A Dance in Intricate Measure

...At Templer's country house they get spiritualist messages on the planchette, but the messages are from Karl Marx...

...I wasn't sure you weren't rather lesbian," he tells Jean winningly, to explain his former neglect...

...By the third novel he has become an influential literary critic, a Communist doctrinaire and a power in the London literary world...

...As time passes, the events gradually take on meaning and pattern...

...Learning the passion concealed beneath English upper-class coolness is another dimension of Jenkins' gradual understanding...

...At Eton, Templer has an affair with a young widow, and Jenkins regards him as "a kind of pioneer in this increasingly familiar, though as yet still largely unexplored country...

...It is the men of will, in Powell's view, overcoming the weaker-willed or those whose wills are turned destructively against themselves...

...Stringham, whose stepfather presented him with a grandfather clock fitted out as a bar for a wedding gift, becomes an alcoholic...

...As it is, we have a work of art...

...An accidental reunion and dinner with Templer, his wife, and his sister Jean—which will develop into Jenkins' affair with Jean—is described as "a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned...

...not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities...

...A Dance to the Music of Time is an examination of upper-class English life in the 1920s and '30s, as it is experienced by the novelist-narrator, Nicholas Jenkins...

...With comprehension come wisdom and tolerance, and if one's eye could, godlike, take in all the gyrations of the dance, he would know all only to forgive all...

...Five novels of an anticipated dozen have so far been published, and the series is already far more than the sum of its parts, with a considerable narrative sweep and a milieu richly brought to life...

...In the two volumes that succeed A Dance to the Music of Time—At Lady Molly's and Casanova's Chinese Restaurant—the moral contrast grows sharper, although the comic tone never falters...

...Kenneth Widmerpool is first encountered at Eton, where he is notorious for "wearing the wrong kind of overcoat...

...Like the Phoenix, Widmerpool rises habitually "from the ashes of his own humiliation," and by the end of the third novel he is an important figure in the City, wearing his illfitting dinner-jacket with an air at Eton Old Boy dinners...

...One Oxford poet, Bill Truscott, is forced out of a business position by Widmerpool, and another, Mark Members, out of a literary position by Quiggin...

...When Dicky Umfraville is mentioned in the first novel, we know that he will appear by the third (as Chekhov said that a gun on the wall in the first act must be fired by the last...

...Powell's images are at once lucid and lunatic, like the first sight of Uncle Giles, with his head peering around Jenkins' door, "as if imprisoned in a cruel trap specially designed to catch him and his like...

...Through Jenkins' eyes we see an Eton where his friend Peter Templer boasts that he has never read a book for pleasure, and an Oxford (presumably Balliol, Powell's college) where his friend Charles Stringham devotes his major energies to arranging the ivory elephants on his mantel...

...Powell's techniques are admirably suited to his themes...

...If Anthony Powell can continue his chronicle to the end without flagging, we will have a matchless social history of our time...

...He is a late bloomer...

...By the time he gets to London, Jenkins has been in love with three girls and has progressed to the stage of "scuffles" with the third...

...Powell's comic technique relies heavily on wry understatement...

...J. G. Quiggin first appears at Oxford, grubby and poor, as an example of "the submerged element of the university...

...As Widmerpool and Quiggin rise, other pairs (Powell's characters oddly come in pairs) decline...

...Something seems to have gone badly with this country," Dicky Umfraville says, back from Kenya...

...During all of this, Jenkins' principal preoccupation is his initiation into sex...

...His London is not only the place of aristocratic dinner parties, but of the bohemian parties that more and more come to replace them, educating Jenkins in the process: "She made use of an expletive that I had never before—in those distant days—heard a woman employ...

...In the third novel Jenkins has his first prolonged affair, with Templer's married sister Jean, who surprises him by her abandon, once receiving him at the door naked...

...The Acceptance World explains the metaphoric nature of its title (a term for bill-broking, Widmerpool's occupation...

...Powell's theme is the dance to the music of time summed up in his title, borrowed from the Poussin painting of the Seasons dancing to Time's lyre...

...From 1931 to 1939, Powell published five lightweight comic novels...

...He is eventually seduced by a girl named Gypsy Jones, attired as Eve for a costume party...

...Jenkins observes that the phrase "seemed to suggest what we are all doing...

...If Uncle Giles is a changeless fixity, Sillery, as he recurs through the novels, becomes more and more a parody of himself, progressing from academic politics to international politicking in a strange Uncle Remus dialect he believes to be suitable...

...He writes: "The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance...

...It is a comfort to note that by the end of these three novels, at least, Jenkins has not attained to that lofty eminence...

...The world of the '20s was a buyer's market, and the sellers of such forlorn commodities as art and integrity were out of luck...

...The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element—happiness, for example—is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill...

...Periodically through the three novels, Jenkins' Uncle Giles appears to complain about the family Trust: invading Jenkins' room at Eton, turning up on the street in London in the middle of the night when Jenkins is on his way home from a wild party, or having his nephew to tea at his Victorian hotel decorated with cream-colored lincrusta dadoes and cornices...

...or, "This digression records, naturally, a later judgment...

...From these we graduate to a world of London dinner parties at which the host remarks over the port, "I hear you're letting your shooting," and of country weekends at which a history of the house is placed by each guest's bed...

...Of an auto accident that left him standing on a country road in a downpour, and shortly due back at Oxford, Jenkins observes: "This was an exceedingly inconvenient occurrence from everyone's point of view...

...In 1951, after an interval of a dozen years when he was otherwise engaged, Powell went back to the form more ambitiously, with the present autobiographical series...

...Powell is not, the celebrant of this stately and anachronistic world but the chronicler of its decay, which he calls "the general disintegration of society in its traditional form...

...Templer coarsens, marries Mona, and loses her to Quiggin...

...They are the New Men, not Snow's "new men" of science and administration, but the ambitious climbers toward money and power who are determined "to Uve by the will alone.' In A Dance to the Music of Time they are principally two, Widmerpool and Quiggin...

...Naturally I did not in those days see him with anything like this clearness of vision," Jenkins will write...

...some ingenious snare, savage in mechanism, though at the same time calculated to preserve from injury the skin of such rare creatures...

...It is upbringing that is called into question by the vagaries of upper-class youth, and perhaps even upchucking...

...The technique is naturalistic, but unlike the plodding naturalism of Galsworthy or the exemplary documentaries of Snow, Powell's naturalism has the reshapings and caricatures of comedy...

...When the girl Widmerpool loves pours sugar on his head at a dance, he smiles apologetically, as he had smiled apologetically back at Eton when an older boy hit him in the face with a banana...

...The other titles seem equally metaphoric...

...In this world without villains, their place is taken by figures of fun who gradually become menacing...

...sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed...

...Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made...

...sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows...

...WRITERS & WRITING A Dance in Intricate Measure By Stanley Edgar Hyman "It is MORE realistic than A La Recherche du Temps Perdu," Evelyn Waugh has said of Anthony Powell's Music of Time series, "and much Upbringing, A Buyer's Market and The Acceptance of the first three novels in the series—A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market and The Acceptance World—in one volume as A Dance to the Music of Time (Little, Brown, 718 pp., $5.95) is a welcome event, and an opportunity for a progress report...

...Related to this theme is an emphasis on the slow development of understanding...

...The main one is the use of recurrence, and the same few people return so regularly that after a while London comes to seem no larger than a ballroom...

...It is also increasingly, in the 1930s, a world influenced by the Communist party, climaxed by a Hunger March in the park, at which Jenkins sees his old Oxford don, Sillery, marching in a cloth cap and shouting "Abolish the Means Test...

...He reappears at a London dinner party with "still something indefinably odd about the cut of his white waistcoat," and turns out to know his hosts because his father sold their family liquid manure...

...Figures appear and reappear in the novels, changeless like Jenkins' Uncle Giles, or altered as much as the model Mona, who redesigns her body for each new phase...