Dance marathon

...His career is the scope and the audacity of the program...

...tives are shifting as the narrator and his new dancer-is prefigured in the ceiling As coincidence would have it, I fin- creator are themselves maturing...

...dental reflection...

...where apparent, and the coming of the It just won't do to lose touch with Second World War the formative mo- these remarkable people...

...husband, then widower, Kenneth Widstyle is the way in which those charac- Dance takes its title from the Poussin merpool, is the pivot, if any character can ters become a fictional society that any be, about which the epic swings...

...F] ment...

...The allusions of the novel the United States, Powell is regarded as by thirty years makes juxtaposition of to painting, music, and literature bring a one of his generation's best novelists, fa- judgments inevitable...

...ell outlived by years the better-known partners in the dance of life...

...The seasons and at the Williams School in New London, Condecades turn, some people die, some necticut...

...The dance of (University of Chicago), a witty, social- the course of twenty-five years, taking time has assembled the familiar principals ly acute chronicle of the fate of the Eng- it, if one looks to the future, where the and the action-intrigue, scandal, changing lish upper class as it unfolded over the writer has yet to live...

...Powell, howev- as both uncover the patterns of the so- Widmerpool, another recurring central er, was adamant that he alone created cial dance, the changing fortunes of art, figure, Powell has created one of fiction's the characters in his labyrinthine opus...

...Her latter-day The great delight of Dance's length and out across Dance's vast canvas...

...The plot depends upon the emergence, withdrawal, and reemergence of Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty a few key characters...

...Jenkins's unobtrusive reflections, for he (1986), the final volume of Dance-the er is made ever more aware of the ef- is most often spectator to the dance, are first volume appeared in 1951-on the fects of time on judgments, judgments wry and allusive: life lived within the sense day Powell's obituary appeared...

...Nicholas Before the chronicle ends there are a members of his literarily illustrious gen- Jenkins, Powell's narrator, is an extra- suicide, an international scandal, and eration, not to mention the prominent ordinary creation in his own right, es- Jenkins's own carefully qualified reportpolitical, social, and academic figures of pecially in the way Powell creates a ing of the testimony of those who claim to twentieth-century British history...

...Al- lovers appear on the arms of foreign in a circle whose movements are both free though not well known in generals, and the separation of meetings yet coordinated...

...One of the work's extralyn Waugh, and Henry Green...

...THE LAST WORD DANCE MARATHON Edward T. Wheeler ritish novelist Anthony come back introduced by another who painting that Powell sees as emblematic Powell died last month at has no idea of a former friendship, old of his artistic vision: four nymphs dancing B the age of ninety-four...

...Commonweal 3 1 May 5, 2000...

...Pow- that are trained on people who recur as of artistic pattern...

...war, marriage, and industry that play great female characters...

...We folreader feels, well, privileged to enter...

...Dance bond between the reader and Jenkins have been witnesses...

...one that retrospection-the great pleasPowell limits his range to that fictional ure of finishing the novel-allows us to terrain we are familiar with from so see as choreographed by the author in many British writers: Eton, Oxbridge, time, and that provokes a desire to reread civil service, and the military, with the the whole again, to put into place how effects of the First World War every- the fatal events unfolded...

...This is all accomhas been mined by critics who treat the that seems almost like a collaboration plished with brilliant satire, and in Pamela work as a roman a clef...

...Style painting of Candaules and Gyges by Tiepoished reading Hearing Secret Harmonies and viewpoints change, and the read- lo...

...As the title Hearing haunting sense that great works offer us vorably compared to his contemporaries Secret Harmonies suggests, there does forms, if not of understanding, of coinciand acquaintances Graham Greene, Eve- seem to be a pattern to it all...

...His rep- Consider the task Powell set himself: ordinary scenes occurs in Temporary Kings, utation rests on his twelve-volume mas- compose a work that is a form of fic- the eleventh volume, when Jenkins visits terpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time tional autobiography, and write it over Italy to attend a conference...

...low Kenneth as school boy, student, Thousands of pages, seventy-five lawyer, financier, soldier, politician, peer years in time, twenty-five years in com- of the realm, and even as a septuagenarposition: the simple details suggest the ian dancer in cult rituals...

...All the perspec- sexual partners, and the looping entry of a course of the past century...