A Second Dance

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."