At Lady Molly's

Cecil Beaton, Merle Oberon, 1934

By Anthony Powell, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990

OK, I've made it through the fourth of Powell's twelve novels in the cycle, Dance to the Music of Time.  Jenkin's affair with Jean is over and he meets the woman who will be his wife, Isobel Tolland.  Lady Molly's house is the novel's central location for conversation, and many of the characters from earlier books make an appearance there.  Widmerpool is engaged to Mildred, a ferocious older woman, who really seems as if she could eat him alive.  Quiggin, ex-secretary to St. John Clarke and an accomplished literary critic, invites Jenkins to a weekend at his cottage.  Quiggin is now living with Mona until she dumps him for the head of the Tolland family, Lord Erridge Warminster. Mona--who I image looking like Merle Oberon so couldn't believe my luck in spotting the above Cecil Beaton portrait--and Erridge run off to China.  

This relationship seems to symbolize the meeting of bohemia, Mona is a raw-edged model and actress, and landed aristocrats, Erridge is a Lefty who has more money than he knows how to spend but is, nevertheless, quite cheap.  As I speculated in an earlier review, AP's world is that depicted by Cecil Beaton in many ways: both are concerned with members of the upper-crust and what we would now call "the creative class."   It goes without saying that I don't share AP's social references.  The class contrast and power dynamic between Quiggin and Erridge is very well done. Quiggin is brittle, smart, and sees right through Erridge, his patron.  Erridge's parsimonious concern for "the masses" felt like a depiction of Robespierre.  

I keep reading for the unannounced Tory convictions of AP. I think his political conservatism lives at the level of social/ political touch points in the text itself.  Who AP imagines he is addressing as the reader of the novels. He's really very off-handed about privilege.  

Widmerpool's marriage is eventually called off.  Widermerpool is such a vile man but he's the source of much of Powell's irony here. (His family makes artificial manure, his marriage fails to come off because he is too sexually inexperienced for Mildred, and the novel ends with Widermerpool smugly offering advice on marriage to Jenkins.) I thought this was the funniest and most charming book in the series by far.  There are references in the text to Freud, the Ballets Russes, the rise of Fascism and other concerns of high society in the1930s. The books' narrative structure consists of telescoped events that are carefully explored rather than a broad synthetic tale.  Just as part of the delight in reading AP is his examination of small, mundane coincidences, there are a lot of gaping holes in the story too.  Isobel Tolland, for example, dropped out of the story once she was introduced, and I wonder what happened to Stringham.  He was so drunk and miserable when we last saw him!  Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings, as usual, has the best review of At Lady Molly's