Thursday, January 13, 2011

Volume 1 finished

I got to the end of A Question of Upbringing last night. One thing about A Dance to the Music of Time is that while it may be twelve volumes long, the volumes aren't nearly as long as Proust. Powell's twelve volumes take up the same amount of space on my shelf as four of Proust's seven volumes do.

I don't know Dance nearly as well as I know Brideshead so I couldn't presume to got at it in anything like the same depth. I'm also feeling a little humbled at how much I missed on previous readings.

The first time I read it I was a teenager and I found Dance on my parents' shelves. For some reason they didn't own volume one so I was about half way through when I went back to find the first. There were only ten volumes published at the time and my parents had lost interest somewhere around the sixth volume so that was where their collection stopped. I went to that first volume expecting to find certain things—I particularly hoped for more about Oxford—and I was disappointed by what I did find.

Reading it this time, I was staggered at how much I missed.

For example, the book opens with a reference back to an imagined classical past. And then a little later, Stringham quotes the poem "Heraclitus" to Le Bas and Le Bas says,
'... Very Good. In fact, alpha plus. It has all the same note of nineteenth century nostalgia for a classical pas largely of their own imagining.'
 So we already have one layer upon another. Our narrator has compared his remembering his school days to an imagined vision of the classical past.

There are even more layers for "Heraclitus" was written William Johnson Cory who was a former master at Eton who was famous for his teaching and for what his students went on to do in life. Le Bas obviously attempts to imitate him and we see this when he shows up at Oxford to visit Nick at the end. It's a cruel scene as Powell plays it with poor Le Bas barely able to remember anything important about his former students.

So what can and cannot be trusted about the memories here? From the perspective of 1951, the 1920s were very much a distant past largely of people's imagination.

Brideshead similarities
Because it covers so much of the same stuff, there are resemblances to stuff that happens in Brideshead. We have a slippery don named Sillery who resembles Mr. Samgrass. For what it is worth (not much I would guess), Wikipedia insists that Sillery is not based on Maurice Bowra but allows that many people thought he was.

What is fascinating for our purposes is that Powell has Nick see him as a kind of Tiresias, a hermaphrodite figure who can emphasize a male or female part of his character to different people.

Finally, for now, there is a car ride wherein two tarty girls are picked up that ends in a crash. The police are not involved but it marks a clear turning point in the characters' lives. Again, though, Powell is moving out to new discoveries. Waugh focuses on loss and intimacy. It's fascinating to see two writers using a very similar, almost identical, set of childhood experiences to achieve very different ends.

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