The Widmerpools and the fall of Anthony Powell

I'm on the 11th of the twelve books in The Dance to the Music of Time. I picked it up as soon as I finished Proust.

Powell was a lot better than he gets credit for. That said, something goes wrong in the final season of the novel. (Dance is a novel made up of twelve volumes which are further organized into four seasons of three books each.) It's brilliant up until the end of book 9, The Military Philosophers. Book 10, Books Do Furnish a Room, falls off the standard Powell had maintained to that point but not so much that you don't hope Powell can pull it back together. Book 11, Temporary Kings, proves that hope groundless but remains a pleasant read even if not up to Powell's earlier standards. And then, disaster; Book 12, Hearing Secret Harmonies, is just awful.

An acquaintance of mine who has taught courses on, published articles and supervised theses written about Powell and Dance is of the opinion that Powell "went crazy" just before writing the final volume. Part of his anger is simply disappointment and part of it no doubt stems from having invested some of his academic career in what seemed a promising work only to have it not pay off.

It could be argued that it doesn't matter that much that the series lets down towards the end. As with Proust, you don't have to read the whole work to get a lot of good reading. You can stop after Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (my favourite) or The Military Philosophers and have a pretty satisfactory experience. Powell had also done very valuable work in influencing Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin and English anti-modernism generally, which alone is enough for us to remain forever grateful to him.

I suspect Powell's reputation would stand far higher today of he had managed, like Proust, to die before finishing. If he had left nothing but a sketch of the final two or three books, thereby inadvertently creating conceptual art, we would no doubt convince ourselves that a satisfying conclusion was possible (something that I think does happen with Proust) much the way we can look at a faded picture or listen to a beat up Edison cylinder and imagine how good it would be if only we had "the real thing".

So what goes wrong? There are a number of things.

1. The Lemon Girl has long been of the opinion that Pamela Widmerpool is one of the big problems with the later novels. I think that is right. She is a very real character. So real that all Powell's contemporaries had no trouble identifying Barbara Skelton as the model for Pamela Widmerpool. Ms. Skelton herself saw the similarity and took it with far more good humour than anyone familiar only with the character based on her would guess. The point of all that seeming digression being that, whatever is wrong with Pamela Widmerpool it isn't that she isn't a convincing character.

What I think is wrong with her is that Barbara/Pamela, however intriguing she might have been in real life, wasn't a good model for a character in a novel. And I think I know why because I was once in a long relationship with a fantastically promiscuous, careless and often cruel woman not unlike Pamela Widmerpool. Several times I've thought of using her in fiction—on the grounds that after all the suffering the bitch put me through, I should be able to make a little art and maybe money out of her with an easy conscience. I've always ended up giving up and this because a character like hers can't really go anywhere. She just is what she is and that is the end of the story. Any redemption would require her to betray her very being and to have her face some sort of downfall would be devoid of feeling because no one could feel much fear or pity at the fate of such a woman.

2. Which brings to Kenneth Widmerpool, whom Pamela marries. Widmerpool is unquestionably the greatest strength of the novel. Take him out of it and it would be a vastly diminished; so much so as to be not worth reading. That is quite a trick in that he is never a likeable character. But Widmerpool loses his "charm" towards the end.

I put the word in scare quotes because Widmerpool is not easy to like. From the beginning, one of the defining characteristics of Widmerpool is precisely that he isn't liked. And I think most people know someone like him at school—a boy or girl who is disliked for not-very-good reasons and yet somehow seems to be shaped by this unwarranted dislike into becoming genuinely difficult to like. (In Widmerpool's case, he came to school with the "wrong" type of overcoat.) And it is a lingering sense that maybe he might redeem himself that comes from this makes Widmerpool so intriguing. Right up until the war's end, you hope that he might change. After that there is no hope.

At which point, Powell saddles him with Barbara Skelton/Pamela.

3.  A related problem with the final volume is that it ends in 1971. Why is that a problem? Because it was written in 1975. Compare that with the opening volume, published in 1951 and concerned with an era some thirty years previous and you'll begin to see the problem. Powell simply didn't have enough distance and time to adequately assess the 1960s before writing about it.

He, like some lame NPR documentary on the 1960s, gets bogged down with a lot of stuff that seemed important at the time but proved to be much less so in the long run. In retrospect, the perspective we see in Mad Men—mostly focused on the world of business and family rather than rock and roll, drugs and the counterculture—gives a much better account of what the 1960s were really about than Powell's to-much-caught-up-with-the-fads-of-the-era account.

4. That feeds into the final, and I think most important, problem with the series. Powell simply never had an adequate philosophical framework to build the novel around. This seems quite forgivable to me: after all who could? Proust didn't either and anyone who really believes that time is in any sense regained is just shallow. The notion, entertained by both Powell and Proust, that a novelist has something useful to say about life in general as opposed to one particular era they happened to experience is about as perfect an example of hubris as you will ever find. Widmerpool's end is unsatisfying because too much depends on it.

What could he have done? The Dance, like British literature generally, struggles as soon as it begins to deal with events after the close of the second world war. British writers had grown up in a powerful and influential nation that dominated the English speaking world culturally, especially in high culture. This was suddenly all over. The election of the Labour Crapweasels after the war was an act of desecration of a once great culture comparable to what would have happened to Mother Theresa's legacy had her successors offered one of her hospices for use a season of Jersey Shore.

Writers who lived through this transition tended either to become bitter (Graham Greene, John le Carré,  Harold Pinter) or a comic to the point of being a little surreal (Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Tom Stoppard). Powell attempts to be cool and objective and does a better job than anyone else I can think of in doing so but bits off a big chunk in doing so. The problem isn't that he wasn't capable of it but that he should have focused much more time and effort on it. That falling of a great nation should have been the central theme. I think he might have done a much better job of it had he focused the final three novels on the period from 1945-1963 and wrapped the story up around something tragicomic like the Profumo Affair instead of trying to say something about the 1960s too.

Books worth reading again

I've written about this before. There ares some books that are wonderful first time through but whose real greatness lies in subsequent readings.

I'm well into Anthony Powell's Dance just now reaching the end of volume three, The Acceptance World. This is not my second but probably my fourth, fifth or sixth time through. I haven't kept track. The last time I read it, I remembered feeling a  slight superiority to Powell. Now, like Twain joked about his father, I'm amazed at how much the old guy has learned in the last decade.

And I have to keep reading because there is stuff I need to follow through. There is, for example, a party at which people play Planchette, an occult parlour game related to the Ouija board. Anyway, the board spells out some sentences that deeply upset young Quiggin, a materialist, in fact Marxist, present. But here is the thing: someone has to have fixed the game but who? I'm leaning towards Jimmy Strippling right now, mostly because it would be highly unexpected of him. But who knows. It may be that the question never gets answered—Powell does that a lot. Then again, maybe it's all spelled out in the text and I've just forgotten. It seems like it might be important right now.

I also keep thinking about Hubert Duggan who, as I've commented before, was fictionalized in very different ways by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Having recently experimented with trying to let real life characters inspire fictional ones, I was amazed at how hard it is to do. The real life of the character is always standing there as a challenge saying, "but he did cheat on his girlfriend" or "but she didn't change for the better". I always used to think that people who drew characters on real life models were being lazy but it's actually much harder than you would guess.

I'm going to put him aside briefly after I finish this volume, and go read Lawrence Durrell (an author who gets progressively less impressive on subsequent reading, at least to me). I'm doing this for research reasons

Before moving on

Of the many overlapping details between the first volume of Dance and Brideshead, one of the most fascinating is Hubert Duggan.

Hubert Duggan was a real guy and he was the source of two characters who don't seem to have that much in common at first glance. Anthony Powell, drawing on his school days, made him the basis of Charles Stringham. Evelyn Waugh, drawing more heavily on his later years and death, made him the model for Lord Marchmain. Duggan's death featured a final visit from a priest (brought by Evelyn Waugh over the objections of others) with results very much like what we see in Brideshead.

It's fascinating to me that the model for Sebastian's father was actually a boy the same age as him.

What definitely is true of both Stringham and Lord Marchmain is there their charm and likability. Both light up the page when they appear. Even later when, well I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but even later when things have changed, Stringham is a man you'd like to associate with.

Some readers may be relieved to know that that is the probably the end of comparisons between the two books. The next volume in the Powell series, A Buyer's Market, goes off in a very different direction and the two worlds never cross again.

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.

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".

Changing partners

Reading Powell's Dance (yes, I am getting dangerously close to blogging it) I found a wonderful sentence. Nick is visiting Peter Templer and another guest named Lady McReith sweeps him up to demonstrate some dance moves (the first mention of actual dancing in the book). Here is how he describes it:

Up to that moment I had found her almost embarrassingly difficult to deal with as a fellow guest: now the extraordinary smoothness with which she glided across the polished boards, the sensation that we were holding each other close, and yet, in spite of such proximity, she remained aloof and separate, the pervading scent with which she drenched herself, and, above all, the feeling that this offered something further, some additional and violent assertion of the will, was—almost literally—intoxicating.

I think there are three, maybe four, interesting points here.

1. I love the expression "almost literally". Technically, "literally" has a toggle meaning. It either is or is not literal. The expression "almost literally" shouldn't have any meaning but it does. I know what it means even though I couldn't define it.
2. This passage goes to the very centre of Powell's purpose in writing the novel. It is as clear and concrete an example as he might give of someone who was not a partner of Nick's in any meaningful way up until now can become a partner with a shift of context. 
3. Note the Nietzschean language here: "some additional and violent assertion of the will". It's important to see, as we read Powell, just how incredibly important Nietzsche is to him.
4. A half point: notice the lovely, long, periodic sentences that Powell writes. This is an art that has almost been lost. People sometimes praise a writer like Cormac McCarthy for his long sentences but those sentences are "in fact, clumsy run-on sentences or massive lists.  Powell writes beautiful, graceful sentences that feel easy and natural (this stuff reads aloud beautifully) but are actually the result of very impressive art on his part.

Powell and Waugh on first loves

Reading the beginning of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time last night I found an interesting example of Powell using a similar metaphor to one that Waugh uses to speak of early experiences of sexual love BUT, and this is fascinating, even in using the similar metaphor to describe the same thing the two novelists are clearly headed in different directions.

Here is Powell first. Peter Templer has just returned from London where he has had sex with a woman he picked up on the street and he has told Nick and Charles about this adventure that he has had and they have not. And Powell has Nick use the metaphor of a door opening to describe his feelings about it.

This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if sounds of a far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before.

These are young men, in the last years of high school in our terms, and the image of the door is meant to signify a leaving behind of the cloistered days of youth and entering the public world of adulthood—a particularly powerful image given that they are sharing tea in their private room at what Powell has described as the "medieval closes" of Eton as Nick experiences this moment. For Powell, sex is the ticket to admission to a ballroom full of shouting and music.

If we compare this with Waugh's use of the mysterious-door-now-open in describing how Charles reacts to meeting Sebastian for the first time, we can see the same metaphor used towards describing sexual experience toward a different end.

... I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find the low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Here the door opens on a  secret world of intimate love. A love that opens, not on and adult world of shouting and music, but on a secret garden that is like a new kind of childhood. A secret intimacy that contains intimations of a connection with God—"Suffer the little children to come unto me".

And the obvious question for our private reflections here is which of these two most closely corresponds to my experience of sexual love? Was sex for me a way to leave behind a protected world of childhood and enter into the risky rewards of adulthood? Or was it the way into a secret, intimate world of naughtiness that in some ways recreated childhood? Or was it one and then the other? Or was it one and, looking back, I wish it had been the other?

I would never discuss the answers to those questions publicly but they strike me as very important questions.


PS: I know some of you will wondering about a certain famous book about an enclosed garden. Well, Evelyn Waugh was just eight years old the year Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden was published. I have no idea whether or not he read it as a child but you do have to suspect he did.

Anthony Powell

I picked up A Dance to the Music of Time again. This has long been a favourite. It's twelve volumes long though so I don't think I'll blog my way through it (not this year anyway). But there were a couple of things in the opening that I think fascinating.

The first of these is the quality of the opening. This book is often compared to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Waugh Brideshead Revisited. The comparison to Waugh irked Powell a bit because, while the content and style of his book is very similar to what Waugh wrote, his aim was very different. Waugh wrote in classic English novel style—a book with a beginning, middle and end leading up to a happy ending  (of a sort)—while Powell is a pagan through and through; his philosophy is what I call "Nietzschean Naturalism". It's plot runs in cycles with the same sorts of things happening over and over again.

Anyway, the thing that hits me every time I pick it up is this, Powell's opening is perfect. Really, if you are a writer or a fan of writing, you should do yourself a favour and read the first ten pages of volume one (it's called A Question of Upbringing). I think that Proust and Waugh outstrip Powell over the long haul but neither of them wrote an opening anywhere near this good.

One of the brilliant things Powell does is the way he introduces the character named "Widmerpool". Kenneth Widmerpool is Powell's greatest creation but it's rarely noted that Powell meant him to be. When Verdi needed a popular song for the Duke to sing in Rigoletto he sat down and wrote one. Some people can do that. Mozart could also say, "I'm going to write a popular song," and then just do it. Beethoven couldn't. Anyway, that is what Powell does he. He decided to create an unforgettable character and then he just did it. Amazing.

The third thing that hits me about the opening is something that will be familiar to anyone who followed the Brideshead Revisited thread here. The following is an extended bit of dialogue from the opening, see if you can figure out what is going on. The first speaker is a guy named Charles Stringham. He is telling Nicholas Jenkins something another boy named Peter Templer told him about Widmerpool:

'As we walked past the fives courts, Templer remarked: "I'm glad that ass Widmerpool fielded a banana with his face." I asked why he did not like him—for after all there is little harm in the poor old boy—and it turned out that it was Widmerpool who got Akworth sacked.'

Stringham paused to allow this statement to sink in, while he arranged the sausages in a new pattern. I could not recall clearly what Akworth's story had been: though I remembered that he had left the school under a cloud soon after my arrival there, and that various rumours regarding his misdoings had been current at the time.

'Akworth tried to set his room on fire, didn't he? Or did he steal everything that not nailed down?'

'He may well have done both,' said Stringham; 'but he was principally shot out for sending a note to Peter Templer. Widmerpool intercepted the note and showed it to Le Bas. I must admit that it was news to me when Peter told me.

'And that was why Peter had taken against Widmerpool?'

'Not only that but Widmerpool got hold of Peter and gave him a tremendous jaw on morals.'

I'll stop there but it goes on a while and every bit of it is magnificent.

It's very inside writing. "The school" for example: Powell tells us the style of architecture and describes the nearby town and the gasworks but never gives it a name. We're just to know that it's Eton.

And the note. That's a fascinating detail don't you think? No one gets thrown out of school for sending notes. It's what's in the note that does it. But what's in it? Something immoral. I know, I know, not with the boys with boys sex again and, well, sorry, but that is what it is but it's played so subtly you could easily miss it.

Great stuff and I recommend it highly.

Extra Brideshead bonus
Do you  remember Olive Banks whom Cordelia was devoting a decade of her daily rosary too? Charles asked about her and Cordelia explained:

'She [Olive] was bunked from the convent last term. I don't quite know what for. Reverend Mother found something she'd been writing.

We might also remember that Anthony brings the very same charge against Sebastian as Templer does against Widmerpool above:

'I left under what is called  cloud, you know—I can't think why it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light; the process involved a series of harrowing interviews with m' tutor. It was disconcerting to find out how observant that mild old man proved to be. The things he knew about me, which I though no one—except possibly Sebastian—knew. It was a lesson never to trust mild old men—or charming school boys; which?

The school in question is also Eton. It's amazing what comes along with a first class education. In any case, it doesn't reflect very well on Sebastian does it?