The following quotation, in which AP talks about starting to write Dance, is taken from the third volume of his memoirs To Keep the Ball Rolling: Faces in My Time (Heinemann, 1980).
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. A long sequence seemed to offer all sorts of advantages, among them release from the re-engagement every year or so of the same actors and extras hanging about for employment at the stagedoor of one's fantasy. Instead of sacking the lot at the end of a brief run ... the production itself might be extended, the actors made to work longer and harder for much the same creative remuneration ... instead of being butchered at regular intervals ...
At the same time there were many objections to setting out on such a hazardous road, chiefly the possibility of collapse, imaginatively speaking; ... simply dying ... before completing the book.
The eighty-thousand-word fetters would not be entirely struck off, if normal processes of commercial publication were accepted ... but such disciplining ... might have advantages in checking too diffuse a pattern ...
Certain technical matters had to be settled at once for early establishment of a sufficiently broad base ... from which a complex narrative might arise; fan out; be sustained over a period of years. This meant that undeveloped characters, potential situations, must be introduced, whose purpose might be unresolved throughout several volumes ... Perhaps understandably, only very few critics of the opening volumes showed themselves capable of appreciating that, in reality, quite simple principle.
An essential point to decide, from the opening sentence, was whether to use a first-person or third-person narrative ... I concluded that the first-person narrative was preferable in dodging the artificiality of the invented 'hero', who speaks for the author ...
At a fairly early stage ... I found myself in the Wallace Collection, standing in front of Nicolas Poussin's picture ... A Dance to the Music of Time. An almost hypnotic spell seems cast by this masterpiece on the beholder. I knew all at once that Poussin had expressed at least one important aspect of what the novel must be.
The precise allegory which Poussin's composition adumbrates is disputed. I have accepted the view that the dancing figures ... are the Seasons ... Phoebus drives his horses across the heavens; Time plucks the strings of his lyre.
There is no doubt a case ... that the dancers are not easily identifiable as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. They seem no less ambiguous as Pleasure, Riches, Poverty, Work, or perhaps Fame. In relation to my own mood, the latter interpretations would be equally applicable ... The one certain thing is that the four main figures ... are dancing to Time's tune.