Secret Harmonies #6/7 Secret Harmonies Journal of the Anthony Powell Society Number 6/7 Spring 2015 Edited by Stephen Walker Editorial Board: Dr Christine Berberich, Dr Nicholas Birns, Stephen Walker Managing Editor & Publisher for the Anthony Powell Society Dr Keith C Marshall The Anthony Powell Society : Greenford, UK 2015 1 Secret Harmonies #6/7 Published in 2015 by The Anthony Powell Society, 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, UB6 0JW, UK © Copyright The Anthony Powell Society, 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. ISSN 1752-5675 Cover photograph © John S Monagan, 1984. Reproduced with permission. Printed by Lonsdale Direct Solutions, Wellingborough, UK The Anthony Powell Society is registered charity number 1096873. 2 Secret Harmonies #6/7 Contents Was There a Powell Generation?, Mark Facknitz ....................................... 7 Friends Do Furnish a Novel – Exploring Male Friendships in Dance to the Music of Time, Gabriella Walfridsson ................................................... 20 Epiphanies, Peter Kislinger .......................................................................... 26 Waiting for (Dr) Belkin, Edwin Bock.......................................................... 46 The End of the Dance, Grey Gowrie ............................................................ 72 The Politics of the Dance, Vernon Bogdanor ............................................. 86 ‘Think First, Fight Afterwards’ – The Soldier’s Art, AN Wilson .......... 100 Anthony Powell Interviewed by Colin Donald, 29 May 1992 at The Chantry ......................................................................................................... 113 Singing a Would-Be King through Comic Invective: Jenkins as Widmerpool’s ‘Inexorable Accessory’, Ashley Herum ........................... 125 AD Powell and the Transactions of the Radnorshire Society, Keith C Marshall ........................................................................................................ 145 Dance for Everybody? Teaching and Living Powell’s Fiction, Nicholas Birns .............................................................................................................. 155 BOOK REVIEWS: Olivia Manning .......................................................... 159 BOOK REVIEW: DJ Taylor, At the Chime of the City Clock: A Triller 167 BOOK REVIEW: Literary Parodies ......................................................... 172 Notes on Contributors .................................................................................... 178 Society Merchandise & Membership ............................................................ 181 3 Secret Harmonies #6/7 Abbreviations of Anthony Powell Works References to the Anthony Powell works cited throughout this volume are, unless specified, to the first UK editions of the individual works using the abbreviations given below; in the interests of concision these works are omitted from bibliographies. Other works are cited in full. AP Anthony Powell Dance Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time (London: Heinemann, 1951-75) QU Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing (London: Heinemann, 1951) BM Anthony Powell, A Buyer’s Market (London: Heinemann, 1952) AW Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (London: Heinemann, 1955) LM Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly’s (London: Heinemann, 1957) CCR Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (London: Heinemann, 1960) KO Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (London: Heinemann, 1962) VB Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (London: Heinemann, 1964) SA Anthony Powell, The Soldier’s Art (London: Heinemann, 1966) MP Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers (London: Heinemann, 1968) BDFR Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room (London: Heinemann, 1971) TK Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings (London: Heinemann, 1973) HSH Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies (London: Heinemann, 1975) AM Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men (London: Duckworth, 1931) A&P Anthony Powell, Agents and Patients (London: Duckworth, 1936) V Anthony Powell, Venusberg (London: Duckworth, 1932) FVD Anthony Powell, From a View to a Death (London: Duckworth, 1933) WBW Anthony Powell, What’s Become of Waring (London: Cassell, 1939) Plays Anthony Powell, Two Plays (London: Heinemann, 1971) Wheel Anthony Powell, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! (London, Heinemann, 1983) FK Anthony Powell, The Fisher King (London: Heinemann, 1986) UR Anthony Powell, Under Review (London: Heinemann, 1992) MV Anthony Powell, Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers 1946-1989 (London: Heinemann, 1990) 4 Secret Harmonies #6/7 TKBR Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) Infants Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling: Infants of the Spring (London: Heinemann, 1976) Messengers Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling: Messengers of Day (London: Heinemann, 1978) Faces Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling: Faces in My Time (London: Heinemann, 1980) Strangers Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Strangers All Are Gone (London: Heinemann, 1982) J82-86 Anthony Powell, Journals 1982-1986 (London: Heinemann, 1995) J87-89 Anthony Powell, Journals 1987-1989 (London: Heinemann, 1996) J90-92 Anthony Powell, Journals 1990-1992 (London: Heinemann, 1997) Album Violet Powell, The Album of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987) Spurling Hilary Spurling, Handbook to Anthony Powell’s Music of Time (London: Heinemann, 1977). Republished as Invitation to the Dance: A Guide to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time (Boston: Little Brown, 1978; London: Mandarin, 1992) 5 Secret Harmonies #6/7 Editorial Editorial text here Stephen Walker Hon. Editor 6 Secret Harmonies #6/7 Was There a Powell Generation? Mark Facknitz, Department of English, James Madison University First given at the 5th Biennial Anthony Powell Conference; Washington, DC; September 2009. “Was there a Powell generation?” I think my title is catchy, apt to go over well with a group of devotees, but I’ll confess straight up that I’m suspicious of the surreptitious value judgments and the general clannishness that goes along with talking about generations. However, I am very interested in what we learn about Powell and his cultural moment by asking if one could reasonably talk about a Powell generation. To begin, there are some broad grounds of agreement about Powell, one his remarkable achievement in writing Dance, which I prefer to not call a roman fleuve because I think the volumes are, in part and in whole, far too architectural to be aptly figured as a river. Asked about his similarity to Proust, Powell responded: Proust is an enormously subjective writer who has a peculiar genius for describing how he or his narrator feels. If he then denies that he has a talent for self-revelation, I am convinced that he left it for us to say that he has a remarkable talent for self-concealment, a way of dispensing the perspective and wit of Jenkins here and there, a game of narrative cache-cache that makes finding Jenkins in the lines of the Dance remarkably like reading the allegorical paintings of Poussin, Bronzino, and Tiepolo for the presence of the tubby little boy, on the left with pipe, on the right with hour glass. Who’s that? Oh yeah, that’s Nicky. We also accept his verdict that the special character of the occult in Dance is the author’s confession that he follows Blavatsky or Gurdjieff; rather the metaphor of the occult stands for a restrained and skeptical view of history and the large patterns of civilization, the idea that that nothing ever changes: that what is now dished up in a supposedly different form is really exactly the same as the thing one was familiar with as a child. (28). One watches, then, the process of time and meaning unfolding with an intense interest but rarely if ever tremendous clarity of mind, for just as the pattern appears ready to steady itself, as if to articulate itself against the stormy horizons of the novels, we are confronted with the blunt mortality of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hard in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to 7 Secret Harmonies #6/7 control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. [QU, 2] This allusion to Poussin’s painting is so provocative, so obviously significant, that one might think it is all the map the author intended to give us at the beginning. Not quite, I think. The force of the idea of the comic formality of the cold, the lyricism of the evocation of the painting by Poussin, and the structural and thematic announcements of the allusion tend to speak so loudly that the melancholy significance of the next paragraph might be missed: “As winter advanced in that river valley, mist used to rise in late afternoon and spread over the flooded grass; until the house and all the outskirts of the town were enveloped in opaque, chilly vapour, tinted like cigar-smoke. The house looked on to other tenement-like structures,