A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell

A Question of Upbringing is the first novel of the twelve novels that together comprise Anthony Powell’s major work called, A Dance to the Music of Time. But is it really a novel itself? I can’t imagine anyone reading A Question of Upbringing who didn’t intend to go on and read the other eleven in the series. I certainly will. Nor does it read as a novel unto itself. The beginning feels like a beginning, the main character is a young man at a boarding school meeting friends and starting life, but the end, despite some circling back to the opening themes, doesn’t feel like an ending. We’re still clearly only getting started.

To further complicate the conception, Powell grouped every three of his novels in the series into four volumes which he titled “movements.” So at this point I’ve read one of the twelve novels, if you divide it that way, or a third of one of the four movements, if you divide it that way, or a twelfth of the entire opus, if you don’t divide it at all. In any case, I figured if I waited to write some notes until after I had finished the series the eventual post would have been impossibly long and I would have forgotten half of what I read. So I’ll do these entries as I finish each novel, and possibly interrupt my reading with some other books along the way.

A Dance to the Music of Time is a fictionalized memoir of Powell’s life and friends set mostly in England, mostly between the world wars. This first novel, published in 1951, is set in the early 1920s. By the time he published the twelfth novel in 1975, he had brought his story nearly up to his present day.

A Question of Upbringing, introduces us to Jenkins, the narrator, based on Powell himself, and three school mates. Peter Templer and Charles Stringham are Jenkins’ good friends at school, a little older than Jenkins. He rooms with Stringham. Kenneth Widmerpool is an odd-boy out at the school who is a person of mutual interest without being exactly a friend of the other three.

Chapter One finds Jenkins and Stringham having tea in their room. They discuss Widmerpool until they are interrupted by Jenkins’ Uncle Giles who hopes to procure his nephew’s help in making an alteration to the distribution of a family Trust that Uncle Giles depends on. The boys nearly get into trouble when Uncle Giles smokes a cigarette and then, after he leaves, Le Bas, the house Don, appears and accuses the boys of smoking, which is not allowed. Templer arrives and is also in trouble for having returned from London on a late train. In the second half of the chapter the boys get their revenge on Le Bas. They notice that Le Bas looks very like a criminal whose picture they see posted in town. After running into Le Bas on a walk around the town they stop at a cafe and Stringham makes a phone call to the police pretending to be Le Bas and telling them that the criminal can be found where the real Le Bas is sitting.

In Chapter Two, Jenkins visits his two friends at their homes, first Stringham, then Templer. Stringham being older has finished school and before going up to University is going to spend a year in Kenya with his father. His parents are divorced. His mother, Mrs. Foxe, is re-married to a man named Buster. Jenkins visits Stringham at his mother’s home before Stringhman leaves for Kenya. He meets, also, Stringhman’s mother’s secretary named Miss Wheedon, but called Tuffy by the family. The visit to the Templer family introduces us to Templer’s sister, Jean, whom Jenkins claims to fall in love with but does nothing about, and to an older sister named Babs, married to a man named Stripling. There’s also a hanger-on to the family named Lady McReith (Gwen), who Peter has a fling with, surprising Jenkins; and a sort-of business friend of Peter’s father named Sunny Farebrother.

For Chapter Three the scene suddenly shifts to France. Jenkins has finished school and is spending the summer abroad before University. He stays at a country home owned by a friend of his father’s that’s set up as a vacation destination. Surprisingly, he runs into Widmerpool staying at the same home. I’ll mention the name Monsieur Dubuisson here, another guest at the vacation home, only because Dubuisson tells Jenkins that he knows Sunny Farebrother, which seems to imply Dubuisson will continue to figure later in the story. The main action of the chapter is a long telling of a falling-out between two Scandinavian visitors over a tennis match and how Widmerpool facilitates a reconciliation.

Chapter Four, Jenkins is at University reading history. He’s with Stringham again. Stringham is bored and inattentive to his studies. The first scene is at a tea thrown regularly by a Don named Sillery. Sillery is adept at making connections and using them to advance his own interests. At the tea we meet a poet named Mark Members, and a student attending University on scholarship named Quiggin. At the end of the party Bill Truscott shows up, a former student of Sillery’s who now works as private secretary for an industrialist and former Member of Parliament named Sir Magnus Donners. Stringham ends up leaving University in order to work with Bill under Sir Donners. After the party, Stringham and Jenkins run into Templer who is visiting the University with a couple of new friends. They all take a late night ride together in Templer’s car, pick up two girls, and the overcrowded car ends up in a ditch. Jenkins, who is narrating the novel as a memory from far in the future characterizes the incident of the car accident as a final break in the friendship between Templer and Stringham – but we’ll see. Bracketing the opening chapter, to bring this chapter and the novel to a close, Le Bas pays an awkward call on Jenkins in his room at the university. Then, Jenkins receives a letter from Uncle Giles inviting him to have dinner with him the next time Jenkins is in London. The chapter closes with Jenkins and his uncle at a restaurant in London discussing the Trust.

A Dance to the Music of Time is a bildungsroman (a novel of a character developing from childhood to adult) and a roman-fleuve (a novel in a series) and, because many of the characters are based on disguised real people, a roman a clef (a novel with a key) . All of which it shares with Proust’s Remembrance of Lost Time. Both have “time” in the title as well, of course, which makes the comparison unmissable. But Proust’s subject is not merely the fictionalized memoir of his own life. Proust’s deeper subject is the way that a life of petty romantic jealousies and social climbing can be transformed into something meaningful and beautiful through the transformation of art. So far, at least, Powell’s work doesn’t rise above the surface of his fictionalized memoir. His writing doesn’t match Proust’s; he’s funny and fussy, and Powell’s life is not interesting enough, at least not yet, to justify a memoir of this detail and scope.

And to return to that question of whether A Question of Upbringing really can be called a novel, if it is, I have to ask what is it a novel about? Jenkins ages from teenager to University student, but as a character he has no direction. He is given no goal. He faces no obstacle. He’s merely moving through the novel and observing those around him. The few incidents that fill out these few years recounted are hardly novel-worthy in themselves: a school boy prank, a car accident, and that’s about it. So I have to answer that no, this is not a novel. But perhaps it will turn out to be the start of a long novel that I am only beginning.