A free ticket to the Dance

As longtime readers of this site know, in my day job I’m the publicity manager at the University of Chicago Press. I try to keep that work as separate from my blogging as possible, but every once in a while the two spheres overlap—which is pretty much inevitable, given that two of my favorite authors, Richard Stark and Anthony Powell, are published by my employer.

The past week has found me getting to work on both: the new Parker novels coming out in the spring (including the elusive (and brilliant) Butcher’s Moon), and, even more exciting, brand new, e-book editions of all twelve individual volumes of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

I’ve written plenty here about Dance; in some ways, this blog is one big ever-growing essay on Powell’s magnum opus. But as someone who’s spent all that time proselytizing, I can tell you that the biggest obstacle to attracting new readers is Dance’s sheer bulk. A lot of people are too daunted by the total page count to try picking it up.

That’s why I’m so excited about the new e-book—and, in particular, about the promotion Chicago is using to launch them: for the month of December, the first novel in the series, A Question of Upbringing will be available as an e-book for free. There’s more information at the University of Chicago Press’s site; you can get the book directly from them or from most e-book retailers, including such outlets as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. If you’ve been reading my encomiums to Dance all these years but haven’t been willing to try it, now’s your chance—you’ve got nothing to lose but a few hours, and your possible reward is a book that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

I’ll leave you with one of the best descriptions of Dance that I’ve come across lately, from Jonathan Ames’s Wake Up, Sir!:

"Jeeves and I were reading together, as a sort of two-person book club, Anthony Powell's epic, twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. It's absolutely a stupendous work—almost nothing of moment occurs for hundreds of page, thousands, even, and yet one reads on completely mesmerized. It's like an imprint of life: nothing happens and yet everything happens."

As Jeeves himself might say, “Indeed.”

Eleventh-century Scots and . . . Anthony Powell?

I wouldn't be a good Anthony Powell obsessive if I didn't follow up Saturday's post on Dorothy Dunnett with a note highlighting the following unexpectedly Powellian passage that I noticed late in her King Hereafter:

The year changed, and then began to unroll, like a wheel in turbulent country; like an unreeling ribbon of Groa's weaving that once, long ago, he had spoiled with his blood. A spinning ribbon in which, peg by peg, the device switched without warning, producing a new assortment of patterns, a new set of boundaries, a new line of direction, a mischievous disorder of design that tested his strength to the limit through the most powerful tenet by which he lived: Adapt and survive.

The language isn't exactly Powellian, but the sentiment definitely is, reminding me of one of the most perceptive and memorable passages in A Buyer's Market, the second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time:

Certain stages of life might be compared with the game of Russian billiards, played (as I used to play with Jean, when the time came), on those small green table, within the secret recesses of which, at the termination of a given passage of time--a quarter of an hour, I think--the hidden gate goes down; after the descent of which, the coloured balls return no longer to the slot to be replayed; and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

So true, so familiar. "Life has begun in earnest," and "scarcely aware that any change has taken place," we are off on what will turn out to be--if for no other reason than that by the time we realize what's going on we will have come such a long way on it--our true course. On that subject, and the way it ramifies throughout our lives, Powell has no equal.

"For some are so gently melancholy, that in all their carriage, and to the outward apprehension of others it can hardly be discerned."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The fickleness of Chicago's perennial false spring, as perhaps best evidenced by the delusions of returning robins and the stubborn redoubts of filthy snow curled about the gravestones in the cemetery behind my apartment, brought on a thoughts of melancholy on Sunday--thoughts which, as they tend to do, led me to Robert Burton, who reminds us that "It comes to many in fits, and goes; to others it is continuate:many in spring and fall only are molested." Burton himself led, inevitably, to Anthony Powell. It is time, hints the weather, to recommence my perpetual re-reading of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Next up is the fourth volume, which, while I've defended it before from its overly ardent detractors, is nonetheless the least overtly satisfying of the batch. There are pleasures, many pleasures, to be found there, but they are for the most part the pleasures of life drawing in rather than of life setting out: if the first two books are about discovery and attempts to set the terms on which one is to enter the lists of adult life, and the third about the catastrophes and losses that begin to assail us, then the fourth is about realizing that the shadows of our day are growing longer, even as we watch closely those who are still learning the earliest steps of the dance.

So it seemed right to begin the fourth volume by returning briefly to the close of the third, the end-of-war memorial service at St Paul's that closes The Military Philosophers. It's a moving scene, less for what happens there than for the way that, prompted by the familiar hymns and ritual words of the service, narrator Nick Jenkins lets his mind wander, memories of the war and its losses side by side with casually habitual close readings of the lyrics, a reminder that even at life's most solemn moments, it is twined about with the words we've used to try to understand it.

Early in the service, Nick recalls his old friend Stringham:

Hymns always made me think of Stringham, addicted to quoting their imagery within the context of his own life.

"Hymns describe people and places so well," he used to say. "Nothing else quite like them. What could be better, for example, on the subject of one's friends and relations than:

    Some are sick and some are sad,
    And some have never loved one well,
    And some have lost the love they had.

The explicitness of the categories is marvellous. Then that wonderful statement: 'fading is the world's best pleasure.' One sees very clearly which particular pleasure its writer considered the best."

For an incurably rackety and fragile character like Stringham, such kidding carries notes of whistling past the graveyard; he would have fared far, far better in a world of precision and order.

A quotation from Blake--"as impenetrable as Isaiah; in his way, more so"--brings on general reflections on poetry, "its changes in form and fashion," which leads to the recollection of some lines from Abraham Cowley:

    Thou with strange adultery
    Doest in each breast a brothel keep;
    Awake, all men lust for thee,
    And some enjoy thee while they sleep.

No poet deserved to be forgotten who could face facts like that, the blending of conscious and unconscious, Love's free-for-all in dreams.

The service, as one would expect, ends with "God Save the King," all three verses:

God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the King!

O Lord, our God arise,
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all.

Thy choicest gifts in store,
On him be pleased to pour;
Long may he reign:
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King!

Which leads Nick into a reflection that brings out many of his characteristics as a narrator: honesty, attention to detail, a fine discrimination of feeling, an eye for historical resonances and anachronism, and, most of all, an acceptance of things as they are:

Repetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination or subtlety of thought and phraseology, the words possessed at the same time a kind of depth, an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment. It would be interesting to know whether, at the period they were written, "reign" had been considered an adequate rhyme to "king"; or whether the poet had simply not bothered to achieve identity of sound in the termination of the last verse. Language, pronunciation, sentiment, were always changing. There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when the verbiage of high-thinking had not yet cloaked such petitions as those put forward in the second verse, incidentally much the best; when, in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had established less of a stranglehold on the public mind. Such a mental picture of the past was no doubt largely unhistorical, indeed, totally illusory, freedom from one sort of humbug merely implying, with human beings of any epoch, thraldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was.

Burton reminds us that we, like Powell's characters, "according to the continuance of time . . . have been troubled"; but without that trouble, where would we be?

And now I think I'm ready for volume four.

"I started without butlers and I'll die without butlers, no less a happy man."

In writing about Anthony Powell's Venusberg last weekend, I quoted a passage wherein the protagonist, Lushington, gets saddled, entirely against his will, with a valet named Pope. Described as "a curious character," by the time he actually shows up, he turns out to be far worse than even that description might suggest, more like a demonic Jeeves, with hints of Dickens. His first appearance in Lushington's service comes with the flick of a light switch in Lushington's bedroom well before dawn, when his new master is still far from finished with sleeping off a late night of carousing:

"Who are you?" said Lushington, still with his eyes shut.

"I'm Pope, sir. Mr. Da Costa's man. I expect Mr. Da Costa mentioned that I was going to call you."

He coughed behind his hand. Lushington tried to adjust his memory. The man's face was certainly familiar, so he said:

"Oh, yes, he did. But you have called me rather early, haven't you? What is the time?"

"Mr Da Costa told me to call you first. Mr. Da Costa goes to the chancellery rather late sometimes. He said that he thought it would be better if I called you first. Those were his orders."

"By all means call me first. Very likely Mr. Da Costa does not get up until lunch. But is it necessary to be as early as this? This is an unearthly hour."

"I'm afraid it would be very inconvenient to call you at any other time sir. I am sorry."

That settled, Pope moves to the task of laying out Lushington's clothes for the far-from-dawned day:

"Which suit will you wear?"

"The blue one."

"The one you wore yesterday?"

"Yes."

Pope hesitated. He said:

"If you did not wear the suit you wore yesterday, sir, I could brush it."

"All right; I'll wear the other one."

"The brown one?"

"Yes."

"The brown one needs pressing terribly, sir."

"I know."

"Shall I press it for you, sir?"

"Will you?"

Uneasily Pope watched Lushington in bed. He said:

"Would it be better if you wore the blue suit today and then I can press the brown one? Would that be convenient?"

"Yes, yes, I'll do that."

For Powell fans, this recalcitrance calls to mind Smith, the resentful, alcoholic butler who plagues Erridge and the Jeavons family in A Dance to the Music of Time. Smith's untimely death (from an infected monkey bite) prompts Ted Jeavons to launch into a rambling eulogy that quickly transforms into a disquisition on the entire profession:

Smith tried to take a biscuit away from that tenacious ape. Probably wanted it himself to mop up some of the gin that he'd drunk. God, the way that man used to put back our gin. I marked the bottle, but it wasn't a damn bit of use. . . . Smith'll probably be the last butler I'll ever find myself employing--not that there's likely to be many butlers to employ, the way things are going. That fact doesn't break my heart. Taking them all in all, the tall with the short, the fat with the thin, the drunk with the sober, they're not a profession that greatly appeals to me. Of course, I was brought in contact with butlers late in life. Never set eyes on them in the circles I came from. I may have been unlucky in the butlers I've met. There may be the one in a hundred, but it's a long time to wait. Read about butlers in books--see 'em in plays. That's all right. Have 'em in the house--a very different matter. Look what they do to your clothes, apart from anything else. I started without butlers and I'll die without butlers, no less a happy man. There's the bell. No butler, so I'll answer it myself.

To which Jeeves would say . . . nothing, for that is what a well-husbanded reticence is for.

"Some suggestion . . . that things could have been even better."

As I mentioned last week, I came to my current re-reading of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time straight from Proust, so I was particularly open to narrator Nick Jenkins's many references to In Search of Lost Time as he's reading it during The Military Philosophers, the last of the war volumes. The following one, which comes at the end of a trip through Cauberg--Proust's Balbec--with a group of foreign military attaches, is worth particular attention:

At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.

Jenkins's--and thus Powell's--take on that disappointment hews closer to my experience than does Proust's, however much I might enjoy it. Being not, by nature, an idealist or a dreamer--I'm essentially a pragmatist, and (were it not for the unavoidable hint of self-congratulation contained in the description) might even call myself a realist--I find neither the ideal so high nor the actual so low as does Proust. Nick's more middling, muddling route--and the melancholy pleasure to be found therein--is closer to my style.

That relative calm also comes through in Jenkins's tendency to meditation, or reverie, a characteristic of the novel that is really standing out in this, my fourth or fifth time through Dance: a scene or a person or an exchange will remind Nick of a book or a painting, perhaps an old memory, and he will pause for a moment to suss out the similarities and differences, and what those might teach him about the current moment. What's struck me this time through is the inherent calm required for that approach, a fundamental wholeness of or confidence in himself that allows him to simultaneously operate on two timescales, that of the moment and the much longer, more lasting one of literature, friendship, and personal history.

It's a deeply appealing characteristic, one that allows Powell to perpetually remind us of the reason we read books, the insight that only they can offer. Acknowledgment of the fact that such insight is unavailable to large swaths of our fellow humans is something else that sets Powell apart from most novelists; I've quoted this passage from The Valley of Bones before, but it remains the most succinct statement of that fact that I know, and thus bears repeating:

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

That thought arises from the fact that, in the Army, Jenkins encounters a situation that will be familiar to anyone who has worked a job that mixes classes: being identified, usually skeptically, as a reader. Jenkins eventually surrenders to being pegged as such:

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

I'll close out my Powellian musings for the week by noting another aspect of Nick's character--and thus Powell's understanding--that I appreciate: the simple fact that anecdotes that will stun some friends will fall entirely flat with others, and that one of the greatest--if simplest--joys of friendship is the eager anticipation of a chance to tell certain friends certain stories that you know will leave them gobsmacked. Those of you who haven't read Dance but might should skip this next passage, which reveals more than you ought to know in advance, but which illustrates my point:

I had not set eyes on Widmerpool myself since the day Farebrother had recoiled from saluting him in Whitehall. Although, as an archetypal figure, one of those fabulous monsters that haunt the recesses of the individual imagination, he held an immutable place in my own private mythology, with the passing of Stringham and Templer I no longer knew anyone to whom he might present quite the same absorbing spectacle, accordingly with whom the present conjuncture could be at all adequately discussed.

E-mail, cell phones, and other electronic communication aids have brought those crucial friends closer to us, made the stories that are the stuff of friendship easier than ever to share, but of course nothing will ever bridge that final gap, which puts me in mind of two passages I first discovered in D. J. Enright's marvelous anthology The Oxford Book of Death (1983). The first, from "Tam Cari Capitas," by Powell's contemporary Louis MacNeice, reminds us that "When a friend dies out on us and is not there," we miss him most "not at floodlit moments," but

. . . in killing
Time where he could have livened it, such as the drop-by-drop
Of games like darts or chess, turning the faucet
On full at a threat to the queen or double top.

Then there's this from the ever-helpful Samuel Johnson, as recounted by Hester Lynch:

The truth is, nobody suffered more from pungent sorrow at a friend's death than Johnson, though he would suffer no one else to complain of their losses in the same way; "for (says he) we must either outlive our friends you know, or our friends must outlive us; and I see no man that would hesitate about the choice."

A sentiment which I believe neither Nick Jenkins nor the long-lived Anthony Powell would dispute.

Proust and Powell

In the rush of artistic exhilaration and literary speculation that makes the last half of the last book of In Search of Lost Time such a moving, memorable experience, the following passage, where Marcel first lays out his nascent narrative approach in detail, stood out:

It would not be possible to recount our relationship, even with a person we hardly knew, without recreating a succession of the most diverse settings of our life. So each individual--and I was one of these individuals myself--became a measure of duration for me each time he completed a revolution not just around himself, but around other people, and in particular by the successive positions he occupied in relation to me. And no doubt all these different planes, in relation to which Time, as I had just grasped in the course of this party, arranged my life, by giving me the idea that in a book whose intention was to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use, in contrast to the flat psychology people normally use, a sort of psychology in space, added a new beauty to the resurrections that had taken place in my memory, by bringing the past into the present without making any changes to it, just as it was at the moment when it was the present, suppresses precisely this great dimension of Time through which a life is given reality.

Proust's description of a character making "a revolution around himself" and "the successive positions he occupied in relation to me" called to mind Anthony Powell, a writer who openly acknowledged his debt to Proust.

The well-known opening scene of A Question of Upbringing, the first novel in Powell's sequence A Dance to the Music of Time shows that influence as clearly as any other passage in Powell's work; after a description of some workmen warming their hands over a trash-barrel fire, Powell's narrator slips into a meditation:

[S]omething in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked graybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality; of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

As with Proust, I'm in some sense always reading Dance: I'd been thinking already of someday soon picking up where I'd last left off--with the third volume--and seeing Powell again through the lens offered by Proust has convinced me that now's the time.

"Seduction is to do and say the most banal thing in the most banal way."

A couple of weeks ago, Maud Newton wrote about a remarkable mid-air romantic entanglement she witnessed while flying back from England. At the time, I was in the middle of yet another re-reading of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, and though Maud didn't offer much detail, the situation she described--to say nothing of the sort of people whom one imagines might maneuver themselves into such an illicit encounter--was so full of comic potential that I started wondering what Powell might have made of it. When I found myself standing in the kitchen unable to follow a recipe because I was busy constructing Powellian sentences in my head, I decided that I had to take a crack at writing the scene as I imagined Powell might have done.

The resulting Powell pastiche is up at Maud's blog now. I hope Powell fans will enjoy it, though I warn them in advance that my hold on Powell's cadences and sensibility slips now and then, giving way to a sub-Wodehousian jokiness. I fear that Powell himself might be offended and decide to haunt me--though what form would that haunting take? Surely he would do little more than sit in a chair, observing, asking the occasional question; maybe he'd occasionally disarrange my books?

I took the headline of this post from Powell's A Writer's Notebook, which is a trove of apothegms and insights. Below are a couple that I wish I'd been able to fit into the story of the inflight romance:

The nearest some women get to being faithful to their husbands is being disagreeable to their lovers.

People usually do what they want.

And when what they want is to join the mile-high club, really, who is a fellow passenger to deny them that pleasure?

In which I demonstrate my ridiculousness in two ways, conveniently photographed (as is so much of my ridiculousness), by rocketlass.

Books do furnish a bag

That is a photo of the contents of my shoulder bag as they looked on my trip to work the first two days of this week. The sane will note that the mini-library pictured is a bit more comprehensive than round-trip commute of two hours would warrant. To which charge my only defense is that each morning as I packed the books I was telling myself that--all appearances to the contrary--I was merely dipping into, rather than actually re-reading, A Dance to the Music of Time, and thus needed to have a lot of other options to hand.

The reality, harder to escape with each turned page, was that of course I was re-reading Dance; fortunately, so far as self-deception goes, the consequences of this feeble pretense were relatively mild, felt only in my aching shoulders.

Flags do furnish a book

For this battered, beflagged galley copy of Roberto Bolano's 2666 I can offer no defense beyond a legitimate, somewhat fuddled effort to grapple with Bolano's talent. So much to note, so much that I might want to cite in my eventual review of the novel, such a mess my good intentions have made.

Which all leads me to this line from The Journal of Jules Renard, which is also somewhere in the shoulder bag:

Every time I want to settle down to work, literature gets between.

Ain't that the truth.

Steps in the Dance

{Photo from the Auckland City Libraries' Anthony Powell Collection.}

If I continue writing this blog long enough, eventually I'll have enough disconnected observations about Anthony Powell's work to fill a book. I suppose if I were a more rigorous thinker that's what I'd aim for: some sort of organized, detailed account of how and why Powell's fiction works. Instead, every time I dip into A Dance to the Music of Time I notice something new that seems worth sharing . . . if along the way I manage to convince a few readers to open Powell's masterpiece, I'll be satisfied.

Today's post is prompted by my re-reading the closing pages of the third novel in the Dance sequence, The Acceptance World (1955), which follows the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins (who is now in his twenties) to an Old Boy dinner for his school, then to an assignation with his problematic paramour, Jean Templer. The Old Boy dinner is a masterly set piece, bringing together figures of Nick's youth in such a way as to make inescapably clear the vast changes that a decade has rendered in their relative positions. Nick's two closest friends from school days, Peter Templer and Charles Stringham, who used to seem so worldly and capable, have both been tested by adult life and found wanting: Peter's marriage is a shambles and his career as a stockbroker in the City has been less than stellar, while Charles seems utterly unmoored and "has been drinking enough to float a battleship." On the other hand, Widmerpool, who in school days was an object of cruel fun, has--while losing none of his awkwardness and unpleasantness--become a surprisingly successful businessman, on the verge of becoming a figure of some renown. Nick, who is slowly finding his feet in an artistic milieu, quietly marvels throughout the dinner at these unexpected alterations of what had hitherto seemed immutable social relations; the dance has barely gotten underway, and its movements have already proved surprising.

What particularly struck me on this reading was the paragraph below. Stringham, burning with a low blue flame from a pitcher of martinis and a magnum of champagne, has decided that the base of the fence around Green Park is a good place to sit for a prolonged spell, and he's resisting Nick's entreaties to rise and stumble home. Widmerpool happens upon the scene, assesses the situation, and acts:

Widmerpool acted quickly. He strolled to the kerb. A cab seemed to rise out of the earth at that moment. Perhaps all action, even summoning a taxi when none is there, is basically a matter of the will. Certainly there had been no sign of a conveyance a second before. Widmerpool made a curious, pumping movement, using the whole of his arm, as if dragging down the taxi by a rope. It drew up in front of us. Widmerpool turned towards Stringham, whose eyes were still closed.

"Take the other arm," he said, peremptorily.

You often hear writers describing the simple mechanics of movement as among the most difficult tasks they face; getting a character out of a room can be surprisingly difficult and awkward. That's essentially Powell's task in this paragraph: he simply needs to get Stringham into a cab and on his way home. Yet in the space of a paragraph he not only accomplishes that task, but also allows Nick a moment of meditative observation about the newly capable, even powerful, Widmerpool. Then he adds that wonderfully vivid image of Widmerpool's physicality, showing the sort of attention to the oddities of motion that makes some of Kafka's scenes so powerfully, comically grotesque. By the time we reach Widmerpool's order to Nick, what could easily have been a throwaway paragraph has instead become another building block in Powell's slow explication of Widmerpool's character, and Nick's worldview.

I've quoted the following passage from The Acceptance World before, but it bears repeating, summing up as it does Nick's central characteristic of an engaged, curious, contemplative attention:

I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

That insatiable interest in the details of human experience, as played out over twelve novels and nearly 3,000 pages, is what keeps me going back to the Dance, and what makes it ever-rewarding.

"Been having a filthy time lately," or, a letter from Julian Maclaren-Ross

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I'm so wrapped up in William Boyd's Any Human Heart today that I can't bring myself to put it down and write a proper post. Instead, I'll share a particularly good letter from writer Julian Maclaren-Ross (who doesn't turn up in Boyd's novelized tour of the English literary scene of the twentieth century--though Anthony Powell, who immortalized Maclaren-Ross as the character X. Trapnel in A Dance to the Music of Time, does make several appearances).

Maclaren-Ross's recently published Selected Letters (2008) is bound to be of interest to any fan of his writing, if only because the letters are full of ideas and proposals, many never realized, for stories, adaptations, reviews, treatments--anything that might bring in some money. Maclaren-Ross was such a wastrel and led such an itinerant, hand-to-mouth existence that the vast majority of the letters in the volume involve him attempting to cadge money from someone, either in return for amorphous future work or simply on the grounds of friendship. Petulance and self-righteous anger greet the frequent refusals; as those familiar with his life already know, he could be quite a difficult man to be around.

For sheer directness and goofy pathos, no letter in the batch can top this one to his friend, writer Dan Davin, from the summer of 1955:

My dear Dan,
Thank you for the drink last night.

I'm sorry I was taken queer before the end & had to go; but truth is I haven't had anything solid to eat for some days and have had to stay in and work nonetheless: also my little illness is troubling me a bit.

Until the holiday is over & the editors get back & get to work, I shan't have any money at all--which means Wed. or Thurs. at earliest.

Have you any money?

I do not have any.

I do not have cigarettes either.

Tonight i could go down to Royal Oxford and get tick, but I can't get cigarettes on the bill--or cigars. Then tehre are 2 or 3 days to get over before what's owing to me comes in; and meantime I must do more work. On empty belly & no fags, not easy.

If you have any money please let me have some. I will pay.

I will look in on you at home about 7.15 p.m. (when you've had dinner) and hope for best. Unless you've a moment to look in here sometime before.

Don't want to come over to pub, because crossing road makes me dizzy in this state; also am not fit company just now in big crowd.

This letter written v. simply because I expect you've a hangover; & I can never take anything in, myself, when I have.

Letter from USA enclosed. Good prospect for future?

I want to ask advice about something; but won't while you've guests to attend to.

Will go to sleep now. Nothing else to do.

As ever,
Julian.

I like to think that Davin, hangover or not, at least came across with some cigarettes, if not bundles of cash. For once, I'm with Maclaren-Ross: given his obvious condition at the time of writing, anything less seems insupportable.

Are you an Anglophile? Take this simple quiz and find out!

Reading John Wyndham's creepy and well-conceived The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was later filmed as The Village of the Damned, brought me several unexpected pleasures.

1 I smiled at this sentence describing the sleepy hamlet of Midwich:

And before that it hit the headlines--well, anyway, the broadsheets--when Black Ned, a second-class highwayman, was shot on the steps of The Scythe and Stone Inn by Sweet Polly Parker, and although this gesture of reproof appears to have been of a more personal than social nature, she was, nevertheless, much lauded for it in the ballads of 1768.

Then I stopped, for it occurred to me that here was a perfect test of whether a reader is amenable to English literature: this droll, historically inclined sentence, which draws its arch-eyebrowed humor largely from its balanced, careful organization, seems characteristic of the dominant strain of the nation's literary output. A reader who pauses to enjoy this sentence might as well move on to Dickens, Thackeray, Waugh, Powell, Fitzgerald, and others. One who doesn't should probably plump for Dostoevsky or Melville instead.

2 As I was reading the book I realized that Ed's and my recent creation of the Invisible Library has unexpectedly added a new layer of drama to my reading. Early in the novel, the narrator refers to Midwich resident Gordon Zellaby's work of philosophy While We Last; soon after, Zellaby himself mentions that the manuscript for his next book, The British Twilight, is overdue.

I snapped to attention: would he--given the distractions posed by an infestation of possibly alien children--deliver the manuscript? Would The British Twilight ever be published--and thus available for stocking at the Invisible Library?

Sadly, John Wyndham seems to have been far less concerned about the fate of The British Twilight than I am, for the novel ends without a definite answer. Given, however, that nine years pass between the initial mention of the book and the conclusion of The Midwich Cuckoos, I decided, in my role as Invisible Librarian, that Zellaby--a professional philosopher--would surely have found the time to finish The British Twilight at some point. Thus a copy now resides on the "Z" shelf.

Did I make the right decision? Only Wyndham would know for sure, and he left this world nearly forty years ago; should his spirit visit the Library, I'll let you know.

3 Because I've had the Invisible Library on the brain this week, I also perked up at the following line spoken by a character:

What's going on here is the burning of books before they have been written.

The character is using books as a metaphor to describe the short-sightedness of the government's failure to study the alien children, but it also seems like a phrase one might find decorating one of the more cobwebby carrels in the Invisible Library.

It seems like it would go nicely that area of special collections that would house lost books like Profiles in String, the greatest work of X. Trapnel, the only manuscript of which was chucked into a Venetian canal by Pamela Widmerpool, because "it wasn't worthy of X."

Now any reader in possession of an Invisible Library card can see for himself whether Pamela was right . . . or whether perhaps the book was brilliant, and that was why it haunted her . . . if that was why, after Trapnel's death she admitted with a shiver, "I see that manuscript of his floating away on every canal."

Stocking the shelves of the Invisible Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this summer, inspired by book-filled novels by Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, I hit upon the idea of using the Internet to start a catalog of books that exist only within other books--a Borgesian invisible library.

Now, through the inventiveness and industry of Ed Park--no mean begetter of imaginary books himself--the Invisible Library has a home! So far Ed and I have catalogued a mere handful of titles--leaning heavily on our old favorite, Anthony Powell--but the library is designed to be infinitely expandable, and we'll continually add more as we come across them.

Come by for a visit: whether you find your fancy piqued by Odo Stevens's wartime memoir Sad Majors or Fellowes Kraft's Joseph-Campbellesque mythic exploration Time's Body or Sebastian Knight's little-understood first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, we promise you'll leave empty-handed.

The dangers of drink!

{Photo of the lovely Le Tigre bar in Madison, Wisconsin by rocketlass.}

At least somewhat under the influence of gin and champagne at a wedding last weekend, I . . .

1 Discussed, with rocketlass and another guest who happened to be an Anthony Powell fan, which of two attendees was most likely to be Pamela Widmerpool. The vote, as I suppose it usually would regarding this question, broke down on gender lines.

2 Urged said Powell fan to watch the BBC television adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time. I would likely never have been willing to try it without Ed Park's recommendation, but on watching it this spring rocketlass and I were pleasantly surprised at how much of Powell's sensibility it conveyed. And oh, the casting is good! I'm not sure that it would hold any interest for a non-Dance fan, aside from its splendidly rendered period settings and costumes (How well upper-class men dressed in the first half of the twentieth century!), but for a Powell fan the initial appearance of nearly every character is a moment of sheer pleasure.

3 Succumbed, following years of resistance, to my friend Erin Hogan's entreaties to read her favorite novel, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. My capitulation came about in large part because said Powell fan, who happens to be her best friend, explained that, on reading Dance, he e-mailed Erin to say, "The Jest has fallen to second place." Worse, I promised to read it this week, which, as I try to be a man who honors his word, I've begun to do.

From reading literature, I'm given to understand that people have, through the years, here and there been known to commit more grievous errors when under the influence of drink. At times, there are unquestionable benefits to being a book nerd.

When the whole of your defense is that they weren't sisters and I only slept with one of them . . .

might it not be best to let the rumors go unanswered?

Perhaps not unexpectedly, that absurdly provocative lede carries us to a letter from Lord Byron, dated November 11, 1818, sent from Venice to his friend and informal agent John Cam Hobhouse along with a manuscript:

There are firstly--the first Canto of Don Juan . . . containing two hundred Octaves--and a dedication in verse of a dozen to Bob Southey {at the time Poet Laureate, reminds your obliging blogger}--bitter as necessary--I mean the dedication; I will tell you why.--The Son of a Bitch on his return from Switzerland two years ago--said that Shelley and I "had formed a League of Incest and practiced our precepts with &c."--he lied like a rascal, for they were not Sisters--one being Godwin's daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft--and the other the daughter of the present Mrs. G[odwin] by a former husband.--The Attack contains no allusion to the cause--but--some good verses--and all political & poetical.--He lied in another sense--for there was no promiscuous intercourse--my commerce being limited to the carnal knowledge of the Miss C[lairmont]--I had nothing to do with the offspring of Mary Wollstonecraft--which Mary was a former Love of Southey's--which might have taught him to respect the fame of her daughter.

Though it's hard to imagine a more un-Byronic figure than Anthony Powell {unless perhaps--and should I be sad about this?-- me}, I find I often link the two, primarily because of Powell's {remarkably non-prurient} fascination with the nearly infinitely variable ways in which sex takes--and even controls--people. I'm reminded of a line from his A Writer's Notebook (2001):

People always talk of a love affair as if lovers spent all their time in bed.

Then there's this, also from Powell's notebook, which--if you can get over the implied note of doubt about the feminine intellect--does seem to jibe with experience:

The really extraordinary thing about professional seducers is the drivel they talk, there is not a single cliche they leave unsaid. That is why they have such a success with women.

Even more, I'm put in mind of a line that Powell gives to the best friend of his narrator Nick Jenkins, composer Hugh Moreland, in Temporary Kings (1973), the penultimate volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. Moreland, who has been through his share of tempestuous affairs, offers this bit of wisdom from what will soon become his deathbed:

All other people's sexual relations are hard to imagine. The more staid the people, the more inconceivable their sexual relations. For some, the orgy is the most natural.

Which brings me to a line that one of Iris Murdoch's characters offers in one of her best novels, The Nice and the Good: (1968),

Sex comes to most of us with a twist.

Like the character who hears that statement in the novel, I don't quite buy it every day--but when I read Byron's letters for long enough I do begin to wonder . . .

Dreaming of the Imaginary Library

1 My initial list of books that only exist within novels featured one, Sebastian Knight's The Prismatic Bezel, for which we even have a review in hand. In Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian Knight's brother explains that the book only received one review, a five-and-a-half-line notice in a Sunday paper:

The Prismatic Bezel is apparently a first novel and as such ought not to be judged as severely as (So-and-So's book mentioned previously). Its fun seemed to me obscure and its obscurities funny, but possibly there exists a kind of fiction the niceties of which will always elude me. However, for the benefit of readers who like that sort of stuff I may add that Mr. Knight is as good at splitting hairs as he is at splitting infinitives.

2 In a comment to the original post about imaginary books, MomVee from Watering Place said that she has always wanted to read The Horn of Joy, by Matthew Maddox, which is featured in Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

Off the top of my head, the one that I'd most like to read is Borage and Hellebore, the critical biographical study of Robert Burton written just after World War II by Nick Jenkins, narrator of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Or possibly the mysterious The Book of Three, from which Dallben draws his often troubling knowledge of forthcoming events in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain--though I have a bad feeling that it would turn out to be some stultifying mix of Nostradamusy vagueness and Tolkienien genealogical portentuousness.

And what about you folks?

3 The night after I wrote the post about the imaginary library, I dreamed that I was rereading Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, in the pages of which I encountered a book I'd failed to note in my post: Ghost Whim, by Robin Anne Powter.

According to Nabokov's narrator in my dream version of Laughter in the Dark, Ghost Whim is a cultural history of dreaming . . . but before I could learn what would happen if I read a nonexistent cultural history of dreaming inside an actual novel inside a dream, I woke up. But now I really want to read that book!

4 This final item has nothing to do with an imagined book, but I can't resist adding it--my excuse is that it ties in to the discussion of Nabokov because it might have been triggered by a conversation Ed Park and I had last night about the ape that is discussed at the end of Lolita. It's another dream, this one from a brief doze on the bus on the way home today:

I was at the zoo, watching a gorilla very close-up through the bars of his cage. He gave me a quizzical look, tugged at his earlobe, then pointed at my earlobes while mouthing the word, "Earring?" I stared for a second, then remembered that I was wearing a big, gold pirate-style hoop in each ear.

Going all the way back to vaudeville days . . . that had to be the gorilla my dreams, right?

And that's all for tonight, because I have no choice but to go spend the rest of the evening reading Roberto Bolano. I'm 200 pages into The Savage Detectives and it's proving ridiculously difficult to put down.

Cyril and the Mrs. Connollys

In The Departure Platform (1998), the third volume of her memoirs, Lady Violet Powell relates the following story of the first visit of Cyril Connolly and his second wife, Barbara Connolly (nee Skelton) to her and Anthony's country house, in the early 1950s:

On Sunday morning Cyril set up a record of six sausages at breakfast, one still standing and only equalled nearly twenty years later by the Australian writer Clive James. Later in the day we drove Cyril and Barbara to see Wells Cathedral. Possibly with the idea of conveying peace to her soul, Cyril dictated that Barbara should sit in the Lady Chapel and raise her eyes in contemplation of the roof. Edward Hutton (Highways and Byways in Somerset) describes the Lady Chapel at Wells as "the most beautiful East End to be found in England, a thing beyond criticism or praise, an immortal and perfect loveliness." These might well have been Cyril's sentiments. Barbara's remained a matter for speculation.

If you detect a wry doubt in that last line, you're not incorrect: it wasn't long before Barbara, whom Lady Violet describes as a "seductively pretty girl," was known to be generally, well, available--among her conquests over the years were, reportedly, Charles Addams and King Farouk.

Not long after the Connollys' weekend visit, the Powells attended a party for election night of 1955 hosted by the Daily Telegraph (a party that one assumes was fairly joyous on the whole, given the strong showing by the Telegraph-supported Tories in that election), where Lady Violet ran into Mrs. Connolly again:

As the night wore on, emotions ran hot and cold. At one moment I found myself soothing a disgruntled politician, who was foreseeing the defeat of his party. Later, I listened sympathetically while Graham Greene, an old friend, complained that a young actress to whom he had taken a fancy was showing an unreasonable preference for a TV commentator more nearly her contemporary. These were simply occasions for kind words, but I was somewhat foxed when Barbara Connolly fought her way through the crowd in order to say, "I hear we behaved so well when we stayed with you that we may even be asked again." My difficulty was that Barbara was closely followed by a new partner, George Wiedenfeld, so that the term "we" had become ambiguous.

What delicate, amused irony in that last line!

Perhaps it is to such brazenness that Connolly was looking forward--while, presumably, drawing on the pain of the failure of his first marriage--when he wrote the screed against wives from The Unquiet Grave (1940) that opens,

There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover. When we see a woman chewing the cud meekly beside her second husband, it is hard to imagine how brutally, implacably, and pettily she got rid of the others. There are two great moments in a woman's life: when first she finds herself to be deeply in love with her man and when she leaves him.

By 1959, however, Connolly had overcome his trepidation once more in order to marry Deirdre Craven, to whom he would remain married until his death in 1974. Deirdre also makes a brief appearance in Lady Violet's memoir, at a dinner party soon after the marriage. I enjoy this scene, like the two above, both for the picture of Connolly and for the glimpse of Lady Violet's eye for character and incident, a taste that clearly ran along similar lines to that of Anthony:

Discussing the pattern of the girls he fancied, Cyril had slotted them into the categories of the dark consoler, the redhead and the extreme blonde. This certainly matched the pattern of his wives as far as appearances went, Jeannie, Barbara and Deirdre in that order.

One can easily imagine that act of categorization, barely altered, turning up in the musings of Nick Jenkins A Dance to the Music of Time.

I'll most likely have some more on Connolly--including his obituaries for lemurs!--over the next couple of days.

Why I find myself dancing to those same old steps again and again and again

Because I proselytize so relentlessly on behalf of Anthony Powell and A Dance to the Music of Time, I'm always searching for relatively succinct ways in which to explain their virtues. I usually place the novels' attraction in Powell's--and by extension, his narrator Nick Jenkins's--insatiable curiosity about the myriad ways that people choose to live their lives; in the fourth novel, At Lady Molly's (1957), in explaining his decision to attend a country weekend that seems likely to be disastrous, Nick Jenkins accords curiosity its proper, exalted place:

Curiosity, which makes the world go round, brought me in the end to accept Quiggin's invitation.

What raises Powell's curiosity in Dance to the level of art is that he leavens it with a real openness to difference, from ordinary English eccentricity to unexpected sexual predilections to inexplicable fixed ideas. That mix of curiosity and sympathy allows Powell to find nearly any person of at least some interest; his much-quoted response to charges of snobbery--that if there were a Burke's of Bank Clerks, he'd buy that, too--rings true for any close reader of Dance.

In the third novel,The Acceptance World (1955), Jenkins neatly sums up Powell's approach and highlights the way that it opens up our understanding of our own selves as well:

I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

In a 1951 review of the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, Julian MacLaren-Ross (who would later form the basis of one of Powell's most memorable characters) sets a similar assessment of Powell's technique in a broader context:

Mr Powell is, mercifully, a writer without a "message," either philosophical, religious, or political; he is content to examine without comment, and to illustrate through character in action, the changes in human nature brought about by the changing face of the social order in which we live; in other words, he is attempting to fulfill the novelist's only true vocation.

To reveal those changes in character, Powell doesn't rely primarily on particularly dramatic events (though there are some, especially in the war novels); instead, as Terry Teachout puts it,

[T]hings happen--life happens--to Powell's characters, and as we watch them grapple with each successive occurrence, we realize that his interest is not in what they do but in what they want.

And, as Powell demonstrates, what people want so often becomes who they are. If curiosity drives the world, desire--specifically the desire for power--is what risks ruining it. To say that Powell approaches all characters with sympathy doesn't mean that he refuses judgment; though he lets events and actions speak for themselves, we see multiple times the grievous consequences of betrayal, cruelty, and the self-interest that is determined to carry all before it.

Serving as a bulwark against these, concomitant with simple human kindness, is the creative act. As Jenkins reflects in the second volume, A Buyer's Market (1952),

[T]he arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk.

The arts may not be able to defeat the Widmerpools of the world, but they can at least create and sustain a rival way of understanding that world, one that the power-hungry will never begin to comprehend. Tariq Ali, at the inaugural Anthony Powell lecture at the Wallace Collection, located the creative act at the center of the novels:

What, then, is the central theme of the series? Creativity--the act of production. Of literature, of books, of paintings, of music; that is what most of the central characters are engaged in for the whole of their lives. Moreland composes, Barnby paints, X Trapnel writes, Quiggin, Members and Maclintick criticise and the narrator publishes books and then becomes a writer. What excites the novelist is music and painting, literature and criticism. It's this creativity, together with the comedy of everyday life, that sustains the Dance.

Curiosity, sympathy, creativity: three strong pillars on which to rest a novel. Add a baroque, yet balanced, prose style and a fierce eye for comedy, and you've got the music for my very favorite Dance.

To be read, may I take the liberty to suggest, with a dry gin martini

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Some offerings from the I've Been Reading Lately bar today: belly up and pick your poison.

1 Having just written about the Amises, I was glad to discover last night in the new issue of Bookforum an article by Alexander Waugh on Kingsley Amis's books on booze . . . of which there are not one, not two, but three! My first reaction was that Amis, a champion tippler (whose monthly bill for Scotch topped £1,000 in the 1970s) and the best writer on drunkenness since Noah first snarfed the grape and rucked up his robes, ought to be a good source for recommendations about drink, but Waugh rightly questions that assumption:

[I]t is worth ruminating for a moment on the question of whether a person who drinks as much as Kingsley Amis did is, or is not, a reliable expert on the subject. You would think that someone who had devoted so much of his life to alcohol would know a thing a two about it—and he certainly did—but are the taste recommendations of alcoholics useful to people who drink only moderately? As an immoderate imbiber myself, I am not the best placed to answer this question, though I cannot imagine that the average two-glasses-of-wine-a-day man is going to think very highly of some of Amis’s recommendations—Bloody Mary with tomato ketchup and no Tabasco, red wine with lemonade, a pint of Guinness mixed with gin and ginger beer (this he erroneously claims to be the invention of my grandfather Evelyn Waugh), Scotch whisky with fried eggs. And who but a committed alcoholic could possibly wish for a glass of the “Tigne Rose,” an Amis cocktail made up of one tot of gin, one tot of whisky, one tot of rum, one tot of vodka, and one tot of brandy? Alcoholics have special cravings that obfuscate, warp, and exaggerate their tastes and, like committed sex maniacs, are often prepared to try almost anything.

The scariest thing about that paragraph for me is that I've encountered—though thank god not tasted—a tomato ketchup Bloody Mary, prepared by Jose, one of the hash-addled South African moving men with whom I shared a horrid travelers' house in north London's Neasden neighborhood in the mid-90s. Not only did Jose seem to have no qualms about making—and heartily quaffing—the aforementioned abomination, he didn't even seem to realize that his concoction was unusual. Thinking of its corn-syrup-thickened redness oozing down his chin still induces a shudder.

2 From Amis's book On Drink (1972), Waugh quotes the following brutally perceptive passage about hangovers:

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Even those among us whose deepest appreciation for drink is more notional—even literary—than actual can recognize familiar elements in that description, however much we might prefer to banish them from memory.

3 Since Anthony Powell featured in the discussion of the Amises the other night, I ought to note that Powell, too, is very good when writing on drink and drunks. On the recommendation of Ed at the Dizzies, we've been slowly making our way through the 1997 BBC adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time, and one of the many surprising pleasures of the film has been the skill at playing drunk evinced by the actor cast as the hopeless alcoholic Charles Stringham; his wide-eyed efforts to effect a hopeless pretense of sobriety on entering a room elicit equal parts sympathetic pain and horrified laughter.

4 At various times in Dance, many of Powell's characters make appearances while deep in their cups. I particularly like this description, from At Lady Molly's (1957), of the extremely minor character Hegarty, who is employed alongside Nick Jenkins as a screenwriter by a dismally shabby film studio:

Hegarty was also in poor form that day. He had been a script-writer most of his grown-up life—burdened by then with three, if not four, wives, to all of whom he was paying alimony—and he possessed, when reasonably sober, an extraordinary facility for constructing film scenarios. That day, he could not have been described as reasonably sober. Groaning, he had sat all the afternoon in the corner of the room facing the wall. We were working on a stage play that had enjoyed a three-weeks West End run twenty or thirty year before, the banality of which had persuaded some director that it would "make a picture." This was the ninth treatment we had produced between us. At last, for the third time in an hour, Hegarty broke out in a cold sweat. He began taking aspirins by the handful. It was agreed to abandon work for the day.

5 In his notebook, which was published in 2001 as A Writer's Notebook, Powell vented a bit, from bitter experience, about film executives:

One of the reasons that films are so bad is that producers assume that a class of picture-goer exists, stupider and slower witted and more vulgar than themselves, which would, of course, be impossible.

Invective is such a pleasure when balanced and properly coiled, concealing until the last the venomous stinger.

6 For a long time, I've vaguely imagined that the drunken Hegarty incorporated characteristics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Powell met while working in Hollywood. Checking the third volume of Powell's autobiography, Faces in My Time (1980), however, I find that the two never actually worked together; in fact, their acquaintance was limited to a single long and amiable lunch. But I did discover the following description of Fitzgerald, which you'll surely agree is timely:

His air could be though a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described at this period, in the least broken-down. When, years later, I came to know Kingsley Amis, his appearance recalled Fitzgerald's to me, a likeness photographs of both confirm.

Powell also describes memorably the tone in which Hollywood figures spoke of Fitzgerald:

It was as if Lazarus, just risen from the dead, were to be looked on as of somewhat doubtful promise as an aspiring scriptwriter.

7 To wrap this up, I'll turn to back to Powell's notebooks, which include plenty of entries touching on drink.

At a party, make up your mind whether you are going to go all out for women, food or drink. You can't have all three.

In quarantine for a hangover.

"I might come in and have a drink with you." "You might come in; a drink depends on my hospitality."

Life is a comedy for those who drink, and a tragedy for those who eat.

A wine snob boasts that he has some bottles corked with corks made from Proust's soundproof room.

A rich left-winger who put his trust in Marx and kept his sherry dry.

A bore, who at worst would explain the meaning of life.

Though the final entry, you'll have noticed, didn't explicitly mention alcohol, I included it nonetheless; I find it nearly impossible to imagine the bore reaching his worst state without the timely assistance of strong drink.

And in this corner, Anthony Dymoke Powell!

Though I understand that lists of the best this, the most that, and the greatest the other have an ineluctable appeal to editors--as well as an undeniable role to play in warming the air around barstools--I generally don't get too worked up about them. If this blog as a whole argues for anything, it's for the pleasures of creating one's own canon, pawing the stacks of the world's literatures to determine--and shout to the rooftops about--what belongs nearest one's own heart. It thus seems barely worth arguing about the vagaries of quasi-objective rankings, especially if I don't know the underlying aesthetic sensibilities of the compilers.

A few days ago, however, Ed from the Dizzies called on my services as a fan of Anthony Powell to argue against Powell's placement in the twentieth position, one behind Martin Amis, on the Times's list of the fifty greatest postwar British writers. Having been thus entered into the lists on behalf of my favorite writer, how could I refuse?

In some ways, the ranking seems absurd on its face: Amis's three or so good novels look paltry next to the twelve-novel stack of Powell's masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time--let alone Powell's early and late comic novels, which stand at least equal with some of Evelyn Waugh's lesser works.

But that doesn't quite seem fair to Amis's novels, some of which I like a lot. While nowhere near as good as his father's best, Lucky Jim (1954), Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers (1973) is still one of the funniest books I've ever read--and, much like Joe Matt's comics, it's impressive in its ability to make me squirm with shame at certain elements of maleness I can't deny having at times shared with the feckless young narrator. London Fields (1989), though it ultimately shambles to a messy, disappointing conclusion, is nearly redeemed by the sheer audacious electricity of its prose.

And while I tend to prefer Powell's looser, more anecdotal approach when it comes to writing criticism, Amis's critical writing is also sharp and thoughtful, driven by an appreciation of precisely crafted descriptive prose and alert to humbuggery (yet without descending nearly so often as Christopher Hitchens into smug self-righteousness). The opening paragraphs of his reappraisal of J. G. Ballard's Crash on the occasion of the release of the David Cronenberg film give a good sample of the latter characteristic, accompanied by another trademark of Amis the reviewer: self-deprecation.

I reviewed Crash when it came out in 1973; and, as I remember, the critical community greeted Ballard's novel with a flurry of nervous dismay. But of course reviewers do not admit to nervous dismay. Nervous dismay is a response that never announces itself as such, and comes to the ball tricked out as Aesthetic Fastidiousness or Moral Outrage.

Crash provoked much fancy dress. Some reviewers reached for their thesauri and looked up "repellent"; cooler hands claimed to find the novel "boring." I'm not sure if anyone else adopted the guise I wore: sarcasm. Haughtily (and nervously), I sent Crash up. I was twenty-three. Later that year my first novel appeared, and, like Ballard, I stood accused of displaying a "morbid sexuality." In comparison, thought, my sexuality--and my novel--were obsequiously conventional.

Having said all that, I still choose Powell. With Dance he has given me dozens of characters who have quite simply become part of my mental universe. They are so richly imagined and sympathetically depicted that they inflect my everyday experience of the world; they're the sort of characters who, to the initiated, serve as topics of conversation, common reference points, aids to understanding new acquaintances, clarifying punch lines to real-life situations.

On top of that, Dance is consistently funny, its humor often grounded in the bewilderment created when those who care only for money or power are confronted with the world of art. Here, for example, Nick Jenkins fields a question from his friend and sometime nemesis Kenneth Widmerpool about his job:

"I was in publishing. Art books. Now it is the film business."

"Indeed? What unusual ways you choose to earn a living."

Or take this exchange, which finds Nick discussing books with the enthusiastic, if gruffly fuddled, octogenarian General Conyers:

"I've been reading something called Orlando," said the General. "Virginia Woolf. Ever heard of it?"

"I read it when it first came out."

"What do you think of it?"

"Rather hard to say in a word."

"You think so?"

"Yes."

Unsatisfied, the General presses Jenkins:

"Odd stuff, Orlando," said the General, who was not easily shifted from his subject. "Starts about a young man in the fifteen-hundreds. Then, about eighteen-thirty, he turns into a woman. You say you've read it?"

"Yes."

"Did you like it? Yes or no?"

"Not greatly."

"You didn't?"

"No."

"The woman can write, you know."

"Yes, I can see that. I still didn't like it."

The General thought again for some seconds.

"Well, I shall read a bit more of it," he said, at last. "Don't want to waste too much time on that sort of thing, of course. Now, psychoanalysis. Ever read anything about that? Sure you have. That was what I was on over Christmas."

Powell's characters--and the gentle irony of his tone--serve as a reminder that we're all strange in our own ways, and we apprehend one another poorly at best; a healthy response is to accept, and attempt to understand, as much of that odd individuality as we can. It's an approach to the world that I ultimately find far more congenial than Amis's more corrosive, biting, and often nasty perspective.

Powell, who didn't mind a literary feud, might enjoy being given the last word; perhaps the following excerpt from the fourth volume of his autobiography, The Strangers All Are Gone (1982) will serve as an acute reminder of the proper relation between himself and Martin Amis. Describing a visit to Kingsley and Hilly Amis early in Kingsley's career, Powell writes:

During the Swansea visit the three Amis children were in some skilful manner relegated so that the Uplands house was entirely free from them throughout our stay. Since Waugh was very keen on the doctrine that children should neither be seen or heard, Violet mentioned to him the adroitness of the Amises in having so resourcefully disposed of their family.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Martin should be neither seen nor heard, but perhaps he should cede his hold on the nineteenth position to his elder and better?

"Pallid as bread dough and jowly as a squirrel," or, the masculine form as seen by Parker

Unable to kick my recently acquired Richard Stark habit, yesterday I read The Jugger (1965), which includes a couple of sharp physical descriptions of people Parker encounters that seemed worth sharing. This one's my favorite of the bunch:

The little guy standing there was dressed like he was kidding around. Dark green trousers, black-and-white shoes, orange shirt with black string tie, tweed sport jacket with leather elbow patches. The fluffy corners of a lavender handkerchief peeped up from his jacket pocket. His left hand was negligently tucked into his trouser pocket, and his right hand was stuck inside his jacket like an imitation of Napoleon. He had the lined and leathery weasel face of an alky or a tout, and he was both. He was somewhere past forty, short of eighty.

It probably won't surprise you that Parker refuses to work with this guy because he's unreliable. That opening line, meanwhile, reminds me of one of my favorite moments in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, perhaps because I remember reading in Publishers Weekly last year that Donald Westlake (Stark's real name) is a Powell fan. Near the beginning of the first volume, A Question of Upbringing (1951), Charles Stringham, a friend of narrator Nick Jenkins, puts a question to their classmate Peter Templer:

But my dear Peter, why do you always go about dressed as if you were going to dance up and down a row of naked ladies singing "Dapper Dan was a very handy man," or something equally lyrical. You get more like an advertisement for gents' tailoring every day.

Getting back to The Jugger, later we get Parker's contemptuous description of a shifty undertaker:

Gliffe at last came through the draperies at the far end of the room, like an apologetic Sydney Greenstreet. He was an extremely tall, somewhat heavy-set man, with sloping shoulders and broad beam and flat-footed stance. He was about fifty, black hair turning gray at the temples the way it was supposed to, face pallid as bread dough and jowly as a squirrel. His eyes were pale blue, watery, slightly protuberant beneath skimpy eyebrows; at the moment they were blinking away sleep. He was wearing a black suit and black tie.

He came forward as improbably light as a Macy's parade balloon, his dead-fish hand extended.

The question I'm left with after that description is whether Sydney Greenstreet ever uttered a sincere apology on screen. I'm confident that the unctuous Signor Ferrari never said a sincere word in his life, but what about The Maltese Falcon's Kasper Gutman? Or perhaps Greenstreet found occasion to apologize when he played William Makepeace Thackeray in Devotion?

Greenstreet's not the only public figure Parker calls on as a descriptive reference in The Jugger. He also delivers this picture of a corrupt local police captain:

Younger got on the phone and made his call and then sat down fat and smug on the sofa, the gun held casually in his lap. His brown suit was baggy and creaseless, his cowboy hat was tipped back on his head. He looked like a yokel Kruschev.

So which would you rather look like, an apologetic Greenstreet or a yokel Kruschev? Me, I'll take the fat man with the fez over the scary dude with the shoe any day.