A Question of Upbringing

Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time, 1634-1636

By Anthony Powell, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1995

The first novel in Powell's twelve-volume cycle entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, after a history painting by Poussin.  Powell's work represents a sort of High Tory take on the 20th century, and he is frequently cited as a British Proust.  I read The Guardian's "Digested Read" by John Crace before actually plunging into the text.  This means I could only read Powell's work as parody.  Describing the opening of the novel, Crace is beyond brilliant:

For some reason, a glimpse of the lower orders warming themselves at a brazier in the street made me think of the ancient world. These classical projections in turn suggested a Poussin scene, where Time gives shape to the steps of the dance that had hitherto felt unfamiliar. So where better to start my meandering epic than at the school - there is only one so I need not be so vulgar as to name it - where these classical allusions first became choate.

Oh, yes, this is the right tone to take with Powell.  The narrator sees men at work in the street, this reminds him of the ancient world, his thoughts shift to Poussin's painting, and all this end with a mediatation on his life at Eton. The narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is a snob who likes housemates Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, they are rich and elegant, but not Kenneth Widmerpool, he is a grunting little striver.  Eventually Jenkins lands at university (either Oxford or Cambridge) where his social life centers around Professor Sillery's tea parties.  This is England in the 1920s.  I enjoyed the pacing of the novel.  Events proceed at an even pace that isn't languid but denotes a modern, pre-digital era when mothers drove up from London to have lunch in their son's rooms.

Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear: Inside the Land of Ballet

Carla Korbes, principal dancer at Pacific Northwest Ballet, in Swan Lake

By Stephen Manes, New York: Cadwallader & Stern, 2011

A fun, informal look at the daily life inside an important regional ballet company, the Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) in Seattle. I learned a lot from this book about how ballets are transmitted from a contemporary choreographer to different ballet troupes.  A stager is dispatched to a company who assumes primary responsibility for a ballet: the stager casts the dance from company members, teaches the dance to the dancers (often with the help of digital recordings), signs off on the costumes, stage lighting, scenery, and even the tempo of the music.  Much of the work I assumed was performed by a company's Artistic Director is actually the job of the stager.  Christopher Wheeldon, Twala Tharp (she's difficult!), and Susan Stroman make cameo appearances in the text.

At 897 pages this book certainly could have used an editor, but I'm glad I plowed through it.  I often felt that Manes was recording episodes he witnessed while observing the PNB without any thought to their significance.  I enjoyed his portraits of the ballet dancers.  I felt relieved when Noelani Pantastico finally decided to move to The Monte-Carlo Ballet.  Carla Korbes, while unmistakeably gorgeous, is too much of an obvious favorite to win my heart.

Nothing

Stanley Spencer, The Sisters, 1940

By Henry Green, n.l.: Dalkey Archive, 2000

Green is an intriguing, witty author and reading Nothing only makes me want to revisit Living, Loving, and Party Going.  There's little background or context in Nothing.  The novel is composed almost solely of dialogue.  Set among upper-class Londoners after WWII, I initially felt bored and confused by the story.  What, exactly, I wondered is going on here?  The talk was so trivial and posh that this world was totally unintelligible to me.  I kept thinking of the cliche that England and United States are two cultures separated by a common language.  

Jane Weatherby and John Pomfret are former lovers who are reunited when their children--Philip and Mary, respectively--decide to wed.  Jane dislikes John's daughter, Mary, judging her to be penniless, plain, and dim.  Jane works to end Philip's relationship with Mary while convincing John that his best interest lies in marrying her.  Jane persuades John to send Mary off to Italy and then spreads the rumor that Philip and Mary are actually half-siblings. John looks up at the end of the story and finds he is hopelessly in love with Jane.

The novel's tone and style, what I admired in Green's other works, felt alien.  The characters spend most of the novel in French restaurants breezily chatting about "nothing."  For example, here is Jane telling John that her former boyfriend--Richard--and his former girlfriend--Liz--are now dating:

"D'you actually pretend you hadn't heard my dear?" she cried.  "Why I thought everyone knew!"

"Knew what?"

"Just that they've started the most tremendously squalid affair. In one way I'm so glad for Richard, even if I do pity the poor idiot."

"Nonsense" he said.  "I don't believe a word. And why are you glad?"

"You ask simply anyone" she replied. "But as to Richard in some respects he's even dearer to me than myself. I'd give almost anything to see the sweet man happy."

"Then is Liz the only future for his happiness?"

"John dear you are so acute.  D'you know I'm really rather afraid she is."

"I thought his allegiance was elsewhere" Mr. Pomfret suggested and gazed hard at Mrs. Weatherby.

"Oh no" she admitted with a cheerful look.  "All that became over and done with ages back.  Isn't it dreadful?" she giggled.

Who are these people? Mrs. Weatherby recalls Patti LuPone as Mama Rose in Gypsy Rose Lee.  She's a vicious mother.

Great Expectations

James Lawson Stewart, The Courtyard of Barnard's Inn , 1890, (book illustration)

By Charles Dickens, ed. and notes by Charlotte Mitchell, London: Penguin Books, 2003

Another late novel by Dickens, the orphaned Pip receives an inheritance and proceeds directly to London  where is job is to become a gentleman.  Freaky Miss Havisham living year after year in her wedding dress is my favorite character.  OK, Dickens is over!  Tick!  On to the next book!

Our Mutual Friend

John Tomson, The Flying Dustman, c. 1877, Museum of London

By Charles Dickens, intro. Richard T. Gaughan, New York: Modern Library, 2002

A deliciously bitter satire about the lure of money in Victorian England.  This is Dickens's final full novel that includes a very complicated plot with a diverse cast of characters.  The newly enriched owner of a dust-heap is the kind Noddy Boffin, called "the Golden Dustman."  Dickens's protagonists are bizzare.  His world just doesn't pull me in.  Mr. Boffin reminded me of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There:  black comedy ensues when innocents gain access to filthy lucre.  

Dombey and Sons

George Townsend Cole, Henry Thomas Lambert, Sailmaker, of 307 Wapping High Street,  1858

By Charles Dickens, ed. with intro. by Andrew Sanders, London, Penguin, 2002

Paul Dombey is a selfish businessman for whom commerce is all.  The plot centers on a family--and by extension a society--run into the ground by an empty-hearted capitalist.  This novel is not destined to be a Tea Party favorite.  I really don't like Dickens.  I feel like The List is turning into a catalogue of classics I find distasteful.

The Idiot

Hans Holbein, Christ in the Tomb, 1521

By Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. by Alan Myers, London: Oxford U Press, 1992.

I want to love Russian literature and this novel in particular.  Proust was deeply influenced by The Idiot.   MAF, my former companion in all things psychological, used to proclaim, "Oh, that is so Russian!"  But, alas, I did not enjoy the experience of reading Dostoevsky.  He is very much a soup to nuts novelist (and sometimes there are too many courses in the dinner).  Dostoevsky tells a complex tale and includes lots of interesting tidbits such as an exploration of the moments before an epileptic seizure and the thoughts of a political prisoner in advance of his scheduled execution.  All fascinating but I found myself yearning for the novel to end.

The theme of the book is that money determines one's social value.  The title's eponymous character is Prince Myshkin, a Christ-like figure whose honesty and humility disrupts the artificial world of 19th century  Russian society.  Holbien's horrific Christ in the Tomb hangs in the parlor of Rogozhin, a fabulously rich ex-merchant, and Prince Myshkin ironically proclaims, "A man could lose his faith looking at that picture."  

Dangerous Liaisons

Fragonard, Blond Odalisque (Marie-Louise O'Murphy), 1752

By Choderlos de Laclos, trans., with notes Helen Constantine, London: Penguin Books, 2007

I saw the movie Dangerous Liaisons in 1988 staring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, and shortly thereafter read the book.  This story introduced me what Pre-Revolutionary courtly culture long before I ever took a history class on 18th century Europe.  I could have done worse.  The Vicomte's betrayal of Madame de Tourvel because he is afraid others are laughing at him confirms the truism that Vanity is the enemy of Happiness.  A novel about cruel willfulness.  Told in letter form, the text is crafted by an "editor" and a "puplisher" but not an author.