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.