The Kindly Ones

Cecil Beaton, Chateau Cande, France, 1936

By Anthony Powell, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995

This novel marks the half-way point through APs cycle A Dance to the Music of Time.  The Kindly Ones is a title that has several meanings.  WWII is just about to be declared, and the title symbolizes the gathering winds of war.  Ancient Greeks called to the Furies "the kindly ones" in an attempt to placate them.  We finally learn some interesting personal information about Jenkins.  AP takes us to his childhood home and introduces us, surprisingly, to the charming servants who worked for his parents.  Albert, a pessimistic artist-cook, refers to suffragists as "Furies," and Billson, a housemaid, sees ghosts.  Jenkins's world is haunted.

Jenkins visits the Morelands at their home near Sir Magnus Donners castle Stourwater (which can be read as "sour water" to a "t"), and everyone gathers chez Donners for a party. Peter Templer, now a coarse stock broker with a rich man's swagger, is present with his fragile blond second wife, Betty.  Playing dress up, they act out The Seven Deadly Sins as tableaux while Sir Donners takes their photographs.  This is vividly drawn.  Kenneth Widmerpool makes a surprise appearance at the end of the night purportedly to discuss business!

Uncle Giles dies in a provincial hotel, the Bellevue run by Jenkin's childhood servant Albert, and Jenkins travels there to see to the body.  While at the Bellevue, he meets Bob Duport, Jean's ex-husband.  Jenkins tries to get into the military, and while at Lady Molly's runs into Hugh Moreland.  He is homeless and lost.  Mathilda threw him over for Sir Donners.

Okidoki, the next three novels are AP's most acclaimed in the opus--they constitute a trilogy about WWII.  I'm rushing through the cycle.  Unlike most readers, I am not in love with AP's prose.  His vocabulary is arcane and arch, but I love the way he structures the plots.  The characters weave in and out of the story so effortlessly, and I've often pulled in my breath with the unexpected sightings of Widmerpool.  AP's sensibility and cultural references, as discussed in the last review, are too alien for me to feel much love. 

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.'"  

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

Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity

James Tissot, Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, 1870

Exhibition catalog, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of  Art, Musee D'Orsay

Lael and I travelled to NYC to see this exceptionally elegant and scholarly exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.  This is one of the most exciting shows I've seen on the nineteenth century.  I long ago wrote off Impressionism as trivial and over-exposed, but my, oh my, how wrong I was!  Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity explores the important role fashion played in the works of key Impressionist such as Manet, Degas and Morisot, and the curators argue that fashion embodied the transience, democratization, and ambiguity that lay at the heart of Haussmann's Paris. Specifically, between 1863 and 1869 the Parisienne emerged in the fine arts and literature as a cultural symbol of the sophisticated fashionable women found in the theaters and drawing rooms of artistic circles.

I've fallen in love with with precise grace of Tissot's paintings.  Before this exhibition, I thought he was too much of an illustrator to be worth much attention, but the beautiful paintings I saw at the Met taught me otherwise.  It was treat to see so many treasures from the Orsay such as Manet's Reading and Monet's Women in the Garden.  I've never visited the Art Insititute of Chicago so I was thrilled to view Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day.  

Its funny how the commodification of art impacts the experiential quality of looking at a painting; that is, in the late 1980s I owned an umbrella printed with Paris Street; Rainy Day.  Viewing Caillebotte's painting for the first time felt, unaccountability, like seeing an old friend after a long absence.  I didn't feel any frisson of excitement from viewing the physical artifact. I was just struck by how delicious the realism is in the painting.  I thought, "Yup, here's the Mother of my umbrella."

What made this show so special is that costumes are set in front of portrait paintings that show the identical  or very similar fashion. The clothing appears to have popped out of the painting and landed on the museum floor in a vitrine. Below is a portrait of Madame Bartholome by her husband Albert Bartholome and, miraculously, the exact summer dress she wore while posing for the portrait.  The fashion recontextualized familiar paintings by prompting me to look more carefully at what I thought I already knew and the physical reality of the costumes gave me a greater appreciation for the works I had dismissed earlier.

The Acceptance World

Bert Longworth, Cecil Beaton, 1930s

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

This is the third novel in Powell's cycle A Dance to the Music of Time.  My review of the first novel is here and the second novel is here.  Jenkins has an affiar with Jean Templer (now Duport), Widmerpool is making a killing in the financial markets, and Stringham is divorced and drinking too much.  I feel like I am finally getting the gist of Powell's project.  Jenkins is still a bit of a mystery, but the prose seems more concrete and less elusive.  I'll never love the AP as much as the blogger at Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings, but the novel's world is starting to cohere.  The female protagonists came alive in this installment.  Jean clearly has a life that extends beyond her interactions with Jenkins, and Mona, Peter Templer's unhappy spouse, is a fully-realized character.


The title refers to a financial maneuver Widmerpool performs, but "The Acceptance World" also stands as a metaphor for life "as one approaches thirty."  Jenkins and his friends from school are grappling with adult responsibilities and making compromises in the course of their lives.  The action occurs in the 1930s: there are workers' demonstrations, and the novelist St. John Clark becomes a communist.  Social and political change is clearly underway, but I was struck at the divorce of the rich from the poor. The novel ends with Jenkins, Templer, Stringham, and Widmerpool attending an Old Boy dinner at the Ritz to honor their ex-housemaster Le Bas. Like Henry Green's Party Going, the elite are isolated (and protected) from the masses while enjoying a fun night out.  The old order may be passing away but privilege endures.

A Buyer's Market

Cecil Beaton, Margaret Emma Alice Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, 1927

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

Set during the interwar years, this is the second novel in Powell's cycle about a group of aristocratic and haute bourgeois Londoners.  I'm looking at photographs of Cecil Beaton to imagine Powell's world.  I wonder if Beaton's sitters aren't too artistic, however.  I'm not sure Powell's mise-en-scene is this glamorous.  Once again, I feel like I'm trying to discern the social life and customs of Martians.

The story opens with a night of debutante balls in London, and the novel's action centers around the families of Nicolas Jenkins, Peter Templer, Charles Stringham, and Kenneth Widmerpool. At the night's first party, Barbara Goring, a lovely but willful young woman, pours sugar over the head of the piggish Widmerpool.  Widmerpool and Jenkins later meet Mr. Deacon, a painter of dull history pictures, and Gypsy Jones, a fetching anti-war activist.  Widmerpool and Gypsy have been having an affair, and Widmerpool pays for her to have an abortion.  Within the context of the novel, I was genuinely astonished.  (Did I dream this?  It is so out of step with the rest of the tale!)

Sir Magnus Donners, Widmerpool's employer, hosts lunches at his estate, Stourwater.  During one of these parties, Jenkins becomes reacquainted Jean Templer, Peter's slender and remote sister.  She's married to Bob Duport, Jenkins's friend from university.  Jenkins yearns for Jean but admits that the "sluttish" Gypsy is quite attractive.  Its hard to tell, but I think Jenkins has an affair with Jean.  In any event, love is in the air: Charles Stringham marries Peggy Stepnev, Barbara becomes engaged to a solider, and Jenkins sleeps with Gypsy.  The renewal promised by romantic love is contrasted with the inexorable march toward the grave.  Mr. Deacon dies after his birthday party. 

I don't understand the title.  What is the buyer's market being referred to?  Is the commodity human connection and love?  Social capital is very important in Powell.  I wonder if the competitive social scene where money and birth are two pillars of influence are the commodities?  As an aside, I so enjoyed reading Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings on Powell.