A Dance Completed

...and a sinister, humiliating death in Hearing Secret Harmonies, after Widmerpool joins a Manson-like hippie family in his embrace of the counter culture...

...he "is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk...

...Oxford enlarges the nucleus of connections that will always remain his fixed points of reference, leading inexorably to the peer's daughter he will marry, the novels he will write, the ordained rhythm he will maintain...

...Past and present are frozen in stasis: "Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence...

...Yet in the mortifying finale decreed for Widmerpool by God the Novelist, there is a distasteful element of vindictiveness toward the non-U schoolmate who, in A Question of Upbringing, was the butt of all Eton's mockery because he wore "the wrong sort of overcoat...

...Cyril Connolly, an Eton contemporary of Powell's, promulgated "a theory of permanent adolescence" from the careers of his talented generation...

...Symmetry of such deliberate formality as Powell here devises is not a quality held in high esteem by most contemporary writers, for whom the world in disorder can be honestly rendered only through art of still greater disorder...

...Powell's most extravagant creation, the pompous oaf Kenneth Widmerpool, combines a genius for low comedy with overweening ambition in a grotesque parody of worldly success and the pride that goeth before a pratfall...

...And despite its Proustian title, his series has no genuine resemblance to Remembrance of Things Past, for Powell has no serious philosophical curiosity about the nature of time and memory...

...When he dutifully tries to reflect on the repetitive patterns of human experience, he produces limp banalities...

...For this uncouth climber, Powell launches a mighty fall in Temporary Kings, following the vengefully macabre suicide of his poisonous wife...

...There can be no doubt that it is a superbly beguiling read, an inexhaustible fount of witty gossip and anecdote about 300 fascinating friends and enemies...

...Writers & Writing A DANCE COMPLETED BY PEARL K. BELL 1951, Anthony Powell opened A Question of Upbringing-the first volume of a vast undertaking to be called A Dance to the Music of Time-with a winter tableau of London workmen huddled round a burning bucket of coal as snow begins to fall...

...From this traditional perspective, "only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by exact definition...

...What forces one to pause is the inordinate, albeit subtle, social weight given so uncritically to "a question of upbringing," to wrong and right "sorts...

...more like a large family, for at this level, as Noel Annan has demonstrated, all Englishmen are cousins-whose members have been living in each other's pockets since the cradle or public school or, at the latest, since Oxford and Cambridge...

...In A Dance, London and a few "great houses" are reduced to a select club...

...Since fate is what the writer chooses to make it, Powell disdains journalistic plausibility, events as they occur, and concerns himself with significant recurrences and uncanny coincidences, patterns of experience that form and dissolve and then form again in subtly different ways...

...This may explain some of my feeling, reading A Dance to the Music of Time the second time around, that after all it is not the masterpiece proclaimed by English critics...

...He has an affectionately wily eye for his particular abundance of English nuttiness and pretense and nonsense, an unweeded garden that can swiftly reduce the grayest of eminences to the rowdy derangements of farce...

...But one begins to wonder, as the end comes into view, whether Powell isn't perhaps too perfectly at ease with his temperamental preference for manners over motives, and too reluctant to risk the unsublime discomforts that lurk beneath the ridiculous...

...There is nothing left to remember...

...In the voice of his doomed young novelist X. Trapnel, Powell rejects the modish pursuit of fictional chaos and affirms the old-fashioned idea that it is the novelist's prerogative to construct a self-enclosed, credible universe of autonomous order...

...Especially in the final volumes, Nick's near-magical affinity for improbable encounters in the unlikeliest places often turns into wonderfully inventive slapstick...

...If this were all Powell has been up to for a quarter of a century, however, simply proving that everything "turns out to be tenaciously interrelated," A Dance would be no more than a gloss on The Forsyte Saga...

...While few of Powell's gestures are as broad, or as cruel, as Evelyn Waugh's, they can be just as funny...

...Only within this ritualistic framework-life understood and accepted by Powell as an unalterable chain of consequence???can the many invented disasters and surprises, the outre profusion of nastiness, perversity and malice, be properly comprehended...

...Unlike Proust's self-probing Marcel, Nick Jenkins is principally an observer throughout the 12 volumes, an ironic witness standing apart...

...But now that the dance has been brought to a close, the turbulent immediacies that had absorbed Jenkins between his school days following World War I and his old age in the late 1960s recede in his mind...

...The English world he portrays in his 2,498-page chronicle is narrow, incestuously intermarrying and interdivorcing, and unapologetically restricted to the sphere Anthony Powell has himself for much of a lifetime inhabited: the English aristocracy and upper-middle-class, with an eccentric and raffish fringe of intellectuals, writers, painters, journalists, musicians, businessmen and social predators...

...As E. M. Forster once wrote, "too many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own detriment as important edifices...

...This is by no means a simple matter of snobbery, nor is one required to make any allowances for the unarguable awfulness of the Widmerpool type...

...Nor are Powell's comic resources limited to such cultivated irony...

...Though Nick Jenkins is merely the son of an Army officer, the trajectory of his life is determined when he enters Eton, where he obtains the passport of manners, education and friends that will admit him to a loftier and more powerful class...

...What exalts the work is that Powell is first and foremost a comic writer...

...Still, if the overflowing abundance of comic delight in A Dunce to the Music of Time must be ranked not with the mighty but the small, we must be grateful, in an impoverished age of fiction, for small pleasures...

...Twenty-five years later, at the close of the 12th and final book in the sequence, Hearing Secret Harmonies (Little, Brown, 272 pp., $7.95), Jenkins lights a bonfire that brings back those vanished workmen...

...At the hub of this tight-knit elite is a handful of ancient surnames that dominate the elaborate kinship and ex-kinship structure...

...Mysteriously, the street scene summoned up for Powell's narrator and alter ego, Nicholas Jenkins, Poussin's painting of the Seasons: four buxom young women, dancing in a ring to a lyre played by a winged and naked Father Time...

...AS Martin Green shrewdly points out in Children of the Sun, Powell's Dance is in many ways a schoolboy saga...

...The extraordinary will without fail be eventually subsumed in the commonplace as Nick progresses from Eton to Oxford, from a job in London publishing to a quieter existence as a novelist, from war to an unsettled peace, and finally into a reluctant engagement in old age with hippies, sinister mystical cults and the decimations of death...

...The intellectual black boyfriend of the homosexual poet Quentin Shuckerly calls him "the Narcissus of the Nigger," and the learned composer Hugh Moreland tells Nick that he cannot pay his insurance premiums "without envisaging the documents going through the hands of Aubrey Beardsley and Kafka, before being laid on the desk of Wallace Stevens.' Nick's Stalinist brother-in-law, Lord Warminster, retreats in times of stress to his secret hoard of juvenile magazines, and the journalist "Books" Bagshaw, never entirely drunk or sober, "possessed that opportune facility for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatsoever at the shortest possible notice War, Famine, Pestilence or Death on a Pale Horse...

...Widmerpool, crude, pushy and vulgar, is the contemptible foil for Nick's elegant friend Charles Stringham, a witty and supercilious dandy who, in a world where Widmerpools are increasingly triumphant, becomes a drunk and dies, with characteristic offstage gallantry, in a Japanese prison camp...

...A flawlessly preposterous philistine, Widmerpool is the arriviste panting after the main chance, the benighted loner hopelessly out of sync with the moral constraints of family, continuity and friendship...

...From his school days Widmerpool tirelessly courts "the right people" as he scrambles toward the top, keeping a finger on the pulse of the Zeitgeist and squashing everyone who stands in his way...