Two dates

Thinking about Anthony Powell, and inspired by a comment from yesterday, I was thinking about two significant events that happened when Powell was writing Dance.

The first happened in 1951 when Britain repealed the laws against pagan religion. That's a little staggering for American readers, where religious freedom has been long established, but Britain and her commonwealth countries, it took a lot longer.

Paganism is an odd thing as it it is almost entirely fictional. It draws on superstitions that are real enough but these are merely superstitions and there is no known connection between these superstitions and any known religion. They are just things that unsophisticated and silly people believed not unlike modern urban myths. There is no known connection, for example, between the crazy people who show up at Stonehenge every year and any even remotely credible historical evidence about that site. When someone tries to put these things together and call them a "pagan religion", as has been done to create Wicca for example, they are actually inventing a fiction in the same way that someone would do if they built a "historical" theme park based on urban myths.

Some scholars have argued that it is precisely the oppression of religious freedom that allowed these things to happen.

In any case, Anthony Powell knew one of the more interesting con men behind paganism in Aleister Crowley and a character who will appear later in the series is based on Crowley. It's actually quite a flattering portrait all things considered. That might seem like an odd claim as Dr. Trelawney is an alternatively silly and manipulative man but he is actually nowhere near as embarrassingly fraudulent and morally vapid as the actual Crowley was, as Powell well knew.

I've never been sure where Powell really sat on this.  I'm quite sure he thought it all nonsense but I think he also understood that this stuff was so appealing to people and used it in his fiction.

Although I very confidently said Powell was a "Nietzschean Naturalist" the other day, it is entirely possible that he felt the same way about Nietzsche; that is to say that he recognized the problems with the philosophy but also understood its appeal. If that is true, I may have been reading Powell incorrectly all these years. It wouldn't be the first time I entirely misunderstood some author.

The other date
I've rather gone on about the first date. The other date of note is the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial in 1960. Powell goes on about it at great length in his memoirs and it obviously influenced him.

He, not surprisingly, loved the ridiculous aspects of it. For example, one of the lines used in the trial was "How would you feel if your wife or daughter were to read this?" The point of the questions was to get people to think not in abstract terms but of the impact the book might have on women the men deciding the issue (and they were all men) felt close to.

A brief digression. Everyone knows that Lady Chatterley features an affair between a gardener and Lady Chatterley but very few people actually read it and, of those who try, I would guess that eighty percent never finish because it is one of the most boring novels ever written, quite an achievement given the subject matter. Anyway, it features what is, even by our standards, fairly rough language and a coarse anal sex scene. By the standards of the time, it was definitely not the sort of thing that most people would like to imagine their daughters reading.

Powell particularly appreciated the member of the House of Lords who said he would have "no objections to his wife or his daughter reading Lady Chatterley's Lover but that he would have the strongest possible objections to his gardener reading it". And that sounds like something one of Powell's characters would say doesn't it?

And it, like a lot of jokes, is transgressive. The Lord in question used the joke to admit something everyone knew but didn't like to say. He knew, for example, that if his wife or daughter encountered one of the uses of the C word in Lady Chatterley, neither would need to ask anyone to explain what it meant to them. And everyone knew that good society women sometimes did cheat on their husbands and that good society daughters might just let the gardener have a shot at them by way of accumulating experience. In practice, however, everyone pretended that this sort of thing might happen but was extremely unusual even if this meant not using language that might shock the ladies while at the time acting as if the ladies would not know what this language meant.

Those dirty secrets were something that made debates about obscenity very different back then from what they are now. At the time, obscenity laws were used to maintain a lie. Novelists were not allowed to describe life as everyone knew it was actually lived. As shocking as it may seem to people now, the majority of women getting married in 1951 were probably not virgins.

(One of the big problems with some contemporary social conservatism is that it forgets this. Some conservative Catholics, for example, argue for a return to a period when rank and file Catholics followed Catholic sexual teachings scrupulously. The problem with that is that there is clear evidence that Catholics had stopped doing so in even the most traditionalist cultures in the first half of the  last century. What conservative Catholics imagine as a return to the sexual mores of 1962, would actually me more like going back to 1862.)

Nowadays, this social and moral aspect has disappeared and censorship debates are almost entirely about the competing rights of people to say whatever they want versus the right not to be offended. And we can see this the way our craven politicians and journalists cave in the face of violent thugs who want to ban, for example, Winnie the Pooh's Piglet. The real freedom, the one that matters, is not the freedom to look at pornography, but the freedom to be honest about, as Trollope had it, "the way we live now". That's what the debates of 1930 to 1960 were really about.

(The irony here, by the way, is that by caving to puritanical bullies within Islam we are denying Muslims the very freedoms we treasure so much for ourselves. The people who suffer most from these oppressions are Muslims and so, by pretending to be "sensitive" to the concerns of Muslims, we actually oppress Muslims.)

A final point about the Lady Chatterley trial is that it was held to challenge a 1959 law. It was not a sudden rejection of an ages old censorship but the culmination of a debate about a censorship that was new in the 1930s and that was debated right through the late 1940s and the 1950s.

The 1950s
To get back to Powell, I think one of the things to keep in mind is that while the timeline in the book ultimately goes all the way back to 1913, this is really a book about the 1950s. (In exactly the same way that Mad Men is really about the world of post 9/11.) And, contrary to my earlier views that he was being Nietzschean I now am beginning to wonder if Powell is, as I have also said of Mad Men, writing something not unlike a theodicy; that is to say, a work that does something like explaining the ways of God to men. It was written in a time of considerable social turmoil and one of its purposes is to remind readers that what felt new and threatening in the 1950s really had long roots and was not so scary as it might first appear.

And, if I am right, that is a very different sort of project from either A la recherche du temps perdu or Brideshead Revisited. Both of those books represent an attempt to work through a problem and solve it. Powell is much more of a Tory. You might say that his project is more like what Wittgenstein was doing in philosophy; that it was to remind us that what seem like new problems are actually old acquaintances  and that they don't need to be "solved".