Secret Harmonies
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The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873 Secret Harmonies Journal of the Anthony Powell Society Number 1 October 2006 ISSN 1752-5675 Price £10 The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873 The Anthony Powell Society is a charitable literary society devoted to the life and works of the English author Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. Officers & Executive Committee Patron: John MA Powell President-Elect: Simon Russell Beale Hon. Vice-Presidents: Julian Allason, Hugh Massingberd *Chairman: Patric Dickinson *Hon. Secretary: Dr Keith C Marshall *Hon. Treasurer: Kevin Jewell *Committee Members: Dr Christine Berberich, Dr Nicholas Birns (USA), Leatrice Fountain (USA), Stephen Holden, Tony Robinson, Prof. Ian Young (N Ireland) Newsletter Editor: Stephen Holden Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall PR/Media Adviser: Julian Allason Secret Harmonies Editor: Stephen Holden Editorial Board: Dr Christine Berberich, Dr Nicholas Birns, Stephen Holden All correspondence should be sent to: Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society, 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK Phone: +44 (0)20 8864 4095 Fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109 Email: [email protected] Web: www.anthonypowell.org * Members of the Executive Committee who are the Society’s trustees. Secret Harmonies Journal of the Anthony Powell Society Number 1 October 2006 Edited by Stephen Holden Editorial Board: Dr Christine Berberich, Dr Nicholas Birns, Stephen Holden Managing Editor & Publisher for the Anthony Powell Society Dr Keith C Marshall The Anthony Powell Society, Greenford, UK 2006 Published in 2006 by The Anthony Powell Society, 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK © Copyright The Anthony Powell Society, 2006. 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 Express Printing, Peterborough, UK The Anthony Powell Society is registered charity number 1096873. Secret Harmonies #1 Contents Contents ........................................................................................................... 5 Abbreviations of Anthony Powell Works .......................................................... 6 Editorial ........................................................................................................... 7 From Poussin to Burton: The Evolving Narrator in A Dance to the Music of Time; James J Scott .............................................................................. 9 When the Time Came; Allison Rung ............................................................. 26 Let the Dance Resume: Echoes of Anthony Powell in the Fiction of DJ Taylor; Jeffrey A Manley .................................................................. 41 Cult and Occult in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time; John Potter...... 54 The Scotsman; 21 January 1995; Colin Donald ........................................... 67 Widmerpool versus MI5; Julian Allason ...................................................... 72 BOOK REVIEW: Nation & Novel by Patric Parrinder ............................. 74 BOOK REVIEW: Betjeman by AN Wilson ................................................. 77 BOOK REVIEW: The Milk of Paradise: Diaries 1993-1997; James Lees- Milne ...................................................................................................... 79 Notes on Contributors ..................................................................................... 81 Society Merchandise ...................................................................................... 83 5 Secret Harmonies #1 Abbreviations of Anthony Powell Works 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) 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) References to the Anthony Powell works cited throughout this volume are, unless specified, to the first editions of the individual works using the abbreviations given above. Other works are cited in full. 6 Secret Harmonies #1 Editorial The Anthony Powell Society has now existed for over six years, being founded a few months after Powell’s death at the age of 94 in March 2000. The Society produces a quarterly Newsletter as well as published conference proceedings, monographs and other publications. Following the success of the 2005 conference to mark Powell’s centenary, it was felt that the Society should, in addition to the quarterly Newsletter, produce a publication that could contain the following: general-interest Powell-related articles that are too long for the Newsletter (ie. over 2000 words); academic/ scholarly articles; chapter extracts from related books; longer extracts from academic theses etc.; book reviews; and anything else of interest to Powell scholars and fans. The Society is delighted that this first edition of Secret Harmonies (as this Journal is to be titled – the result of a competition amongst the Society membership) not only reflects the Society’s overall aim “to advance for the public benefit, education and interest in the life and works of the English author Anthony Dymoke Powell” but also reflects the wide range and depth of “Powelliana” in all its forms. It is expected that Secret Harmonies will be produced annually to begin with, but more frequent publication may be considered in due course. Stephen Holden Hon. Editor 7 Secret Harmonies #1 8 Secret Harmonies #1 From Poussin to Burton: The Evolving Narrator in A Dance to the Music of Time By James J Scott Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time1 is framed by two crucial scenes. In the first, Nicholas Jenkins – Powell’s narrator – sees a group of workmen gathered around a fire and reflects on Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the Seasons dancing to the music of Time (QU, 1-2). In the second, Jenkins tends his own bonfire and recalls a passage from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy while “the formal measure of the Seasons seem[s] suspended in the wintry silence” (HSH, 271-272). To the best of my knowledge, no critic has addressed the possibility that Dance can be read as an account of the evolution of Jenkins’s views from the time that he sees the group of workmen gathered around their fire and reflects on the Poussin painting to the time when he tends his own bonfire and recalls the passage from Burton. It is this possibility that I intend to explore below. I. Dance as a Divided Narrative As Jenkins steps out of the Barnabas Henderson Gallery after hearing Bithel’s account of Widmerpool’s death, he sees a group of workmen gathering around a fire (HSH, 271). A number of critics have asserted that this is the same … group of workmen, gathered around the same fire, that Jenkins describes at the beginning of A Question of Upbringing. According to those critics, Jenkins is prompted to narrate Dance by what he saw and heard in Henderson’s gallery, and he introduces his narrative by describing the group of workmen he saw when he stepped out of that gallery. 2 Jenkins tends his bonfire and recalls the passage from Burton no more than two weeks after he visits Henderson’s gallery (when describing the bonfire scene, Jenkins refers to a newspaper article he had read “a week or two before”; he adds that he had read the article before his visit to Henderson’s gallery (HSH, 244)). And, in Jenkins’s mind, the passage from Burton is apparently associated in some way with the group of workmen that Jenkins saw outside that gallery: The smell from my bonfire … now brought back that of the workmen’s bucket of glowing coke, burning outside their shelter. For some reason one of Robert Burton’s torrential passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy came to mind. (HSH, 271) If Jenkins did, in fact, introduce his narrative by describing the group of workmen that he saw when he stepped out of Henderson’s gallery, it would be difficult – 1 Throughout I use Dance when referring to A Dance to the Music of Time. References to individual novels are abbreviated. 2 See, for