Powell's Hearing Secret Harmonies

PATRICK SWINDEN 51

Powell’s Hearing Secret Harmonies Harmonies in the first phase of this last Dance to the Music of Time’ are so secret as to be almost inaudible. In the grounds of Jenkins’s country house, his wife Isobel’s niece, Fiona Cutts, is observed with three other members of a hippy-style commune angling for crayfish in a brook‘ that flows through their camp site. Fiona’s presence went unremarked in earlier volumes, though her parents, Roddy and Susan Cutts, had contributed to some of the best scenes of Books Do Furnish a Room and Temporary Kings. Rusty, a surnameless girl ‘with the look of a young prostitute’, remains stolidly featureless, one of those blank characters who convincingly reproduce the forgettability of so much of what falls within the outer reaches of our social acquaintance. The two men, Scorpio Murtlock and Barnabas Henderson, are also new characters, carrying with them no echoes from the past.

And yet the past presses on the present with a notable persistence. The scene is mediated through Nicholas’s unobtrusive but tirelessly retrospective consciousness. The quarry in the distance summons up the spectre of Edgar Deacon’s painting of the Boyhood of Cyrus, an ubiquitous presence in the early and middle volumes. Echoes of blasting, combined with a flight of duck over the landscape, call to mind an argument between General Brobowski and General Philidor back in The Military Philosophers (not actually reproduced there). Fiona’s presence on the estate is explained through further retrospect, involving her aunts Blanche and Norah Tolland, and touching the later careers of their brother Hugo and their friend Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.

This retrospective propinquity, even where the figures en sc‘ene are new, does not surprise. In A Buyer‘s Market, almost at the beginning of the sequence, Nicholas had expressed the belief ‘that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all. ’

From the middle of the Dance onwards these supplementary worlds have proliferated in an increasing abundance. After the worlds of school and university traversed in the first volume (A Question of Upbringing), Nicholas’s set remains fairly homogeneous and interconnected at numerous points (from A Buyer’s Market to Casanova ’s Chinese Restaurant). The progress from the Walpole-Wilson establishment at Eaton Square to the raffish Bohemian quarters of painters and musicians like Barnby and Morland (punctuated by weekends in the country at Sir Magnus Donners’s Stourwater or Erridge’s Thrubworth for *Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies. Heinemann, €3.10.

52 Critical Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4

example) is a progress that establishes marked, if sometimes tenuous, relationships within a clearly defined social milieu. It is not easy to put a name to this milieu. Phrases like upper middle class, Establishment, fashionable metropolitan are insufficiently precise. It is better defined through aspects of its life style: comings out, debutante balls, dinners presided over by society hostesses; interests its members have in respect of certain writers, painters, political causes; buildings they entertain in, sometimes live in, which are considered half way between examples of architectural styles and insecurely maintained family possessions.

Above all it is characterised by the language its members use: inflections of tone; choice of slang; ways of responding to questions without answering them, because they are recognised as not being questions but polite forms of self-assertion, or protection. Nicholas is referring to it early in the pages of At Lady Moli’~ ’s when he reflects on Chips Lovell’s comment that ‘Realism goes with good birth’. The statement, he says, might be hard to substantiate universally, ‘but, by recognising laws of behaviour operating within the microcosm of a large consanguineous network of families, however loosely connected, individuals born into such a world often gain an unsentimental grasp of human conduct : a grasp something superior to that of apparently more perceptive persons whose minds are unattuned by early association to the constant give and take of an ancient and tenacious social organism’. Nicholas appears to have been born into just such a world. His ability to move at ease in it over the span of those first six volumes contrasts with the awkwardness of some others among the characters - notably Widmerpool. But most of the dkzn of the narrative depends on Nicholas’s movements within a social world to which he is so acclimatised as to be invisible most of the time. It may occur to us that this is true also of his creator, and we shall have to deliberate on the strengths and weaknesses inherent in that fact.

Intimations of the Nazi war in The Kindly Ones bring with them a superb and unexpected flashback to Nicholas’s childhood near an army camp outside Aldershot in 1914. The description of the lives of domestic servants during that period, the muted pathos and comedy of Billson the parlourmaid’s unrequited love for Albert the cook, and the melancholia of Bracey, Captain Jenkins’s manservant, are consummately achieved, and represent a high point in the development of English social comedy. None of my forthcoming remarks about Powell’s art in general can take away anything from the admirable treatment of these events. Much of what follows in The Kin& Ones comes dose to the perfection of these early scenes, especially the occurrences in Albert’s seaside hotel involving the mage Dr Trelawny, and Jenkins’s erstwhile rival (for the favours of Jean Templar), Bob Duport. Here the comedy shifts to a different key. The pathos is gone, but the restrained articulation of social absurdities is

Powell’s Hearing Secret Harmonies 53

not harsh or critical. Trelawny in the lavatory, muttering mystical inanities through the locked door as he tries to pick his way out, is as funny as but less moving than Billson’s nude appearance at the Jenkins’ dinner table - crazed out of her wits by Albert’s announcement “of his engagement to another woman.

Thereafter the supplementary worlds in which Jenkins moves become less and less closely interrelated, less homogeneous. The army brings him into contact first with a battalion full of Welsh bank clerks and petty officials, then with eccentric foreigners of the lntelligence Corps (Polish Liaison). In the post-war volumes he mixes with writers and editors of uncertain provenance. Bagshaw, Trapnel, Gwinnett and, in Hearing Secret Harmonies, Scorpio Murtlock are much less firmly identified in their social ambiance than, say, MacClintick or Ted Jeavons in earlier novels. Some of them, Trapnel in particular, possess pasts shrouded in mystery. Others, like Gwinnett or Bagshaw, have ascertainable origins in the English (in the first case American) class system, but Powell is not as alive to the details of the social station from which they have emerged. Moving into Jenkins’s own social circle they carry with them little convincing testimony to the social contexts of their previous lives.

There is a provocative passage near the beginning of The Acceptance World that throws some light on Powell’s difficulties. Significantly Nicholas is sitting at a table in the Ritz, casting his eye over a party of South Americans who are chatting excitedly to one another at a little distance from him. He begins to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, somewhat in the Jamesian manner - I mean in the life of Hawthorne. He feels that ‘Intricacies of social life 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’. We have to remember Nicholas is living in the late twenties, early thirties, at this time. Even so, the statement strikes me as being only half-true. All classes of this island did not at all times converse in understatement and irony, though it may be true that until the First World War most of their literary progeny did. And though it may be true that understatement and irony were not, and are not, the monopoly of the upper and professional classes, the kinds of oblique speech available to people who can be considered models for the ‘unassimilated’ characters of Powell’s latest offerings in The Music of Time are different from those available to the ‘assimilated’ ones.

Powell nicely evades the problem in the army volumes by setting his scene first of all in Wales (and tactfully underplaying the Welsh accents) and then by making good use of the fact that army life, particularly among officers, possesses a language of its own, cutting across class barriers for the most part,


or at any rate muffling the point of contact between class and class. This deflects attention from the unassimilated languages Powell cannot manage in their pure, or neat, forms. As a result his comic touch here is as sure as it was in the earlier volumes, but it is rather more emphatic. The difference can be illustrated by comparing the chamber pot incident involving Sunny Farebrother and Jimmy Stripling (both assimilated characters in spite of their very different temperaments) in A Question of Upbringing, with any of a number of incidents in that very funny novel The Valley of Bones. Take for example Captain Gwatkin’s interview with the reprobate Private Sayce. With characteristic indeterminacy Powell informs us that Sayce’s affairs ‘had reached some sort of climax’ and Gwatkin, his c.o., decides to have a ‘straight talk’ with him. This turns out to be a sentimental heart to heart about everybody in the company doing his bit towards the war effort, with Sayce conspicuously letting the side down. Sayce’s incomprehension (whilst saying the right things and feeling momentarily abashed when, later in the day, the light begins to dawn) and Gwatkin’s self-satisfaction and genuine, though absurd, feeling, are accurately observed. Part of the comic effect is unpatronisingly achieved by the way the public-school ethos of Gwatkin the bank clerk’s sentiments, and even his phraseology, are brought to our attention. The army has provided an opportunity for what would otherwise have been considered an alien form of address. Sayce, ‘that bugger Sayce’ as his Sergeant Major refers to him, is, of course, quite untouched, ethically and linguistically, by this particular pep talk. He sniffs ‘frantically’ towards the end, and ‘seemed moved almost to tears by the thought of all his own hitherto unrevealed goodness’ (everybody is fundamentally a good chap according to Gwatkin’s hybrid ethic). But this is clearly an irrational reaction to the strangeness of the situation. The comedy lies in the mutual incomprehension between the two men, disguised from one of them by the fragile bridge of words, conventional feelings, one-sidedly good intentions, that he has thrown across the cultural abyss. And the success of the comedy in this instance lies in the fact that the cultural separation does not correspond to a class separation; or if it does (we are not told what Sayce’s civilian occupation is) neither of the classes we are concerned with falls into the categories within which Powell has up to this point (with the exception of the Stonehurst domestics) concentrated his attention. Linguistically the comedy is expressed through mannerisms of speech we associate with the army; and though these probably have their origins in upper class mores and speech habits, they are not the same speech habits as the ones we were used to in the civilian scenes in earlier volumes.

Elsewhere Powell’s comedy is expressed through dialogue that is unambigu- ously the creation of a particular class. Within this class there is an almost infinitesmal accumulation of sub-strata, ranging from Widmetpool to Erridge,

Powell’s Hearing Secret Harmonies 5 5

or from Jimmy Brent to Molly Jeavons. Much of the fascination of The Music of Time evolves out of shifts in station, fashionableness, success as the fortunes of individuals change through marriage or accumulation of wealth, or as times change and different accommodations are made with classes above or below. Lady Molly’s marriage to Ted Jeavons, in the 1930s, has an altogether different social complexion from Rosie Manasch’s marriage to Odo Stevens in the 1950s. Through all this, though, the language the characters speak remains startingly uniform, and the dialogue tends to confine them in a linguistic quarantine where only the bland, the suave, the standard English is spoken. What can only be taken, so far as the characters are concerned, as a widening of the class waveband in later volumes, is accompanied by no significant variation in the language spoken. This is true also of other things we would have expected to modify the character of speech affected by different persons in age, profession, style of life. There is none of, say, Angus Wilson’s ear for the idiosyncracies of speech and what they can be made to reveal of social position, among other things. And this means Powell’s comedy owes very little to those clashes of idiom, dialect or linguistic tone that had played such an important part in earlier comic dialogue, in the novel or on the stage. On the contrary, the levelness of speech forms and the uniformity of pitch and tone throw the responsibility for the success of the comedy on to the information each separate part of the dialogue transmits - as well as on the timing of the release of each of those parts.

The often inconsequential, even bizarre, movement from address to response and back again, couched as it is in the unruffled prose of gentlemanly conversation - drawling, bored, fastidious, disengaged - lies at the root of Powell’s comic achievement. It is an extension of the sort of thing he did so well in his early fiction. One thinks of the conversation, in Afternoon Men, between Barlow and Atwater and the others about what to pay the fisherman who saved Pringle from his mock suicide:

‘Who is this man?’ said Pringle. He rubbed his eyes. Mrs Race said: ‘He’s the man who lent you the clothes. We thought you’d like to

‘What clothes?’ ‘The clothes you came back from the sea in. Don’t you want to give him some

‘Why?’

give him some money.’

money?’

‘I don’t know.’ Pringle said: ‘Well, if you all think so, I suppose I ought. How much shall I give

him? Mrs Race said: ‘I think ten shillings would be enough. The others think a pound.’ ‘Ten shillings?’ said Pringle. ‘A pound?’


Atwater said: ‘You see, they’ve probably got the whole thbg out of proportion

‘But, I mean, a pound is enormous.’ ‘Give him ten shillings then.’ ‘Ten shillings isn’t enough,’ said Harriet. ‘You must see that.’ Atwater said: ‘How many men were there?’ ‘Two,’ said Pringle. ‘But only one of them helped me into the boat.’ Mrs Race said: ‘Why not compromise and give the man fifteen shillings?’ Pringle said: ‘I might do that.’ He looked as if he had woken up now. He fumbled

‘Has anyone got any change?’ he said. Barlow said: ‘I can give you half-a-crown, but it’s the only loose change I’ve got.

‘Here’s another half-crown,’ said Atwater. ‘So, if you’ve got ten shillings?’ Sophy came in again. ‘He’s drinking the coffee,’ she said. She sat down and went on with her work. Pringle said: ‘Will you give him this, Sophy?’ He gave her a ten-shilling note and the two half-crowns. Sophy took the money and

‘What did he say?’ Sophy said: ‘He just said, “Tar”.’ ‘Nothing more?’ ‘No.’ ‘That was obviously the right sum,’ said Pringle and, retying his dressing-gown

in their minds.’

about in his note-case.

The two pounds has got to last me till Friday.’

went out again. When she came back, carrying the coffee-cup, Mrs Race said:

cord, he went upstairs.

Oddly enough, the passage in The Music of Time which reminds me most of this takes place among the lower classes in The Kindly Ones, where Bracey and Billson argue over whether Billson should have given the remains of a seed cake to some of Dr Trelawny’s exhausted athletes when they appeared at the door of the Jenkins menage.

But many of the most celebrated scenes in The Music of Time owe nothing to dialogue at all. Even so, the linguistic devices which have been described as the expression of a class, each member of which manipulates them in order to project and dramatise himself in the company of his peers, re-emerge in Nicholas’s own descriptive prose. I am referring to those habits of understatement and irony, appropriate in the forms they take here (in spite of Powell’s suggestion to the contrary) to a particular class and milieu, which Nicholas himself referred to in the passage quoted above. Typically they take the form of dfident qualification, muted insistence, indirect and circuitous stalking of a point, an opinion, a pronouncement. A good place to look for it in the new volume is almost at the end, where Widmerpool abases himself before his old business acquaintance, Sir Bertram Akworth, at Fiona Cutts’ wedding. Wid- merpool’s behaviour is histrionic and absurd. Having thrown in his lot with


Murtlock’s transcendental squatters and failed to browbeat Murtlock himself into submission to his authority, he has become a pathetic wretch, his will totally dissolved in an orgy of penance and self-humiliation. Sir Bertram’s reaction to his present display is cool, though disgusted, and Powell’s prose mirrors it faithfully. The composed discrimination of the balanced clauses (‘Sir Bertram either did not . . . or, more probably . . .’ etc.) and the pressure of expressions like ‘more than a trifle’ or ‘socially to discompose him’, all conspire to produce an impression of well-bred disdain, ever so slightly lifted eyebrows, precisely an immunity from social indisposition. This is what I take to have been Michael Ratcliffe’s point in his Times review of the series when he referred to Powell’s ‘resources of metropolitan detachment’. Whilst it may have played its part in the composition of these scenes I have confessed to admiring so much in The Kindly Ones and The Valley of Bones, it seems to me to be most in evidence in descriptive comic scenes like this one between Widmerpool and Sir Bertram Akworth. Most of the celebrated comic scenes in the series take this form: Barbara Goring pouring sugar over Widmerpool’s head at the Huntercombe ball; Pamela Widmerpool being sick in a Chinese vase after Erridge’s funeral - it is significant that so many of these scenes involve the discomfiture of Widmerpool. Because I find these scenes less funny than some critics, professing more sophisticated tastes, do, I feel the need to go beyond them to explain why that metropolitan detachment often strikes me as being only in a special sense a ‘resource’ - presumably, it is implied, of literary excellence.

Let us start with a sample of the evidence. A typical example of Powell’s comedy is Nicholas’s explanation of how Bagshaw acquired his nickname, in Books Do Furnish a Room. Here is the passage:

all the while legend accumulated round this weaker side which Bagshaw’s nickname celebrated. Its origin was lost in the mists of the past, but the legend emphasised aspects of Bagshaw that could make him a liability.

There were two main elucidations. One asserted that the worse for drink, trying to abstract a copy of The GoMen Treasury from a large glass-fronted bookcase in order to verify a quotation required for a radio programme, Bagshaw overturned on himself this massive piece of furniture. As volume after volume descended on him, it was asserted he made the comment: ‘Books do furnish a room’.

Others had a different story. They would have it that Bagshaw, stark naked, had spoken the words conversationally*as he approached the sofa on which lay, presumably in the same state, the wife of a well-known dramatic critic (on duty at the theatre that night appraising the First Night of The Apple Curt), a clandestine meeting having reached emotional climax in her husband’s book-lined study. Bagshaw was alleged to have spoken the words, scarcely more than muttered them - a revolutionary’s trib-ute to bourgeois values - as he rapidly advanced towards his prey: ‘Books do furnish a room’.


The lady, it could have been none other, was believed later to have complained to a third party of lack of sensibility on Bagshaw’s part in making such an observation at such a juncture. Whichever story was true - probably neither, the second had all the flavour of having been worked over, if not invented, by Moreland - the nickname stuck.

The most noticeable feature of this extract is its tentativeness. Both explana- tions are hypothetical, and offered in a quietly diffident manner. We are not intended to take them too seriously. The incidents described are probably fictitious, certainly exaggerated. The repetition of the word ‘asserted’ in the first paragraph is rueful, incredulous. Reliable people like Jenkins never assert things. Things that are asserted as distinct from suggested, observed, surmised, tend not to be true. They do not belong to the world of ironic understatement which is the world that Nicholas and the novelist inhabit. The second story too is hedged about with qualification and uncertainty - ‘They would have it’, ‘Bagshaw was alleged to have spoken’. In fact the absurdity of the two situations is m d e d by this evidence of authorial detachment, and the comedy exists somewhere in between what the events suggest and what is done to them by Nicholas’s apologetic mode of presentation. It is the opposite technique to that of Evelyn Waugh, a writer with whom Powell has often, for the most part mistakenly, been compared. The sports day at Llanabba Castle in Decline and Full or Apthorpe’s peregrinations with his thunder box in Men at Arms succeed by virtue of the emphasis Waugh places on the ever increasing absurdity and incongruity of what happens. Having set events in motion, he gets out of the way, or appears to do so - which novelistically speaking is the same thing. Powell, by contrast, interposes not merely Nicholas (and therefore someone very like himself), but more than one often anonymous and always unreliable third party in whom the story originated. Powell knows that ‘When such scraps of gossip are committed to paper, the words bear a heavier weight than when the same information is imparted huskily between draughts of champagne in the noise of a crowded room’. That was what he said, through Nicholas of course, in A Buyer’s Market. So to soften the impact of the comedy he has recourse to that cushion of qualification, circumlocution, tentativeness and obliquity which is the hallmark of both his and his character’s style. As a result of this his readers’ interest tends to be deflected’from the scene and caught up in that unruffled, sceptical well-bred tone. Often when they assume they are being amused, they are actually being uplifted, and what they are being uplifted into, linguistically, is a class above themselves.

Thinking of General Conyers practising the ’cello (At Lady Molly‘s, p. 72), Nicholas conjures up ‘one of those Dutch genre pictures . . . impressive . . . from the deep social conviction of the painter’. Powell’s social conviction is very deep. In A Buyer’s Market he has Nicholas say that ‘human l ie is lived


largely at surface level’, which means for the most part in social terms, or at any rate in a way that makes it susceptible, without a great deal of distortion or omission, to treatment in terms of social comedy. Where it is not lived on the surface, Nicholas finds it virtually impossible to articulate: ‘A close examina- tion of what happened at any given period in itself provokes an unnatural element, like looking at a large oil painting under a magnifying glass, the over-all effect lost’ (Temporary Kings, p. 57). There is something commend- able, and tactful, about such an insistence on the limits of art, or of communi- cation generally. But it can run to undue caution, undue reticence. It can also encourage too great an insistence on tone at the expense of matter, an air of literary gossip about fictional people. In Powell’s case I believe something like this has happened and that it has become more damaging since the war volumes because of the growing area of social life he insists on noticing, but refrains from investigating at all thoroughly. It was present back in the old Walpole- Wilson, Warminster, Tolland days but the fact of social homogeneity made it less startling; and Widmerpool’s carefully documented origins in the lowest stratum of Nicholas’s and Powell’s own social class provided a firm backbone to a plot which elsewhere betrayed some purposelessness and irresolution - inseparable from the restrictions Powell imposed on his hero’s contacts with other people. In recent volumes the other side of Powell’s reticence, the shallowness of his insight into what are potentially his most interesting characters: Trapnel, Murtlock, Pamela Widmerpool (to a lesser extent - there are scenes involving her where Powell overcomes his self-imposed limitations) has become much more pronounced. But the tone remains genial, tactful, civilised to many people’s way of thinking.

London critics have emulated Powell’s metropolitan detachment and conferred on his novels an almost unanimous accolade. It was left to an American, Edmund Wilson, to sound a cautionary note. He didn’t see why the English made so much fuss about Powell: ‘He’s just entertaining enough to read in bed late at night in summer.’ That was unjust, if a useful corrective. As an American, however, Wilson felt no need to be uplifted into an English class from which the style and tone of the prose extend such a seductive invitation. English men of letters have fewer defences. Powell himself is certainly not a snob in the new sense of the word, but I have more than a little suspicion that in the subtlest and least deliberate of ways he has exposed snobbery, in the old sense, disguised as comic appreciation, in many of his readers.

The snobbery travels far beyond its basis in idiom and tone because the actual content of Powell’s social observation grows progressively less important as the cultivated sensibility which is responsible for it (‘half way between dissipation and diffidence’) attracts more and more attention. In fact from the first we find out extraordinarily little about even the most superficial of the characters. Yet

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this is what Nicholas calls ‘an unsentimental grasp on human conduct’, available, we remember, only to those like Powell and himself ‘whose minds have been attuned by early association to the constant give and take of an ancient and tenacious social organism’. It seems to me that whilst such attunement may be very real, and in an earlier age had a great deal to do with, for example, Jane Austen’s success as a novelist, this attempt to separate it from critical thought by ‘apparently more perceptive per~011s’ is disingenuous, and incidentally inapplicable to Powell’s own best work. My point is that Powell has been taken at more than his word by fashionable critics who have noticed the felicities of his detached comic method whilst remaining blind to the exclusive tone through which so much of it is radiated. And this is because it is the charm of this tone that it provides the illusion of a shared attitude and a shared status. It makes exclusiveness inclusive. Readers in general are flattered into a sort of class collusion, which they interpret as emotional poise, comic detachment, a restrained delicacy of appreciation. But what it offers to our contemplation , especially in much of the later books, is emotionally superficial , intellectually unambitious, and often not very funny either. In the end tone is almost all that is left. If flutters elegantly in a void at the back of which Trapnel , Gwinnett, Murtlock, even Widmerpool, have been done away with. Metro- politan critics of matching resource have not been slow to fill it with their own professions of significance.

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Powell's Hearing Secret Harmonies