On a few occasions I spoke harshly to the cat, but speaking harshly did not give the relief—often a false relief—that speaking harshly to a person might have given. In a moment of pique, I even smacked him lightly. And once, when the cat persisted in climbing on the kitchen counter, pawing and sniffing at food, knocking over containers, I screamed loudly, Get away. Get away! Twice, and louder than I had screamed at anyone or anything in years. My scream must have expressed a resentment stored up for some time, all the time I was learning the fabled mysteries of catness, a dormant resentment ready to spring awake and pounce. And then I shut up. Maybe I had gained a measure of self-control since my screaming days, or maybe I grasped, even in my rage, that screaming would do no good: the cat could not understand a surge of bilious words as children would have done. Though now that I think of it, maybe they hadn’t understood either, back then. Anyhow, no satisfaction could be gotten from scolding the cat, not that there is ever much satisfaction in scolding anyone, but somehow the opaque catness of the cat, the way it slunk away as if ashamed not of itself but of me, made that very clear.
I grasped that the presence of any living creature would be a burden to me, except maybe a plant. The least burdened state would be solitude, where I could indulge every arbitrary mood without the slightest thought for its effect on others. But solitude too has its burdens and demands. There is really no easy way to be conscious; that must be why I revere sleep.
I was cool toward the cat after the kitchen counter incident. Not cruel, only cool, again indulging my nature with all its moods. The cat would never tell. The cat might even be seen as practice for indulging my moods in society, for not straining to offer more in the way of kindness or engagement than I am inclined to give. Cat therapy. I was almost afraid to envision how I might behave with people, were I to master too well the lessons of being with the cat. I would rarely consider how others felt or what they needed, until I was abandoned by everyone, left all alone to indulge my arbitrary moods.
After a day or so, I decided this coolness was unworthy of me. The cat was just a cat; it could not help climbing on the counter. (Or could it? Was it purposely provoking me? This is one of the unplumbed mysteries of catness.) It had no moral nature and apparently did not learn from experience; its feelings could be hurt, yes, but it was unwilling or unable to behave well in order to avoid having its feelings hurt. I had no illusion that cause and effect was operative, that shouting would deter him from pawing at food; I did not credit the cat with that much logic or self-control. Even babies do not have that much logic or self-control, though we tend to forget that when rearing them. Anyhow, the cat need not be prepared to get on in life. There were no crucial or obligatory lessons. Treating it well was in no way an investment in the future.
Treating the cat well was a gratuitous act. Living with the cat was living in an eternal present—no history, no patient shaping of connection through accommodation, nor any call for anger and forgiveness. The cat was a cat. I might as well end my coolness and give him the affection he craved. But I felt constrained giving affection I didn’t feel, reasoned affection, so I waited a day or so until my annoyance dissipated and I could give affection in good faith, and we resumed our life in the eternal present.
In the end, I liked the cat best when he sat quietly on my lap and consented to be stroked. But while seemingly contented, he would abruptly leap up to pursue his mysterious business, as arbitrary in his way as I was in mine. Maybe he didn’t like me at all, only used me as a provider of food and strokes. (Or as a mirror?) He must like me a bit, I thought. Probably he both liked me and used me, in very human fashion. We may love others, but they are useful all the same as providers, and it is wisest for both user and used not to measure comparative degrees of love and utility.
I remembered I loved my infants with most ease when they too lay docile on my lap, showing no will and making no abrupt movements. They were safe. Passive receptacles for my affection. I was safe. As soon as they stirred, perhaps to demand of me something unknown, I would feel a faint irritation which only years later I recognized as the mask of panic. As soon as a creature shows itself distinct and self-willed, it begins to determine and shape the nature of the love it seeks. And in turn, the love you give becomes something not entirely of your own shaping and thus dangerous. Was I unable, then, to love anything that had its own being, could I love only an utterly passive creature? If so, my love was arbitrary and self-serving, not so much love of something distinct from me as love of my own act of loving, which is easy, natural, and demands nothing. Self-love.
The cat was becoming a fun-house mirror, alarming me with its unlovely distortions. I turned away. His usefulness was finished. Even so, when our sojourn was over, I missed the cat from the heart. I study photographs of him. In the photographs, there are no reflections of me. I see only the cat himself, large, orange, and beautiful. At last, with him far away and requiring nothing, I can revel in his beauty.
Listening to Powell
YEARS AGO, WORKING AT a temporary job in some godforsaken place, bored and friendless, I spent a while on the phone complaining to an old friend about my plight. When I was finished I paused, hoping for some Delphic utterance about how I might endure until my term came to an end. In the past she had been occasionally oracular. The pause lasted for some time, growing weighty with her anticipated wisdom. Finally she said, “What you need is …”
I waited, taut.
“A VCR.”
Like other oracular utterances, this was puzzling, even disappointing at first. But it turned out to be very smart. I remembered it much later when I found myself again working in exile—luckily not bored and friendless this time, but in a place I didn’t want to be, in a life that didn’t seem my own. My sublet house had a VCR but I had no time to sit in front of it. I needed something for short, intermittent flights from reality. A colleague mentioned listening to books on tape while pacing the treadmill in the gym. Portable. Controllable. Soon I had in my eager hands tapes of the opening volumes of Anthony Powell’s epic twelve-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time. The entire work took up six boxes of tapes, each box holding some ten to a dozen tapes. It was winter. I trudged through the snow in heavy gear and came home to the warm house, the cat that was part of the sublet deal, and the tapes. When I finished listening to one box, I’d seal it up, drop it in the corner mailbox, and phone an 800 number to order the next.
A Dance to the Music of Time, hailed as a twentieth-century British masterpiece, was something I had always intended to read, but I had been daunted by its Proustian magnitude. I thought I had to wait for some endless summer, like the long-ago summer of my youth that I spent with Proust. Anthony Powell’s book turned out to be like Proust in other ways as well: its submission to the rigors and caprices of time, its reliance on memory as a magnetic field, its enormous cast of recurring characters. The comparison has been noted often enough by readers and critics and is alluded to more than once by Powell himself, most memorably when the narrator, serving as an Army liaison officer, realizes that the French seaside town where he’s quartered for the night is none other than Proust’s Balbec.
I had been standing on the esplanade along which … Albertine had strolled into Marcel’s life. Through the high windows of the Grand Hotel’s dining room … was to be seen Saint-Loup, at the same table Bloch, mendaciously claiming acquaintance with the Swanns.
But even though he capitalizes “Time” much of the time, Powell is a Proust minus the fluid poetry and minus the soul. Proust made pragmatic, stripped of metaphysics. Or more precisely, the novel is Proustian with the social world in its broadest sense—lineage, tradition, the tangled web of relationships—inflated and elevated to occupy the place of the metaphysical. Whether society can be successfully made to occupy this place is one challenge of the enterprise, whose true genre is wry social comedy, frequently edging into satire and burlesque.
Proust or no, A Dance to the Music of Time was fine for my purposes. I
wanted something to see me through, something I couldn’t see the end of. In the very first moments of listening, as I heard the words of the second paragraph (though of course I couldn’t know it was the second paragraph), I knew I’d found my salvation:
For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world, … of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape.
Here was an alternate world in which I could live, and for a long time indeed.
I shouldn’t give the impression that those opening paragraphs were what I heard first. No. Presumably to ensure that the listener misses nothing a reader would be privy to, the producers of the tapes were excruciatingly thorough. The reading opens with a recitation of the copyright page, followed by the jacket copy, even the blurbs. When opening a book, I find this material a nice aperitif; when listening, it’s a delay, like an actor clearing his throat before the great soliloquy. It also has a greater influence than it should, read as it is in the same voice and tone as the text itself. I tend to read jacket copy in a skeptical mood. “The most important fiction since the war,” says Kingsley Amis? We’ll see about that!
Powell’s gargantuan and hugely funny novel is narrated in the first person by Nicholas Jenkins, himself a novelist, who begins as a late-adolescent British schoolboy and progresses through the twelve volumes to early old age; it sweeps through the century from the First World War to the social antics of the 1960s and 1970s, chronicling the strivings and connivings of a generation bent on making its mark, while the old order collapses to be replaced by a new kind of anarchic, aggressive pluralism, many of whose manifestations—student activism, bizarre Utopian cults, and shoddy clothes among them—the author clearly finds appalling. In “real” life, I was later distressed to learn, Anthony Powell has been a lifelong Tory and recently an admirer of Margaret Thatcher. Also, one of his passionate interests is genealogy, which was not surprising given his patient tracings of the histories and labyrinthine connections of invented families that go back centuries, in a few cases to the time of the Norman conquest.
A Dance to the Music of Time sweeps across social classes too, as Nick Jenkins moves through archetypal institutions like the public school (Eton), the university (Oxford), and the Army, and through London literary and social circles where the aristocracy, politicians, artists, lowlifes, and gay theatrical types mingle with more ease than one might expect. Powell’s life seems in broad outline to have followed the same paths as his narrator’s, and like Jenkins, he was acquainted with the major literary figures of his day. In fact, to informed British readers the novel is doubtless a roman à clef, but on this side of the Atlantic and far from home besides, I was not in possession of the clef, nor did I seek it. My whole desire was to be transported to an imaginary realm that would welcome me without any passkey.
Had I been reading, I would have made the automatic effort one does to distinguish between the narrator and the author, especially in a novel that appears autobiographical to some degree. But listening, I found an intermediate character muddling my efforts, and this character was the reader, identified on the tape as David Case. Since David Case was so proficient and convincing a reader, I couldn’t help imagining he was Anthony Powell himself, or possibly Nicholas Jenkins himself, confiding his gossip to my ear alone. (Gossip, in its most exalted mode, is what I was hearing and relishing. Much of the dialogue consists of characters, by the dozen, reporting on each others’ love affairs, marriages and divorces, career moves, war records, all the assorted high jinks of lives crowded with incident, in a tumultuous century.) Yet paradoxically, Case’s skilled reading also established him as a strong presence distinct from author or narrator: the transmitter of the story. Someone new was added to the cozy intimacy of writer and reader—the proverbial third who makes a crowd. And as in any sudden threesome, the positions of the original intimate pair undergo subtle shifts. Where, in the presence of this newcomer, was Anthony Powell? Where was I?
Hearing fiction read aloud by actors, either on tape or in public performance, is a mixed blessing. It would take a heart of stone not to be entertained by their virtuoso displays. Still, while I grin and groan along with the rest, I always feel suspicious. Something is being betrayed. We’re all having a wonderful time at the expense of … what? The words themselves. The actors, by voice and gesture, illustrate the meanings of the words literally, act them out as in a game of charades. On the page the words neither have nor need any such assistance: they present themselves and we do the rest. Nothing is lost, or added, in translation. Even though performances give color and vivacity to the words—bring them to life, as we say—these translations into another medium are a trifle patronizing, as if the words themselves can’t be trusted to deliver the emotion they bear, as if they were mere lifeless nothings before actors got their vocal cords around them.
Again, had I been reading the book, it would have been my own voice silently taking on the roles: schoolboys and masters, marriageable society girls, business tycoons, military men from private to general, innkeepers, servants, musicians, royalty-in-exile, demimondaines, editors, spiritualists, communist agitators, plus Welshmen (Powell himself is from an old Welsh family), Europeans and Americans (South and North, from a charming military dictator to a filmmaking playboy). Of course David Case played them better than I ever could, but they lived in his impeccable and variegated accents, not mine. If reading is simultaneous interpretation, then David Case was doing the interpreting for me. Either I accepted his version whole, or did a simultaneous translation of my own, a translation of a translation. But how could I? I had no text, only his voice! I was enjoying a command performance, an unattainable—for me—accuracy of diction; the price was giving up my own voice, the sonic prism of literature.
Now and then I’d wonder in confusion, Would the “real” Nicholas Jenkins sound like this? A Dance to the Music of Time is not quite a bildungsroman, certainly no Education Sentimentale. Even more than the object of our observation, Nick is the point from which we observe—at once a character in formation passing before us and the window through which we regard the passing scene. The trouble is that the window is not quite transparent.
At first, Nick Jenkins seems a self-effacing narrator, even ingenuous—or it disingenuous? In dialogue, Case-as-Jenkins’ stones are bland and reactions to him temperate, with only a few exceptions as clues to his nature. “Why are you so stuck up?” the raucous, vulgar communist agitator Gypsy Jones asks “truculently.” “I’m just made that way.” “You ought to fight it.” “I can’t see why.” But Powell has such obvious scorn for poor Gypsy Jones that her judgment is not to be trusted. A smug middle-aged do-gooder remarks that Jenkins does not “seem a very serious young man,” no doubt because at that early stage he shows no evidence of what we’d call “career goals,” and his conversational style is terse and marked by levity. A canny fortuneteller (the story is spiced by devotees of the occult) says that Nick is “thought cold but has deep affections.”
Apart from the dialogue, he poses as the unobtrusive chronicler of his illfated contemporaries (alcoholic, depressive, womanizing, killed in battle or in the Blitz), with his own ups and downs mentioned almost as modest afterthoughts. In truth, Jenkins has us firmly in his grasp, calibrating the viewpoint with his unrelentingly ironic commentary. At least David Case’s cultivated voice and accent gave every word an ironic edge. (He could sound supercilious even while instructing the listener to “slap the cassette smartly on a hard, flat surface” if it gets stuck.) Whole clauses might have been set in quotation marks; indeed, I can’t imagine a better example of audible quotation marks than Case’s description of a benefit concert for a “good cause.” Of course most British social novels cohere thanks to irony—that’s one reason we read them. Jenkins himself, brooding on “the complexity of writing a novel about English life,” notes
that “understatement and irony—in which all classes of this island converse—upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.”
But just how sarcastic did Powell intend to be? To find out whether so pungent an irony were built into the novel and not simply built into David Case’s voice, I would need to read it later on. The voice itself, while making me laugh and ponder, was also making me passive, lulling my critical faculties to sleep. For now, though, I had no choice but to accept the faint sneer rimming the words, an audible equivalent of the faint sneer on the face of the cat who took to listening along with me.
Besides, it would be most ungrateful to criticize David Case, who gave his all through countless hours of taping. Which raises a question that often nagged at me: Did he study all twelve volumes first, planning the dozens of accents and voices he would use? I could picture his text, the dialogue marked with his own private code for the characters, according to social class, gender, age, and nationality. Or could he possibly have read extemporaneously? He’d have to be something of a genius to manage that, but maybe skilled actors can sight-read as well as musicians. A rare slip now and then suggested he might have been sight-reading, for instance, when he adjusted the accent midway through a speech, or missed the stress of a sentence. But as a rule he was faultless and unstinting. (Was he ever bored? Tickled? When once in a while his voice began on a new pitch, had the tape been turned off so he could laugh or grunt?)
In the unlikely event that he read off-the-cuff, he couldn’t have known that the clumsy schoolboy Widmerpool, at first so Uriah Heepish in his creepy false humility, “the embodiment of thankless labour and unsatisfied ambition,” would turn out to be a monstrous and dangerous hypocrite. Must David Case have known Widmerpool’s future in order to give an accurate reading of his youth? How remarkable, in general, that actors manage to hint at the seeds of the future lurking in the present, while pretending to be as innocentas the audience itself. How unlike “real” life, where we don’t know where our natures will lead us, yet must play our roles perfectly, and usually do.
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