The first volume of Summer, the second of four trilogies of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Synopsis followed by What I Thought.In this synopsis I’m quite sure there's nothing that need be hidden within the folds of spoilers. I've used Hilary Spurling's brief overview of the chapters to remind me of the narrative threads in each of them; see Invitation to the Dance.This segment of the Dance takes place in 1934. The first chapter commences on the New Year. The series’ first person narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is now in his late twenties, working in the low-grade film industry as a scriptwriter. He’s taken to a party by Chips Lovell at Lovell’s aunt’s place. The aunt is Lady Molly Jeavens, who has graciously bestowed her name (via the handiwork of Powell) to the book. The typical party banter of Powell’s novels here produces among other new revelations of time’s passing the unexpected news that Jenkin’s long-time acquaintance Widmerpool (from school and college) is engaged to be married.The second chapter involves lunch with Widmerpool, a tea attended by Jenkins at which he is quizzed about Widmerpool by the latter’s soon to be in-laws, and a chance encounter with J.C. Quiggin.Since we had been undergraduates together my friendship with Quiggin, moving up and down at different seasons, could have been plotted like a temperature chart. Sometimes we seemed on fairly good terms, sometimes on fairly bad terms; never with any very concrete reason for these improvements and deteriorations. However, if Quiggin thought it convenient to meet during a ‘bad’ period, he would always take steps to do so, having no false pride in this or any other aspect of his dealings with the world.In this instance, Quiggin indeed does have a reason for meeting with Jenkins, and invites him out to Quiggin’s cottage for a weekend.Chapter three finds Jenkins having accepted such an invitation and taking a train out from London, where a taxi meets him at the station and conveys him to the “cottage”. Jenkins was hesitant about the get-together, knowing that Quiggin was now living with, perhaps even married to, Mona, the former wife of one of Jenkins best friends from school, whom he had ‘run away’ with. As Jenkins had reflected before accepting the invite, I was unwilling to seem to condone too easily the appropriation of an old friend’s wife; although it had to be admitted that Templar [the old friend] himself had never been over-squeamish about accepting, within his own circle, such changes of partnership. Apart from such scruples, I knew enough of Quiggin to be sure that his cottage would be more than ordinarily uncomfortable. Nothing I had seen of Mona gave cause to reconsider this want of confidence in their combined domestic economy.During the visit, Quiggin’s patron and landlord, “Erridge”, stops by unannounced. It is decided that the next evening they will have dinner at Erridge’s estate Thrubworth Park, a couple miles through the woods. (Erridge is the Viscount Erridge, also the Earl of Warminster, the eldest of the Tolland clan, an “erratic and high-minded social revolutionary”.) At the dinner two of Erridge’s sisters drop by. The first sight of one of these, Isobel, occasions our narrator to remark, Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should 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 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.The fourth chapter takes place as Widmerpool’s wedding is approaching, a month or two after the previous. The location, after some initial moving about of the pieces on the playing field, is a pub in Soho. Jenkins finds himself, against many odds, drinking with Jeavons, Lady Molly’s husband, who happened to be in the pub when Jenkins entered by himself. Jeavons supplies Jenkins with several surprising stories of times gone by, involving both Jeavons and others of the characters involved in the Dance.The final chapter takes places in the fall of 1934, once again at Lady Molly’s. The party has been arranged subsequent to the engagement announcement by Jenkins and Isobel. Fate has twisted for Widmerpool, and during much of the party Jenkins is closeted with General Conyers, who reveals to him his knowledge and psychological analysis of the Widmerpool episode. Widmerpool himself has the last word. You know, Nicholas, it is wise to take good advice about such a thing as marriage. I hope you have done so yourself. I have thought about the subject a good deal, and you are always welcome to my views.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -What I Thought about ...1. Powell's writing styleIf this is the first review you have read of Powell’s Dance, you should take particular care to note the quotes above and below. All of these illustrate one of the two things about these novels that appeals so inordinately to me. That is the superb phrasing and word choice he uses, particularly in the internal narration by Jenkins. The dialogue (of which there is a fair amount) is not so much in this style, which is probably just as well. But for the narrative passages, Powell never uses the same important noun (or verb) twice in the same sentence, and generally not even in the same paragraph. This leads to writing which sparkles with unpredictability, and frequently with a delightfully humorous glow as well.Here’s one final extended quote, from the party in the last chapter, that illustrates the comedy that occasionally emanates from Powell’s meticulous prose: The guests seemed, in fact, to have been chosen even more at random than usual. Certainly there had been no question either of asking people because they were already friends of Isobel or myself; still less, because Molly wanted either of us specifically to meet them. All that was most nondescript in the Jeavons entourage predominated, together with a few exceptional and reckless examples of individual oddity. I noticed Alfred Tolland… was standing in the corner of the room, wedged behind a table, talking to – of all people – Mark Members, whom I had never before seen at the Jeavonses’, and might be supposed, in principle, beyond Molly’s normal perimeter, wide as that might stretch; or at least essentially alien to most of what it enclosed. To describe the two of them as standing looking at one another, rather than talking, would have been nearer the truth, as each apparently found equal difficulty in contributing anything to a mutual conversation. At the same time the table cut them off from contact with other guests.2. TimeThe other appeal of the Dance is, of course, the magnificent theme of time’s passage, or put another way, of the characters’ (and our own) passage through time. Over and again Jenkins tells us how through a conversation or simply though observing another of the characters playing his role in a given scene, he suddenly becomes aware of something which he never suspected before: either about that character, that character’s relationship to another character, about his own relationship to this or some other character; or even a more general truth about himself (and most of us along with him). The Dance. That great dance of life, in which we swirl our way across the years, observing and discovering the changing relationships between ourselves, our loved ones, our friends and acquaintances, the ever-changing judgments we make of the fortunes, driving forces, and characters of these people as they approach, recede, disappear, and reappear as they dance - to the music of time.
I am currently on volume 7, The Valley of Bones, but am posting the same review on each of the first six volumes, and will update as I move forward. Here's my impression so far of Powell's 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time:Cleaning out my attic recently, I came across a four-foot file box stuffed with drafts of a book I once almost wrote. I had all but forgotten it. The book was a memoir of my early life with a theatrical troupe, a memoir I never finished for reasons beyond my control. Still, being confronted with my own really quite gargantuan efforts to write this story, more important to me then than it is now, was liberating and, to use a word I basically detest, empowering.Within a few days I had started work in earnest on my current project, a memoir of my long, winding road to the Catholic Church.Just being reminded that I once had and that I therefore could again was what did the trick. I’ve written long books before, including the 520-page history of a major Boston hospital. But that was on commission. For cash. To invest such effort in one’s own story, and without the promise of being paid for it, was something I wasn’t sure I would ever do. And now I’m doing it.Like my hero, Norman Maclean, who began writing a “few stories for my children” when he was seventy, I am writing with my two daughters most clearly in mind, trying to keep any thoughts of acclaim or profit at bay. Maclean ended with the great memoir of his trout-fishing family, A River Runs Through It, and followed that up with my favorite nonfiction book, Young Men and Fire, about the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana that killed thirteen young “smoke-jumpers” (parachuting fire-fighters). Coincidentally, as I make headway on this project—is anything ever coincidental?—I have finally rounded the halfway point of Anthony Powell’s astounding twelve-volume cycle A Dance to the Music of Time. Three times before I started reading these books, written between 1951 and 1975, about four friends from an English boarding school growing up and growing old through the middle half of the twentieth century. Templer, Stringham, Widmerpool, and the narrator, Jenkins, start as lads together just after World War I and end as old men surrounded by hippies in the early 1970s.There are some things that particularly strike me about Powell’s masterwork. First comes the faith the author must have had to undertake it in the first place. It is clear from the very first volume that he had in mind a multivolume work taking as its theme a painting by Poussin of the same name. According to one source, Poussin’s picture “was meant to represent the passing of time, and the different stages of life on the rapidly revolving wheel of fortune: poverty, labor, wealth, and pleasure.” Jenkins’s three boyhood friends come and go through the twelve-volume cycle, along with 300 other characters.What if Powell (pronounced pole) had died midway through volume four? Don’t you suppose that possibility occurred to him? (In fact, he lived another 25 years after completing volume 12, Hearing Secret Harmonies.) What if his inspiration ran dry, a calamity feared by most writers? Yet here they are today: four volumes of three novels each, packaged by University Chicago Press A Dance to the Music of Time—1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Movements.Powell’s work is often compared with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time). I’ve never finished Proust and suspect I never will, but I’ve read enough to think that Powell wins out over the French novelist on several counts.First, while Proust is sometimes wry, Powell is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Just today I was reading volume 7, The Valley of Bones, in which Jenkins has entered military service at the beginning of World War II. A general, inspecting a platoon, asks the commanding officer what the men had for breakfast. When he learns that they had liver, bread, and jam but no porridge, he is dumbfounded. He begins asking one man after another whether he likes porridge, and the soldiers, thinking it the right answer, all answer no. Finally—The General stood in silence, as if in great distress of mind, holding his long staff at arm’s length from him, while he ground it deep into the earthy surface of the barnhouse floor. He appeared to be trying to contemplate as objectively as possible the concept of being so totally excluded from the human family as to dislike porridge. His physical attitude suggested a holy man doing penance vicariously for the sin of those in his spiritual care.Finally, one man, a simpleton but an honest one, confesses that he likes porridge.Slowly General Liddament straightened himself. He raised the stick so that its sharp metal point almost touched the face of Corporal Gwylt. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘look, all of you. He may not be the biggest man in the Division, but he is a sturdy fellow, a good type. There is a man who eats porridge. Some of you would do well to follow his example.’With these words, the Divisional Commander strode out of the barn.Immediately following this brilliant bit of comedy, after the general’s car has disappeared in the distance, Powell hits the reader with a sudden shift of perspective:We returned from the exercise to find Germany had invaded Norway and Denmark.“The dogs bark; the caravan moves on,” Jenkins comments in volume 6, The Kindly Ones, and this could be taken as an epigraph for the entire dance. Powell’s focus is almost always on dogs in the foreground, on the foibles and fallenness of the mortals dancing there. But he frequently reminds us that these small and really inconsequential narratives are playing out against a grand backdrop, that the caravan of history inevitably rolls on.This also sets him in front of Proust, I think. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel (Proust’s alter ego) is the main character, and much of the interest derives from what is essentially happening inside his head. The other characters—the men and women he loves, largely vicariously—are projections of his own self-absorbed consciousness.Powell’s alter ego, the narrator Nick Jenkins, is almost a nonentity by contrast. Compared with other major characters and even many minor ones, we learn very little about him because he is so interested in others. While religion is almost never discussed in the first seven volumes of Dance, with the exception of a couple of cultish characters in volume 6 and an arguably anti-Catholic parody of a priest in volume 7, the perspective of the Anglican Powell is ironically more Catholic than that of the French Proust.What strikes me about A Dance to the Music of Time now is Powell’s love for his characters—all 300 of them, in all their brokenness. It is a love for humanity, God’s greatest creation, a love I would darly like to demonstrate in my own relatively unambitious project.
What do You think about At Lady Molly's (1985)?
A Dance to the Music of Time number 4, and possibly the most complete stand-alone novel of the bunch so far. Certainly, the jaundiced figure of Widmerpool looms large in a wonderful comic portrait, engaged as he is to a somewhat flighty older woman, Mildred. Lady Molly's husband Jeavons also makes his bow, as Jenkins joins him on the fag end of a pub crawl. Quiggins and Mona's utopian left wing existence is further disrupted by the aristocratic down and out Erridge. While Nick Jenkins the narrator is a shadowy figure, only existing really as the straight man to the comedic foibles of the others, Isabel Tolland is positively a ghost, appearing as his fiancée, but not in any visible or corporeal sense. I am however, looking forward to their wedding in the next instalment.
—Ian
I have been spending too much time on photography and not enough on reading, so have taken a long time to read this. No reflection on the book at all - it's delicious. Wonderfully funny passages, as for example those involving the butler Smith. When asked whether there was any champagne:"Smith's face puckered, as if manfully attempting to force his mind to grapple with a mathematical or philosophical problem of extraordinary complexity. His bearing suggested that he had certainly before heard the word 'champagne' used, if only in some distant, outlandish context; that devotion to his master alone gave him some apprehension of what this question - these ravings, almost - might mean. Nothing good could come of it. This was a disastrous way to talk. That was his unspoken message so far as champagne was concerned. After a long pause, he at last shook his head.'I doubt if there is any champagne left, m'lord.'" (page 142)
—Eleanor
I started reading this book in early October and finished it on Christmas Eve. It took a ridiculously long time because life kept getting in the way, including a three week trip to the USA. So, what lingers is not so much the plot -- it's part of Powell's Music of Time series -- but the writing style. Writers begin with Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and much else that I read is pale in comparison. Powell, however, is good and better than most but not as good as Austen and Woolf. So, it's Powell's style, nuance, dry humour and characterisation that make this book and the others I've read in the series worthwhile. Already onto the next, which, hopefully, I will be able to without so many interruptions.
—Kim Stallwood
