It’s hard to tell whether my addiction to A Dance to the Music of Time is something to worry about.
Is it a bit like spending too much time at one’s club, when a more adventurous approach to social life might introduce me to ‘new people’? (‘Dread phrase’, as Wallace Arnold might have said.) Probably. But one of the pleasures of old age is that you no longer feel shame at basking in the familiar. Open any volume of Dance and you know you will not be disappointed.
Every now and then I reread a volume of Proust to remind me that Powell is not really in the same league as the long roman fleuve to which Dance is, in a sense, a tribute.
But, in fact, the pleasures of reading the two novelists are quite distinct. The truly great writers, of whom Proust is one, actually change your way of looking at the world. Powell’s cold-fish, English irony holds back from anything as uncool as a world-view.
In September, a plaque was unveiled on the house where Powell was living when he began to write his novel-sequence. The period is evoked in Books Do Furnish a Room. It is a personal favourite, perhaps because it evokes a way of life that has now utterly vanished.
That is the way of life which I should like, as an old hack, to have lived myself, but which would not really be possible in today’s economic climate – a world where literature was taken seriously by a sizeable public, and where patrons were willing to subsidise literary loafers.
Powell’s exact Balliol contemporary Peter Quennell once told me he lived entirely, during this period, on his income from book reviews: ‘In those days, if you wrote a review for the New Statesman, it paid you enough to have dinner with a bird at the Savoy Grill and, if you got lucky, to stay the night.’
Generous as some periodicals might think themselves, today, none would pay enough, for one book review, to buy a few hours in an Airbnb in Scunthorpe.
Powell always resisted the identification of his fictional characters with people in ‘real life’. Nevertheless, it is hard not to see that ‘Books’ Bagshaw, the ex-leftie literary journalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of, and interest in, the abstruser byways of left-wing adherence, owes something to Powell’s friendship with Malcolm Muggeridge.
Similarly, the gangling Erridge – in the sequence, the brother-in-law of the narrator – who dresses like a tramp, goes to Spain to fight for the Republic, and dies young – is clearly in part based on George Orwell.
It was in Albany Street, near Powell’s house, now adorned with the plaque, that his friends organised Orwell’s funeral.
Merely to name Powell, Muggeridge and Orwell is to recall an era of literary and journalistic life which seems in every way more interesting than the present scene.
Horizon – between 1939 and 1950. The small-circulation journal was the first to publish Evelyn Waugh’s masterly account of American funerary customs, The Loved One.
Other contributors included André Gide, Rose Macaulay, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, W H Auden and Kenneth Clark. Béla Bartók wrote a piece for it, as did Barbara Hepworth. Distinguished as periodicals might have been in our day, we’ve surely not seen anything to match this?
W B Yeats said, ‘the intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work’.
The circle of Bohemian friends and acquaintances who ‘sat’ for their portraits in Dance are surely to be valued as much for their very imperfect lives as for what they wrote. Barbara Skelton, married to Connolly, once asked him, seeing a smudge on his nose, ‘What’s that on your face?’ – to receive the immediate reply, ‘Hate’.
Their tempestuous relationship undoubtedly helped Powell fashion the unforgettable figure of Pamela Flitton.
Among other memorable scenes in Dance, she throws up after Erridge’s funeral and memorably elopes with X Trapnel, the writer Powell acknowledged as a portrait of Julian MacLaren-Ross. The dark glasses. The shooting stick. The perpetual losing battle against debt.
Someone once went into a London pub and saw two men at the bar. One was Evoe Knox, editor of Punch, and the other was one of his brothers. (Evoe was father of the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald.) ‘What do you do, then?’ asked the man. Knox replied, ‘We live on our wits.’
It was easier to live on your wits in the days of Connolly, Orwell and Muggeridge. The Sunday papers had large spreads of book reviews. Some of Orwell’s best work was for the Tribune. Hard to imagine now.
One of the best scenes in Books Do Furnish a Room is when Widmerpool denounces Trapnel for eloping with his wife. Widmerpool represents enmity to everything which ‘we’ – complicit with the author – believe in: the free life of the mind, and the imagination. It takes time to read as widely as Connolly or to be as promiscuous as Peter Quennell.
None of the above, one suspects, ever had a mortgage or took much trouble to pay a bill. Happy days.
The Oldie October 2023 issue
