Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

Cecil Beaton, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor; Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor (King Edward VIII), 1937

By Anthony Powell, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995

This book represents the fifth installment in AP's twelve novel opus, Dance to the Music of Time.  The first part of the book rounds back to before Mr. Deacon's death, but the bulk of the plot concerns the narrator Nick Jenkins and his comrades Hugh Moreland and Maclintick. We learn little about Isobel Tolland and the state of Nick's marriage to her, but matrimony is a key topic here. Hugh Moreland, Nick's friend from university who is a music composer, struggles in his marriage to the jolie laide actress Matilda.  The real fireworks in terms of interpersonal conflict, however, is between Maclintick, a music critic, and his spouse Audrey.  Maclintick and Audrey sing arias of contempt and disdain.  Their fights truly made me squirm in discomfort.   

Erridge returns from an unsuccessful trip to Spain where he attempted to aid the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War.  Widmerpool makes a brief appearance and frets over Edward VIII's abdication.  Mrs. Fox gives a party to celebrate the performance of Moreland's symphony, and Stringham makes a sad, drunken appearance.  Audrey leaves Maclintick, and in despair, Maclintick commits suicide.

Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings has a supurb account of Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, no surprise there, and I uncovered Christopher Hitchens's jewel of a book review about Powell.  Hitchens is very clear regarding Powell's attitude about class. Hitchens draws comparisons between AP and George Orwell and argues that Powell's elitism resides in breezy characterizations of those who stand apart from the beau monde and well-heeled bohemians.  He is worth quoting at length:  

The simplest means of delineating Powell’s extreme and splenetic conservatism, then, is probably to contrast it with the manners of his famous contemporary. Orwell would not, I think, have straightforwardly described a character as resembling “a thoroughly ill-conditioned errand-boy,” as Powell’s narrator does, as naturally as breath itself, in The Acceptance World. He would not have done so because he would not have assumed that all his readers used or shared the social reference; he would not have done so because he would have had occasion to wince at hearing others employ similar braying tones and judgments; and he would not have done so, I surmise, because of the implication of the word “conditioned.” Moreover, if Orwell had served in a regiment made up chiefly of Welsh coal miners, and fictionalized it as carefully as Powell did in The Valley of Bones, he would not have dreamed of saying, after an encounter with a faintly bibliophile fellow officer (Roland Gwatkin, the luckless but honest bank manager turned honest but luckless soldier who is one of Powell’s most finely realized minor characters): “This was the first evidence come to light that anyone in the unit had ever read a book for pleasure.” The Welsh miners were rightly famed for their literacy, their workingmen’s institutes, and their splendid union-endowed lending libraries: Powell degrades the speech of the “other ranks” and the lower echelons to the low-comedy status of semi-disaffected plebeian singing and babbling, of the sort that might be loftily overheard by a junior officer eavesdropping in the pub. 

Finally, I do not believe that Orwell would ever have made use of the expression “to work like a black,” as Powell does in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. I do not mean, here, to deploy retrospectively what Powell’s admirers would take pleasure in apostrophizing as “correctness.” The fact is that these attitudes seem instinctive, and that they are revealing.

But, what exactly is the social reference of "a thoroughly ill-conditioned errand-boy"?  Hitchens identifies the "braying tones and judgments" contained in this description, but I don't understand what Hitchen is pointing to in "the implication of the word 'conditioned.'"