novel sequence

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

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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:

“All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.” (Anthony Powell)

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It’s month three 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.

Either I’m getting used to Powell’s syntax, or as he developed as a writer he found a fondness for full stops, because I found The Acceptance World (1955) had a much more comprehensible prose style than its two predecessors.

As usual Powell doesn’t explicitly state when the story is set, but a reference early on to “the country’s abandonment of the Gold Standard at about this time” means it starts around 1931. Economics feature heavily in The Acceptance World and the privileged circles Nick moves in are not entirely immune. There are frequent references to “the slump” taking a toll. Unfortunately political satire never seems to date;

“’Intelligence isn’t everything,’ I said, trying to pass the matter off lightly. ‘Look at the people in the Cabinet.’”

Schoolfriends and university friends reappear: Templer, Widmerpool, Stringham and Manners. The title is taken from recurring talisman/character Widmerpool’s new job. Templer tells Nick “’Widmerpool is joining the Acceptance World. […] he is going to become a bill-broker.’” This work, like most City work, makes absolutely no logical sense and reaps large financial rewards. Essentially Widmerpool accepts the transitory debts of companies and takes them on based on their reputation. Later in the novel Nick sees this principal applying more widely:

“The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element – happiness, for example – is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions are discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.”

The tone felt more sombre in this volume. Having spent time with Nick through his schooldays and at debutante parties in the first two volumes, he is now nearing thirty. Europe’s economic and political situation, while not given lengthy consideration, is creeping into everyday life. On a smaller scale, there are divorces, disillusionment and alcoholism amongst his peer group. If this sounds too depressing, Powell’s satire keeps a sharp, humorous eye on proceedings, such as Stringham’s divorce:

“Soon after the decree had been made absolute, Peggy married a cousin, rather older than herself, and went to live in Yorkshire, where her husband possessed a large house, noted in books of authentically recorded ghost stories for being rather badly haunted.”

He also sets a humorous tone from the beginning, detailing a meeting with his Uncle Giles in an unprepossessing Bayswater hotel:

 “He spoke slowly, as if, after much thought, he had chosen me from an immense number of other nephews to show her at least one good example of what he was forced to endure in the way of relatives.”

The ‘her’ in quote above is Mrs Erdleigh, a dreamy woman who reads cards: “She seemed hardly to take in these trivialities, though she smiled all the while, quietly, almost rapturously, rather as if she were enjoying a warm bath after a trying day shopping.”

The novel expands on Nick’s circumstances of work a bit further, although it remains all a bit vague. He has published a novel but he says very little about it:

“‘I liked your first,’ said Quiggin.

 He conveyed by these words a note of warning that, in spite of his modified approval, things must not go too far where books were concerned.”

There is also consideration of women, as Nick begins an affair with an old friend. His observations are callow generalisations, but I don’t think the reader is supposed to find Nick particularly insightful or wise in this regard. In contrast, his observations about men are astute, from the comic summation:

“Like most men of his temperament, he held, on the whole, rather strict views regarding other people’s morals. […] In any case he was not greatly interested in such things unless himself involved.”

To a thoughtful consideration of those slightly older than him affected by the previous war:

“He seemed still young, a person like oneself; and yet at the same time his appearance and manner proclaimed that he had had time to live at least a few years of his grown-up life before the outbreak of war in 1914. Once I had thought of those who had known the epoch of my own childhood as ‘older people’. Then I found there existed people like Umfraville who seemed somehow to span the gap. They partook of both eras, specially forming the tone of the post war years; much more so, indeed, than the younger people. Most of them, like Umfraville, were melancholy; perhaps from the strain of living simultaneously in two different historical periods.”

I really enjoyed The Acceptance World and there’s so much I haven’t covered here. I’m starting to find returning to the sequence like sinking into a big squashy chair. Although it’s not a comfort read, Powell’s writing, his comedy and insights, and the (now) familiar world he creates are a joy to return to.

I’m also beginning to really understand the complexity and subtlety of what Powell is doing in A Dance to the Music of Time. His style is so deceptive; he seems to be writing about nothing while in fact he’s writing about everything:

“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.”

To end, in honour of Mrs Erdleigh:

“The business of her life was to get her daughters married.” (Jane Austen)

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It’s month two in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. It was 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.

After reading A Question of Upbringing in January, I think I’ve adapted to Powell’s unusual prose style with long, meandering sentences. I had to remind myself in A Buyer’s Market (1952) that it was likely that very little was going to happen. Once I’d readjusted to the lack of plot, the style made more sense. It has the feel of extended reminiscences, with the reader listening in.

In A Buyer’s Market, Nick has left university and is working for a publishing house focussed on art books. That is about as much as we hear of his career, as the novel is concerned with the social life of the upper classes and the parties that form part of the season for debutantes. The time isn’t specified but it seems to be around the late 1920s.

Sometimes I joke with my mother that she gave birth 77 years too late. That, had I been born in 1900, it would have worked perfectly for me in terms of an adulthood in the era of my tastes in books, films, fashion, decor and architecture. But, as I don’t fancy being poor before the invention of the NHS, I’d have to be born into much richer circumstances and become a flapper. Well, A Buyer’s Market thoroughly disabused me of that notion. Goodness me, the round of parties seemed unutterably tedious. It says something for Powell’s writing that the novel wasn’t tedious at all.

The novel begins, after a brief flashback scene, with Nick attending a dinner party at Lady Walpole-Wilson’s:

“her comparative incapacity to control her own dinner parties, at which she was almost always especially discomposed, seemed to me a kind of mute personal protest against circumstances – in the shape of her husband’s retirement – having deprived her of the splendours, such as they were, of that position in life owed to her statuesque presence; for in those days I took a highly romantic view, not only of love, but also of such things as politics and government: supposing, for example, that eccentricity and ineptitude were unknown in circles where they might, in fact, be regarded – at least insofar as the official entertaining of all countries is concerned – almost as the rule rather than the exception.”

(Please note the quote above is one sentence!)

At this point Nick believes he is in love with Barbara Goring, but it is when she plays a prank on Nick’s old Eton associate Widmerpool, that he rapidly changes his mind. This is not through sympathy for Widmerpool to whom he still has ambivalent feelings, but there remain hints at the greater role he will play in Nick’s life:

“I did not, however, as yet see him as one of those symbolic figures, of whom most people possess at least one example, if not more, round whom the past and the future have a way of assembling.”

Nick and Widmerpool are having coffee at a street stand when they bump into Mr Deacon, an old artist friend of Nick’s parents, who is touting  disarmament pamphlets with a young woman, Gypsy Jones. Nick’s old schoolfriend Stringham arrives, and this unlikely quintet go to a second party at Mrs Andriadis’ – a more bohemian affair than the dinner, but one where Nick identifies  “almost exactly the same chilly undercurrent of conflict”.

If the cynicism wasn’t apparent enough in this volume’s title, Powell makes his feelings abundantly clear. The parties of this circuit are not joyful affairs, they are occasions where everyone wants something: spouses, social advancement, career advancement, money.

“Everyone used to say that dances bored them; especially those young men – with the honourable exception of Archie Gilbert – who never failed to respond to an invitation, and stayed, night after night, to the bitter end. Such complaints were made rather in the spirit of people who grumble at the inconvenience they suffer from others falling in love with them.”

It all sounds a bit desperate and boring.

Later in the novel Nick attends a party at Sir Magnus Donner’s castle, where many of the characters from the party appear again. It is a small social set but not an intimate one. Sir Magnus seems particularly unlikable and even sinister. One of my favourite passages was Nick’s spiky assessment of his host:

“Sir Magnus himself did not talk much, save intermittently to express some general opinion. His words, wafted during a comparative silence to the father end of the table, would have suggested on the lips of a lesser man processes of thought of a banality so painful – of such profound and arid depths, in which neither humour, nor imagination, nor indeed, any form of human understanding could be thought to play the smallest part – that I almost supposed him to be speaking ironically, or teasing his guests by acting the part of a bore in a drawing room comedy. I was far from understanding that the capacity of men interested in power is not necessarily expressed in the brilliance of their conversation.”

I mentioned when reading A Question of Upbringing that it was the satire that saved the novel for me and it is the same here. I doubt Anthony Powell saw himself as a subversive but he definitely has an assessing gaze regarding the privileged upper classes. I also thought it was notable what he doesn’t comment on. The need for an abortion is detailed but not judged, gay male characters have their sexuality mentioned in passing but again not judged. Both these were still illegal in the UK when this novel was published.

Although the theme of the novel is about commodification and how “Human life is lived largely at surface level”, I did feel the reader had a growing intimacy with Nick. Barely present in his own story in the first volume, in A Buyer’s Market Nick reported more of his own speech, motivations and feelings. This strengthened the storytelling and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.

To end, after reading this novel, not even Liza can persuade me to come to the debutante’s ball:

“Books do furnish a room.” (Anthony Powell)

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I’ve decided that 2024 will be the year of a reading project I’ve been considering for a while – a book per month throughout the year 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.

What’s that you say? I have half-completed reading projects still languishing? I have a spiralling TBR that doesn’t need 12 more books added to it? Be gone! You are clearly a pragmatist and such attitudes have no place in my reading life 😀

In the first novel, A Question of Upbringing (1951), we follow Nick Jenkins from his school days at a thinly-disguised Eton to his university days at a thinly-disguised Balliol College, Oxford. Starting at School, we meet Jenkins’ friends Stringham and Templer, and hear of their frustrations with housemaster Le Bas.

“’He started life as a poet,’ Stringham said. ‘Did you know that? Years ago, after coming back from a holiday in Greece, he wrote some things he thought were frightfully good. He showed them to someone or other who pointed out that, as a matter of fact, they were frightfully bad. Le Bas never got over it.’

‘I can’t imagine anything more appalling than a poem by Le Bas,’ said Templer, ‘though I’m surprised he doesn’t make his pupils learn them.’

‘Who did he show them to?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Stringham. ‘Henry James, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or someone like that.’”

The boys are varying degrees of privileged, from uber-wealthy to moderately wealthy, from landed gentry to new money. The societal hierarchies are complex and imperfectly understood, even by those in their midst:

“Clearly some complicated process of sorting out was in progress among those who surrounded me: though only years later did I become aware of how early such voluntary segregations begin to develop; and of how they continue throughout life.”

In theory I have limited patience for such stories, after the enormous damage Eton-educated men and their cronies have done in UK politics. Yet I found myself enjoying A Question of Upbringing. I think because Powell doesn’t suggest the superiority of anyone he’s writing about or the systems in place, casting a satirical eye over it all.

For example, when Nick begins his travels, he finds himself hopelessly ill-equipped to comprehend any culture beyond his own:

“I had seen a provincial company perform The Doll’s House not many months before, and felt, with what I now see to have been quite inadmissible complacency, that I knew all about Ibsen’s countrymen.”

It is during these travels that he meets Widmerpool again, a boy somewhat disregarded as figure of fun at school, who shows himself to be more astute than Nick and the other pupils allowed for.

“Later in life, I learned that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction.”

Nothing of huge significance seemingly happens in A Question of Upbringing, but it wouldn’t surprise me if events somehow cast a long shadow in later volumes. As a standalone novel, Powell keeps the narrative compelling by picking out certain moments and impressions, rather than plodding through years with equal weighting. It’s a short novel, only 223 pages in my edition and this length worked well – satisfying but also with a sense of setting the scene for later novels.

It took me a while to adjust to Powell’s dense writing style; he likes long sentences of several clauses. Once I had got used to this though, I found myself swept along.

“The evening was decidedly cool, and rain was half-heartedly falling. I knew now that this parting was one of those final things that happen, recurrently, as time passes: until at last they may be recognised fairly easily as the close of a period. This was the last I should see of Stringham for a long time. The path had suddenly forked. With regret, I accepted the inevitability of circumstance. Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.”

Nick is an enigmatic narrator. In this first volume he describes many people and events, observes whole scenes, without appearing to have spoken or acted himself at all. We learn very little about him. I found myself wondering why Powell had opted for an omnipresent narrator over an omniscient one, when Nick barely seems present. But that’s not a criticism, just what seemed a curious choice. Maybe Nick will emerge from his own story in the subsequent volumes. I’m looking forward to finding out.

To end, a dance from the 1950s, looking back to the 1920s: