Dance: TK

The Dance goes on, richer yet, but slower and more measured as Temporary Kings (wonderful title) takes us into the 1960s, with an extended visit to Venice - the bulk of the book - and literary and domestic life in London.  New characters continue to appear - Glober, the American tycoon, and Gwinnett, the academic researching the life of Trapnel.  There are some horrifying moments in this book, and some wonderful laughter too.  As always, threads from earlier novels are deftly picked up and either woven into the new fabric or sometimes given some sort of resolution - though you never feel any story will ever quite come to an end.

While in Venice, Nick and two colleagues are reading about a sexual and spying scandal which may implicate two people at the conference they are attending; the report is in a French scandal sheet, in which "promise was well short of performance", allegations of misbehaviour of the most appalling kind in a London hotel being hardly at all substantiated.  Dame Emily Brightman comments:

How unchanged remains the French view of English life - phlegmatic, sadistic aristocrats, moving coldly and silently from one atrocity to another through the fogs of le Hyde Park and les Jardins de Kensington. ... [later continues] ... One of my maiden aunts -a social category no longer extant - used to live permanently in that hotel.  I'm sure she had no idea things like that were going on ... She would have been surprised.  Rather thrilled, too, I think."

The other passage I always quote from TK - having achieved my own half century a year or so ago - is this:

Each recriminative decade poses new riddles, how best to live, how best to write. One’s fifties, in principle less acceptable than one’s forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardised fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living.  The quinquagenarian may not be master of himself, he is, notwithstanding, master of a passable miscellany of experience.

That's not a bad summary, it seems to me, of a rich life which has nevertheless achieved nothing very concrete, and which, at fifty, has not delivered the unattainable finished adult of early dreamings.  This seems to me largely what the whole series of novels is about - for Nick, the unobtrusive narrator, this is exactly how we see him - becoming more knowledgeable and wiser, yet still following multiple stories of key parts of which he is still unaware, or which are not actually subject to knowing.  For Widmerpool, on the other hand, the trajectories have been more violent, more apparently happening and being done, but with the same underlying complexity of thought, apprehension, and motivation.  Temporary Kings tells of serious damage to Widmerpool's private and public personas - the so called kindly ones of the earlier novel come to mind - but you have to wait for the final novel to discover whether he once again rises above vicissitudes or is utterly cast down by them.

Comments

[adele geras]

Have finished Temporary Kings and only one left to go. Will have to start again at the beginning, but first want to go on to the Non Dance novels and memoirs. TK is wonderful, I think. I loved the way the whole thing is coloured by that Tiepolo ceiling in Venice. And nice to see how Powell loosens up as the Sixties approach. Terrific stuff. And btw, I was the Ritz the other day (what a lovely sentnce that is to write!) and the whole thing is straight out of Dance, still! I saw several of his protagonists having lunch there...

[Mr Cornflower]

Interesting echoes of Larkin's stylised disillusion in the latter passage e.g. from 'Send No Money'

Standing under the fobbed
Impendent belly of Time
'Tell me the truth' I said...

[...]

So he patted my head, booming 'Boy
There's no green in your eye;
Sit here, and watch the hail
Of occurrence clobber life out
To a shape no-one sees...'

I love that 'hail of occurrence' image; it reminds me of what Larkin said in an interview of how the novelist had a much harder job than the poet, who only has to summon up 'a spearpoint of emotion' while the novelist has to create a landscape and people it with believable characters. Perhaps 'A Dance...' is the hail of occurrence...

[glo]

One more thing... Don't miss 'The Essay' on BBC Radio 3 this coming week (4-7th February), it's about English essayists.

[glo]

Jane Austen challenge completed!
I have finally finished reading Pride and Prejudice and enjoyed the very fine writting of Miss Austen, although the novel is not perfect in all aspects. Nevertheless, both the writting and the interest improve as you keep reading.

The first volume is not the best and is clearly different from the rest of the novel. The second volume (which contents the whole story of Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins) is better than the first one although it seems too long and a bit boring - and so gossipy. The third volume is really the highlight of the book, the novelist has now a real command of both the craft and the story. I'll tell you more as soon as I can write down a full report about it.

But for now here is one fine quotation that you probably noticed too:
'Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure'.(Volume 3 chapter 16)