This is the tenth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. 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 tenth volume, the wonderfully titled Books Do Furnish a Room, was published in 1971 and is set just after World War Two. (If you google, there are some marvellous images of Anthony Powell in his book-furnished study, reclining on a red chaise longue 😊)

It opens with Nick back at Oxford, researching a book on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and meeting old tutor Sillery. At the end of the novel he again returns to an educational establishment from his past, organising a place for his son at Eton and meeting old tutor Le Bas. Between times, he is in London, part of a literary scene, where people are trying to re-establish themselves after the upheaval of the preceding years.

“The war had washed ashore all sorts of wrack of sea, on all sorts of coasts. In due course, as the waves receded, much of this flotsam was to be refloated, a process to continue for several years, while the winds abated. Among the many individual bodies sprawled at intervals on the shingle, quite a lot resisted the receding tide. Some just carried on life where they were on the shore; others – the more determined – crawled inland.”

After the focus on companies of men in the war trilogy, much of this novel reads like an extended character study of one person: author X Trapnel. And what a character he is – uncommonly bearded (for the time), wearing a safari suit, tie embossed with nude ladies, and dyed black RAF greatcoat, he carries a skull-topped sword stick.

“When he began to talk, beard, clothes, stick, all took shape as necessary parts of him, barely esoteric, as soon as you were brought into relatively close touch with the personality. That personality, it was at once to be grasped, was quite tough.”

And yet:

“The practical expression of the doctrine of ‘panache’… played a major part in Trapnel’s method of facing the world.”

As with all Powell’s characterisations, his presentation of Trapnel is clear-sighted but never nasty. He has a way of being unsentimental but never unpleasant; discerning but non-judgemental. He seems to enjoy people as they are.

“No brief definition is adequate. Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, comrade, and eccentric, a sage, virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, hard case, spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the slightest affront, to live to a hundred full years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age.”

Around Trapnel swirl the other characters and events of this time. He is employed by publishers Quiggin and Craggs to write for a new magazine, Fission. The ever-present Widmerpool is an investor, and his beautiful wife Pamela continues to bring disdain and chaos with her wherever she goes.

Widmerpool is an MP, as is Nick’s brother-in-law Roddy Cutts, and I enjoyed this brief portrait of Nick’s visit to Westminster:

“We rose from the table, exchanging the claustrophobic pressures of the hall where the meal had been eaten, for a no less viscous density of parliamentary smoking rooms and lobbies, suffocating, like all such precincts, with the omnipresent and congealed essence of public contentions and private egotisms; breath of life to their frequenters.”

Where of course he and Roddy run into Widmerpool:

“The two MP’s were in sharp competition as to whose passion for directness and simplicity was the more heartfelt, at least could be the more forcibly expressed.”

There are also some great descriptions of the seedier parts of London (now very swish areas, but back then poorer and war torn).

Books Do Furnish a Room is quite a contrast to the immediately preceding war novels and a really effective evocation of a chaotic and impoverished postwar London literary scene. I can’t believe there’s only two more left in the sequence for me to read.

“It turned out in due course that Trapnel impersonations of Boris Karloff were to be taken as a signal that a late evening must be brought remorselessly to a close.”