Books Do Furnish A Room

Lord of the Dance: TK

Opening in Venice, perhaps around the mid 1950s, Temporary Kings, the eleventh novel in Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, is immediately more spacious, more relaxed, than previous novels.  Both the setting and the action is more modern, more cosmopolitan, though not without disturbing hints of darker forces beneath – such as threatening relations between East and West.  Nick is in Venice for a literary conference, and meets new characters but also, as always, links backwards in time to understand more of Trapnel, Widmerpool, and others he has known – and known of – all his life.  Understanding grows, but the questions multiply as well; but as new themes are introduced, you also know that the story will not be finished, ever – or rather that you will not be here for the finish.  Your regret at planning to leave early, so to speak, is added to by the regret of others leaving, early as it seems.  But the book is not melancholy, just comprehending and knowing the limits to comprehension.

·     “Do you think the soubrette is his mistress, or his great-granddaughter?  ... They seem on very close terms.  Perhaps both.”

 

·     “Why do the British always ask [about a man’s background]?”  “One of our foibles.”  “That’s not what Americans do.”  “But we’re not Americans.  You must humour our straying from the norm in that respect.”

 

·     [A committed admirer of the USSR on modern art at the Venice Biennale]:  “I can guarantee that the only sanctuary from subjectless bric-à-brac here will be in the national pavilions of what you no doubt term the Iron Curtain countries.”

 

·     “... he remains essentially American in believing that all questions have answers, that there is an ideal life against which everyday life can be measured ...”

 

·     “Well, I mustn’t waste the whole morning coffee-housing on this vile instrument [the telephone]”

 

·     Reunion dinners, to the point of morbidity, gave the chance of indulging in ... reminiscent scrutinies.

Lord of the Dance: BDFAR

As I progress through Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, arriving at Books Do Furnish A Room marks a crucial stage of the journey.  First, the war is in the past, with its heavy load of external events and inevitable tragedies – though all the war novels are also intimate and funny; but perhaps more importantly, the pace slows.  We have roughly one book each decade after the war, compared with three, and a good part of a fourth, covering only six years or so.  And finally, the main protagonist Nick and his peers are showing signs of settling down, readjusting after the war and accepting that they are older and occasionally wiser now they are in their forties or more.  The last three books are just as wise and perceptive as the earlier ones, but there is maturity, judgement, experience and tolerance which belongs to the characters and not just to the author.

For me, of course, Books Do Furnish A Room is particularly poignant, named as it is after this blog.  And as I read it, I found it a veritable feast of insight, laughter and understanding.  The pattern of the dance is not yet clear, but more and more of the earlier movements are making sense, while more new ones crowd in thick and fast, here simplifying or resolving, here confusing or alarming, and here laying the ground for future exploration and resolution.  And finally, this novel is an absolute treasure trove of quotations I felt I just had to give you – so I have split this post into two!

·     Returning to the university at forty, one immediately recaptured all the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition.

 

·     ... that law of nature which rules that the whole confraternity of politicians prefers to operate within the closed circle of its own initiates, rather than waste time with outsiders. 

 

·     [Jeavons on marriage] “I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way.  Married couples usually do. ... People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other.”

 

·     Camel Ride To The Tomb [a tour operator’s cry in Egypt, and the title of X Trapnel’s novel] ... Camel Ride To The Tomb ... I grasped immediately that’s what life was.  How could the description be bettered?  Juddering through the wilderness on an uncomfortable conveyance you can’t control, along a rocky, unpremeditated, but indefeasible track, towards the destination crudely yet truly stated.

 

·     The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters.  It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

 

·     Accidents will happen even with the best regulated secret police.

 

·     ... he belonged to a generation which continued to use that excellent masculine invocation of surname, before an irresponsible bandying of first name smothered all subtleties of relationship.

 

·     “[Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy] Rather a morbid subject.” ... He may have thought reading or writing equally morbid, whatever the content.

Lord of the Dance: MP

The Military Philosophers is the third war novel, and the ninth overall, in Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time.  Nick Jenkins has not had an interesting war up to this point, although it has made interesting reading, suffering boredom and despair in gloomy surroundings without action or danger.  That all changes in this book, when he finds himself and begins in one sense to enjoy the war, and to do something useful and for which his talents are fitted.  There is some danger, from bombs and the V2, but a great deal of human interest, with a notably international face.  I have written about this novel before, of course, but here are the finds of the 2010 reading.

• I gave up further talk.  Perhaps she had a grievance or the curse ... It occurred to me - one never feels older than in the middle thirties - that she was bored with all but young men or had taken an instantaneous dislike to me.

• Until you have met Blackhead, the word "bureaucrat" will have conveyed no meaning to you.

• Most people's sex life is a mystery, especially that of individuals who seem to make most a parade of it.

• Afterwards, in memory, the apple orchards were all in blossom ... But it was already November.  There can have been no blossom.  Blossom was a mirage.  Autumnal sunshine, thin, hard penetrating, must have created that scenic illusion, kindling white and silver sparkles in branches and foliage.  What you see conditions feelings, not what is.

 

Lord of the Dance: SA

In The Soldier's Art, Nick Jenkins knows despair.  This is the second of the three war books from Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music of Time, but there is no war in it - just the bleakness of life working in a dead end job under Widmerpool's obsessive military bureaucracy, and the comedy of being a living, observing being.  General Liddament is a joy, as is our first view of Finn (VC), and the blitz evening in London, with its tragedy, ignorance and superficial gaiety, is a an absolute masterpiece. Here is what I wrote about it last time through, and here are a few apercus from this reading:

I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all the undertakings of life; but then, plenty of actors have little enough.

"Told me you were a reader ... didn't you?"   "Yes, I am.  I read quite a lot."    I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications.  At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd category of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.

Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward - in contrast to love - is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.

(on Browning's Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came) Like everything that's any good, it has about twenty different meanings.

Lord of the Dance: VB

In Anthony Powell's Valley of Bones, Nick finds himself in the army, slightly older than his colleagues and unlike them, not from a lower middle class Welsh small town background; army life away from war proves a good mirror for understanding himself and concepts like will and action.  It is also extraordinarily perceptive and funny.  My earlier post draws attention to the mix of minute social perception and large scale history, and it is certainly true that the three war novels of the sequence - this is the first - are drawn on a larger, more worldly political canvas than earlier ones.

• It's no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan

• (About the adultery of a sergeant's wife, and his subsequent suicide) Makes you glad you're married ... don't have to bother any more about women

• Nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react

• (On a sudden death)  As in musical chairs, the piano stops suddenly, someone is left without a seat, petrified for all time in their attitude of that particular moment. The balance-sheet is struck there and then, a matter of luck whether its calculations have much bearing, one way or the other, on the commerce conducted. Some die in an apparently suitable manner, others ... on the field of battle with a certain incongruity.

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

 

 

Lord of the Dance: KO

The Kindly Ones is a tremendous novel; it is the sixth in the Dance To The Music of Time series by Anthony Powell, and marks a change of mood and tempo.  In the previous novel - Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, the approach of war is marked by the sense of "a body across the line" on the Ghost Railway.  As I described in my previous post on this book (link at the beginning), the war is put off for a whole book: having felt its hot breath in the previous book, you are now taken back to the years before the previous conflict - both a device of intense drama, but also reflecting the death of his parents, who Powell refused to write about while they were alive.

The young Nick is made vividly, painfully aware of the approach of the First War as a young child, and ends the novel preparing - a little on the old side, as he is in his thirties - to put on uniform himself for the Second.  En route, there are many extremely funny passages - Billson's ghost, Trelawney trapped in the bathroom, the photographs of the seven sins - but also plenty of the harsh light that shines on the scaffold, particularly in relation to Nick's own emotional entanglements, laid painfully bare by a series of difficult conversations brilliantly rendered.

Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and  understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better then a flat assertion of bare fact.

She can be tough, you know.  One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are.  You know that already.  It is how nasty the nice people can be.

In this novel, it seems to me, Powell ceases to be a very fine novelist and achieves greatness.  The greatness, of course, informs the books before it as well as those that come afterward: it is almost as if Powell were saying - "Now we come to it; now the crisis for which we have been preparing has arrived".

Lord of the Dance: CCR

The fifth volume of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time is Casonova's Chinese Restaurant, recklessly titled after the merger of two very different eating places. You can read my comments of a couple of years ago here, but what I was most struck with this time was the transitional nature of this book.  In it, Nick Jenkins meets another key group of friends, including Moreland and Barnby, and the easy, relaxed, even dissolute world of the inter-war years starts to fade as political pressures in Europe presage the conflict in Europe.  It is also, perhaps, the first of the novels to invoke a nostalgic tone - written well after the war, the opening passages recall, among the bombed out ruins of London, the pub where they all met.  It is always tempting to give exactly the same quotations as I used last time, but here are some thoughts that struck me particularly this time around.

• In the end most things in life - perhaps all things -turn out to be appropriate.

• To hold a friend in the background at a certain stage in a love affair is a technique some men like to employ; a method which spreads, as it were, the emotional load, ameliorating risks of dual conflict between the lovers themselves, although at the same time posing a certain hazard in the undue proximity of a third party unencumbered with emotional responsibility - and therefore almost always seen to better advantage than the lover himself.

• "Do you remember when we used to talk about the Ghost Railway and say how like everyday life it was - or at least one's own everyday life?"  "You mean rushing downhill in total darkness and crashing through closed doors?"  "Yes, - and the body lying across the line.  The Maclintick affair [the suicide of a close friend of his] has reminded me of the disagreeable possibilities of the world one inhabits: the fact that the fewer persons one involves in it the better."  (This powerful image is developed further in the famous closing paragraphs of the book, invoking the threatening imminence of war).

 

Lord of the Dance: ALM

On with the dance!  fatigue is forbidden, pinching slippers and drooping eyelids must be forgotten - here is the next partner on your card; she's young and beautiful and exciting, and we'll be At Lady Molly's until the dawn, courtesy of Anthony Powell and his Dance to the Music of Time.  See here for my last thoughts on this lovely novel, and below for the snatches of insight and laughter that caught my eye this time round.  Here Widmerpool falls in and out of an engagement with the fearsome Mrs Haycock, the General psychologises, and Nick meets her, Isobel.  Wonderful, wonderful.

... there is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

Life is full of internal dreams, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.

Women will show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.

Marriage ... is a form of action, of violence almost: an assertion of the will.  Its orbit is not to be charted with precision, if misrepresentation and contrivance are to be avoided.  Its facts can perhaps only be known by implication.  It is a state from which all objectivity has been removed.

What was it Foch said?  War not an exact science, but a terrible and passionate drama?  Something like that.  Fact is, marriage is rather like that too.

As an unmarried man, I perhaps have chosen oddly, but somehow these fragments, which I have shored against my ruins, capture something of the spirit of relationships I observe and hear about, though I am equally convinced that nobody can understand a marriage unless they are inside it, perhaps not even then.  But as for entering the wedded state, Nick has a wonderful experience, captured in the moment of meeting Isobel.

Lord of the Dance: AW

The Acceptance World is the third of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence, with its twin themes of St John Clarke's secretaries, and Nick's relationship with Jean, one immensely funny and a window into the heady arts-politics misture of the period, the other charming, stringently observed and heartening (we don't often hear of Nick enjoying himself or success, though we know we does).  Just a few lines would justify (if justification were needed) the re-reading:

... an inexorable law governs all human existence in that respect, ordaining that sooner or later everyone must appear before the world as he is.  Many are not prepared to face this sometimes distasteful principle.

...nothing in life is planned - or everything is - because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.

There is always a real and an imaginary person one is in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.

I reflected [  ] how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world into which it is possible at will to wander.  All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

Lord of the Dance: BM

On to volume two of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time,  which is one of my favourites - A Buyer's Market (link to my earlier piece, where you will find the book's final, wonderful paragraph, about how unsuspected events can suddenly take on importance, and we go "uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity").  This is a fine book, very largely set over a single evening - dinner, a dance, then an unplanned visit to a slightly louche party, and it has the funeral seduction too.

A couple of lines which stood out this time:

...certain acquaintances remain firmly fixed within this or that person's particular orbit; [  ] "people choose their friends" is true only in a most strictly limited degree.

...

I used to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting,for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play:  a profession or calling being, according to that concept, [   ] something entirely different from "spare time".  That illusion [  ] was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments.  As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact,draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; [  ] nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common: while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.

 

 

. 

I am the Lord of the Dance

After a break last year, when I read C P Snow, I have returned to my traditional New Year reading (a little late, becasue I have been away), and will be reading Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time again this year.  I will not bore you all by reviewing each volume again, just giving a link to my previous version - but I will allow myself the odd illustrative quotation.

The first volume, of course, is A Question of Upbringing.

"Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned; and in due course only its most determined devotees remain unwilling to admit that an intimate and affectionate relationship is not necessarily a simple one: while such persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.  At that period love's manifestations are less easily explicable than they become later: often they do not bear that complexion of being a kind of game, or contest, which, at a later stage, they may assume.  Accordingly, when I used to consider the case of Jean Templer, with whom I had decided I was in love, analysis of the situation brought no relief from the uneasy, almost obsessive thoughts that filled my mind ..."

...

Stringham offered him sherry, which was refused.  Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink.

Diffugere nives

A terrible pun to start off – “the snows are all fled away” from Horace’s famous ode, merely to mark the end of my reading of C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, eleven full length novels spanning British life and politics from just before the 1914-18 war  until the 1970s.  I have written about all the individual novels over the past few months – see the C P Snow tab under “categories” – and I do not propose to reprise them now.

 

But I did want to attempt some overall evaluation.  The first point is that re-reading these novels – for perhaps the third or fourth time – was in no sense drudgery or a burden, even though there must be over 3,500 pages or so.  This may have been because I spread them out over several months, always allowing a fortnight or so to elapse between novels, which gave me a chance to read something else, and to tune into a different locale and a different chronology.  They were a delight, and I recommend them warmly; they can easily be read as independent novels (especially, I judge, The Masters and The New Men), but they gain immeasurably in richness by being read as a sequence.

 

They are warm, disconcertingly honest, and very knowledgeable and wise; they occupy a different social milieu to Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, a more robustly workaday one, more concerned with the tasks and enterprise of power and the struggle to form and manage relationships, and less with Powell’s interest in the emotional and psychological drama of power and love.  Both are acute social and personal observers, though Powell is clearly the finer writer and the more easily applicable to different periods and different personalities – though Snow has his strengths here too.  Powell’s style is quite different, as well – more light and allusive, while Snow is normally a more “straightforward” writer, both in terms of plot construction and prose, though anyone who thinks this is an easy matter of “writing down what happens” has clearly not tried it!

 

Finally, a word about Snow’s other books.  There are other novels, few of which I have read – but there are two crime novels, too, both well worth reading.  Early in manner – a writing finding his feet – is Death Under Sail, an enjoyable mystery on a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads; it is slightly old fashioned, and has a few lively characters who perhaps veer too close to caricature.  But A Coat of Varnish is much more assured, a formidable novel about a brutal murder in an affluent but declining square in west London; the violence breaks through the thin coat of varnish which is all that civilisation is, covering and hiding our animal natures.  Soon, you know who the murderer is – but can the police prove it?  And what does this sudden irruption of violence mean for the serenity and security of the people who live in the square? – a fine murder thriller, worthy of the top shelf.

Brideshead Revisited revisited

Long ago, when you and I were young, I was entranced by an ITV production of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.  Last week, I read the book, perhaps thirty years later, and am struck by how accurately the images of that long ago vision were conjured up by the words that had inspired them.  O tempora, O mores.

Jeremy Irons was Charles Ryder, Anthony Andrews was Sebastian, and the unspeakable Blanche was played by Nikolas Grace - and Diana Quick was the ineffable Julia.  Aloysius the teddy bear, of course, emerged from retirement to play himself in an understated and delightful cameo; rumours that he was a fiction, based on John Betjeman’s Archie, are of course ridiculous. I was later given a teddy bear by a girl friend in rather tragic circumstances, a gift triggered by the memory of Aloysius and, I wanted to hope, a haunting memory of Irons in my own features.  I christened my bear – who was about twenty-five years old when I was given him – Stigand, after the Archbishop of Canterbury who, legend has it, fought alongside Harold at Hastings.  I have him still, occupying the passenger seat of my car, and guarding it against all comers.

What either the years or the nature of the television series obscured, was that this is both a Catholic novel and one with a foothold in the Second World War, though it is in no sense a war story.  Principally, it is a novel of the loss of love and of memory.  It opens with a grim wartime move by train from one camp to another, and it is interesting to compare these pages with Powell’s description of the same event in Valley of Bones, two quite different approaches, but with a common language and a common effect.  The Catholicism is more important - indeed the book is sub-titled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, and Sebastian’s Catholicism comes up several times in the opening section, Et In Arcadia Ego ("I (Death) am here, even in Arcadia").  The other theme is regret, longing, and the death of love; it is intense, and in Waugh’s own introduction to the reprinting in 1959, he explains how hard it was in 1944 to foresee the survival of the English aristocracy and the country house, and how he was mourning the passing of a graceful, national artistic achievement which (in 1959 and now) has, after all, not passed:

So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity. ... Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an empty coffin. ... It is offered to a younger generation of readers as a souvenir of the Second World War rather than of the twenties and thirties, with which it ostensibly deals.

This novel is beautifully written, and I enjoyed it much more than I expected.  I was haunted by the parallel between Sebastian (who never reappears, but who recurs towards the end of the book in reported speech) and Charles Stringham in Powell’s Dance sequence.  Both are gilded youth, deeply out of sympathy with their fellows, and both express a profound melancholy in alcoholism, and both find a sort of escape in service – Stringham in the army as a waiter, Sebastian in looking after his unreasonably demanding German friend in North Africa, and later working as a menial in a monastery.  As Waugh wrote his book in 1944, and Powell did not begin his sequence until the late 1940s (A Question of Upbringing was published in 1951), it is clear that Stringham follows Sebastian, not vice versa.  I do not know how much Powell was deliberately developing Waugh’s idea, or how much, during and just after the war, such a character would have seemed a natural way of depicting the changing social structure of the preceding thirty years.  Stringham of course, is much more present as a character, and is killed in the war (“awfully chic to be killed”, he says), whereas Sebastian, after the first third of Brideshead, is an absentee cipher for wasted beauty and rejection.

The story itself is relatively simple: Charles Ryder, after an overnight arrival at a new camp, wakes to find that he has come back to the great house of Brideshead, the scene of his university attachment to Sebastian, and later of his love for Sebastian’s sister Julia; the rest of the novel is a fugue of memory, bringing him now to the end of all, in the misery of war: “I’m homeless, childless, middle-aged, love-less”.  After the infatuation with Sebastian, Ryder follows his instinct to paint, loses touch with his friend, and marries Celia, a marriage which quickly proves loveless.  By chance, he runs into Julia and both quickly realise that this is the real thing, the love they were meant for; after a couple of happy years, they divorce their spouses, planning to marry each other as the threat of war unsettles everything.  But the Catholicism which Julia rejected as a child comes back to claim her father on his death bed, and, in a furious emotional storm, Julia herself.  She may be left with her new faith (and her consciousness of sin), but he is left with nothing.  How appropriate, therefore, that the last line of the book is a comment addressed to him, after he has spent his first day back at Brideshead facing up to these memories: “You’re looking unusually cheerful today”, said the second-in-command.

Mons Veneris

Another of Powell’s early novels, Venusberg was published in 1932 and is set a couple of years earlier in a Baltic republic.  It’s hard to say what it’s about, as the action is purely descriptive of evolving relationships, with a number of vignettes, all very much prefiguring the mature Powell of Dance.  The febrile and mechanical joy, and the bathos which pervades the whole book, is beautifully caught in the epigraph, allegedly (can it really be true?) from Baedeker, the travel bible of the time:

Here, according to popular tradition, is situated the grotto of Venus, into which she enticed the knight Tannhauser; fine views from the top.

I am aware that neither this, nor the book’s title, quite justify my title, but it was utterly irresistible! 

A journalist called Lushington, “remaining securely out of touch with life” was “going as special correspondent to a country on the Baltic, the name of which he never could remember”. Once he gets there, he finds that almost nothing happens except conversations and parties, some of the most peculiar and haphazard sort.  One gets an impression of a society very much ill at ease and insecure, as it might well be with a newly expansionist Russia on its borders.  The conversation and the social interactions convey the bizarre effect of a jolly party where all the guests know that disaster is imminent but are powerless to anything about it – and therefore ignore it in gaiety and louche behaviour.

But the diplomatic confusion is echoed by the social.  Lushington is leaving behind his great love Lucy, whose charm is only slightly impaired by the fact that she has no amorous interest in Lushington at all – and is in fact deeply in love with his friend Da Costa, who is at the embassy of the country Lushington is going to!  On the way out to the Baltic, however, Lushington meets and falls in love – or at least in lust – with Frau Mavrin, who turns out to be all too well known and well loved wherever she goes.

But one detects in Powell’s careful and subtle writing a darker theme, and the storm breaks, tragically and mindlessly, in a savage political outrage, to describe which would spoil a first reading.  In two quiet pages of unemotional prose, Powell sweeps the bric-a-brac aside and shows the raw wounds of the city.  The pain is great, but Lushington makes his way home, to find his stories unread in the newspaper office, and Lucy waiting for him in the cold London of the depression and the coming European war: “I suppose I am more or less yours now.” “Yes.” “If you still want me”. 

For Powellites, this is an interesting novel in several ways; it’s well worth reading in itself; it gives an interesting sense of Powell’s development as a writer – this is clearly inferior to the Dance, but the genius is developing and the characteristically muted music has begun to play; finally, this is presumably one of the novels Nick Jenkins himself was writing in the 1930s, and discussing with his friends, in The Acceptance World and At Lady Molly's!

Re-Reading

Having finished my annual re-read of the Dance To The Music of Time sequence recently, I was moved to think a little bit about the idea of re-reading things.  It seems to excite, in non- or occasional readers, much more surprise than going to see a film again, or watching a repeat of a favourite television programme or sporting event  And as for looking at a picture again, or listening to music more than once, everyone seems to accept this as completely normal.  Indeed, it would be a sad world if you couldn’t look twice at Las Meninas or listen more than once to the Mahler 3.

So why do people say – “how can you re-read a book, you already know what happens!”?  My first response (apart the fact that the same point can be made about films, music and the rest) is that I very seldom read to find out what happens, or at least not just to find out.  An exception might be a thriller bought in desperation at an airport or a railway station, or – in youth – a Thomas Hardy (novels I found at once unreadable and compulsive).  But even with the “lowest” forms of writing, I try only to read things that I might want to read again – whether it be poetry, high novels, crime thrillers, or travel writing.  This is not, course, to say that I do read them again – life is short, the book so long – but the idea is there.

If someone tells me that I waste my time to re-read a poem of Donne or an Austen novel, I might retort that they should not waste precious minutes tasting a fine cheese or wine a second time, since “they know what it tastes like already”.  And the absurdity is the same, my brain needs nourishment all the time, and it’s enjoyable (and extra rewarding) to give it food it has enjoyed before.

But the real point is that it never is the same.  Sure, the murder is always solved and the same person dunnit, Elizabeth Bennet always marries Darcy, and July is never the cruellest month.  But the experience is always different – my mood, what I have read and learned since my last reading (including the book itself), my attention, my sensitivity to certain factors.  Even with the books I re-read most, I find sentences I swear I have never noticed before, and my taste changes surely over the years and with the gradual influence of wider cultural stimuli.  As a boy, I preferred the Odyssey over the Iliad, now the reverse is true; I grew to love Eliot gradually in my late teens and early twenties, but my passion – still undimmed – has a different quality to it.  And there is the wonderful pleasure of meeting old friends, sometimes knowingly, sometimes sprung upon you by the imperfect memory of the reader.

I read Dance all through every year, and all of Jane Austen, and the short stories of Kipling and Borges; less frequently,  a whole host of books, fiction and non-fiction, and lots of crime novels.  As for poetry, it exists to be re-read and savoured, and Donne and Eliot are often off the shelf.  I shall continue to re-read without shame, as long as I can find savour and depth in the reading, and as long as I have time to read lots and lots of new stuff as well!!

Dance: HSH

Hearing Secret Harmonies is not only the final novel in Powell's Dance To The Music of Time sequence, it is a fitting conclusion and crown, in which much is resolved, though much continues on, complex and entrancing, into the years beyond Powell's ken.  Some strong links are made to very early novels, and the brooding and uncomfortable presence of Widmerpool remains central - but he is the subject of dramatic and fantastic developments which represent just one form of growing older, the rejection of all that he has stood for and failure even in his new character.  Powell lives in HSH, as he does elsewhere, by the mantra that exaggeration mars the accuracy which is always more interesting than fantasy.  Events continue to be described calmly and from many points of view, whether they are simple and commonplace, or frightening and extraordinary.

In the last book (Temporary Kings) Powell notes the perspective a man's fifties bring.  Here, he notes that there are:

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

On the same page - though more trivially - he delightfully remarks that:

I was turning the pages that evening with the sense - essential to the mature enjoyment of any classic - of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.

And he reverts to Trapnel, the long dead novelist who features so centrally in Books Do Furnish A Room, for comments on what is realism and what is invented:

People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case.  Because a novel's invented, it is true.  Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened.  The novel can do that.  The novelist himself lays it down.  His decision is binding.

And so the caravan rolls on, and Powell ends where he began, twelve novels earlier, with drama, failure and understanding, and an image of winter and fires, just as in the first paragraph of A Question of Upbringing.  It is a fire he had lit twenty years and a million words before, which still burns for me and thousands of others.

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.

Dance: BDFAR

The war is over, and life is settling down – or settling into new patterns – in Books Do Furnish a Room, the tenth novel in the Dance sequence. In some special sense, it’s my signature novel, as a glance at the title of this blog will tell you.  And it marks another change of pace: the last three novels are much more spaced out in time than the earlier ones, much less overlapping, and the pace of Nick’s life seems more measured, more mature – partly, of course, he is older, partly he has a life and an identity, which is more settled, which will flux less than formerly – though plenty of interest still remains.  And partly, there is a sense of relaxation, of ease, after the prolonged crisis and tension of the second world war.

Literary life dominates the book, literary life, a funeral, and a disastrous love affair.  Nick, seeking the consolation and solitude of serious study after the claustrophobia of the war, is at Oxford, writing a book (as Powell himself did) on Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1622) – something I keep meaning to read.  He starts the novel with one of the great Powell sentences:

"Returning to the University at forty, one immediately recaptured all the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition." 

While there, he hears that his brother in law, Erridge, has died.  The funeral is one of the great set pieces in which he specialises, full of brilliantly observed detail, tiny behaviours, and an apparent passivity which almost un-noticed moves both plot and understanding along apace.  Here are two of his comments on mourners – first on a bumbling but likable elderly relative who went to Singapore when young:

Unlikely he had taken with him a girl like Mona, though one could never tell.  Barnby always used to insist it was misplaced to speak categorically about other people’s sexual experiences, whoever they were.

And then on two MPs:

The two had gravitated together in response to that law of nature which rules that the whole confraternity of politicians prefers to operate within the closed circle of its own initiates, rather than waste time with outsiders; difference of party or opinion having little or no bearing on this preference.

And finally, Jeavons explains why a couple being discussed had got divorced:

I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way.  Married couples usually do. ... People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other.

I quoted some time ago the novelist Trapnel's diatribe against critics; in this book, he turns reviewer himself, and upsets the management and a ‘house’ writer.  But as far as Nick is concerned – by now books editor on a literary magazine –

... the juggernaut of critical opinion must be allowed to take its irrefragable course.  If too fervent worshippers were crushed to powder beneath the pitiless wheels of its car, nothing could be done.  Only their own adoration of the idol made them so vulnerable.

The novel goes on, with subdued drama on every page, and ends in a truly magnificent scene in which Trapnel, drunk, discourses on naturalism and realism in literature – exquisitely funny – just before suffering a serious of desperate hammer blows to his personal myth and all that he holds dear.  I’d love to tell you about it, but there are novitiate readers to consider!

Dance: MP

The end of the war approaches, and in The Military Philosophers, Nick is posted to London.  One doesn't look at a string of pearls and remark the beauty of the fourth one along - one is ravished by the ensemble.  So it is with Dance to the Music of Time, and yet, and yet, if I had to choose, this might be the finest novel of them all.  First, the mood is lightening, though the war is still very present and weariness and loss are everywhere.  But there is enormous richness in the cast of characters, some superbly funny passages, and much serious reflection.  And there are a couple of passages of prose which are amongst his finest, and some hardly visible technical mastery which is dazzlingly effective and entirely unobtrusive.  I had real difficulty selecting a passage or two to highlight, but I've done my best.  If you know this book, you will have your own favourites; if you don't, when you read it, you will be continually surprised at the gems on my cutting room floor.

To start with, there is the most wonderful portrait of the civil servant of legend, one Blackhead.  Early in the book, Nick is told:  "Until you have dealings with Blackhead, the word 'bureaucrat' will have conveyed no meaning to you", and we are then treated to an extended whimsical essay on his status, then to an exquisite example of his method, too long to quote here.  But professional writers, and civil servants, know that to write briefly is much harder than to write at length - Horace's tag is perfect for all time.  Here, this is toyed with, reversed and left hanging, to illustrate and amuse.  Blackhead has written a long minute, or official note, on how stores should be issued to Allied troops:

Blackstone 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.

Blackhead, of course, misses the point and is outraged at this slur on his competence, believing that Pennistone really thinks he has missed some crucial information.  But later, all is explained (David Pennistone is a philosopher serving in the Army in the same branch as Nick):

"What on earth were you about, David, minuting Blackhead please amplify?"

"Has it upset him?"

"Beyond description".

"Good ... Renan says complication is anterior to simplicity.  I thought Blackhead would make an interesting experiment for trying out that theory".

"We can only pray Renan was right".

"Renan would find prayer charming but ineffectual".

Later, Nick is in France, escorting visitors round newly liberated Normandy (the war is still on), and leaving their hotel one day, realises too late that he has stayed at one of the key locations in Proust, Balbec (or Cabourg in real life):

... a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent ...

A rather pessimistic, but wonderfully true comment.  No wonder he is such a fine novelist, who can face reality like that and not be downcast.  And what a novelist, what a web he is weaving for us.  Six, nearly seven, novels earlier in The Acceptance World, Powell (or Nick) describes a large South American family seen while he is waiting in the Ritz.  They are quite incidental, they take no part in the action, they are merely a focus for Nick's musings.  And here, in MP, he is talking to a South American military attache, who remarks that:

I was here - what -  fifteen years ago, it must be.  With all my family, an absolute tribe of us.  We stayed at the Ritz, I remember.  Now ...

And that is all.  But a tiny silver thread has been drawn across seven books and fifteen years, binding the characters and reader into a complex web of knowing and understanding, strong and almost invisible.  But now the war is over, and it is on to happier times.

Dance: SA

The Soldier's Art continues Nick Jenkin's Dance through the war.  The tone is immediately more intense, as he finds himself in thrall to a man he dislikes in a post which is without interest and without prospects.  The war is not going well, for Britain or for him personally, yet the novel never drags, is never despairing. 

However, there is a passage of pure horror, on leave back in London, when two of Nick's relations are killed on the same night in separate events.  Nick learns of the first of them from a cabaret performer, who has just returned from performing at a nightclub, the Madrid.  The events are invested with an extreme poignancy by the connection with the nightclub and it's tawdry glamour, and the fact there has been no preparation in Nick's mind that anything unusual has happened.  The whole passgae is too long to quote, but believe me, it takes some skill to write that lightly and impose such weight: eventually Max Pilgrim (the singer, portrayed by Marc below) says "It was Bijou's last party" and the reality sinks in.

There are also wonderful views of the many different types of soldiers, many of whom I recognise from having worked with the Army in Kabul, including a hilarious discussion mid exercise between Nick and his Divisional Commander on the merits of Trollope.  And there is a final despairing moment of pathos at the end when Nick, having been told about the suicide of a fellow officer, is asked:

"What do you think of the news?"

"Well, it's rather awful, sir.  Biggs was in my Mess - "

"Oh, I don't mean Biggs", he said.  "Haven't you seen a paper or heard the wireless this morning?  Germany's invaded Russia."

An immediate, overpowering, almost mystic sense of relief took shape within me.  I felt suddenly sure everything was going to be all right.  This was something quite apart from even the most cursory reflection upon strategic implications involved.

It were premature to say that he was right, yet the mood lifts a fraction with this news, on the last page of Soldier's Art, preparing us perfectly for the final instalment of the war.

Dance: VB

With The Valley of Bones, we are into the three novels of the Dance sequence set in the second world war.  When I first read Dance, I liked these novels least of all, but my view changed gradually and now they are some of my favourites.  They are in no sense "war novels", for although Nick Jenkins is in the army, he does not see action  - but the unusual surroundings of war, the intensity and strain, and the upsetting of social strata, all create unparalleled opportunities to observe and comment on how and why humans behave.  And, of course, what he is describing is of great interest in its own right, especially in the third "war" novel, The Military Philosophers.

Nick finds himself in Valley of Bones in an out of the way regiment in South Wales, with which he has - almost extinct - family connections.  The soldiers are largely bank employees among the officers and miners among the men.  Apart from widening Powell's social field dramatically, this new gallery offers a host of intriguing characters, some drawn in cameo and some more fully.  The boredom, routine, and petty irritations that make up much of army life, and of war itself, are well to the fore; but there is never any lack of pulse, and occasional leaves back to London draw in the characters and themes we have got to know over recent novels.  And his pungent observation of relations between the sexes is unimpaired; here, Umfraville describes the difficulty of persuading his first wife (there were several!) to marry him:

'There was all that business of "Not tonight, darling, because I don't love you enough", then "Not tonight, darling, because I love you too much" - Christ, I've been through the whole range of it.  The nearest some women get to being faithful to their husbands is making it unpleasant for their lover.  However, that's by the way.  The point is that Dolly married me in the end.'

But he is just as sharp on the subject of getting a bit older: 

" nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react",

and on people who pride themselves on being realists, and who can be brusque or even rude on that account:

Kedward dealt in realities.  There is much to be said for persons who traffic in this corn, provided it is always borne in mind that so-called realities present, as a rule, only a small part of the picture.

Finally, Powell - through Nick - remains conscious that books (his books?) really only reach a few.  Having failed to get a literary point across, Nick says:

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

Dance: KO

The Kindly Ones is an extraordinary novel in the Dance sequence, and represents Powell's need or desire "reculer pour mieux sauter".  You have been left at the end of Casanova's Chinese Restaurant expecting the oncoming war, and the tempo and mood are right for a plunge into the horrors and the confusion of the second world war.  But that has to wait for an entire novel (I'm very conscious at least two regular readers are going through Dance for the first time at the moment, and I don't want to spoil things!) while you go right back to Nick's childhood in 1914, and then forward again to the months just before the second war, and into the phoney war.  This is for several reasons - the first war adds to the burdens of the world, and also introduces Nick's parents (Powell waited for his own parents' deaths before drawing on them for his novels).  Finally, he is able to enrich some existing themes through this detour, and to create new ones.  The title, incidentally, refers to Greek habit of using this phrase to refer to the Furies, who, in the young Nick's words

"inflicted the vengeance of the gods by bringing in their train war, pestilence, dissension on earth; torturing, too, by the stings of conscience.  That last characteristic alone, I could plainly see, made them sufficiently unwelcome guests".

When General Conyers (by then retired, but still a courtier) hears about the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand, which rang up the curtain on the first world war, he remarks that

There will be trouble about this. Bad trouble. They'll have to postpone tomorrow night's State Ball

- a nice admixture of disaster and trivia.  This drama has been preceded, in the best Shakespearian tradition, by a remarkable, hilarious, passage to do with a housemaid's thwarted love, which I will not share - partly it's too long, partly because I want others to reach it fresh.

The novel then returns gracefully, almost seamlessly (Powell's technical profieciency in constructing the novel is unsurpassed), to 1939, but with a lot of personal and political storms in the air.  Increasing military activity, marital unhappiness, death of family members all contribute to the mood - but with a lot of amusement, too.  One of these incidents gives rise to the most powerful line in the entire sequence, when somebody (I won't say who) is talking about a loved one who has left him:

She can be tough, you know.  One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are.  You know that already.  It is how nasty the nice people can be.

The Kindly Ones ends with Nick arranging to enter the army, worrying what kind of a figure he will make at the great age of about 30.  The reader is very conscious that he is entering different territory altogether:  indeed, three great war novels stretch before you, of which more anon.

Dance: CCR

The fifth volume of Powell's Dance sequence is Casanova's Chinese Restaurant.  In spite of the frivolous, even reckless, sound of the title, this is the volume in which serious clouds gather for the first time.  The writing is still light, and the medium is still the acute description of complex social interactions, but there are increasing voices from a wider world - the Abdication, political events in China, the Spanish Civil War.  There is gloom present, and the young are not only not unaffected, they are the worst affected.  Describing the house in which his step mother-in-law lives, with a number of her step-children, Powell writes:

The accommodation in the house of several younger members of the family had not resulted in much outward gaiety of atmosphere.  On the contrary, the note struck as one entered the hall and ascended the staircase was quiet, almost despondent.  The lack of exhilaration confirmed a favourite proposition of Moreland's as to the sadness of youth.

"I myself look forward ceaselessly to the irresponsibility of middle age", he was fond of stating.

And towards the end of the book, building on the final paragraph of A Buyer's Market, three novels before, which I quoted a few days ago, Powell invokes a different but no less frightening image of the future - readying you for the next volume and the descent to war.  Life is slipping out of the control of these young men and women:

Once, at least, we had been on a ghost railway together at some fun fair on a seaside pier; slowly climbing sheer gradients, sweeping with frenzied speed into inky depths, turning blind corners from which black, gibbering bogeys leapt to attack, rushing headlong towards iron-studded doors, threatened by imminent collision, fingered by spectral hands, moving at last with dreadful, ever increasing momentum towards a shape that lay across the line.

Dance: ALM

A long, empty day at court yesterday on jury service, which enabled me to read the fourth volume of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, At Lady Molly's.  At this point, the characters are really getting into their stride as adults, and both Jenkins and Widmerpool, the quiet narrator around whom the whole thing revolves and his unlovely and not always welcome companion throughout life, develop dramatically.  And yet, when Jenkins meets Isobel Tolland, he feels both on the threshold of a wonderful love affair - and all the dreamy ennui of a man who has seen and understand all life already.

"Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I would marry her?  Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague inchoate sentiments of interest of which I was so immediately conscious.  It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness.  I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered.  Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of 'getting to know' one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worth while.  We knew one another already; the future was determinate.  But what - it may reasonably be asked - what about the fact that only a short time before I had been desperately in love with Jean Duport; was still, indeed, not sure that I had been wholly cured?  Were the delights and agonies of all that to be tied up with ribbon, so to speak, and thrown into a drawer to be forgotten?  What about the girls with whom I seemed to stand nightly in cinema queues?"

Dance: AW

Still reading my beloved Powell - and have now finished The Acceptance World.  This is a novel in which much shaking up goes on, as the initial pattern of early adult life is altered by changes of career, marriage, shaking off the shackles. The writing is sublime, and each minor description carries a considerable load of meaning and illumination.  Here, for example, Nick Jenkins, the main protagonist, describes the writer Quiggin arriving at the Ritz unexpectedly, a man strong in his self conceit, talented, but defensive about his humble origins and always keen to pursue his radical political views:

"Pausing, with a slight gesture of exhaustion that seemed to imply arduous travel over many miles of arid desert or snowy waste (according to whether the climate within or without the hotel was accepted as prevailing), he looked about the room; gazing as if in amazement at the fountain, the nymph, the palms in their pots of Chinese design: then turning his eyes to the chandeliers and the glass of the roof.  His bearing was at once furtive, resentful, sagacious, and full of a kind of confidence in his own powers.  He seemed to be surveying the tables as if searching for someone, at the same time unable to believe his eyes, while he did so, at the luxuriance of the oasis in which he found himself.  He carried no hat, but retained the belted leather overcoat upon which a few drops of moisture could be seen glistening as he advanced further into the room, an indication that snow or sleet had begun to fall outside.  This black leather garment gave a somewhat official air to his appearance, obscurely suggesting a Wellsian man of the future, hierarchic in rank.  Signs of damp could also be seen in patches on his sparse fair hair, a thatch failing to roof in completely the dry, yellowish skin of his scalp."

Dance: BM

On with Dance, and the second volume, A Buyer's Market.  I want to share a wonderful piece of writing with you, but it's a secret secret of Powellites, and I don't think I dare.  But there is a test of your reading in this book which is subtle and precise (and completely fair), when something momentous happens but you might not notice!  Powell, I think, is deliberately devaluing the event by this approach - but if you've read this book properly, you'll know what I'm talking about, if you haven't, I won't spoil it for you.  By the way, I missed it the first time.

A Buyer's Market is a novel about the uncertain process of becoming an adult - when does it begin, does it ever end? - and is full of uncertainty and discovery.  Most of all, there is the feeling that life is just beginning, that you have to take advantage of the experience, or it will pass you by.  The very last paragraph in the novel is wondrously telling:

"Certain stages of experience might be compared with the game of Russian billiards, played (as I used to play with Jean, when the time came) on

those small green tables, within the secret recesses of which, at the

termination of a given passage of time—a quarter of an hour, I think—the

hidden gate goes down; after the descent of which, the white balls and the

red return no longer to the slot to be replayed; and all scoring is doubled.

This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the

time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly

to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really

know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we

ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering

uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."

Dance: QU

I promised I wouldn't exhaustively review every volume of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, but offer little snapshots.  Well yesterday I read the first, A Question of Upbringing, and here is my offering, an extended quotation:

"Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned; and in due course only its most determined devotees remain unwilling to admit that an intimate and affectionate relationship is not necessarily a simple one: while such persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.  At that period love's manifestations are less easily explicable than they become later: often they do not bear that complexion of being a kind of game, or contest, which, at a later stage, they may assume.  Accordingly, when I used to consider the case of Jean Templer, with whom I had decided I was in love, analysis of the situation brought no relief from the uneasy, almost obsessive thoughts that filled my mind ..."

I've now moved onto the next volume (which alternates with Su Doku and a wonderful posthumous book by Roger Deakin on woodlands, Wildwood) as I wait at the Crown Court to be summoned for jury service; already, his emotions are getting tangled up with another, quite different woman.  Ah, si jeunesse savait!

Come Dance with me

Cornflower mentioned our universal need for still points the other day, and I agree; but for me, still points are pauses for action, still only in the sense that movement is temporarily contained, perhaps momentarily halted, not in any sense permanently suspended or evaded.  And in the passage where Eliot uses the phrase, he uses the powerful image of dance to capture this:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I am passionate about dance and I love this image.  The violence of a reel, the clodhopping rumbustiousness of country dancing, the grace of a waltz, the care and structure of a minuet, the heightened sensibility and tautness of the  ballet, they all seem wonderful images of life: pattern you cannot quite understand or achieve, intimacies and ephemeral contacts; grace and sweat blood and tears - how perfect do you want your images to be?

Eliot plays with this image and ones like it  - to do with stillness and movement - several times in Four Quartets.  He talks of

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only ...

Or

... a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. ...

The pattern here is the dance, and one particular Dance I love is Anthony Powells' Dance To The Music Of Time, the twelve volume sequence of novels which covers a slice - an ever changing slice - of English society from the First World War to the 1970s.  They are hilarious and tragic and they make me understand - for brief fleeting moments - how people work.  I read them all every New Year, and I shall start tomorrow of A Question of Upbringing;  I shall not post exhaustively on each of them, that were tedium for my readers, but I shall offer you a little vignette or paragraph from each as we go along.  So, come and Dance with me!

Afternoon men

The title comes from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but this is one of Anthony Powell's early novels, from 1931.  Loving the Dance to the Music of Time sequence, and his late great novel, The Fisher King, I have been catching up on his early work.  Afternoon Men is about the lost generation of the 1920s, and it has all the hallmarks of Powell's later work: understatement, calm comedy, slightly difficult relationships, small actions carrying a great burden of meaning and understanding.  So much is this true, that the most dramatic event in this book doesn't actually happen.

Let me give you an example of his quiet, minimalist approach to language, and his vision of the bored rituals of society:

""Don't", she said. "You're not allowed to do that."

"Why not?"

"Because you're not."

"I shall."

She said "I'm glad we met. But you must behave."

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

Later, they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat."

The novel takes a few episodes in the lives of poor artists, young and emotionally impressionable, and a party or two, and a weekend in the country.  It explores their failings and inadequacies without rancour, but with precision and humour.  It's a joy to read, and for the dedicated Dance reader, it's fascinating to see Powell working up themes and flexing his character skills.  The book ends exactly as it begins, with a casual invitation to a party, and one feels a real lack of significance in the characters' lives, something which was radically to change as the 1930s unfolded.

T T Waring

As the title of this site will tell you, I am an avid fan of the novels of Anthony Powell, especially the twelve volume series Dance to The Music of Time, written between 1951-1975.  I read them every year - normally once, but occasionally more often - and I estimate that I have notched up 35 readings overall.  When I next embark on this joyous marathon, I assure you that you will hear all about it, and if you want to share my pleasure, Hilary Spurling’s excellent guide to the novels, Invitation To The Dance, is invaluable.  These novels are one of the supreme literary achievements of the twentieth century, and are illuminating, funny and vividly immediate to each of our individual experiences.  He may not be in quite the same class as a novelist, but in tone and method, he is the Austen of the modern age.

But my reading of Powell was largely confined to these novels, and the wonderful Fisher King, his last novel, published in 1986.  But last year, I read his biography, Anthony Powell, A Life by Michael Barber. This is well worth reading as a picture of literary London from the 1920s to the 1980s, especially the earlier decades of that period. Barber’s book reinforces what you suspect from the novels, and what is clear from Powell’s memoirs (To Keep The Ball Rolling - four volumes, and a rather dense and unrewarding read, if the truth be told) and diaries (Diaries, in three volumes), that his work was unusually autobiographical.  Powell was open about this, asking how anyone could write about things they didn’t know about and hadn’t experienced - and, for example, explaining that one of the reasons that his account of Nick Jenkins’ childhood (Nick is the main protagonist in the Dance, and his alter ego) occurs so late in the sequence - its in The Kindly Ones, the sixth novel - is that his parents were by then dead, and were therefore ‘available’!  But the biography also makes it clear that the early novels, before Dance, are well worth reading, and I have put them on my list.

Afternoon Men (1931), Venusberg (1932 ), and From A View To A Death (1933) await in the book tray, but I have just read What’s Become of Waring? For some reason I don’t understand, this title has always put me off (anyone who tells you not to judge a book by its cover or its title preaches in vain) and made me think that the novel must be a piece of vapid juvenilia, only childishly amusing.  I confess to being completely wrong.

Published in 1939 - after the first two novels of the Dance sequence - What’s Become of Waring? is set in pre-war London, with a holiday in south of France.  Much of the story revolves round a publishing house (which is where Powell started his career, at Duckworth & Co), where T T Waring is an elusive but successful author of off the beaten track travel books.  His sudden death is the catalyst for a chain of events involving the publishers, his would be biographer and his alleged former fiancée, Roberta Payne.  (The photograph is of one of Marc’s illustrations to a modern edition, showing Hugh Judkins, the elderly publisher, and the fatale Roberta). It’s a fine portrait, lightly written and gently allusive, of a slightly rackety and uncertain period - the “twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres” as T S Eliot has it.

Dance

One of the less bookish themes that might crop up here occasionally is dance.  Not only do I love ballet, but dance has always seemed a marvellous analogy for life itself.  Think of T S Eliot in Burnt Norton:

At the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Or Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time is a series of novels I return to again and again - and I even go and look at the Poussin in the National Gallery, though he is not one of my most admired Old Masters.  But the reason dance is on my mind at the moment is that I watched Darcey Bussell's farewell from the Royal Ballet a few days ago - the performance she chose was MacMillan's Song of the Earth to Mahler's song cycle of the same name.  These German translations of Chinese poems cannot be called cheerful, but both in the Mahler and in MacMillan's ballet realisation, there is such beauty.  I had the pleasure of seeing the ballet a week or so earlier as well, when I took my god-daughter to Covent Garden, a very pleasant afternoon indeed, quite without the tears which attended Darcey Bussell's farewell.

The Zantedeschia which have been trumpeting their purity all around my pond for weeks now, seem to capture the same mood of elegiac beauty, so here is a particularly fine example from my garden, after rain.

And here are a handful of other books in that tray I showed yesterday (complete with skull - no Webster references intended):

And its just occurred to me that The Fisher King, which I re-read last week, centres on a great ballerina, whose dancing is a sacrifice for the man she loves; but when she dances again, he knows he has lost her.