Anthony Powell and His Critics

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Pritchard, William H

There is no other work in the annals of European fiction that attempts meticulously to recreate half a century of history, decade by decade, with anything like the emotional precision or details of [these] twelve volumes.

Anderson does not exclude Balzac, Zola, or Proust, and he says also that the elegance of Powell's artifice is "only compatible with comedy."

Here I will inject a personal note testifying that reading Dance aloud, as I currently am with my spouse, one comes across numerous manifestations of the comic that were missed, or forgotten about, in reading to oneself. To give but one example, I hadn't until reading aloud registered how interesting a talker Nick's roommate at school, Peter Templer, can be. We remember him mainly from the opening volume, A (Question of Upbringing, in which he arrives back late at school after a successful encounter in London with a "tart." In The, Acceptance World, Templer and Nick meet up by chance at the Ritz, where Nick is waiting for Mark Members, a literary acquaintance, to show up, and we get the following banter between Templer and Nick:

"I suppose you are waiting for someone, Nick," he said, drawing up a chair. "Some ripe little piece?"

"You're very wide of the mark."

"Then a dowager is going to buy you dinner-after which she will make you an offer."

"No such luck."

"What then?"

"I'm waiting for a man."

"I say, old boy, sorry to have been so inquisitive. Things have come to that, have they?"

"You couldn't know."

"I should have guessed."

"Have a drink anyway."

Waugh without the wit? Not at all, since in Waugh we could never have missed the (probably) loud joke first time through. By contrast, "Things have come to that, have they?" is so quiet and uninflected as to be almost undetectable-or so it was to me in previous readings.

Brooke Allen testifies to how the larger effects of Dance on a reader take time to manifest themselves:

I first read Dance when I was in my twenties, and though I loved and treasured it, it now seems clear that I couldn't have understood half of it. Though it is a book that appeals to the young, it is not a young person's book. One has to be middle-aged to have experienced the almost arbitrary dissolution of love and friendship, the almost arbitrary apotheosis of some and dissolution of others, to understand that Powell was not being gratuitously cruel to his characters but simply realistic.

This is tellingly said and put me in mind of a finality in Dance, when Nick's friend, the composer Hugh Moreland, makes his last appearance (in Temporary Kings, penultimate volume of the series). Nick is visiting the dying Moreland in a South London nursing home where Moreland, surrounded by books, remembers a song from a little-read Jacobean play by John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan. The song-which begins "The dark is my delight / So 'tis the nightingale's"-brings to Moreland's mind the predacious Pamela Flitton, now married to Widmerpool. He says that, if there had been time, he might have done a setting for the song, and he imagines how it would have made his friend, the music critic Gossage, sit up: