“I record these speculations…to emphasise the difficulty in understanding, even remotely, why people behave as they do.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile

I’ve just managed to keep up my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence this April! It’s been a bit of a month and May looks equally challenging so I won’t be doing my Novella a Day in May this year, though I will focus on novellas for the month as I had some lined up that I’m really keen to read.

Back to A Dance to the Music of Time! Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The fourth volume, At Lady Molly’s, was published in 1957 and is set in the 1930s before the start of World War Two. Politics is only mentioned very occasionally though, and the focus remains on the relationships between an insular set of people.

This is the volume where I started to get a sense of the dance. With marriages a strong theme, the characters circle around, encountering one another for periods before spinning off again. Others weave in and out.

 Nick is now working as a script writer and his affair has ended. At the start of the novel he is taken by a colleague to a party at Lady Molly Jeavons. Once again he runs into acquaintance/talisman Widmerpool:

“Yet, for some reason, I was quite glad to see him again. His reappearance, especially in that place, helped to prove somehow rather consolingly, that life continued its mysterious, patterned way. Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road”

Widmerpool is engaged to Mildred Haycock, who is quite a few years older than him and has a colourfully described past. Later we learn that Widmerpool’s political aspirations are growing, and there is a chilling speech he gives Nick over lunch at his club, in favour of appeasement of Hitler.

Once again I was struck by Powells astute, clear-sighted assessment of people. Surrounded as it is by a satirical comedy of manners, he can really pack a punch when he chooses.

“Sentiment and power, each in their way, supply something to feed the mind, if not the heart. They are therefore elements operated often to excess by persons in temperament unable to love at all, yet at the same time unwilling to be left out of the fun, or to bear the social stigma of living emotionally uninteresting lives.”

There are lighter portraits too of course. My favourite in At Lady Molly’s was retired General Alymer Conyers. In his eighties, he spends his retirement reading Virginia Woolf, practising the cello, and learning about psychoanalysis:

“‘Been reading a lot about it lately,’ said the General. ‘Freud – Jung – haven’t much use for Adler. Something in it, you know. Tells you why you do things. All the same, I didn’t find it much help in understanding Orlando.’

Once more he fell into a state of coma.”

Quiggin and Mona Templar reappear (“She was like a strapping statue of Venus conceived at a period when more than a touch of vulgarity had found its way into classical sculpture.” Ouch.) living in a cottage owned by Erridge, who is now Lord Warminster. The lord of the manor dresses in scrappy clothes, has a big beard and gives a lot of his money away to good causes. I work near Shoreditch so none of this sounds like remotely remarkable manhood to me, but to his 1930s aristocratic family he seems mad. I’ve read somewhere he may have been based on George Orwell!

Nick meets two of Erridge’s sisters when he visits, including Isabel, “a bit of a highbrow when she isn’t going to night clubs”. He falls in love at first sight but their courtship happens entirely away from the eyes of the reader. Powell’s interest isn’t romance, but rather the dynamics of relationships and how these play out in the wider world.

“Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.”

There are so many ways A Dance… is of its time (which I think is exactly as intended) but it also doesn’t age, through Powell’s astute characterisation. I was very struck by this comment early on in At Lady Molly’s:

“One of those men oddly prevalent in Victorian times who sought personal power through buffoonery”

You don’t have to look very far back through our Prime Ministers to find a much more recent example…

I absolutely whizzed through At Lady Molly’s and I’m really looking forward the next volume, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.

To end, a beautifully simple rendition of a song about Molly:

22 thoughts on ““I record these speculations…to emphasise the difficulty in understanding, even remotely, why people behave as they do.” (Anthony Powell)”

  1. This is really a book that seems to be a literary landmark for UK readers and that I’d absolutely never heard of before reading British blogs. (Same for Sebald btw) I’ve never seen a translation of this lying around in a bookstore. Isn’t that odd?

    It sounds wonderful though, even if it requires a bit of stamina, like Proust, I guess.

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    • It is odd, because its so very English, but an England that really doesn’t exist anymore, that I would think it would have overseas appeal.

      I think the thought of the cycle requires stamina if that makes sense! The individual books are pretty short and once you get into them they are quick reads.

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  6. Lovely, lovely post Madame B – once you get into your stride with these you can’t stop, can you? You remind me of all I loved about the series, and the line “Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road” really does resonate!! What a character!!

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  7. Just catching up with blog posts. I really enjoyed reading this review and, like kaggsy, it was the ‘Widmerpool milestone along the road’ quote that I liked the best. You are making me think I want to reread these again!!

    Hope May is not too stressful for you. It’s probably good for my teetering tbr pile that you are not doing novella a day in May as I need time to catch up! I am currently loving The Rising Tide which I would not have read were it not for you as I thought I would not like Molly Keane as she would be too dark for me. The Rising Tide is wonderfully funny but the psychological depictions of the different characters, especially the contrast between their public and private ‘face’ are excellent. Thank you for the recommendation!

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  8. I love what you’ve said about getting a sense of the dance at this point in the series with characters circling around, encountering one another for periods before spinning off again. As griffandsarahthoams just said, you’re making me want to read the sequence again as there’s so much to absorb in each book. Spreading them out to read a book a month is absolutely the right approach here!

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    • It is a really clever balance of satire and insight, and it doesn’t have a bitterness to it which satire can sometime have. I’m yet to read Valley of Bones – that will be July’s read if I keep on track! I hope you enjoy this if you get to it Mallika.

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    • I think it is, with the sense of time and patterning underpinning it all. But I guess I’ll know for sure when I finish the sequence!

      She really was, wasn’t she? Her performances are so accomplished but they still have that rawness to them.

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