A Dance to the Music of Time

There are some books that you would only want to read once; War and Peace, say, or Jordan’s Autobiography…  Then there are others that you find yourself returning to time and again. I think I’ll leave RF Delderfield for another day, before we get too middlebrow (he’s very good though – never be ashamed to read what you enjoy), so, today we’re going to talk about Anthony Powell’s masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time.

I touched briefly on the Dance yesterday whilst looking at Julian Maclaren-Ross.  It’s a couple of years since I read it, but just thinking about X Trapnel brought the whole work swimming back t the foreground of my mind.  If you take Patrick O’Brian as Britain’s Homer (don’t panic, I’ll get round to justifying that at some point), then Powell has a fair claim to being our Proust.  The Dance is nothing so much as a conversation sustained over 12 novels.  Plot arcs are leisurely to the point of rendering themselves invisible, characters appear, start to get interesting, then vanish for a couple of books – or occasionally permanently. You could read one constituent volume as a novel in itself, but to be honest I can’t think why you’d want to; the whole thing would be far too confusing.

The sequence takes its name from the painting of the same name by Poussin, which hangs in the Wallace Collection and details the march of time through the seasons of life (if you haven’t been to the Wallace Collection, go immediately – it’s round the back of Selfridges in Manchester Square and is probably the only collection in the world that splits its catalogue down the middle between Old Masters and armour…..).  At one point in the Dance, Powell has his narrator and a colleague looking down from a window at the War Office on some workmen taking a break around a brazier.  Their movements as they circle the fire seem almost choreographed, a though they are taking part unconsciously in some great performance.

Powell’s great achievement then was to replicate the rhythms of life, through the eyes of his narrator, Nick Jenkins.  Jenkins is an odd device, clearly based on Powell himself; we learn very little about his close relationships (his marriage and wife are described very lightly), he simply stumbles through life from school to late middle age whilst things happen around him.  It is the vast supporting cast that repays the effort of reading.

Whole theses could probably be written about the monstrous character of Kenneth Widmerpool – by the end he is almost the star; did Powell intend this from the start? However I must say that I have never been too concerned with the story of his rise and ultimate fall.  The really interesting figures are the composer Hugh Moreland (drawn from Constant Lambert), and the tragicomic figure of Ted Jeavons.

Coming to the sequence for the first time can be pretty daunting – after all, one is essentially signing up for 12 volumes on spec, knowing that if you give up at any point before the end there won’t be any satisfying conclusions.  It’s also not helped by the first novel, “A Question of Upbringing,” is pretty heavy going (and ostensibly a “school story” qua Jennings or Mike and Psmith – if you come to it at the age of, say, 15, you are going to be disappointed).  Indeed, Powell takes a couple of volumes to really hit his stride, but by No3, “The Acceptance World,” it should have become clear to most readers what he is trying to do and they’re likely to want to stick with it.  Books 4-9 , taking Jenkins through the 1930s and the Second World War, are probably the best, but I do have a soft spot for No10, “Books Do Furnish a Room,” which deals with the early post-war period and literary London.

The only let down is the conclusion (no spoilers).  Book 12, “Hearing Secret Harmonies” does rather jar with what has come before.  I think this is because for the first time Powell is not writing about the past – Jenkins has caught him up and he is writing about the contemporary world.  The main characters that sustained the previous eleven volumes are perforce dead/dying off, and their children are carrying more of the action.  Powell unfortunately doesn’t really get the age of Aquarius, and his descriptions of proto-hippies are worryingly off-beam. Particularly hard to grasp is the end of Widmerpool.

Having said all that, the faults must be taken in the context of the whole (“the essence of the all is the god-head of the true,” as Dr Trelawney might have had it), and for the most part what you have got in the Dance is a window into the mind of the mid-20^thcentury man, living with him his loves and friendships, seeing what made him, and how he will continue being made as hid life goes on.

If Powell had been killed in the war (he served with the Welch Regiment and in military intelligence), he would probably have been remembered as an author of “Bright Young Things” fiction, along the lines of early Waugh or Huxley.  That he survived is English fiction’s immense gain – next time you’re in the Wallace Collection, seek out the painting, stand a while, and wonder.

London

London.  Sooner or later we were always going to have to talk about London, that teeming agglomeration of places you wouldn’t want to live that casts its baleful eye over the rest of the country and looks for fresh prey.  It started with Middlesex, most beautiful and unassuming of counties, despoiled beyond recognition – what price Betjeman’s “rural Rayner’s Lane” now? – and then began work on the people and places further afield, sucking talent and opportunity away from the rest of the country in its insatiable lust for commerce.

Of course, there are nicer parts, Wimbledon is generally lovely; Soho has a mystique all its own; but for every place you’d want to live there’re two where you’d only exist.  Most of west London, for example, for which the best that can be said is that the house prices aren’t as bad as Fulham; or Angel/Islington, that weird combination of Guardian reading public school luvvies and Telegraph reading public school lawyers and city types – not that you could put a cigarette paper between them.  Or Stoke Newington: about as “edgy” these days as Bloomsbury was in the 1890s.

London has always been a graveyard of hopes and dreams, but this has occasionally led to great art – as poverty, in a clichéd fashion, sometimes does.  Patrick Hamilton has been experiencing something of a renaissance lately, his chronicles of lower middle and upper working class London life in the interwar period (most notably “Hangover Square” or the trilogy “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky”) perhaps chiming with the uncertainties and economic hardships of our own time. 

Hamilton, of course, was an uneven writer – his star burned brightly enough to begin with, and reached its zenith with “The Slaves of Solitude,” before beginning the long slide into mediocrity with the Gorse trilogy (the last volume of which, “Unknown Assailant,” is probably only worth reading for the sake of completeness; the reader is long past caring about the story or the character).

Then there’s Julian Maclaren-Ross. You’ve probably come across Maclaren-Ross, even if you haven’t realised it. He was the template for the self destructing idiot writer; a prototype for the sort of chap (other than himself) that Cyril Connolly had in mind when he wrote “Enemies of Promise.” He was also the model for X Trapnel, far and away the most intriguing character in Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” If you haven’t read this sequence, then go and do so immediately – for Trapnel’s appearances you want volumes 10, 11, and 12, respectively – or, for the York Notes crib, just watch Sean Baker’s brilliant portrayal in the Channel 4 adaptation from the late 1990s.

JM-R was, in truth, a bit of an oddball.  A somewhat peripatetic childhood in France, and broken schooling, eventually saw him washed up in pre-war London.  He didn’t really trouble the literary world over much until towards the end of the Second World War when, managing to extricate himself from the army, who were probably as glad to see the back of him as he was then, he became a fixture of the Soho scene.  Reading his excellent “Memoirs of the Forties” is like having a front row seat in a parade of mid 20^th century British greats.  Waugh is there, as is Betjeman (both of whom were admirers of his prose), Orwell, Tambimuttu, Connolly and Horizon magazine….

Maclaren-Ross completed only one “literary” novel (as opposed to some dreadful penny shockers), 1947’s “Of Love and Hunger,” but this alone would be enough to see him occupying a creditable place in the English novelist’s second XI.  I’ll be honest that it probably doesn’t sound totally promising when I say it’s about a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman in 1930s Brighton, but it speaks eloquently of lost love, drudgery, hardship and heartbreak. Much as with Waugh, the bad end unhappily and the good even more so, but it is crystal clear prose that you can lose yourself in.  Possibly the only comparable prose stylist working today is Edward St Aubyn.

The chief glory of the JM-R oeuvre, however, is the short stories.  You can still pick up first and second editions reasonably cheaply, but they have been collected into a couple of volumes that are easily available on Amazon, notably “Selected Stories” and “Bitten by the Tarantula.” These demonstrate Maclaren-Ross’ pitch perfect ear for dialogue, particularly the army stories, which limn with devastating accuracy the predicament of the over intellectual under achiever conscripted into the machine of total war. Then there’re the peppery ex colonials, the young men on the make, and a cast of grotesque suburbanites and central London bohemians.  He was on to a good thing and, during the war when there was a hunger for reading material of all types, literary magazines were booming in the publishing mainstream, and the short story was enjoying its last hurrah as an artistic form, he made absolute hay.

Maclaren-Ross was however afflicted with Sohoitis in a big way – Tambimuttu’s term for spending all one’s time in the pubs of Soho and never getting any work done. He spent periods of time sleeping rough, suffered psychotic episodes (in the grip of one of which he stalked and plotted to murder George Orwell’s widow Sonia), and died much too young in the 1960s. Paul Willetts did an excellent job of bringing him back to life in his 2005 biography “Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia,” which is heartily recommended. 

I thought about Maclaren-Ross as I sat in the bar of the Fitzroy Tavern the other week.  Sam Smiths have managed to keep the place looking appropriately unmodernised, and it was easy to imagine the man in the dark glasses and the teddy bear overcoat, wielding his swordstick and knocking back the  drinks as he kept the hordes of hangers on entertained before going home to get on the Benzedrine and write until dawn in his miniscule handwriting.  Essays, reviews, short stories, parodies, begging letters to the Royal Literary Fund….  For a short time London came alive again, and its depressing descent into plastic consumerism was arrested.  The provinces have had their literary hymners too, Priestley say, or Francis Brett-Young.  But it is perhaps appropriate that the chronicler of 20^th century London should have been so heroically underachieving.

Julian Maclaren-Ross, then, in the words of Paul Willetts “a mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent.”

9 Lessons and Carols

Last night we braved the increasingly icy B roads of East Oxfordshire to attend the service of 9 lessons and carols at the village church.  Apart from starting slightly late, it all proceeded pretty quickly (the fastest rendition in recent history of Silent Night being a particular highlight...), but the church was full, and the singing enthusiastic, so perhaps there's hope for the dear old CofE after all.

Sometimes it can feel rather like the world is moving on without us out here in the countryside.  Working so close to London I often hear colleagues talking about the latest restaurant that they have been to, and wonder for a moment if I'm missing out.  I''m not sure we are all that badly off out here though, you just have to work harder to pass the time.

I think the key to it all is evolution, not revolution.  In the same way that we've found ways to cope within the Hunting Act 2004, so too we have to cope with the changing needs of people for entertainment.

9 Lessons and Carols is actually an important symbol of this particularly English genius for evolution.  The CofE has since Cranmer's adaptation of the Daily Offices found time for Evensong, but the whole idea of going to church at night is not so very Anglican.  Neither is the presence of candles in church, now taken for granted, something that would have happened before the late 19th century.  The service was designed by Edward White Benson OE (an interesting chap who I may return to) during his time as first Bishop of Truro, and would have been dismissed, rather like Midnight Mass, as overly Roman had it not spoken to a deep need of the English people.  Today it seems as natural, timeless, and organically English as Cranmer's prose.

Happy Christmas