Anthony Powell’s Very English Dance

Anthony Powell is little read these days. Ask for his nine-volume saga of English life and manners, A Dance to the Music of Time, in any Australian bookshop and all you encounter are blank stares or a suggestion you try the music department. In the UK, the Anthony Powell Society keeps his memory alive, but its demography is not encouraging. Yet Powell, a contemporary at Oxford of Evelyn Waugh, wrote the twentieth-century’s masterwork of English literature. What accounts for his neglect?

The problem begins with Powell’s comparison with more critically acclaimed modernist writers. Commentaries on the Dance sequence generally assume that a European tradition of novel writing and, in particular, Marcel Proust, influenced him. Critics, when they consider him at all, refer to him as “the English Proust”. The comparison, of course, is odious. The academic determination to reduce Powell to a poor imitator of Proust rests primarily on the fact that both authors wrote novels about the passage of time.

However, interviewed about his roman fleuve, Powell insisted that although he admired Proust, “the essential difference is that Proust is an enormously subjective writer who has a peculiar genius for describing how he or his narrator feels”. The great modern novelists, Powell continued, showed how their protagonists thought and felt. Emile Zola, James Joyce, Henry James and Robert Musil all in different ways shared “this very particular sort of talent” that came to define the modern novel.

Powell, by contrast, is a very English exception. He admitted that he had “no peculiar genius for describing how his narrator feels”. Indeed, the Dance explores this difficulty in the novel about post-war literary life, Books Do Furnish a Room, where the novel’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, and Xavier Trapnel, the author of Camel Ride to the Tomb, discuss the art of writing. Trapnel contends that “there was no such thing as Naturalism in novel writing”. He explains:

People think because a novel’s invented it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. 

Later Trapnel says, “Naturalism is only ‘like’ life, if the novelist himself is any good.”

Powell observed that he had

no talent for this … sort of self-revelation … it’s a very particular sort of talent, but people talk as if every writer had it. You’ve only got to see the number of books in which people bore you to tears with very detailed revelations about their sex lives to realize that this isn’t so.

Given Powell’s view of naturalism, how we might wonder is the representation of character handled in the Dance, a biographical novel about the life and encounters of Powell’s alter ego, Nick Jenkins, and how does this depiction affect the work’s overarching themes of time and contingency?

Given that Powell was himself a biographer of the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey, and that Nick Jenkins writes a biography of the anatomist of melancholy, Robert Burton, and that Russell Gwinnett, a key protagonist in the later novels, is the biographer of Trapnel, adds a further dimension to the question. In fact, character in the Dance evolves, not in accordance with modern, naturalist preconceptions, but according to Powell’s own highly original engagement with a seventeenth-century English view of “charactery” and its relationship to time, experience and change.

Seventeenth-century character and the music of time

Reference to John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the poetry of Philip Sidney, Abraham Cowley, John Wilmot and George Herbert and the Jacobean tragedies of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker litter Powell’s literary output. Nick Jenkins writes Burton’s biography, Borage and Hellebore, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, while Russell Gwinnett, the biographer of Death’s Head Swordsman, is also writing a monograph on The Gothic Symbolism of Mortality in the Texture of Jacobean Stagecraft. Powell himself revived Aubrey’s Brief Lives, wrote a biography, John Aubrey and his Friends, and considered Aubrey the founder of modern biography and a superior exponent of the form than later proponents like Lytton Strachey. Powell believed Aubrey “might have been a novelist if he had lived at a different date”.

Immediately before the war, Powell had begun researching a work on Aubrey. After the outbreak of hostilities, circumstances he found unconducive to novel writing, he discovered in seventeenth-century works by Aubrey, Aubrey’s sometime collaborator Anthony Wood’s Athenae Oxoniensis and Narcissus Luttrell’s Brief Relations “vistas of the past, if not necessarily preferable to one’s own time, at least appreciably different”. How, we might wonder, did English seventeenth-century vistas on character influence Powell’s treatment of personality and plot in the Dance?

Powell observed in 1978 that Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy “just stands for my book on Aubrey”, first published in 1948. It is clear, however, that Powell had read both works along with other seventeenth-century studies of character and adapted his approach to the novel in accordance with them.

Nick Jenkins considers Burton’s style of writing “as the subject required” worthy of emphasis and imitation. He cited approvingly Burton’s practice of not composing:

neatly … but to express myself readily and plainly as it happens. So that as a river runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then winding … doth my style flow now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required.

Commentators generally note the fact that Powell opens his first novel in his roman fleuve, A Question of Upbringing, by referencing Nicolas Poussin’s allegorical painting, Dance to the Music of Time (1634), from which the novel sequence takes its title, and that he expands on Poussin’s image as the work passes through the spring, summer, autumn and winter stages of Jenkins’s life. However, they ignore the conclusion to the final novel, Hearing Secret Harmonies, which concludes with a “torrential passage” from Burton’s Anatomy. Jenkins channels Burton, observing how he “hears every day rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland”. The passage and the novel end: “Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, tomorrow of some great men deposed … one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, etc.”

Burton’s view that he “wrote of Melancholy, by being busie to avoid Melancholy”, moreover, permeates the post-war “winter” sequence of novels. Books Do Furnish a Room finds Nick at his old Oxford college at forty recapturing “all the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition”. Burton had observed that students leading “a sedentary and solitary life” were more “subject to this malady than others”. Jenkins is researching Borage and Hellebore, his biography of Burton, and finds in the solitude of “archaic folios, a soothing drug”. War, had:

… left on the one hand a passionate desire to tackle work: on the other, never to do any work again. It was a state of mind Robert Burton … would have well understood. Irresolution appealed to him as one of the myriad forms of Melancholy, although he was, of course, concerned in the main with no mere temporary depression or fidgetiness, “but a chronic or continued disease, a settled humour”. Still, post-war melancholy might have rated a short subsection in the great work.

Melancholy had achieved something of a cult status in seventeenth-century England. “Lowness of spirit” became known as the “English disease”. One of its myriad forms was literary. The melancholic disposition prompted wider disquisitions upon character, as commentators witnessed “the endless janglings and perplexities” that beset the troubled kingdom from 1603 to 1688. These perplexities were not so different from the ones that troubled Powell’s post-war English world.

A vogue for writing set “characters” swept through the Jacobean and Carolingian court. Satirists remarked upon the peculiarities of English character as obedience to the authority of the crown in church and state declined. Bad habits led to hardened hearts. It was not difficult, in the English context, to connect tender conscience to habit, and habit to humour and character.

The Anglican Bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall, England’s first satirist, taxonomised contemporary character types and established a genre that led both to Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and the early English novel. In the literature of characters, from Hall’s Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) to Samuel Butler’s Characters (1667–69), there is an efflorescence of character types, from twenty-six in Hall to almost 200 in Butler, together with a growing satirical and moral intent in their composition.

Hall’s virtues include characters like the wise, humble, valiant, honest and patient man, whilst the vices involve hypocrisy, inconstancy, flattery, presumption and ambition. As the genre develops, however, characters become more diverse and precise. For Thomas Overbury, a character was not only a “picture (reall or personal) quaintly drawne”, it also “signifieth to ingrave, or make a deepe impression”. It was an “imprese, or short embleme; in little comprehending much”. Character sketches over time became personified. Thus, Overbury characterised generic types like the whore or the flatterer as well as more specific types ranging from a French cook to a “braggadochio Welshman”. Similarly, John Earle’s Microcosmographie (1628) offers characters that range from weak, plausible, sceptical, blunt and worldly wise men to a handsome hostess, a tobacco seller and a grave divine. Among the developing cast of English characters some were obviously more conscientious in their attention to duty and obligation than others.

Disquieting for social order, but stimulating for the satirist, were characters that dissembled and dissimulated. The hypocrite, for example, who “cometh nearest to virtue and is the worst of vices”, infected the English body politic.  There were more specific manifestations of this infection in the character of the puritan, who, “should the church enjoyne cleane shirts, hee were lousie”, or the “she precise-hypocrite”, “who accounts nothing Vices but Superstition and an Oath, and thinkes Adultery a lesse sinne, then to sweare by my Truely”. Different, but equally disturbing to the civil peace, were the zealot and the fanatic. The latter, Samuel Butler explained, “chooses himself one of the elect” and was “mad with too little” learning.

As the genre developed there evolved not only a relationship between character and event, but also with the maxim that, in a sentence, illustrated a character type. A maxim offered “the outlines of a picture at which a common spectator will gaze without knowing what is intended … though a skillful eye will immediately perceive … the beauty of the painter’s design”. By contrast, the character must be animated and realised by the force of the reader’s imagination. Ultimately, the precise, but “distinguishing differences between one man and another which the … refinement of a life immensely different from the simplicity of nature has brought into view … requires a discriminating judgment and extensive knowledge”.

It was John Aubrey, in particular, who turned this discriminating judgment of character in the direction of biography. In capturing the lives of his contemporaries, Aubrey, Powell maintained, contemplated “the life around him as in a mirror—scarcely counting himself as one of the actors on the stage, caring for things most when they became part of history. He was there to watch and record.”

Powell further observed of Aubrey’s style that:

… the words are often half humorously written like a remark made in parting conversation, a characteristic that his writings always retain. The method is all part of his presentation of life as a picture crowded with odd figures, occupying themselves in unexpected, sometimes inexplicable, pursuits. He wrote down what appeared to him the truth, but it is often the truth of poetry rather than the truth of science.

This is, of course, the way Powell discloses his world and the characters that inhabit it.

Character, time and the dance

The discriminating judgment of the character sketch, combined with the “masterly stroke of the maxim” in the context of time passing, informs Powell’s depiction of characters dancing and inexorably falling prey to the English disease.

The seventeenth-century treatment of character offered Powell a creative escape from the dilemma the modern English novelist faced and which Nick Jenkins broods over in The Acceptance World. Jenkins considers “the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things conveyed”. More precisely, it is the “intricacies of social life [that] make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony—in which all classes of this island converse—upset the normal emphasis of reported speech”.

Even to describe his own character was “hard … even the bare facts had an almost unreal, almost satirical ring” when presented in the manner of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels:

“I was born in the city of L—— , the son of an infantry officer …” To convey much that was relevant to the reader’s mind by such phrases was in this country hardly possible. Too many factors had to be taken into consideration. Understatement, too, had its own banality … encourag[ing] evasion of unpalatable facts.

Jenkins speculates about how he might describe the difference between the poet Mark Members, his Oxford contemporary, and himself. Viewed from a sociological perspective, both “might reasonably be considered almost identical units of the same organism”. They “were both about the same age, had been at the same university and were committed to the same profession of literature”. The way out of his difficulty comes via the seventeenth-century notion of character capturing its essence in an “imprese or short emblem”. In Jenkins’s case, the writer’s prejudice:

might prove the very element through which to capture and pin down unequivocally the otherwise elusive nature of what was of interest, discarding by its selective power the empty unprofitable shell making up that side of Members untranslatable in terms of art; concentrating his final essence, his position, as it were, in eternity, into the medium of words.

Powell captures all his characters in this manner. Thus the painter Ralph Barnby belonged “in a group” defined by will and power. He enjoyed “the uncomplicated, direct powers of attack that often accompany a gift for painting”. More precisely, “Like Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he set store ‘upon what terms’ he possessed a woman seeking a relationship in which sensuality merged with power, rather than engaging in their habitual conflict.” Hugh Moreland, whose character is defined in antithesis to Barnby, asks him, “if he did not find most women extraordinarily unsensual”. Barnby replies that he “never noticed”. “I suppose,” said Moreland, “had you asked Lloyd George, ‘Don’t you think politics rather corrupt?’ he might have made the same reply.” Barnby, as Jenkins explains:

would not in the least have endorsed this picture of himself. His own version was that of a man chronically overburdened, absolutely borne down by sensitive emotional stresses. All the same in contrasting the two of them there was something to be said for Moreland’s over-simplification.

Prejudice and the “imprese” are particularly at work in the portrait of Kenneth Widmerpool. The name itself derived from a particularly officious new model army officer described in Lucy Hutchinson’s English Civil War memoir The Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Recalling Widmerpool’s early interest in golf many years later, Jenkins observes:

he made not the smallest acknowledgement of the feat of memory on my part … The illusion that egoists will be pleased, or flattered by interest taken in their habits persists throughout life; whereas, in fact, persons like Widmerpool, in complete subjection to the ego, are, by nature of that infirmity, prevented from supposing that the minds of others could possibly be occupied by any subject far distant from the egoist’s own affairs.

Later, Jenkins’s own prejudice prevents him from appreciating how Widmerpool’s status altered over time. Thus, Jenkins’s Eton friend Peter Templer, describing Widmerpool’s place in the City’s acceptance world, no longer views him as a figure of schoolboy fun, but “crystallised” into “a City acquaintance … as a normal vehicle for the transaction of business; perhaps even one particularly useful”.

The prejudicial sketch extends to minor characters. Powell captures the figure of the Field-Marshal in Normandy in 1944 through eccentric self-presentation:

the eyes were deep set and icy cold. You thought at once of an animal … Did the features, in fact, suggest, some mythical beast, say one of those encountered in Alice in Wonderland full of awkward questions and downright statements?

Reference to English wars fought in Flanders in the Tudor–Stuart period, not Proustian recollections of Balbec, further reinforce the English character and context. Jenkins recalls that Philip Sidney had died at Zutphen, his character like a monk who “submitted himself to the military way of life, because he thought it right rather than because it appealed to him”.

However, it is the Field-Marshal’s concern with fashion, another theme of Burton and of character writers more generally, that establishes the figure. Introducing a group of allied officers to the Field-Marshal, Jenkins observes:

There was a moment’s pause when we stood at ease. Then the Field-Marshal appeared from one of the caravans. He had his hands in his pockets, but removed them as he approached. It was instantaneously clear that he no longer chose to wear his pullover showing under his battledress blouse. Indeed, he had by now, it was revealed, invented a form of battledress particular to himself, neatly tailored.

In fact, “from the very beginning of his fame, the Field-Marshal had never ignored Chips Lovell’s often repeated reminder that it was a tailor’s war”.Lovell’s aphorism highlights, too, the role that maxims play in Powell’s ironic definition of character. Thus Peter Templer, himself not averse to the practice, avers that, “Adulterers are always asking the courts for discretion … when as a rule discretion is the last thing they’ve been generous with themselves.” Barnby observes of the novelist St John Clark that he “fell in love with himself at an early age”, to which Jenkins replies: “The trouble with self-love is that it seems so often unrequited.” Barnby contends: “All women are stimulated by the news that any wife has left any husband”, whilst Moreland finds that “Seduction is to do and say / The banal thing in the banal way”. Charles Stringham captures his relationship with Peggy Stepney in the phrase, “Coronets on the table napkins, but no kind hearts between the sheets”. Dicky Umfraville finds that “growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed”. Meanwhile, Chandler captures the minor figure Rupert Wise in the phrase, “He may have a profile like Apollo, but he’s got a mind like Hampstead Garden Suburb.”

Maxims determine Powell’s conversational approach to character development. Equally Jacobean is the role that melancholy plays in character development in the Dance. Minor and major characters suffer from melancholy as a habit, in Burton’s precise sense, of “a chronic and continuate disease, a settled humour”, not a passing “disposition”. Stringham, Moreland and Johnny Pardoe all succumb, the latter sitting “in the library for weeks at a time just brooding”. Stringham by contrast finds release, if not relief, in the alcoholic indulgence of “an afternoon man”. Moreland thinks he might die of nostalgia. He had always been fond of The Anatomy of Melancholy and found in Ben Jonson a writer “who reminds one that human life always remains the same”.

In the post-war, winter novels, the melancholic’s love of death becomes an all-pervasive theme. Burton offers the means to anatomise Trapnel’s doomed passion for Pamela Widmerpool. Pamela Widmerpool loves death, makes love like “a corpse” and the thanatic impulse eventually overwhelms her. Trapnel joins “the dynasty of Pamela’s dead lovers”. Sex and death were conjoined in her character. Her death could “only be looked upon as a sacrifice—of herself to herself”.

Trapnel’s American biographer, Russell Gwinnett, shares Pamela’s melancholic habit and this forms the basis of their mutual attraction. Gwinnett was “more than a little taken with mortality”. Indeed, “had he been an English undergraduate, his rooms would have been equipped with black candles, skulls, the odour of incense. He likes Death. The atmosphere is not the American tradition. The taste has told against him.” Gwinnett prefaces his biography of Trapnel with an ambivalent quotation from Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy. Jenkins observes, “Tourneur, as Gwinnett himself, was obsessed with Death.” The subject “enraptures” Gwinnett; commenting on his biography of Trapnel, he observes, “Death as well as Life can have its beauty.” Gwinnett later quarrels with Scorpio Murtlock, a character equally preoccupied with death, over their conflicting interpretation of death’s representation. One of the tenets of Murtlock’s occult sect, which took its understanding of hearing secret harmonies from the seventeenth-century alchemist Thomas Vaughan, was that “Harmony, Power, Death, are all more or less synonymous—not Desire and Death”. Gwinnett disapproved. He resented “Death being, so to speak, removed from the romantic associations of Love … to be prostituted to the vulgar purposes of Power—pseudo-magical power at that”.

The Jacobean influence further extends to the role time plays in the construction of the novel. Hilary Spurling writes that “the deepest satisfaction” in the novel “comes less from character and incident than from the structure that supports them both”, namely, time. In the Poussin painting, Spurling maintains, Time “smiles a sinister smile as well he may considering that in life as in art he has the upper hand”. Time is to Powell “what space is to the painter. Almost any character will serve to illustrate time’s role.”

This is persuasive, but inaccurate. It overlooks Powell’s distinctly seventeenth-century approach to time. Time for seventeenth-century writers was circular and contingent. Time is tyrannical, but ultimately beholden to the arbitrary march of “events”. Jenkins observes that friendship and love bore within them “something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events”. This was, as Jenkins later observes, “a writer’s time rather than a painter’s time”. Indeed, the seventeenth-century understanding, as Jenkins explains, comes from Ariosto. This conception, in fact, is diametrically opposed to Poussin’s “unhurried” image of Time. Instead Ariosto’s, and by extension, Powell’s time is “far less relaxed, indeed appallingly restless”. “The naked ancient” is “in an eternally breathless scramble with himself”, collecting “from the Fates small metal tablets … then mov[ing] off at the double to dump these identity discs in the waters of Oblivion”. While the Dance opens in Poussin’s unhurried time, the mood “genial and composed”, it ultimately closes in a Burtonian torrent of writerly time. Nothing could be more Jacobean.

To conclude, Powell creates a fictional memoirist (Nick) and the Dance is an imaginative creation and depiction of his memory. Nick has to order his memories and interrogate them sequentially. Thus rather than plot driving the narrative, character and events determine the dance of time. Character emerges and allows patterns to be discerned—“but in a sense nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be”. Such an understanding of character eschews the modernist, introspective approach found in the work of Joyce or Proust and instead demonstrates the influence of Aubrey, Burton and the Jacobean preoccupation with character, time and death.