World War 2

“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)

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

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: