A Different Drummer

Anthony Powell is one of those half flavors that no one can quite define. Even when consumed in quantity— and he is now up to volume nine in his sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time— he tends to evaporate on the palate in the very act of tasting. Pity the poor novelist who reminds people of someone else! Groping a little desperately for the quintessence of Powell, admirers have compared him to P. G. Wodehouse and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Jane Austen and Jules Romains. A Trollope-lover once called him “a latterday Trollope.” Evelyn Waugh likened him to Proust, and nearly everyone has likened him to Evelyn Waugh.

by Anthony Powell (Little, Brown, $4.95)

It is as if a kind of low-pressure energy—too weak to assert itself as personality—operated at a discount in Powell as mere manner, tone; and even that tone proves too pale for positive identification. Early Powell tone could be called, by a stretch of the term, satirical; later Powell tone lies somewhere between well-bred irony and rather elegant ennui.

Yet Powell is almost as difficult to forget as he is to define. Other novelists—almost any other novelistmake more powerful impact. But Powell lingers on, like a tune one can neither quite whistle nor chase out of the mind.

Perhaps the least unsatisfactory definition of a Powell novel is a collision staged between a traditional, suave style—social comedy—and a kinetic, uncouth theme—the twentieth century. As might be anticipated, nowhere is this collision more head-on than in Powell’s war novels, of which The Military Philosophers is last of a trilogy within The Music of Time. A number of earlier novels in this sequence—At Lady Molly’s (1957), Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960)—are nearly self-sufficient units. The war novels are not. To read The Military Philosophers out of The Music of Time context is like judging a mosaic when only a fraction of the design is visible.

The sequence dates back to World War I. The time span of The Military Philosophers is 1942 to 1945. Nicholas Jenkins, Powell’s selfeffacing narrator, is fighting a wry war mostly in London as a liaison officer, first to the Poles, then to Belgians and Czechs. Names get casually dropped, far away in another world: Stalingrad, Normandy—the most offhand of associative devices.

Powell’s war takes place as a sort of cheap-budget theatrical production-alarums and V-2 rocket sound effects offstage. His notion of a battle scene is to send Jenkins to his “action station" in the cupola of an old Edwardian home, where he discusses the plot of Adam Bede with his corporal. In his previous novel, The Soldier’s Art, Powell actually compared the flares from Nazi raiding planes to Japanese lanterns at a garden party. He does not go quite so far here, but all is certainly quiet on the gazebo front; and when Jenkins joins a brief inspection tour of the continent, Powell has him see an abandoned battlefield as a “Corot landscape,”and an officers’ drinking party as a scene abstracted from Antony and Cleopatra.

For the rest, Jenkins further buries himself in Proust and a number of sound seventeenth-century writers. His combat zone is imperiled mostly by red tape. His chief foe is a memo-obsessed officer who fills page upon page with “the theory and practice of soap issues for military personnel.”

From time to time, Jenkins runs across an old schoolmate, and we have one of those Powell recognition scenes. The usual procedure is this: on a crowded street or across the room at a party Jenkins zeroes in on the back of a head—the gray, balding, or flesh-thickened caricature of a memory. Bells ring: the past insists on its imperatives. At last, with a disclaiming little cry (“I had not thought much about him for years”) , the identification is made, and a marvelously bland reunion is played out. But, costumed for a depressing charade, the old boy reunions have become a little cursory here, even a bit demoralizing.

There is a girl in The Military Philosophers, Pamela Flitton, whose random affairs give a kind of zigzag direction to the plot. With Pamela, Powell is obviously trying to make the usual connections between war and promiscuity—death and sex. But just as the drawing-room window is no place to watch a war, so also every convention of social comedy seems to oppose Powell when he comes to sex. Strong passions, urgent needs—these are not what gather around silver tea trays at early twilight.

In his highly stylized version of war Powell can at least give trivia their own particular horror. On the subject of sex he is simply at his most English, his most handcuffed. Circling warily, he describes Pamela rather by code as “thoroughly vicious, using the word not so much in the moral sense, but as one might speak of a horse—more specifically, a mare.”

When things begin to hot up, Powell’s instinct is to clear his throat and interrupt himself with generalizations about the “cumbersome burden of desire.” Inadvertently his love scenes take on aspects of French farce, with the obiter dicta of the author playing the role of the nearcuckold husband stumbling home just in time. It is as though he will do practically anything to keep himself and his reader from the showdown.

Brought up on A Farewell to Arms and The Naked and the Dead —the literary cult of fighting violence with violence—we ask ourselves, is Powell more suited to cover World War II than, say, Gainsborough to paint The Last Judgment? Perhaps not. But he almost carries it off by the sheer persistence of his iron frailties. He remains so deeply true to the narrowness of his vision! That vision arrives at a characteristically negligent climax during The Military Philosophers in the final reckoning between Widmerpool, the man of the future (bad), and Stringham, the man of the past (good, or at least, better).

In A Question of Upbringing, Powell’s public school novel, Widmerpool was the classic outsider, the son of a liquid fertilizer supplier, who had somehow ended up in one of the right schools. He was known among his classmates chiefly as the boy with “the wrong kind of overcoat.” Powell was absolutely merciless with him. He gave him a squint, gritty little knuckles, lots of drive but no grace. Widmerpool walked “like an automaton of which the mechanism might be slightly out of order.” He articulated “as if tongue were too big for mouth.” One of nature’s jokes, he seemed doomed also to be the butt of his fellowmen. Boys threw bananas in his face, girls called him the Frog Footman and poured sugar over his head. No one ever remembered his Christian name.

Widmerpool is an astonishing act of snobbery on the part of Powell, who comes as close as possible to converting snobbery into a moral value. Perspiring with ambition, despising the arts, doing all the things that are just not done, Widmerpool is the enemy: the barbarian. He is also the new Establishment. The absurd fact that Widmerpool, once out of school, prospers while old classmates flounder is Powell’s requiem on what he calls the “general disintegration of society in its traditional form.”

Stringham is the old-model public school boy. Witty, charming, wellread without ever giving the impression of studying—the complete antithesis of Widmerpool—he resembles those “sad young men in ruffs, whose long legs take up so much room in sixteenth-century portraits.” Stringham deteriorates in the world in which Widmerpool thrives. After an Old Boy’s Dinner, Widmerpool puts the drunken Stringham to bed with cruel efficiency-burying him as one of the new society’s misfits. There is worse to come. In The Soldier’s Art, Widmerpool, “looking like a railway official, perhaps, of some obscure country,” is a major on his way up. Stringham becomes a waiter in the officers’ mess—a burnt-out remnant of an obsolescent elite. In The Military Philosophers, as Widmerpool continues his climb, Stringham dies in a Japanese concentration camp in Singapore.

Stripped of its slightly effete overlay, The Music of Time is an old member’s precise, mutedly anguished statement of how his club went to pot. As novel has succeeded novel, divorces multiply, careers wobble, projects come to nothing. The bright, aging young men commit suicide, go mad, or at best, turn “hard, even rather savage,” as if they had made up their minds “to endure life rather than, as formerly, to enjoy it.” More and more, they seem to lack some element of self-control. At the end of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, life is lugubriously compared to the ghost railway at an amusement park, “slowly climbing sheer gradients, sweeping with frenzied speed into inky depths, turning blind corners from which black, gibbering bogeys leapt to attack, rushing headlong towards iron-studded doors, threatened by imminent collision, fingered by spectral hands, moving at last with dreadful, ever increasing momentum towards a shape that lay across the line.”

Elizabeth Janeway has written extensively about American literature.

Victor Lange is chairman of the German Department at Princeton University.

Melvin Maddocks is literary editor of the Christian Science Monitor.

Edward Weeks, the Atlantic’s editor from 1938 to 1965, is now a senior editor for the Atlantic Monthly Press.

Robert Evett who edits the Arts and Letters section of the Atlantic, is the composer of a harpsichord sonata which has just been released by Composer’s Recordings, Inc.

Jay Cantor is a Harvard undergraduate who writes about films for the Crimson.

Herbert Kupferberg is writing a book about the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Phoebe Adams writes a monthly column for the Atlantic.

Now, in World War II, Powell has crossed the line and collided with that “shape.” The instinct of the war novelist is to cry, “The devil with society! Man is dying.”Not Powell. He flinches but refuses to reverse himself. The profanity, the obscenity, the awful animal act of war cannot divert him from methodically noting what seems to him the death of the spirit: the passing of properly serviced hotels, comfortably shaggy country homes, and flawlessly unexciting parties in Belgrave Square. War for him must be the final breach in good manners.

In the opening pages of The Kindly Ones, Powell explains that his title is the saving term by which the Greeks referred to the Furies: it cushioned their terror. Social comedy is the euphemism by which Powell makes his own demonic times bearable; and it is a euphemism, paradoxically, that permits him to be more honest than he could otherwise endure to be in his conviction that civilization is the sum of a series of small fine gestures.

E. M. Forster once wrote: “The people I respect must behave as if they were immortal and as if society were eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on working and eating and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.”Powell is one generation too late to make these assumptions for his characters, but he makes them for himself in his art, and this gives him the sad, gallant, and, yes, slightly blurred charm of those who live by a tradition even as they record its demise.