This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  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 World War I to the antics of the 1960s and 1970s, chronicling the strivings and connivings of a generation bent on making its mark. Meanwhile 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 fact, I learned later, Anthony Powell was a lifelong Tory and an admirer of Margaret Thatcher. Also, one of his passionate interests was genealogy, which is 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 theatrical types mingle with more ease than one might expect. Powell’s life seems in broad outlines 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 usual effort 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 that 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 dozens, reporting on each other’s love affairs, marriages and divorces, career moves, war records, all the assorted high jinks of lives fumbling along 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, I always feel suspicious. Something is being betrayed. We’re all having a good 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 the actors wrapped 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 privates to generals, 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 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 Éducation Sentimentale. Even more than the object of our observation, Nick Jenkins 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 is it disingenuous? In dialogue, Case-as-Jenkins’s tones are bland, and reactions to him are temperate, with only a few exceptions giving clues to his nature. “Why are you so stuck up?” the raucous, vulgar 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 fortune-teller (the story is spiced by devotees of the occult) says that Nick Jenkins is “thought cold but has deep affections.”

  Apart from the dialogue, Jenkins poses as the unobtrusive chronicler of his ill-fated contemporaries (alcoholic, depressive, compulsively 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 the tape should get 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 was built into the novel and not simply part of David Case’s voice and delivery, 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? Tickl
ed? When once in a while his voice began on a new pitch, had the recording machine 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 innocent as the audience itself. How unlike actual life, where we don’t know where our natures will lead us, yet must play our roles perfectly, and usually do.

  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 chief 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 apt for hearing aloud. Everything in the early books is foreshadowing, no detail arbitrary or forgotten. Each hint and anomaly, each 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 a bygone uncle. 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.

  I wasn’t resting quietly while 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 favors 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 had to stop and think about: “There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.” How true. Or some spectacular gossipy 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 awhile 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 inappropriate.” 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 out 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 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 need? Would my responses and judgments be the same had I “really” read it? Did I underestimate, overestimate, grasp the relative weight 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 with 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 fortune-teller who keeps turning up 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. In life, 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; formerly a trifle ramshackle, 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 age,” 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 o
f 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—on tape, sound had tempered them to a less threatening mode. Complex passages—the many descriptions of paintings, the historical analogies—proved more lucid on the page. 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 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 that might reflect Powell’s horror at Stalinism, or just plain snobbery and orneriness. Or, to be reluctantly fair, conviction. (“‘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.