The humiliations of Widmerpool

Recently while flipping through Anthony Powell's A Writer's Notebook, I happened across an entry that can't believe I hadn't noticed before:

Someone pees on Widmerpool and Fettiplace-Jones, during an army exercise. ?Sunny Farebrother

There are a lot of Dance-related snippets in the notebook, many of them kernels of characters or episodes found in the books, others eventually discarded. But this one seems to me easily the most interesting of the leftovers.

If you know A Dance to the Music of Time, then as soon as you read that entry you can instantly picture how Powell would handle it, and how it would work into the unfolding of Widmerpool's character. The scenes in training camp do a great job of revealing character anyway, as Jenkins encounters both new people and a number of familiar figures from his life who are now thrust into new positions and new relationships. And the training exercises in particular, their complexity and pointlessness guaranteeing they'll be cock-ups, push characters beyond their usual limits. It's during a training exercise that we see Nick, quietly and subtly, come as close to losing it as at any other time in the series. So to imagine a series of mistakes that would lead Sunny Farebrother to pee on Widmerpool isn't difficult. And it would surely have appealed to Powell's love of echo, calling to mind the night that Jimmy Stripling attempted to play a trick on Farebrother with a full chamber pot.

More important, such an incident would also fit with the pattern, observed as early as school, of Widmerpool being physically assaulted in a humiliating fashion . . . and seeming to take masochistic pleasure from it. At school, it's a banana thrown by the cricket captain, an "over-ripe" banana, Stringham says, that "burst all over his face, knocking his spectacles sideways." Stringham continues:

Do you know an absolutely slavish look came into Widmerpool's face. "I don't mind," he said. "I don't mind, Budd. I don't mind in the least." . . . It was as if Widmerpool had experienced some secret and awful pleasure.

A few years later, a similar occurrence at a formal dinner--involving a girl Widmerpool likes pouring a caster of sugar on his head--results in Widmerpool looking

beyond words grotesque. The sugar sparkled on him like hoar-frost, and, when he moved, there was a faint rustle as of snow falling gently from the leaves of a tree in some wintry forest.

Instantly, Nick recalls what Stringham called Widmerpool's "slavish" look:

There could have been no better description of his countenance as he shook off the sugar on to the carpet beneath him. Once again the same situation had arisen; parallel acceptance of public humiliation; almost the identically explicit satisfaction derived from grovelling before someone he admired; for this element seemed to show itself unmistakably--though only for a flash--when he glanced reproachfully towards Barbara: and then looked away. This self-immolation, if, indeed, to be recorded as such, was displayed for so curtailed a second that any substance possessed by that almost immediately shifting mood was to be appreciated only by someone, like myself, cognisant already of the banana incident; so that when Widmerpool pushed his way between the chairs, disappearing a minute later between the doors of the supper-room, he appeared to the world at large, perhaps correctly, to be merely a man in a towering rage.

An additional scene of Widmerpool's physical humiliation--and, presumably, his largely concealed pleasure in it, would seem to fit with Powell's aims. As described in the notebook, it would have the added benefit of enabling us to see Widmerpool's reaction in contrast to that of a minor character. Surely Fettiplace-Jones would have responded with anger, unleavened by any more secret feelings.

But then there's the simple fact that the scene involves urine--and the inextricability of that from sex. Oh, urophiliacs may be few and far between, but nonetheless it would be hard to write a scene in which Widmerpool adopted a "slavish" look in the wake of being peed on without putting the reader in the mind of unusual sexual preferences. I suspect that Powell decided, therefore, that the scene (whose comic potential can't be denied) was a step too far: for while he did eventually want us to realize that Widmerpool's love of humiliation extended to matters sexual (remember Pamela's taunting him about voyeurism in the presence of a painting of Candaules and Gyges), to have made it explicit that early would have risked altering our perception of the arc of Widmerpool's life. Instead we learn of his sexual humiliation at the very moment that his life is crumbling around him, his power revealed to be to some extent a mirage.

So in the end, Powell left the scene out, and in fact kept Widmerpool out of the training camp section entirely. It isn't until later that Nick is assigned to his staff, where he discovers that Widmerpool's ruthlessness and eye for power are perfectly suited to the military structure, with its need to deny men their individuality even as it needs some of them to retain enough of it to facilitate the denial of the rest. (As Powell wrote in his notebook, "The Army is at once the best and the worst place in the world of egotism," and elsewhere, "The Army is of necessity the world of the will; if the will is weak, the Army is weak.") Sunny Farebrother is there, too, and it turns out that he's Widmerpool's bureaucratic foe--but while there is pissing, it's metaphorical, and the person who gets the worse soaking is, sadly, Sunny.

Wodehouse's letters

In need of a quick post today, I find Jeeves coming, as usual, to the rescue. Well, not Jeeves so much as his creator: I can't believe I've not yet mentioned the new collection of P. G. Wodehouse's letters.

For a proper review of the volume, you couldn't do better than my fellow Invisible Librarian Ed Park's for Bookforum (which I just amused myself by mistyping Bookfuror). One of Ed's most interesting observations concerns the disjunction between Wodehouse's meticulous plotting and an expressed desire for its opposite:

How interesting, then, to read what a younger Wodehouse wrote to a friend in 1914: “That is what I’ve always wanted to be able to do, to interest the reader for about five thousand words without having any real story. At present, I have to have an author-proof plot, or I’m no good.” Voice is subservient to narrative. Of course, an author as long-lived as Wodehouse will change his views on craft and ambition over the years. But in that contradiction between form and style—in a pinch, predestination and free will—lies a curious truth. Could it be that for us readers (after all, the most important part of this equation), Wodehouse in the end achieved his goal of dispensing with “any real story”? “It’s just a question of detail,” Wodehouse remarks about the composition, after the heavy lifting is done. Perhaps the aspects of his books that give us the most pleasure—the utter insouciance, the similes of fizzy genius (comparing, to pluck at random from the sacred oeuvre, a dour countenance to a “V-shaped depression off the coast of Iceland”)—could only be arrived at once the scaffolding was absolutely secure. Which is to say, a reader with much on his mind about the uncertainties of life might well have deeper reasons for immersing himself in a story called “There’s Always Golf.”

It's well worth clicking through to read the rest--there are few writers whose comedic sense I trust more than Ed's, and that comes through in his choice of lines to quote.

For my part, I'll share just two of the bits that have greatly amused me as I've flipped through the book. First comes from a letter to Wodehouse's daughter, Leonora, of July 3, 1921:

Love Among the Chickens is out in the cheap edition. I'll send you a copy. Townend told me it was on sale at the Charing Cross bookstall, so I rolled round and found they had sold out. Thence to Piccadilly Circus bookstall. Sold out again. Pretty good in the first two days. Both men offered to sell me "other Wodehouse books," but I smiled gently on them and legged it.

Just as Bertie would have done.

Then there's this account, sent to his friend William Townend in 1932, of a visit to H. G. Wells's house:

I like Wells, but the trouble with him is that you can never see him alone. He is accompanied wherever he goes by the woman he's living with. When they came to lunch, we were all set to listen to his brilliant table talk, and she wouldn't let him get a word in edgeways, monopolizing the conversation while he sat looking like a crushed rabbit. I did manage to get him away in a corner after lunch long enough for him to tell me that he had an arrangement with her that when he went to London, he went by himself, and he added, his face lighting up, that he was going to London next week. Then she yelled for him, and he trotted off.

By the way, when you go to his residence, the first thing you see is an enormous fireplace, and round it are carved in huge letters the words: TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE.

Her idea, I imagine. I can't believe Wells would have thought of that himself.

What makes that letter even more deliciously amusing is that--as editor Sophie Ratcliffe points out in a note, Wodehouse used that very image a mere six years later in The Code of the Woosters. Bertie explains that at the house of a newly married friend he'd seen, over the fireplace, "the legend 'Two Lovers Built This Nest,' and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch's eyes every time he came in and saw it."

I would be falling down on one of my self-imposed Internet duties if I didn't close with some lines from Wodehouse's one letter to Anthony Powell, from 1967. A bookseller had sent him Powell's 1939 novel What's Become of Waring, and Wodehouse sent Powell a note of appreciation:

I have always admired your work so much, especially the Music of Time series. The early ones are all fine, but what I like, and what I suppose everyone likes, is the feeling that one is living with a group of characters and sharing their adventures, the whole thing lit up by the charm which is your secret. I hope the series is going on for ever. I should hate to feel that I should never meet Widmerpool again.

Which leads to two thoughts:

1 It's interesting that Wodehouse likes Dance, for Powell's sense of time couldn't be more different from Wodehouse's: the latter's characters are trapped in amber, living forever in a prelapsarian (or at least pre–World War I) wonderland, while Powell's are forever moving, paced by death and driven by various and sundry furies, acted upon by time in ways they could never have predicted.

2 I'm pleased that Wodehouse uses the word "charm." It's undeniably one of Dance's great qualities, yet it's not one I've ever properly identified by that name. But Wodehouse is right: there are few books whose wit and humanity are more delicately charming than Dance.

How to know that you've spent too much time reading Anthony Powell

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I'm going to use the fact that the New York Review of Books blog has recently been running a series of posts on dreams--a topic that longtime readers know is dear to my heart--as an excuse to share a dream from last week. Today's NYRB post is from Tim Parks, who writes of his many dreams about water and says that "It is impossible not to wish to interpret or somehow understand intense dreams." Well, there's a very simple interpretation of the dream I'm going to share today: I've read A Dance to the Music of Time too many times.

The experience of duality is common to dreams, possibly even fundamental. A person is a stranger, yet also your cousin. An object is ordinary, yet also horrifying. While it's impossible to convey the full experience of a dream--impossible even to retain it for long ourselves--I can tell you one thing about a lot of my dreams: they're simultaneously something I'm experiencing and something I'm reading. The dream world, for me, is often made of words.

That was definitely the case with the dream I'm about to describe. While I'm sure that a substantial amount of accuracy has been lost to the transition to the waking, typing world, what follows are, to the best of my ability to recall them, the actual words I remember from my dream as it unfolded, simultaneously events in space and words on a page:

Tired from the hours of sleep lost to preparation for the day's exercises, I hoped to pass the General's door unnoticed, but the fates, busy, one might reasonably suppose, in the larger theater of war, were not with me. "Captain Jenkins," came the call from the office. "Captain Jenkins!"

I took the minimum number of steps into the office that military etiquette required. "Yes, sir?"

"I've been going over the map for today's exercise, and I've discovered something."

Was he proud? Chagrined? Sleeplessness was not helping me to read what hid beneath his graying guardsman's mustache. "Yes, sir?"

"I'd thought it was fifty miles we'd be covering. I was sure it was fifty miles--I've done it before, and I knew it was fifty. But it's not: it's thirty-seven."

"Indeed, sir?"

"Thirty-seven! But I'm so used to fifty . . . and it's such a solid number! So . . . we're just going to say it's fifty nonetheless. We'll be doing fifty miles today, Captain--but fifty short miles. I doubt the men will mind." Stroking his mustache, the Generale lowered his head and chuckled quietly to himself as he folded his map, clearly amused by the ever-reliable reactions of the enlisted man through history. "No, no, I doubt the men will mind a short mile or two."

"Indeed, sir."

Indeed. Sleep well, folks.

"The mystic holy essence incarnate of arguing, encumbering, delaying, hair-splitting," or, Anthony Powell reads William Gerhardie

As Michael Holroyd points out in his introduction to the new edition of William Gerhardie's The Polyglots in Melville House's Neversink Library series, Anthony Powell was an avowed fan. In a review for the Daily Telegraph in 1970, Powell called the book "immensely enjoyable," writing that in the decades since its 1925 publication it had "lost none of its freshness." He also makes the entertaining--and too-rarely noted--point that too much praise can easily put a dedicated reader off a new book:

The extraordinary burst of praise on the part of Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and a row of other pundits, that greeted The Polyglots when it appeared put me off as such pontifical recommendations do when you are young.

Powell didn't end up reading the book until 1928, when it came across his desk in a professional context through his work at Duckworth.

I think it's reasonable to say that Gerhardie's book was an influence on Powell's early novels. The most important models for those books are Evelyn Waugh and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Firbank, neither of which are much disguised--but now that I've read The Polyglots I see Gerhardie's influence, too: the air of indolence, of action detached from meaning, of uncertainty about the future and certainty--in a negative sense--about the institutions and honors of the past that are found in, say, Afternoon Men and From a View to a Death are fully present in the bizarre world of exiles, sharps, and failures Gerhardie creates.

The most obvious legacy of Gerhardie in Powell's work, however, comes later, in the figure of one of the most memorable minor characters in A Dance to the Music of Time: the military bureaucrat Blackhead. Major David Pennistone introduces Blackhead by saying that "Until you have dealings with Blackhead, the word 'bureaucrat' will have conveyed no meaning to you." And while Nick Jenkins is skeptical, given "Pennistone's taste for presenting individuals in dramatic form," he soon finds that "the picture was, if anything, toned down from reality." Blackhead's ability to "evolv[e] a really impregnable system of obstruction and preclusion" turns out to be so far above the field as to make him, in the philosopher Pennistone's words, "a man apart. . . . His minutes have the abstract quality of pure extension." In fact, reflecting on Blackhead's power and seemingly uncheckable bureaucratic immobility, Nick speculates,

It was as if Blackhead, relatively humble though his grading might be, had become an anonymous immanence of all their kind, a fetish, the Voodoo deity of the whole Civil Service to be venerated and placated, even if better--safer--hidden away out of sight: the mystic holy essence incarnate of arguing, encumbering, delaying, hair-splitting, all for the best of reasons.

The ever-inventive Pennistone--one of the few kindred souls Nick encounters in the relative intellectual wasteland of the Army command--does get a bit of his own back, however:

Blackhead pointed severely to what he had written. Then he turned the pages several times. It was a real Marathon of a minute, even for Blackhead. When it came to an end at last he tapped his finger sharply on a comment written below his own signature.

"Look at this," he said.

He spoke indignantly. I leant forward to examine the exhibit, which was in Pennistone's handwriting. Blackhead had written, in all, three and a half pages on the theory and practice of soap issues for military personnel, with especial reference to the Polish Women's Corps. Turning from his spidery scrawl to Pennistone's neat hand, two words only were inscribed. They stood out on the file:

Please amplify. D. Pennistone. Maj. GS.

This does not, you can imagine, sit well with Blackhead. Nor is it easy for Nick to keep from laughing, "which would have been fatal, an error from which no recovery would have been possible." Powell's spinning out of the angry, threatened intricacies of Blackhead's reaction is a brilliant piece of comedy.

It's one of my favorite moments in the whole of Dance, and I think of it every time I come up against entrenched bureaucracy. So imagine how I perked up when I read the following passage from The Polyglots, which I'm quoting at length both because the whole paragraph is good and because the joke requires the context:

My chief was a lover of "staff work," and besides the many ordinary files he had some special files--a file called "The Religious File," in which he kept documents supplied by metropolitans and archimandrites and other holy fathers, and another file in which he kept correspondence relative to some gramophone records which had been taken from the Mess by a Canadian officer. And much of our work consisted of sending these files backwards and forwards. And sometimes the gramophone file would be lost, and sometimes the religious file, and then Sir Hugo would be very upset. Or he would write a report, and the report--so intricate was our organization--would also be lost. Once he wrote a very exhaustive report on the local situation. He had it corrected very carefully, had, after much thought, inserted a number of additional commas, had erased some of the commas on secondary consideration, had had the report typed, and had corrected it again when it was typed, inserting long sub-paragraphs in the margins which he enclosed in large circles, and so attached them to wherever they belonged by means of long pointed arrows trespassing on each other's ground, thus giving the script the appearance of a spider's web. Then he had read it through once again, now solely from the point of view of punctuation. He inserted seven more commas and a full stop which he had previously omitted. Sir Hugo was most particular about full stops, commas and semicolons, and he was very fond of colons, which he preferred to semicolons, by way of being more pointed and incisive, by way of proving that the universe was one chain of causes and effects. In order to avoid any possible mistakes in the typing of his manuscript, Sir Hugo surrounded his full stops with little circles, and in producing commas he would turn his pen so as almost to cause a hole in the paper and then slash it down like a sabre. The colons were two dots, each surrounded by a circle, and a semicolon was a combination of an encircled full stop and a sabre slash of a comma. There could be no possible mistake about Sir Hugo's punctuation. And would you believe it? After he had dispatched the report, marking the inner envelope in red ink "Very Secret and Personal," and placing the inner envelope in an outer envelope and sealing carefully both envelopes--the report was lost.

Sir Hugo had, of course, made enquiries. he established a chain of responsibility, and it seemed that each link had done its duty: yet the chain had failed. But Sir Hugo would not give in. He had accumulated a pile of unshapely correspondence on the subject of the prodigal report and had collected the papers in a file named "The Lost Report of Sir Hugo Culpit," and when he collected a scrap of evidence on the subject he would scribble it down on a buff slip and then send it in to me (whom he had now entrusted to keep the file), with the words: "Please attach this slip, by a pin, to confidential file, entitled "The Lost Report of Sir Hugo Culpit." And in a humorous vein I had written on the slip in imitation of Sir Hugo's manner:

Please state what pin:

1 (a) An ordinary pin; (b) a safety-pin; (c) a drawing-pin; (d) a hair-pin; (e) a linch-pin.
2. What make and size

and sent the slip back to Sir Hugo.

Gerhardie's narrator's victory isn't nearly so satisfying as Pennistone's, however. Rather, he is reprimanded, which reminds him that

Sir Hugo hated people like himself, because they acted as a sort of caricature of himself: served to remind him of a fact of which in his more open moments with himself he was dimly conscious--that he was to a large degree absurd.

Surely Powell recalled this scene, even if subconsciously, as he wrote of Pennistone's defeat of Blackhead?

I've quoted enough now to make my small point, and god knows this post is long enough already . . . but I can't resist quoting the denouement of The Lost Report of Sir Hugo Culpit:

And yesterday--two months later!--the prodigal report had returned to the office. To the unspeakable horror of Sir Hugo it was found in an empty oat sack at the distant wharf of Egersheldt, and Sir Hugo now broke his head as to how it could have possibly got there. He was determined to trace back its journey to the office, even if that should cost him his health.

He had convened a special conference comprising all the heads of departments and told us of the mysterious circumstances. "We must begin," he said, "right at the beginning. There is, in fact, many a worse point to begin at. I am not entirely pessimistic. We've got the sack. That is all right. Beyond the sack we know nothing. Now here is the sack." He stretched out the sack. "I suggest, gentlemen," he said, "that you work backwards. The first thing to do is to trace the manufacturers of the sack."

Pennistone aside, it's a sad truth of life that the martinets and bureaucrats usually have the last word. Duly notarized in triplicate.

A time for toasts

To mix the proper spirit to carry us into New Year's, I turn first to the old standby, Anthony Powell. Every year around this time I find the opening sentence of this passage from The Acceptance World running through my head:

It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas. My own existence seemed infinitely stagnant, relieved only by work on another book. Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic. Imminent change of direction is for some reason often foreshadowed by such colourless patches of time.

E. B. White, late in life, was even more bleak about the winding down of the year. In a letter sent to friends in early January 1984, White called Christmas and New Year's "the two long loneliest holiday weekends of the year." But he had a way to get past their air of, in Powell's terms, "moral suspension":

The year is only a few days old but I am already in my thoughts careening toward summer and fall, awaiting the day when I can boost my canoe on top of the car and set out for the lake.

Anyone viewing straight-on the snowbanks of a New England January is likely to look to spring, and then on to summer, but it takes a special temperament to already be thinking, mere days into January, of the gentle, wistful wane into autumn.

Ah, but if you're going out tonight, let Amor Towles remind you that that the martini is the only drink, and should be treated as such:

Casper placed a napkin on top of a silver shaker and rattled it good. Then he carefully began to pour. First, he filled my glass to the brim. The liquor was so cold and pure it gave the impression of being more translucent than water. Next he filled Eve's glass. When he began filling Tinker's, the flow of alcohol from the shaker slowed noticeably. And then trickled. For a moment it seemed as if there wasn't going to be enough. But the gin kept trickling and the surface kept rising until with the very last drop Tinker's martini reached the brim. It was the sort of precision that gave one confidence.

And, should you down too many martinis, I'll supply you, from Dawn Powell's diary entry of October 28, 1939, with this unimpeachable defense:

Coby, drunk, tie awry, coat half wrong-side out, hair tousled, inspires a "Good God!" from group. Why? he wants to know. "Go to a mirror," they suggest. "Just take a look at yourself." He shakes his head complacently. "I look alright," he says. "My genitals are covered, aren't they?"

Happy New Year, folks.

Christmas Eve

Reading Steerforth over at The Age of Uncertainty on the unpleasures of bookselling as the holiday sand drips through the hourglass of advent is sufficient to remind me to be grateful that I'm not working today, my days of shooing customers out the door just as the reindeer are touching down long over.

But before I turn out the lights on this little shop for the holidays, I've got a couple of modest gifts to distribute. First, this account of holiday skulduggery, from Anthony Powell's journal for Christmas Eve of 1987:

My tenant Adrian Andrews recently reported theft of a black ewe (only one in his flock), saying sheep-lifting by no means uncommon in this neighborhood. Today he arrived on doorstep (having grown beard so that I did not recognize him). . . . I remarked the black ewe had reappeared. He said police found her dumped in garden over Cranmore way. Like living in Wild West.

I don't think rocketlass and I are likely to get up to any sheep-lifting over Christmas, but if we do, we'll surely have the sense to stick to the white sheep, rendering our crime less likely to be detected. Good god, have these crooks never read any Holmes?

The party Dawn Powell (no relation to Anthony) attended on Christmas Day, 1932, and recorded in her journal may have been more civilized than sheep-lifting, but it was perhaps in some ways just as unbuttoned:

To a party at Cheryl's. Decided to do a rowdy modernist version of Aristophanes' "The Knights," which Cheryl was eager about--have hecklers, stooges, big placards through the house, "The Theater is Propaganda" across the curtain. Have the senate in back of house, sausages rushed through audience, passed-out Cleon and Sausage-Seller have fight of swear words across audience. Dress in stylized Greek costume, shirts, etc Have scenes described in play actually take place either by marionettes or by movies, have music, have people sell things between acts like a burlesque show.

As entertaining as that sounds, knowing my temperament I'd more often than not instead plump for a day like Thoreau's Christmas eve of 1856:

To Walden and Baker Farm with Ricketson, it still snowing a little.

It was very pleasant walking thus before the storm was over, in the soft, subdued light.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Enjoy the "soft, subdued light" of the ebbing of the year.

Another mysterious missive!

Three weeks ago I blogged about receiving an anonymous postcard in the mail. The card had a postmark from Dallas, my address, and a quote from Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Its mystery made my day.

Like some of the early reviewers of A Question of Upbringing, I seem to have erred, taking as a standalone the first part of a series. For in my mailbox yesterday was the card pictured below.





The image is captioned thus:

The Powder Tower, 1650, and the Revolution Museum of the Latvian SSR

In case you can't read it, what it says beside my address and the same Dallas postmark is simply:

All this, and Mopsy Pontner too.

Powell fans will remember Mopsy Pontner as the most minor of characters (despite sporting one of Powell's best names). She first turns up in Temporary Kings, the lovely wife of a dealer in paintings. Moreland is said to have fancied her, in the days before his marriage to Matilda, but kept away because he liked her husband. As Nick explains, "Moreland tended to keep off his friends' wives." (What a large amount of work that one word "tended" does in that sentence!) It's possible in any case that Moreland's reticence would have been matched; Mopsy does have the relatively rare distinction of having turned down Barnby.

Her sole appearance in the sequence is at a recollected dinner party that she attended as part of the sale of an Augustus John drawing to American film magnate Louis Glober, a sale by chance brokered by Nick, who thus also ends up at the party. Moreland, too, is there, "in poorish form, absent in manner, probably weighed down with a current love affair gone wrong." He isn't alone: the dinner's cast never quite clicks, and overall it turns out to be "heavy going." A year or so later, however, having gotten to know Mopsy Pontner a bit better, Nick has this exchange with her about that night:

"Glober did me on the table."

"Among the coffee cups?"

"We broke a couple of liqueur glasses."

"You obviously found him attractive."

But the showstopping revelation--the reason Glober sticks in readers' minds despite being a tad bland in general, is still to come. Mopsy tells Nick:

One rather odd thing about Glober, he insisted on taking a cutting from my bush--said he always did that after having anyone for the first time. He produced a pair of nail-scissors from a small red leather case. He told me he carried them round with him in case the need arose.

Nick, the epitome of English unflappability, drolly replies:

We all have our whims.

At a party years later, the merest mention of that dinner is enough to send an ailing Moreland into paroxysms of nostalgic giddiness--he imagines the headline "Musician Dies of Nostalgia." Then, rambling through all the old memories that the current night's guest list has brought to the fore, he caps it with, "All this, and Mopsy Pontner too." The nostalgia gets so thick and ridiculous that he tells Nick,  only half joking, "You shouldn't have told me about Mopsy Pontner. It wasn't the act of a friend."

Sending mysterious Dance-related postcards, however? Oh, that is unquestionably the act of a friend.

Powell on friendship old and young

One thing I've been particularly enjoying this time through Hearing Secret Harmonies is when Nick Jenkins distills the fruit of his years of experience into general pronouncements on life. Like this one about friendship:

In any case the friendships of later life, as contrasted with those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions. Probably thirty was placing the watershed too late for the age when both parties more or less begin to know (at least think they know) what the other is talking about, as opposed to those earlier friendships--not unlike love affairs, with all sexual element removed--which can exist with scarcely an interest in common, mutual misunderstanding of character and motive all but absolute.

The overarching point is hard to argue with, but at first glance Powell's explanation seems off: the friends of our youth we misunderstand? Seems wrong, no?

But with more thought, I found myself agreeing with him. When we're young and ill-defined, thinking taste more important than character, we tend to assume that anyone our age who has chosen a broadly similar approach to dress and affect surely shares our outlook on life--and the potent combination of our inexperience, ignorance of the world's multiplicity, and solipsism enables us to rush headlong into friendships that in later life caution would halt at the handshake.

Hearing autumnal harmonies

The streets having, as Zelda Fitzgerald put it, "once more assumed their academic context," I find the recurrent patterns of life, seemingly dormant amid the possibilities of summer, beginning to stand in sharper relief once more, as they do annually when September brings thoughts of school, never, it seems to be banished despite the accumulation of post-graduate years. Which means it's time once again to pick up where last I left off with my perpetual re-reading of A Dance to the Music of Time.

This turn through the Dance, which I believe is my fifth, has brought me to the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies. It's regarded by many readers as the least of the series, the moment when Powell's age and success insulated him just enough from changes in the culture (and especially the growth of the counterculture) as to render his observational, ironic manner ineffective. Christopher Hitchens called the final volume an "extreme disappointment," writing,

Here, the shortcomings of the preceding novels appear condensed and intensified. Confronted by what he would doubtless call “the Sixties,” Powell sounds less and less like a stoical and skeptical observer and instead takes on the lineaments of a vaporing old bore. The book supposedly concerns the cult of youth and the traps that this cult will set for the trend-crazed older person who needs or desires to appear contemporary. But it is no longer informed by experience and curiosity, well-recollected and hard-won and wrought over in reflection. Rather, it resembles the plaintive tone of a beached colonial retiree, convinced that all around him is going to the dogs.

Though I wouldn't claim that Hearing Secret Harmonies is the Dance at its best, I've written before of my disagreement with the assessment of it as a failure. Despite a few mis-steps here and there, I think it achieves what Powell aimed for it to achieve: bringing the series to a close without offering closure, asserting the primacy of pattern and repetition and reminding us that the different starting and ending points of all our separate sprints through life mean that the finality offered as a matter of course by most novels is at best a chimera, at worst a lie.

Today, as I started into the book again, I was struck by how much of Powell's style, technique, and concerns make themselves known within just the first few pages. The opening passage gives us his precise, even fussy descriptions and convoluted, even antiquated syntax, festooned with clauses to the point that nearly every assertion feels like a reticent aside:

Ducks, flying in from the south, ignored four or five ponderous explosions over at the quarry. The limestone cliff, dominant oblong foreground structure, lateral storeyed platforms, all coral-pink in the evening sunlight, projected towards the higher ground on misty mornings a fading mirage of Babylonian terraces suspended in haze above the mere; the palace, with its hanging gardens, distantly outlined behind a group of rather woodenly posed young Medes (possibly young Persians) in Mr Deacon's Boyhood of Cyrus, the picture's recession equally nebulous in the shadows of the Walpole-Wilson's hall.

If we were coming new to the books, that passage would suffice to establish narrator Nick Jenkins, and by extension Powell, as a close observer, someone who takes the necessary time to look--and then, having looked, to describe with care what he's seen. It's Jenkins's characteristic role throughout the series: he is more than anything else a watcher, our window to the panoply of lives, hopes, ambitions, and adventures of his generation. His primary mode is meditative, and returning to his narration is a reminder of how dismayingly rare that quality is in fiction.

A few paragraphs on, we get to see how that interest in description and observation can be turned to humor, in an account of a crayfishing expedition:

The single crayfish emerging from under the stones was at once followed by two more. Luck had come at last. The three crayfish, swart miniature lobsters of macabrely knowing demeanour, hung about doubtfully in a basin of mud below the surface. The decision was taken by the crayfish second to enter. He led the way with fussy self-importance, the other two bustling along behind.

Again, it's the precision--bordering on finickiness--that makes the passage work. "Swart"(an archaic version of "swarthy" with an extra valence of malignance), "fussy self-importance," the characterization of the most intrepid crayfish as the second in a duel, setting out to examine the ground for the contest--all this may be pointless, but it's funny, and, moreover, it gives us a sense of the kind of eye we're looking through. A man who troubles to describe crayfish so carefully will not fall down on the job when his fellow humans enter the picture.

The opening paragraph quoted above also introduces another key aspect of Jenkins's approach to life, one that's closely tied to his meditative stance: his constant use of culture to help him understand the lives and events around him. His mention of Mr Deacon's painting is particularly rich because it refers to the imaginary artistic world of the novel itself, but in the opening chapter he also finds room for an apposite Shakespeare quote and draws on knowledge of local archaeology and legend. None of the references seem a stretch; rather, their emergence feels like the organic workings of a mind that is forever remembering, judging, comparing, considering. At the opening of chapter two, Powell writes of the small consolations of getting old:

The other mild advantage endorses a keener perception for the authenticities of mythology, not only of the traditional sort, but--when such are any good--the latterday mythologies of poetry and the novel.

In the face of the typical fourteen-year-old's dismissal of culture as irrelevant ("Why do we have to learn all this old crap?"), I would put forth the workings of Jenkins's mind: because the more we know of what came before, the greater our ability to understand what we see before us now, to detect similarities and patterns, and--perhaps most important--to understand that, while Ezekial's "nada y nada y nada" may have been a tad too gloomy, there certainly isn't a lot new under the sun, and that, rather than something wholly new and different (and, as is usually implied, better), we are but another link in a long chain. One of the great glories of Dance is that it contains such multitudes that it creates the very conditions that Nick so enjoys: its fans find themselves using its memorable characters to help them understand the people they meet in everyday life.

Knowing of Jenkins's tendency to view events through the lens of art also helps us catch a good moment in these first pages with his wife, Isobel. As she explains to her niece and others how to catch crayfish, she says,

The trap must be hauled up gently, or they walk off again. The frustration of the Old Man and the Sea is nothing to it.

Jenkins is remarkably close-mouthed about his marriage--he says at one point, "What can one say about one's marriage?" and mostly sticks to that position. But the glimpses we do get of Isobel's mind--for example, when Nick is able to sneak a weekend pass during the war and she fills his ear, gleefully, with exactly the sort of gossip that he has most been hungering for--enable us to understand the basis of their connection. Her line here is little more than a joke, but it's a good one, one that reveals a fundamental, satisfying affinity.

This, all this, the distinctiveness of Nick Jenkins's voice and worldview, is why returning to the Dance feels like an imperative every fall: there's nothing else quite like it, and it feels like going home. When the consolations of the summer--the sun, the long days, the baseball games on the radio into the night--are being taken away one by one, the familiar is your friend, always there to be leaned on.

The mail brings a greeting, and a mystery

From what I've been given to understand, if you're ever walking down the street and a passerby says to you, "Magic magic ninja what?", the proper response is, "Magic magic ninja what!" That's how you'll both know that you're fellow members of the Juggalo Nation. (If, that is, you are and want to be taken for a member of the Juggalo Nation, which, um, you may not be.)

I thought of that yesterday when I received the postcard pictured below:



The image on the front is of the Transit Synagogue in Toledo, Spain. But that's not the important part. What's important is what's on the back:



"The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True." Anthony Powell fans will know that there's a proper response to that statement, which is "The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight." It's the ritual greeting that Dr. Trelawney, a guru and mystic in A Dance to the Music of Time exchanges with adherents and fellow travelers in the occult sciences. Nick Jenkins first learns it at his initial meeting with Trelawney, just days before the outbreak of World War I, when Trelawney, wandering through the country with a band of followers, delivers it "in a low clear voice, almost in accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates the English is not his native tongue." To Nick's surprise, his family's old friend General Conyers, with "an almost imperceptible nod," offers the response. It's not the last indication Jenkins will get of Conyers's unexpectedly broad outlook on life, nor is it the last time that Trelawney's appearance will signal the onset of a worldwide conflagration: on the eve of World War II, Nick himself will unexpectedly find occasion to make use of his knowledge of the phrase, to almost magical effect.

This is definitely one of the best postcards I've ever received. The problem I face now is this: I know how to reply, but to whom? Should I send a postcard to General Delivery, Dallas? Or can this post suffice to, in itself, begin healing the blindness of sight?

Round and round with Hardy and James

I make no promises that this post bears anywhere near the inspiration and joys of juxtaposition of Craig Brown's wonderful daisy chain of a book, One on One, about which I've written before (and which, oddly enough, remains unpublished in the States), but it shares a bit of that book's haphazardly paired DNA.

It began when I was flipping through a volume of the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson and came across a letter to Henry James of December 5, 1892.* After bringing James up to speed on his threatened deportation from Samoa, Stevenson settled down to discussing books:

Hurry up with another book of stories. I am now reduced to two of my contemporaries, you and Barrie -- O, and Kipling! I did like Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily; it isn't great but it's big. As for Hardy -- You remember the old gag? -- Are you wownded, my lord? -- Wownded, 'Ardy. -- Mortually, my lord? -- Mortually, 'Ardy. Well, I was mortually wownded by Tess of the Durberfields. I do not know that I am exaggerative in criticism; but I will say that Tess is one of the worst, weakest, and least sane, most voulu books I have yet read. Bar the style, it seems to me to be about as bad as [sensational novelist George William Macarthur] Reynolds -- I maintain it -- Reynolds: or, to be more plain, to have no earthly connexion with human life, and to be merely the unconscious portrait of a weak man under a vow to appear clever, or a rickety schoolchild setting up to be naughty and not knowing how. I should tell you in fairness I could never finish it; there may be the treasures of the Indies further on; but so far as I read, James, it was, in one word, damnable. Not alive, not true, was my continual comment as I read; and at last -- not even honest! was the verdict with which I spewed it from my mouth. I write in anger? I almost think I do: I was betrayed in a friend's house -- and I was pained to hear that other friends delighted in that barmecide feast. I cannot read a page of Hardy for many a long day, my confidence is gone.

Editor Ernest Mehew's quite good notes to the volume of Stevenson's letters reveal both James's initial opinion of Tess, which, it appears, is what prompted Stevenson to take it up, and his later, more damning assessment. In a letter the previous spring James had written,

The good little Tommy Hardy has scored a great success with Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which is chock-full of faults and falsity and yet has a singular beauty and charm.

Though I'm more forgiving of Hardy's faults, that assessment is far from unfair. After receiving Stevenson's broadside, however, James replied,

I grant you Hardy with all my heart and even with a certain quantity of my boot-toe. I am meek and ashamed where the public chatter is deafening -- so I bowed my head and let Tess of the D's pass. But oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile. The pretence of "sexuality" is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of language only by the author's reputation for style.

James would surely be pleased to learn that Hardy's reputation as a stylist has taken a hit, as these days, he's praised in spite of his sometimes clunky prose, but if James thought Tess's sexuality was overplayed to the point of falseness, just think--D. H. Lawrence is still to come!

Longtime readers will know that I disagree heartily with Stevenson's and James's assessments (though I admire Stevenson's passion--oh, the books that provoke us to actual anger!**). Hardy is far from perfect, certainly, but while I am willing to give Hardy critics Jude the Obscure, a book whose determination on doom is so pervasive as to render it laughable, I can read Tess again and again and find myself swept up in it anew each time. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for his other major novels; The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, and The Return of the Native all have substantial charms.

After reading these letters, I went in search of a favorite Anthony Powell line about Hardy, which I found in a 1971 review of a critical biography of Hardy for the Daily Telegraph:

Hardy's failing was a total lack of humour, which, one feels, might have prevented some of the absurdities. He could do knockabout up to a point, or irony, but one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, or Conrad***, to see the missing quality that is possessed by most of the great novelists in one form or another.

On the next page of Miscellaneous Verdicts, the collection in which I found that review, is one from 1972 of a collection of Hardy's letters to his ill-situated semi-paramour Florence Henniker. Powell quotes the following passage from one of Hardy's letters:

In my enforced idleness, I have been reading H. James's Wings of the Dove--the first of his that I have looked into for years and years. I read it with a fair amount of care--as much as one would wish to expend on any novel, certainly, seeing what there is to read besides novels--and so did [his wife] Em; but we have been arguing ever since about what happened to the people, and find we have wholly conflicting opinions thereon. At the same time James is almost the only living novelist I can read, and taken in small doses I like him exceedingly, being as he is a real man of letters.

I absolutely love this letter. How often do you find someone acknowledging, not simply that James is complicated, but that he can be so subtle as to leave readers with wholly different--and irreconcilable--understandings of what he was trying to say? And then there's the reminders of Hardy's perpetual insecurity: there's the dig about "what there is to read besides novels," from a man who'd seven years earlier given up the form; and also the reasons for his approval of James, that he is "a real man of letters," a contrast with Hardy, who seemed to perpetually need reassurance that he had reached the inner circle.

I'll close with the letter that sent me to Stevenson in the first place--and which, conveniently, pulls together most of the threads herein. It was sent by George Lyttelton to Rupert Hart-Davis on March 8, 1956; after airing a dislike of Austen (and a belief that Emma deserved spanking), Lyttelton writes about the Irish novelist and critic George Moore,

D[esmond] MacCarthy somewhere hints that G.M. had really read very little and that mere deliberate mischief played a great part in his dicta which listeners were glad to have for their wit and sometimes were shrewd enough. "What is Conrad but the wreck of Stevenson floating about on the slip-slop of Henry James?" is beastly good, though (of course) unfair. But how I do enjoy the old rascal; how attractive are complete absence of principle and an unlimited love of mischief, both apparently quite unselfconscious!

True on all counts.

"Boswell's perpetual doses of clap," or, Oh, thank the gods for the weekend

Is it in the jelly-side-down nature of things that a ten-hour workday, in which it's impossible for hours at a time to escape the computer's gravitational pull, will necessarily fall on a Friday?

Such, at least, has been today, and it leaves little time or mental capacity for blogging. So herewith, a bit about Boswell I happened across in Anthony Powell's journals the other day, from the entry for December 31, 1987:

Reread three vols of Boswell's Journals. . . . As with Pepys, tho' in quite different manner, I cannot really like Boswell, who undoubtedly had good points, capacity for taking keen interest in other people in spite of his own overweening egotism (of which he was completely aware, one of his good qualities) and ability to describe them. One can't really forgive him for behaving so odiously to the dog given him by the Corsican General Paoli. Also one gets rather sick of Boswell's perpetual doses of clap (unlike Casanova he probably never got cured by a severe regime, which Boswell was temperamentally incapable of keeping). At the same time he must be given credit for not suppressing his less attractive side.

It's no surprise that Powell is attracted to Boswell's "keen interest" in others, since that was Powell's most salient characteristic as a writer. I don't remember the dog Powell refers to, and a quick online search isn't turning anything up--anyone familiar with that story? It doesn't sound likely to be anything but awful, but I wonder whether Boswell's maltreatment of the dog would have seemed noteworthy in amid the more common animal cruelty of the eighteenth century?

The journal entry continues in a more somber vein:

This year ended on a pleasant note. I doubt it I would ever again have energy to write another novel, even a short one, trouble being largely identification of author's point of vie, vis-a-vis other people, so hard to establish in changing world as one gets older. Such ideas as one has must go into this journal.

Powell's final novel, The Fisher King had been published the year before, when he was eighty-one. It's his most Dance-like standalone novel, full of people speculating about the lives, histories, and motivations of other characters they only half know; it's funny and lively and effective. It doesn't feel like an ending, though it was. It does, however, close appropriately:

The rain had abated a little, though not altogether. In spite of foul weather there was exhilaration in the northern air. The leaden surface of the loch was just perceptibly heaving in the wind, still blowing from time to time in fairly strong gusts. On the far side of the waters, low rounded hills, soft and mysterious, concealed in luminous haze the frontiers of Thule: the edge of the known world; man's permitted limits; a green-barriered check-point, beyond which the fearful cataract of torrential seas cascaded down into Chaos.

And on that note, it's the hour for a martini and some time at the piano. May your reading this weekend keep Chaos at bay.

Simon Raven

A friend asked in an e-mail earlier this week whether I had read Simon Raven. The name was familiar, and I knew he was an English novelist, but that was about as far as I could get. But when my friend pointed out that there are those who plump for Raven over Anthony Powell--who say that Raven's roman-fleuve, Alms for Oblivion, is better than Powell's . . . well, I had to go check this out for myself.

I've grabbed the first novel in the sequence, The Rich Pay Late (1964), from the library, and it'll go to the top of my post–George R. R. Martin stack. Before that, however, I thought I'd take a quick trawl through the home shelves to figure out where I'd encountered Raven. I started with Powell's diaries and memoirs, but his only appearance there is as one of many who congratulated Powell on being named a Companion of Honor in the early days of 1988.

Raven does, however, turn up in Michael Barber's biography of Powell. Barber is describing the pervasively present absence of Nick Jenkins, Powell's narrator in A Dance to the Music of Time, and he brings in a "pungent" description by Raven of Jenkins's tone:

It's the tone of a gentleman's club, really, with a slight breath--not exactly of the slums creeping in--but a breath of corruption. It's a bit like sitting in, say, White's or Brooks's, and every now and then somebody opens the window and a rather nasty smell--not exactly of shit--well, yes, of shit, but also of corpses--comes into the room. And somebody makes a polite observation as to the nature, respectively, of shit and corpses and closes the window for the time being. That's how it strikes me.

Despite the tone of disapproval, Barber says that Raven admired Powell's novels--though from that account it's hard to escape the conclusion that he didn't get them. His example isn't wholly inaccurate, but it leaves out the breadth of Powell's range of subject and interest: the oddities that are simply oddities, not signs of corruption; the things done for love (often self-love) rather than power or status; the comedy of expressed individuality. Raven makes it sound like Powell seeks credit for exposing hypocrisy, while leaving the genteel world essentially intact. Far from it--rather, Powell is interested in making us see the complexity and strangeness that underlie even worlds (and people) we think we know well.

Barber goes on to draw what seems a useful distinction:

Raven is explicit. Powell is implicit. In Raven's fiction the source of the nasty smell--a steaming turd, a festering cadaver or whatever--is there on the carpet for all to see. In Powell's fiction we never really establish what it is or where it comes from, only that it stinks. Raven's characters simply ring for a servant to clear up the mess, following which they settle back in their armchairs as before. He is, for all his lurid effects, a cosy writer. Powell, most emphatically, is not. His characters will probably have to live with that smell whether the window is open or not because it may, after all, be the drains (but try telling that to the club secretary). "The world is never a very nice place," he said more than once. "Tony's far more melancholy and serious than I am," was Raven's comment.

Raven also turns up elsewhere in Barber's bio, and while neither of these instances is useful for comparison's sake, they're too irresistible to pass up. Of Violet Powell's ability to demolish the character of an absent person in conversation, Raven said, "Chop, chop, chop--until there was nothing left but a bit of gristle." And then Barber offers Raven's recollection of an excuse that Violet once told him Cyril Connolly had given for not being able to write: "He told her he couldn't write for a month after he'd come."

The Guardian's obituary for Raven was also written by Barber, and it's a joy, opening brilliantly:

The death of Simon Raven, at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is proof that the devil looks after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died of shame at 30, or of drink at 50.

Barber also described him as combining "elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester."

The reference to Waugh made me think that even though they're of different generations surely Nancy Mitford would have encountered such a creature, or at least enjoyed gossiping about him. Initially I struck out in her letters, too, until I turned to the slim volume of her correspondence with bookseller Heywood Hill. Raven turns up there in a letter from Nancy of January 15, 1971. Having been asked by her neighbor, Mme. Suchard, to recommend some "light English books" for her nephew and godson of seventeen, "a lazy boy who is learning English," she had ordered some Penguins from the bookshop, which, on arrival, she dispatched to her neighbor.

The next day she loomed, saying, "These books--you know we are not very go-ahead in my family--could you very kindly see if they are really suitable for a young boy?" Well, two of them had disgusting naked women on the cover. I got away with them (as they were called things like Rose of Tibet) by saying the women were goddesses. The third had a picture of a boy dressed for cricket fondling a naked lady (my dear, lucky it was a lady, in view of the contents) & written on the cover "A novel of strange vices" which of course even Mme Suchard could translate. I simply grovelled--said I couldn't believe it of MY MOTHER's old bookshop, one of the most respectable in London.

And then there's the punchline:

Well, I couldn't be bothered to send back strange vices & I read it--too brilliant, screamingly funny & disgusting beyond belief. It's called Fielding Gray by S Raven--I do recommend it.

And that is why I knew and remembered Raven's name!

More to come on this front later, I expect.

Whatever it is I think I see, or, Some resemblances from the weekend

Let's start with the one that seems least likely to be intentional. From George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons:

The cheesemnonger laughed so hard that Tyrion feared he was about to rupture. "All the gold in Casterly Rock, why not?"

"The gold I grant you," the dwarf said, relieved that he was not about to drown in a gout of half-digested eels and sweetmeats, "but the Rock is mine."

I'm surely not the only one who immediately thinks of Mr. Creosote, right?



Okay, fine: that's just a case of me seeing what I want to see, like when I mistake a windblown plastic bag in a vacant lot for a cute bunny hopping happily along. (Still, the Pythons did have a thing for cheesemongers and dwarves, no?) But what about this one, also from A Dance with Dragons:

His fellow drinkers were talking about dragons now. . . . "Wasn't there some princess, too?" asked a whore. She was the same one who'd said the meat was grey.

"Daena," said the riverman. "That was the sister. Daena of Dragonstone. Or was is Daera?"

"Daena was old King Baelor's wife," ssid the oarsman. "I rowed on a ship named for her once. The Princess Daena."

"If she was a king's wife, she'd be a queen."

"Baelor never had a queen. He was holy."

"Don't mean he never wed his sister," said the whore. "He just never bedded her, is all. When they made him king, he locked her up in a tower. His other sisters, too. There was three."

"Daenela," the proprietor said loudly. "That was her name. The Mad King's daughter, I mean, not Baelor's bloody wife."

Now, for all his overuse of the word "jape," Martin isn't much of a one for jokes--but that said, doesn't this exchange call to mind the perpetual, booze-clouded, fact-free discussions overheard at the O. J. in the Dortmunder novels? A deliberate allusion? Perhaps not, but I do find it comforting to think that drunken discourse never changes much, across centuries or imaginary continents.

Finally, an allusion that I do think is surely deliberate. Penelope Lively's new novel, How It All Began, a gently comic and unassuming look at the ramifications of one small change in the lives of a number of contemporary Londoners, features as its most fun character a self-regarding retired historian, Lord Peters. He is of course writing his memoirs; they are of course little more than the lightly fleshed-out contents of his Rolodex. After lost lecture notes lead to a debacle that leaves him feeling old and out of touch, he happens across a Simon Schama program and is inspired. "One has vastly underestimated television, I've come to realize," he tells his assistant. Then he turns to his niece, who is an interior decorator, and tells her of his plans for a series of half a dozen hour-long programs about the Augustan age:

"So where you come in, my dear, is to sort out some key person I should be getting in touch with. I'm not particularly au fait with that world, and you have so many contacts all over the place, don't you? You are always telling me about your prominent clients."

Marion stared across the table at him. Challenged, it would seem. Hoist with one's own petard, is that it? Trust Uncle Henry to put you on the spot when it suits him.

"Well . . . actually, I'm not at all sure that I . . . "

"Someone well established at the BBC, or the other outfit--whatever it's called." He waved a deprecating hand. "One of those in charge of program making. I wondered initially about going straight to the top chap at the BBC, the . . the . . ."

"Director-General, I think."

"Quite. Find out who he is and put the proposal to him--but, on second thought, it makes more sense to deal with the people who're going to actually do the program, don't you think? So--who do you suggest?"

It won't surprise you to learn that getting a TV show made involves a bit more than calling up the right man. In the process of being turned down, Henry makes the acquaintance of a recently minted PhD in history named Mark, who decides that Henry could be his meal ticket for a while. On seeing Henry's study, Mark says, wholly without irony, "Books do furnish a room, don't they?" Anthony Powell fans will of course recognize the reference, and if the name Mark hasn't already brought to mind Powell's character Mark Members, Mark's next step surely will: he insinuates himself as Lord Peters's archivist, a sinecure that will secretly leave him plenty of time to turn his dissertation into a book. "It's Henry now, no more Lord P.," notes Lord Peters's personal assistant, whom Members has elbowed aside a bit. "Got his feet properly under the table, he has."

Which, Powell fans will surely agree, is a very Mark Members thing to do. And that makes me, scoring generously, one for three in the allusion department for the weekend. Given all the nonsense floating around the brain at any given point, that doesn't seem like too bad a score.

Pym, Powell, Murdoch, Bayley

John Bayley's introduction to the 2009 Virago edition of Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings (1958) might as well have been written specifically for me, as it brings in two writers very close to my heart, Anthony Powell and Bayley's wife, Iris Murdoch.

Powell, as I've noted before, was a fan of Pym, writing in his journals in 1992,

From being merely tolerant of [her] as a novelist, I have now got into the swing of her style and characters, find the books very amusing. . . . She is one of the few novelists I regret never having met.

But Bayley reveals much more:

Addicts of Pym tend to get together to discuss their heroine, and that happened to me with Powell. We agreed, for example, that his own immortal character Kenneth Widmerpool might have walked out of a Pym novel, together, of course, with his mother in her famous "bridge coat," a garment that much delighted Pym.

I think Widmerpool is ultimately too grasping to fit in a Pym novel, but his mother--good god, yes!

About Murdoch, Bayley offers the passing observation that she was "never a fan of Pym's novels," but liked her greatly as a person. His invocation of the pair in his introduction is perfect, for A Glass of Blessings is simultaneously the most Powellian and most Murdochian of the Pym novels I've read (which at this point is most of them).

The Powell links are easy to trace--indeed, it's hard to imagine any Powell fan not perking up at a couple of points in the novel when the narrator and protagonist, Wilmet Forsyth, a thirty-five-year-old married housewife, reflects, Nick Jenkins&8211;like, on the people around her. Here, for example:

At that moment I heard the bell ring and shortly afterwards Sir Denbigh Grote came into the room, rubbing his hands together as if it were a cold afternoon. He looked so much like a retired diplomat is generally supposed to look, even to his monocle, that I never thought of him as being the sort of person one needed to describe in any detail. What did seem unusual was his friendship with Miss Prideaux, who in spite of being a gentlewoman had only been a governess in some of the countries where he had served in a much higher capacity. It could only be supposed that retirement, like death, is a kind of leveller; and that social differences had been forgotten in the common pleasure of recalling garden parties at the embassies to celebrate the sovereign's birthday, and other similar functions which few people would have been capable of discussing at all knowledgeably.

It's Powell to a T--especially from "It could only be supposed" on; the internal reflection is pure Nick Jenkins, especially in its focus on the effects of the passage of time on status and class relations. Pym even uses a semicolon, like Powell, where an ordinary writer would use a comma! The Murdoch echo is more muted, but ultimately, I think, just as inescapable for a fan of both writers. A Glass of Blessings, like many Pym novels, turns on a character who fails to imagine the full scope of the lives of those around her--and is thus surprised when they a revealed to be fully rounded humans, acting on emotion and sentiment, instead of plodding along on the familiar paths she's assumed they'd follow. Late in the novel Wilmet lies abed, thinking about some news she's just had delivered about an acquaintance:

I lay awake for rather a long time, either because of the coffee or my confused thoughts. It seemed as if life had been going on around me without my knowing it, in the disconcerting way that it sometimes does, like the traffic swirling past when one is standing on an island in the middle of the road. Sybil and Professor Root, Piers and Keith, Marius and Mary--the names did sound odd together--all doing things without, as it were, consulting me.

One of Murdoch's great themes is the way that our solipsism blinds us to the reality--and separateness, difference--of other people, and, while usually stated more quietly than in Murdoch's novels, it's also one of Pym's recurring points. Even people we think of as good friends can regularly surprise us with their actions--and, more, with the reminder those actions bring that we're not after all the center of the universe. (Of course--what supplies much of the humor in Pym--we would never think of ourselves as the center of the universe . . . it just happens that only rarely can we achieve the critical distance required to escape our own glorious shadow.)

That said, I'm not surprised that Murdoch wasn't a fan of Pym's novels. She should have been, clearly: the two were working different sections of the same field. But Pym had none of Murdoch's glittering skill with--and love of--plot, none of her excessive qualities, none of her confidence in (and fear of) the tranformative, even demonic powers of love and passion (to say nothing of true eros, which has a deliberately muted place in Pym). Pym, as Bayley puts it in "Barbara Pym as Comforter," an essay he contributed to "All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym (2003), "offers the comfort of total non-insistence." She simply presents lives as they are, with the absolute minimum of drama required to sustain a novel; one of the most impressive things about A Glass of Blessings is how little of note happens in the book. Where Murdoch is everywhere overflowing, Pym is everywhere restrained.

And yet perhaps there was a late rapprochement. Bayley concludes "Barbara Pym as Comforter," with a few words about his late wife:

The novel is, ultimately, a very personal form, so I will conclude on a personal note. My wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, suffered in the last years of her life from Alzheimer's disease. When she had been well and writing her own novels, I would sometimes read her bits of Pym that had amused or delighted me. I continued to do this when she was ill, and she always smiled at me or at the writer, even if she did not understand. After I had put her to bed, I came down for my own drink and supper, during which I usually and avidly read a Pym. The novels not only sustained but calmed and satisfied me during those days, as nothing else could.

A key thing that we learn from Pym is that one should take what comfort one can; the world offers little, and we should hold tight to it. Who knows what Iris Murdoch understood, much less appreciated, of what her husband read her, but the comfort the thought brought him was as real as anything.

Conrad and Powell

Anthony Powell fans who turn to Joseph Conrad's novella The Duel (one of the five novellas of that title that Melville House, in a clever gimmick, published together last week) will enjoy an amusing echo of Uncle Giles in the whinging of one of the two contestants. Conrad's tale concerns Feraud and D'Hubert, a pair of officers in Napoleon's army who, through the insane readiness of Feraud to take offense, spend more than decade of the Napoleonic Wars in an on-and-off duel. Or, rather, a perpetually on duel, one whose interstices are forced by circumstance: recovery from wounds, lack of proximity, or, in the case that calls Uncle GIles to mind, difference in rank. D'Hubert is promoted to colonel, which leaves Lieutenant Feraud unable to challenge him without rendering both men liable to court martial. Feraud, formerly a casual, even feckless soldier, felt "an urgent desire to get on" spring up in his breast. He

resolved in his mind to seize showy occasions and to court the favourable opinion of his chiefs like a mere worldling.

That in itself is not much like Uncle Giles, who didn't tend to court work or opinion of any sort. But this certainly is:

He began to make bitter allusions to "clever fellows who stick at nothing to get on." The army was full of them, he would say; you had only to look around. . . . Once he confided to an appreciative friend: "You see, I don't know how to fawn on the right sort of people. It isn't in my character."

The minute he gets his promotion, Feraud begins making the arrangements to meet D'Hubert at arms, for,

"I know my bird," he observed grimly. "If I don't look sharp he will take care to get himself promoted over the heads of a dozen men better than himself. He's got the knack for that sort of thing."

Powell was a staunch fan of Conrad, calling him "one of our greatest novelists" in a 1974 article, so it's not unreasonable to think that Feraud's cynical disdain played a part in the creation of Giles.

In a different article on Conrad, published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1947, occasioned by a two new volumes of biography, Powell draws out a couple of succinct distillations of Conrad's stance and concerns as a writer. One is constructed almost entirely from some lines from Razumov, the student from Under Western Eyes who, as Powell puts it, is "forced to play a shabby part through no particular fault of his own . . a favourite theme of Conrad's":

"As if anything could be changed!" thinsk Razumov. "In this world of men nothing can be changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary trifles." This was the lesson Conrad himself had learnt.

Then there's this, which fruitfully compares Conrad to Kipling (an author to whose fundamental literary and imaginative qualities Powell, with his conservative leanings, is probably a better guide than many, able to judge with relative dispassion Kipling's achievements and failures; those of us on the left can then decide where to set the balance regarding other aspects):

Indeed, his informed distrust of pretentious claims to idealism and of pursuit of power masquerading as liberalism sets him apart form the mood of his literary contemporaries. . . . In this divergence he resembles Kipling--an author personally unsympathetic to him--who shares Conrad's respect for a sense of duty, his recognition of the practical difficulties of exercising command, and also, to some degree, his satirical attitude towards officials. Conrad is more sensitive than Kipling in handling the niceties of human character, but he does not possess Kipling's dexterity nor, perhaps, his imaginative powers. On the other hand Kipling--although his dislike for Peter Ivanovitch and his [anti-Tsarist terrorist] circle would in no way have fallen short of Conrad's--could never have achieved the objectivity of Under Western Eyes.

For the best distillation of Conrad's moral sensibility, however, you'll be best off turning to Conrad himself--and if you don't have time to read the whole of Victory, where it's given its most explicit treatment, then this brief passage of scene-setting from The Duel will suffice:

No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It hurries us into situations from which we must come out damaged; whereas pride is our safeguard, by the reserve which it imposes on the choice of our endeavour as much as by the virtue of its sustaining power.

I suppose as a key to Conrad, that passage could be faulted for lacking an explicit reference to honor and duty, but it's at least a good start.

The Beauties of Powell--and no, this isn't a post about Pamela Flitton and Matilda Donners

When you re-read a favorite book as often as I re-read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, you find yourself focusing on different aspects each time through. This time around, as I've been reading the penultimate volume, Temporary Kings, the past couple of days, I've found myself reading it almost as if it's one of those collections from the days of lax copyright enforcement, a "Beauties of" collection, this one not The Beauties of Shakespeare or The Beauties of Sterne, but The Beauties of Powell.

I'm drawn to his frequently memorable turns of phrase, their aphoristic nature softened--even as their effect is heightened--by Powell's habit of putting them in the mouths of specific characters. Take this, for example, from Dr. Brightman, an academic Nick Jenkins meets at a conference in Venice:

Certain persons require a court. Others prefer a harem. That is not quite the same thing.

It's a line that could have come from any number of Nick's closest friends--Barnby, Moreland, and even Isobel come to mind--and its function here is not only make us smile with recognition, but to help us understand the affinity Nick feels, to his mild surprise, for Brightman.

Then there are Nick's own observations, which tend to be more extended and to carry a meditative, worried-over, even self-doubting quality. Here, he's reflecting on some stories provided by a potential biographer of X. Trapnel:

Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded.

Then there's this, provoked by meeting a pair of acquaintances whom logic suggests would only be found together if sex is involved:

Ada's immediate assumption of the exaggeratedly welcoming manner of one caught in compromising circumstances was not very convincing either.

Or this, on an old boss re-encountered:

He gave minute instructions, forcibly bringing back the years when I had worked under him, something establishing a relationship which can never wholly fade.

Or his assessment of his father, whose finicky, martinet-by-way-of-habitual-grumpiness marked Nick's childhood:

My father had few friends. The cause of that was not, I think, his own ever smouldering irascibility: people put up surprisingly well with irascibility, some even finding in it a spice to life otherwise humdrum. There is little evidence that the irascible, as a class, are friendless, and my father's bursts of temper may, for certain acquaintances, have added to the excitement of knowing him. It was more a kind of diffidence, uncertainty of himself (to some extent inducing the irascibility) that also militated against intimacy.

Adding interest to this description is the fact that Nick, while alert to his father's faults, is himself diffident, more seen than heard, a quality that makes him the perfect narrative window.

Page after page of Dance offer similar pleasures, presenting the world seen, not, in Browning's sense, plain, but through a distinct sensibility, Nick's, informed by the experience (and gossip) of decades and generous enough to encompass, gratefully, the stories and opinions and judgments of the many other people who make up the weave of a life. There's a reason this is my favorite book in the world, folks; I'll be reading and re-reading it for a long, long time to come.

Temporary Kings

Finding myself last night in one of those rare moods when I couldn't settle into any one book--I tried fiction, criticism, poetry, history--I finally remembered the best rule for a situation like that: turn to an old favorite. For me, that was Anthony Powell, and the moment I opened A Dance to the Music of Time my restlessness was cured.

I picked up at the penultimate volume, Temporary Kings (1973), where I'd last left off in my perpetual re-reading. The final volumes of Dance are unquestionably the weakest. Some critics, including Christopher Hitchens, deem them (or at least the final one, Hearing Secret Harmonies) a failure,

no longer informed by experience and curiosity, well-recollected and hard-won and wrought over in reflection. Rather, it resembles the plaintive tone of a beached colonial retiree, convinced that all around him is going to the dogs.

Though I think Hitchens certainly goes too far (a specialty of his), and I've defended the final volumes before, I'll concede that the final two books, at least, don't have quite the verve or appeal as the earlier ones: many of the most interesting characters of the earlier volumes are dead, and even Trapnel, the series' final brilliantly living invention, is no longer around, leaving the narrative to be carried by second stringers (Ada Leintwardine, Polly Duport, Books Bagshaw) and new characters, some compelling (Gwinnett, Brightman), others flat or one-note (Jacky Bragadin, Louis Glober).

This leads to a slight, but palpable sense of disengagement--but one that is, if frustrating at times, nonetheless suitable. The greatest achievement of Dance is its tracking of the way that age changes a cohort, from Nick Jenkins, the narrator, on down. By Temporary Kings, Nick and friends are in their mid-fifties, and while a true aficionado and observer of human behavior will always find new wrinkles to fascinate him, by the time of Temporary Kings, Nick evinces an awareness that the stories most important to his life, the threads that have truly been woven in with his own, have been spun out, tied off, and that when most of the new threads he sees around him, spun out by people in a younger generation, are resolved, he won't be around to see them. The novel's title, taken from a reference Nick makes to The Golden Bough, is an acknowledgment of that fact: the world is slowly passing him, and his generation, by, as it always has and always will.

Which is not to say, by any means, that a reader of Dance won't find pleasures in the characters in this volume, nor that they shouldn't look forward to some of its truly dramatic and revealing scenes featuring older favorites. The first time around, there will be plenty to engage and surprise in Temporary Kings. But on what must I think be my fifth time through, I found myself taking pleasure in and attending less to the specifics of character or plot than to the simple pleasure of being in company with Nick Jenkins and his approach to thought and observation, modeled, one feels comfortable assuming, on Powell's own.

Take the opening scene, which finds Nick, in Venice for an academic conference, watching an aged singer of Neapolitan songs perform. As usual with Nick, art occasions reflection, offering new ways of thinking of, classifying, and understanding friends, family, and experience, seeing how each holds up against or is refracted by similar or dissimilar portrayals in various art forms. In this case, a memory of a youthful visit to Venice (during which he saw a singer who looked remarkably similar to this one) leads to comparisons of the singer to an old acquaintance:

The stylized movements of the hands were reminiscent of Dicky Umfraville at one of his impersonations. He too should have harnessed his gift, in early life, to an ever renewing art from which there was no retiring age. To exhibit themselves, perform before a crowd, is the keenest pleasure many people know, yet self-presentation without a basis in art is liable to crumble into dust and ashes. Professional commitment to his own representations might have kept at bay the melancholy--all but chronic Frederica and his stepchildren complained--now that Umfraville had retired from work as agent at Thrubworth.

Which eventually returns Nick to the singer himself:

The aged singer looked as if thoughts of death, melancholy in any form, were unknown to him. He could be conceived as suffering from rage, desire, misery, anguish, despair; not melancholy. That was clear; additionally so after the round of applause following his number. The clapping was reasonably hearty considering the heat, almost as oppressive as throughout the day just passed. Dr Emily Brightman and I joined in. Acknowledgment of his talent delighted the performer. He bowed again and again, repeatedly baring blackened sporadic stumps, while he mopped away streams of sweat that coursed down channels of dry loose skin ridging either side of his mouth. Longevity had brought not the smallest sense of repletion where public recognition was in question. That was on the whole sympathetic. One found oneself taking more interest than formerly in the habits and lineaments of old age.

What I appreciate about these passages is less the specifics of Nick's reflections, though I definitely enjoy those, than the fact of them: this, I realize as I read them, is how we experience art, one part of our brain engaging, sometimes deeply, with it, while another part meditates, zooms off on tangents, weaves it into the larger fabric of life and our attempts to understand it. Reading Dance reminds me of how frustratingly short shrift art (and especially books) gets within fiction; a reader's life, mental and emotional, is always wrapped up in the books he's reading, but how often do you encounter a fictional character who manifests that relationship to any kind of art?

I'll have more to say about Temporary Kings in Friday's post. For now, I'm just pleased to be back in Powell's world, one where art is as much a part of life as friends, gossip, love, and loss.

Pithy thoughts on what Ovid called "that rumpy-pumpy stuff."

Alain de Botton came up with a nicely phrased thought this week in his Twitter feed:

So many affairs would be prevented if people could more easily reveal that they would ideally like to sleep with one another--but won't.

In its pithy incisiveness, it sounds like something that ought to have been said by an Anthony Powell character, perhaps Moreland (whose affair with Priscilla Tolland might have been headed off by such a conversation).

That thought sent me back to Powell's Writer's Notebook, a volume whose only flaw is its slimness. I sought out this old favorite:

All love affairs are special cases, and yet at the same time each is the same case.

And this:

It is always a mistake to assume that other people have lower standards than oneself.

Then I encountered this gruesome idea of service:

A is having an affair with B's wife, and tries to teach her habits of punctuality, so that B too shall profit in some way from the situation.

And finally, we get to just one of the many bad outcomes that could result from all this sneaking around and double-dealing, presented here with the sort of admirable matter-of-factness that would, one assumes, go over well at the sort of parties to which one, being dull, is not generally invited:

I must go off now and see a man who is blackmailing me.

Quite.

"You now have Siegfried's life on your hands!", or, The Perils of the Reviewing Life

What better way to close out a week that saw the publication of a new issue of the Quarterly Conversation than to offer up a couple of tidbits about the perils of reviewing?

First, a wonderfully catty letter that Lytton Strachey sent to Virginia Woolf on February 21, 1917:

That wretched woman, the Lady O[ttoline] Morrell writes to me as follows--"Do you think you could write to Virginia, & ask her if she could get Sassoon's book of Poems, and if she would review it kindly. . . . I think if he heard that his work had 'Promise' it might make him want to Live--to do things in the Future. But it is all ghastly and he can hardly bear it. Shall I shoot Lloyd George?"

It is indeed "all ghastly", and probably you could hardly bear it. but you see that you now have Siegfried's life, to say nothing of Lloyd George's, on your hands. I suppose you don't as a rule review what they all "poetry". Perhaps if you wrote to Richmond [editor of the TLS] suggesting that the bloody book should be noticed, it would suffice. Or what?--Let me know so that I may send some reply to that creature, who is now I think almost at the last gasp--infinitely old, ill, depressed, and bad tempered--she is soon to sink into a nursing-home, where she will be fed on nuts, and allowed to receive visitors (in bed).

I like to think I always take my responsibility to an author seriously when I write about a book, but good god--to have not just the fate of his book but his very life placed on your shoulders! That's pressure!

And it looks as if it worked--at least so far as getting her to review the book: she wrote a piece for the Times Literary Supplement titled "Mr. Sassoon's Poetry" on May 31, 1917, and another called "Two Soldier-Poets" in 1918. Whether she came through with sufficiently fulsome praise I won't know until I dig up the appropriate volumes of her essays . . . but whatever her verdict, the notice seems to have been sufficient to achieve Ottaline Morrell's ends: Sassoon found a way to hold on for a few more years, dying in 1967 at the age of 81.

Anthony Powell, so far as I know, never told any stories of such grave weight being placed on his reviews, but he did acknowledge the frustrations of churning out reviews in an interview that ran in the Paris Review in 1978:

INTERVIEWER

Do you still do any reviewing?

POWELL

Yes, I do two pieces a month for the Daily Telegraph.

INTERVIEWER

You don't find it a chore?

POWELL

On the contrary, I find it extremely stimulating. I get two really pretty serious books a month--and I must say they're extremely good at trying to give me something that I like--and I really think it's rather good for you to have to review, say, a book about the organization of the Roman Army in the first half of the month and then the life of Christina Rossetti in the second. So far from being bad for you, I think it's very educative and it really makes your mind work. In fact, as I said before, I'm really rather lost now if I don't have something like that that I've got to do. . . . But of course there are demoralizing forms of literary journalism, and I've done my stint of reviewing five novels in a column and so on. You know how it is: Your friends say, “Are you mad saying this terrible book is quite good?” But you can't week in, week out keep saying this is all absolute rubbish.

Ah, the benefits of being a blogger: I'm never so pressed for space or copy as to be forced to praise inferior books. If something turns out to be rubbish, I can just reshelve it in silence and spend my time instead telling readers of books they might actually enjoy.