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THE FUTURE IN A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME John A. Gould The following paper was presented at the First Biennial Anthony Powell Conference held April 23, 2001, at Eton College. |
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1. What Anthony Powell Did Imagine a man about to paint a mural. The wall before him is still under construction, being erected panel by panel, yet he walks back along its most recent sections and carefully begins painting images of Eton and Oxford and London between the wars. It is constructed from the lumber of all his experience, this wall. Anyone can see the similarities between the life etched on it and the mural overlaid; yet as he paints, he alters details, inventing or omitting events, conflating characters, revisioning even his own successive self-portraits. The wall offers structure and images for the mural, but it does not dictate precisely what the man will paint. The wall is history, the mural art. At one point the muralist moves backwards along the wall quite near its beginning to fill in an earlier scene, then returns to where he left off -- by now images of World War II -- and resumes work. After a long while he arrives at the last panel completed when he began (roughly 1950); then he continues over the more recently constructed surface, finally painting his way almost to his present (1971) and thus to conclusion. He stands back, silverhaired and elegant, no trace of his labor on his hands or clothes. The wall is still being constructed ahead; but he -- and we -- gaze back at the long mural stretching behind him, enamels gleaming, the work entire, finished. Over the course of a quarter century the British novelist Anthony Powell wrote what may well be the longest novel ever: A Dance to the Music of Time, a 12-volume work, more than a million words, several hundred characters, 2948 pages. The novel follows the life of its narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, who resembles Powell himself in many ways. Both men were born midway through the first decade of the 20th century. Both were the sons of military officers; both attended Eton and Oxford; both worked for film companies and book publishers before World War II, both served during the war in a Welsh unit and later did liaison work with the Poles; both wrote novels and edited a magazine; and so on. Clearly Powell used the outline of his own life in creating Jenkins's, peopling it with a myriad of fictional characters and a good number of historical ones as well. Some readers have found sport in regarding the series as a roman à clef, matching characters with actual people; however, for those like me who never knew the composer Constant Lambert (the model for Hugh Moreland) or the author John Galsworthy (St. John Clarke), the identities don't matter. The characters, with their extraordinary names and manners -- Charles Stringham, Dicky Umfraville, Bijou Ardglass, Scorpio Murtlock, and above all, Kenneth Widmerpool -- far transcend any real-life models. Dance covers more than half a century, beginning around 1921 and progressing for the most part chronologically through the years. In the sixth volume, The Kindly Ones, the action briefly flashes back to 1914 and then returns to 1938; and the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, concludes in 1971, when both Jenkins and Powell have reached their sixties. When Powell began the series, he didn't know how long it was going to be. He writes in a volume of his memoirs, Faces in My Time, "I had been turning over in my mind the possibility of writing a novel composed of a fairly large number of volumes, just how many could not be decided at the outset" (213). In a later volume he notes that after TKO was published, he decided that the "Dance should be contained within twelve volumes" (TSAAG, 116). While he was writing the series, readers like me had to wait for successive volumes, recalling an earlier era of novel-writing, when people lined the docks in Boston and New York for the next number of Pickwick Papers or Great Expectations or whatever Charles Dickens was writing at the time. Indeed, Powell shared some of Dickens's problems. In Time and Anthony Powell: A Critical Study, Robert Selig talks about serial publication causing the past events of Dance to become "frozen within the textual past" (32). Even in my first frenzy of reading, I wondered if Powell ever wished he could revise some of his earlier volumes, adjusting an earlier nuance, say, in order to make a later event more ironic. Dickens, dealing only with a group of chapters in each number, presumably knew the whole story he was planning to tell. Powell, on the other hand, hadn't decided where ADTTMOT would end, and he was working with much larger serial blocks. Like Dickens in his early numbers, Powell had to live with any problem he might create in the early books. There was no going back to alter or excise a character or an action. Moreover, he had begun writing the first volume, AQOU, around 1949, which means that the last twenty years of Jenkins's story -- as told in the last two volumes -- transpired while Powell was creating the first thirty. In terms of the opening analogy, here is the point at which the muralist moves onto the section of wall erected after he began painting. Powell had locked himself into a course of events without knowing where they might lead or if he could ever arrive there at all. He was certainly aware of this latter problem; indeed, one of his real concerns was whether he would live long enough to finish the sequence (TSAAG, 116). 
The author reading this paper at Eton, April 23, 2001. 2. The Surreptitious Serial Perhaps if the first installment, AQOU (1951), had flopped, Powell would have stopped then and there, for indeed, there was little about that first novel to suggest that eleven more volumes were to come trooping after it in roughly two-year intervals. He did insert into the first volume a half-title page, "The Music of Time," followed by a single star (indicating at least to him that this was the first volume in a series), but that must have seemed enigmatic to those who read AQOU when it first appeared. The dust-jacket copy on the front flap of the British first edition -- with the phrase "subsequent volumes" (Young) -- gives only faint suggestion that further novels are planned. The one possible hint on the cover of the American first edition takes the form of a passing nod to Powell's mentor: "[the novel's] Proustian savoring of detail." How did AQOU set itself up as the opening of a long serial work without announcing itself as such? In many ways it seems complete in itself. It has, after all, a framed structure, opening with the irascible Uncle Giles' arriving (with his abominable, possibly "Turkish" cigarette) at tea at Eton and ending with Uncle Giles redux, receiving the narrator for dinner at the Trouville in Soho. Furthermore, the narrative has a sustained and finished action: the narrator starts out in company with two great public school chums -- Templer and Stringham -- and one great public school enigma -- Widmerpool; at the end, both chums have ceased to be close friends, and the enigma seems to have dropped away. "The path had suddenly forked," Jenkins writes when he has a premonition that he and Stringham shall not meet again in the near future (229). Templer has already separated from Stringham, and Jenkins senses he too is growing away from this friend as well: "I had to admit that I did not care for the idea of spending much of my time with his present acquaintances" (201). Widmerpool materializes in the middle of the book, in France, and gives Jenkins a lesson in negotiation and small-scale power-brokering that he appreciates but does not fully comprehend: "Even then I did not recognize the quest for power" (157). Widmerpool's presence in this section of the book mostly acts as a bridge between the period of the friendships and that of their dissolution. So the book reads like a fictional schoolboy memoir, and at the end it feels finished. However, the eleven subsequent volumes confirm that the author has been here laying groundwork for a much longer work. Armed with the knowledge that AQOU does instigate a long serial, we might look carefully at its references to the future, to see how much of Powell's intention he allows us to surmise. Jenkins, Powell's narrator, telling his story in the past tense, admittedly stands a long way from the narrative occasion he describes. AQOU takes place in the first half of the decade of the 1920's, and the novel was published in 1951. Without specific evidence to the contrary (and there is none), a reader from that time must have assumed that the narrator was writing from the position of his "now," 1950, say, 30 to 25 years after the facts. After the opening description comparing several workmen to Poussin's painting A Dance to the Music of Time -- located in no specific time -- the narrator explicitly pushes us a long way back from the narrative present. "At this distance of time I cannot remember precisely what sort of an overcoat Widmerpool was said to have worn...."(5). Although Jenkins will prove to be extraordinarily precise about many details, this one escapes him, mostly in order to establish early on that this is a novel of memory. Such novels are certainly common enough, and there's nothing odd about a mature narrator commenting on the significance of an early action from his later vantage point. Jenkins does this often in AQOU without seeming to raise our expectations for a sequel. He goes on to talk about the overcoat: "[It] gave Widmerpool a lasting notoriety which his otherwise unscintillating career at school could never wholly dispel" (6). The "never" suggests a long period of notoriety indeed, but it doesn't imply eleven more volumes to continue the iteration. In fact, the promise of the "never" seems fulfilled within the book, at La Bas's visit to Jenkins at Oxford, when he says of Widmerpool, "there were jokes about an overcoat in the early days" (223). When Jenkins first sees Buster Foxe, he notes "the slightly drawn expression that one recognises in later life as the face of a man who does himself pretty well" (55). The reference to "later life" need not create any future expectations at all; it is simply the narrator, being a bit expansive. Two references in AQOU -- both concerning the same character -- create an explicit expectation for the dramatization of events far beyond the timeframe of the novel. When Jenkins is staying with the Templers, he remarks, "Years later, when I came to know Sunny Farebrother pretty well, he always retained for me something of this first picture of him" (78). Later, saying farewell to Farebrother (in what we may later date as 1923), he concludes, "He piled his luggage, bit by bit, on to a taxi; and passed out of my life for some twenty years" (105). "Some twenty years" seems to suggest that a sequel will be forthcoming. In fact, somewhat sooner than two decades, in 1941, Sunny will turn up in The Kindly Ones as Widmerpool's antagonist as they maneuver against each other in the army. Coming as it does as the final sentence in Chapter 2, this sentence resonates strongly of The Future, but it is one of a very few moments in the first volume that do so. Of course AQOU contains preparations for future volumes of Dance, but within a first reading they are surely made invisibly. Some of the future dancers -- Members and Quiggin, e.g. -- seem fully realized right from the start. Some -- Sillery, Stripling, Bob Duport -- are more quickly sketched. A couple are so faintly laid in that their reiterations, volumes later, are utterly unlooked-for. For instance, "one of Sillery's pupils, a small nervous young man who never spoke, addressed as `Paul', whose surname I did not discover" (176) finally turns up as Canon Fenneau in the concluding volume HSH, one of the few people who can handle Scorpio Murtlock. Bertram Akworth, mentioned but never met, the boy who sent Peter Templer a mash note for which, at Widmerpool's instigation, he was sent down from school, also reappears in the final book, where Widmerpool performs startling penance before him. Robert Selig notes that subsequent events in Dance alter our perception of earlier ones, so much so that "only rereading can do justice to these changes" (76). The most powerfully -- and invisibly -- ironic of these in AQOU is the remark by Stringham, concerning Widmerpool's piscine reaction to La Bas's arrest after the Braddock alias Thorne debacle: "That boy will be the death of me" (49). And so he will, some six volumes later, though at this point we would never believe it to be possible. 3. The Wall's Leading Edge Powell's handling of time in Dance has excited much discussion. As he flashes back or forward, readers wonder what time the narrative voice is actually writing from. Michael Henle suggests that it lies at the very end of the sequence: "The events of Dance are recalled by the narrator over a period of 1-2 weeks in 1971." James Tucker, in The Novels of Anthony Powell, seems to agree with this view: Jenkins is "virtually omniscient, looking back from anywhere up to fifty years ahead" (109). Robert Selig, however, demonstrates convincingly that the opening scene of street workers in AQOU is different from the similar scene in HSH, and that "the hundreds of thousands of words in this very long novel do not form a single flashback" (27-31). He opts for an "open-ended time scheme"; "the narrator cannot recall events that have yet to happen as the story keeps unrolling into the narrator's future" (31). Selig is right, I think, but the narrator's "now" -- call this the "narrative present" -- in any particular volume is not an open-ended determination. It is set in approximately 1950 for AQOU, and it shifts constantly, utterly unremarked as it does so, in approximately two-year increments into the future with each successive installment. Simply, the narrative present of each volume is the date of its composition, say about a year before publication. Re-imagining the muralist, we can see that for most of the time there is roughly a quarter century's worth of wall between the panel on which he is painting and the wall's leading edge -- which is the narrative present. This phenomenon explains why Jenkins can state categorically in the second volume, A Buyer's Market, "The last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon's work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death" (1) and yet can rediscover them yet again in HSH at Barnabas Henderson's art gallery. This apparent contradiction signals only that the leading edge of the wall has moved from 1952 (the approximate "now" of ABM) to 1970 (the approximate "now" of HSH). In TKO Jenkins makes the farthest jump back in time, some 24 years, from the narrative occasion of 1938 to 1914, so he may compare his experiences at the opening of each of the two World Wars. As we have seen, he occasionally jumps forward, sometimes -- as with the first sentence of ABM -- all the way to the "now" of whatever installment he is writing. Perhaps the most complicated section of time-shifting -- as Robert Selig has carefully pointed out (56-9) -- occurs at the opening of Casanova's Chinese Restaurant. Selig lists five separate time settings for the first chapter. For me, the first three are most important. A bit of summary is necessary: Jenkins is inspecting the bombed-out Mortimer public house, when he hears a crippled singer. Her song reminds him of the first time he talked with his friend Hugh Moreland about Moreland's getting married, which conversation marked the beginning of their long friendship. He flashes back to that day. Then comes a parenthetic reference to a third moment in time: "The Mortimer (now rebuilt in a displeasingly fashionable style and crowded with second-hand-car salesmen)...." (9) The question is when do these three moments happen? Selig assumes that the bombed-out Mortimer scene occurs in 1959, because the nostalgia of the song would be reinforced by Jenkins's awareness of Moreland's recent death (in the summer of 1959, according to TK). The flashback returns to some time around 1928-29, a determination supported by plenty of subsequent textual support. The "displeasingly fashionable" Mortimer, says Selig, is set in "an indeterminate time, perhaps as late as the 1970's." According to my analogy, the narrative present of CCR is approximately 1959. Since the narrative voice can never leap ahead of the wall's leading edge, the era of the rebuilt Mortimer must be seen as deep Cold War -- when sleazy used-car-salesmen reigned supreme -- rather than as post-Sgt. Pepper -- when Scorpio Murtlock was busily falling on everyone's neck. The opening flash-forward of the bombed-out Mortimer would stand somewhere in between the war and the "now" of CCR -- say, 1950 or so. The narrator's ability to move so easily forward and back creates extraordinary layers of coincidence, and One of the firmest tenets -- so Moreland always said -- in the late teachings of Dr. Trelawney was that coincidence was no more than `magic in action.' (HSH, 35) For an example, Mrs. Erdleigh functions explicitly as a kind of nexus of coincidence, from which activity is projected both forward and back. "Have you met her yet?" she asks Jenkins when they meet at the Templers' house in Maidenhead in The Acceptance World (102). She is referring to their earlier meeting, where, in company with Uncle Giles, she read Jenkins's cards and foretold his meeting with Jean: "a much more important lady, -- medium hair, I should say" (TAW, 15). Then she promises to see Jenkins again "in about a year from now" (17). At the scene in Maidenhead, both predictions have come true, within twelve hours of each other, in fact. Although these prognostications occur within the same volume, at other times Mrs. Erdleigh gazes ahead into a future one. In The Military Philosophers, she reads Pamela Flitton's palm, foretelling her marriage to a "man a little older than yourself.... A man in a good position ... a jealous husband" (134). She also lays out some vague, but grim, intimations about where Pamela is heading: "You must be careful my dear.... There are things here that surprise even me... les tentations lubriques sont bien prononcées." Pamela's marriage, to Widmerpool, is effected before this volume is finished; but there are two more volumes to run before her doom is finally accomplished, and Mrs. Erdleigh's voice will grow louder as that doom approaches: "My dear, beware. You are near the abyss. You stand at its utmost edge. Do not forget the warning I gave when you showed me your palm on that dread night" (TK, 260). 4. The Unpainted Wall A hugely interesting element of the mural-painter analogy is that forward-shifting unpainted piece of wall between the narrative occasion (the "action" of the books) and the narrative present, the year of composition. For this, I'd like to construct a time chart: |
| Vol. | Narr. Occasion | Narr. Present | Differential the "future" |
| AQOU | 1924 | 1950 | 26 |
| ABM | 1929 | 1951 | 22 |
| TAW | 1933 | 1954 | 21 |
| ALM | 1935 | 1956 | 21 |
| CCR | 1937 | 1959 | 22 |
| TKO | 1939 | 1961 | 22 |
| TVOB | 1940 | 1963 | 23 |
| TSA | 1941 | 1965 | 24 |
| TMP | 1945 | 1967 | 22 |
| BDFAR | 1947 | 1970 | 23 |
| TK | 1959 | 1972 | 13 |
| HSH | 1971 | 1974 | 3 |
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Here, the first date is the final year of the volume's narrative occasion; the narrative present has been set by subtracting a year from the publication date; and the differential, the difference between them, is the amount of future the narrator has to play with. It is surprising to notice how consistent Powell has kept the length of time between narrative present and narrative action. We see it creeping apart during the War, when the rich activity in Jenkins' life slows down the time-span of each volume; but, except for the first book and the last two, the narrator's forward reach is right around twenty-two years, give two or take one. Only as the novel approaches its conclusion does the future start to shrink, and it does so precipitously. The shrinking is accomplished essentially by leaving a decade's worth of wall panels unpainted; the years 1948-1957 (between BDFAR and TK) and 1960-1970 (TK and HSH) are not dramatized. There are some substantial differences between the first ten installments and the last two, not least of which is that the concluding pair are set in the years after Powell began the sequence, and so the models for their plots --i.e., the events of Powell's life -- hadn't taken place when he began writing. In BDFAR, the tenth volume, Jenkins writes his work on Robert Burton, Borage and Hellebore: A Study, which corresponds to Powell's biography of John Aubrey, the work he completed just before beginning Dance. At this point Jenkins -- were his life utterly faithful to his creator's -- should begin his own duodecology. In fact he does continue writing, apparently quite prolifically: "Look at all those books you've written," Matilda Donners says to him in HSH (62). So perhaps he is busy with a twelve-volume sequence about an English writer called Tony Powell; but, if so, we never hear about it. Instead, life contracts. Other than pursuing his "work," Jenkins doesn't do much from 1950 to 1971 -- attends an admittedly lively literary conference, serves as a judge for a book competition, attends a family wedding, and potters about the grounds of his country residence, conserving Fingers, burning brush, and watching duck, "flying in from the south" (HSH, 1). As the differential between narrative occasion and present shrinks in the two final volumes, Powell mentions the future much less frequently, but, when he does so, the passages resonate with significance. There are two explicit references to the future in TK. The first of these demonstrates Jenkins's characteristic indecision about a character's motivation, in this case about Glober's decision to introduce Gwinnett to Pamela: "Why Glober did that I could not guess at the time, have never since quite decided" (99). This introduction will prove to have enormous consequences for what remains of the novel, and Jenkins's remark brings emphasis to it as he goes on to speculate at length about its significance. From this event leads a straight line of causality to Pamela dead in Gwinnett's bed, and its reverberations will echo all the way to the end of HSH: Gwinnett's biography of Trapnel and Murtlock's stag-dance in front of Gwinnett and Widmerpool's sorry end. The second reference in TK to the "leading edge" is, in form, similar to the moment in ABM when Jenkins mentions the last time he saw Mr. Deacon's paintings: "That morning was the last time I saw Moreland. It was also the last time I had, with anyone, the sort of talk we used to have together" (276). This is an extraordinary remark for Jenkins, perhaps the most expressive he ever makes about his feelings for another character. The closing down of his future -- the shortening of the wall left before him -- means that this "last time" is absolute; there isn't be future enough to revise this judgment as there was when the sale of Deacons near Euston Road sometime before 1951 was supplanted by the "Bosworth Deacon Centenary Exhibition" in the autumn of 1971. There is a radical closing down in some other concrete ways, as well. Over the first ten volumes, Powell has introduced us to approximately 400 characters. In each of the last two installments we meet only about twenty new ones, of whom only three in TK (Emily Brightman, Louis Glober, and Russell Gwinnett) and four in HSH (Fiona Cutts, Gibson Delavacquerie, Barnabas Henderson and, of course, Scorpio Murtlock) have any real stature. Furthermore most of these new characters are from younger generations, and they tend to dominate the action of these two books. If a generation occurs every twenty years, in TK Pamela Widmerpool is a half generation behind Jenkins; and Russell Gwinnett and Polly Duport are a full one. In HSH, Delavacquerie is a full generation behind, and Fiona, Henderson, and Murtlock are two. The dancing slippers are being passed on to younger dancers. And finally, the older dancers are dying. Both of these books are concerned -- although in quite different ways -- with death, a theme perhaps made inevitable as the gap between narrative occasion and present closes. Time is running out. We might think that death has been treated before in Dance, especially in the war volumes, but in fact it has been surprisingly rare. Mr. Deacon's death is the only one mentioned in the first three volumes. In the next three, a mere five deaths are brought to our notice, including St. John Clarke, Maclintick, and Uncle Giles. Even during the entire war trilogy we hear of only perhaps a dozen, and four of those -- Bijou Ardglass, Molly Jeavons, Pricilla Tolland, and Chips Lovell -- occur during the same blitz. Of course two other deaths from this trilogy are immensely significant -- Stringham and Templer -- and when we learn of their demises in The Military Philosophers we feel acute loss. Still, Jenkins has had a remarkably gentle war. In TK and HSH the number of deaths surpasses twenty, almost as many as are mentioned in the first ten volumes altogether. This shouldn't surprise us, for people die when they grow old. Powell's shrinking of the "leading wall" forces death to occur more frequently, for not only are the characters older, but now their world is spinning at the rate of a decade per volume instead of a more leisurely two years or so. Thus both of these volumes are filled with what Mrs. Erdleigh calls achieving "the Eighth Sphere to which Trismegistus refers" (TK 245-6). However, they treat death in radically different ways. The title Temporary Kings is explained early in the volume. When Mark Members tells Jenkins he will "live like a king" at the Venice Conference, he replies, "One of those temporary kings in The Golden Bough, everything at their disposal for a year or a month or a day -- then execution?"(7). Some of these transitory monarchs sacrificed themselves after a set term; others were put to death as circumstances or even mood dictated. When Dr. Brightman retells the Gyges-Candaules myth, Candaules represents another sort of temporary king, who, having exhibited his wife to Gyges, is killed and replaced by him on the throne. Temporary kings abound in the volume: Léon-Joseph Ferrand-Sénéschel, dead in bed with Pamela Widmerpool; X. Trapnel, collapsed in a gutter after a glorious night in The Hero of Acre; and Louis Glober, killed in a car driven "at unusually high speed" by a "well-known French racing-driver" (268). All of these men have known acclamation, if not full coronation, in the arts. The writer Ferrand-Sénéschel is one of the "minor celebrities" of the Venice Conference, "not to be underrated as a force," although "not a particularly attractive one" (10). The kingliness of Trapnel is made explicit by critic Malcolm Crowding, who gives the recognized account of his last night on earth: "X walked through the doors of The Hero like a king." (33). Finally, Glober, a film director and playboy-tycoon, specifically resembles a monarch: "Herod the Tetrarch was perhaps nearer the mark than Byzantine emperor" (79). These three kings even share the same queen -- the virulent, malevolent, unquestionably desirous Pamela, who plays at least some part in each of their deaths. She seems to have induced Ferrand-Sénéschel's fatal heart attack. Her treatment of Trapnel is certainly the cause for his decline, although his actual demise does not occur until several years afterwards. The image of Pamela as a consort of temporary kings becomes explicit in Jenkins's remark, "Now, it had become Trapnel's turn to join the dynasty of Pamela's dead lovers" (102). Finally, her savaging of Glober breaks up his engagement to Polly Duport; and a year later Glober is dead in a car crash. In their deaths, the temporary kings are bleak figures. There is little sense at the end of TK that their influence will extend beyond their graves. Trapnel's reputation might enjoy posthumous resuscitation, by the agency of Gwinnet's biography; in fact, however, the last we hear of Gwinnett in TK is that he has abandoned his academic career and is teaching water-skiing on the coast of Spain (268). As the future in ADTTMOT shrinks, so for Jenkins does hope. The last king standing is Widmerpool, antithesis of art, apotheosis of ego, muttering angrily to himself, "more than a little unhinged": not temporary enough, this king. Fortunately the series does not end with the pessimism of TK. The final volume allows Powell to suggest more lasting solutions to the evanescent, transitory reigns of temporary kings, even as the novel's future contracts nearly to the now. Toward the end of the penultimate volume, Mrs. Erdleigh shows the way by offering both direction and title for the ultimate one: "Where, as again Vaughn writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies" (246). HSH opens with a perfect example of how Powell will interpret these words: Duck, flying in from the south, ignored four or five ponderous explosions over at the quarry. The limestone cliff, dominant oblong foreground structure, lateral storeyed platforms, all coral-pink in evening sunlight, projected towards the higher ground on misty mornings a fading mirage of Babylonian terraces suspended in haze above the mere; the palace, with its hanging gardens, distantly outlined behind a group of rather woodenly posed young Medes (possibly young Persians) in Mr Deacon's Boyhood of Cyrus, the picture's recession equally nebulous in the shadows of the Walpole-Wilson's hall. (1) This passage is rich in references to Vaughn's words. The time of day is sunset, and Jenkins's soul -- when last seen, in sore need of liberation -- is gazing skyward, moving (like the ducks) past actual sounds (of ponderous explosions) towards the discovery of secret harmonies: limestone cliff merging with Babylonian terraces, fading into Mr. Deacon's Boyhood of Cyrus. The emphasis here is on the past, traveling from this scene to ancient history and myth, forward to Mr. Deacon's work, at last arriving magically at an early -- and highly charged -- memory, that of visiting the Walpole-Wilsons' hall, always for him associated with his first love, Barbara Goring. Jenkins is explicit about the power of this process: "The ducks' coalescence into the muffled crimsons of sunset had been dramatic enough to invoke reflection on mysterious things" (19). In fact, HSH is primarily concerned with reclaiming the past. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Jenkins muses long about Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and particularly Orlando's friend Astolpho's journey to the moon, where he discovers the Valley of Lost Things. For Jenkins the most important Lost Things seem to be reputations, for he applies the concept to Dr. Trelawney, to Sir Magnus Donners (though only as a patron of the arts), to St. John Clarke, and finally to Mr. Deacon: "Henderson had done a stupendous rescue job from the Valley of Lost Things; Mr Deacon's Astolpho... fishing up his medallion for the Temple of Fame" (247). Not all the past is reclaimable. As he has all along, Powell shows his distaste for those who, living by the will, pursue power in its myriad forms. The archetype of this class of humans has been, from the very beginning of Dance, Widmerpool. Recall "the quest for power" that Jenkins did not recognize at La Grenadièr (AQOU, 156). In every volume since, we have seen Widmerpool overcome disaster after disaster, simply by the exertion of his extraordinary will. However, in HSH he arrives at the point at which willpower fails. "Ken never wanted to be outdone in Harmony by Scorp," says Henderson (267), and it is this monomachy of willpower against Murtlock -- whose own willpower is "stronger than anything" (262) -- which finally kills him. Widmerpool, whom Jenkins identified as Orlando, has no Astolpho to rescue him from the Valley of Lost Things -- unless it is perhaps Jenkins himself. In fact, in HSH Powell emerges from the pessimism of TK exactly where we should expect him to land. Art survives. Ego perishes. Emblematic of the process is Stringham's Modigliani drawing, which has passed through some of the darkest most egotistical hands of the novel -- Pamela's, Widmerpool's, Murtlock's -- to arrive safely in those of Henderson: "Now the agent, even at secondhand, of its preservation, he deserved his prize" (270). The "torrential passage" from The Anatomy of Melancholy lists the sorts of things the Widmerpools of the world cherish: exercises of the will -- wars, thefts, monomachies, lawsuits, trophies and triumphs, deaths of Princes, enormous villainies of all kinds (271-2). But these are ephemeral, bound for the Valley of Lost Things and the Waters of Oblivion. The Modigliani is what remains. HSH's final passage recalls its opening, the ducks at the quarry. Like that paragraph, it resolves from narrative experience to myth to the enduring timelessness -- and motionlessness -- of art. This stopping of the clock signals that the music for this dance has run out, that the panel for this mural has arrived at its present. Here, however, the description settles not upon Mr. Deacon's art, nor upon Modigliani's, but upon Poussin's, and thus upon Powell's own, which with these words we now read to conclusion: The thudding sound from the quarry had declined now to no more than a gentle reverberation, infinitely remote. It ceased altogether at the long drawn wail of a hooter -- the distant pounding of centaurs' hoofs dying away, as the last note of their conch trumpeted out over hyperborean seas. Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintery silence. (272) |
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All the page references to A Dance to the Music of Time are to the Little, Brown three-volume omnibuses. (After the first, these volumes are distinguished as "Second Movement," "Third Movement," and "Fourth Movement.") The pagination of these volumes is identical to the Heinemann editions. The novel titles and publication dates, in order of composition, are listed below. Other works consulted follow. A Question of Upbringing. 1951. A Buyer's Market. 1952. The Acceptance World. 1955. At Lady Molly's. 1957. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant. 1960 The Kindly Ones. 1962. The Valley of Bones. 1964. The Soldier's Art.1966. The Military Philosophers. 1968. Books Do Furnish a Room. 1971. Temporary Kings. 1973. Hearing Secret Harmonies. 1975. Christie, David. "{ap list] Re: View of the Fox ." E-mail to author. 10 Aug. 2000. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 1 Volume Abridged Edition. Macmillan: New York, 1947. Henle, Michael. "A Dance Miscellany." Powell, Anthony. Faces in My Time. Holt, Rinehart, Winston: New York, 1980. __________. A Question of Upbringing. First American Edition. Scribner's: New York, 1951. __________. The Strangers are All Gone. Heinemann: London, 1982. Selig, Robert. Time and Anthony Powell: A Critical Study. Fairleigh Dickinson: Rutherford, NJ, 1991. Spurling, Hilary. Invitation to the Dance. Little, Brown: Boston, 1977. Tucker, James. The Novels of Anthony Powell. Columbia University Press: New York, 1976. Young, Ian. "{ap list] Re: New Member ." E-mail to author. 10 Aug. 2000. |