Saturday Diversion: A Dance to the Music of Time
Just read it, OK?
A Dance to the Music of Time is a 12-volume novel by the English writer, Anthony Powell. Powell is sometimes referred to as “the English Proust.” But he’s way more fun and way easier to read! Maybe a 12-volume novel sounds a bit daunting but reading it is enormously rewarding and endlessly fascinating—really, it’s one of the great works of 20th century English literature. I’ve read the whole series three times and I’ll shortly be going back for a fourth.
But what’s it about you ask? This from Amazon isn’t bad as a plain vanilla description:
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume [each volume has three books] panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.
Perry Anderson correctly observes:
There is no other work in the annals of European fiction that attempts meticulously to recreate half a century of history, decade by decade, with anything like the emotional precision or details of Powell’s twelve volumes. Neither Balzac’s panorama of the Restoration, nor Zola’s chronicles of the Second Empire, nor Proust’s reveries in the Belle Epoque can match a comparable span of time, an attention to variations within it, or a compositional intricacy capable of uniting them into a single narrative…
But these don’t really capture the feel of Powell’s masterpiece. Try this, from the from the opening of first volume of Dance, as Nick Jenkins, Powell’s narrator, reflects on the Poussin painting that gives the series its name:
These classical projections, and something 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 recognisable 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.
Or this, from Christopher Hitchens who wrote for my money the best essay on Dance called, appropriately, “Powell’s Way”:
“Nick” Jenkins does not give us his long life story, or the story of his contemporaries in, so to speak, first gear. In the opening volume, A Question of Upbringing, for example, he is a boy at Eton and the time is just after the First World War. At the start of the sixth volume, The Kindly Ones, he is a smaller boy living at home in the pregnant summer of 1914. The general title of the sequence is taken from a painting done by Nicolas Poussin in 1639, and hanging at present in the Wallace Collection. It represents Time as rather gloatingly savoring his advantage over those who gyrate to his lute. Musical and painterly allusions recur throughout the novels, providing many of the binding references that are necessary in a work of a million words and almost five hundred characters, and several of the crucial subordinate figures are either painters or musicians by profession.
What Powell is aiming for is the harnessing of counterpoint. Characters appear and disappear and then reappear, as do certain events and objects (a practical joke here, a painting there). People die in one book and are encountered afresh in a later one. But as the sequence takes hold of the reader, the separate melodies become slowly subordinate to the basic one, and strive for a harmonic whole. A strong minor figure, the war-invalid Ted Jeavons, is described not by accident as “seething with forgotten melodies” and does exert a bonding force on numerous large changes of scene. By a happy chance, the dictionary definition of “counterpoint” also has an application to heraldry. It denotes the meeting of two chevrons at their “points,” or apexes, in the center of an escutcheon, or shield. This has a real analogue in Powell’s method, which relies to an unusual degree on kinship and lineage…
As composer and as orchestrator, and indeed as herald and genealogist, Powell chiefly means to control. He attains this objective by striking certain chords which, echoing in the mind even of an inattentive reader, will firmly but gently recall him to an earlier one. Let me give a single illustration. In the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, we are introduced to the school friends who will feature in the life of Nick Jenkins. Among these are Kenneth Widmerpool, the most dogged and fearsome solipsist in modern fiction, and Charles Stringham, the languid and epicene loser, who, at once fatally charming and fatally languid, succumbs to a combination of alcohol and inanition….
Widmerpool is insufferable from the start, but more as someone prematurely pompous and absurd than, as he later proves, someone decidedly sinister. The charming Stringham makes game of him, imitates him to perfection, and treats him as a figure of fun. “That boy,” he asserts in a commonplace phrase, “will be the death of me.” Eight volumes and two decades later, in The Soldier’s Art, Widmerpool does deliberately and cynically, by the exercise of bureaucratic fiat in sending the unresisting young man to a front-line wartime posting, cause Stringham’s death. Widmerpool’s callousness is also the oblique cause of his own ensuing ruin and disgrace, these being precipitated when (in another coincidence mediated by about four degrees of separation) he contracts an ambitious but calamitous marriage to Stringham’s unstable niece. And yet there is nothing of the morality tale in the way that this complex evolution is set down. Nor does Jenkins make any effort to assist the reader to judgments or conclusions…
Remember that name….Widmerpool….and just read it, OK? Consider this your invitation to the Dance.