be thought of.. .. On the stage, however,

Introduction xvii

masks are assumed with some regard to procedure: in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is ... ; though there are times when close observa­tion reveals, one way or another, that matters may ... 24

Evasive phrases such as 'for some reason', 'perhaps'; the abundance of modulations: 'in its way', 'by no means', 'not altogether', 'no doubt' or 'more or less'; the constant recourse to the modal verb 'may'; are hallmarks of the probity of an ebulliently searching mind, never cocksure about anything, fastidiously attached to the finest shades of meaning - the rich lexicon bears testimony to this - and concerned with the most fastidious accuracy. One can no longer speak of uncalled-for long-windedness or of pompous turgidity; one witnesses refined meticulousness and commendable intellectual honesty. The best illustration of this extreme caution in expression is found in the narrator's wary stance. Never will he be caught ham­mering a point home or passing peremptory comments admitting of no contradiction. All views are consistently put forward hesitat­ingly, exploratorily. Let us follow Powell in his quest for truth.