A Strained Passage
CURLEY, DANIEL
A Strained Passage THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS By Anthony Powell Little, Brown. 244 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes," "How Many Angels?" Perhaps it is not fair...
...He has, it is true, just married a strange, violent girl, a born troublemaker...
...This ambitious man appears to be crushed time after time yet continually reappears one step further up the ladder, one move closer to the sources of real power, more and more in a position of making decisions whose moral implications he is constitutionally incapable of understanding...
...Even General Conyers, our old friend, now an air raid warden although a man upward of 90, dies offstage in indirect discourse, chasing a looter during a blackout...
...Good poets are, of course, masters of what in sports is called "the second effort," and out of the loss of one experience create a new, even better one...
...And Jean Duport, once Nick's mistress, has become history, he realizes when he sees her again...
...At this point Powell introduces a page of Proust, and simply the look of that massive paragraph beside Powell's thin page should be enough to stimulate more than one thesis as the readers try to play these different kinds of music...
...and the Ring music, so to speak, is heard again in air raid shelters, cellars, and even in a considerable preoccupation with cloak-and-dagger work centering, of course, on the unspeakable but always fascinating Widmerpool...
...He flourished during the War...
...Faced with the problem of coping with something as large as the war, Powell elects to suggest size and scope by the Proustian awareness of "the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent...
...This is a very painful movement in the music of time...
...So one would do well to start elsewhere?at the beginning of the series perhaps, or with the Victorians (say, Trollope's Barsetshire novels), or to be ahead of the critical summaries when the chronicle is complete, with Marcel Proust...
...Nick's wife is quite properly banished to the country during the blitz, but even when she does come up to London she isn't really there...
...At the age of 20 she has disrupted the diplomatic service and the military and caused international episodes, and she may cause Widmerpool trouble even he can't rationalize...
...The past is not being recaptured here, and the present is being lost...
...It is a Victorian sort of pleasure suited to the serial publication of Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope or William Makepeace Thackeray, and generates a cumulative interest that leads readers to go down to the docks, as it were, to hear from arriving travelers the latest word of Little Nell or of Widmerpool...
...The present is already becoming history...
...It gives the impression of serving as a transitional work that can only be fully appreciated in the context of the whole...
...Another occasion is slipping away...
...People are reported as dying in distant parts of the world...
...It is an incident fit to rank with that splendid moment when William Wordsworth, lost and wandering in the mountains, discovers that he has all unaware crossed the summit of the pass and missed what was to have been a vital experience...
...This observation is immediately followed not by a view of a great event, the Normandy invasion, but of its debris, a "vast floating harbour designed for invasion, soon to be dismantled and forgotten, like the Colossus of Rhodes or Hanging Gardens of Babylon...
...At this stage of the War, Nick, the narrator, has been transferred to a liaison post with foreign groups in London, first the Poles and then the Belgians and Czechs...
...A gnomish lieutenant is explicitly compared to Mime in The Ring...
...That would make us all of —well, never mind...
...The new reader may look at this if he likes, but he would do better to go back to the first book and work slowly through the series while the final three volumes are coming to light—for the real pleasure here is implicit in the title, A Dance to the Music of Time...
...Indeed, throughout the volume the present seems elsewhere...
...For in this installment Powell directly invites comparison with the French novelist...
...But my money is on him, as it would be on a Snopes or a Heep or a Karamazov...
...And one has only to reflect for a moment on recent history to be able to guess whether he will continue to flourish in the postwar world...
...So many deaths—for this installment takes us through to the end of World War II...
...And Nick Jenkins, you know, must be all of 40 by now...
...The book opens with a teletype about Polish soldiers in Russia being allowed at last to filter over the border into Iran, and a new phase of Nick's life begins...
...Nick is showing his age...
...Reading it, the Powell addict will have the familiar sensation of getting a letter from someone who has kept in touch with the old gang and can tell you the latest on affairs and divorces and careers and deaths...
...Perhaps it is not fair to try to deal with The Military Philosophers as an independent novel when it is, in fact, ninth of a projected 12 volumes in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series and is less suitable to be read independently than some of the others...
...Perhaps not so much history as legend, the story true only in a symbolical sense...
...On a military mission to France toward the end of the War, Nick passes the night in a town which he realizes the next day, after he has gone on, must have been Proust's Balbec...
...Not even the second generation of women has the power to seem really alive as we see them through his eyes—not Jean's daughter, so like her as a girl, not even the man-spoiler, Pam Flitton, whom we once saw as a flower girl at a wedding throwing up in the font...
...There is an air of narrative summary over this volume, of anecdote without development...
...Widmerpool, who was scorned at school, nourished during the '30s amid the circumstances that made the War...
...We've known him since he was a boy in school way back in the '20s...
...because, although its outlines might have general application to ourselves, or even to other people, Jean and I were no longer the persons we had been...
...The apparently innocuous message and a sense of importance start the novel moving, but this theme, if I may call it that, is immediately crossed by subterranean imagery...
Vol. 52 • March 1969 • No. 6
