Literary waltz

Anthony Powell came of age in the 1930s, probably the most dynamic and creative decade in the English literary world. A host of writers wh...

Anthony Powell came of age in the 1930s, probably the most dynamic and creative decade in the English literary world. A host of writers who were to leave an indelible impress on their generation and the next half-century in both political and literary terms made their debut during this time George Orwell, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, Edward Upward and Powell himself. The death of Powell on March 28 at the age of 95 breaks our last link with this era.

Antony Dymoke Powell was born into privilege on December 21, 1905, and educated at Eton. He read history at Balliol College, Oxford, and joined the publishers Duckworth. During World War II, he rose to become a major in the Intelligence Service as a liaison officer with the Allied governments-in-exile. Before and after the war, he concentrated on a literary career, wrote for Punch, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph, refused knighthood, and made startling pronouncements like 8220;George Orwell would have supported the Falklands War.8221;

In the 1930s, he wrote Afternoon Men, a novel about the Bright Young Things that his friend Evelyn Waugh was to make his trademark, and Venesburg, an unfairly neglected satire about Finland. Powell8217;s reputation, however, rests on A Dance to the Music of Time duodecalogy a 12-novel sequence which started out in 1951 with A Question of Upbringing and ended with Hearing Secret Harmonies in 1975.

Powell8217;s long narrative 8212; filmed for television in 1997 8212; is about the decline of the British aristocracy and the fragmentation of the Victorian world through eras of crisis, observed through many tones and voices, and with irony. Narrator Nicholas Jenkins8217; story takes us from, in effect, the period when naturalism dissolves into modernism, through the years of great changes and into the postmodern world. Against the survivor Jenkins is set the formidable destructive figure of Lord Widmerpool based on Powell8217;s bete noire, C.P. Snow who hungers for ever wider horizons of success and power, and emerges chameleon-like in various positions of power at different points of history. At one stage he is a university vice-chancellor with radical opinions, at others he is a spy.

But what is the Dance of Time? At the beginning of A Question8230; he describes watching Nicolas Poussin8217;s painting A Dance to the End of Time: 8220;The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable 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.8221;

Anthony Burgess has remarked on the 8220;epic scale8221; and 8220;smallness of scope8221; of Dance. The epic scale is due to the fact that it begins in the 1920s and winds down in the late 1960s. The smallness of scope is due to Powell8217;s disinterest in the political, and his focus on the social. It is also because of Powell8217;s vision of Time as simply a continuing 8220;music8221; carrying forward the movements of the 400 characters.

The dual impact of this scale and narrowness 8220;drives a relatively deep fissure through variegated seams of Team.8221; Such fissures appear frequently. Widmerpool enters the sequence running on a chilly winter afternoon at school in the first volume, and dies, appropriately running, in the last. Jenkins, too, ends as he begins: burning leaves and reflecting on the dance of the seasons and of human beings. Such patterns and seams of time contribute to the continuing appeal of Dance, the most substantial account of English life and manners in the 20th century.