THE WINDING UP OF WIDMERPOOL

...Professor Gwinnett has come from America to be honored for his biography of the novelist X. Trapnel, who once took Widmerpool's wife away from him...

...Even the bride's grandfather had been in school with them until his mash note to Templer, reported by Widmerpoot, led to his expulsion...

...Notoriety, yes...

...An aging poet knit of sensibility and toughness (" 'Firmness, in any sphere, is ultimately the only -thing, anyone respects") , is counterpoised by a young magus (perhaps the reincarnation of the eerie Dr...

...Scorpio twists together the mystic strands of earlier volumes into a Gordian knot of alchemy, astrology, ; cabalism, esoteric Buddhism, catatonic druidism and even herbology...

...Widmerpool surprisingly glows to hear of the presence at the wedding of the first known victim of his officious malice and, clad in a blue gown, he pursues him through the guests to atone...

...Visiting the gallery with her is a former husband who still does not suspect that Jean, while his wife, had initiated Jenkins into the mysteries of love, in ABuyers Market (1952...

...Yet another fire had almost consumed Stringham's Modigliani that very day, Jenkins learns...

...the wrongness of education, the wrongness of government, the wrongness of the manner we treat kids like these...

...Time has erased the medieval, virginal saint of the narrator's earliest vision of Jean, leaving "one of those sad Goya duchesses," about whom the ultimate truth must remain forever veiled...

...But eminence eludes him, and now he trots out out of his life, out of ours twelve volumes and some three thousand pages later...

...Fifty years later he has accreted barnacles of notoriety...

...THE WINDING UP OF WIDMERPOOL NEIL BRENNAN Hearing Secret Harmonies ANTHONY POWELL Little, Brown, $7.95 Twenty-five years ago Kenneth Widmerpool trotted into The Music of Time, striving by sneer will to propel himself into athletic eminence at an Etonian public school...

...From here they foray into philistia, to shock and outrage society, most comically when Widmerpool, now seventy, leads the two co-eds who spashed him with paint to stinkbomb the Donners Literary Prize award dinner...

...in Temporary Kings (1973) a brash and booming American movie-producer balances the reticent Ivy League scholar Russell Gwinett...

...Today we all rejoice...

...So nice to have met.'" English understatement reaches here an apotheosis...

...The end of the dance comes beautifully...

...and] for bringing home to so large an audience the irrelevance of such concepts in this day and age . . . the wrongness of the way we live, the wrongness of marriage...

...Widmerpool has tried to ride every wave driven in by history, but always after the crest has passed...

...This twelfth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time pulls the whole together in a triumph to equal Proust's final "temps retrouve," or Thackeray's "Come," children, let us shut up the box and the puppets . . ." or Shakespeare's "the rest is silence...

...Jean does remember the first night of their affair, in her brother's house in Maidenhead, presided over by seascapes, now back in vogue, and planchette...

...Trelawney of The Kindly Ones, 1962) whose will to power exceeds even that of Widmerpool...

...Indeed, at times doubts must have haunted Powell as he passed his fiftieth birthday, then his sixtieth, then neared his seventieth with the way still stretched ahead...

...The newspaper item which had recalled the last of Jean Templer and of Kenneth Widmerpool first desire and first antipathy falls I out of his hand into the autumnal flames...

...Then the stink-bomb explodes...

...Perhaps to the dismay of recent addicts, Hearing Secret Harmonies opens with the addition of new characters to an , already formidable' dramatis personae...

...Venture capitalist in the late 1920s, fascist in the late 1930s, communist in the late 1940s, now in the early 1970s he seeks desperately the crest of the counterculture foaming up on the beach...

...but the Modigliani had been salvaged at the I last moment and is delivered to the gallery that evening along with the story of Widmerpool's last night...

...Jenkins had not been able to make the opening, but two weeks later had approached the gallery, with workmen gathering around a fire in the wintry street, and inside had found Jean Templer, now the widow of an assassinated South American dictator...

...Give it half an hour...

...Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence...

...It seems to be the final assembly of his generation: Umfraville and Flavia and Widmerpool, shadowed by the ghosts of Peter Tempter and Charles String-ham, both killed in the war...

...The climax comes in wild burlesque as Widmerpool, groveling at the feet of the bride's grandfather, is tripped,over and fallen upon by his former mother-in-law, Flavia, Stringham's sister, who detests him beyond any living soul...

...She alludes to it with a smile, and Jenkins recalls her first invitation ("It's the bedroom next to yours...

...Fifty years later, retired to the west country, Jenkins is burning the detritus of the year and notes, among the newspaper scraps, one announcing the opening of an exhibition of Deacon's paintings, newly "discovered" by a former disciple of Scorpio's...

...He was not to achieve that in A Question of Upbringing (1951...

...And Scorpio uses this creed, bis cult, his commune, his will to haul Widmerpool into a hell that seems to eliminate the need for any future existence, at least as far as Widmerpool is concerned...

...Maiay doubted in the 1950s that Anthony Powell could pull it off...

...Scorpio, learning of the deed, has inflicted oh Widmerpool an "unspeakable" penance...

...Widmerpool looms into view finally at the wedding reception of one of Jenkins' nephews at Stourwater Castle, now a girls' school but over thirty years ago the scene of the mime of the Seven Deadly Sins in which Jenkins had posed as Accidie...

...Both a poet and a business-man, Delavacquerie does not meet the guru Scorpio Murt-lock, but both remain, to the end, vessels of strength and mystery...

...One of the greatest characters in literary history has been created, one of the world's great novels has reached its end...

...A convert to alternative lifestyles, "Harmony" T-shirts and medallions, Lord Widmerpool turns the official residence granted him as university chancellor ("Call me Ken") into a hippie commune where drugs and sex rituals radiate "harmonious vibrations...

...A Question of Upbringing had opened with Jenkins observing workmen around a fire, a tableau which suddenly resembled Poussin's painting "A Dance to the Music of Time" (now in the Wallace Collection in London...

...In Hearing Secret Harmonies his installation as chancellor of a British university is covered by TV and so is his being splashed with paint by angry students...

...the same Gwinnett in whose seedy London hotel room Widmerpool's wife bad committed suicide for love...

...The narrator's mind returns to the fire he is tending...

...And a theatre director in the party wonders where, in Ariosto's Valley of Lost Things, might be found the statue of "Truth Unveiled by Time" which he had sold to Deacon, in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960...

...But as Widmerpool comes trotting across the field at the head of the disciples, he is accompanied by the one-time commander of the Mobile Laundry Unit in which Stringham had found "the soldier's art" (1966) a lieutenant drummed out of the army by Widmerpool...

...Don't be long"') as she bids, him goodby with cool and mysterious finality...

...But at the banquet Widmerpool tacitly forgives Trapnel and Gwinnett in announcing his conversion to youth: I take pride in ridiculing what is or rather was absurdly called, honour, respectability, law, order, obedience, custom...

...The pattern is familiar: in Books Do Furnish a Roomt (1971) a glib BBC litterateur is a foil for the wracked but perceptive novelist X. Trapnel...