As the novel’s villain, finally brought grotesquely low, Widmerpool begins as a comic oaf who’s frequently the target of projectiles—a ripe banana, a canister of sugar, and in his late years, a can of red paint. He soon becomes chilling, though no less oafish: “an archetypal figure, one of those fabulous monsters that haunt the recesses of the individual imagination, he held an immutable place in my own private mythology.” In Jenkins’s mythology, Widmerpool represents exorbitant egotism, will unhampered by any semblance of heart, wild ambition, and a narrow bureaucratic intelligence immune to shame, perpetually rising “from the ashes of his own humiliation,” rather like Richard Nixon. As an army major and later a member of Parliament with Stalinist leanings, Widmerpool wreaks havoc, destroying lives and provoking a murky international incident. But beyond his mythic aspects, Widmerpool’s periodic and unwelcome reappearances in Jenkins’s life carry with them the novel’s favorite and unifying theme: a rhythmic recurrence that gives shape to the dance of the title, “the repetitive contacts of certain individual souls in the earthly lives of other individual souls.”
Eternal return as a strategy for fiction makes A Dance to the Music of Time especially apt for hearing aloud. Everything in the early books is foreshadowing, no detail arbitrary or forgotten. Every hint and anomaly, every nuance of character will blossom into incident, anecdote, drama, or disaster, even if it takes two or three or six volumes—or in my case, weeks of listening. The season changed; the snows melted; the cat stared out the window at budding branches instead of icicles. As I changed my heavy coat for a light jacket, characters I remembered from the winter tapes kept reappearing, altered by Time. By the middle volumes, they were even echoing each other exactly as they might in life—those strange reincarnations when a woman met at yesterday’s party recalls your algebra teacher, or the new pharmacist moves with the same gestures as your bygone Uncle Joe. Jenkins’s brother-in-law evokes his old school friend, the languid, doomed Charles Stringham, dead in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp; the adolescent look-alike daughter of a once-loved woman stirs Jenkins’s erotic memory more than the aging woman herself.
It would be a mistake to imagine me as resting quietly, taking these meaty matters in. No. I listened mornings while I did a half hour of dance exercises, puttered in the kitchen, and prepared to set off for work, and then early evenings, again in the kitchen. Normally, when an author is a stylist, I linger over the sentences I like. Aside from his glittery dialogue, Powell’s sentences range from juicily aphoristic (“Though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly”) to gorgeously baroque. Nick’s speech may favor brevity, but his narrative style, like Henry James’s, often takes lengthy circuits. At their best, such sentences are brilliantly hyperbolic, at their worst merely tendentious. In any event, to linger over passages on tape, athletic feats and prestidigitation were required. I’d be flat on the floor with my feet over my head when something came along that I must stop and think about: “There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.” Right on! Or some spectacular gossipy and/or philosophical bit, such as,
Establishing the sequence of inevitable sameness that pursues individual progression through life, Flavia had married another drunk, Harrison F. Wisebite, son of a Minneapolis hardware millionaire, whose jocularity he had inherited with only a minute fragment of a post-depression fortune.
There was nothing for it but to unwind my body, rewind the tape, and play the passage again. Over and over this happened, in the middle of stirring a soup, or packing my briefcase, or folding laundry. It was vexing to me and perplexing for the cat, who perhaps was caught up in the narrative and resented the interruption. Other times, I’d turn off the tape to stew a while at some gross generalization, as when Jenkins passes the site of a bombed-out café where he used to meet an old friend, and muses, “In the end most things in life—perhaps all things—turn out to be appropriate.” Or, when a show of paintings by a friend of his youth makes him think of long forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specific personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and pain, how could I not pause to do the same? After two or three hearings, or after a reflective silence, the rhythms of the phrases would be set in my mind as they could not be from ordinary rereading. And it was in David Case’s voice, not my own, that these rhythms lived and continue to live in my ear. Eerie.
Daffodils finally popped up all over my neighborhood. I shed my jacket and dug out my sandals. Soon my job was over; time to leave the rented house and cat and return to my life. Sadly, I dropped the last box of tapes in the corner mailbox and packed up. I felt like Nick Jenkins at the close of an unexpectedly intimate talk with a mellow old retired general:
The change in his voice announced that our fantasy life together was over. We had returned to the world of everyday things. Perhaps it would be truer to say that our real life together was over, and we returned to the world of fantasy. Who can say?
Either way, I had had a fine time, the book was majestic and delicious and irritating, but had I actually read it? How much of its majesty and delight and narrow-mindedness was due to the reader, David Case, rather than the author? How much to my own desperate need? Would my responses and judgments be the same had I “really” read it? Did I underestimate, overestimate, grasp the relative weights of things? Get the characters right? The sense and texture? Would it stay with me, or had it literally floated in an ear, soon to drift out the other?
Back home, I got hold of Powell in the flesh, so to speak. I read the twelve volumes in a fever of curiosity, one after the other, a swift two and a half weeks compared to four months of sporadic listening. I wasn’t surprised at the rush of familiarity, but it was not the familiarity of rereading. An unfamiliar familiarity. The airy sounds that had been, for me, the book, were collected in one place, tethered to printed words. And speaking of printed words, the first thing that struck my eye was a matter that may seem trivial but in fact was not. Here were the characters, my companions in exile, whose names I had heard daily over a stretch of months lived more intensely in their world than in my own, and I had been misspelling many of them in my mind. Precisely because they were made-up characters, their names were as important a feature of their identity as any other data. Besides, I am a spelling fetishist: the look of words is as crucial as their sound, and misspelled is as jarring as mispronounced.
The florid, ageless fortuneteller who rhythmically reappears to read palms, tarot cards and the future at large (always correctly, despite Jenkins’s skepticism) was not Mrs. “Erdly,” as I had been labeling her, but Mrs. Erdleigh. On earth, a rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but in fiction a Mrs. Erdly is not the same as Mrs. Erdleigh. My vision of her changed entirely. She became someone to be reckoned with; a trifle ramshackle before, she took on dignity. Another transformation struck the racy (and racing buff) Dicky Umfraville, whom I’d been seeing as Umpherville—unaccountably, since David Case’s diction was flawless. The delectable comment, “Like many men who have enjoyed a career of more than usual dissipation, he had come to look notably distinguished in middle years,” is truer of an Umfraville than an Umpherville. And Jenkins’s commanding officer in the army, Roland Gwatkin, a Welsh bank clerk who harbors fantasies of battlefield heroics, was deromanticized by proper spelling. “Gwatkin” is the squat, sad truth about a character whose first name echoes heroes of chivalric times—La Chanson de Roland as well as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.
The spelling jolt once passed, the book was the same—yet different. Not as much unadulterated fun. More than a touch melancholic. (Jenkins, as it happens, writes a book about Robert Burton, seventeenth-century author of The Anatomy of Melancholy.) Certain characters who had seemed engagingly lightweight on tape took on density and sobriety. Others became more sinister or more outrageous—audible voices had tempered them to a less threatening mode. Complex passages—the frequent descriptions of paintings
, the historical analogies—naturally proved more lucid on the page. Just as naturally, dramatic or comic dialogues had shone more brilliantly on tape. Reading took less time, but was more painstaking and precise. At first David Case’s voice accompanied me, a simultaneous sound track, but as I read on, it faded, replaced at last by my own.
Majestic and delicious it all remained, and even more irritating without the mitigating appeal of its reader. Irritating above all in its wholesale contempt for all efforts at liberal political change, a contempt which might reflect Powell’s horror at Stalinism, or just plain snobbery and orneriness. Or, to be reluctantly fair, conviction. (Or “conviction,” as David Case might sarcastically pronounce it.) Powell seems closest to the character who declares, in true Orwellian spirit, “The people who feel they suffer from authority and oppression want to be authoritative and oppressive.” (He was well acquainted with Orwell.) Irritating also for the continual cavalier generalizations about women as an alien and troublesome species, some kind of beautiful and necessary, but regrettable, pest.
David Case could be exonerated from adding his own irony. The irony is all Powell’s, shielding each page like a scrim. Even the neutrality of Nick Jenkins’s conversation, as rendered on tape, was actually a dryness wrought, or wrung out, to the highest degree, an arch, self-protective detachment so suffusing that it comes to be taken for granted, like London fog, maybe. On the page, it’s clear that what Jenkins, and presumably Powell, loathes most is hypocrisy and pomposity. What he admires is character, restraint, style, and panache—the aristocratic virtues. He rarely finds them among the aristocracy, however; they are distributed democratically, if sparsely.
But “irony, facile or otherwise,” Jenkins acknowledges, “can go too far.” Even in comedy. With very few exceptions, Powell is unable or unwilling to say anything with a straight face—what today’s thirty-somethings call fear of commitment, in the moral or philosophical sense. This might be acceptable: no one demands earnestness of Swift or Wodehouse. But Powell solicits our allegiance to what is behind the fixed mask of bemused urbanity—an equally fixed piety.
No one could quarrel with what Powell holds sacred, only with his discomfort in presenting it: first, the sufferings, both military and civilian, during the Second World War. His most “sincere” passage occurs at a ceremony of General Thanksgiving held in St. Paul’s Cathedral at the end of the war, when for a brief moment, after some initial squirming in the toils of cleverness, Jenkins finds a simple statement of feeling manageable:
The sense of being present at a Great Occasion—for, if this was not a Great Occasion, then what was?—had somehow failed to take adequate shape, to catch on the wing those inner perceptions of a more exalted sort, evasive by their very nature, at best transient enough, but not altogether unknown. … Perhaps that was because everyone was by now so tired. The country, there could be no doubt, was absolutely worn out. That was the truth of the matter.
Almost as sacred is genuine friendship as opposed to the utilitarian camaraderie of literary and upper-class life. After seeing his dying friend Moreland in the hospital, Nick says, “It was … the last time I had, with anyone, the sort of talk we used to have together.” Finally, married love, at least the kind we must infer Nick enjoys with his wife, Isobel, daughter of a large family of eccentric aristocrats. On this theme, restraint nearly catapults to sentimentality, the satirist’s lurking danger.
About his devotion to Isobel and about her perfections, Nick is reticent to the point of perversity. Before she ever appears, she’s called “rather different” and “a bit of a highbrow when she isn’t going to nightclubs.” Perfect for him, in other words. When she turns up, it’s love at first sight, on Nick’s part at least:
Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? … It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of “getting to know” one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worth while. We knew one another already; the future was determinate.
Marriage, a miscarriage, and an unspecified number of children ensue. (At one point Nick alludes to Isobel’s having “her” baby; later on he leaves town for an “arrangement about a son going to school.” Otherwise his domestic life is discreetly elided—safe from Powell’s acidic pen.) Isobel appears maybe eight or ten times over the twelve volumes; her remarks could fit on a couple of pages, and their tone is uncannily close to Jenkins’s own—wry, knowing, understated. Of her tastes, her activities, her predilections, we hear nothing but that she has, like Nick himself, a “knowledge … of obscure or forgotten fiction.”
Sketched with such pious reserve, Isobel is a generic, idealized presence; one suspects her voice, like Cordelia’s, is “ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.” How different from the treatment of Jean Tempter, with whom Jenkins has an affair in his mid-twenties. Nowhere near as perfect as Isobel, Jean is a far better character, rich in subtleties and surprises and sex and shrewdly drawn betrayals. The subject of sex does not graze Isobel. Powell must be aware of some great lacuna, for he tries several times to explain it away. When asked about Isobel, Nick eludes the question: “It is hard to describe your wife.” Elsewhere he resorts to literary casuistry:
It is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality. Even those writers who suggest some of the substance of married life best, stylise heavily, losing the subtlety of the relationship at the price of a few accurately recorded, but isolated, aspects. To think at all objectively about one’s own marriage is impossible. … Objectivity is not, of course, everything in writing; but even casting objectivity aside, the difficulties of presenting marriage are inordinate. Its forms are at once so varied, yet so constant, providing a kaleidoscope, the colours of which are always changing, always the same.
A poor excuse from a writer who manages to present, without much worry about objectivity, the broad spectrum of postwar political hues, or the finest nuances of social class, or the changes in attitude toward homosexuality, or the psychic toll of alcoholism, depression, and thwarted affection. Beyond misplaced piety, the reason for Powell’s constraint with Isobel is not hard to fathom: her virtues undermine the novel’s presiding view of women as willful items of merchandise passing themselves from one man to another. Even in her absence, Isobel defies one character’s view that “The minds of most women are unamusing, unoriginal, determinedly banal.” She couldn’t possibly be treated as another suggests: “Why discuss your work with her? … Tell her to get on with the washing-up.” Perhaps she conforms to the type Jenkins describes approvingly as a suitable companion for a writer, “unusually pretty, … also to all appearances bright, good-tempered and unambitious.” No wonder Powell has more to say about eccentric, foolish, promiscuous, and downright awful women than about the classic helpmeet. Dreadful Pamela Flitton, a brittle, predatory avenger, is, in literary terms, the best of women, drawn with zest and esprit.
In the end, reading brought no great shocks. I found I had already absorbed the book through the ear and through the pores; I had heard its music, tripped to its rhythms, joined in its dance. Its prejudices I had passed over more easily than I would have on the page, or rather had let them pass over me as I stirred my soup and the tape rolled on. I suspect I might not have loved it so much had I first encountered it in print. Enjoyed, yes, but not loved. Cold, austere, and supremely amusing, perfect tonic for my apathy, it is not lovable in the manner of Jane Austen or even Ivy Compton-Burnett. Probably it was the faithful performance of David Case that I loved. His role was paramount. And enduring: because of it, I’ll never know what I might have felt or thought about the novel as a “mere” book.
Of course, on the p
age, A Dance to the Music of Time is its own grand performance too, exquisitely choreographed and staged with the deep genius of a Balanchine and the deft direction of a Busby Berkeley. And because of the limits of ear and of memory, I couldn’t appreciate the grandeur of its design until my marathon weeks of reading.
Powell’s dance comes full circle to end where it began. I missed that the first time around. Forgot in May the words that had so enthralled me in January. That early passage, “For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world,” refers to a group of workmen huddled around a bucket of flaming coke, taking a break from fixing the pipes beneath a London street as Nick Jenkins happens by. His musings on the ancient world lead in turn to memories of school, and so the story begins.
At the close of the twelfth volume—I’m only a season older, while Nick is nearing seventy—he visits a gallery showing paintings by a long-dead friend: in keeping with Powell’s notion of periodic recurrence, the artist who had barely been taken seriously in his own time has been rediscovered as an example of what we’d call “outsider art.” On the way, Nick notes offhandedly “the street in process of being rebuilt.” Afterward, having seen the paintings (and coincidentally run into his old faithless lover, Jean Templer), he walks out into the starting snow: “The men taking up the road in front of the gallery were preparing to knock off work. Some of them were gathering round their fire-bucket.”
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