twentieth century fiction

“People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case.” (Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies)

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I did it! This is the final instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. I’d been put a bit behind by labyrinthitis but I finished on 31 December. I’d hoped to write and post this the same day but I got distracted by my Christmas jigsaw puzzle on The World of Virginia Woolf 😀

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 twelfth volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, was published in 1975 and opens in 1968.

Much of Hearing Secret Harmonies is concerned with the past but it opens by introducing a new character, the sinister Scorpio Murtlock who is camping on Nick and Isobel’s land with some of his followers. Nick, always such an astute observer of people, is not taken in by Murtlock’s charisma:

“When Murtlock smiled the charm was revealed. He was a boy again, making a joke, not a fanatical young mystic. At the same time he was a boy with whom it was better to remain on one’s guard.”

“Murtlock himself possessed to a marked degree that characteristic – perhaps owing something to hypnotic powers – which attaches to certain individuals; an ability to impose on others present the duty of gratifying his own whims.”

It’s a masterstroke of Powell’s writing that while Murtlock remains elusive, he is also deeply unnerving. There’s no doubt as to how dangerous he could be, fully realised by the novel’s end.

Nick then attends two dinners which work well as devices for him to meet past friends and acquaintances, drawing them into the final sequences, and alerting the reader as to has left the Dance for good. There is a sense of time folding in on itself:

“Members, his white hair worn long, face pale and lined, had returned to the Romantic Movement overtones of undergraduate days.”

And of course Widmerpool, Nick’s talisman of sorts, reappears. He is quite extraordinary: a former beacon of the Establishment now refuting his knighthood, asking to be called Ken, wearing a grubby red polo neck to formal occasions and focussing on the power of 1960s youth movements for societal change. His involvement with Scorpio Murtlock seems inevitable…

This final volume works well in balancing reflections of the past without becoming overly contrived. There is a sense of reflection occurring organically, without being maudlin, sentimental or nostalgic. Powell is far too astute and insightful for the ending to take such tones.

There’s also a great deal of humour, from larger set pieces with Murtlock’s naked dancing cult providing a bathetic contrast with the central image of the novel sequence:

“It was not quite the scene portrayed by Poussin, even if elements of the Season’s dance was suggested in a perverted form; not least by Widmerpool, perhaps naked, doing the recording.”

To smaller moments such as disagreement over paintings at a retrospective of Deacon’s work:

“Well Persepolis isn’t unlike Battersea Power Station in silhouette.”

And Nick’s various assessments of himself:

“Pressures of work, pressures of indolence.” (my life frustrations in a sentence!)

“These professional reflections, at best subjective at worst intolerably tedious,”

I have really enjoyed reading A Dance to the Music of Time and it hasn’t been an arduous undertaking at all. I’m sure it will reward re-reading; there are so many allusions and subtleties that have certainly passed me by. For me, the sequence peaked with the war trilogy, but each novel held its own joys, working on an individual level as well as part of a whole sequence. I’m going to really miss Nick, even though he remained half-hidden to me throughout the twelve volumes.

“Two compensations for growing older are worth putting on record as the condition asserts itself. The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one’s own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add.”

“Some things have happened in this house that are not to be cured by pots of tea.” (Cyril Hare, An English Murder)

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I enjoy a golden age mystery at Christmas. It’s my comfort reading at any time of year, but I always try and read one at Christmas, when the tropes of being snowed in (and what will the thaw reveal?!), country houses, groups of people with various tensions trapped together, jovial facades and traditions hiding mendacity and murderers, work especially well.

Unfortunately I had a couple of false starts. The first two I tried promised much of the above, but for various reasons didn’t quite work. Thankfully, a recent addition to the TBR, Cyril Hare’s An English Murder (1951), came to the rescue.

The title of the mystery is very apt: Hare takes a humorous but incisive view of postwar English society, making his points without rancour. Published only six years after the war, perhaps too harsh a criticism would not have been well-received by a generation who went through horrors in service of country, but at the same time things were changing and Hare captures this well.

The story opens:

“Warbeck Hall is reputed to be the oldest inhabited house in Markshire. The muniment room in the north-eastern angle is probably its oldest part; it is certainly the coldest. Dr. Wenceslaus Bottwink, Ph.D. of Heidelberg, Hon.D.Litt. of Oxford, sometime Professor of Modern History in the University of Prague, corresponding member of half a dozen learned societies from Leyden to Chicago, felt the cold sink into his bones as he sat bowed over the pages of a pile of faded manuscripts, […] The real obstacle that was worrying him at the moment was the atrocious handwriting in which the third Viscount Warbeck had annotated the confidential letters written to him by Lord Bute during the first three years of the reign of George III. Those marginalia! Those crabbed, truncated interlineations! Dr. Bottwink had begun to feel a personal grievance against this eighteenth-century patrician.”

Dr Bottwink is a concentration camp survivor. He is learned and wise, and really wants to be left alone with his papers “in response to an instinct that drove him to seek refuge from the horrors and perplexities of the present in the only world that was entirely real to him.”

Unfortunately for him, he will be drawn into the Warbeck family’s Christmas, including having to deal with the revolting Robert, heir apparent:

“I don’t think I shall greatly enjoy sitting down at table with Mr. Robert Warbeck.”

“Sir?“

“Oh, now I have shocked you, Briggs, and I should not have done that. But you know who Mr. Robert is?”

“Of course I do, sir. His lordship’s son and heir.”

“I am not thinking of him in that capacity. Do you not know that he is the president of this affair that calls itself the League of Liberty and Justice?”

“I understand that to be the fact, sir.”

“The League of Liberty and Justice, Briggs,” said Dr. Bottwink very clearly and deliberately, “is a Fascist organization.”

“Is that so, sir?”

“You are not interested, Briggs?”

“I have never been greatly interested in politics, sir.”

“Oh, Briggs, Briggs,” said the historian, shaking his head in regretful admiration, “if you only knew how fortunate you were to be able to say just that!”

One of the drawbacks of golden age crime is that you often come across anti-Semitism. It was a relief to see Dr Bottwink quickly established as the reluctant detective, and Robert and his organisation given short shrift.

Also present in the house are Sir Julius, cousin to Lord Warbeck and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new socialist government, whose budget is likely to mean Warbeck Hall will be sold; his Scotland Yard bodyguard, Rogers; Lady Camilla Prendergast (who for unfathomable reasons is attracted to Robert); Mrs. Carstairs, politically ambitious for her husband; Briggs the ancient retainer steeped in duty to the class system and struggling with all changes; and his daughter Susan. I have a terrible memory with too many characters in mystery novels and this number was just right – enough for various suspects but not so many that I had trouble keeping them straight.

Hare lightens the story with gentle humour. Dr Bottwink’s outsider status means there are plenty of digs at English social mores, as well as direct from the authorial voice too, such as this sickbed reunion between Lord Warbeck and Robert:

“When they met they shook hands as English people should. But there is something rather absurd about shaking hands with a man who is lying down. Eventually he compromised by placing one hand lightly on his father’s shoulder.

“Sit down over there,” said Lord Warbeck gruffly, as though a little ashamed at his son’s display of emotion.”

I also enjoyed Rogers’ resolute imperturbability in the face of any heightened emotions from his political employer. Mrs Carstairs provides broader humour through unstintingly loquacious self-interest:

““She overran [Lord Warbeck’s library] like an occupying army, distributing her fire right and left and reducing the inhabitants to a stunned quiescence.”

If you’ve struggled with the social demands of Christmas dragging you away from your reading, you will certainly identify with Dr Bottwink. Far away from his beloved manuscripts, his considered, intelligent attempts at small talk fail miserably in the face of English ignorance:

Camilla laughed. “That was very simple of you, Dr. Bottwink,” she said. “Did you really expect a Cabinet Minister to know the first thing about constitutional history? He’s much too busy running his department to bother about a thing like that.”

“I fear that my knowledge of England is still imperfect,” said the historian mildly. “On the Continent it used not to be uncommon to find professors of history in Cabinet posts.””

On the first night Robert gets horribly drunk and offends even those more favourably disposed towards him. Dr Bottwink’s assessment of him remains unchanged:

“A disregarded spectator in the shadows, Dr. Bottwink gazed at him with cold and steady dislike, remembering other men who had professed principles not so very different from those of the League of Liberty and Justice, who had been noisy and genial in their cups, and had thereafter committed crimes beyond all reckoning.”

Unsurprisingly someone soon bumps Robert off with cyanide in his drink. But as it snows steadily, cutting everyone off, are the others safe? Will Dr Bottwink find the culprit in time, and if he does will anyone listen to him?

An English Murder was well-paced and a quick read.  I hadn’t read Cyril Hare before but on the strength of this I’d be keen to read more. The Guardian included An English Murder in its Top Ten golden age detective novels and I can see why.  

“When I am told that I cannot possibly think anything, my nature is so contradictory that I immediately begin to think about it.”

To end, Dr Bottwink’s knowledge of William Pitt helps him solve the mystery. He may take issue with the historical accuracy this portrayal:

“Have you practised swooning?” (Ruby Ferguson, Apricot Sky)

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This is my contribution to Dean Street December, a month-long celebration of this wonderful indie publisher, hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home.

Dean Street Press’ imprint Furrowed Middlebrow focuses on early and mid-twentieth century women writers, and it’s from this collection that I’ve chosen my read, Apricot Sky by Ruby Ferguson (1952 – please note for Simon and Kaggsy’s 1952 Club running next year!)

I must confess that rather than a DSP edition, my copy is a nice little hardback I found in my local charity shop, inscribed with the author’s love to Flossie and John 😊 I picked up her later novel The Leopard’s Coast at the same time, also given with the author’s love, so I wonder if Flossie and John lived near me and their books have been cleared out…?

Aside from the Jill pony books I read as a child, I only knew Ruby Ferguson from Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary  (1937) republished by Persephone Books. But I’d enjoyed that so much that I felt confident enough to swoop up the two books when I saw them; and what a total joy Apricot Sky turned out to be.

Set in 1948 in the Highlands of Scotland, the story follows the MacAlvey family through the events of one summer. A descriptive passage on the first page sets the tone:

“The charm of islands which changed their colour every few minutes, of lilac peaks smudged on the farthest horizon, of white-capped waves on windy days, of distant steamers chugging romantically on their ways, of little boats with faded brown sails scudding before the breeze, of sudden storms pouring fiercely across the terrific expanse of sky and water, of thousands of seabirds planing and diving, of floods of sunshine scattering millions of diamonds upon the rippling waves, all this made-up the view about which the MacAlvey’s visitors had so much to say while the MacAlvey’s themselves listened indulgently and with inward amusement.”

The MacAlvey’s are a nice family living a life not without trials but without any great drama, comfortably well-off and settled.

“Kilchro House was noted for its hospitality. It was a gay house where a gay family gave charming entertainment and never tried to descend into banality by prattling about themselves.”

The MacAlvey’s younger daughter Raine is due to marry Ian, brother of the Laird of Larrich. This is the thread which runs through the novel, as the wedding gathers apace for the September ceremony.

Raine’s older sister Cleo is back from three years in America, everyone expecting her much changed, but her heart stayed with her Highland home, and Neil, the Laird. Whenever she sees him she becomes utterly tongue-tied, and feels entirely inadequate alongside the charms of Inga Duthie, a sophisticated widow who is new to the area.

“Cleo MacAlvey could think of no worse desolation than that those she liked should not like her. She was a great deal more diffident than her sister Raine, who barged through life without caring whether people liked her or not, and was about as introverted as a fox-terrier puppy.”

Alongside these adult concerns are the younger children, left to their own devices. Primrose, Gavin, and Archie were orphaned by the war and live with their grandparents. The whole summer stretches before them:

“At Strogue there was no promenade and no cinema or skating-rink and only about three shops, and you couldn’t move without getting yourself in a mess with tar and fish and stuff left about, but everything you did there was full of exhilaration and had a way of turning out quite otherwise than you expected.”

They love boats and beaches and being out of doors. The only blight on their idyll is distant cousins Elinore and Cecil who come to stay for a few weeks. They are refined and self-contained, and in the case of Elinore, an unmitigated snob.

The children’s adventures are reminiscent of the Famous Five: there are islands, swimming and a big focus on picnics. There is post-war rationing to contend with, but it is seemingly straightforward to overcome – they frequently manage sweets, pies, jam, sandwiches and fizzy drinks.

For the adults, the trials are tedious houseguests in the shape of Dr and Mrs Leigh, and the appalling Trina, married to their son James. Mrs MacAlvey loves having guests though, and loves her family and her garden. Her part of the world gives her all she needs and she feels no desire to venture any further:

“She found herself unable to picture it, for she had never been to England, and always thought of it as being full of successful people living in Georgian houses.”

Despite being so rooted in her domestic life, she remains blissfully unaware of what her grandchildren get up to all day, and how tortured poor Cleo is by her unspoken love for Neil:

“Nobody talked about their feelings at Kilchro House, it was considered one stage worse than talking about your inside.”

I thoroughly enjoyed my summer with the MacAlvey family in a beautifully evoked part of the world, far away from chilly London. The stakes were soothingly low, and the humour was gentle. Any drama was short-lived, and things worked out exactly as they should.

If you are looking for a warm-hearted, escapist read, Apricot Sky will serve you well.

“‘All right,’ said Raine, holding out a ten-shilling note. ‘I’ll try anything once, even altering the course of history.’”

“Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.’ (Anthony Powell)

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This is the eleventh 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 eleventh volume, Temporary Kings, was published in 1973 and is set towards the end of the 1950s. I can’t believe I’m at the penultimate volume!

I’m writing this as I recover from labyrinthitis; today is the first time I’ve been able to sit up after two and a half days flat on my back. So I’m not sure how much sense this post will make, but I wanted to get it written in November. Please bear with me!

Temporary Kings is set for the most part at a cultural conference in Venice in 1958, which Nick has been sent to somewhat unwillingly, by Mark Members who has organised it but can’t be bothered to go himself.

I felt a sense of slowing down, as old acquaintances arrive and new people join the dance; it is almost a series of character sketches. Given Powell’s enormous talent for incisive but never cruel summations of people in just a few lines, this made for an enjoyable read.

For example, how’s this for a description of Louis Glober, a filmmaker:

“What did not happen in public had no reality for Glober at all. In spite of the quiet manner, there was no great suggestion of interior life. What was going on inside remained there only until it could be materially expressed as soon as possible.”

I also liked the new character of Dr Brightman, an academic who:

“had made clear a determination to repudiate the faintest suspicion of spinsterish prudery that might, very mistakenly, be supposed to attach to her circumstances.”

The Widmerpools turn up trailing controversy in their wake: Kenneth has lost his seat as an MP and so given a knighthood and a seat in the Lords (sigh…) and Pamela has been embroiled in a sex scandal. I do enjoy Pamela’s relentless creation of discomfort wherever she goes:

“She had the gift of making silence as vindictive as speech.”

On returning to the UK, Nick finds the conference hard to shake off:

“The conference settled down in the mind as a kind of dream, one of those dreams laden with the stuff of real life, stopping just the right side of nightmare, yet leaving disturbing undercurrents to haunt the daytime, clogging sources of imagination – whatever those may be – causing their enigmatic flow to ooze more sluggishly than ever, periodically cease entirely.”

There is an unsettling feeling to the scenes, and sense of so much unknown among the characters which could implode at any moment. Somehow it doesn’t entirely, but I felt a creeping sense of doom alongside the belief that things will just carry on.

We also have Stringham’s suspected death in a POW camp confirmed. More than any other, that character broke my heart.

Towards the end of the novel, Nick reflects:

“One’s fifties, in principle less acceptable than one’s forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardised fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living […] After passing the half-century, one unavoidable conclusion is that many things seeming incredible on starting out, are, in fact, by no means to be located in an area beyond belief.”

This is a terrible post and I’ve missed so much out! I blame my ears 😉 But I hope it’s given something of the sense of the novel.

Paula’s recent Winding Up the Week post alerted me to this wonderful article about Violet Pakenham, Anthony Powell’s wife and her role in the production of Dance. It’s also a great portrait of postwar Bohemian family life. I really recommend it and you don’t have to have read any of Powell to enjoy it.

To end, a song from 1972 but a UK hit the same year as Temporary Kings was published. I chose it from many 1973 hits because after 11 volumes, Nick still remains somewhat elusive to me as a reader:

“I have looked for life, but I can’t find it.” (Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel)

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November is the month of sooooo many reading events, and I’m hoping to take part in Margaret Atwood Reading Month and Novellas in November, but I thought I’d start with German Literature Month XIV, hosted by Caroline at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy Siddal at Lizzy’s Literary Life.

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum (1929, transl. Basil Creighton 1930-1 revised by Margot Bettauer Dembo 2016) is a novel I’ve been meaning to get to for some time, republished by the wonderful New York Review of Books Classics.

I find a Weimar Republic setting always so enticing, and this novel was a bestseller in it’s day, originally serialised in a magazine. Sometimes with serials you can really see the joins when they are placed in novel form, but the episodic nature of hotel stays by various guests works well and Grand Hotel felt entirely coherent.

The titular building is opulent and glamorous:

“The music of the jazz band from the Tearoom encountered that of the violins from the Winter Garden, and mingled with the thin murmur of the illuminated fountain as it fell into its imitation Venetian basin, the ring of glasses on tables, the creaking of wicker chairs and, lastly, the soft rustle of the furs and silks in which women were moving to and fro.”

As readers we know that momentum for World War Two is building, but for the guests at this time it is the shadow of World War I which still looms large. Doctor Otternschlag’s face has been severely damaged by a shell. Every day he asks if a letter has arrived for him which it never has. We don’t know what this quiet, traumatised man is waiting for.

“Doctor Otternschlag lived in the utmost loneliness – although the earth is full of people like him…”

Glamour is brought by Grusinskaya, a prima ballerina desperately trying to hang on to physical vigour against the forces of aging. She is somewhat ambivalent, feeling driven to be as she has always been, and exhausted by it all:

“Perhaps the world would have loved her as she really was, as she looked now, for example, sitting in her dressing room – a poor, delicate, tired old woman with worn out eyes, and a small careworn human face.”

The most pathos occurs in the guest who doesn’t fit in: Kringelein, a clerk from Fredersdorf, given a terminal prognosis and determined to squeeze the pips from life before it’s too late. He chooses the Grand Hotel as his boss, Herr Preysing, stays there when in Berlin.

“He felt again, here in the bar of Berlin’s most expensive hotel, the same intoxication, a sense of exuberant plenty as well as of anxiety and alarm, the faint threat haunting the wicked joy of wrongdoing, the excitement of an escapade.”

Kringlein’s difficulty is, he is unsure of how to achieve his somewhat nebulous aim. Doctor Otternschlag tries to help but fails, unsurprising given his jaded, damaged view of the world. More successful is gentleman thief Gaigern, a dashing young nobleman who charms everyone:

“I am quite without character an unspeakably inquisitive. I can’t live an orderly life and I’m good for nothing. At home I learned to ride and play the gentleman. At school, to say my prayers and lie. In the war, to shoot and take cover. And beyond that I can do nothing. I am a gypsy, an outsider, an adventurer.”

He kits out Kringelein in fine clothes and takes him for fast drives in cars and up in a plane, but what are his motives? As Kringelein throws his hard-earned but limited money around, what will Gaigern do?

“Human kindness and warmth was so much a part of his nature that his victims always received their due share of them.”

Baum weaves together these disparate lives expertly, as they bump against each other within the Grand Hotel to a greater or lesser extent. There are overarching plots that draw characters together but Baum demonstrates that while hotels are places where change may occur, they do not lend themselves to resolution so easily. Hotels are by nature transitory and lives must be continued, consequences dealt with, once the guests pass through the revolving doors and back into the world.

“Perhaps there is no such thing as a whole, completed destiny in the world, but only approximations, beginnings that come to no conclusion or conclusions that have no beginnings.“

The tone is so well-balanced, with moments of light humour, almost slapstick, alongside darker elements. I did feel a constant undercurrent of sadness, but this highlighted the resilience of the characters who keep on keeping on during this interwar period, rather than being depressing.

Grand Hotel provides a compelling evocation of the Weimar era too, with glamour, seediness, riches and poverty all bound together in a vibrant, intoxicating, overwhelming Berlin. I’m so pleased to have finally read this novel.

“The room had taken on that utterly strange and enchanted appearance often encountered in hotel bedrooms.”

Grand Hotel was adapted by Hollywood in 1932, which despite my love of Garbo I’ve never seen. Time to remedy the situation!

“I loved all of Harlem gently.” (Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner)

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The 1970 Club is running all week hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. The Club weeks are always great fun, so do check out the posts!

Whenever the club weeks are announced I always go straight to the TBR to see what I’ve got available. 1970 didn’t yield as many fruits as 1937 Club back in April, but it did offer four choices. Unfortunately I don’t think 1970 is my year as far as my TBR pile goes…two DNFs and a third I wish I had DNF’d rather than ploughed through. Thankfully the fourth I found to be excellent!

Daddy Was a Number Runner was the first novel by Louise Meriwether and widely acknowledged to be bona fide classic in its evocation of 1930s Harlem, through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl, Francie Coffin. In the Foreword, James Baldwin writes:

“she has so truthfully conveyed what the world looks like from a black girl’s point of view, she has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country. She has achieved an assessment, in a deliberately minor key, of a major tragedy.”

From the opening lines as Francie helps her father with his titular illegal lottery, her voice is so direct and distinctive. As she runs home to try and get to school on time, we are thrust into a hot summer’s day in Harlem.

“The air outside wasn’t much better. It was a hot, stifling day, June 2, 1934. The curbs were lined with garbage cans overflowing into the gutters, and a droopy horse pulling a vegetable wagon down the avenue had just deposited a steaming pile of manure in the middle of the street.

 The sudden heat had emptied the tenements. Kids too young for school played on the sidewalks while their mamas leaned out of their windows searching for a cool breeze or sat for a moment on the fire escapes.”

Francie’s family are incredibly poor, and running the numbers brings some money in. If lotteries are a tax on hope, Harlem is full of hope. It’s also full of bed bugs, rats and roaches. Poor Francie is eaten alive every night and has to go armed into her favourite pastime:

“I was sitting at the dining room table reading a library book, armed with my usual supply of weapons. Tonight I had a hammer, a screwdriver, and two hairbrushes. When I heard a noise I threw the hammer toward the kitchen and the rats scurried back into their holes. When I got down to my last piece of ammunition I would give the dining room up to the rats and go on to bed.”

Reading and schooling are seen as a way out of the ghetto. Francie’s older brother Sterling is bright and just about staying in school. Her other brother, James Junior, found school hard and, much to the worry of his loving parents, he is running with the local gang:

“He wasn’t mean enough to be an Ebony Earl nohow. How could he ever mug anybody, good-natured and nice as he was. Why, when he smiled his whole face laughed. He wasn’t like old Sterling who didn’t like anybody and whose narrow, old man’s face was full of dark, secret shadows.”

Francie’s parents are loving and kind, and how they hold onto those traits against the relentless grind of poverty is a miracle.

“[Mother] was always either soaking clothes or scrubbing them or hanging them out on the line. With all of that activity we should have been super clean but somehow we weren’t.”

“Daddy played by ear and could swing any piece after he heard it only once.”

Francie’s father is proud and doesn’t want to accept state relief or for his wife to work. But eventually he has to give in on both counts:

“They don’t give you enough money to live on so you have to bootleg some kind of work, then they deduct that from your relief check, too. I wonder how they expect you to live. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to mess with those people?” But for once he didn’t shout, seeming to be more tired than angry.”

The structural racism faced by Francie, her family, and everyone she knows is brilliantly evoked. Meriwether displays it through various characters, and there is an enormous tragedy looming for several families. The fallout on children is vivid, through Francie but also her peers. Her best friend Sukie is always filled with fury, which young Francie fails to see is due – at least in part – to Sukie’s father seeking release in alcohol and her sweet sister China Doll working for a violent pimp who beats her in front of onlookers.

Meriwether also articulates issues directly to the reader in her portrayals of, or references to, real life characters who Francie encounters, such as Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Father Divine, Marcus Garvey, and the Scottsboro case.

There is so much hardship in Daddy Was a Number Runner, and outside of the home Francie has to navigate violence and sexual attention from many that grows into assaults. There’s also a horrible scene with a cat. What stops the novel being unremittingly bleak is her loving parents; her love of books; and Francie’s resilient, honest, humorous, indignant voice.

“I walked to 110th St and looked across Central Park at the lights twinkling in the skyscrapers. That was another world, too, all those lights way over there and this spooky park standing between us. But what good would those lights do me anyway?”

“It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.“ (Anthony Powell)

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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.”

“One often felt ungrateful in literary matters, as in so many others.” (Anthony Powell)

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This is the ninth 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 ninth volume, The Military Philosophers, was published in 1968 and is set in the latter part of World War Two. It forms the final part of the war trilogy within the sequence, after The Valley of Bones and The Soldier’s Art.

Nick is working in Whitehall as a military liaison during the later stages of the war, and Powell captures the quirks and foibles of his colleagues in these powerful – for some – administrative roles. He demonstrates how soldiers are still people with all their flaws; and how everyday concerns run alongside such enormous ones as the fate of nations and the likelihood of imminent death.

During an air raid, Nick reflects:

“Rather from lethargy than an indifference to danger, I used in general to remain in my flat during raids, feeling that one’s nerve, certainly less steady than at an earlier stage of the war, was unlikely to be improved by exchanging conversational banalities with neighbours equally on edge.”

While I don’t suppose Powell was anti-war or anti-establishment, he brings his clear sight to all he portrays, including the venerated men of war. An imposing portrait of the man who came to personify the previous war is described:  

“Kitchener’s cold and angry eyes, haunting and haunted, surveying with the deepest disapproval all who came that way.”

And in a rare instance of Powell describing a real-life character (though never named), Field-Marshall Montgomery is all too believably portrayed:

“An immense, wiry, calculated, insistent hardness […] one felt that a great deal of time and trouble, even intellectual effort of its own sort, had gone into producing this final result. The eyes were deep set and icy cold.”

There’s absolutely no jingoism in The Military Philosophers. Nick is a loyal soldier, but he doesn’t automatically equate the behaviour of his country with honourable deeds:

“The episode strongly suggested that the British, when it suited them, could carry disregard of all convention to inordinate length; indulge in what might be described as forms of military bohemianism of the most raffish sort.”

Truly terrifying is the development of Widmerpool in this volume. Already a deeply unnerving character, Powell has him arrive in the volume with some levity:

“‘You must excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was kept by the Minister. He absolutely refused to let me go.’

 Grinning at them all through his thick lenses, his tone suggested the Minister’s insistence had bordered on sexual importunity.”

Later we are reminded of Widmerpool’s absolute lack of any morality, when he describes the Kattyn Forest Massacre as merely “regrettable”.

By the end, he is truly sinister, observing “I have come to the conclusion that I enjoy power.” He informs Nick that he will revel in the command of empire overseas. The racism is explicitly stated; the violence of imperialism implied.

Various associates from Nick’s past reappear in his life. We learn that Nick’s childhood friends Stringham and Templar are both most likely dead, and sadly so is my favourite character General Conyers, succumbing to a heart attack after chasing looters and trying to stop the theft of a refrigerator.  

Stringham’s niece, Pamela Flitton, plays a significant role in this volume, essentially by sleeping with a lot of different men and being furious the whole time. Let’s just say her taste in partners leaves a lot to be desired…

There are lighter moments too, and I particularly enjoyed Nick’s colleague Finn risking both a court martial and being stripped of his VC, in his desperation to collect a fresh salmon and using a military car to do so.

The volume ends with the Victory Service at St Paul’s, and then Nick going to collect some civilian clothes at Olympia. It is a subdued ending, deliberately so.

“Everyone was by now so tired. The country, there could be no doubt, was absolutely worn out.”

I found the tone very moving, reflective of all the loss that had been experienced through the war years and all that must now be endured in the immediate post-war period.

“The London streets by this time were, in any case, far from cheerful: windows broken: paint peeling: jagged, ruined brickwork enclosing the shells of roofless houses. Acres of desolated buildings, the burnt and battered City lay about St Paul’s on all sides.”

“Everything alters, yet does remain the same.” (Anthony Powell)

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This is the eighth 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 eighth volume, The Soldier’s Art, was published in 1966 and is set in 1941.Unlike the previous few novels, this only had three chapters, the middle one depicting Nick’s leave in London, bookended by his experiences in the army while still billeted in Northern Ireland.

As I mentioned in the previous volume’s post, Nick doesn’t really fit in with army life. But he doesn’t particularly labour on this, or feel sorry for himself. I enjoyed this exchange when he runs into Bithel again:

“’Told me you were a reader – like me – didn’t you?’

‘Yes I am. I read quite  a lot.’

I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications. At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd character of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.”

In this volume I felt I saw a much fuller picture of Nick’s touchstone Widmerpool. Is machinatious a word? If it isn’t, the character of Widmerpool suggests it should be, because his machinations inform his behaviour through and through.

Nick is acting as his secretary, desperate to get away.

“Indeed, it was often necessary to remind oneself that low spirits, disturbed moods, sense of persecution, were not necessarily the consequences of serving in the army, or being part of a nation at war, with which all inclusive framework depressive mental states now seemed automatically linked.”

Nick manages to stay out of Widmerpool’s connivances due to the latter’s egomaniacal need for control. However, he can observe his senior officer’s behaviour at much close quarters than before, including:

“An amateur soldier in relation to tactical possibilities, and … a professional trafficker in intrigue”

“[My] incredulity was due, I suppose, to an underestimation, even after the years I had known him, of Widmerpool’s inordinate, almost morbid self-esteem.”

By the end of the novel Widmerpool is moving on, and I had a horrible feeling that by the end of this novel sequence he might be Prime Minister…

Another of Nick’s schoolfriends is present in the company. Stringer, maintaining his sobriety, turns up as a mess waiter.

“Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward – in contrast with love – is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment”

Stringer is an intriguing character, with a deep sense of sadness about him. We’ve never learnt what led him to self-medicate with alcohol, and now he is sober he seems to have an extreme resignation to life. He seems too equanimous, knowing no joy. I find him quite haunting.

In the middle chapter Nick uses his leave to visit friends in London. His wife Isobel and young child get a passing reference. If I was Isobel I’d be mightily annoyed that my husband spent his army leave in Blitz-torn London rather than in the country with his newly-expanded family, but maybe she’s more tolerant than I am.

This middle section was hugely moving. Powell conveys the tragedy of war, of lives cut short without warning. Of the senseless waste and cruel arbitrariness of it all. He does it all with understatement which perfectly drives home the horror, and how this became a regular occurrence for so many. It was an astonishing chapter.

It is in army life that Powell finds his comedy and satire. This was probably the most sad, most moving, and most silly and funny of all the volumes I’ve read so far.

I particularly enjoyed a completely daft dinner scene between two Colonels, one called Eric, one called Derrick. Powell uses the rhyming names to full effect, having both of them end their sentences with the other’s name, as they engage in a furious, but politely mannered argument.

“Both habitually showed anxiety to avoid a junior officer’s eye at meals in case speech might seem required. To make sure nothing so inadvertent should happen, each would uninterruptedly gaze into the other’s face across the table, with all the fixedness of a newly engaged couple, eternally enchanted by the charming in appearance of the other.”

There’s also Nick’s experience of inciting the wrath of a General, when he admits he doesn’t like Trollope and prefers another author:

“‘There’s always Balzac, sir.’

‘Balzac!’

General Liddament roared the name. It was impossible to know if Balzac had been a very good answer or a very bad one.”

The more I read of this sequence the more impressive I find it. Powell’s wit, humanity, clear-sightedness, and ability to balance the various aspects of life are really extraordinary. And he does it all with such a light touch.

“All the same, although the soldier might abnegate thought and action, it has never been suggested that he should abnegate grumbling.”

To end, I’m feeling quite smug for working out that I can shoehorn in an 80s pop video by choosing one by some of the Blitz Kids (and fair to say 80s pop videos did not generally follow an Anthony Powell-esque light touch 😀 ):

“Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.” (Anthony Powell)

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This is the seventh 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 seventh volume, The Valley of Bones, was published in 1964 and is set at the start of World War Two, when Nick has joined the army as an officer.

I’ve said when reading previous novels in the sequence that I’m intrigued by Nick’s outsider’s view, as it’s not clear where it comes from since he seems so much a part of the society he portrays. In the army, the distinction is clearer. Nick finds himself billeted to South Wales within a company made up mostly of bankers, very different to his bohemian artsy London life.

“I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned.”

Nick casts his sharp eye over these new associates in the same way he has for his friends, family and acquaintances up to this point. A central character is Captain Rowland Gwatkin, a man who seems simultaneously devoted to the army and entirely bewildered by it too:

“Gwatkin lacked in his own nature that grasp of ‘system’ for which he possessed such admiration. This deficiency was perhaps connected in some way with a kind of poetry within him…Romantic ideas about the way life is lived are often to be found in persons themselves fairly coarse- grained.”

Gwatkin is really tightly wound, and there is a sense of impending doom at best, destruction at worst with him.

Nick is an indifferent soldier, neither very good nor absolutely awful. There is some consideration of philosophical theories of war, but primarily Nick is interested in those who surround him:

“It is a misapprehension to suppose, as most people do, that the army is inherently different from all other communities. The hierarchy and discipline give an outward illusion of difference, but there are personalities of every sort in the army, as much as out of it.”

Powell brilliant portrays the simmering tensions in the company, both from the mix of personalities attempting to work together within and the increasing threat from Hitler without. There are those with alcohol problems, death by suicide, and broken hearts, yet the days mostly pass in utter tedium. Nothing changes even after the company is uprooted to a posting to Northern Ireland:

“At Castlemallock I knew despair. The proliferating responsibilities of an infantry officer, simple in themselves, yet, if properly carried out, formidable in their minutiae, impose a strain in wartime even on those to whom they are a lifelong professional habit; the excruciating boredom of exclusively male society is particularly irksome in areas at once remote from war, yet oppressed by war conditions.”

As Adjutant Maelgwyn-Jones observes: “That day will pass, as other days in the army pass.”

Yet there is some light relief too, such as an inspection from a visiting General, seemingly obsessed with breakfast foodstuffs:

“The General stood in silence, as if in great distress of mind, holding his long staff at arm’s length from him, while he ground it deep into the earth the surface of the barnhouse floor. He appeared to be trying to contemplate as objectively as possible the concept of being so totally excluded from the human family as to dislike porridge.”

And Nick does get some weekend leave in order to catch up with his family. There he finds people thrown together, behaving oddly and under strain. In other words, not so very different from his army posting. As his pregnant wife Isobel observes: “the war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves.”

In The Valley of Bones Anthony Powell shows himself uninterested in the glorification of war or in any sort of jingoism. He also doesn’t fall into the trap of a wholly satirical, detached point of view either. He manages a delicate balance between conveying the seriousness of war alongside the human inadequacies and frailties of those expected to enact it.

He also pulls an absolute masterstroke at the finish. The boredom, the admin, the essentially unthreatening – if somewhat self-destructive – colleagues are turned upside down in an instant, and Nick finds himself carried forward, powerless in a situation about which he has a deep sense of foreboding. It’s a chilling ending and I’m anxious to see how it plays out in the next volume, The Soldier’s Art.

“In the army – as in love – anxiety is an ever present factor where change is concerned.”

To end, a song absolutely synonymous with wartime Britain for many, which seems particularly apt for Nick as he’s always running into people he met previously: