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

Marchout Already

The other day, I realised that I was old - either that or that my friends were too young.  It wasn't just my thirty first birthday, but that I found myself having to explain to two separate people who Ocean Colour Scene are...

If you were anywhere near Birmingham in the mid 90s it would have been inconceivable that anyone would not have known OCS, probably personally.  London had Blur, Manchester had Oasis, Liverpool, God help them, had Cast...., we had Ocean Colour Scene.  And they were visible.  It wasn't just their appearance playing The Day We Caught the Train on Top of the Pops, or The Riverboat Song belting out every time TFI Friday came on, but you had a good chance of running into them down the pub - either the Flapper (behind Symphony Hall), or the Tap & Spile off Broad Street.  OCS had a national profile, but largely only one that involved being attacked by the NME as purveyors of "Dad-rock."  Thank you, Steven Wells...  They sold out arenas though, because away from the press the UK is not short of people with taste - or, at least it wasn't - in the era of the X Factor frankly who knows....

Britpop has been accused of many things, probably most accurately of being a magpie genre; nicking a riff here and a middle 8 there and putting them together to create something less than the sum of its parts.  At least OCS had the intelligence and taste to raid the back catalogues of some minor heroes - where Oasis spent their time listening to the Beatles, Birmingham's finest had immersed themselves in the back catalogue of the Small Faces and supped deep at the well of Northern Soul and the Wigan Casino.

On Friday night I took myself off to the Oxford Academy to see a band I last saw playing at the NEC to a crowd of about 20,000 in 1998.  Timing to a perfection so as to miss the support act, I'd just got my first pint by the time they wandered on stage and struck up the first half of the set, which would see the seminal 1996 album Moseley Shoals played in its entirety.  It was like being 16 again.

Simon Fowler always did have one of the most bell clear and distincttive voices of the 90s, and it hasn't suffered at all over the last decade - demonstrating a note perfect musical sensibility on everything from Robin Hood to Get Blown Away, and a storming, vocal chord tearing, rendition of Day Tripper at the end.

Steve Cradock demonstrated once again his claim to be one of the most technically proficient guitarists working in the UK, although it has to be said that the absence in live performance of the "5th member of the band", 90s producer Brendan Lynch, meant that the sound lacked some of the distinctive tape loops and squelch which typified Moseley Shoals and Marchin' Already.

Oscar Harrison was great on drums, and they really don't miss ex-bassist Damon Minchella.  Great night all round really...

So, Ocean Colour Scene, then, poets of the Birmingham suburbs and small West Midlands towns; champions of the underdog; backing band by appointment to Paul Weller; and still standing.  More importantly, still marching....

And where are the Undertones now then NME?  In fact who even reads the NME these days....?

Notes on A Canterbury Tale

Given that it's the weekend, and a Sunday afternoon no less, I thought it would be worth writing up a matinee film...

Last week I looked at the Powell and Pressburger masterpiece "I Know Where I'm Going!" - I've had a couple of requests to give "Peeping Tom" the treatment, but today I'd rather re-examine their earlier wartime film "A Canterbury Tale."

ACT is in many ways a troubling film - it's clearly a lyrical hymn to England and a certain type of Englishness, but at the same time there is a definite undercurrent which, whilst not quite sinister, is somehow not quite as innocent as it might look either.

The plot is on the face of it quite slight, 3 modern day pilgrims waylaid on their way to Canterbury and forced to spend some time in the fictional town of Chillingbourne.  While there, Alison, a land girl, has an encounter with the Glue Man, a local figure notorious for pouring glue into the hair of village girls.  The rest of the film follows their efforts to unmask the culprit, before they head to Canterbury to complete their pilgrimage in different ways - either to receive a blessing, or, in the case of the Glue Man, to do penance.

It is the direction and cinematography of the film, as so often with P&P, that is the real glory, however.  The opening, where a swooping hawk is transformed into a diving Spitfire somewhere over the Kentish weald is rightly famous, but it is outclassed completely shortly before the end with a wonderful sequence where Alison walks through the bombed out streets of Canterbury - one of the great P&P moments.  There is a propaganda function to the film no doubt, of the gentler "Britain can take it" type rather than the more full on how-to-kill-a-German-invader that you might see in for example Cavalcanti's "Went the Day Well," but there's also something else; something far more interesting.

A Canterbury Tale is a celluloid record of an England that has utterly vanished.  The early scenes around the village, in the timber yard, the wheelwright's shop, or up on the weald, are straight out of Stanley Baldwin's idealised England, short only of the plough team coming over the hill.  In many ways, this part of the film unconsciously presages Ronald Blythe's much later literary work "Akenfield," capturing a record of a community unchanged for centuries being turned upside down by the rapid pace of technological change (in this case the arrival of Bren gun carriers and the United States Army in their quiet corner of a near mythic Albion).

Of course, it was never quite like that, but watching ACT it is difficult not to believe that well within living memory we were closer to John of Gaunt's demi-Eden than we are now.   I defy you to watch the mock battle between the gangs of local children without feeling an immense sadness and nostalgia for something that we've never known, and which probably never was.  Perhaps that's what gets to the heart of what's unsettling about ACT - it holds up a mirror to the English sense of self, to the hopes and fears of a nation at war, and yet is still relevant to the current generation of English men and women.  I  shows our country as we would like to imagine it, whilst pointing out the flaws with that dream.  At the same time, it holds out a tremendous sense of hope, of optimism, and the feeling that miracles really can happen to deserving people (and the undeserving).

A final word on the acting performances - all are competent (and the future Mrs Richard Attenborough is particularly luminous as Alison), but I want to say something very particular about Sergeant John Sweet, an amateur actor loaned fron the US Army.  Given that his entire acting career essentially was this film, he puts in a controlled performance well beyond what ought to be expected of someone of his experience, and he just doesn't get the credit that he should in my view.  Quite a talent there, that was never really followed up.

If this was just a hymn to P&P, I could wax lyrical about how they got around the fact that Pressburger (as an enemy alien), was refused permission to travel to Canterbury, leading to the construction of a replica of the cathedral interior at Denham studios just to get round the problem.  And about how that bleends seemlessly with genuine shots so that you would never have noticed the join if you hadn't been told.

But it's more than a hymn to P&P, it's a hymn to England.

Why Speed 2?

Just occasionally, you get caught on the horns of a dilemma.  Being naturally fairly pro-rail, and pro-countryside, I'm a bit torn about what to make of High Speed Two.  Add in the fact that I live on the route (or at least very near to it), and you'll start to see why it's difficult.

First the problems - and they exist on both sides.  I wonder about the charge of Nimbyism, given the outstanding beauty of the Chilterns, but there's got to be at least a small dose of it around, because that would only be natural.  On the other hand, the Pro campaign haven't really handled their case all that well either.

The strongest argument that the Pros have in their arsenal is also the most provocative - but at the same time incredibly divisive.  Northern jobs are worth more than southern lawns.  I'm sorry, but I've got a lot of time for that if it really is that much of a zero sum.  I just haven't seen too much evidence that it is actually the case.  Having said that, saying that you're going to cut x minutes off the London-Birmingham time  isn't that strong. 

I get the impression that the only reason that argument was ever trotted out is that segment is all they can afford to build in phase 1.  HS2 has got nothing to do with reducing the London-Birmingham journey time, and everything to do with decreasing how long it takes to travel between say Leeds and London.  That's something that I can buy into, but it demands a level of vision and long term funding commitment that probably isn't there.

The other problem with HS2 is that it's essentially bipolar - it's great if you want to travel from A-Z but no good at all if you want to go to any of the places from B to Y.  All the compromise plans that suggest going via Heathrow, or ask "why can't we have a station for our town?" are heroically missing the point of High Speed rail.  You either totally go for the idea of mass rapid transit between cities, or you don't bother.

Of course, we did once have an alternative north south high speed rail link, the Great Central route out of St Pancras to Sheffield via Nottingham; but inevitably that was closed....

I do wonder though if there are other lines that we ought to be thinking about reopening first.  You could start with almost anything in the United Kingdom that runs east-west.  Given that the old Oxford-Cambridge line practically goes across the bottom of my garden I suppose I ought to be against it reopening, but, you know what? It would make a lot of sense, and potentially open up a new corridor for investment from Oxford to Cambridge via Bletchley, Milton Keynes and Bedford.  Now, there's an idea.  At the same time, there's the Waverley route up in the borders and Oxford-Cheltenham via Witney - all useful lines that I'd feel happier about investing in putting back.

Quainton Road - should we put the services back here in Bucks first before worrying about HS2?

I'd like to support HS2, I'm just not sure that it makes sense at this time, and on the terms outlined by the current plan.  I'm keeping an open mind, but east-west is at least as important as north-south - it's just that we don't have the lobby power in the west...

Summer in Stanley

In the post on I Know Where I'm Going, I described it as portraying an utterly vanished way of life. That's not quite true - if you want to really get back to the England of the past, then you could always try the Falklands. You would also be visiting the Falklands of the 21st century, which is somewhere you really shouldn't miss....



One of the benefits of spending a bit of time in the navy is the opportunity to see a few places that are further off the beaten track than many people get to go, and not having to pay for it! I'd always wanted to get down to these remote islands at the bottom of the world, and when I finally got there they more than lived up to expectations.



In many ways, it's more like the Western Isles than the Western Isles are - similar latitude, geology, weather (and in many ways people); but with a distinctive history and character like nowhere else on earth.

We might as well get the war out of the way early on. You ought to visit the battlefields, particularly Tunbledown, to get an idea of the conditions and terrain of that bleak little conflict in 1982 in which so many on both sides died. There's a good little museum in Stanley, with some heartbreaking artefacts from the conflict, including notes passed from Argentinean conscripts to the curfewed islanders asking for food.



But there's much more to the islands than a war that occupied only a few months in one year. Penguins, obviously, which give their name to the excellent local newspaper, the Penguin News, as well as a large number of highly picturesque shipwrecks in the harbour.



We’ll gloss over the massive military complex at Mount Pleasant, because, except for landing there, you won’t be allowed to spend much time at it.  The drive down the road to Stanley is pretty crazy – built on a causeway and unmade, it winds through the boulder strewn countryside down to the coast and is about the only place in the islands where you’ll get your Land Rover out of second gear.  After passing Sapper Hill, you round a bend and the little capital is laid out before you. 



Stanley is an extraordinary place, with a row of terraced houses that wouldn’t look out of place in Coronation Street, and the most southerly Anglican cathedral in the world, complete with whalebone arch.  As there’s a bit of a dearth of natural roofing materials, the north west England look is slightly tempered by the fact that almost every building sports a roof of brightly painted corrugated iron.



The post-war development has seen a suburb growing up towards the racecourse, with flatpack houses shipped down from Scandinavia, lending a slightly surreal touch to the landscape.



Then there are the pubs.  It’s possible to go on a decent crawl around Stanley, from the Upland Goose to the Globe via points in between, finishing up at the Trough nightclub (which was BYO when I went!).  The house band, the Fighting Pigs, weren’t half bad either….

But it’s not all about the “urban” areas.  Outside Stanley, in camp, you’ve got fine upland scenery, scattered settlements, sheep, and some of the best beaches you’ll ever see (Calgary Bay has got nothing on this). The weather is, er, changeable – you can go from sunbathing to putting on the fifth layer in the course of the afternoon, but once you’re down there, you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.  I’d go back tomorrow.



So, the Falklands – it’ll take you 24 hours to get there, but they’re worth the effort.