In his
essay Imagination as Value (from The Necessary Angel, 1942) Wallace Stevens lays out a case for "perceiving
the normal," in contradistinction to "the deliberate exploits of the
abnormal," as in the case of Rimbaud and Kafka:
"Jean
Paulhan, a Frenchman and a writer, is a man of great sense. He is a native of
the region of Tarbes. Tarbes is a town in southwestern France in the High
Pyrenees. Marshal Foch was born there. An equestrian statue of the Marshal
stands there, high in the air, on a pedestal. In his Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Jean Paulhan says:
One sees
at the entrance of the public garden of Tarbes, this sign:
It
is forbidden
To
enter into the garden
Carrying flowers
He goes on
to say:
One finds it, also, in our time at
the portal of literature. Nevertheless, it would be agreeable to see the girls
of Tarbes (and the young writers) carrying a rose, a red poppy, an armful of
red poppies.
I repeat
that Jean Paulhan is a man of great sense. But to be able to see the portal of
literature, that is to say: the portal of the imagination, as a scene of normal
love and normal beauty is, of itself, a feat of great imagination. It is the
vista a man sees, seated in the public garden of his native town, near by some
effigy of a figure celebrated in the normal world, as he considers that the
chief problems of any artist, as of any man, are the problems of the normal and
that he needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give.”
When I first read them, I found Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time books both highly entertaining and highly irritating. (I'm not the only one to feel irritation. Scribbled on the first page of my paperback
copy of A Question of Upbringing is what
I take to be a quondam reader’s exasperated warning: “NEVER TRY AGAIN.”) The
books' narrative delivery is unusual: The narrator, Nick Jenkins, is a
companionable but secondary presence. The books are mainly his investigations into the lives of other people—met at school, in business, and at parties; mixed
up in the worlds of business, romance, politics, the arts and the second world war, inter alia. The books are short—they average about 230 pages—but in no hurry.
The "action" isn’t so much slow as intermittent, sometimes abrupt. Sixty pages might be spent at a single
dinner party. Dialogue alternates with Nick’s philosophical musings. Like Henry
James, Powell operates at a slow boil, though to a lighter and a more comic effect.
I found the peculiar ruminativeness of Powell's style—which, if you lack a certain sense of humor, would be absolutely crushing in its deliberativeness—frequently irritating in my first run-through. I don't know why. Maybe I was missing a lot of the humor. Maybe I was more sympathetic to the gist of that famous and priggish Eleanor Roosevelt quote about great minds discussing ideas and small minds discussing people. But aren't novels, primarily about people, a higher form of gossip, anyway? Powell, not a small mind, discusses people first, to delightful effect. That's also his way of getting at ideas, which—it's easy for people like Roosevelt to forget—are never unaccompanied by human bearers. My second time through the Dance, my irritation with Powell is gone; my enjoyment, nearly unadulterated. (There are, here and there, longueurs.) I don’t mind his sixty-page dinner parties in the least. Bring ‘em on, I say!
To like Powell, you have to find enjoyable this species of reflective riff:
"There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to 'only' children: neurasthenia: an inability to adapt themselves: all the traits held to be the result of a lonely upbringing. The corporate life of large families can be lived with severity, even barbarity, of a kind unknown in smaller related communities: these savageries and distillations of egoism often rendered even less tolerable if sentimentalized outside the family circle."
