Hearing Secret Harmonies

Arnold Newman, Cecil Beaton, 1978

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

Viola!  Finis!  The final novel in Dance.  AP's world view revolves around two poles: the exercise of domination--a will-to-power--along with chance and coincidence. These are the two factors that move the plot forward in Hearing Secret Harmonies and throughout the 12 novel cycle.  Jenkins is now a believably middle aged novelist living in the late 60s or early 70s when the story opens.  His family hosts a caravan of hippies that include is niece, Fiona Cutts, and a creepy cult leader named Scorpio Murtlock.  Widmerpool is a chancellor at a US university and a convert to the counter culture.  Nick visits Matilda Donners and is shown the photographs of the Seven Deadly Sins tableaux taken decades ago.  The Donners Memorial Prize, a literary award, is established, and Jenkins is a member of the jury panel.  Russell Gwinnet is awarded the prize for his biography of X Trapnel.  Fiona leaves Murtlock's cult and marries Gwinnet.  Widmerpool is back in England and takes up with Scorpio or "Scorp" as he calls him.  Widmerpool and Murtlock battle for control of the hippies, and Widmerpool suffers a humiliating defeat.  With tragic absurdity, Widmerpool dies running naked with the cult in the early morning hours.  The novel ends, as the series began: workmen are laboring in the street and this reminds AP of the stories, myths of the ancient world.

So, how is AP like Proust?  Not very is my response.  I found an old but wonderful book about AP entitled Criticism of Soceity in the Englsih Novel Bewteen the War by Hena Maes-Jelink that helped me think more clearly about this question.   Maes-Jelink writes, "Feelings are set to one side and a real exploration of personal relationships are left off."  This captures what I find so frustrating about Dance.  Jenkins rarely ventures beyond the world of appearances.  By contrast, Marcel is so extremely sensitive and possesses a rich emotional life.  There isn't much psychological analysis in AP.  Maes-Jelink continues, "Powell reconstructs the past chronologically without referring to the inner life of his characters; he relies almost exclusively on facts to describe relations between individuals and between individuals and society."  

Temporary Kings

Cecil Beaton, Ian Fleming, 1962

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

Things really heat up in this penultimate novel of Dance to the Music of Time.  In the late 1950s, Jenkins attends a literary conference in Venice.  He meets Russell Gwinnet, an off-putting young American academic, who hopes to write a biography of deceased X Trapnell.  While looking at a fresco by Tiepolo in the Bragadin Palace, Gwinnet is introduced to Pamela, and he asks to interview her for his book.  (The painting is a mythical subject in which a king hides a courtier behind a drape so the courtier can see his nude wife.  Hint, hint: this will become symbolic later.) Pamela is attended by Louis Glober, an American director.  Kenneth arrives, and the Widmerpools fight.  There's gossip that Pamela slept with the French author Ferrand-Seneschal on the night of his death, and a waft of necrophilia hangs in the air.

Back in England, Jenkins learns that Pamela is courting Gwinnet, and Widmerpool may have been arrested for spying.  Moreland hosts a Mozart concert with Glover and Polly Duport, the actress daughter of Bob Duport and Jean, in attendance.  The Widmerpools kick up a tussle, and Mrs. Erdleigh warns Pamela that she is on a dark path.  Moreland becomes ill after the concert and dies.  Pamela dies of a drug overdose while in bed with Gwinnet.  Pamela's relationship with Ferrand-Seneschal introduces the idea that sexuality and death are dangerously combined in her life.  The real kicker comes, however, when we learn that Widmerpool was watching Pamela and the Frenchman have sex from behind a curtain on the night that Ferrand-Seneschal died! Furthermore, Widmerpool is let off of spying charges only because he ratted out the communist Ferrand-Seneschal.  There's betrayal all around.  

I understand the title of the novel to mean that Jenkins and his cohorts are at the height of their powers. They are successful economically, socially, and part of the culturally ascendant group, but nothing lasts for long in Post-war England.  They are only temporary kings.  At this late date, I have to admit that AP is starting to win me over.  I've invested hours watching this high-class quadrille spin itself out.  There's a formal, abstract beauty in the way he plots the story.  The sweep of Dance is impressive.  I love the complex relationships that form and dissolve across the 20th century throughout the novels.

Pamela emerges as something more than a one-dimensional archetype here.  My complaint with the previous novels this that AP repeatedly asserted that she was beautiful without showing the reader what qualities made her so compelling.  AP seemed unable to name her mysteries: glossy hair and a trim figure can't make up for such a nasty personality.  The reader knows from Books Do Furnish a Room that Pamela's sexuality is a surface thing.  X fumed that she initiated sex frequently but was curiously "dead" and unresponsive in bed.  I wonder if sexuality in Dance is notable for being about power?  Sir Magnus Donners, after all, was a Peeping Tom who built secret compartments into Stourwater so he could spy on his lovers.

Books Do Furnish a Room

Cecil Beaton, Graham Vivian Sutherland, Somerset Maugham, 1949

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

9 novels down and 3 to go until I finish Dance.  Good grief!  The plot is this: its 1945 and Jenkins returns to his university (Cambridge or Oxford, natch) after the Wars to research a book on Robert Burton, the 17th century author of The Anatomy of Melancholy.  While visiting Sillery, Jenkins meets his new secretary, Ada Leintwardine.  Quiggin starts a literary magazine called Fussion.  This venture was to be sponsored by Erridge, but he suddenly dies.  Erridge's funeral at Thrubworth brings together Quiggin, the Widmerpools, and Gypsy Jones (now Lady Craggs).  At a launch party for the magazine, Jenkins encounters the dapper bohemian, X Trapnel.  Pamela and Trapnel start an affair, and Pamela flees Kenneth.  Pamela eventually abandons Trapnel and throws his book manuscript into a canal.  The novel ends with Jenkins returning to his old prep school (the scene of the action in A Question of Upbringing).  La Bas is in his 80s and working in the school library as a reference librarian.  The Widmerpools are also visiting the school that day, and Kenneth leans against a stone wall in dejection.

Coming into Fashion: A Century of Fashion Photography at Conde Nast

Edward Steichen, Lee Miller, 1928

By Nathalie Herschdorfer, Munich: Prestel, 2013

I spent an enjoyable summer afternoon reading this book on my couch escaping from the oppressive heat.  Its instructive to read a survey of the nude in contemporary art  before an overview of 20th and 21st century fashion photography.  One can clearly see how representations of the ideal body migrated from elite to popular culture.  Herschdorfer offers a competent survey of photographic trends from 1911 to 2011, but I was struck by the fleeting, superficial impact these images had on me.  Fashion photography is extremely pleasing and utterly forgettable.

Fashion photography offers up an entire lifestyle, an alternative world where aesthetics and a commodified, consumerist notion of beauty reign supreme.  These representations are ultimately unsatisfying because they never get anywhere--there's not a trajectory of a medium like in art history--and they eschew genuine ambiguity.  Fashion photography is imprisoned by elegance.  Glamour and sexiness are endlessly defined in these images, but at the cost of greater artistic meaning.  As Herschdorfer notes, "If we study a century's worth of fashion photographs, what we notice is that the genre is forever reinventing itself from the same staring point."

The Naked Nude

John Currin, Bea Arthur Naked, 1991

By Frances Borzello, London: Thames & Hudson, 2013

The idealized nude is a staple of art history and it is my favorite type of genre painting.  Kenneth Clark famously stated that being naked is the condition of being without clothes, but the nude is art with a capital "A."  Clark wrote, "The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled or defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body reformed."  The nude, as Borzello so helpfully notes, "in art is a victory of fiction over fact."  

She asserts that the birth of modernism marks the end of the idealized nude.  Contemporary artists turn away from the depicting the perfect body and focus on our conflicted ideas about what it means to have a body.  We are obsessed with food, health, sexuality, weight, fashion, pornography--all topics that hinge on the problem of embodiment.  For example, John Currin once said that he like to paint images that embarrass him.  Indeed!  Looking at Bea Arthur Naked causes me to squirm.  I want to say, "Maude, please put your top on!"  Bea Arthur looks perfectly composed and dignified, but she has Mom breasts. In addition, that 80s hair style really hits too close to home.  

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

Damien Hirst, richest artist in Western Euope and friend of oligarchs everywhere

By Joseph Stiglitz, New York: WW Norton & Co., 2013

With crystal clear prose and a well-organized argument, Stiglitz offers a devastating critique of contemporary American society. He writes, "We have a political system that gives inordinate power to those at the top, and they have used that power not only to limit the extent of redistribution but also to shape the rules of the game in their favor and to extract from the public what can only be called large 'gifts.'" Stiglitz introduced me to the vitally important concept of rent seeking that he defines as obtaining income not as a reward for creating wealth but as the end product of jiggering the political and market environment to one's own advantage. To put the question baldly: one can become wealthy by creating income or one can take it away from others.

I now see rent seeking all around me: agricultural subsidies that go to million dollar corporations; mining companies that extract resources from national parks and pay less than what the commodity is worth; the opaque and unregulated health care industry governed by kick backs and the drive for 20% annual profits; low-wage workers paid with Chase debit cards that charge a fee every time these employees use the card or obtain a "cash advance." These rents move dollars from the bottom and the middle to the top. Stiglitz explores aspects of the political and social systems in America that are rigged in favor of the 1%. A powerful and depressing book.

Nijinsky: A Life of Genuis and Madness

Vaslav Nijinsky in costume for the ballet Le Spectre de la Rose, ca. 1912

By Richard Buckle, New York: Pegasus Books, 2012

Buckle was a dance critic, curator, and scholar of the Ballets Russes.  He was a pall bearer at Nijinsky's funeral and decided it was his mission to "collect every single surviving Diaghilev design in the world."  This is a lively, fun book full of sharp insight.  It reads like a Vanity Fair profile crossed with an academic text. Buckle does an excellent job in laying out the social milieu and cultural world of the Ballets Russes.  There is no extant film of Nijinsky dancing, but Buckle works hard to convey the astonishing grace and daring innovation of Nijinsky's career.  His decline into mental illness, he suffered from schizophrenia, is truly heart breaking. 

Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced with Music

Leon Bakst, Costume design for Vaslav Nijinsky as the Faun from The Afternoon of a Faun, 1912

Edited by Jane Pritchard, London and Washington, DC: V&A, NGA, 2013

This is the exhibition catalogue for the eponymous show at the NGA on the Ballets Russes.  Sergei Diaghilev was a masterful impressero who created the Ballets Russes troupe specifically for European (and eventually North and South American) audiences.  It was a touring company.  Diaghilev combined classical ballet with European high modernism and venacular Russian folklores.  The exhibition was arranged chronically which helped me learn about the different artistic phases of the Ballets Russes.  Diaghilev created productions that fused together dance, music and design in pursuit of "total art," or gesamtkunstwerk.