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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 7: The Dance October 7th, 2010 
For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world — legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier; mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea . . . An Englishman of a certain age sees a group of road-workers gathered around a fire they’ve built in a bucket as the London snow pelts down, and the sight triggers these Classical images, which, in turn lead the observer back to the time he was in school. That’s the opening of A Question of Upbringing, the first of the twelve novels that make up Anthony Powell’s monumental A Dance to the Music of Time, which — at this time in my life, when I’m approaching the age of that Englishman — is probably my favorite novel of the 20th century. (By “novel” I mean the entire twelve-novel sequence, which actually comprises a single, monumental story.) Reading books, I realize now, is more complicated than I used to think it was. The reading of a book is an exchange between the book and the reader, a kind of mental and emotional jigsaw puzzle in which the book supplies some pieces and the reader offers up the rest. Either the pieces from the book fit into the spaces formed by the reader’s tastes and desires and experiences, or they don’t. That’s why, in my experience, anyway, we can love at 50 a book that bored us senseless at 21 or wonder at 60 what the hell we saw in a book we practically built a shrine to at 30. I’ve read A Dance to the Music of Time four times and loved it every time, although I’ve loved it differently. That makes sense, since Dance does nothing less ambitious than to follow four English boys of just-below-upper-class status through the entire course of their lives, a swath of time that includes bits of World War I and ends in the improbable Sixties. In telling the “boys’” stories, Powell charts the course, over five decades, of a whole world. The American publishers, possibly attempting to clarify the overall organization of the series, released it in four thick paperback volumes, entitled “Spring,” Summer,” and so forth, later changed to “First Movement,” “Second Movement,” etc. I was in my mid-twenties when I stole the “Spring” volume. (I stole a lot in those days.) I was unhappy,working an unsatisfying job, barely speaking to people I had long regarded as my closest friends. I was also just beginning to drink too much, living alone in the house Simeon Grist later occupied, and feeling — in all — treacherously abandoned by my youth. I was prematurely nostalgic for the days when I was always part of a group and no one seemed to have a subconscious: We all told each other everything. Powell might have written the first three books specifically for me at that point in my life. Those books, A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer’s Market, and The Acceptance World, follow the four boys through school, university, and their entry into the wider and colder world beyond. The narrator, Nick Jenkins, and his two closest friends, Peter Templer and Charles Stringham, are from good families, although only Templer’s has real money; and the fourth, Widmerpool, is the only son of a widowed mother whose hold on gentility is grimly precarious. Jenkins, Stringham, and Templer are attractive, amusing, and adaptable. While at first, as boys, they seem similar, they become more individual as they grow up and (inevitably) apart. Widmerpool, on the other hand, never seems similar to anyone. He’s the boy in every school whom all the others look down on. The only thing that his schoolmates admire about him is his doggedness, a characteristic that will, over decades turn him into the greatest and most complex comic monster I know of, outside Shakespeare. The rise to considerable power, and the ultimate fall, of Widmerpool — often at the expense (and sometimes to the horror and/or amusement) of his former schoolmates — is one of the primary threads of the series. Widmerpool is a Sacred Monster, utterly self-involved except for his slavish devotion to his widowed mother, and ultimately he shrugs even her off as he climbs higher and higher. One of the things that dazzles me about the series, which was written and published over a span of 24 years, between 1951 and 1975, is the foresight with which Powell wrote the earliest volumes. The poisonous Pamela Flitton, for example, makes her first entrance in one of the first three books at the age of four, creating an indelible impression during a society wedding by vomiting into the church’s baptismal font. Ten or eleven books later, Pamela is a primary architect of Widmerpool’s hellacious and very public humiliation. But what captivated me on my first reading of the three books combined into Spring was the story of the creation and partial dissolution of three youthful friendships — and especially the deterioration, mostly through drink, of the most brilliant of them while the odd boy out, Widmerpool, glumly claws his way into the world of influence. Every reading since has reinforced the power and the remarkable humor in those three books, but with each successive reading, a new “season” opens itself to me as I, like the characters, progress from Spring into Summer, Autumn, and Winter. It’s art of a very formal kind, like the Poussin painting from which the series takes its name, but if you can put up with the formality of the narrative and Powell’s lack of pretense that he’s doing anything but writing a novel — he’s not aspiring to naturalism or even realism — you may love these books as much as I do. And, really, what’s to lose? You can get them free at any decent library. And they’ve illuminated my life. Wow — we’re a whole week into the project. Only 51 weeks (and a day) to go. Thanks for reading along.
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