A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

The twelve novel series collectively titled A Dance to the Music of Time, consisting of:

A Question of Upbringing
A Buyer’s Market
The Acceptance World
At Lady Molly’s
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant
The Kindly Ones
The Valley of Bones
The Soldier’s Art
The Military Philosophers
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies

The series is narrated by Nicolas Jenkins. Born in the early 1900s (Powell was born in 1905), Jenkins ages with the twentieth century. In the first novel, we meet Jenkins as a teenager at school with a couple of friends, Peter Templer and Charles Stringham. We meet, also, a fourth young man named Kenneth Widmerpool, a little older than the other boys, awkward, not well-liked, an object of pity, and scorn and fun.

The four boys continue to move in and out of each other’s lives as they go on to university and begin their professional lives. At first it seems as though the series will follow the four through all twelve novels. But as more and more characters accrue the original quartet breaks apart. The expectation that these four are the focus of the series is completely upended when Stringham and Templer both die in the ninth novel during the war. At that point I felt a little adrift. Who or what is this novel actually about? Where is it going except wandering through an accumulation of years?

Even before the war, Stringham and Templer had already receded into a great crowd of characters taking their turns in the story spotlight: artists and writers, a composer and a couple of music critics, publishers and a publicist, university dons, poets, politicians, war veterans and heroes, a wealthy industrialist, a South American diplomat who becomes a dictator. It’s a bewildering pile of characters, made all the more confusing in that they ceaselessly intermix in different contexts and relationships. Suddenly we find them again, now attached to a different person. Nearly everyone is married three or four times. Characters part and recombine romantically in every conceivable permutation (plus several that are frankly inconceivable. Human psychology is often sacrificed in favor of plot). The women take new names with every marriage. The titled have honorary names that aren’t the same as the family name that isn’t the same as the nicknames anybody actually calls them. I longed for a fold-out chart in the flyleaf that would help me sort out who’s who and how they’re related.

As dozens of characters are introduced, play their part, and recede, Powell never entirely lets anyone go. As though they were actors in a television series contractually obligated to appear in a set number of episodes, names are mentioned at a dinner, or Jenkins runs into someone on the street, not to move the story forward but seemingly just so we remember the person exists. Like a juggler already juggling twenty balls, adding a twenty-first and keeping them all in play doesn’t really make the trick any more impressive, it just adds to the confusion. Which might be said of the series as a whole; do we really need twelve novels?

In fact, the series feels very much like a long-running television show. Not a show with a main protagonist and a clear arc, like Breaking Bad or Mad Men, but a show like Downton Abbey or Friends, where we simply set out an ensemble of characters and let the stories spool out at long as we can invent them and the sponsors keep paying for them.

Through it all, only Jenkins and Widmerpool appear from beginning to end, and in every novel. Jenkins is the narrator, so of course we can’t lose him. So it seems, then, by the end of the series that Widmerpool must really be the point of the story. He’s everywhere. He appears by surprise in the unlikeliest places. But he’s also, by personal character, unpleasant. So when he shows up he’s annoying. He’s disagreeable. He, alone of all the characters in the series actually has an arc. He changes, but unfortunately he doesn’t improve. He’s a prig at school, uptight, rule-bound, un-fun, and picked-on by the other boys because of it. He’s ambitious once he enters the working world, a show-off, and insensitive to those he steps on or maneuvers out of the way to facilitate his rise. As a military officer during the war years he’s conniving and back-stabbing. Even when his schemes backfire he never apologizes or learns a lesson. When he enters politics he starts out agenda-free and uncommitted but liberalish and then is pulled, waywardly, toward more radical leftist politics. He loses his elected position and by the end seems nearly to lose his mind.

Meanwhile, Jenkins, who narrates the novel and appears in nearly every scene, has no arc at all. In fact, he has nearly no personality. He ages through the novel but doesn’t seem to have any goal or desire or motivation. He’s a cipher. I can’t tell if he’s happy or disappointed, or if he counts his life as a success. He’s passive. He plods. He writes a few novels but we don’t know what they’re about. He gets married and has two children but we know nothing of his family or his feelings about them. He observes others and records their conversations. But he hardly every expresses himself.

Powell is often compared to Proust, but the similarities are only superficial: the length of the work, the first-person narrator, perhaps the mostly aristocratic milieu. But the narrator in Remembrance of Lost Time is also the protagonist, has clear motivations and goals, and is profoundly changed by the end of his story. Not so Jenkins.

One other congruence with Proust is the homosexuality in both works. Powell began writing the first novel in the series in 1951 though it takes place thirty years earlier. In the second novel, two characters are introduced clearly coded as gay: a painter named Edgar Deacon and a music hall performer named Max Pilgrim. Gradually, though, the gay characters proliferate and become more overt. One of the sisters, Norah, of the large central family, the Tollands, lives with another woman. A brother of the same family, Hugo, is whispered about early on and then later, his lover Sam is openly acknowledged. The sexuality of many characters is wondered about, without condemnation. There’s another out gay couple, named Chuck and Barnabas, in the final novel that takes place around 1970 whose relationship is regarded as completely mundane. It’s interesting that while one theme of Powell’s novel seems to be the increasing decadence of the 20th century from the “everyone knows their place” 1900s to the “anything goes” 1960s, his treatment of homosexuality goes in the opposite direction, from the scandalous “love that dare not speak its name” of the 1920s to the “love not worth mentioning” post-Stonewall era.

So Powell gives us a strange novel where we are firmly bound to a first-person narrator, who has no story of his own. The stories happen to other characters and Jenkins finds out about them because he happens to run into someone at a party, or sit next to someone at a dinner, and they tell him the story. Perhaps observation is the quintessential quality of a writer, but then this novel is what you get when you put a writer at the center of your novel. Sometimes interesting things happen, but they happen offstage, and then we’re told about them, often secondhand, like visiting with a well-informed gossip. It’s fun, when the stories are fun; but it’s not dramatic because the drama is always at a distance.

Because of this manner of telling his story, the novel again and again comes back to a few similar scenes. Jenkins is at a dinner. Or Jenkins is at a party. Jenkins goes from a dinner to a party. Jenkins is at a restaurant. Jenkins is at a club. Jenkins is at a table in the mess hall. Jenkins is at his desk in a busy office. A chapter or a novel will begin with a little bit of authorial philosophizing, often about some classical text or Greek myth and then Jenkins is at a dinner. Or Jenkins is at a party. Then Powell gives us pages of dialogue, with Jenkins saying little, while a dozen other characters come up to him one by one catching him up on stories.

I don’t mean to say that Jenkins never takes action himself, at all. It is a very long book (one of the longest works of fiction in the English language) so of course there are some scenes where Jenkins actually participates in a story. But with Jenkins firmly placed as the narrator, Powell is forced to either have the story happen with Jenkins present (if not necessarily involved) or to have a scene where someone tells the story to Jenkins, which Powell can then give to us in dialogue. I counted only three places in all twelve novels where Powell/Jenkins relates a story that he didn’t himself see directly or recreate the circumstances of where he heard about it. All three come in the eleventh novel. I have no idea why that is so.

Seeing the novel as a whole, and in particular looking in reverse at the shape of the novel from the closing pages, there seem to be two thematic strands that Powell is interested in throughout. One is leftist politics. The other is mysticism. Both strands recur consistently in small ways and large. Both strands are exemplified by a few particular characters but gradually infect others. Both strands threaten the cultured, educated, social world of Powell’s characters. These are characters with money, or at least who don’t worry where their money comes from. These are characters who live in houses that have names and people who hang portraits of their ancestors on the walls, or at least hang out with people that do.

Into this ordered world the twentieth century throws chaotic elements. Communist and communist-leaning characters are introduced early on. Mid-way through the novel Widmerpool is ensnared in a diplomatic scandal with an Eastern Bloc nation that comes close to treason. The mystic strand is represented by a Dr. Trelawney who leads a small cult through spiritual exercises in the English countryside near Jenkins’ boyhood home, and a medium named Myra Erdleigh who reads palms, and horoscopes, and tarot cards, and makes oracular sayings about people’s futures.

By the end of the novel those two strands have taken over, and found their culmination in a character named Scorpio Murtlock. He’s a mystic, like Dr. Trelawney. In fact, it’s whispered Murtlock might actually be the reincarnation of Dr. Trelawny who died earlier in the novel. Murtlock is also a libertarian radical concerned with freeing his followers from bourgeois social norms like money, and clothes, and monogamy, and having a permanent address. He’s mostly just a decadant age-of-aquarius hippie, but there’s a tone of something more sinister there, and Widmerpool becomes his targeted victim.

Widmerpool throughout the novel is pulled by these political and mystic forces politically leftward, and morally downward. He’s attracted to Scorpio Murtlock’s sexual/political revolution and wants to play with that power. Instead he becomes overwhelmed by it, toyed with, and humiliated. It doesn’t count for tragedy because Widmerpool was never admirable in the first place. Perhaps for some it might seem like a satisfying comeuppance for a character who deserves it. But for me, because Widmerpool had been portrayed as set upon from the beginning (he gets a banana thrown in his face in the first novel and a bowl of sugar dumped over his head in the second) it merely felt pathetic.

This book has been on my radar ever since a friend read it in college and recommended it. That would have been only a few years after the final novel was published in 1975. Some people like it very much. But I suspect it’s admired for the audacity of its size rather than the quality of its art. It’s not a great book. Certainly not on par with Proust. I read the book amused, I suppose, or curious enough to keep going. The pages turn easily. I am glad to have read it after so many years anticipating I would someday and wondering when. I was determined to finish it in any case so liking it would have made the project a lot easier. But I never did like it. It felt like a project, eventually, a task I’m glad to be done with.