Different Speeds, Same Furies

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Different Speeds, Same Furies

Powell, Proust and Other Literary Forms

Perry Anderson

First published by Verso 2022
© Perry Anderson 2022

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Title: Different speeds, same furies : Powell, Proust and Other Literary Forms / Perry Anderson.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022025010 (print) | LCCN 2022025011 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804290798 (hardback) | ISBN 9781804290828 (ebk)

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History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays.

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1. Two Conjurors of Time

2. The Longevity of Powell

3. From Progress to Catastrophe

4. Persian Letters

Notes

Index

  Authors et alia

  Critics

  Characters

FOREWORD

Comprising four essays dealing in different ways with literature, this book is unlike my previous writing, concerned with historical and political questions, though these are not altogether absent here. I owe my interest in literary issues to undergraduate years in Oxford, where I studied French and Russian. There I had the great luck of being taught – I had no prior conception of either – by two scholars, each unusual, perhaps unique, in England at the time: Dickie Sayce (1917–1977) and Richard Freeborn (1926–2019). Sayce was the author of Style in French Prose: A Method of Analysis, whose second impression (1958) appeared while I was studying with him: a work that introduced the continental tradition of Stilistik to England, where it was largely unknown at the time, and is still little practiced today. Introducing it, he distinguished his own approach from that of Leo Spitzer, the Austrian master of this kind of study. Years later I discovered that Spitzer had responded to Sayce with a courteous but sharp rejoinder in Critique, the ‘general review of French and foreign publications’ founded after the war by Bataille, his reply ending with a bravura analysis of baroque rhetoric in Bossuet’s sermons.¹ Freeborn too, recently arrived in Oxford from a posting with the British embassy in Moscow, where he had witnessed the obsequies of Stalin, had an intellectual background unfamiliar in the England of the fifties. Among his enthusiasms were White emigré scholarship on Dostoevsky, about whom he would later write, and the tradition of Russian formalism, on which he directed me to Erlich’s classic work.² So I had the good fortune of early acquaintance with two European approaches to literary criticism, each of them exotic and stimulating, in a period where contemporaries studying English literature – in much greater number than those concerned with foreign languages – were confined to Anglo-American schools of thought. The same kind of luck held after I left university, in friendships formed with Roberto Schwarz, Franco Moretti and Fredric Jameson, in their respective generations three of the world’s greatest thinkers about literature. Without always agreeing with them – they often disagree with each other – I have since been indebted to them in whatever I’ve made of cultural questions.

The first essay below takes the form of a comparison between two novelists, Anthony Powell and Marcel Proust. At any sustained length, close comparative criticism in literature is perhaps rarer than it should be – certainly than comparative studies in history or sociology. Soon after leaving Oxford I came upon the work of Peter Stern, which made a lively impression on me, partly by awakening curiosity about German literature, partly by the fluency with which Stern conjoined literary and political interests – the first book of his I read was his succinct tour de force on Ernst Jünger. But I suspect that the assurance of his comparisons – Effi Briest, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, for example, brought together in a single frame³ – also exerted an unconscious influence on me. In the particular case of Powell and Proust, similarity – which is not identity – of background and project is so close that comparison seems obvious. It is a closeness that makes the ways they differ from each other the more interesting, and the contrast in their receptions all the more striking.

Reaction to what I write of these differences has been strong among Proustians, who have tended to regard my treatment of Proust as a dismissal. It is far from that. Some, more defensibly, have observed that its tribute to Proust nevertheless falls short of the homage warranted by the grandeur of À la recherche. There, context matters. Historically, the ever-increasing mass of writing Proust’s novel has produced is put into perspective by the two German Romanists who recognized its stature very early on: Curtius, whose consideration of Proust dates from 1922–1924, before its final volumes were even published, and Spitzer who took his inspiration from Curtius some years later.⁴ Today, the cult of Proust is its own worst enemy. The volume of adulation surrounding his novel has warped judgment to a point where a rational assessment of it, taking stock, along with its majesty, of limitations and defects to which its devotees are blind, is bound to seem unworthy of its object. That said, moderate objections to what I remark of Proust need to bear in mind two points. Commissioned to write on Powell, I decided to compare him to Proust. But in the nature of the commission, Powell’s writing remained the principal object of consideration, so there is an asymmetry of treatment in my account of the two. That might have troubled me, had it not been for the one great exception to the ruck of late Proustiana, Malcolm Bowie’s Proust among the Stars, a work whose scintillation – warmth and acuity married without fissure – is so outstanding that as a comprehensive view of À la recherche it leaves little more to be said, other than to single out its preeminence, which I do.

Soon after the appearance of the essay in the London Review, I was asked to give a lecture to the Anthony Powell Society, which forms the second chapter of this book, and considers the four volumes of his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling. These have been much less discussed than Dance, but in the literature of recollection – as opposed to imagination – represent a distinctive achievement of their own. In talking about them, I touch on some of the reasons why Powell meets resistance from readers today, and how I myself too reacted when I first started reading him. Taste in literature is a question of temperament, which is individual and untransferable. But it is also a question of background and period, to which belong some of the reasons why my initial resistance to Powell passed – that is, of historical location in place and time, conditions that are social and communicable. These change, and with them taste. Significant art, of course, outlasts such changes. As to how long, Powell and Proust were each, in their different ways, non-committal.

The following chapter turns to the historical novel as a literary form. Powell’s Dance, for all the length of time it covers – over half a century – is not one, being rather what German criticism terms a Zeitroman: a novel covering periods through which the author has lived, and recreated in characters and situations expressive of them. Conspicuous in the record of the historical novel as a form have been two features. The first is its mobility across cultural registers, from high art through mid-cult to low commerce, setting it apart from any other sub-genre of the novel. The second is the paradox of its postmodern revival – explosion, even – in the upper registers of the form, after long relegation to the lower depths of popular fiction. Starting from Lukács’s classic account of its rise in the early nineteenth century, and looking at its fluctuating fortunes thereafter, what explains its proliferating recrudescence today? Originally a response to a talk by Fredric Jameson in Los Angeles, I have added a postscript on his subsequent reflections about the historical novel, which take the story of its arc up to its latest twist in the present century.

The book ends by going back in time to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Though not the originator of the epistolary novel as a form, this was its detonator to dominance in the fiction of the eighteenth century, precursor to the hegemony of realist fiction in the nineteenth. Persian Letters owed that role not only to the gifts of its author, but to the way it formulated key questions for the Enlightenment, which acquired its first approximation to a name soon afterwards. The epistolary novel became in due course an archaic form, yet Montesquieu’s use of it, I suggest, anticipates modernity in two ways. It introduced Europe to the novel of ideas, whose heyday would come after an interval of another hundred and fifty years; and its ideas – of sexual liberty, gender equality, demographic decline, proto-nuclear annihilation – remain of arresting contemporary resonance.

1 March 2022

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The original version of ‘Two Conjurors of Time’ was published in the London Review of Books on 6 and 19 July 2018; of ‘The Longevity of Proust’, given as a talk at the Travellers Club on 17 December 2018, in Secret Harmonies, no. 9, Autumn 2020; of ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’ in the London Review of Books, 28 July 2011; and of ‘Persian Letters’ in Il Romanzo, II, Turin 2001. I owe invitations to produce the first to Mary-Kay Wilmers, the second to John Roe, the third to the UCLA Comparative Literature Program, and the fourth to Franco Moretti, who edited the five-volume Einaudi edition in which it first appeared.

1

TWO CONJURORS OF TIME

I

Are there any appropriate dimensions to literary biography as a form? The stature of a writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some coordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred less from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at fifty-one, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at fifty-nine, eight hundred from Richard Ellman. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was sixty-two; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a miniscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.

Spurling’s ‘Life’

Hilary Spurling’s life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern.¹ The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his ninety-four years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of postscripts. Yet his memoirs, which run to nearly double the length of her biography, stop at much the same cut-off point. Did they cover so much ground that little was to be gained by treading it again? By no means. In the four volumes of To Keep the Ball Rolling, riveting portraits of his contemporaries screen notable discretion about himself. Nor has Spurling’s own practice as a biographer in the past been so succinct. Her double-decker lives of Compton-Burnett and Matisse, each of them outstanding, are considerably longer than of Powell. Would the difference be due to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but on the whole, in the warmth and grace of Spurling’s account there is a kind of natural tact but little sign of inhibition. Perhaps simple consideration of sales was a factor: over a certain length, publishers rarely break even. Aesthetically speaking, at all events, the economy of her study is not out of keeping with its subject: Powell, a disciplined writer with a laconic streak of his own, would have appreciated it.

What does Spurling add to the story outlined in Powell’s memoirs and projected in his fiction – military father, excruciating prep school; happiness at Eton, depression at Oxford; job in publishing, deadpan early novels, marriage into the Pakenhams; war service in Northern Ireland and Allied Liaison; post-war triumph with A Dance to the Music of Time? The most striking revelations come where he said least, of his childhood and his loves. The finest thing in Spurling’s book is her delicate portrait of the extraordinary union that produced Powell and shaped his infancy. Though both parents came from gentry families, their marriage defied convention, since his mother was fifteen years older than his father, who wed at the age of twenty-two – an age gap frowned on enough in civilian life, but virtually unheard-of in the army. Breaking a still greater taboo, she even travelled on her own to South Africa to join him during his service in the Boer War before they were yet married. Sadly, however, the price of such daring was thereafter, in Spurling’s surmise, her all but complete withdrawal from society out of timidity at being taken as a cradle-snatcher, which Powell’s father – opposite in temperament in every other respect – did little to offset, given his own volcanic temper with the world at large. Within the nuclear cell, the marriage itself was a success, though the social isolation of the family was compounded by the uprooted, nomadic character of army life. As to its consequences for the future author, Spurling opens her book: ‘Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child’s point of view.’²

Such, at the outset, was his external environment. Within the family, the extreme contrast between his parents – his father ‘a champion grudge-bearer, liable to resort at the smallest real or imagined slight in public or private to hysterical rage’; his ‘calm and generous’ mother ‘a born peacemaker’ – left a two-fold mark on him: on the one hand, acquiring as a baby ‘the rock-bottom security that came from being unconditionally loved by his mother’, who bore him when she was thirty-eight; on the other, learning as a boy from the spectacle of his father the need for ‘strategies of discipline and restraint’.³ Arrival at the age of thirteen at Eton, a year after the Great War had come to an end, brought him in Spurling’s view

the underlying stability and continuity that came from a sense he had never known before of belonging to a community that accepted him, the nearest thing to a place where he felt at home. The school became from now on a kind of virtual extended family whose members – however rebarbative, reluctant or remote – stood in all his life for the actual relatives he hadn’t got.

Fortunate in finding himself in an unpretentious house, ‘with a poor reputation and no standards to keep up’, presided over by an easy-going master, he flourished as a member of the school’s Arts Society, did well academically, and emerged more polished and confident socially.⁴

Oxford was an abrupt reversal: depressed and inchoate, he got little out of the university, and left with a poor degree. Remarking that his subsequent accounts of his time at the university were ‘both vague and characteristically harsh’, Spurling conjectures that with ingenuous good looks, he may have suffered from predatory advances in a setting where homosexuality was not unusual. Certainly his main later complaint was the impossibility of any relation with girls, under vigilant bar by the authorities. There was also his lack of money for the kind of lavish living affected by smart undergraduates, and his relative modesty of background – an absence of snobbish connexions Spurling takes to have left him lonely and disoriented, his social life ‘arid, sometimes non-existent’ in London on going down.⁵

Reacting against standard images of Powell as the consummate denizen of an aristocratic beau monde, more than one reviewer of Spurling has bent the stick in the opposite direction, depicting him as by her account an outsider who eventually made his way, through literary achievement and likeability, from social disadvantage to exalted company. This notion is only a little more accurate than the received version. One third of the boys in Powell’s house at Eton came from titled families; at Oxford he was a member of the Hypocrites Club, haunt of iconoclast high-rollers; in London, he was shoe-horned by a former staff captain of his father, without even applying for it, into a job with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford, Belloc historically on its list. As an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way.⁶

There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of limited means, liable to be snubbed or dropped, as Spurling depicts him. Flexible though each may have been, there were different levels in the upper social hierarchy of the time. Still, a certain worldly success came early. Powell reached London when he was twenty-one. At twenty-five he had published his first novel, Afternoon Men, well received by critics across the board, and sufficiently popular with readers for a fan letter to yield him a fashionable mistress in Chelsea, after an earlier affair with Nina Hamnett, model for Modigliani and his route into bohemia.

Powell was reticent about these matters in his memoirs, leaving readers to deduce the possible significance or otherwise of the women featuring in them, prior to his marriage in 1934. Spurling offers a sequence of vivid silhouettes, panels in a period fresco, of what he omitted: failures with the débutante Adelaide Biddulph and model Enid Firminger; passages with Nina Hamnett and Dorothy Varda, another model, both self-destructive; a fling with the artist Juliet O’Rourke, wife of a modernist architect; a tumble in the afternoon with the Irish writer Mary Manning; a ‘great passion’ for Marion Coates, wife of another architect, before his wedding to Violet Pakenham, sixth daughter of a Longford earl. All these set in an inter-war landscape where bohemia and la bonne société – hostesses, adventurers, artists, intellectuals – overlapped in the scenes of the first half of A Dance to the Music of Time. Marriage extended rather than altered this, Powell acquiring many an in-law from an Anglo-Irish background to which itself he was allergic, while his wife ‘slipped effortlessly’ into ‘a shabby, rootless urban world unlike any she had known before’. Spurling’s portrait of Violet Powell – another part of his life, as he often said, he could never describe – is the second great virtue of her book. Written with an underlying entre femmes warmth and understanding – what today might be called solidarity of gender – its stress falls on ‘her extraordinary openness to experience, her voracious hunger for life and the energy she put into it’. High-spirited and quick-witted, becoming in due course a fluent writer herself, she proved a temperamental and intellectual partner rare in that generation, whose impact on Powell’s post-war fiction was no small one: in their son Tristram’s words, her memory ‘was, as it were, the right arm of my father’s imagination’.⁷

With the onset of the Second World War, the Dance becomes more closely autobiographical, his memoirs moving in parallel, and once the novel-sequence itself started to be published, at the turn of the fifties, it naturally dominated his life. Across this stretch of time, there is – with one exception – less that is new in Spurling’s narrative, which contracts accordingly: three-quarters of it covering the first forty-five years of his life, a quarter the subsequent twenty-five. The author of a comprehensive handbook to the Dance, published shortly after it was completed, her commentary on it here is always to point, if tilted towards identification of characters with real persons, a regular tendency in critics whose over-simplifications Powell himself often warned against, if occasionally also allowing. Spurling’s principal trophy is pinning the original of his most celebrated creation, Widmerpool, on the colonel who hired and fired him in the wartime Cabinet office, Dennis Capel-Dunn, an ‘undistinguished’ lawyer in civil life, who perished on a flight back from the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco, to no great distress on Powell’s part.⁸ With the completion of Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last volume of the Dance, Spurling effectively brings her biography to a close. Its brief postscript describes her friendship with him, his subsequent brace of novels, honours and travails of old age, final infirmity. Though tight-lipped, it makes a moving conclusion to the book.

Yet there is undeniably an element of paradox in its upshot. What more sense do we gain of Powell himself as a person, once launched on adult life? Spurling observes of the biography he produced after the war, John Aubrey and His Friends, that ‘for all its evident respect and affection, its subject never comes to life as Aubrey makes his own subjects do.’ How far can the same be said of her account of him? Good-natured, amusing, affable, to many he also seemed inscrutable. ‘Nobody could get the wrong impression of you’, a woman friend once told him, ‘because you don’t give them anything to go on.’⁹ To interviewers he would deflect questions about himself with the disarming claim, ‘I never feel strongly myself what my own character is like’ – ‘I have absolutely no picture of myself. Never have had.’¹⁰ Spurling knew him well, but he was in his sixties by the time she met him, when such defences were long in place. By the time she came to write his biography, he had outlived every one of his contemporaries who might have had unexpected perceptions or memories of him: the lack of third-party insight or witness in the story is striking. There was nothing to be done about that.

Still, signs of considerable inner turbulence beneath the unruffled outward surface Powell presented to the world were there. He suffered from nearly permanent insomnia – ‘In my early days I never slept a wink’ – later on installing a camp bed by his desk so as not to keep his wife awake too. Prey not only to bouts of paralyzing accidie, ‘the feeling that nothing’s worth doing’, but to spells of black depression – after an unsuccessful sortie to Hollywood in 1937, and in still more acute form, on returning to civilian life again after the war, when ‘every morning he wished he were dead’ – in his memoirs he implied a rather different explanation of why he had nothing to say when asked about his character, observing that ‘not everyone can stand the strain of gazing down too long into the personal crater, with its scene of Hieronymus Bosch activities taking place in the depths’.¹¹ Spurling, tacitly treating his depressions as discrete episodes, without much bearing on what he may have been like at some deeper level, does not recall this graphic image. Reluctance to venture much psychological surmise after Powell landed in London is visible in other ways. Reporting his claim never to have raised his voice again after leaving Eton, she later shows he was not so imperturbable: ‘rage and frustration’ at the tedium and inanity of life in the army ‘drove him to the kind of explosion he had witnessed as a child from his father’; ‘white with rage’ at Graham Greene’s obstruction of his book on Aubrey; hopelessly drunk with ‘unguarded anger, bitterness and shock’ on dismissal as literary editor at Punch; severing his long-standing ties with the Daily Telegraph in ‘grief and rage’ at infantile barbs from the junior Waugh.¹² Some of the materials for a more complex, in all probability no less sympathetic, portrait of Powell lie plain in the pages of this biography. But by choice, certainly not inability, they are denied synthesis.

The one arresting novelty in the latter half of Spurling’s narrative is that Violet Powell had an affair during the war that she described as the love of her life to Sonia Orwell, without identifying her lover. Spurling writes with typical understanding of the conditions making in this case for such an affair, and attributes Powell’s post-war depression to his discovery of it. In the most startling single passage of her book, she argues that the famous scene in which the Dance’s narrator Nick Jenkins takes Jean Templer in his arms – in the back of a car, speeding through night and snow along the Great West Road, past the neon sign where a bathing belle ‘dives eternally through the petrol-tainted air’: the opening embrace of the principal romance of the novel – mingles the lightning suddenness of Powell’s courtship of Violet with the beauty and marital circumstances of her predecessor Marion Coates, on whom Jean was modelled, transferring the pain of Violet’s infidelity to the successive deceptions of Jean.¹³

This is an ingenious reconstruction, which seems to have the authority of Violet behind it. But if it is accurate, it only shows how the extraordinary power of a creative imagination transformed particles of experience into the universe of his fiction, since there is not the least hint of the enigmatic sexual waywardness of Jean in anything represented by Spurling of either woman in real life. This is not to say there is no mystery in Powell’s affair with Marion Coates, of whose emotional and sensual straight-forwardness Spurling paints an attractive picture. But it lies elsewhere. What is truly strange about the connexion is the fact, which Spurling reports without any expression of surprise – perhaps of interest – is that Marion, born in China and schooled in England, ‘gentle, self-contained and demure with a softness and sweetness of manner that hid a cool analytical brain and a streak of unexpected toughness’, was a lifelong Communist, whose intellectual mentor was none other than J. D. Bernal.¹⁴ Given his own political outlook, a more unlikely figure for Powell to fall passionately in love with is difficult to imagine.

Did he ever stray after marriage, as his wife once did? If so, his discretion has never been breached. Glamorous photographs to be found in this biography and his memoirs – of Miranda Christen, adventuress installed by Powell in Islington as stenographer for Orwell, or Georgina Ward, actress in a belated stage version of his pre-war novel Afternoon Men – tell no tales. His friend Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine, thought that, surrounded by promiscuous friends, he may have simply found a vicarious pleasure, productive for his fiction, in observing them,¹⁵ while conducting his own marital life with the meticulous sexual correctness Jenkins whimsically fancies of the usurper Gyges at one point in Temporary Kings. That is quite possible. Spurling says nothing either way. A protective motive is more or less explicit at the end of her book, but it is directed elsewhere. Though herself not especially distant from them, she has reasons for not wanting to dwell on Powell’s politics, which play less of a role in her story than in either his life or his art. Her concern is for his contemporary reputation, in her view diminished by a disobliging myth of them.

The Precedent of Proust

There is no doubt that, as a French critic has put it, the question of literary status is unusually acute in the case of Powell. It is difficult to think of another writer where opinions diverge so widely. Readers of his work, an American scholar observes, tend to be either addicts or indifferent, to love or to hate it: ‘there is not the dutiful normative respect coupled with limited concrete enthusiasm garnered by so many canonical writers’.¹⁶ The reasons for that, however, have in the first instance little to do with its political dimensions, significant though these certainly are. They relate to the nature of his project as a whole. In scale and design, the architecture of the Dance is unique in Western literature. Scale: the novel covers a period of over half a century, from 1914 to 1971. Design: it forms a sequence of twelve self-standing, but completely interconnected, works. Why is this combination unique? Balzac’s Comédie humaine, covering the history of society from the Revolution to the last years of the July Monarchy, is comparable in span. But its ninety-one volumes form no single narrative: they are separate fictions, in which characters may reappear a few times, but the stories are essentially disconnected, at best unified ex post facto by the more or less arbitrary categories of the creator’s ‘system’. The twenty volumes of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle start with a prelude in the ancien régime, but as their subtitle ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’ indicates, eighteen of the novels are set in the two decades of Louis Napoleon’s rule, they too integrated only by a doctrine extraneous to them, ostensibly obeying a biological determinism. In Spain, Galdós produced forty-six Episodios Nacionales, from the battle of Trafalgar to the fall of the First Republic, but these are historical novels in the strict sense, comprising five distinct series, each with a new hero, and each recounting major political conflicts through the adventures of an individual.

The more relevant comparison, it is sometimes felt, is between Powell and Proust.¹⁷ There are good reasons for this. In the titles of the two novels, À la recherche du temps perdu and A Dance to the Music of Time, the dominant term is the same. Their length is very similar: 1,240,000 words in Proust, 1,130,000 in Powell. Bearing in mind that French is syntactically more prolix than English – translations of the latter into the former typically increase in size by some 15 per cent – the longer work, in strictly comparable terms, may actually be the Dance. In both, a unitary overall narrative encompasses successive distinct volumes. The social settings and occasions of each have much in common, aristocrats and artists, dinners and parties featuring prominently in both. The predominant focus of each is on sexual relations. Both are delivered in a high style. Both are inlaid with literary, painterly and other aesthetic references. Both are tours de force in comedy.

How far in any of this was Powell, two generations younger, directly indebted to his predecessor? In his many considerations of other writers – three volumes covering English, European and American literature – none figure so frequently as Proust, a revelation to him already at Oxford. There is no question that À la recherche was one of the preconditions of the Dance, which could not have been written without the formal breakthrough it represented. But Lermontov and Fitzgerald were equally, in certain respects perhaps more, important as inspirations. Powell was no-one’s epigone. Set beside Proust, it is not the connexions between them, but the disparities in reception that are most significant. The literature on Proust is an ocean, at the latest count over three thousand titles.¹⁸ On Powell, less than a dozen: seven studies from America, one each from France, Japan, Switzerland – and one from England. Figures like these have no conceivable relation to respective achievement. They call for other kinds of explanation.

Two, of course, come readily to mind. Proust transformed the parameters of the novel as a genre, in a way that only Joyce has also ever done. That accords him a place of his own in its history. Then there is the fact, now a thing of the past, but central for the better part of a century, of French predominance in the world republic of letters. Neither of these tells us much, however, about the specific literary qualities of À la recherche. There is a sense, indeed, in which both have tended to obscure them. In the huge modern literature on Proust, it is noticeable how little of it is actual criticism, in any traditional meaning of the term, as distinct from documentation or devotion. That this has been a general drift across the discipline, Joseph North has argued in his recent Literary Criticism: A Short Political History with good reason. A fortiori in the case of such an eminence as Proust. In the academy, criticism as once understood is, on the whole, at a discount. Comparison tends to fall with it. Not just as suspect for other reasons – de gustibus – but because it is inherent in judgment of any kind, which always implies a distinction or opposition within a commensurable set of values.

Such preventions are superstitions. Without critical comparison, reading is intellectually and aesthetically blind. Where two writers are at once as similar and dissimilar as Proust and Powell, they invite interrelated judgments. A starting-point, as good as any, is offered by background. The contiguity in the ambience of their novels, appreciable but far from complete, was not a product of common origins. Powell’s family were not particularly well off, but belonged to what historically was in technical terms regarded as the nobilitas minor – rural gentry without titles – of the country. Proust came from an extremely rich bourgeois household in Paris, closely connected to the highest circles of power in the Third Republic. His maternal grandmother was a niece of Adolphe Crémieux, author of a famous decree according French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria during the Second Empire, after its fall minister of justice in the Republican government of National Defence of 1871. His father was a friend of Félix Faure, president of the Third Republic in the last years of the nineteenth century, who expired in one of its most famous scandals, in the course – his pompe funèbre, as it was widely dubbed – of fellation by his mistress. Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux, champion of colonial expansion in Africa, was a guest at his dinner-table.¹⁹ This was a republican elite of distinctly roturier origins: Faure had been a tanner, Hanotaux’s father was a provincial lawyer. When his mother followed his father to the grave, at the age of thirty-four Proust inherited a fortune of about $6.5 million. He never earned a centime or had to do a day’s work in his life. If Powell was in one writer’s words ‘liminal’ to a socially fashionable world, it was a step he would cross quite easily, without being overly impressed on the other side. Proust arrived much earlier in smart society, from the age of seventeen dandled for his good looks and wit in aristocratic salons. Dazzled by the ci-devant world of a class which, cut off – unlike its counterparts in England, Germany, Austria or Russia – from power, compensated for political impotence with extravagant social pretensions and mannerisms, Proust settled in to a lifelong frequentation of it, if modulated over time by illness and reclusion.

Out of his exceptional gifts and this crucible came the revolutionary achievement of À la recherche as a novel. Technically speaking, that lay in its combination of two attributes, each without precedent: monumentality of narrative scale and intensity of elaborate introspection – a fictional universe teeming with characters, steeped in an unremitting interiority, made one in an intricate poetry of complex syntax and imagery. Thematically speaking, too, this was the first sustained representation of same-sex relations in Western literature. Moving fluently across comic and tragic registers, the grandeur of À la recherche was immediately recognized by contemporaries: ‘one of the great minds and imaginations of our day’, wrote Edmund Wilson in the twenties, ‘absolutely comparable’ to ‘the Nietzsches, the Tolstoys, the Wagners and the Ibsens of a previous generation’.²⁰

All literary magnitudes are finite. In the case of great writers, it is understandable that their vices should attract so much less attention, not infrequently to vanishing point, than their virtues; but not defensible. For all its gifts, Proust’s work is also subject to conspicuous shortcomings, regularly ignored in the cult of it. Time – the grandiloquent leitmotif of the novel – is handled erratically at the episodic level of the narrative, in ways that cannot be explained by the vagaries of the narrator’s memory. Proust, who never dated his letters, blurred temporality by avoidance of any specifications of age, and frequent resort to the iterative form of the past imperfect (‘Aunt Léonie would …’), but lapses of control are obvious enough. Odette’s visit as a courtesan to Uncle Adolphe when the narrator is plainly older than when she figures for him as already Swann’s wife in earlier childhood; references to historical events impossible at the time of fictional episodes – Edward VII’s state visit to Paris (1903), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), the death of the Swedish king Oscar II (1907), all at an early stage of talk about the Dreyfus Affair (1898): the external and internal chronologies of the novel do not fit. More significant is the stasis of the society depicted in the arc of the narrative as a whole. Between the 1870s, when the story of Swann hypothetically begins, and the aftermath of the First World War, where the novel ends, virtually the only area of change is technological. Electrical lights replace gas lamps, motorcars replace coaches, telephones and aeroplanes appear: otherwise, all remains essentially as it was. Even the war alters only fashions in dress, and guests in the same receptions. History, for Proust, was romantic imaginings of a mediaeval or renaissance past – ‘the distant gules of kingly France’. It had little or no meaning for him in the present. The passage of time is purely existential, the slide towards decrepitude and death. The mystique of involuntary memory he erected around it was essentially defensive. In his remarkable Proust among the Stars, the one study of À la recherche equal to its splendours, Malcolm Bowie observed with justice that while Time in this mode is ‘a “big” controlling theme’, calling forth ‘an impressive philosophical diction’, it ‘levitates too obligingly above the restless detail of Proust’s writing’ in ways that can be ‘intimidating and coercive’, the strengths in his handling of it lying elsewhere. ‘It is down among Proust’s intricate propositional structures with their outrageous embeddings, suspensions and redundancies that his boldest pieces of temporal architecture are to be found’.²¹

Like capitalized time, characters are another overdone feature of standard encomia of the novel. For the most part, these have plenty of life, but lack any depth. Where they are most vivid, Proust’s portraits belong to the art of caricature. They depend on repetition and exaggeration, resembling the garish dummies that are a feature of Dickens more than anything in prior French fiction. There is a range here: at the lower end, the dullards of the Verdurin salon, Cottard, Brichot, Saniette and the rest declaiming their tag lines, the poseur Bloch with his ludicrous affectations, the hypocritical snob Legrandin: grotesques pure and simple. A notch up, the sententious diplomat Norpois and his one-time mistress Madame de Villeparisis. Beyond these, the bluff Duc de Guermantes and ineffable Verdurin couple themselves. At the heights, his most famous creation, where pathos transfigures a comic monster into something closer to, if never altogether becoming, a credible human being, the Baron de Charlus. This gallery does not, of course, exhaust the population of the novel. But characters who escape such treatment pay a penalty: they remain curiously blank. Famously so in the vacant mystery of Albertine, but in large measure true also of Swann and Odette, figures memorable more for their repertoires and accessories, and the stylized roles they play, than for their indistinct persons; of Gilberte, given little more than the red hair and freckles of her childhood; or even, after his initial scenes, monocle dancing in front of him like a butterfly, Saint-Loup. These are not caricatured, but they too lack complexity.

What replaces it in Proust is mutability. In some cases – Swann – infatuation works the change; in others, more often – Odette, Bloch, Madame Verdurin – the shifting tides of snobbery or fashion. In others again, the most striking, it is an abrupt characterological capsizal, lacking any motivation at all: the odious Morel, cowardly deserter one day, gallant patriot the next; the golf-bag ninny Octave late magicked into a distinguished writer; the vicious lesbian lover of Mlle Vinteuil, co-defiler of her father’s image, transformed into the devoted posthumous saviour of his compositions; Saint-Loup, long impassioned lover of the actress Rachel, overnight a brutish pursuer of men. Most ubiquitous of all is the pattern of which Saint-Loup is the type: the unstoppable revelation of such a high proportion of the dramatis personae of the novel, men and women alike, as addicts of their own sex. ‘Inversion’, as Proust calls it, sweeps through the ranks of his characters, warping all credibility before it.

Though no admirer of the term realism, Proust was not a fantasist: he was committed to verisimilitude. The distortion it suffers in his work was a product of his own compulsions. At the turn of the century, the upper levels of French society were not as hypocritical or repressive as their counterparts in England. It was nevertheless a notable act of literary courage for Proust to foreground homosexuality in his novel, something no writer had ever done before. But, caring much for his standing in polite society, he feared scandal if he was identified with it. So his representations of homosexuality could never accord with his actual feelings about it. A sinister light had to fall on it, its adepts depicted as a secret society under a curse, in the biblical cadences of the exordium to its full-scale invasion of the narrative. There, Proust sought to square the circle of social stigma and personal experience, twisting rejection and explanation together in a desperate just-so story of his own: what in classical times was once culturally normal had become physically pathological, repugnant if blameless. The strain is all too obvious: the pressure of emotion denied blows its rivet in the longest single sentence – three unbroken pages – of the novel. Inevitably, the bad faith of the construction becomes a filter clouding its optics. Collectively, the return of the repressed breeds the over-population of supposedly a medical minority that swarms across the narrative. Individually, it dictates the indeterminacy of the central alter of the story: Albertine, projection of Proust’s love for a young man, obliged to acquire the image of a young woman, can never achieve resolution, remaining a vague blur, its wavering contours drained of substance by the prohibition Proust imposed on his creation.

A sexual preference can be lived in any number of ways. Under the social constraints of the time, Proust’s version restricted and displaced his range of characterization. But there was a further handicap from which this suffered. He was a homosexual, but so far as is known – and no doubt will be, until the diaries of the companion of his twenties, Reynaldo Hahn, are published twenty years hence – one who may have been forever unconsummated. Shortly before his death, he told Gide he had loved only men, but never enjoyed physical union with anyone. What is certain is that the only direct report he ever left of sexual pleasure was with himself. His French biographer Tadié’s view that ‘onanism was always his principal sexual activity’ is supported by testimony, grim beyond words, from the male brothel he patronized in his last years.²² In a novel where, as Bowie puts it, ‘sex in a precariously sublimated form’ is present throughout, ‘recklessly exceeding the requirements of the plot’ to a point where it often seems to be ‘the enveloping “category of categories”’, possessing an ‘unlimited range and warrant when it comes to explaining the order of things’,²³ such specialization could scarcely fail to have had consequences for the imaginary of the work. In passing, Bowie remarks that the amatory style of À la recherche is one ‘where couples and coupling do indeed point back to a primordial narcissism, an objectless inward rapture’, without pausing to consider what this might imply for those represented in it. Intent on the ‘relentless desire-drivenness of the novel’ – the way ‘Proust’s versatile comic intelligence dwells with relish upon an outrage, a lack of proportion and right-mindedness inherent in human sexuality’ – he is not concerned with its capacity for characterization.²⁴ But it was there that narcissism exacted its cost.

Flooding the narrative, total immersion in the self yielded prodigious riches of interior perception and reverie, delivered with continual energy and subtlety. At such a pitch of creative intensity, however, the egoism of Proust’s imagination permitted no more than fitful and superficial attention to others. That might have just been a limitation, of the kind to be found in any writer. Proust, however, erected it into a doctrine: the impossibility – not just in his, but in every case – of anyone ever knowing anything of others. Hence the ease with which his characters become their opposites. He once wrote: ‘Something repeated ten times is the opposite of art’, and in the novel has his narrator disdainfully declare: ‘A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it’.²⁵ Yet, of course, À la recherche is laden with theories, none more tirelessly repeated than a dogmatics of nescience, the natural epistemology of an artless narcissism. Persons are but ‘a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge’ – ‘man is a creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself, and if he says the contrary, lies’ – ‘it is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the perishable collections of our mind’: ad libitum.²⁶

Obnubilating others as individuals, the doctrine does so in the name of universals. The writer should ‘listen to people only when, stupid or absurd as they may have been, they have become, by repeating like parrots what other people of similar character are saying, birds of augury, mouthpieces of a universal law. He remembers only what is general’.²⁷ As for forms of social intercourse, ‘it is superfluous to make a study of manners, since we can deduce them all from psychological laws’.²⁸ Underlying such pronouncements was a pessimism rooted in Proust’s disappointments: aristocracy, love, friendship had all in different ways failed him. The social world he so ardently courted, and never deserted, had become, by the time he was writing À la recherche, ‘the realm of nullity’.²⁹ Sexual desire had never found romantic fulfillment. So passion was not just necessarily unrequited, but founded on a delusion. For since it was a ‘law of nature that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love’, in such cases the only emotion the self can actually feel is anxiety at not knowing the activities or whereabouts of the other: ‘love is what we feel for someone whose actions seem to arouse our jealousy’.³⁰ So ‘how can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we lift a finger to preserve ourselves from death, in a world in which love is provoked by falsehood, and consists merely in our need to see our sufferings appeased by the person who has made us suffer?’³¹ Friendship fares no better. In the milieu he frequented, Proust had no real interlocutors, intellectual equals capable of contesting him, whom he avoided. He concluded that for a writer, friendship was nothing less than an ‘abdication of the self’, that yielded nothing: ‘even conversation, which is the mode of expression of friendship, is a superficial digression which gives us no new acquisition’.³² Yet one more ‘indication of the unreality of others’, friendship could only be ‘a simulacrum’ – ‘our friends being friends only in the agreeable folly that accompanies us through life, and to which we lend ourselves, but which at the deepest level we know well to be the delusion of one who talks to furniture because he believes it is alive’.³³ With axioms like these, the final apodictic judgment follows: ‘After failure in every quarter of the domain of life and action, it is a mental incapacity for happiness that nature creates in us. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear or gives way to the bitterest of reactions’; virtually its only function is to make ‘the valuable agony called unhappiness possible’.³⁴

Valuable because ‘suffering is the best thing one can encounter in life’, since it alone gives that sight of ‘the whole law-governed immensity’ which is the condition of literature, and ‘true life, life at last laid bare and illuminated – the only life in consequence which can be said to be fully lived – is literature’.³⁵ More, if ‘sorrows are the servants, obscure and detested, against whom one struggles, beneath whose dominion one more and more completely falls, servants implacable and irreplaceable who by subterranean pathways lead us to truth and death’, it is only they who permit the final triumph of truth over death.³⁶ ‘The cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their déjeuner sur l’herbe.’³⁷ The consolations of the age had never received such magnificent expression. But such they remained. In England, by the time of Arnold, salvation by art was already the conventional intellectual substitute for faith. In France, Thibaudet would observe in 1926: ‘The nineteenth century began, with Chateaubriand, in the poetry of religion. It ended, with Mallarmé and his disciples, in a religion of poetry’.³⁸ Proust was at odds with both Mallarmé, for culpable obscurity, and Thibaudet, for daring to point out weaknesses in Flaubert, but the cap fitted. Chateaubriand and Nerval, as he often explained, were his primary literary inspirations, and the cadences of his novel famously resemble poetry, culminating in the most famous of all professions of the redemptive vocation of art. There, as Genette would write, it ‘parts company with the tradition of the Bildungsroman and approaches certain forms of religious literature’, for ‘the narrator does not simply know more, empirically, than the hero; he knows in the absolute sense, he understands the Truth’.³⁹ At this deepest level of his sensibility, Proust was a late Romantic.

That left its mark in the moral landscape of his novel, opinions and characters polarized into ways close, as Edmund Wilson noticed, to the good and evil valences of melodrama. In one register, there is Morel: ‘a vile nature who would not shrink from any act of meanness’ – typically so, for in that ‘he resembled the majority of mankind’;⁴⁰ and indeed there is scarcely anyone the narrator encounters after his childhood in Combray who is not in one fashion or another tainted or degraded: cruelty, hypocrisy, mendacity, greed, pretension, selfishness are all but universal. At its opposite, we are told, no less sweepingly, that ‘it is not good sense that is “the commonest thing in the world”, but human kindness. In the most remote, most desolate ends of the earth, we marvel to see it blossom of its own accord’.⁴¹ The four pages that follow retail one disobliging or unattractive human characteristic after another. But Proust can readily return to the charge: ‘Kindness, a simple process of maturation which in the end sweetens characters originally more acid even than that of Bloch, is as widespread as that belief in justice which, if our cause is good, makes us no more fear a hostile than a friendly judge’.⁴² Fine words. In practice, actual warmth and compassion are to be found only in the narrator’s family circle, above all his mother and grandmother – that ‘race from Combray, from which sprang human beings absolutely unspoilt’, seemingly now ‘almost extinct’.⁴³ The shabbiness or villainy of the world beyond it is not entire. Ethically, Proust will occasionally stitch a silver lining into his persons: Verdurin is capable of an unexpected act of charity, his wife is a genuine lover of the arts, deep-down Charlus is naturally good, Bloch could sometimes be nice, and so on. But the mitigations are nominal: they have no narrative weight. Rather, like the transformations of Morel or Saint-Loup, they come from the fictional plasticine out of which Proust peopled his world. The only real changes À la recherche records come from the rotations of fashion and the talons of ageing.

Powell: Distinctions

The design of the Dance is altogether distinct. Powell was a teenager when the First World War ended, and a student as The Waste Land, Ulysses and Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche detonated in its aftermath. The combination of moral caesura and literary revolution marked a divide that Proust, though he would contribute to it, had never known. ‘This “age-gap” of the Twenties was a chasm to make all subsequent ones of its sort seem inconsiderable’, Powell wrote in his memoirs.⁴⁴ A product of it, he was bound to be acutely conscious of the temporality that had so largely passed Proust by. Time in À la recherche has two registers: psychological and biological. There are references to political or cultural events, but they feature only as incidents in the persiflage of the salons without bearing on the action; even the Dreyfus Affair simply illustrating the frivolity of the chameleons who frequent them. In the Dance too, time is existential as Proust conceived it – memory and mortality; but it is also fully historical, recording changes in outlooks, customs, institutions, alternating periods of war and peace, across half a century. Twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties: each decade is sharply delineated. Sarajevo, Versailles, Depression; Abdication, Spanish Civil War, Munich; Home, Western and Eastern Fronts in the Second World War; Austerity, Cold War, Counter-Culture – these don’t just supply backdrops or atmospherics. Determining actions, entanglements, destinies, they orchestrate the narrative.

Like Proust, in all but the affair of Swann and Odette, Powell chose a first-person form for it. It is a common complaint that in doing so, he went to the opposite extreme, creating a narrator not all-engulfing, but so neutral and self-effacing, spectator rather than participant in the story, that the effect is to lower the emotional voltage of the novel. This is a misconception. The personality of Nicholas Jenkins is inseparable from its power. By no means a Lockwood or Marlow, or even – perhaps the nearest, if still quite distant, precedent – a Nick Carraway, he is fully present as the actor on whom the story is centred in the first four installments of the Dance, which form a classic Bildungsroman embedded in the larger architecture of the novel, tracing his path from innocence to adulthood, through discovery of the intermittences of friendship, the pull of money and the tricks of desire, circles of society old, new and off-beat, demonstrations of the will and misadventures of the heart. Volume Three is even canonically entitled The Acceptance World, though the classic resolution of the genre does not arrive till marriage in the fourth, before the fifth and sixth undo any generalization of it, amidst the wreckage of the wedded state among friends, and the revelations of death and betrayal. With the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes, the subjectivity of the narrator returns front stage as a soldier, journeying from regimental through staff to war office experience. Only in the final three post-war volumes, which cover the period when Powell was writing the novel, does he withdraw Jenkins to the position of essentially an onlooker. Prior to these, a wide palette of feelings is at work. The narrator is scarcely a cipher. Bemused, elated, ashamed; jealous, embarrassed, lonely; desiring, priggish, maladroit; furious, in despair; in tears, in love; at one point or another he is all of these. Defining the tone of the novel, however, is the reflective cast of his mind, in certain respects recalling that of Proust’s narrator, yet also markedly different from it.

Powell thought passionate interest in oneself – not self-interest, or mere selfishness – rather rare.⁴⁵ It was something Proust possessed, and he lacked. He could have added that comprehensive interest in others – a fully engaged, impartial curiosity – is even rarer. That, like perhaps no other writer on record, he had. Precise calculations differ, but if we take Kilmartin’s Guide and Spurling’s Invitation as benchmarks, Proust’s novel contains over three hundred, Powell’s some four hundred characters.⁴⁶ The only work to bear artistic comparison with them, Cao Xueqin’s great Dream of the Red Chamber, approaches five hundred. In each case, of course, a distinction has to be made between actors and extras – figurants who appear only once, or rate simply a mention. The ratio of the first to the second is 0.89:1 in Proust, 1.46:1 in Powell – a considerable difference. More extras than actors in À la recherche, more actors than extras in the Dance. Of the extras in Proust, nearly half are so class-marked – the lift-boy, the gardener, the laundry-girl – they don’t earn so much as a name. In other words, the ‘character-space’ of the two works, to use the term coined by Alex Woloch in his pioneering study of the relationship between major and minor figures in the novel, The One vs. the Many, is quite distinct. Powell’s is demographically much richer. If we reckon that, fictionally speaking, the critical measure is not the number of persons who cross the stage of a novel, but those who can be said to occupy it for any space of time, the Dance contains about twice as many ‘main’ characters, on either a broad or a narrow definition, as À la recherche.

Quantity is one thing, quality another. There Powell stands alone. Traditionally, masters of characterization – Balzac, Eliot, James – were omniscient, describing their creations both from without and within: representing their thoughts and feelings as freely as their carriage or clothes, if typically according one subject-position within the novel, the hero or heroine, the central point of view on the tale, recounted in the third person. Proust took the alternative of a first-person narrative, nearly as canonical since the time of Constant or Charlotte Brontë, to lengths never attempted before, if also without overmuch coherence: the narrator not only reports Swann in the third person, but assumes on occasion an impossible omniscience in the first person.⁴⁷ By the time Powell started to write, the interior monologue – Dujardin, Joyce, Woolf – had overtaken authorial omniscience, as superior in depth and less suspect of artifice, while Hemingway was dispensing with both, for pure exteriority of speech and action. The early, pre-war Powell modelled himself on the latter, producing terse third-person narratives with deliberately flat characters. The enormous change he made in writing the Dance was to switch to a first-person narrative that retained most of the restraints of this mode – that is, no direct psychological access to the inner life of the other characters – while giving them, with unique economy, the presence and depth of figures from the expansive tradition of old, that allowed itself every facility of purchase in its portraiture.

Powell employed four principal means in bringing his characters to life, each offering an instructive contrast with Proust’s. The first was his gift of physical depiction, the classic introduction to them. Here is the way the best friends, in early days, of the two narrators are described.

Saint-Loup:

Along the central gangway leading inland from the beach to the high road I saw tall, slender, his neck uncovered, his proud head held high, a young man go past with searching eyes, whose skin was as fair and his hair as golden as if they had absorbed all the rays of the sun. Dressed in a loose, almost white apparel such as I could never have believed any man could wear … His eyes, from which a monocle kept dropping, were the colour of the sea. Everyone looked at him with interest.⁴⁸

Stringham:

He was tall and dark, and looked a little like one of those stiff, sad young men in ruffs, whose long legs take up so much room in sixteenth-century portraits: or perhaps a younger – and far slighter – version of Veronese’s Alexander receiving the children of Darius after the battle of Issus: with the same high forehead and suggestion of hair thinning a bit at the temples. His features certainly seemed to belong to that epoch of painting: the faces in Elizabethan miniatures, lively, obstinate, generous, not very happy, and quite relentless.⁴⁹

Proust’s vision is little more than romantic schmaltz of the period: ‘golden’ – applied in due course interminably to features of the Guermantes clan as a whole – is merely a vacant signifier for glamour; ‘the colour of the sea’ is meaningless – it can be grey, blue, brown, green. Powell delivers an image of indelible precision and detail.

Conversation typically comes next as a marker. A quarter of À la recherche is made up of dialogue; a half of The Music of Time. Speech in Proust is generally entertaining – it is where his comic gifts are concentrated – but it is a crude instrument of individuation, since it relies so much on parody. Bloch, Legrandin or Saniette speak distinctively enough, but as objects of the stylized ridicule of cartoons. Talk in the Guermantes or other aristocratic salons, unlike the Verdurin household, is not guyed in the same way, but it is uninflected, the company maintaining much the same worldly tone, with at best some sidelong sparring between the ducal pair; Charlus alone is accorded some wonderful harangues, courting without collapsing into burlesque. Perhaps most conspicuous is the absence of exchange where the narrator is concerned. As a critic noted in the Nouvelle Revue française early on, no-one is truly allowed to answer him. Albertine may protest, but no real argument ensues. Françoise, essentially a stock figure of the faithful servant given to grumbling, with a strong sense of proper hierarchies, can issue a rebuke to her employer, moved by dislike for Albertine. But when she does so – an illiterate countrywoman – Proust cannot resist the parodic impulse, and has her addressing him, grotesquely, in a sentence of high-flown Marcelese length and orotundity:

To be sure, you yourself are kind, and I shall never forget the debt of gratitude I owe you, but the house has become a plague-spot now that kindness has installed trickery within it, now that intelligence protects the stupidest creature ever seen, now that refinement, good manners, wit, dignity in everything, a real and visible prince, lets vice – everything that is vulgar and low – lay down the law, hatch its plots, and humiliate me, I who have been in the service of this family for forty years.⁵⁰

Powell was immune to this kind of ineptness. With an extraordinary ear for spoken language, he created defining ways of talking for character after character, across a wide gamut of diction, without any need to resort to verbal tags or inflation. Templer and Duport, Mona and Quiggin, Mrs Erdleigh and Mr Deacon, General Conyers and Lady Molly, not to speak of Widmerpool or Stringham, speak in expressive voices that, even at the more exotic end of the spectrum, never strain belief; in more vernacular idiom, the exchanges between Albert, Billson and Bracey in Stonehurst have little in common with the mannerisms of service at Combray. Dialogue here is not just illustrative, as conversation so often is in Proust, it is concomitant with action. Of that, there is very little in À la recherche, whose narrative proceeds for long stretches without it. Acts indicative of characters are few and far between: sometimes just minimal gestures like the careless abandon of Albertine’s opening jump over a beachcomber at Balbec, or the chivalry of Saint-Loup’s acrobatic navigation of banquettes to confer his coat on the narrator in a restaurant in Paris. For more significant scenes, we are left with incidents of a wilful childhood and episodes towards the end of the novel: Swann ditched by the Guermantes, Charlus humiliated by Morel at the instigation of the Verdurins, Albertine’s decision to decamp. There is nothing comparable to Powell’s cannonade of symptomatic actions prepared or recollected in dialogue, from the opening shots of Uncle Giles’s intrusion at school and Stringham’s impersonation of Le Bas onwards: Templer showing off his roadster, Donners displaying his dungeon, Mona summoning Quiggin, Moreland’s rescue mission to Maclintick, Conyer’s handling of Billson, Duport’s dealings with Jenkins, Bithel’s choreographic turning of the tables, Stringham’s refusal of pre-war connexions, and so on. In a typical passage of Powell’s high comedy – far from his only register – here is Widmerpool, newly engaged, explaining what is on his mind, and Jenkins’s reactions, in a conversation preparing the dénouement of At Lady Molly’s. The year is 1935.

He began to speak hurriedly again, the words tumbling out as if he wished to finish with this speech as quickly as possible. ‘I should not wish to appear backward in display of affection’, he said, developing an increased speed with every phrase, ‘and, in addition to that, I don’t see why we should delay unduly the state in which we shall have to spend the rest of our life merely because certain legal and religious formalities take time to arrange. In short, Nicholas, you will, I am sure, agree – more especially as you seem to spend a good deal of your time with artists and film-makers and people of that sort, whose morals are proverbial – that it would be permissible on my part to suppose – once the day of the wedding has been fixed – that we might – occasionally enjoy each other’s company – say over a weekend –’

He came to a sudden stop, looking at me rather wildly.

‘I don’t see why not.’ It was impossible to guess what he was going to say next. This was all far from anything for which I had been prepared.

‘In fact, my fiancée – Mildred, that is – might even expect such a suggestion?’

‘Well, yes, from what you say.’

‘Might even regard it as usage du monde?’

‘Quite possible.’

Then Widmerpool sniggered. For some reason, I was conscious of embarrassment, even of annoyance. The problem could be treated, as it were, clinically, or humorously; a combination of the two approaches was distasteful. I had the impression that the question of how he should behave worried him more on account of the figure he cut in the eyes of Mrs Haycock than because his passion could not be curbed.⁵¹

In evoking personality, to physiognomies, declarations and actions, Powell added one of his trademarks, succinct encapsulations. Here is Sonny Farebrother, at first, and then subsequent, sight:

1922: There was a suggestion of boyishness – the word ‘sunny’ would certainly be applicable – about his frank manner; but, in spite of this manifest desire to get along with everyone on their own terms, there was also something lonely and inaccessible about him.

1943: He bestowed around him a sense of smoothness, ineffable, unstemmable smoothness, like oil flowing ever so gently from the spout of a vessel perfectly regulated by its pourer, soft lubricating fluid, gradually, but irresistibly, spreading; and spreading, let it be said, over an unexpectedly wide, even a vast area.⁵²

Dicky Umfraville:

1936: Trim, horsey, perfectly at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf himself, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity when the crash came. The charm he exercised over people was perhaps largely due to this ability to juggle two, contrasting, apparently contradictory attributes; the one, an underlying implication of sinister, disturbing undercurrents; the other, a soothing power to reassure and entertain. These incompatible elements were always felt to be warring with each other whenever he was present. He was like an actor who suddenly appears on stage to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder, yet who utterly captivates his audience a second later, while their nerves are still on edge, by crooning a sentimental song.⁵³

Pamela Flitton:

1943: Iciness of manner remained complete. She was perhaps not altogether normal, what Borrit called ‘a bit off the beam’. There was no denying she was a striking girl to look at. Many men would find this cosmic rage with life, as it seemed to be, an added attraction.

1953: The violent antithesis presented by their contrasted forms of existence [husband and lover], unique specimens as it were brought into collision, promised anarchic extremities of feeling of the kind at which she aimed; in which she was principally at home. She liked – to borrow a phrase from St John Clarke, to ‘try conclusions with the maelstrom’.⁵⁴

There are echoes of Proust in certain characters in Powell. Uncle Giles’s description of himself as ‘a bit of a radical’ is a repetition of the claim Legrandin awards himself; Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson’s letter to The Times invokes the adage beloved of M. de Norpois, ‘the dogs bark, the caravan moves on’.⁵⁵ The first pair are both poseurs with a grudge, the second both sententious diplomats. But as to portraits (much the same could be said of, say, Quiggin and Bloch), there is no comparison. Powell’s are much subtler, more complex. The contrast becomes still sharper in characters more central to the narrative. It is enough to match Stringham against Saint-Loup, not just at first sight, but across their respective unfolding; the enigmatic plenitude of Jean against the empty riddles of Albertine; Widmerpool against Charlus as comic monsters. Characterization here is never static, but Powell handles change in a way quite unlike Proust, not as precipitous moral volte-faces, or mere physical deliquescence, but as gradual evolution or revelation, across a carefully calibrated sequence of situations and actions. Widmerpool’s mutation as he alters from ridiculed schoolboy to humiliated suitor, capable but still absurd Streber in business and the City, ruthless wartime colonel and high-level military intriguer, Labour MP and ennobled fellow-traveller, to his downfall in the Cold War and descent into an occult netherworld, is an organic process: from the laughable to the malignant to the abject. Charlus simply shrinks into himself, tel qu’en lui-même la sénilité le change.

Range, Narrative, Dicta

Powell’s social range is, of course, much wider too. The aristocracy certainly provides its quota to the Dance, either by repute or in person – Bridgnorth, Huntercombe, Warminster, Aberavon, Sleaford and assorted offspring, especially the Stepneys and Tollands. Not invested with any special aura, they are no cause for any particular disappointment. As in Proust, there are painters, writers and musicians, actors, scholars, and critics – though these inhabit purlieus bohemian or academic, not to be found in À la recherche; servants – more disturbed, truculent, melancholic in Powell; but, the critical difference, also businessmen, politicians, soldiers, publishers, journalists, bureaucrats, adventurers, mages and misfits – a company beyond Proustian ken. The spirit in which this landscape is treated finds famous expression in Powell’s maxim: ‘All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary’. Dwelling on the even play of curiosity that followed from it, Ferdinand Mount, who has written notably well about his uncle, remarks that so far from being snobbish, as often charged, ‘his fiction is extraordinarily democratic in a way few other writers of his time could claim’.⁵⁶

The judgment is carefully formulated and can be upheld, with two provisos. Powell’s world is certainly larger than that of any of his contemporaries. But it has a frontier: other than miners conscripted as soldiers, represented as soldiers rather than miners, likewise bank clerks, it doesn’t contain workers or figures from the lower middle class, the majority of the population in most of the period covered by the narrative. His class background didn’t in itself preclude this – Henry Green, a close friend at Eton and Oxford, built novels around them – but his personal trajectory, with the exception of regimental service, did. No writer has ever produced a successful encyclopaedia of the society in which they lived, Zola coming nearest, all experiences of life limiting imagination in one way or another. What holds good is the variety of Powell’s world, and the equity in his inventory of it: both indeed unequalled in his time, or since.

The equity is not absolute. If only by implication, Mount overstates it in one significant respect. Women, who lend as much colour to the story as men, are handled differently. Throughout, the narrator refers to all men, even close friends, by their surnames (Barnby, Moreland, Pennistone); all women of his own generation, the majority, by their first names (Barbara, Gipsy, Priscilla); those of an older generation, much fewer, by surnames distanced with honorifics (Madame Leroy, Miss Weedon, Mrs Erdleigh); only a servant features, pre–First World War style, with a surname alone: Billson. The contrast in Jenkins’s own cohort does not denominate greater intimacy with the opposite sex, but the reverse. Its visual equivalent is the asymmetry with which the appearances of men and women are described. Jenkins, like most of the male characters, certainly appreciates looks in women, on which they all comment freely. But compared to the precision with which men are depicted, these remain on the whole curiously undefined – reduced to vague or generic categories; ‘willowy’, ‘fierce’, ‘striking’, ‘tolerable’, ‘a beauty’ and so forth. Here is a married couple encountered early on in Jenkins’s cursus, Amy and Buster Foxe, mother and stepfather of Stringham:

Buster:

Buster was standing beside this urn, cleaning a cigarette-holder with the end of a match-stick. He was tall, and at once struck me as surprisingly young; with the slightly drawn expression that one recognizes in later life as the face of a man who does himself pretty well, while not ceasing to take plenty of exercise. His turn-out was emphatically excellent, and he diffused waves of personality, strong, chilling gusts of icy air, a protective element that threatened to freeze into rigidity all who came through the door, before they could approach him nearer. ‘Hullo, you fellows’, he said, without looking up from his cigarette-holder, at which he appeared to be sneering, as if this object was not nearly valuable enough to presume to belong to him.

Amy:

A moment or two later his mother appeared. I thought her tremendously beautiful: though smaller than the photograph in Stringham’s room had suggested. Still wearing a hat, she had just come into the house.⁵⁷

The disproportion is in no way a reflection of the respective importance of the two in the narrative, rather the opposite: Amy effortlessly controls her husband and is of significantly more moment to the story. Even where Powell’s gifts are most engaged, characteristically mobilizing the arts to his effects, when Jenkins falls in and eventually out of love with Jean Templer, the result is blurred:

First sighting, 1923: Like her legs, her face was thin and attenuated, the whole appearance given the effect of a much simplified – and somewhat self-conscious – arrangement of lines and planes: such as might be found in an Old Master drawing, Flemish or German perhaps, depicting some young and virginal saint; the racket, held awkwardly at an angle to her body, suggesting at the same time an obscure implement associated with martyrdom. The expression of her face, though sad and a trifle ironical, was not altogether in keeping with this air of belonging to another and better world.

Second meeting, 1928: She still seemed slim, attenuated, perhaps not exactly a ‘beauty’; but, all the same, still in some way mysterious and absorbing to me, just as she seemed when I visited the Templers after leaving school. There was perhaps a touch of the trim secretary of musical comedy.

Two or three hours later: She reminded me of some picture. Was it Rubens and Le Chapeau de Paille: his second wife or her sister? There was that same suggestion, though only for an instant, of shyness and submission.

1932: Once she had reminded me of Rubens’s Chapeau de Paille. Now for some reason – though there was not much physical likeness between them – I thought of the woman smoking the hookah in Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Perhaps there was something of the odalisque about Jean, too. She looked pale and rather tired.

1945: It was as if the mother was someone different; the daughter, the remembered Jean. About seventeen or eighteen, Polly Duport was certainly a very pretty girl; prettier, so far as that went, than her mother at the same age. Jean’s attraction in those days had been other than mere prettiness.

1971: She was now transformed into a foreign lady of distinction. The phrase ‘sad Goya duchess’ did not at all overstate the case.⁵⁸

Each vivid enough in itself, the multiplication yields no cogent physical image: Rogier Van der Weyden, Noël Coward, Rubens, Delacroix, Goya cancel each other out. Can the sequence be justified as the impress on the narrator’s perceptions of someone essentially elusive, across successive conflicting emotions and the passage of time? Perhaps. But the indeterminacy also speaks to a larger question.

In the morning after the night Jean materializes unforeseen at the Ritz and they later become lovers, Jenkins recollects an argument with Barnby about how women are pictured in novels, in the course of which he remarks: ‘No real tradition of how women behave exists in English writing.’⁵⁹ In an interview, Powell himself went further: ‘Females are very hard to do. I don’t think any male writer has ever done one right.’⁶⁰ As such, the notion makes no sense: where would James figure in it? But the view that ‘women are terribly, terribly difficult’ to depict well confesses a gradient in the portraits in his own novel, where few achieve the full-length treatment accorded leading male protagonists, requiring analytic reflection of a kind the narrator can never bring stably to bear, for example, on Jean. The principal exception is Pamela Flitton, whose sexual nihilism is examined with a sombre power transcending the conventions of the femme fatale, a type that was anyway a historical anachronism by the time of the narrative. That she is in this respect hors série has led some to tax Powell with an underlying misogyny. Nothing in the novel speaks to this. Both of the women who figure as the worst news for men, Audrey and Pamela – Xanthippe and Circe – achieve a kind of atonement, in unexpected turns to care or sacrifice. On the other side of the gender divide, no such alleviation attaches to Widmerpool or other brutish male specimens.

In twentieth-century literature, prejudicial treatment of women can take two forms, which of course may be combined. Are they disliked? Are they slighted? The first, misogyny strictly speaking, is rarer than the second, male chauvinism, and where it exists typically generates much cruder kinds of disparagement. The asymmetry in Powell’s handling of the sexes is free of any hostility to women. It is not their presence, but their absence that arouses vehemence of feeling: ‘the excruciating boredom of exclusively male society’ of which the narrator complains in the army.⁶¹ Arguably the warmest single portrait of anyone in The Music of Time is of Molly Jeavons, in the disorderly kindness and disregard of convention in her cross-class household. Marriage, understandably of no interest to Proust, who vouchsafes scarcely a thought about it, but still in Powell’s time central to relations between the sexes, forms one of the leading topics of the Dance. Few avoid misfortune there, scenes of conjugal discord among the most wrenching pages in the novel. Significantly, it is not a man, but a woman – Moreland’s wife, Matilda, one of Powell’s most sympathetic characters – who gives most eloquent expression to what marriage is likely to mean for either sex, in an outburst rare for use of italics: ‘Is it fun to be married to anyone?’ she asks, and continues passionately: ‘I mean married to someone. Not to sleep with them, or talk to them, or go about with them. To be married to them.’⁶²

Women can be liked but all the same belittled, tacitly if not explicitly. Impossible with such variously commanding figures as Madame Leroy, Miss Weedon and Mrs Erdleigh, could that be said of the narrator’s contemporaries? For Isabelle Joyau, French student of Powell, most of his female characters – besides such older ones, she instances six of his own generation – are ‘startlingly tough’. ⁶³ That may be, critics can reply, but as his best English reader, James Tucker, remarked, none are shown discussing, joking, intriguing or speaking about art, politics, literature or money in the style of men.⁶⁴ Morally and practically speaking, giving as good as they get, if not better: but professionally or intellectually? The only jobs ascribed to the pre-war lot are model and actress. Post-war this alters: in the final trilogy, Ada Leintwardine, successful novelist, is capable of trumping or outmanoeuvring any of the literary figures around her; no-one else in the novel comes near the erudite fire-power of Emily Brightman, sprightly historian of late antiquity. Powell was a product of his class and period, with the blind-spots these imply, but changes in gender roles were not lost on him. The notion of any particular sexism doesn’t stick. Spurling’s love of his work is scarcely an eccentricity: women have been among its greatest admirers.

That this should be so is also a natural response to the structure of the work, capable of impartially attracting any reader. Rather bafflingly, Powell disavowed much skill with plots, to all appearance not out of false modesty, saying he was bad at a side of novel construction to which he has owed many fans. How in fact he planned the intricate architecture of The Music of Time, with its huge cast of characters across a dozen volumes, remains something of a mystery. It is not clear if at the beginning he envisaged even more than three, and certain that he claimed not to have decided on twelve till he had reached six. Yet in the very first, Stringham says laughingly of Widmerpool, ‘that boy will be the death of me’,⁶⁵ which he coldly becomes in the eighth; while in the same opening volume Widmerpool, peering over a hedge at the discomfiture of Le Bas engineered by Stringham, is – viewed retrospectively – in petto already the voyeur he turns out to be in the eleventh; Sunny Farebrother, said by Jenkins to disappear from his life for twenty years after impressing him as a teenager, resurfaces punctually seven volumes later; Pamela Flitton makes her entry in the second volume as a bridesmaid of about six or seven vomiting into a baptismal font at her uncle’s wedding, before hitting assorted military careers like a meteorite in the ninth, and repeating her eructations in a large Chinese urn in the tenth.

Such precision of long-range balletics is very rare, perhaps unique. It unfolds within a structure in which each of the twelve volumes has its own self-contained plot, built of five or so episodes separated by intervals, within the overall narrative. Openings are typically meditative, passages of controlled, often ironic reverie; endings alternating between deadpan or wry deflation of previous intensities of emotion or action, and bleak registration or stoical foreboding of events and the passage of time. In between, the dramas dominating the narrative are formed by social juxtapositions of one kind or another: visits, receptions, parties, meals, weddings, drinks, soirées, exhibitions – a much wider variety than in Proust, where dinners and receptions occupy a third of the novel, but with the same set pieces in large gatherings. Parties in À la recherche roll on for well over a hundred pages apiece. More concise, Powell’s certainly owe something to Proust’s example, but are closer to the art of Dostoevsky, whose Possessed he regarded as perhaps the greatest of all novels.

What Dostoevsky invented were scenes of polite society where antagonistic emotions explode the conventions of the occasion in comic outrage and social scandal, no less potentially tragic for that. Not simply expressive, they are performative, culminating in deeds as well as words. Such too are the set-pieces in the Dance: successive exits of Stringham and Mr Deacon, followed by the disparate volley of her curses, from Milly Andriadis’s party in Mayfair; the apotheosis of an alcoholic Stringham, transfixing listeners at his mother’s reception for Moreland, and his chilling captivity that ensues, followed by the suicide of one of his audience; the panic-stricken flight of Templer’s second wife, soon to descend into an asylum, from a too suggestive tableau vivant after dinner at the castellar residence of Sir Magnus Donners; the climactic nocturnal confrontation between Pamela and Widmerpool, amidst a throng of other interested parties, after a private performance of Il Seraglio in Regent’s Park. Scenes, mutatis mutandis, all worthy of The Idiot.

A recurrent motif at these and other key moments of the novel is the role of the physical mishap as precipitant of events, one of the most distinctive features of Powell’s imagination, figuring the casual emblems of contingency in life. These can function as comic slapstick – the misaimed banana that splatters on Widmerpool’s face, the sugar-castor that accidentally opens over his head; or more ambiguously, the untied shoelace on a staircase that freezes the narrator into a vision of him as a prisoner behind bars, then as a bureaucrat glaring through his guichet, each time revealing another aspect of him. But equally as dramatic device: triggers of break-up, trailers for downfall, conditions for scandal – the jostling of a girl on a passenger’s knee that causes Templer to drive his car into the ditch, severing his friendship with Stringham; the jamming of the door as Mr Deacon tries to negotiate it with bundled sheets of War Never Pays! cascading from under his arm, in ignominious exit from Milly Andriadis’s party, prelude to his death from injuries, sustained falling down the stairs of a seedy club not long after; a chauffeur’s confusion between a Terrace, a Place and a Gate of the same name, delaying the limousine whose arrival would have averted the terminal fracas between Pamela and Widmerpool among the guests on the pavement in Regent’s Park. It may even have been a bump in the asphalt that throws Jenkins and Jean into each other’s arms on the Great West Road.

The twelve plots within the plot that comprise the Dance each contain a crescendo of complex feeling, typically but not invariably towards the end of the volume: Stringham’s signal to the narrator of a parting of the ways in A Question of Upbringing; the narrator’s dream-like intercourse with Gypsy Jones (‘there was something odious about her that made her, at the same time – I had to face this – an object of desire’)⁶⁶ after Mr Deacon’s funeral, in A Buyer’s Market; Widmerpool’s assertion of authority over Stringham at his alcoholic collapse after the Old Boy dinner where Le Bas is taken ill, in The Acceptance World; the narrator’s coup de foudre and prevision of his marriage in At Lady Molly’s; Maclintick’s suicide in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant; the revelation of Jean’s passages with not just one but two of the figures most despised by the narrator – ‘perhaps, I thought, her men are gothic too, beings carved on the niches and corbels of a mediaeval cathedral to arouse at once laughter and horror. In any case, I had been one of them. If they were horrifying, I too had been of their order. That had to be admitted’;⁶⁷ news of the Nazi–Soviet Pact the next morning announcing that war was at hand, in The Kindly Ones; Gwatkin’s loss of his command in The Valley of Bones; the awkward chassé-croisés at the Café Royal during the Blitz and the deaths that follow it; the punishment of Bithel and Stringham’s posting to what will be his end in Singapore in The Soldier’s Art;⁶⁸ Pamela’s public accusation of Widmerpool as murderer of Templer in The Military Philosophers; Trapnel’s discovery of her abandonment of him and destruction of his novel in Books Do Furnish a Room; her gift of her death to Gwinnett in Temporary Kings; Widmerpool’s demise in Hearing Secret Harmonies.

The issues in such episodes, when the emotional register is suddenly heightened, are humiliation, betrayal, friendship, love and death. However pointed, pathos is always kept tightly under control. Typically, Powell will put a gap between the event and the narrator, employing third-party accounts rather than direct report to describe them. These can be quite circumstantial – Jean’s shuttle between lovers in South America, Trapnel’s final night of inebriated glory in a pub, Widmerpool’s crazed chanting to his woodland end – and in a few cases the narrator is on the spot either shortly before or just after the event – Maclintick’s turning on the gas, the bomb that hits Lady Molly’s – lending it peculiar immediacy. But often events tragic or lurid – the killing of Templer by partisans in the Balkans, of Stringham in captivity in Malaya, the sacrifice of Pamela in a sordid hostelry – occur off-stage, particulars withheld. The distancing devices increase in number and effect as the narrative lengthens. In part, this is a natural consequence of the way the narrator is decentred once past the threshold of marriage. But it also corresponds to the tonal parabola of the novel. Association of its curve with spring, summer, autumn and winter is contested by some, though its last words certainly allude to the seasons. What is undeniable, however, and insufficiently emphasized is the buoyant – if certainly also often ironic – sense of adventure and high spirits of the first four volumes of the sequence, in the comedy of youthful discovery of life; touches of darkening as the war approaches; with it, the coming of austerity and tragedy; final descent into the realms of the macabre. As a turn to ever more extreme actions and situations unfolds, in a shift resembling that in Proust, whose example may have licensed Powell’s imagination for it, the requirement for buffering procedures steadily mounts, till by the end nearly all is elaborate – often even, with a further twist, speculative or dubitative – oratio obliqua.

Stylistically speaking, Powell is the very unusual case of a writer who radically changed his way of writing mid-way through life. He himself made light of the difference between his quartet of pre-war novels and the post-war Music of Time, preferring to present his work as a more or less continuous development, and on the whole his admirers have followed him in this. In reality, it is hard to think of any other novelist where the formal contrast is so marked. Hemingway was the principal influence on Powell’s pre-war writing, along with E. E. Cummings and Wyndham Lewis: clipped sentences, terse dialogue, dead-pan affect. Late in life he would dismiss Hemingway’s prose with a telling epithet – ‘muscle-bound’ – and find much of Farewell to Arms ‘terrible stuff’.⁶⁹ But at the time, he sought to repurpose its techniques for inter-war English comedy. The results were not particularly high wattage. The verdicts of a Japanese scholar, comparing them with Waugh’s output in the same period, are brisk. Similarities abound – Decline and Fall: Afternoon Men (’the merry-go-round of manners’); Black Mischief: Venusberg (‘topsy-turvy in a foreign land’); Vile Bodies: Agents and Patients (‘satire of the fast set’); A Handful of Dust: From a View to a Death (‘the country-house is falling down’); Scoop: What’s Become of Waring? (‘the dinginess of hacks’) – but lacking the gusto of Waugh’s ‘wild, grotesque flights of the imagination’, Powell’s energy-saving variants yield no more than a ‘light, prosperous disdain for the sordid affairs of the world’.⁷⁰ That could be thought too harsh. But Koyama is perfectly correct in pointing out the most striking feature of the early novels. They contain, virtually without exception, only flat characters.

The First World War, although it impinged on him directly very little, altered Proust’s enterprise decisively, suspension of publication after the first volume in 1913 extending what would have been a trilogy into six more volumes when it was resumed in 1919. The effect of the Second World War on Powell was more drastically transformative. He emerged from it, he said, a different person. Unable to compose any fiction in the army, he immersed himself in writings familiar and obscure of the seventeenth century, with a view to producing the biography of Aubrey that became his first book after the war. The impact of what he would term Aubrey’s ‘new sort of sensibility’ proved critical, taking from it both his ‘appreciation of the oddness of the individual human being’ and ‘mastery of the ideal phrase for describing people’.⁷¹ The lapidary side of The Music of Time owes quite a bit to this. At the same time, a more general steeping in seventeenth-century prose that – especially in generations formed before the Civil War: for Powell, conspicuously Burton – was modally baroque left its mark too.

Out of this frequentation with forms of writing prior to Augustan normalization, and a much wider range of wartime and post-war reading, not just in English literature, Powell developed a style as unlike his pre-war fiction as the characters of The Acceptance World are from the matchstick figures of Afternoon Men: combining formal elegance with colloquial energy, brilliant descriptive passages with abrupt analytic reflections, elastic clauses and sparing connectives, a prose uniquely at once alembicated and taut. Powell’s sentences are nowhere near the length or complication of Proust’s, which average thirty-five words apiece, and his imagery, vivid enough in its own right, does not compare with the poetic and scientific range or density of Proust’s. His art is more laconic. Counter-intuitively, English has a more Latinate syntax than French, a single verb able to control a sequence of clauses where French requires cumbersome repetitions; it also allows participial constructions barred or reproved in French. Powell made extensive use of both possibilities, especially the latter, making an English equivalent of the Latin ablative absolute one of the trademarks of his style, with sovereign indifference to schoolroom objections to the pendant participle. English also, of course, has twice the vocabulary of French, because of its double Latin and Teutonic roots. Powell made use of that too: contrary to expectation, words that would normally be regarded as recondite, mostly of Latin origin, are more frequent in the Dance than in À la recherche.

What Powell took most importantly from Proust was the reflective generalization as an integral thread in the narrative of each. In his use of this, Proust was drawing on his own seventeenth-century literary resources, the maxims of the French moralists. À la recherche would be unimaginable without it, the title of the novel itself a promise of research to a generalizable end. But as noted above, intellectually speaking Proust’s obiter dicta are too often weakened by monomania and inflation; they lack the ironic precision and control of La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyère. Far more observant about others, Powell was his superior in handling fictional generalizations about them. Flowing seamlessly through the plot, and delivered by the narrator, defining his personality, they are consistently finer-grained, and typically more striking.

They also cover a much wider span of objects. Modes: ‘fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another. They cannot properly be equated.’ Setbacks: a ‘law that requires most people to minimize to a superior a misfortune which, to an inferior, they would magnify’. Appearances: ‘Persons at odds with their surroundings will not infrequently suggest an earlier historical epoch.’ Rebels: ‘Nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react.’ Digs: ‘that streak of social cruelty few lack’. Nuptials: ‘Weddings are notoriously depressing affairs.’ Sexual success: ‘Seduction is to do and say, the banal thing in the banal way.’⁷² Some of these are no more than high-spirited quips, others apothegms that go deeper. None touch on matters much, if at all, considered in À la recherche.

Bearing directly on its themes, and moving at a level well above them, are longer reflections. Extracted from the narrative contexts that give each its particular analytic force, they inevitably lose something of their flavour, but are indicative enough. Alterity: ‘It is not easy – perhaps not even desirable – to judge other people by a constant standard. Conduct obnoxious, even unbearable in one person, may be readily tolerated in another: apparently indispensable principles of behaviour are in practice relaxed – not always with impunity – in the interests of those whose nature seems to demand an exceptional measure.’ The second parenthesis, qualifying without cancelling the conclusion, is characteristic. Unpredictability: ‘Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.’ Egoism: ‘Self-interest, equally unattractive in outer guise and inner essence, is, all the same, a necessity for individual survival. It should not perhaps be too much despised, if only for that reason. Despised or not, its activities are rarely far from the surface. Now at Widmerpool’s words about leaving, I was unwelcomely aware of self-interested anxieties throbbing hurriedly into operation.’ Love: ‘Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.’⁷³ Generalizations eschewing absolutes, each with its reservation or proviso – ‘most’ – ‘perhaps’ – ‘not infrequently’ – ‘few’ – ‘rarely’ – ‘at all’ – ‘not always’ – ‘scarcely’ – ‘all the same’ – ‘not without impunity’. Overturned, one Proustian sententia after another.

II

Comparisons between works of art, Adorno maintained in Minima Moralia, are inevitably at once refused and demanded by them.⁷⁴ That they may simply be incongruous he disregarded. Cases where parallels are as close as those between Proust and Powell are on the other hand rare, but lending ‘the compulsion to evaluate’ he thought so generally inescapable a particular force, requiring especial care. We are dealing with two great writers, one universally, the other marginally, acknowledged as such. Yet in at least a couple of respects that have traditionally been held central to the art of the novel, construction of plot and depiction of character, Powell unquestionably ranks far above Proust. How much does such an advantage matter? Leading novels that scant or defy plot have a long and distinguished history – Sterne already in the eighteenth century, Goncharov in the nineteenth, Rilke in the early twentieth; dozens thereafter. Starting later, effectively in the inter-war period, major work dispensing with characters became a regular feature of the literary landscape, from The Trial to La Nausée onwards: Beckett, Borges, Gracq, Calvino and others. Proust, however, disavowed neither, innovating rather than abolishing them, as he saw it. As a claimant to both, he is subject to comparative judgment of what he made of them.

There his aura has been protected by the differing fortunes of plot and character in the history of modern criticism. For Russian formalism, the most original school of literary theory of the past century, whose influence has also lasted longest, the action of any novel combined a story – fabula – and a plot – siuzhet, study of whose variant relations in due course produced a technical discipline, narratology, that has flourished ever since. Where did character fit into this structure? It was reduced to a set of functions supporting the narrative, on the model of Propp’s taxonomy of folktales, precursor of Lévi-Strauss’s treatment of myths. Much intellectual water has flowed under the bridge since the time of the Formalists, but the theoretical hierarchy they introduced has remained; its most popular current device, Greimas’s ‘semiotic square’ in which characters become so many ‘actants’ occupying six invariant positions in any given tale. ‘For a long time now’, writes Woloch, ‘characterization has been the bête noire of narratology, provoking either cursory dismissal, lingering uncertainty or vociferous argument.’⁷⁵

Continuing post-structuralist and ongoing scientistic trends in literary theory, sworn foes otherwise, are both averse to it: for the first, tainted with the delusion of identity, for the second, recalcitrant to the progress of computability (when it comes to questions of evaluation, often also two sides of the same coin, equally petrified of it). Since Proust’s handling of narrative, where he was a pioneer in the creative loosening of previous corsets, whatever the shortcomings of his execution of it, was superior to that of character, where on the contrary the rigidity of his preconceptions undermined what he took to be his discoveries of it, it is not illogical he should have in general enjoyed a critical free pass where he was weakest.

Reception and Its Reasons

Scholarship is one thing, readership another. Contrast in the reception of the two writers is not confined to the volume of academic literature about them, where the legendary overproduction of writing by the French about their national icons – there are three thousand books on De Gaulle, five times as many as on Churchill – needs to be taken into account. A more significant index is translation. On the centenary of Du côté de chez Swann, a colloquium could discuss translations of Proust into English, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Croat, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Korean and Chinese.⁷⁶ To date, the twelve volumes of the Dance have appeared only in French, Spanish and (completed in 2018) German; Italian and Finnish petering out after the fourth, Swedish after the second, Portuguese the first. Rendering works the size and complexity of À la recherche and Dance into another language is an expensive business, incurring costs requiring commensurate sales. Literary laurels and commercial success, though today ever less independent of each other, remain distinct. The thumbs-up of the market is clear: Proust’s popularity is much greater.

At first sight, this might seem a strange way of describing a writer in so many respects the less accessible of the two. But there is a sense in which the scale of the audience for Proust derives from the ambiguity of his achievement. For some of what, viewed intellectually or aesthetically, are limitations of his art are also, looked at sociologically, among the attractions of it. Though set in a highly specialized and now distant milieu, his novel offers scenes of it reducible to readily available registers: satire of manners and ontology of passions, the one figuring as mask of the other. The satire requires no great depth of sophistication to grasp, answering to standard expectations of what an aristocracy past its prime would be like – pretension, snobbery, egoism, hypocrisy. Behind this local diorama of frivolity and falsehood, however, lie truths of universal scope: laws of the heart and mind operative everywhere, abstract and absolute, secrets brought at last to light by art, unmediated access to which readers anywhere on earth can gain.

Proust was not, of course, the first novelist to issue existential edicts, even if no-one before had ever done so at such length. What sets his apart is a more general feature of his writing, which accounts for much of its appeal: modal reliance on hyperbole. The rule of his imaginary is exaggeration. Characters balloon into caricatures; psychological insight escalates to ontological lemma; metaphor – more typically simile – lifts the banalities of everyday sense-data into a stratospheric poetry of colour and light. Detesting what he called realism, Proust wanted to outbid it, and in doing so won part of his acclaim. Larger than life is, after all, a term of praise. Hyperbole – the briefest glance around the society of the spectacle is a sufficient reminder – pays. So too, sex. Bowie’s ‘enveloping category of categories’, ‘recklessly exceeding the requirements of the plot’, is another reason for the allure of À la recherche. Novels governed by the dynamics of desire, naturally, pre-existed Proust – Laclos and Balzac had each written a masterpiece. But no-one had ever produced such saturated sexualization of an entire fictional world, sensational not only in degree but in kind, as the most forbidden forms of desire – between men, between women, pleasure in inflicting cruelty, pleasure in receiving it – become as it were the ground-bass of all conventional forms. Much has been normalized since, but the frissons of that erotic expansion have not lost their zing at the till.

Finally, there is Proust’s romanticism. Formed in the nineteenth century, drawing inspiration in different ways from Chateaubriand and Nerval, he had no prevention against the dramatic afflatus of the high romantic tradition, or its characteristic tropes – enchanted childhoods, nature-dazes, unhappy loves, tormented souls, vanities of the world, consolations of art – of which so many would become, in degraded form, staples of the culture industry in the next century. Fond memory belonging to the repertoire, Proust gave his touch of magic to it: the madeleine – in due course convertible into an item for comestible tourism – along with the rebaptism of Illiers in the spirit of Disney, how-to kitsch and the rest of the postmodern paraphernalia around his name, to which Proustian scholars delight to allude with a complaisant wink.⁷⁷ So too in moral sensibility, the inseparable couplet of the cynical and sentimental, perhaps the most common of all legacies of romanticism, from Bohemian garrets to Hollywood studios.

In reproducing so many of these, they would enter into his posthumous reception. But, of course, the heights of his art transcended them. The weaknesses of À la recherche that have supplied so many of its popular attractions were also among the prices of its greatness. Had Proust been less indifferent in his fiction to the existence of others, the scruples of the intellect, the flux of history, he could not have created the vaulting interior universe of sensuous perception and emotion, a subjectivity unbound and hitherto unimaginable, of his novel. Nor the language in which he created that universe, soaring above the restrictions of what it contained and, resisting all impatient access, leaving the intractable mark of genius on it, in more, and more unforgettable, images than any other novel ever written. Proust aimed at the sublime. His addiction to hyperbole could become a lame, on occasion even absurd striving for it – few passages in Western literature court ridicule with such success as the anthropomorphic apostrophe to hawthorn blossom in the second volume of À la recherche. But that at his finest – depicting and confronting death – he achieved the sublime, no reader of the last days of his grandmother, or the final pages of his novel, could doubt. Art could redeem death, was its formal conclusion. Yet he could also concede that art was not itself immortal: it might survive a century or two, but along with the human race, it would perish in the end, with the cooling of the earth. The ability to contemplate both ideas ‘in a single encompassing gaze’, as Bowie rightly observed, was the mark of a disinterested vision that ‘only great artists can achieve’.⁷⁸

In all these respects, Powell offers a counterpoint. His world is not so immediately available across languages, because it is so much less abstract: not a set of universal propositions with a light topping of satire, but the representation of a particular society over time through a large number of carefully delineated individuals. He was very conscious of just how distinctive was the class structure and culture of the England he portrayed, and the specific problems these presented the novelist. While in the Ritz, the narrator of the Dance muses:

Waiting for someone in a public place develops a sense of individual loneliness, so amongst all this pale pink and sage green furniture, under decorations of rich cream and dull gold, I felt myself cut off from the rest of the world. I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed.⁷⁹

Remarking in an interview that he felt ‘Russians and Americans’, and ‘to a certain extent the French’ could – as it were – simply ‘throw somebody onto the canvas’, and ‘everybody would they know what they were talking about’, Powell spelled out the problem, as he saw it: in England, ‘people have to be described much more, you do get these extraordinary variations’.⁸⁰ The variations – a point underlined by the difference between the narrator and the acquaintance he is failing to meet, of the same age, university and profession as himself, which sets him thinking – are products not just of temperament, but of institutions, some understanding of which is essential for a sense of Powell’s achievement.

The opening pages of À la recherche and of the Dance illustrate the questions of access each pose a first-time reader neither French nor English. Both start with a famous paragraph of notable beauty: depicting insomnia in Proust, snow descending on fire in Powell. The first person singular occurs fifteen times in Proust; in Powell, not once. All readers, anywhere, possess an ‘I’ and have experienced sleep or lack of it. No language besides English possesses a one-word equivalent of the kippers, cast on flames, that billow smoke into the wind as the ‘grey, undecided’ snowflakes drift down on them. In Proust the novel proceeds for the next forty pages to describe a scene from the narrator’s childhood, peopled by his family. Every reader was once a child. In Powell, it moves to scenes in a boarding school, an institution few anywhere have ever attended, and of a kind that exists in no other country. In Proust, it is the syntax that tests the reader’s curiosity and intelligence. In Powell, the society. A glance just at what translators have made of his titles suggests how difficult that can be: A Buyer’s Market reduced in French to the slop of Les mouvements du cœur, The Kindly Ones to the bathos of Les braves gens. That last word in A Question of Upbringing? The renditions in Italian, Spanish, French – classe, formación, éducation; the connotation escapes them all.

A further hurdle to reception at large is a question of style. Where Proust employs hyperbole, Powell characteristically chooses litotes, which has no comparable continuum of use across different cultural registers. No block-buster can afford understatement. In the same passage of The Acceptance World, the narrator connects the two impediments, of a complicated class structure and a preference for low-decible forms of expression, directly: ‘Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.’ Though litotes is as distinctive of Powell’s own writing, if not as pervasive, as hyperbole is of Proust’s, he was aware of its dangers. After further thoughts on the question, the narrator’s meditation ends: ‘Understatement, too, had its own banality; for, skirting cheap romanticism, it could also encourage evasion of unpalatable facts.’⁸¹ No sense of the risks of overstatement is to be found in Proust.

Sex? The Music of Time gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human motive’.⁸² No reader is likely to tax Powell’s Dance with that limitation. Reversing national stereotypes, its French critic indeed, notwithstanding her admiration for the novel, purses her lips at what she terms ‘the abyss of carnality’ portrayed in the ‘sexual shuttles’ of its characters.⁸³ Such a view conspicuously misses its mark, relationships in the novel ranging far beyond mere physical coupling. The erotic is ‘an element’ in human motive, not its invariable dominant: there is none of the overdrive of À la recherche. Nor can it be understood simply as concupiscence. Based as it was on a lifelong fascination with others, Powell’s grasp of the attachments between them was incomparably wider and deeper than Proust’s fixation on the mechanisms and manias of jealousy. ‘Few subjects are more fascinating than other people’s sexual habits from the outside; the tangled threads of appetite, tenderness, convenience or some hope of gain.’⁸⁴ The apposition defines the sentimental world of The Music of Time. It withholds the crowd appeal of the cattleya.

Then, too, there is Powell’s consistent critique of romanticism. In a TLS editorial of 1951 – at the time, naturally unsigned – on the occasion of a re-edition of Mario Praz’s Romantic Agony, after remarking that the antithesis of the classical and the romantic, however inexact and often expelled from critical vocabulary, always tended to return, he offered his own provisional descriptions of the terms. ‘A certain directness of approach to life and tradition – whatever the immediate technique – surely suggests Classicism; while Romanticism could perhaps be described as dealing in terms of “what life might be”.’ Tiresome and misleading as the couplet became when employed to excess, it remained of use. If it had been largely abandoned by literary criticism, he observed some years later, that was because ‘we have all become so hopelessly steeped in Romanticism that it is hard for anyone to imagine any other point of view’: newspapers, films, posters, feuilletons had made its ‘pervasive and protean’ appeal ‘part of our daily lives’.⁸⁵ Formed at the moment of an intransigent modernism for which romanticism was anathema, never altogether losing his admiration for the ‘luminous brutal prose, blocked-in with a painter’s eye’ of Tarr, Powell identified self-pity and sentimentality as besetting weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many a well-regarded writer: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce.⁸⁶

How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He often remarked – it was one of his most characteristic sayings – that with any writer of significance, even the greatest, you always had to put up with something. In the case of Proust, he wrote later, alongside brilliant set-pieces you had passages of an overpowering artificiality; dreadful longueurs in Albertine disparue; generalizations that often didn’t make sense; virtually no difference in social scenes of 1900 and 1920. But ‘the dazzling side of the novel makes up for a certain amount of dullish, even silly stuff.’⁸⁷ There was nothing unusual in that. But how was his work to be classified? It had to be granted there were strong romantic elements in Proust; his attitudes to love and friendship, art and history, not to speak of duchesses, spoke of that. But in the ruthless consistency of its philosophy, structure and development in handling these ingredients, À la recherche as a whole was essential classical.⁸⁸ It might be asked whether here limits of a dichotomy to which Powell, with all due qualifications, typically held weren’t reached. That he himself could always not sustain it can be seen in his debt to Fitzgerald, no Chateaubriand, but who all the same approached everything in ‘a spirit of pure romanticism’.⁸⁹

In his own work, here is how he finesses the purest romantic epiphany:

Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest of which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of ‘getting to know’ one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worthwhile. We knew one another already; the future was determinate.

The lyrical high ends like this:

But what – it may reasonably be asked – what about the fact that only a short time before I had been desperately in love with Jean Duport; was still, indeed, not sure I had been wholly cured? Were the delights and agonies of all that to be tied up with a ribbon, and thrown into a drawer to be forgotten? What about the girls with whom I seemed to stand nightly in cinema queues? What, indeed?

‘Aren’t we going to be told who everyone is?’ said Susan, looking around the room and smiling.⁹⁰

Effects like these have little in common with the ways of Swann or the beaches of Balbec; let alone celluloid derivatives.

Lastly, and in many ways most significantly for reception at large, there is a difference of generic weighting. In the fictional worlds of À la recherche and the Dance, as in that of The Dream of the Red Chamber, there is much that is comic. But the place of laughter in them is not the same. Many of Proust’s social scenes, when not overdone, are famously entertaining; taking up close to a third of the novel, they are integral to its greatness, which without them would necessarily be a lesser, more monotone affair. The form of the comic thread that runs through it, however, is satire, which is always an attack – derision of a particular target, in this case snobbery, hypocrisy, pretension. In the enclosed world of the Jia-Zhen compound in Cao’s novel, delightful comic elements abound: but more delicate in dialogue and situation, these take the form of wit. In Powell’s novel, by contrast, though there is both mockery and wit, it is comedy in a larger sense, neither instrumental nor incidental – of characters and careers, actions and emotions – that prevails.

Here, certainly, lies a good part of the reason for the restricted circulation of the Dance. It is a rule of cultural geography, Franco Moretti has written, that ‘relatively speaking, comedies do not travel well’. He was concerned with the cinema, but the two explanations he gave apply a fortiori to literature. One was what he termed the inertia of language, jokes in one predictably weakened – at the limit: puns, disabled – by translation into another. The other was ‘the fact that laughter arises out of unspoken assumptions that are buried very deep in a culture’s history: and if these are not your assumptions, the automatic component so essential to laughter disappears’. Remarking that while ‘we usually associate the national spirit with the sublime’ – unknown soldiers, torn flags and the rest – he observes that what makes a nation laugh is more distinctive than what makes it cry, where ‘the same sublime objects reappear relentlessly from one culture to another’. Comedy differentiates. ‘All sublime nations resemble each other, we might paraphrase Anna Karenina, but when they start laughing, they all do so in their own unique way.’⁹¹

The general truth of this contrast requires some qualification and unpacking. Though they can of course overlap, satire and wit are to be distinguished from comedy, tragedy from the sublime; while all these can mingle in differing measures in a single work. With this proviso, À la recherche, Dream of the Red Chamber and Dance offer variations on the argument. Proust’s novel, constructed in the register of the sublime, suffers little in universal appeal from its satirical side, since the target is so standard and generic – what hierarchical society has ever lacked snobbery or hypocrisy? Cao’s work is ultimately a tragedy, as his first modern critic Wang Guowei understood, even if we don’t possess the exact version Cao made of its ending.⁹² But the place of wit within it is not at all like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of the novel, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to any Anglophone reader, it is inseparable from the character-space of the novel, and its captivation. There, as its bearers, young women occupy a position in the narrative with which Dance cannot compete, let alone À la recherche. Like Proust, Cao was much seized of flowers, scarcely fewer varieties than his 270 appearing in Dream, and the title of Proust’s second volume could all but perfectly fit the first sixty-two chapters of this novel. But to move from the band at Balbec to the verse-cappers of the Daguanyuan is to cast aside lucozade for wine, so enormously superior are Cao’s powers of female characterization to the vapid surrogates of Proust’s imaginary. In Dream, where flowers have a more pregnant metaphorical force, comedy and tragedy are of equal access. What doesn’t travel, at least beyond East Asia, is the escape-hatch of religion at the end: redemption through ascesis rather than art, as in Proust, but beyond adepts of the cult of either, to no more effect.

Powell’s novel fits Moretti’s fork best. Consistently the funniest English narrative of the last century, the proportion of comedy in it is far larger, and far more entangled in a specific society with an unusually complex stratification in forms of class, and a specific language with an exceptionally wide range in styles of speech. Here customs form barriers higher than any tariff. But the Dance is not, of course, simply or as such a comic novel. Years ago Hilary Spurling perhaps described it best, in terms Cao would have grasped immediately. ‘The whole sequence unfolds in both real and fictional time like a Chinese scroll painting, a vast canvas streaked with violence and perturbation, suffused with humour, at once passionate and dispassionate, lyrical and absurd, almost disintegrating at points into gloom and chaos, rising at others to fierce, complex, brilliantly coloured climaxes.’⁹³ The novel is not tragic, and does not aim at the sublime, though in it what is comic brushes both. Powell once described the torrential quotation from Burton with which it ends, encompassing all three, as ‘a wonderful epitome of what life is like’.⁹⁴ Such inclusiveness is not the least reason for the anomalous status of the Dance, viewed comparatively.

Horizons

The international reception, or lack of it, of any work of fiction is one thing, its native standing another. By definition, traits that risk seeming intractably English should present little difficulty in England. At home, however, opinion divides quite sharply, admiration and aversion often appearing in equal supply. There are reasons for resistance to Powell’s writing that are themselves specifically English. An introduction to them is offered by the critic who in his own day could be accounted his leading champion. In a front-page spread in the Times Literary Supplement, John Bayley hailed him under the banner of ‘A Family and Its Fictions’. There was a conflict in Powell, he explained, between the Gothic and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of their richness to his work – provided the former, with its better indigenous pedigree, had the last word. A figure like Widmerpool might have something in common with denizens of Balzac or Gide, but was reassuringly overlaid with the homely watermarks of Billy Bunter and Colonel von Stumm – ‘Mr Powell has contrived to capture the powers of infantilism which underlie the most mesmerizing feats of fictional creation’, at risk where French influences intruded on ‘the more natural climate of Gothic and Dickensian fantasy’ in which the author’s best self flourished.

Indeed, Bayley maintained, the very technique and tone of Dance was ‘determined by a family framework’, in which ‘other people exist, and become people, because they have joined the family circle in some capacity’, for ‘the possibilities of character are based on the family’ alone. ‘Family orthodoxy’ was the secret of Powell’s narrative success, ‘bedtimes tales’ nestling snugly within it. Alas, however, its final volume raised the dark question of ‘how much the family can absorb, and is absorbing, to survive; how different it will be if the counter-family takes over, how ready to replace authority with tyranny and substitute gross caprice for the freedoms and flexibilities of custom’. Still, newcomers to the series could be counted on to long for revelations of what might next befall its characters ‘with the same eagerness with which transatlantic readers waited at the pierhead to get news of Little Nell’.⁹⁵

Dickensian fantasy indeed, at full bore. Family life plays scarcely any role in the Dance, outside the Tolland clan and glimpses of the Foxe household. Aside from the infant Pamela’s moment at the font, children are completely absent. Powell never showed any particular liking for Dickens, finding much of Our Mutual Friend – he admired the beginning – ‘unremitting rubbish’.⁹⁶ While acknowledging Dickens’s gifts and position in folk memory, he wrote more warmly and less cursorily about Surtees. Abhorring sentimentality, any figure further from his sensibility than the byword for it out of The Old Curiosity Shop could hardly be imagined. His literary preferences were the virtual antithesis of Bayley’s. Tolstoy, Bayley’s prime object of worship, produced two of the world’s greatest novels, yet in their basic lack of subtlety these resembled ‘magazine stories of genius’, unfolding like the movies into which they were so successfully made, his characters ‘always to be easily understood in popular terms’.⁹⁷

Bayley loved Dance. He once said, ‘I could read whatever Powell writes from here to eternity’.⁹⁸ But what, a contrario, his attempt to domesticate him for native consumption shows is one of the reasons why Powell is not comfort food for British palates. He despised what Bayley prized, and in which his compatriots wallowed. English writers could rarely stick to the point, he wrote, or look straight at what was in front of them, ‘one eye always swivelling in the direction of fantasy’.⁹⁹ What he valued was what, choosing his last word with care, Bayley tacitly deprecated as – the polite cough is audible – ‘Gallic psychological attribution’. Nothing so forbidding as analysis. Formed in the ‘hard, cold-blooded, almost mathematical pleasure I take in writing’ to which his narrator confesses,¹⁰⁰ Powell’s generalizing, analytical turn of mind was foreign to the traditions of the English novel. Empirically grounded it remained; but alien to local habits all the same. The imagination at work in the Dance has an unsettling intellectual edge. It is no accident that Powell’s first critical project, when he was in his twenties, at a time when no Anglophone study of him yet existed, was a book on Stendhal.

There was a further side to this distance from any standard Englishry. Powell’s literary culture was unusually wide. In this country, it is difficult to think of any contemporary novelist who matched it. Proust wrote with feeling about the predecessors he valued – principally Chateaubriand, Nerval, Baudelaire – and in a coruscating polemic against Sainte-Beuve, incapable of perceiving the outstanding writers of his period, left a lasting manifesto of critical method. He was no provincial, admiring Goethe and George Eliot along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But most of what he wrote on literary matters he left unpublished, and his range was essentially French. As a critic, he is remembered today principally for his dismissal of Sainte-Beuve’s aberration in talking about the life of a writer as if it bore on his work, the occasion of his famous pronouncement: ‘a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.’¹⁰¹ No doubt in part moved by an understandable fear of exposure of his own life to any too inquisitive gaze, Proust was himself quite unable to live up to his dictum, proceeding immediately to treat Balzac in much the fashion for which he reproached Sainte-Beuve – plunging right away into the mercenary vulgarity of Balzac’s correspondence, where ‘there is no call to differentiate between his letters and his novels.’¹⁰² In effect, the distinction on which he legitimately insisted could never be a scission such as the mystique of the author to which he aspired would make of it.

Coming later, Powell had access to a landscape of fiction which, for those willing to scan it, widened considerably after the First World War, and after the Second depended on reviewing books for a living, a job he enjoyed so much he continued doing long after it was an economic necessity. Contributions to the Spectator, Punch, TLS and Daily Telegraph – his successive standbys – were journalism. They paid little heed to Proust’s broadside against Sainte-Beuve. For Powell, biographical information about a writer was usually of pertinent interest. Most of his pieces were short, and often their subjects a matter of chance. But the three books he collected out of forty years of this kind of writing make over a thousand pages, not counting extensive entries on related matters in his Journals. From them emerges a mind of notable learning, and decided outlook, that helps explain Powell’s off-track position in English letters. Strikingly, his retrospect of these – extensive enough – bypasses the Georgian and Victorian novel all but completely: no Austen, no Brontës, Dickens given the merest nod, no Eliot, no Thackeray, no Meredith, no Gissing. The Edwardians fare no better, Bloomsbury pointedly absent. To all intents and purposes, coverage of fiction starts with James and Conrad, Hardy and Kipling as proximate backdrop to his own generation – the first and last most important for Powell, an admirer of both, though in no sense a pupil. James he found in the end too niggling and inhibited, Kipling too knowing and unctuous. Joyce was a master of words and phrases, but not, in forsaking the initial naturalism of Ulysses for a surfeit of pastiche and pedantry, of form, though he revolutionized it.¹⁰³ Lewis was to be respected for his life-long crusade against romanticism, if not himself immune to it, but lacking in warmth was undone by his venomous obsessions. Gerhardie – the last (quasi-)English novelist Powell wrote seriously about – provided a critical link to Russian literature.¹⁰⁴ Polite about contemporaries like Waugh and Greene in public, he was less so in private.

Significantly, Powell’s coverage of the European novel starts much earlier: tributes to the delicacy and economy of Constant, the irony and generosity of Stendhal, the colossal vitality of Balzac, the comic wildness of Gogol, the inextinguishable energy of Dostoevsky. Alert to less familiar writers of the nineteenth century, he found Galdós a ‘startling discovery’, superior in wit and psychological subtlety to either Balzac or Dickens; saw in Nievo a portrait of Italy at the time of Napoleon to counter Stendhal’s. Along the way, he could be as astringent about such a venerated totem as Flaubert as Jenkins is about Trollope: monotonous predictability of plot and characterization, Bel-Ami vastly superior to L’Éducation sentimentale, a touch of the mountebank.¹⁰⁵ In the twentieth century, he pioneered admiration for Svevo in England, and was first off the mark in hailing Musil, whose appearance he greeted with delight. Among post-war writers, he commended Moravia and Malaparte, and was respectful of Aldanov and Malraux. Critical of Sartre and Mann, cool about Camus and Pasternak, he warmed to Queneau.¹⁰⁶

These were novels of others. It is in his own that the effect of Powell’s personal culture becomes salient. More real persons are referred to in À la recherche than there are characters: about double the number, close to seven hundred. Proust was the first writer to multiply references on such a scale. This was his most direct legacy to the Dance, where they become a leading feature too. Powell’s handling of them, however, differs. The ratio of the real to the fictive is less: characters outnumber references, if not by much – just over, to just under, four hundred. Their distribution is also distinct. In Proust, artists of one kind or another – principally writers, painters and sculptors, musicians, in that order – comprise about half the roll-call, the rest made of rulers, princelings, politicians, generals, diplomats and the like; in Powell, two-thirds. Within these, Proust was more parochial: 90 per cent of his writers, two-thirds of his painters were French; in Powell, close to half his writers, and three-quarters of his painters aren’t English.

Allusions are the light infantry of reference, quotations the cavalry. Proust cites some thirty authors, 90 per cent French; Powell around forty-five, of whom three-quarters are English. Within his national literature, Proust draws on a limited number of sources: eight writers, headed by Hugo, Racine and Saint-Simon, supply nearly half of his quotations, and no one figures whose name is at all out of the way; most, standard classroom material. Within his, Powell quotes much more evenly across a far wider range, stretching to some writers even the best equipped might be tested by – Preston, Peele, Ingelow, De Tabley (one of the most enjoyable of all passages in the novel). The part played by quotation in the two novels is also – this is the really critical difference – quite distinct. In Proust, they have two main functions: satirical, in which they figure as the small change of fashionable causerie, where regular misattributions – by Bloch, Mme de Cambremer, the Duc et Duchesse de Guermantes et cie – show up the ignorance of the smart, or would-be smart, world; or self-corroboratory, as when the narrator invokes Baudelaire to touch up his already lyrical description of the sea, or Chateaubriand to back up his theory of involuntary memory.¹⁰⁷

In the Dance, quotation is not an instrument of satire.¹⁰⁸ It is either a playful note in high-spirited intellectual dialogue, of a kind that Proust’s narcissism does not permit, or a poignant signal of what is to come, or has just come – in other words, not mere décor or self-justification, but inseparable from the action of the novel. In both registers, Powell makes much more intensive use than Proust of poetry, and in doing so – unlike his own writing on the novel – draws extensively on (often little-known) Victorian, Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline writers, and French lines whose spirit is not to be found in À la recherche. Not long before being brigaded, rather rebelliously, to the last great set-piece social occasion on the eve of war, which will be a watershed for the narrator and his friends, Moreland is recalled reciting Rimbaud:

Oisive jeunesse

À tout asservie

Par délicatesse

J’ai perdu ma vie

On emerging from the dinner at Stourwater, and the disastrous tableau vivant that follows it, Baudelaire:

‘Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons’, said Moreland.

‘But that was Cythera’, said Isobel, ‘the island of love. Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?’

‘I don’t know’, said Moreland, ‘love means such different things to different people’. ¹⁰⁹

The atmospheric air-pocket is characteristic: a diminuendo not cancelling but intensifying, by contrast, what precedes it. In the same way, when Stringham bids farewell to the narrator, en route to his end in Malaya, after quoting with approval a passage from what in context is an ominous Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, he casually remarks that Browning ‘always gives the impression of writing about people who are wearing very expensive fancy-dress’.¹¹⁰ Three years later, as British tanks roll towards Zutphen, it is Spenser on Sidney, Rochester and his lubricious drinking cup, that drift across the map room. Between Potsdam and Hiroshima, on encountering Widmerpool, fresh from intriguing in the bunker of the Cabinet Office and now engaged to Pamela Flitton, the narrator’s reaction is to recall a Scottish poet, not exactly a household name:

Some lines of John Davidson suddenly came into my head:

And so they wait, while empires sprung
of hatred thunder past above,
Deep in the earth for ever young
Tannhäuser and the Queen of Love.

On reflection, the situation was not a very close parallel, because it was most unlikely Pamela had ever visited Widmerpool’s underground office. On the other hand, she herself could easily be envisaged as one of the myriad incarnations of Venus, even if Widmerpool was not much of a Tannhäuser. At least he seemed in a similar way to have stumbled on the secret entrance to the court of the Paphian goddess in the Hollow Hill where his own duties were diurnally enacted. That was some qualification.

At the Victory Service in St Paul’s soon afterwards, one of the pivots of the novel, the narrator’s mixed feelings at a ceremony he finds in many ways more lowering than elevating find expression, as among the hymns and monuments his thoughts wander from war to death to sex to politics, in a free association of floating quotations: The Ingoldsby Legends, Canon Twells and Captain Newton, Blake, Cowley, Pope, Edgar Allan Poe succeeding each other, without any straining for effect.¹¹¹ At the funeral of a brother-in-law some months later, Herbert and Raleigh in opposite registers, disinflationary and grandiloquent, come to mind with equally natural ease.¹¹² The erudition informs, but never clutters the action; distinct from the intellectuality of the Dance, but related to it, here is another stumbling block to English habits of reading. Powell himself was well aware of this, reflecting on ‘the ingrained philistinism, illiteracy, humourlessness, fear and hatred of literary references’ of most reviewers.¹¹³ In this national culture, there was a time when any unfamiliar word, let alone allusion, could arouse resentment, as if intrinsically affectation or display of superiority. Today, an instant’s tap or click can unfold any term or quotation. Whether the habits these form encourage a more carefree curiosity, elation rather than indignation at encountering something new, remains to be seen.

Politics

Concluding her biography, Spurling laments that ‘by the time I reached London in the early sixties, it was already becoming almost a badge of political correctness in literary circles to disparage the Dance’, while since then ‘the popular myth of Powell as an arch-Tory and snob’s snob’ has been a miasma virtually impossible to dislodge.¹¹⁴ Avoiding the subject of his politics, the one major weakness of her book, is not going to dispel it. No one could doubt Powell was conservative. The relevant questions, which bear on his reception in England, are: how important were politics to him, and what kind of conservative was he? Here too, comparison is illuminating. Claiming he got on as easily with a dustman as a duke, in practice Proust was a social climber absorbed by the world of titles, whose contact with those in overalls was little more than sexual. He could muse (at least, his French editors surmise, towards the end of the First World War, as unrest was growing) that it was ‘an important social question’ whether the hungry poor watching the wealthy dine behind the great glass windows of the hotel in Balbec might not one day break in and make an end of them.¹¹⁵ But social hierarchy was not to be tampered with lightly; democracy would not abolish but probably in secret accentuate it. The innate respect of the nobility for those who were clever but not well-born, ‘made revolutions so unjust’. Indeed the revolutionary spirit itself sprang from ‘an embittered love of the nobility’.¹¹⁶

A Dreyfusard at the turn of the century, after initially joining with Daniel Halévy to secure Anatole France’s support of Zola’s protest, Proust never published a line of his own in support of Dreyfus, and later deplored the vote of the Chamber affirming Dreyfus’s innocence as unnecessarily divisive.¹¹⁷ On the other hand, he sprang into print to attack measures against the Church, and when the Bloc des Gauches won the elections of 1906, fulminated against the ‘infamy’ of the ‘Combiste horde’, and its ‘immoral and absurd triumph’ at the polls.¹¹⁸ These were passing moods; in general, his interest in politics was tepid. Save on one score: indignant that Tolstoy should have criticized the celebrations of the Franco-Russian alliance, a fatal slipway to 1914, Proust explained that while socialism might be altruistic among those of the rich willing to advocate the idea, it was egotistic for the poor to do so, whereas patriotism subordinated egoism to altruism in both classes, uniting them when necessary for the moral duty of war.¹¹⁹ Like most of his contemporaries across Europe, he never doubted the justice of the cause of his own nation in the First World War, bringing down on him savage words from a youthful Beckett, in every other respect a boundless admirer.¹²⁰ But though a reflex patriot, by the standards of the time he was a humane one, who criticized indiscriminate denunciations of German culture during the war, and opposed triumphalist bids to proclaim the hegemony of French letters after it. His outlook was, as Tadié accurately describes it, a liberal conservatism of a largely unpolitical stamp. ‘La politique au fond m’est égale.’¹²¹

Powell’s conservatism was much more political, and more radical. It took some time to crystallize, early attitudes not to be collapsed into later views. His first published pieces of writing date from 1924, his second year in Oxford. Among them was a review of a biography of the pre-revolutionary Marat, in which after remarking that the leaders of revolutions could all but universally be classified as ‘unqualified scoundrels or tiresome and ill-informed pedants’, he went on to observe that ‘a hereditary monarchy by the law of averages produces a certain number of good rulers, but a democratic upheaval ensures only that the reins of government are given over to the hands of the morally and intellectually deficient’.¹²² Not that unusual a flourish for English undergraduates at the time. A decade later, looking back on his days at Eton, he could write of his house there: ‘There had been a period in the immediate past, happily drawing to a close at the time of my arrival, when the non-Aryan proportion in its membership had seemed to many unnecessarily high’.¹²³ Michael Barber, Powell’s earlier biographer, who first pointed out these passages, sensibly did not make too much of them. Like offhand dismissals of democracy, casual expressions of antisemitism were comme il faut in the upper classes of the period, a lightly worn prejudice raising few eyebrows – Graham Greene, who conceived and edited the volume of reminiscences, The Old School, in which this appeared, no exception; Orwell could give voice to much the same as an informant for British security in the Cold War. Sharing the typical outlook of his cohort, there is little sign that in these years Powell was any more seriously interested in politics than Proust had been.

As the thirties set in, and a new literary generation made itself felt, this altered. He was ‘totally out of step’ with the new mood, he told Barber forty years later: it was a moment when ‘committed writing really completely took over, and it felt quite extraordinary if you were another sort of person’.¹²⁴ Aversion to Auden and his fellows certainly reinforced his instinctive attachment to the social order against which they railed. Not, however, to the point of picking up any opposite banner. One of his closest friends, John Heygate, became a fan of the Nazis, but leanings like this never rubbed off on him. Communism was no barrier to love; his passionate affair with Marion Coates dates from 1934. Two years later, he and Violet were setting off for a summer’s holiday in Russia. When the Spanish Civil War broke out and Greene organized another anthology about it, Writers Take Sides, Powell declined to do so, making mild fun of the camps arrayed against each other: amidst so many distinguished names, how could such eminences as Beverly Nichols or Godfrey Winn have been overlooked?¹²⁵

It was the Second World War that changed all this, permanently. Powell was ‘caught up in a tidal swell’ of patriotic feeling, Spurling writes, losing his temper with friends who weren’t rising to the occasion.¹²⁶ The fate of the country was at stake. After the continent had fallen to Hitler, when British isolation was broken by the German invasion of Russia, his narrator’s reaction is the opposite of Waugh’s hero Guy Crouchback, who sees only dishonour in the alliance that lies ahead: ‘An immediate, overpowering, almost mystic sense of relief took shape within me. I felt suddenly sure everything was going to be all right.’¹²⁷ Subsequent transfer to political duties in the War Office, involving liaison with the Polish forces in exile, brought Powell face to face with disputes over how to react to Katyn. Spurling implies, though her wording is careful not to say so explicitly – Powell’s memoirs don’t make the claim – that it was his opposition to the wish of officialdom to cover up the massacre in the interests of the Soviet alliance which led to his dismissal from the Cabinet Office. But there is no doubting the strength of his feeling about the killings, and the regime responsible for them. As the war neared its end, he pulled off what he regarded as his major contribution to its successful conclusion, a scheme to ensure that the Communist resistance in Belgium, the principal force of underground struggle against the German occupation, was neutralized before it could make a bid for power.¹²⁸

Out of all this, Powell emerged from the war highly politicized, as many hitherto rather unpolitical writers were on the Continent – Sartre an example from the opposite end of the spectrum; fewer in England. His first substantial piece of writing, a long essay on the diaries of the Swiss man of letters Amiel, picked out the bleak warnings in them of the polar night of despotism that Russia already represented in the nineteenth century, and the threat it posed to Europe should it ever become master of the continent: ‘tyranny such as the world has never known, silent as darkness, rigid as ice, insensible as bronze, decked with an outer amiability and glittering with the cold brilliancy of snow, slavery without compensation or relief’. Attlee quoting this strophe in a speech soon afterwards, Powell prided himself for having prompted it.¹²⁹ Whether he was right to do so or not, the passage quickly became a Cold War staple, popularized by the Reader’s Digest. But other than the defeat of Germany and Japan, peace gave him little reason for satisfaction. The mood of his narrator in St Paul’s could only be subdued, in the presence of a Yugoslav Partisan and other incongruous figures from Eastern Europe in the pews nearby, not to speak of the levelling imprint of Labour on the arrangements of the ceremony itself. The deep depression into which Powell fell after demobilization may also have had something to do with the state of the world in his eyes, once the Conservatives were unsaddled, a possibility Spurling doesn’t consider.

Recovered, he fought the good fight against CPGB infiltration of the National Union of Journalists, shoulder to shoulder with his best friend at the time, Malcolm Muggeridge, seeking to convince him of the importance of ousting Labour – whose boast of a popular majority in 1945 was bogus – from control of the LCC.¹³⁰ Talking about the Spanish Civil War, he and Orwell agreed that if the Republic had won, the Reds would have joined the Nazi–Soviet Pact and invaded France when Hitler attacked it, as Stalin had done in Poland. Of the alternatives, little as he liked Franco, the victory of the Nationalists was preferable; if forced to choose, he would have supported them.¹³¹ Fascism proper, he would later decide, was essentially a movement of the left.¹³² So it is logical that in The Music of Time Widmerpool should first be an apologist for Hitler, and later an asset for Stalin. Congratulating Powell on ‘not only what we might call good political taste, but true nobility of spirit’, his leading American admirer has termed Temporary Kings, in which Widmerpool’s treason is portrayed, ‘a major contribution to the literature of anti-communism’.¹³³

Such solemn tribute is misplaced. Powell’s fiction does not belong with 1984 or Darkness at Noon. It is of another sort altogether. Anti-communist, of course, he was. But that was a conviction, not a passion. What defined his outlook was something else, his own brand of patriotism. This was no common or garden affair. Anchored in his family background, it was highly distinctive. Though he found his father personally impossible, the institution he represented commanded his unswerving respect, from earliest childhood on: at the age of eight or nine, Jenkins can already rattle off regiments and their colours to General Conyers. Though himself far from enjoying life in it, at any rate service in the field, the Army was in Powell’s genes, as his nephew has written.¹³⁴ This meant that for him, patriotism was inseparable from the military record of the country, whose defining experience as he grew up was the First World War, in which his father was a decorated officer, at a time when Britain still headed the largest empire the world had ever seen.

Imperial connexions are everywhere in the first nine volumes of the Dance: Egypt and South Africa, where Uncle Giles suffered disgrace; Kenya, where Umfraville disported himself and Stringham begins his fall; the Gold Coast, where Borrit worked in Intelligence; Persia, where Cutts falls for a cipher clerk; Afghanistan and Burma, where Conyers served as a subaltern; India, where Bagshaw and Trapnel serve in PR; Malaya, where Stringham is killed; China, where treaty revisions form the subject when Widmerpool first holds forth in company (the career of Powell’s father came to an unhappy end in Shanghai); even the informal empire in South America, where Brent and Duport are in oil. Powell does not insist on any of these; they are background. Nor does he include any treatment of the First World War itself. Remembrance that begins with Sarajevo then jumps to Versailles, Jeavon’s wounds the only real marker of what happened between. But that the Great War formed the touchstone of Powell’s own politics is clear. Again and again, in his journals and reviews, he attacked those who either at the time or later questioned its necessity, ‘people who waffle about war being avoidable in 1914’.¹³⁵ Such anathema to him was any reservation about the war that his literary judgments were inflected by it. The ‘antics of Bloomsbury’ during the fighting were despicable; but even the war poets did not escape his censure. It was not enough that Apollinaire was legitimately an aesthetic favourite. Heavily wounded at the front and eventually killed by Spanish flu, he had also to be contrasted with the ‘strong admixture of self-pity and even a kind of defeatism’ of Owen and Sassoon.¹³⁶ In the country’s epilogue to the war, his father served in the British campaign to crush Irish independence. Sixty years later, while diplomatically conceding it was a quirk, Powell told an interviewer: ‘I have the strongest possible dislike of Ireland … That awful national egotism.’¹³⁷

Vindication of the cause of the Entente remains, of course, the standard reflex of official Anglo-Saxon historiography to this day. Less common are Powell’s projections of it backward to earlier conflicts. The Boer War? ‘Even now’, he complained of David Garnett’s autobiography, ‘he can produce a paean of praise for the pro-Boers.’¹³⁸ The Crimean War? ‘ “We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do” has managed to get a bad name but was a perfectly healthy instinct, especially in insisting that the Russians shall not have Constantinople.’¹³⁹ The Napoleonic Wars? Whigs who opposed Pitt were ‘near-Quislings’.¹⁴⁰ Or forwards, conjecturing the future fate of the Second World War. In St Paul’s:

We rose again for another hymn, ‘Now thank we all our God’, which was, I felt pretty sure, of German origin. Whoever was responsible for choosing it had either forgotten that, or judged it peculiarly apposite for this reason. We had just prayed for the ‘United Nations’ and ‘our enemies in defeat’. In the same mood, deliberate selection of a German hymn might be intended to indicate public forgiveness and reconciliation. Quite soon, of course, people would, in any case, begin to say the war was pointless, particularly those, and their associates, moral and actual, who had chalked on walls, ‘Strike Now in the West’ or ‘Bomb Rome’.¹⁴¹

Politically speaking, Powell had, of course, no time for socialism in any shape or form. Hayek had demolished its pretensions in 1944. But he was more consistently exercised by liberalism, to which his hostility never wavered. Personified in the Dance in the voluble posturing of the Oxford don Sillery, he regarded it as a danger to any stable social order. ‘Liberalism (to which the Labour Party essentially belongs) is a force unconsciously seeking anarchy’, he said.¹⁴² The English were all too prone to it. Looking back, a case like Shelley’s illustrated Dostoevsky’s dictum that liberalism in one generation bred nihilism in the next.¹⁴³ If the description seems atypically extreme, the reason for it is clear. Liberals were found wanting whenever Britain was at war: who could forget Forster’s credo that he would rather betray his country than a friend? Behind Woolf or Strachey lay such as Hobson, Cobden, Hazlitt, Shelley. Campbell-Bannerman had wanted to scuttle in South Africa; Asquith had failed to prepare for the Great War and bungled conduct of it. That historically for every British liberal who opposed an imperial war, a hundred had usually supported it, only underlines how much a tiny scattering of literary dissent in August 1914 affected Powell’s angle of vision.

If liberalism was the formula for a rootless anarchy, what were the bulwarks against it? There he held fast to the institution to which he had paid homage in his first political pronouncement at Oxford. In the Dance, the monarchy enters the narrative with the Abdication crisis, when Widmerpool, hinting at a newly gained standing in exalted circles, banks on the marriage of the king to Mrs Simpson, a sure sign this would be a bad thing. Powell had strong views about royal duty, as his opinion of dramatis personae sixty years later would show. En route to Los Angeles in 1937, he celebrated the coronation of George VI on board ship in the Caribbean with such exuberance that he woke up with the worst hangover of his life. In later years, he and his wife were faithful viewers of Trooping the Colour and the Cenotaph ceremony on television. When he was made a Companion of Honour – unaware that the likes of Eric Hobsbawm, whose presence on a George Orwell fund sufficed for him to refuse to join it, would in due course receive the same bauble – he was so overcome that he listed the congratulations he received across twenty pages of his normally sharp-witted and vivid Journal: the one occasion on which he truly became the caricature Spurling deplores.¹⁴⁴

The monarchy, of course, was not in itself enough to stay the forces of disorder. By the turn of the sixties, as the Macmillan government came under satirical bombardment, he was on the alert against talk of the Establishment, a ‘silly phrase’, those who regarded themselves as anti-Establishment often displaying ‘amusing pomposities that far outstrip anything against which they are themselves up in arms’. On the appearance of the counter-culture, he observed that beats and hippies would have made an admirable subject for the brush of George Grosz.¹⁴⁵ These were asides, while he was composing The Music of Time. By the time he completed the novel, in the mid-seventies, far worse had been let loose, liberalism incubating precisely the anarchy he had foreseen, with its climax in Labour’s Winter of Discontent. By then, as he subsequently told her, Powell had decided that Thatcher was ‘the Answer’. Aside from her personal attractions – she reminded him of Io in her rapture with Zeus in Correggio’s painting, her voice too casting a certain spell – her political firmness won his unconditional admiration, even if all she could speak of at supper was public affairs.¹⁴⁶ In 1990 his dismay at her fall knew no bounds. ‘Owing to the insane antics of the Tory party Mrs Thatcher has resigned, impossible not to comment quem deus perdere vult, prius dementat’, he noted in his diary. Three days later: ‘I wrote to Mrs Thatcher expressing regret at her resignation, saying that at one of the dinner parties where I met her she had spoken of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (in Russian The Devils), i.e. those that entered into the swine, which then rushed over the cliff. This seemed a perfect example of what had happened to her, the swine being her betrayers in the Tory Party.’¹⁴⁷

Powell had no hesitation in describing himself as a traditional Tory. He detested, he said, wet variants like Heath. Asked if he did not think Ferdie Mount wrote very well, ‘I replied that some of his political stuff was not sufficiently High Tory for me.’ One surmises family differences over Europe. The Danish referendum of 1992 is unlikely to have pleased his nephew. Powell’s reaction could not have more cheerful: ‘I am absolutely delighted by the Danes buggering up the EC.’¹⁴⁸ Uninhibited opinions like these typified the vigour of his private outlook. They pose the question of its relation to the public art of his novel. There, certainly, Tucker was right to be troubled by an aspect of Powell’s depiction of Widmerpool, otherwise deemed superb (‘he grows into rottenness’), in his progress from schoolboy unpopularity to adult careerism, callousness, treachery, voyeurism, and ultimate dementia: ‘it is a worrying equation which makes social ineptitude and lowish family signify latent delinquency.’¹⁴⁹ That said, it is characteristic of the novel that there are also occasions when the narrator feels sympathy, even a kind of solidarity with Widmerpool, quite credibly.

‘Allowing characters an author dislikes no marks at all is a self-defeating practice, if only too easy to fall into’, Powell noted in his Journal.¹⁵⁰ Waugh was an example. In the Dance, he avoided it. His feelings about the literary left of the thirties were savage – and who can say he was wrong about a world-class inanity like ‘we must love one another or die’? – but in his novel, he took care to represent it in the entertaining, in neither case entirely negative, figures of Quiggin and Members, critics rather than poets, in whom traces of Connolly and Quennell are discernible, rather than Auden or Spender, whom he cordially despised. The nearest the narrator ever gets to a direct political statement expresses the core belief of Powell’s conservatism. It is characteristically low-key. At the funeral of one brother-in-law, a high-minded, eccentric pacifist of the left, soon after the death from war wounds of another, a dull if good-natured, not very successful businessman, Jenkins compares the two. The former had been in ‘a fervent anxiety to set the world right’; the latter ‘had never shown much concern with righting the world, except that in a sense his death might be regarded as stemming from an effort to prevent the place from getting worse’.¹⁵¹

History, Perennity

Powell said he couldn’t stand people who wanted to put the world to rights. In the long retrospect of the novel, had it got significantly worse? Many critics have thought so. For Pritchett, the Dance depicted ‘a society in the process of disintegration’; Bergonzi, ‘a shabby and dispirited society’; Mount, ‘the shabby, uncertain, apprehensive character of British life’, ‘a background of decay and exhaustion’, ‘the worn-out quality, inescapable shabbiness of nearly all the places where the action is set’.¹⁵² This is surely overdone. Belgravia, Berkeley Square, Hill Street, Regent’s Park were and are not exactly down-at-heel; nor are leading characters lacking in energy or vitality, not a few at different points brimming with them. Certainly, the traditional world in which Powell grew up and chronologically the opening episodes of the narrative are set, when the social system of the Belle Epoque was still largely intact and the expanse of the British empire had never been so vast, has crumbled away by the end of the novel. It is also true, though less remarked, that the great ferment of the first quarter of the century in the arts, much of it coming from Europe, which lent a cultural excitement to the period Powell would never forget, had passed by the thirties, and would never be repeated. By the time he came to write the Dance, there was much for him to regret. But there is scarcely any trace of nostalgia in it.

That absence – given the social landscape that had already emerged when he started composing the Dance, let alone which surrounded him when he completed it, and his political outlook in this period – is impressive, even uncanny. What explains it? Two passages from his writing, one from The Military Philosophers and the other from the last volume of his memoirs, The Strangers All Are Gone, suggest the answer. The first is the way the Victory Service of 1945 ends. The congregation rises to sing ‘God Save the King’, whose three verses are given in full. Within a year, the second would be altered at royal command for the First General Assembly of the UN, held in London in 1946, ‘to bring it more into the spirit of the brotherhood of nations’. The narrator reflects:

There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when high-thinking had not yet cloaked such petitions as those put forward in the second verse, incidentally much the best; when, in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had less of stranglehold on the public mind. Such a mental picture of the past was no doubt largely unhistorical, indeed totally illusory, freedom from one sort of humbug merely implying, with human beings of any epoch, thralldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was.¹⁵³

The second passage will have been composed in 1981, the year before the publication of Strangers, at a low point in Thatcher’s rule, when she recoiled at the threat of a miners’ strike, before triumph in the Falklands and stockpiling of coal to crush the NUM. Powell is on tour in India, watching a temple monkey in Benares appear to read a tattered newspaper, then as if in uncontrollable exasperation, cast it away and leap to the topmost ledge of the temple, to rest and regain composure.

In that parade of utter dissatisfaction with things I became at once aware of a strong fellow feeling. How often do the papers report something that seems to demand just such energetic and immediate form of self-release – had one the monkey’s agility – as the only practical means of discharging inward discontents, rage, contempt, despair, at what one reads in the papers.

This is the only time, in all his writing, that Powell ever yielded to an O tempora! O mores! It is a very strong one. The passage continues:

It is better to remain calm; try to remember that all epochs have had to suffer assaults on common sense and common decency, arts and letters, honour and wit, courage and order, good manners and free speech, privacy and scholarship; even if sworn enemies of these abstractions (quite often wearing the disguise of friends) seem unduly numerous in contemporary life.¹⁵⁴

This great enumeration of the values to which Powell held, complete with its typical baffle against sonority – they remain abstractions – is unique, too, in his work. The eloquence of both passages lies in the critical tension which inoculated the Dance against the temptations of nostalgia. Asked, halfway through its composition, whether the impulse behind his novel was simply to record social change, or also to evaluate it, he replied: ‘Certainly not the latter. I’m not trying to evaluate.’¹⁵⁵ Powell’s imagination was deeply historical, as Proust’s was not. He was also much more deeply conservative. That could easily have led to a threnody of time past, not individual as in À la recherche, but political and cultural. What checked any such move was the other side of his conservatism, conviction of the constancy of human nature, which he shared with Proust. In the tension between the two lay the difference, which cascades down the last page of his novel. All epochs – the word occurs in each passage above – are equal in the eyes, not of Ranke’s god, but of Burton’s panoptic gaze. That encompasses the fate at once of individuals and of states, the private and the public worlds of human life. Selectively: on the one hand, ‘vows, wishes, actions … weddings, maskings, mummeries … revels … funerals, burials’ – ‘one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps’; and on the other, ‘new books every day … new discoveries, expeditions’, ‘leagues’, ‘battles fought, so many men slain … strategems … treasons … enormous villainies in all kinds … new lords created … great men deposed’. In sum, ‘now comical, now tragical matters’.

That sensibility, creatively divided yet balanced between the historical and perennial, was remote from the right-wing cronies of Powell’s latter years. Each dimmer, coarser and more provincial than the next, it is fitting that Muggeridge, Naipaul, Larkin should all have turned on him.¹⁵⁶ The liberals he disliked were to be less disobliging, but could hardly be expected to show much enthusiasm. Castigating post-war English fiction as a house of ‘thick theories and slender fulfillments’ – few characters of any substance, childishly explicit with symbol and allegory, bossy authorial intrusion, shallow comic effects – James Wood instanced Golding, Carter, Spark, Drabble, Byatt, Murdoch, Wilson, the Amises.¹⁵⁷ Powell? Nowhere to be seen: in a feat worthy of a latter-day Sainte-Beuve, beneath notice. The left? One night at the turn of the seventies, slumped in a dive on Margaret Street – Trapnel territory: the scene could have come from Books Do Furnish a Room – a swarthy, famously farouche cadre of the revolution, extremely drunk and not known for much interest in matters literary, startled the company with a sudden pronouncement: ‘There are two kinds of art. There is good reactionary art and there is bad reactionary art’. The maxim certainly cut the gordian knot of many a far-left dispute over the relations between aesthetics and politics. Even if counter-examples – Brecht, Sartre, Marquez – could be mustered, its paradoxical radicalism is still perhaps worth reflecting on; capable, at least, of offering any self-respecting enragée licence to enjoy A Dance to the Music of Time with a good conscience. Brexit? Where I-Love-EU is in inverse relationship to the faintest idea about the Union, enthusiasm about Europe waiving the need to know anything of a solitary one of its cultures or politics, let alone have a glimmering of the labyrinths of Brussels, there can be no takers. Powell was too European for that. In France, Proust did not achieve his position as the literary equivalent of Joan of Arc until after the Third Republic of which he was a product had collapsed, Germany occupied France, and another historical era began, in which his stature gained consensus from distance. Though the world which produced him and his novels depict has largely disappeared, no comparable elapse of time or change of circumstance separates us from Powell. The least English of writers, the most English of writers, he continues to be immeasurable, at home and abroad.

2

THE LONGEVITY OF POWELL

The title of this talk is ambiguous, and may come to seem a bit misleading. Anthony Powell was long-lived; as a man, dying at the age of ninety-five, as a writer, the three volumes of his journals ending when he was eighty-seven, and we are now into the fifth decade of the posthumous reputation of his great novel, A Dance to the Music of Time. Lengths of time, however, involve more than a sum of years. They raise questions of what changed or happened within the stretch of these; the different ages at which a writer produced his work; the different ages at which readers encountered them. So I’ll begin with my own experience, as one random reader among the many hundreds of thousands of the Dance, and then move to the novel’s relation to the times of its composition, to what Powell’s memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling, tells us about these, and finally to his reputation.

In the winter of 1959, having just graduated from Oxford and still there, lodged in Wellington Street, I caught a bad flu, confining me to bed. Casting about for something to read, it occurred to me I might as well as see what a novelist widely praised in my cohort – Dennis Potter, later television dramatist, foremost among them – was like. I shared digs with three friends, and sure enough they had copies of the early volumes of the Dance. With a high temperature I started to read A Question of Upbringing. I finished in a state little short of outrage – a mixture of incredulity and indignation: how on earth could anyone admire a work so inconsequential in its characters, and so rambling and inconclusive in its narrative? Mentally, I prepared the tirade I would deliver on the subject to its credulous fans. But I was still pretty sick, and not yet in a position to do that. After another day or so of shivering and sweating, I decided that since I was still trapped in bed, I might as well stockpile more ammunition for my assault by ploughing grimly on through the sequel. About a fifth of the way through A Buyer’s Market, I was a captive, as I’ve remained ever since. It was one of those emotional switches as abrupt and violent as falling in love with someone after a tense initial aversion to them, lurking hostility suddenly capsizing into lasting passion.

Such emotions are dated. I don’t mean in the sense of becoming passé, but of springing from a relation to a specific temporal context. I was just twenty-one when I read A Buyer’s Market, within a year of the age of Nicholas Jenkins and his contemporaries, as they find their way for the first time in London, to which I was myself about to move. So discovery of the Dance coincided with discovery of the world. Thereafter, I would read successive volumes in something, existentially speaking, not unlike syncopation with the development of its first characters, not identifying with any of them, the sixties anyway offering a very different scene from the twenties, but memories of that period graphically punctuated by my reaction to the sequels, one read in Russia, another in Latin America, and so on, up to The Kindly Ones. With the war, of course, that kind of parallelism ceased. But it resumed again, now quite circumstantially, with Books Do Furnish a Room, since I was then working, as to some extent I still am, in what might well be regarded as the closest equivalents, a quarter of a century later, of Fission magazine and its disreputable Quiggin and Craggs publishing house; while with Temporary Kings and Hearing Secret Harmonies, the novel moved into the time of its reader.

I report this reminiscence, not as of any significance in itself, but as in my case prompting reflections on Powell’s own relation to the world he created in the unique literary architecture of A Dance to the Music of Time, with its astonishing range of striking or subtle characters and emotional registers, from the comic to the ironic to the tragic. Biographically, Powell was forty-six when the first volume of the Dance appeared, and seventy when the last was published. The distance between the author and the time he was depicting was close to thirty years in A Question of Upbringing, finished in 1950 and set in 1921– 24. Across the next nine volumes, it held steady at around twenty years between composition and plot. Then, in the final two volumes, it dropped precipitously, halving to ten years in Temporary Kings, then no gap at all in Hearing Secret Harmonies, when the age of the writer and the period he was writing about, the edge of the 1970s, had become one. What did that curve mean, subjectively, for Powell? He may have had mixed feelings. For, on the one hand, he was the author of five pre-war novels, from Afternoon Men to What’s Become of Waring?, written between his mid-twenties and mid-thirties, to which he remained extremely attached throughout his life, indeed looking back on them with a certain nostalgia.

Recalling what he called the ‘unchannelled forces bubbling up in youth’, he wrote in his memoirs:

In those days there were plenty of people to recommend abstention from writing, especially novel-writing, until you were thirty-forty-fifty. Something can be said for deferment; something against. The chief objection to delay is loss of a kind of lyricism – and energy – that disappears with increased age. Deeper qualities no doubt take the place of that lyrical element, they never quite match it.¹

What separated him from these when he embarked on the very different enterprise of the Dance was not just the passage of years, but the decisive experience of his adult life, the war. While it lasted, that cut off any further attempt at fiction, and when it was over, altered quite fundamentally the kind he wrote thereafter. ‘The second war’, he recorded,

drew a hard line across the story of one’s days after which nothing was ever quite the same again. Those six years not only concentrated into a short span of time contacts and experiences that could not otherwise have come my way, but by drastically altering normal routines penetrated almost every area of existence. Certain writers continued to produce books throughout the war in spite of military or other employments. I found that impossible, as much from disruption of inner machinery as from sheer lack of time. This total abstinence from writing undoubtedly had the consequence of storing away material, past and current, that might otherwise have been dissipated piecemeal. To that extent the war had a stimulating effect, something new jobs and changed scenes can never guarantee a writer.²

The break, in other words, had released a sustained imaginative stamina across a long retrospect, both lived and observed, that continuation in the mode, say, of Venusberg or Agents and Patients could never have afforded.

If Powell seems at moments to have regretted what he took to be the price of the change in the loss of an original lyricism, his feeling is to be respected, but I think it was an illusion, perhaps equating elation at first publications, a common enough experience, with effects actually achieved in them. There is nothing remotely as lyrical in the early novels as his descriptions of the precinct of La Grenadière – its name taken from a novel by Balzac by the same Loire – under the reign of its sorceress Madame Leroy in A Question of Upbringing; or in The Acceptance World the drive through the night to the virginally white, ‘snow-bound reservation of prosperous businessmen’ in which Jenkins unexpectedly spends his first night in the arms of Jean Templer.³ Or – connotations reversed – the German air-raid over Belfast in The Soldier’s Art:

Towards the far side of the town – the direction of the harbour – thin greenish rays of searchlight beams rapidly described wide intersecting arcs backwards and forwards against the eastern horizon, their range ever reducing, ever extending, as they sliced purposefully across each other’s tracks. Then, all at once, these several zigzagging angles of light would form an apex on the same patch of sky, creating a small elliptical compartment through which, once in a way, rapidly darted a tiny object, moving like an insect confined in a bottle. As if reacting in deliberately regulated unison to the searchlights’ methodical fluctuations, shifting masses of cloudbank alternately glowed and faded, constantly redesigning by that means half-a-dozen intricately pastelled compositions of black and lilac, grey and saffron, pink and gold. Out of this resplendent firmament – which, transcendentally speaking, seemed to threaten imminent revelation from on high – slowly descended, like Japanese lanterns at a fete, a score or more of flares released by the raiding planes. Clustered together in twos and threes, they drifted at first aimlessly in the breeze, after a time scarcely losing height, only swaying a little this way and that, metamorphosed into all but stationary lamps, apparently suspended by immensely elongated wires attached to an invisible ceiling. Suddenly, as if at a prearranged signal for the climax of the spectacle – a set-piece at midnight – high swirling crowds of inky smoke rose to meet these flickering airborne torches. At ground level, too, irregular knots of flame began to blaze away like nocturnal forges in the Black Country. All the world was dipped in a livid, unearthly refulgence, theatrical yet sinister, a light neither of night nor day, the penumbra of Pluto’s frontiers.

Powell’s passage ends with a typical, terse drop from the metaphorical to the matter-of-fact:

The reek of scorched rubber became ever more sickly.

Proust’s famous description of German fighters caught in the searchlights of Paris in the First World War, French planes rising like Valkyries to meet them, is a slight thing by comparison.⁴

When he conceived the project of the Dance, around 1947– 48, Powell was conscious of the risks it ran. Here is how he describes two of them, after at first explaining his intention:

I had been turning over in my mind the possibility of writing a novel composed of a fairly large number of volumes, just how many could not be decided at the outset. A long sequence seemed to offer all sorts of advantages, among them release from the re-engagement every year or so of the same actors and extras hanging about for employment at the stage door of one’s creative fantasy. Instead of sacking the lot at the end of a brief run – with the moral certainty that at least one or two of the more tenacious will be back again seeking a job, if not this year or next, then in a decade’s time – the production itself might be extended, the actors made to work longer and harder for much the same creative remuneration spread over an extended period.

Yet, he went on, there were also ‘many objections to setting out on such a hazardous course, chiefly the possibility of collapse, imaginatively speaking; or, like Robert Musil, a novelist of immense gifts, simply dying (something bound to happen sooner or later) before completing the book’.⁵

What precautions could Powell take against these two dangers, each in their own way proof against acts of will? Physical longevity was not at anyone’s command; nor, he often insisted, was creative imagination, its welling-up or subsiding essentially unpredictable. So what remedies did he have? By the standards of many others, Powell was a slow writer, happy if he produced a thousand words in a week. But he was an extremely disciplined one, as he had to be for the task he was embarking on, and that meant, under the always lurking threats of eventual atrophy or sudden expiry, he felt the pressure of time. The subjective experience of composition thus became, paradoxically, the opposite of what might be thought its objective pace. ‘From the very beginning’, his Journals report, ‘I was painfully aware of the necessity of speed, which would, in fact, continue for twenty-five years, deciding how much time could be allowed for perfecting things, without danger of delay, running out of steam at the close of the sequence.’⁶

In bringing the vast, intricately orchestrated score of the Dance to completion, Powell beat the clock of mortality, with nearly two decades of further writing to go. Did he also defeat diminution of creative powers – ‘not wanting the engine to run down before the end of the journey’, as he put it – as the sequence moved towards its end?⁷ There, opinions divide, some admirers holding that the last three instalments of the Dance, set in the post-war period, mark a falling-off of achievement; some holding that traces of this are visible only in the final volume; others, that the magnificence of the novel remains undimmed to the end. Reviewing the series fourteen years after its completion – at times, not always with reason, self-critically – Powell himself thought Temporary Kings ‘perhaps the best constructed volume of the sequence’.⁸ Personally, my own view would be that it is really only with Hearing Secret Harmonies that strains can be seen: effects not so much of a decline of powers, but of the difficulties Powell faced once the distance between the time of composition and the time of the narration, which had been a structural condition of the design of the novel, closed – closing, moreover, into a present where, conversely, a chasm opened up between his own experience of life, by then semi-sequestered in the Chantry, and the counter-cultural turmoil of a generation twice removed from his, in the landscape of the late sixties. Malcolm Muggeridge thought the only chink in Powell’s otherwise invulnerable armour of unbelief, which in the name of a conventional piety he deplored, was a faible for the occult. Put to wonderful use in the creation of Mrs Erdleigh and Dr Trelawney, in the figure of Scorpio Murtlock its deployment escapes the comic controls with which they were conceived, to my mind to its detriment. Yet to the very last, Powell’s architectonic skills persisted. Each volume of the Dance marshalling at once a host of characters from preceding – if far from always immediately preceding – volumes, together with entirely new creations, the final volume contains two of the most arresting examples in all the Dance of this genius: the re-emergence of ‘a small, nervous young man who never spoke, addressed as “Paul”’,⁹ surname unknown to Jenkins, not meriting so much as a sentence to himself in a Question of Upbringing, into the memorably unsettling figure of Canon Fenneau; and, of course, the materialization as full-bodied City financier of the boy expelled from school after delation by Widmerpool, his name mere legend or rumour, in the person of Sir Bertram Akworth, at whose knees Widmerpool falls in a transport of dubious repentance.

At the conclusion of a work on the scale of the Dance, as long as that of Proust, Powell might have been expected to fall silent for a while, if only to replenish his energies. The contrary was the case. Within a year of the publication of Hearing Secret Harmonies there appeared the first volume of his memoirs, its very title, To Keep the Ball Rolling, urbane defiance of any such notion; succeeding instalments coming out with the same regularity, at two-year intervals, as the novel. The resulting four volumes have understandably attracted less attention than his fiction, but they are as singular in the genre of the memoir as the Dance is in that of the novel, composing a carefully constructed work of art at times more ciphered than the Dance. What, to begin with, explains the astonishing speed with which Infants of the Spring followed on the heels of Hearing Secret Harmonies? In her fine biography of him, Hilary Spurling offers a glimpse of a Powell the world never saw, which might account for it, observing at one point: ‘For Tony writing had always held at bay the intolerable pressures of unreason and black despair.’¹⁰ Logically, these would have no place in a work acting to repel them, one solitary hint perhaps aside. Reviewers have often complained of the memoirs’ lack of autobiographical revelation, or self-portraiture of any sort. Powell took his title from a passage in Chance, Conrad’s most commercially successful novel, though not one held in high critical regard, whose structure is more convoluted than any other, interweaving three narrators, of whom one is called Powell, a young sailor licensed at the docks as second mate by a senior namesake, the Powell – ‘not exactly remarkable’ – of the memoirs’ overall epigraph, who resembles Socrates, but only physically. The hidden joke of the epigraph, one might surmise, is that duplication and elusion.

In substance, beneath a relaxed surface of anecdote and wit, the four volumes of the memoirs cover matters of the deepest concern to Powell. I will mention just three of them. The first, which supplies many set-pieces, was friendship, whose importance for Powell can be judged from the number of exceptional portraits in them, testimony to his lifelong fascination with others. Looking back, there was always something asymmetrical about it. Striking in Hilary’s Spurling biography is the absence of reciprocal testimony about Powell from his contemporaries, who – if I’m not wrong, on the evidence, at least – seem never to have mustered a tenth of the imaginative interest in him that he took in them. To our loss, we lack any life-study of him from the period of the Dance.

Another object of continual reflection in the memoirs is obviously writing itself. Messengers of Day, the second volume, ends:

Inability to produce is, of course, the haunting fear of the writer, especially the novelist; a spectre exorcized at the risk of raising the almost equally gruesome one of over-production. Scrutinizing the work of novelists past and present, one ponders this matter. Have novelists simply got a certain amount in them, which (if not cut off by early death) is in due course exhausted, or does some manner of existence stimulate or dry up these powers? Do certain ways of life build up reserves? If so, what are these ways of life; how should they be practised? Is there no rule?

– words echoing the pregnant line in Temporary Kings: ‘Each recriminative decade poses new riddles, how best to live, how best to write’, the rare adjective conferring its gravity to these problems.¹¹

Lastly, of course, there was death, eluded by the Dance, closer – though in the event still at a distance – as he completed To Keep the Ball Rolling. Comparison with Proust, often inescapable in reading Powell, brings to mind the great concluding meditation on mortality of À la recherche du temps perdu, beginning, ‘This idea of death installed itself in me as definitively as does love’, the solemnity of its soaring periods not unlike, at times, those of a latter-day Bossuet.¹² As one would expect, Powell is pithier, offsetting the ceremonial with the colloquial. The passage reads:

As the eighth decade gradually consumes itself, shadows lengthen, a masked and muffled figure loiters persistently at the back of every room as if waiting for a word at the most tactful moment; a presence more easily discernible than heretofore that exhales undoubted menace yet also extends persuasive charm of an enigmatic kind.

Death is the mother of beauty, hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment of our dreams And our desires

Anyway that was what Wallace Stevens thought; others too. Again – as with loudly decrying the world and its ways – a tranquil approach is probably to be preferred, rather than accept too readily either Death’s attractions or repulsions; better that the dual countenances of the ubiquitous visitant should not cause too prolonged musings on either the potential relief or potential afflictions of departure. Better, certainly, not to bore other people with the subject.¹³

Each writer shared the national temperaments of their period. In the kicker at the end, English reserve versus French diapason.

What, finally, of Powell’s reputation after his death? That it is far from uncontested is clear, so any sounding of it has to take account of typical objections to the Dance, his masterwork. The first, and most familiar, is – putting it crudely – that this is a tale of toffs, an ‘elitist, class-ridden’ novel ‘written by a snob’, in standard phrases quoted by Hilary Spurling, which it would be easy to multiply, and supply in more vehement versions. ‘I detest Powell’ an eminent historian told me the other evening, in a tone brooking no reply: an opinion often heard. Powell was, of course, aware of this reaction, and left us an indirect comment on it: ‘The current fashion’, he wrote in Messengers of Day, ‘is to condemn novels or plays about small aristocratic societies on grounds that what happens there is without bearing on the doings of the rest of the world. Yet after all, when it comes to general implications of behaviour, Oedipus was king of Thebes; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; Petronius clearly not at all inhibited from knowing about everyday things, on account of his position as arbiter of elegance at Nero’s court.’¹⁴ The copy of Messengers of Day that I recently borrowed from the London Library, a favourite haunt of Powell’s, most of whose members certainly still belong to the various worlds he inhabited, has an elegantly pencilled note in the margin: ‘not [underlined] fashion – legitimate and accurate comment – no [repeat underlined] bearing on common reality at all’.

That objections of this sort are questions of taste rather than of class was clear to me as early as Oxford, since Dennis Potter – Powell’s greatest public fan there at the time – came from a working-class family in the Forest of Dean, origins of which he was proud and made much of in his writing, as a man of the left. He and Kenneth Trodd, another friend of the time, also of resolutely plebeian stock, were the first to try and make a TV serial out of the Dance, even if Powell complained that they bungled the venture with the BBC.¹⁵ In any case, of course, the Dance is far from confined to a small aristocratic milieu. But that it depicts the complexities of a classically stratified society is occasion enough for some to reject it out of hand. To an art historian friend declaring he refused to read Powell, I pointed out: ‘But you have no difficulty reading and admiring Proust, whose world is much more socially exclusive’, to which he replied: ‘Yes, but Proust is over there – his world is not my affair. Powell’s world is here, and I can’t abide it.’ Mutatis mutandis, something like this might explain the paradox that critical works about Powell by Americans, all admiring, are seven times the number of the single book by an Englishman.

Questions of gender form another, less frequently expressed, but not inaudible complaint about Powell – that his perspective on the world, and gallery of leading characters, is so male. That there is something to this would have been conceded by Powell, who confessed he found it more difficult to represent women than men, though he certainly left vivid enough portraits of the opposite sex. What is true, however, is that until the concluding trilogy of the Dance, female characters of the inter-war period rarely have professions of their own – curiously, the one semi-exception predates it, in the person of the young Mildred Blaides in her VAD uniform during the First World War, ‘striding in like a grenadier’: to the ten-year-old Jenkins a figure of dashing emancipation. Women of working independence there were, of course, in the twenties and thirties, though universities were still largely closed to them. If they weren’t the rule, Powell could still be faulted for scanting the presence of exceptions. But by the standards of the time, it’s enough to consider the literary partnership he formed with his wife, Violet, rare in his cohort, to acquit him of much male chauvinism. As for any special impassability of his writing to women, that Hilary Spurling should be its foremost scholar in this country, and his authorized biographer, speaks for itself.

Another front of criticism of Powell is more aesthetic. It comes in two versions. For the first, the Dance as a novel is, by reason of its realism, too traditional in form to pass muster as a serious work of modern fiction, which has dispensed with illusions of verisimilitude current in the nineteenth century. In this view, Powell’s writing would be a sample of archaism, the author a kind of fossil that outlasted the time of its origin. In the words of a leading contemporary theorist of literature, his name synonymous with innovation in methods for studying it, such realism is ‘not what literature does – or does best. It took a different path a long long time ago’. In other words: Powell missed literary modernism and so can be relegated to the also-rans of history. The irony of such a misjudgment, of course, is that Powell’s achievement is unthinkable without his formative immersion in modernism. ‘In the 1920s, even when a schoolboy’, he recalled, ‘one was conscious of feeling this was an exciting intellectual epoch in which to grow up.’¹⁶ Victorian fiction he seems to have rejected en bloc, pointedly ignoring it when he subsequently came to write about literature. Discovering The Waste Land at school, Proust at Oxford, later Apollinaire and Hart Crane, his first literary influences were Cummings, Hemingway and Wyndham Lewis, intransigent moderns all; and he was combative in his preferences. Spurling points out that no one in the Dance is on the receiving end of such frankly expressed aversion as St John Clarke, the Edwardian man of letters personified in the novelist supposed to be his model, Hugh Walpole. Agreeing that ‘one of the least supportable things about later life was the fact you began to see almost everyone else’s point of view’, Powell could allow himself the irony that ‘tolerance becomes an increasing burden with age’, and regret ‘a slowing up of former antagonisms inseparable from the energies of youth’.¹⁷ Were literature really, which it is not, a line of march as that ‘long long ago’ so confidently implies, his place was never in the rear.¹⁸ A somewhat different if related complaint would fail Powell not on modern but current postmodern grounds, as ‘autofiction’, staging the self without limitation or inhibition, has become the favoured form of the internet age – Knausgaard, Heti or Cusk, the Titans and Titanias of the Facebook world – and language sheds all compunction in the foul-mouth chic of the best literary periodicals, not to speak of tabloids like the Guardian or The Times. Powell was at the antipodes of this sensibility, the style of his memoirs a ne plus ultra of its contrast. In the course of these, he noted – before their full arrival – that the informalities of current diction were ‘not only more self-conscious’ than the formalities they replaced, but ‘presuming over-simplification of another sort’ tended to end in a ‘debauchment of words sabotaging phrases previously regarded as universally admissible for definition of emotional life’.¹⁹ He would have expected, and been happy, to be beyond the pale of such norms.

Then there is the issue of his cultural horizon. Knowledge of foreign languages and literatures was more common among the educated of his generation than in any post-war levy, and has declined steeply in today’s Anglosphere, where the global dominance of English breeds a complacent indifference to these, imperial in stamp in the United States, provincial in the United Kingdom. But in his generation, no native writer assimilated more naturally or completely into his own thinking and writing the work of writers or artists outside the country. It is enough to look at the way each volume of his memoirs opens. Infants of the Spring: on the first page, Donne – ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’ – then Gauguin: D’où venons-nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons-nous? On the first page of Messengers of Day: Jarry – ‘clichés are the armature of the absolute’ – and Balzac: the ambitions of Rastignac or Rubempré. Faces in My Time: Hart Crane, Nietzsche, Valéry – Tous les arts regardés longtemps s’approfondissent en problèmes insolubles. In The Strangers All Are Gone: Dostoevsky, ‘kept for several hours wearing only a shirt in temperature under freezing expecting to be executed’. In such allusions, no breath of affectation obtains. This was the way he naturally reflected and composed. Supremely English, he was also distinctively un-English as a writer. That combination too, inseparable from his greatness, can be held against him.

Powell ended his memoirs with what he called a packet of literary prejudice, which ‘however dry might be preferable to general conclusions, possibly even more revealing’. Somewhere in the five pages on Shakespeare that follow must lie a revelation, but what it might be remains cryptic, as he reflects in seemingly free-floating fashion on writers who were perfectionist – Flaubert, Joyce – and those who were not – Balzac, Dostoevsky, Proust, Shakespeare; on the importance or otherwise of ‘great’ themes in literature; on the controls that satire and irony require. He saves the question of longevity – not of authors, but of their works – to the end. Proust, after affirming the opposite in his threnody for Bergotte, wrote in the final pages of his novel: ‘Doubtless my books, like my fleshly being, would one day die. But one must resign oneself to death. One accepts the thought that one will die in ten years, and one’s books in a hundred. Eternal duration is no more promised to works than to men.’²⁰ On his final page, Powell asked another question, but his answer echoes Proust, at once more lightly and more drastically, in his own register.

If the consolation of life is art, what may the artist expect from life? An incident mentioned in Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors always seems to me worth recalling … On a winter day in Florence, when snow was deep on the ground, one of the Medici sent for Michelangelo to build a snowman in the courtyard of the Medici palace … One can scarcely doubt that the finest snowman on record took shape.

The lesson? ‘Duration in time should not necessarily be the criterion of producing a work of art.’²¹ The spirit of that image and its moral, sovereign in its lack of anxiety at the short-lived, belong to what assures Powell’s art its longevity.

3

FROM PROGRESS TO CATASTROPHE

Within the huge multiverse of prose fiction, the historical novel has – almost by definition – been the most consistently political. It is no surprise that it should have occasioned what is still probably the best-known of all works of Marxist literary theory, Lukács’s study The Historical Novel, composed in Russian exile in the thirties, and first published in the DDR in the fifties.¹ Any reflection on the strange career of this form has to begin with Lukács, however far it may then wander from him. Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types, whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous historical figures will feature among the dramatis personae, but their roles in the tale will be oblique or marginal. Narratives will centre instead on middling characters, of no great distinction, whose function is to offer an individual focus for the dramatic collision of opposing extremes between which they stand, or more often waver. What Scott’s novels then stage is a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the historical necessity of the winners. The classic historical novel, inaugurated by Waverley (1814), is an affirmation of human progress, in and through the conflicts that divide societies and the individuals within them.

It follows from Lukács’s conception that the historical novel is not a specific or delimited genre or subgenre of the novel tout court. Rather, it is simply a path-breaker or precursor of the great realistic novel of the nineteenth century. A generation later, Balzac – for example – essentially adapted Scott’s techniques and vision of the world to the present instead of the past, treating the France of the Restoration or the July Monarchy in much the same way that Scott had represented mid-eighteenth-century Scotland or twelfth-century England. Balzac’s great successor, for Lukács, was in turn the towering figure of Tolstoy, whose War and Peace represents a peak simultaneously of the historical and of the realist novel in the nineteenth century. In more advanced societies than Russia, on the other hand, the development of capitalism had by this time pitted a revolutionary working class against a bourgeoisie that no longer believed it bore the future within it, and was intent on crushing any sign of an alternative to its rule. In this quite different – but after 1848 much more typical – situation, the connexions of the past with the present were cut in European fiction, and the historical novel gradually became a dead antiquarian genre, specializing in more or less decadent representations of a remote past with no living connexion to contemporary existence, but functioning rather as a rejection of and escape from it. Such was, archetypically, the fantasy of ancient Carthage constructed by Flaubert in Salammbô.²

Fredric Jameson, while remaining faithful to Lukács’s overall vision, has offered a different periodization within it.³ He suggests that, rather than seeing Scott as the founder of the classically realist historical novel, we should view him as the practitioner of a costume drama, whose narrative form stages a binary opposition between good and evil. A naive ethical antithesis of that sort is the mark of melodrama, and it is no accident – Jameson suggests – that its characteristic artistic expressions should be operatic, rather than novelistic. The truth of Scott is to be found in Rossini or Donizetti, who borrowed from him, rather than in Manzoni, let alone Balzac.

If we wish to see a truer exemplar of Lukács’s prescriptions, Jameson argues, we must turn to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a historical novel whose triumph is to transcend the costume-drama oppositions of hero and villain, in its remarkable portraits of a hyper-active yet futile Napoleon, brittle symbol of the French, and an apparently torpid yet supremely sagacious Kutuzov, authentic representative of the slow rhythms of the Russian people, and the peasant masses composing its overwhelming majority. Not only this. In War and Peace we find a realism so advanced in its figurations of psyche and sexuality that we seem already to be in the presence of a modernism avant la lettre. Yet there is a paradox here, Jameson remarks, in that modernism proper appears, because of its commitment to the primacy of immediate perception, to have been constitutively incapable of generating the totalizing retrospect that defines a true historical novel.

This is a brilliant rewriting of Lukács, the seduction of whose starting point – recasting Scott as a librettist for opera – is difficult to resist. Certainly the ethical binary of good and evil imposes a logic of melodrama on much of Scott’s work, but it might be said that Jameson has flinched from the conclusion to be drawn from his own argument. For the fact is surely that Tolstoy – far from transcending this melodramatic structure – reproduces it still more extravagantly in the public narrative of War and Peace, where the opposition between Napoleon and Kutuzov takes the binary of villainy and virtue, the hateful versus the heroic, to caricatural extremes that Scott rarely ventured. Tolstoy’s portrait of Napoleon, Jameson concedes, is perhaps rather petty, unduly diminishing the emperor. But he implies that Tolstoy can thereby be acquitted of demonizing him. An answer to this, however, can be found in Sartre’s notable deconstruction of the concept of evil in Saint Genet, where he shows that the pure notion of evil is always caught in the same aporia – what he calls a tourniquet. Either supreme iniquity requires a hideous intelligence and daring in the performance of great crimes, but if so it thereby borrows qualities from the good and ceases to be absolutely evil. Or it is a merely deadened violence, devoid of any reflective, let alone heroic dimension, but in that case it becomes a pathology without responsibility, whose moral insignificance – banality, Arendt would call it – fails in the opposite way to represent true evil.⁴ Tolstoy’s belittling of Napoleon is simply the second variant of this antinomy of villainy, in itself no better than the first.

That this is so can be seen vice-versa in the figure of Kutuzov. Jameson suggests that he is no conventional hero, but an empty actant whose function is simply to represent the Russian peasant masses. What tells against this view is not just the effusive, sentimental detail Tolstoy lavishes on the serf-owner general – far more a projection of the author’s personal ideology than anything to do with the Russian peasantry – but the lengths to which, as Viktor Shklovsky demonstrated, he went to rig the historical record in constructing him as a patriotic icon.⁵ In preparing War and Peace, Tolstoy took the trouble to study, albeit selectively, materials of the period, so was not unaware of salient realities of the time, but deliberately bent the evidence where it was inconvenient for his propagandist purpose. This is something Scott was on the whole reluctant to do. In War and Peace we are closer to the spirit of the maxim attributed to Alexandre Dumas: ‘On peut violer l’histoire à condition de lui faire de beaux enfants’.

The question, of course, is whether Tolstoy’s fictional portrait of Kutuzov qualifies as such a handsome offspring – that is, a persuasive work of art. The answer is surely no. The evidence that it fails to do so is written out in extenso in the novel itself, whose incoherent philosophical tirades on the nature of history – deplored by virtually all its readers – function as a compulsive make-weight for the flimsiness of the oleograph at one centre of the narrative, the political stage on which the fate of Russia is played out. The personal destinies of its fictional characters are another matter. But to grasp the sense in which War and Peace is a historical novel, classically interconnecting public events and private lives, it needs to be reinserted in the series of which it is a member. This is something Lukács’s account of the form touches on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others.

The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic expansion. Although this had popular roots, above all in the Tyrol, Spain and Germany, it was everywhere also driven by the need of the continent’s different anciens régimes to mobilize local enthusiasm for the defence of crown and altar. Viewed as a whole, its dominance was always a counter-revolutionary response to the French Revolution. But each particular national situation generated its own distinct forms of imagination and retrospect. Scott was writing in the one bastion of the old order that went unscathed through the Napoleonic Wars, scarcely a French footprint on Anglo-Scottish soil. The focus of his nation-building narrative is thus quite distinct from its continental sequels, and corresponds to the duality of the composite British kingdom itself.

On the one hand, there is the heroic story of the emergence of English national identity, as it first took shape in the struggle of democratic Saxons against aristocratic Normans in the early Middle Ages – Ivanhoe – and then deepened and developed through the early modern Tudor and Stuart periods. Here romantic mediaevalism was given full rein, in fictions rife with melodramatic contrasts and moralizing stereotypes of the kind that rightly draw Jameson’s strictures. In European terms, this was probably the most influential side of Scott’s work. On the other hand, Scott was also the chronicler of the peculiar trajectory of his native Scotland, a quite distinct society, within this larger story. Here a completely different vision was at work, formed not so much by Romantic Schwärmerei, as by the Scottish Enlightenment, whose theories of historical development as a universal succession of stages, passing from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to commercial forms of society, Scott absorbed from Ferguson and Dugald Stewart and mapped into his recreation of the conflicts between Highland and Lowland, clan and capital, in Waverley and its sequels. It was Scott’s capacity to represent the tragic collision between historically distinct times and their characteristic social forms – what Bloch would later call Ungleichzeitigkeit – that commanded Lukács’s special admiration, and lifts this part of Scott’s fiction above the moralisms of the costume drama.

In Tolstoy’s case, we can find a very similar sense of the tragic collision of nonsynchronous worlds in his tales of Tsarist penetration of the Caucasus, above all in his last writing, Hadji Murad, the masterpiece of his historical fiction.⁶ There we are shown, with an impassive, laconic tautness closer to Babel or Hemingway than any writer of his own time, the utterly contrasting worlds of Russian imperialism, spiralling from military cantonments on the frontier through regional headquarters in Tiflis all the way up to the emperor in Saint Petersburg, and Chechen and Avar clan and religious resistance to it, with their own divisions – each side fully realized, with a magnificent economy of means, in a tale as modern as the carnage in Chechnya of late. In War and Peace, however, there is an all but complete absence of any drama of this kind, since the conflict that is nominally staged lacks any truly imagined adversary. Tolstoy, in effect, makes no serious attempt to represent the French invader, but seeks rather to obliterate it by devices of minimization that stretch from a jejune cartoon of Napoleon to voluble protestations that the whole expedition of the Grande Armée was a meaningless affair anyway. The consequence, inevitably, is something close to a chauvinist tract of political intent, in which the enemy remains essentially abstract, not a concrete figuration of two contending historical forces. It is partly for this reason that War and Peace, though it undoubtedly is – despite Tolstoy’s own denials – a historical novel, set in a period before the author’s lifetime, is so seldom considered primarily as such today.

But there is another reason for that too. Setting aside the insubstantiality of the French, even within the Russian society it depicts, the novel offers little sense of the passage of historical time – that is, of any disconcerting contrast between the epoch of Alexander I, in which it is set, and of Alexander II, in which it was written. At most, the use of French among aristocrats acts as a generic signifier of difference. Otherwise, we are in a kind of continuous present, a more or less eternal Russia in which the leading characters perform much as if they were contemporaries of the author. It is enough to look at Anna Karenina to see how far we are in the same universe. War and Peace thus offers the curiosity of a historical novel with a very weak sense of history, not because Tolstoy was incapable of one – Hadji Murad shows the opposite – but because at this point he was programmatically committed to treating major historical conflicts as meaningless, in the homemade philosophy set out at such length in the book itself.

Of course, this is not all of War and Peace. What lifts the novel above the level of an idiosyncratic – one might say peculiarly know-nothing – version of romantic nationalism is not just Tolstoy’s extraordinary gifts of observation, and sense of panoramic construction, but the analytic psychology he learnt from Rousseau and (above all) Stendhal, whose role in his development as a writer might be compared with that of Ferguson and Steuart in Scott, as the Enlightenment antidote controlling and redeeming the melodrama of national salvation. The greatness of War and Peace lies here – not in the images d’Épinal of Kutuzov and Napoleon, but in the side of Tolstoy, closer to Laclos and Stendhal, that was relentlessly rationalist in his dissection of motive and feeling. Of course, there is no clear-cut line of division between the two registers of his writing. Much that is conventionally ‘romantic’ in a mediocre sense can be found even in his individual characterizations, brilliant as many of these are. Natasha, for example, has many of the traits of a chocolate-box heroine, the ‘poetic, graceful imp’ (inspired, his sister-in-law reported, in part by Mrs Braddon’s sensation novel Aurora Floyd), whose fantasy function – at the time and since – as winsome vehicle of Russian charm continues to produce kitsch like Orlando Figes’s pot-boiling celebration of the national culture, Natasha’s Dance.⁷ Pierre’s lumbering progress into her arms is the weakest, because most moralistically predictable, feature of the Bildungsroman that the novel also contains. But such impurities are only a reminder of a larger, more constitutive heterogeneity, not so much of this work as such, but of the genre of the historical novel to which it can still be said to belong.

For if the historical novel began as a nation-building exercise in the backwash of romantic reaction to the French Revolution and Napoleonic expansion, the results varied according to context. The curious emptiness of the political space of War and Peace is also, of course, a function of the fact that the Russian Empire was an already constituted great power, which victory in 1812 simply conserved as it was. Behind the novel was not an impulse of emancipation, but of displaced compensation. Smarting from Russian humiliation in the Crimean War, where the troops of Napoleon III had stormed Sebastopol before his eyes, and detesting the liberal intelligentsia that blamed the country’s current defeat on the backwardness of a society still resting on serfdom, Tolstoy fixed on victory over Napoleon I as a salve for contemporary morale and rebuff to the callow intelligentsia of 1856 – ‘treasonable hands that would not hesitate to ignite the fires of revolt’ – who had called for a prompt emancipation of the serfs that he believed could only ‘end in them slaughtering us’.⁸ Central to the purpose of the novel became the counter-projection of a fictive unity of peasantry and aristocracy, repelling the foreign invader despite a Frenchified court and (in reality) all too Germanic high command, to be parodied or ignored.⁹ Historically speaking, the sublimation of a retrospective revanchism could only yield what Shklovsky called the canonization of a legend. War and Peace remains, of course, a great novel; unlike most other masterpieces of conservative imagination, however, fissured and weakened by its political intentions, not strengthened by them.

Elsewhere, writers were less ideologically driven. In Germany, Fontane conceived a historical novel set in the campaign of 1812–13, Vor dem Sturm, in 1863, the same year that Tolstoy began work on his, which was published in 1869. Completed in 1878, it even includes the memories of a Prussian officer who had fought at Borodino on the other side, with the Grande Armée. But Fontane’s patriotism was free of any jingoist spirit, respectful of French adversaries and critical of Prussian defects alike. The Prussian Reformers, learning the lessons of defeat by Napoleon at Jena, had started to modernize the state as Alexander I did not, and Fontane’s pendant to Tolstoy inverts its schema. Its aristocratic heroes raise volunteers to fight the French as they retreat from Russia, only to find that, in a dialectical irony, Prussian habits still make this militia too clumsy and rigid to prevail against them on the Oder. Far from striking any self-satisfied nationalist note, the novel gives full expression to Polish scorn for the vices of Preussentum.¹⁰ In Spain, Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales likewise followed the struggle against Napoleon, but could move to the liberal revolution and absolutist reaction that were intertwined with it in a way that Tolstoy, concluding his narrative before the Decembrist rising of 1825 and Tsarist repression of it, could not. By any measure the greatest monument to the form ever produced – a chain of forty-six historical novels written over forty years, between 1873 and 1912 – it was set off by the disappointments of the Spanish Revolution of 1868, whose roots Galdós traced to the war that had reclaimed the nation’s independence from Napoleon.¹¹ In a panorama unsparing of his country’s defects, without a hint of sentimentality about its nobility or its peasantry, or the frailties of its reformers, a reasoned patriotism and pessimism were conjoined.

In Northern Italy, where French rule was often more appreciated than detested, there was no national reaction against the First Empire, so Manzoni – author of a famous ode to Napoleon – had to situate I promessi sposi much further back in time, to Spanish rule over Milan in the seventeenth century, avoiding any too remote antiquarianism, while offering a parable of popular life to stir patriotic feeling against Austrian dominion in the age of the Holy Alliance. The logic of this international pattern can be seen a contrario from the case of France, where for obvious reasons no comparable historical narrative could be constructed. Strictly construed, the nearest equivalent – noted by Lukács – would be the regional drama of Balzac’s Chouans, a Vendéen version of Scott’s Highlanders. But the centrepiece of romantic historical fiction in France was, of course, Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, whose mediaeval fantasmagoria, free-floating sentimentalism and detective-story motifs place it completely outside the ranks of the classic historical novel as Lukács defined it. Yet this oddity presaged a more pregnant multiplication of the genre.

In the next generation, France became the leading exporter of the costume drama sans phrases, with the extraordinary career of Alexandre Dumas, though England was not far behind with Harrison Ainsworth and G. P. R. James. It is at this point that the historical novel started to acquire its modern ambiguity. Most literary genres have included a variety of registers, and as the Russian Formalists always emphasized, their vitality has typically depended on interactions between high and low, elite and popular forms, either in a circuit within the genre, or via diagonal connections across them. At the same time, the dominant pole within a genre will usually be fairly clear-cut – symbolist poetry, let’s say, lying at the elite end of the spectrum, thrillers at the popular end. The peculiarity of the historical novel, however, has been to elude any stable stratification of high and low. Its evolution exhibits instead an oscillating continuum of registers, including – to use for a moment anachronistic terms – not just ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ but also importantly ‘middle-brow’ ranges of work. It is the extent of this continuum that arguably sets it apart from other narrative forms.

The reason this may be so appears to lie in the nature of its subject matter. For Lukács, the historical novel was essentially epic in form. It was an extensive representation, in Hegelian terms, of the ‘totality of objects’, as opposed to the more concentrated ‘totality of movement’ proper to drama. But if this is a plausible description of the origins of the form, it cannot account for its diffusion. There, it was not an aspiration to the representation of history that would ensure the enormous popularity of fictions about the past, but rather the pre-constituted repertoire of scenes or stories of that history, still overwhelmingly written from the standpoint of battles, conspiracies, intrigues, treacheries, seductions, infamies, heroic deeds and deathless sacrifices, offered to the imagination – everything that was not prosaic daily life in the nineteenth century. Here was the road, so to speak, from Jeanie Deans to Milady. The historical novel that conquered European reading publics in the second half of the nineteenth century would not offend patriotic sentiment, but no longer had a nation-building vocation. The Three Musketeers and its innumerable imitations were entertainment literature.

Side by side with it persisted ‘high’ forms of the genre. Now, however, the typical development was for leading authors to try their hand at the historical novel, composing one or two such works in a corpus otherwise devoted to realistic representations of contemporary life. Barnaby Rudge and Tale of Two Cities, Henry Esmond, Romola and Salammbô illustrate this pattern. Lower down, but still above the stratum of Dumas or Ainsworth, figured writers like Stevenson and Bulwer-Lytton. The central fact to grasp, however (the evidence for this is graphically laid out in Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel) is that the historical novel as a genre predominated massively over all other forms of narrative down to the Edwardian era. It combined enormous market success with continuing aesthetic prestige. In the last season of the Belle Epoque, Anatole France was publishing Les Dieux ont soif, Ford Madox Ford his Fifth Queen; in a postscript, even Conrad would end his career with a couple of historical fictions, set once more in Napoleonic times.

Twenty years later, the scene was utterly changed. By the inter-war period, the historical novel had become déclassé, falling precipitously in literary esteem, out of the ranks of serious fiction. There were two body-blows to its position in the hierarchy of genres. One was the massacres of the First World War itself, that stripped the glamour from battles and high politics, discrediting malignant foes and sacrificial heroes alike. Staged by both sides in 1914 as a gigantic historical contest between good and evil, the war left the survivors with a terrible hangover from melodrama. The swashbuckling fare of a Weyman or Sabatini looked risible from the trenches. But there was also the critical effect of the rise of modernism, broadly construed, to which Jameson has rightly drawn our attention. He points to its primacy of perception as incompatible with totalizing retrospect, rendering impossible a modernist version of the kind of historical novel theorized by Lukács.¹² To this could be added its hostility to the corrupting effects of aesthetic facility – to all that was too readily or immediately available – which struck down the popular and middle-brow versions of the historical novel still more stringently.

Thus if we look at the inter-war scene, the historical novel becomes a recessive form, at virtually all levels, in Europe. In the United States, on the other hand, shielded from the shock of the First World War, Faulkner could produce a Gothic variant, flinching before no melodramatic license, in Absalom, Absalom, while at a less ambitious level its middle range flourished as never before – Thornton Wilder, for example, enjoying a reputation that would have seemed odd in Europe. More spectacularly, Gone with the Wind – a tale of Civil War and Reconstruction with a lightweight resemblance to the romantic nation-building fiction of the previous century – became the most successful historical novel of all time. Significantly, what Europe produced in this middle-market mode was principally Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, the mental escape of a First World War veteran into Antiquity, later fodder for a slack television serial. At a higher level, similar reflexes generated a cluster of historical novels by German exiles – the elder Mann, Broch, Brecht – in which fascism was allegorized into the past, as the rise of Julius Caesar, mobs howling for Augustus, or the killers of the Catholic League, in a deliberately modernizing spirit completely at variance with the classical conception of the historical novel.¹³

If this was an enclave with few consequences, two works of the inter-war period appear by contrast as sign-posts to the future. One is perhaps the only work that defies Jameson’s judgment that a modernist historical novel would be impossible, although it is certainly true that it makes no attempt at that ‘sense of a historian’s interpretive commentary on events’ whose absence, he argues, debars Döblin’s Wallenstein – its ferocious canvas of absurdity designed after the senseless slaughter of the First World War – from such a title. This jeu d’esprit was Orlando, whose metamorphoses of time and gender, breaking with every realist norm, occupy a niche in the development of the genre comparable, in its proleptic isolation, to Michael Kohlhaas on the eve of its classical form. Woolf was a modernist par excellence. That an older realist tradition was not extinguished, but still capable of a remarkable reassertion, was shown by Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, which appeared in 1932. This great novel, which Lukács came to admire, answers to all his criteria save one, which it pointedly reverses. Lukács believed that the true historical novel was carried by a sense of progress, such as had carried Scott. Once this disappeared after 1848, decline to a vitiated antiquarianism set in. The Radetzky March demonstrated the opposite. For Roth’s epic traces the decay of the multinational Habsburg empire and its dominant class with a clarity and artistry equal, if not superior, to any progressivist nineteenth-century forebear. A deep historical pessimism proved no bar to a magisterial representation of the totality of objects. Simply, in this reversal the nation-state, once the ideal horizon of the classical historical novel, figures in the novel’s sequel, The Emperor’s Tomb, as the end-point of a social and moral collapse – the shrunken, riven Austria of the Depression and the Heimwehr when these works were composed.

Roth’s achievement attracted little notice at the time. The Second World War, when it came, reinforced the effects of the First. The flow of historical fiction at the lowest levels of the genre, reduced but even in Europe never interrupted, swelled again as mass literary markets expanded with the post-war boom – in Britain, for example, hoary sagas of doughty patriots battling against Napoleon poured – and still pour – off the presses, from C. S. Forester through Dennis Wheatley to Patrick O’Brian. Over time, this output has yielded a teeming universe that can be glimpsed in such omnibus guides as What Historical Novel Do I Read Next?, with its capsule descriptions of over 6,000 titles, and league tables of the most popular historical periods, favoured geographical settings and, last but not least, ‘top historical characters’ – Henry VIII and Jesus Christ tie for fourth place.¹⁴

But the larger and more indiscriminate this stratum became, the lower the depths to which the historical novel was consigned as a respectable literary form. In 1951 it came as something of a shock when Marguerite Yourcenar won the Prix Femina for her Mémoires d’Hadrien, so completely out of season did historical fiction of any kind – even such a strange anomaly as this one – seem in the true republic of letters. Did people still write that kind of thing? The profound discredit into which the genre had fallen was made clear by the initial reception of what remains in retrospect the greatest historical novel of the century, Lampedusa’s Leopard. Initially rejected for publication, even when it appeared it was greeted with widespread bafflement by Italian critics.¹⁵ How could such an old-fashioned piece of work have been produced in the contemporary world? Should it be taken seriously as literature?

In fact, what Lampedusa had done was to take the same theme as Roth – the fate of an aristocracy in a dying Absolutist order, amidst the rise of romantic nationalism – to yet grander conclusions, in a verdict of pitiless detachment on the nation-building process in Italy, the adjustments of the old order in Sicily to it, and the fate of individuals at the cross-roads between them, viewed in the light of eternity. Here, the interlocking of historical and existential registers, that for Lukács and Jameson defines this form, found – in the counterpointing of the futile survival of a class and the cosmic extinction of an individual embodying it – supreme expression. Far from being a throwback to Victorian models, the sudden elongation of the novel’s conclusion, jumping twenty years forward to the final disintegration of the taxidermic familiar of the Prince, marks The Leopard as a distinctively modern masterpiece.

Strikingly, in the same years that Lampedusa was composing his portrait of the Risorgimento in Palermo, not so far away in the Mediterranean a historical novel was moving in the opposite direction. Najib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, depicting semi-colonial Egypt from the rise of the Wafd at the end of the First World War to the activity of Muslim Brothers and Communists during the Second, through the story of a bourgeois family, was written under Farouk, and only saw the light of day after the monarchy had been overthrown, in the Sturm und Drang of the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. Mahfouz had begun as a writer of pure costume dramas, Egyptian-style – that is, fanciful romances set in Pharaonic Antiquity. With the Cairo Trilogy he became a historical novelist such as Lukács has conceived one: real historical figures interwoven with fictional characters, middling heroes, a sense of popular life, and – last but not least – a powerful underlying narrative of progress, however halting or ambiguous, towards national emancipation, even if in this case, technically a Zeitroman, overlapping with his own lifetime. Here it was language rather than prejudice that isolated his work, unknown to the non-Arabophone world till its translation into French many years later.¹⁶

A reclusive semi-Belgian, a dead Sicilian, an obscure Egyptian. That was about where the historical novel lay, a few antique jewels on a huge mound of trash, for some thirty years after the Second World War. Then, abruptly, the scene changed, in one of the most astonishing transformations in literary history. Today, the historical novel has become, at the upper ranges of fiction, more widespread than it was even at the height of its classical period in the early nineteenth century. This resurrection has also, of course, famously been a mutation. The new forms signal the arrival of the postmodern. To discuss these with due amplitude would require another occasion. The postmodern turn has, of course, extended across virtually all the arts, with local effects distinctive to each of them. But if we consider its morphology in the literary field, there seems little doubt that the most striking single change it has wrought in fiction is the pervasive recasting of it around the past. Since postmodernism was famously defined, by Jameson himself, as the aesthetic regime of an ‘age that has forgotten how to think historically’, the resurrection of the historical novel might seem at first glance paradoxical.¹⁷ But, of course, this is a second coming with a difference. Now, virtually every rule of the classical canon, as spelt out by Lukács, is flouted or reversed. Among other traits, the historical novel reinvented for postmoderns may freely mix times, combining or inter-weaving past and present; parade the author within the narrative; take leading historical figures as central rather than marginal characters; propose counterfactuals; strew anachronisms; multiply alternative endings; traffic with apocalyptics. By no means all, of course, in the vast range of historical novels – including many a Zeitroman – produced by accredited writers in the past thirty years exhibit these features. But the core of the revival has typically displayed some or most of them, while around it more traditional forms have proliferated too.

How are we to understand the aetiology of these forms? In a wonderful passage, Jameson speculates that the function of their ‘exaggerated inventions of a fabulous and non-existent past (and future)’ is to ‘rattle at the bars of our extinct sense of history, unsettle the emptiness of our temporal historicity, and try convulsively to reawaken the dormant existential sense of time by way of the strong medicine of lies and impossible fables, the electro-shock of repeated doses of the unreal and the unbelievable’.¹⁸ This is a powerful suggestion. But it raises the question of its possessive pronoun. Who is the ‘we’ of such loss of temporality, that extinction of a sense of history which is ours? Are the postmodern forms of the historical novel effectively universal today?

Certainly, if we were to make a roll-call of all those contemporary novelists who have in one respect or another contributed to the new explosion of invented pasts, the list would stretch around the world, from North America to Europe to Russia to the Subcontinent to Japan to the Caribbean and Latin America. In that sense, such forms have become as global as the postmodern itself. But if we want to track the emergence of the mutation that has produced them, and venture beyond an inventory to their taxonomy, we probably need to consider the spatial organization of this universe.

No aesthetic time-span is ever homogeneous. The dominance of postmodern forms in the past thirty years did not, and could not, displace all others. At the opposite ends of Asia, something like the classical imagination of the historical novel lived on, producing in Indonesia and Arabia two remarkable cycles of nationalist fiction that can be regarded as, in their way, cousins of Mahfouz: Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, composed between 1975 and 1985, and Abdelrahman Munif’s quintet Cities of Salt, already much freer in its handling of time and probability, written in the eighties. These are novels, each starting at the turn of the twentieth century, written directly out of the experience of Dutch and American imperialism. But they are outliers within the universe of postmodern recreations of the past. To follow these, we must cross the oceans.

For in point of origin, there is little doubt where meta-historical fiction began. It was born in the Caribbean with Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo which appeared in 1949, followed by his El siglo de las luces in 1962.¹⁹ Settings: Haiti, Cuba, French Guyana. Five years later came García Márquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude. Over the next thirty years, Latin American historical fiction became a torrent, with many tributaries beyond Carpentier and García Márquez – Roa Bastos, Carlos Fuentes, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Fernando del Paso, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many more. Here, unquestionably, was the pacemaker for the global diffusion of these forms, which were invented in the periphery – like the concept of the post-modern itself. Not that sources in the centre were entirely missing from it: Carpentier was steeped in French surrealism; Orlando, translated by Borges, put García Márquez into a fever. But clearly, it was the historical experience of Latin America itself that gave birth to these imaginings of its past. The question is: what experience?

A standard answer would be: if we set aside individual precursors, the collective take-off of these forms dates from the early 1970s. What they transcribe, essentially, is an experience of defeat – history as what, for all its heroics, lyricism and colour, went wrong in the continent – the discarding of democracies, the crushing of guerrillas, the spread of military tyrannies, the disappearances and tortures, of that period. Hence the centrality of dictator novels in this cluster of writing. The distorted, fantastical shapes of an alternative past, according to this reading, would stem from the thwarted hopes of the present, as so many reflections, admonitions or consolations. It is difficult to deny all force to this diagnosis. But we should remember that the themes of Carpentier’s two originating works themselves, written long before the grim years of continental slaughter and repression, were the Haitian Revolution and the impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. These novels, founding texts of magical realism, do not minimize the disappointments and betrayals that overtook each – and which occupy much of the narrative – but their drive is wholly affirmative. The first appeared in the year the Chinese Revolution triumphed; the second just after the Bay of Pigs. Their relationship to the consolidated forms of the fiction they set in motion poses an interesting problem. Could Saramago, a historical novelist whose belated career was ignited by the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, be regarded as a collateral descendant of this now otherwise stranded moment of inception?

In the United States, by contrast, if we consider the span of historical novels of one sort or another produced in the same period, the core experiences triggering the American branch of the phenomenon would appear to be race (Styron, Morrison, Doctorow, Walker) and empire (Mailer, Vidal, Pynchon, DeLillo, Stone, Sontag). Here the most distinctive paradigm has been society as conspiracy; not the ostentatious dictator, but the secret network as the hidden ossature of rule: The Crying of Lot 49, Harlot’s Ghost, Gravity’s Rainbow, A Flag for Sunrise, Underworld – a literature of paranoia offering its own kind of black-magical realism. In Europe, on the other hand, it has been, not the CIA, but the Third Reich and the Judeocide that have polarized historical imagination: Grass, Tournier, Sebald. England, relatively untouched by the Second World War, has generated instead mostly Victoriana – Fowles, Farrell, Ackroyd, Byatt, Carey (an Australian extension) – or reversions to the much more traumatic First World War, as in Barker’s trilogy.

Military tyranny; race murder; omnipresent surveillance; technological war and programmed genocide. The persistent backdrops to the historical fiction of the post-modern period are at the antipodes of its classical forms. Not the emergence of the nation, but the ravages of empire; not progress as emancipation, but impending or consummated catastrophe. In Joycean terms, history as a nightmare from which we still cannot wake up. But if we look, not at the sources or themes of this literature, but at its forms, Jameson suggests we should reverse the judgment. The postmodern revival, by throwing verisimilitude to the winds, fabricating periods and outraging probabilities, ought rather to be seen as a desperate attempt to waken us to history, in a time when any real sense of it has gone dead.

Still, he concludes, in just these conditions does not the Lukácsian connexion between great social events and the existential fate of individuals remain typically out of reach? Benjamin, who detested the idea of progress nurtured by nineteenth-century historicism – the outlook that lay behind so much of the classical historical novel – would not have been surprised, or perhaps felt much regret. He used yet another image of awakening. The angel of history is moving away from something he stares at. ‘Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed.’²⁰ Part of the impulse behind the contemporary historical novel may also lie here.

Postscript

The text above derives from a colloquium held in May 2004 at UCLA, at which Hayden White and myself were invited to respond to a paper given by Fredric Jameson, entitled ‘Is the Historical Novel Still Possible?’ The arguments of this paper White attacked – to Jameson’s surprise: the two were old friends – with vigour, the exchange between them becoming the focus of ensuing discussion. Three years later, speaking on the same subject in the course of a trip to Brazil, I was asked if my talk could be translated in the journal of the CEBRAP (Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento, founded in 1969 as a forum of opposition under the dictatorship). I had no objection, provided that Jameson’s talk, to which mine was a response, appeared in the same issue of the centre’s journal. To this Jameson readily agreed, and the two texts were published together in the March 2007 number of Novos Estudos Cebrap.²¹ There matters rested till 2011, when my piece appeared in a somewhat amplified version in the London Review of Books.²² With some emendations and footnotes added, this is essentially the text that appears above.

Since then, however, Jameson has notably enlarged and enriched the original ideas of his UCLA talk, published only in Brazil, in The Antinomies of Realism, his most extended reflection on prose fiction as a form, which came out in the autumn of 2013. In this, ideas about Scott, about Tolstoy, about Galdós, about George Eliot, and about Wallenstein sketched in 2004 become sustained considerations of each in chapters either wholly or largely devoted to them, within an overarching argument about the metamorphoses of the novel in the course of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The book ends with a chapter on the historical novel itself, its title a reprise of his contribution to the colloquium in Los Angeles, but three times as long, its case altogether more capacious and ambitious. In his reworking of themes of his original paper, modifications here and there in the light of my response to them are perhaps discernible: treatment of Scott shifts from Waverley to Heart of Midlothian; Sartre’s critique of evil is invoked for the general absence of villains in Eliot’s fiction; Kutuzov’s standing as embodiment of the popular wisdom of the Russian peasantry recedes, and Hadji Murad stages an entrance.²³ But the integrity of Jameson’s overall conception of historical fiction is not altered, but rather renewed and expanded, as it is subsumed within a distinctive theory of the destiny of the novel as such.

From the outset, Jameson had followed Lukács in maintaining a structural continuity between the historical novel pioneered by Scott and the realist novel inaugurated by Balzac, separated by the times of the society they depicted, but less by the scope and methods of the narratives they set in them. A change, however, supervened in Jameson’s understanding of realism – from Balzac onwards the dominant mode of nineteenth-century fiction in Europe – with the rise of styles of literary criticism in America loosely termed affect theory, whose crystallization in pedagogic compendia and the like occurred towards the end of the first decade of this century.²⁴ In effect, Antinomies of Realism became the first systematic construction of the notion of affect into a constituent dimension of the whole course of classical realism, marked – so Jameson argued – by a basic tension between its two organizing principles: narrative and affect, or the opposition between story-telling, or the récit, and conveyance of that range of near-bodily sensations,²⁵ without conscious intent or familiar name, which he suggests is often better captured by the German term Stimmung, of which Zola was master. The contradiction between the two is essentially one of temporality: narrative always presupposes, even if it does not invariably figure, a linear chronology, where affect is an ‘insurrection of the present’ against it. The history of realism, he contends, begins in a genealogy of storytelling, and ends with its dissolution in the representation of affect – the route, so to speak, from Michael Kohlhaas to Molloy.²⁶

In the course of this trajectory, Jameson’s argument continues, realist fiction spawned at least four subgenres – the Bildungsroman, novels of melodrama, of adultery, naturalism – as well as mutations of the historical novel itself, which had preceded it; not to speak of hybrids mixing these variants, Ulysses offering a compendium of residues of them all save melodrama. After surveying examples of this overall development in the forms and torsions of realism, from Goethe through Balzac and Dickens, Eliot and Maupassant, to Faulkner and Kluge, Antinomies delivers its finale in the longest chapter of the book, a reconsideration of the question of whether a historical novel in the true sense is still possible today, and if so how and why.

Here Jameson returns to a thesis on the conditions of the form he first broached in his talk of 2004. In its classical version, the narrative of a historical novel required the underlying fuse of an ‘Event’ of revolutionary proportions – that is, one which changes the nature of a society – to set its story in motion. In Scott, this was the destruction of clan-bound feudalism in Scotland by the bourgeois modernization brought to it by Hanoverian arms; in Balzac, the French Revolution that overthrew the ancien régime, as premise of the whole Comédie Humaine; in Eliot’s Romola, the twin shocks of the Renaissance and the Reformation, prefigured by the arrival of Greek learning and the meteor of Savonarola in Florence; in Galdós, presumably, the defeat of Trafalgar, presaging the overthrow of Bourbon misrule and the birth of Spanish liberalism at Cádiz.²⁷ In each of such cases, to the revolutionary event corresponds the entry of a collective popular agency. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, that collectivity becomes for the first time a multitude without names, the Russian ‘people’, of whom Kutuzov is no more than the stand-in for its lack of any conscious design. The next stage in this dissociation are historical novels in which names – those of famous individuals – linger in the absence of major events: Henry Ford in Dos Passos or Doctorow, Humboldt in Kehlmann.

What then, finally, of today’s practitioners? Here Jameson pulls out the coup d’éclat that separates his account of the form in Antinomies from his adumbration of its themes a decade earlier. In the age of fully planetary capital and of mounting metereological calamity, the space and time of the historical novel become in principle exponentially extended: in space, spanning the entire globe, in time moving not only backwards beyond the milestones of early modernity, but above all forwards into the far future of the race. For that move, resort to the only genre trafficking in it is unavoidable: ‘I want to claim, however, outrageously, that the historical novel of the future (which is to say our own present) will necessarily be Science-Fictional’.²⁸ A characteristically striking image captures the change he observes in the form: ‘The historical novel today must be seen as an immense elevator that moves us up and down in time, its sickening lifts and dips corresponding to the euphoric or dystopian mood in which we wait for the doors to open. For historicity today – an acute consciousness of what Heidegger calls the historicality of our historical situations – demands a temporal span far exceeding the biological limits of the individual human organism: so that the life of a single character – world-historical or not – can scarcely accommodate it; nor even the meagre variety of our own chronological experiences of a limited national time and place’.²⁹

The text Jameson takes as exemplary of this alteration is David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), composed of six disparate layers of narrative, four situated in the past between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth century, and two in successively more remote futures, linked by the passage of traces between them, and all but one divided into two interrupted and symmetrically arranged parts: diary of a lawyer in the South Seas in the mid-nineteenth century; letters of a young composer in Bruges in the 1930s; story of an investigator into nuclear malfeasance in California in the 1960s; remembrance of the misfortunes of an ageing publisher in Britain of the 1980s; drama of a rebellion of clones fabricated as a spectacle by their makers in a dystopian Korea; ruminations of a post-apocalyptic survivor, in a Hawaii reverted to tribal barbarism and redeemed by all but virtual extraterrestrials. In what sense is the upshot a historical novel? After expressing some reservation about the combination of times and places that it offers, by no means exhaustive of contemporary imagination, Jameson stakes its claim to canonical status on two more significant features of Cloud Atlas as a historical novel.

Of these, the first lies in its composition as a sequence of pastiches, each mimicking signature tics and genres of the period in which they are set or – in the case of those cast in the future – imagined, linking it to what Jameson has elsewhere termed the nostalgia film, and defining this work as postmodern, since here too periods are essentially grasped as styles, conceived as the ‘evolution of taste, experience and the social constraints that determine “adventure” in history’.³⁰ The second lies in the way that its respective imaginaries of the future polarize the alternatives before humanity as either techno-dystopia or barbarism, thereby fulfilling ‘one of the great indispensable functions of ideological analysis: namely to show the contradictions in which we are ourselves imprisoned, the opposition beyond which we cannot think.’³¹

Does the novel leave us trapped there? Not exactly, in the sense that it offers the relief of a set of happy endings to its stories, in reverse chronological order, closing with the moral conversion of its first protagonist to pre-Lincoln abolitionism. A mere sop to the reader? Alongside these concessions, however, comes another and better strand of narrative, in the communication of messages from each tale to another, signs of human perdurance, defamiliarized by the telling omission of computers and the internet from its technologies of transmission. Certainly, Cloud Atlas does present ‘immemorial human cruelty’ in a relentless sequence of incarceration, wreckage and misery, but these horrors do not cancel the other side of its ‘immense glissando through all the styles and affects of history’, or ‘the joyousness of this art,’ captured in page after page of its thematics of communication – the two, if taken on their own each purely ideological, forming in tandem ‘distinct orchestral voices heard together’. The lesson of the novel is that the value of the best works of art lies not in their content, but their form, which relativizes their intended ideas and meanings. Properly aesthetic are not their referential dimensions, so often shabby ideological messages, or ‘rather pitiful calls to this or that action’, but their reminders of the plenitude of all human impulses, which along with the blackest of these include the revolutionary-utopian and the temptation of the good, ‘the will to escape and to be free, the delight in craftmanship and production, the implacably satiric, unremittingly skeptical gaze’. Jameson ends on this note: ‘Art has no function but to reawaken all these differences at once in an ephemeral instant; and the historical novel no function save to resurrect for one more brief moment their multitudinous coexistence in History itself’.³²

How is this reconceptualization of the historical novel for the new century to be viewed? The cast of Jameson’s Marxism has always been Hegelian. The real is rational: in the sense that it is intelligible and cannot be circumvented or denied, but must be understood, however critically, in the historical logic that has produced it. In treating of the arts, that has meant a practice that is consistently affirmative. Very rare, if not altogether absent, are negative judgments, works meriting these falling below the plumb line of serious engagement. To literary as to visual or musical arts, the attention of Jameson’s writing has been (as again in Antinomies) not to content but to form – an option derived in his case less from the Russian critics who pioneered its primacy than from Adorno, who gave it his own distinctive twist, in part derived from a critique of expressionism, which Jameson would adopt and develop: form as generative of content, where it matters. His admiration for Cloud Atlas follows from this double commitment. That it captures much of what defines the novel is clear. Does it overlook other significant aspects of it?

Jameson’s account, cogent as it is, of the different genres with which the novelist plays omits one – fantasy literature, whose trademark is to bathe in the supernatural. In good part this is because he deals with Cloud Atlas alone, without concern for the rest of Mitchell’s fiction, in general a perfectly legitimate and familiar procedure, but in this case one that ignores the unusually explicit connexions between them, each work pointedly containing characters featured in another, to the point that Mitchell terms them a single evolving ‘Über-novel’. In the chain of these works, the fantasy element is conspicuous in both the first and the last of the sequence so far, Ghostwritten and Boneclocks/Slade House, where the supernatural is at full bore: metempsychosis, reincarnation, immortality. Though adjacent enough on the shelves of commercial bookshops, and sharing a certain obvious departure from the tangible world, fantasy literature is categorically distinct from science fiction. However learned stray practitioners – Mitchell compares himself to Tolkien, declaring of his über-novel ‘I have created my own Middle Earth’ – it is much closer to a pure phenomenon of mass culture, whereas science fiction has from the start generated literature in both elite and popular registers, avant-garde and pulp forms, much like the historical novel itself, if in markedly different proportions. Fantasy literature lacks such ambiguity: with its infantilist tilt, it is a product of the ‘culture industry’ as Adorno and Horkheimer termed it.

What then is its role in the universe of the über-novel? Effectively, it offers its own kind of conduit to religion. Not that Mitchell himself is a believer in any of the major available faiths, even if among them he expresses a definite preference for Buddhism. He is ‘post-secular’ in the usage now current, averse equally to theist and atheist dogma, uplifted by a spirituality transcending them. Reincarnation, whatever its literal truth, about which he reserves judgment, features prominently in his fiction as a chastening reminder of the consequences of the actions of the living after they have gone, never more needed than today as humanity faces the possibility that, unchecked, it will perish in an ecological abyss. Against that prospect, belief capable of remedial action is a barrier, be it even an individual drop in the ocean; since in the concluding pronouncement of Cloud Atlas, oceans are ‘but a multitude of drops’.

In the curve of the über-novel, if fantasy has increasingly gained the upper hand over science fiction, it is eclipsed by the latter in what remains Mitchell’s best-seller, with its clones and prescients, rather than noncorpa, horologists and the rest, and science as imagined by the author constitutes the other shuttle beyond the mundane in this fiction. So too, if the mandalas of Tibet have inspired one of the two major readings of his work, the computations of Digital Humanities have prompted the other, a mathematical calculation complementing a mystical hermeneutic.³³ The sensibility accommodating such contrasted approaches finds graphic display in an exchange between critic and writer in the former book:

RBH: It seems that the Anthropocene is a kind of wake-up call that geological time is all too linear; and the damage to the earth and its species is irreversible. By exploring reincarnation and cyclical time as an alternative approach to linear geological time, it seems to me that your works perhaps suggest the value of seeing the cyclical within the linear. So amid the threat of a long, dystopic, linear decline, our ends are still others’ beginnings and change is still possible at each given moment in this endless cycle of human births, and rebirths, and experiences. What do you think?

DM: Yes! I’ll take that and raise you one. The inevitability of life after the Anthropocene, that even if we wipe ourselves out as a species and take a lot of species down with us – as we’ve already done, heaven knows – that there will still be life, I find great solace in that … Whatever damage we do to the earth, even every single nuclear bomb in existence and all the damage that would do – it wouldn’t be enough to wipe out everything. Come back in a billion years and just see what’s flourishing here. It may come out of the lakes underneath Antarctica, for all I know. But there will always be something – and the chances are, there’d be a lot, lot more than a small something. It would be a big something that would be left after us. And that is hopeful and a source of hope. Raising it, I’ve read this lovely book, The World without Us, it’s by an American multi-discipline science guy … What would be left of humans [without nuclear destruction] in billions and billions and billions of years would be ever-diminishing, but never quite vanishing, signals that we sent out between the invention of radio waves and the rise of broadband and Wi-Fi which no longer is transmitting our products into outer space. What would be left is about a hundred years’ worth of broadcasts and radio waves that would eventually come back to the same spot, because the universe is spherical. Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t it an antidote to the pollution, and the spilled mercury sulphate, and the albatrosses dead in oil slicks, and the Russian president’s bombing citizens in Syria to provoke refugee crises to hit the economies of the countries that are punishing him with trade sanctions for having invaded Ukraine, et cetera. Isn’t it an antidote to all of that? I find it is.³⁴

What light, if any, does this throw on Cloud Atlas? Perhaps this. As a historical novel, it recounts a series of disasters and defeats, linked and offset by a chain of transmissions, material in form, spiritual in effect – science and religion offering solace, such as Mitchell finds it above, for the tares of this world. In that, the novel is postmodern not just in its construction of tiered pastiche, but in its simulation of the beyond. The allure of the supernatural – quasi-technology, para-theology – offers balm for the wounds of the natural. But the compensation it supplies is never that serious. It is belief-lite, an exercise closer to play than prayer, as befits the postmodern. It could hardly be otherwise, since after all these novels are regularly hailed by reviewers as fun to read, sporting in the liveliest fashion with an array of popular genres. Mitchell is without question an accomplished writer, mimicking any number of period styles with panache, and commanding without pretension a mixed bag of intellectual resources. The fortune of Cloud Atlas as a best-seller might be compared to that of The Name of the Rose, another historical novel whose own success was based on its sublimation of a popular genre, the mystery story, into a changeling of erudition. Less of a scholar than Eco, Mitchell is a more gifted writer, but the nature of the standing, and success in the market, their signature works have enjoyed is not dissimilar.

To reflections of this sort Jameson has a ready answer, having already noted that the polarized future of Mitchell’s novel, cyber-totalitarianism and palaeo-barbarism, generate ‘their respective lines of flight in religion and science, the transmission of salvational legend and the safeguarding of the last great scientific discoveries’. More fundamentally, do we in any case ‘have to accept authorial intention?’ – a fallacy Jameson’s whole work has condignly side-stepped, without need of thanks to the New Critics of old. Still, a pair of doubts perhaps remain. Those two strands of which he speaks in Cloud Atlas – the history of imprisonments and timeless cruelty, and the transmission of joyful escape from their grip – are they of equivalent weight? For a younger critic, in their ‘strained efforts’ to imagine ‘dim, spectral utopias’, the latter are little more than progressive daydreams. The rubric of the latest wave of the form cannot be reconfigured as from disaster to deliverance: rather what persists, more radically than before, are ‘overwhelmingly historical novels about defeat and dead-ends’.³⁵ The measure of truth in this can be gauged against the claim with which Jameson ends Antinomies. If the historical novel has no function but to resurrect the multitudinous coexistence of all conflicting human impulse in one brief moment, does that not mean that its traditional vocation, as Lukács and Jameson himself once conceived it, to capture the collision of contrasting modes of production and their progressive movement from one to another, has vanished?

That matters may be otherwise has since become clear. The envoi of 2010 was not to be Jameson’s last word on the form. In the spring of 2022 appeared a buoyant essay on The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, an exhilarating tour of its world that is perhaps his warmest single response to any historical novel on record.³⁶ Across close to a thousand pages, Tokarczuk tracks the adventurous career of Jacob Frank, a former merchant trading in silks and jewels, in what are today the borderlands of Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Hungary in the 1750s, after proclaiming himself a messiah, the reincarnation of a previous Jewish claimant, who to save his life converted in due course to Islam.³⁷ Attracting a schismatic following in the Jewish communities through which he moved; accepting formal conversion to Catholicism in 1760, imprisoned for thirteen years in Częstochowa by the Church, released by Russian troops; migrating to Moravia, received by the Austrian Empress and her son, visited by the future emperor of Russia; ending as a prosperous, self-styled Baron of Offenbach with his own guards in Germany, Frank expired in the epoch of French Revolution, his daughter becoming ‘holy mistress’ of his following and receiving a visit from Alexander I after the battle of Leipzig. Drawing crowds everywhere during his years of freedom, Jacob himself is the largely silent centre of criss-crossing tales of multiple individuals in the Jewish and gentile communities around him, whose stories make up the spoken substance of the novel.

What sort of a composition are we dealing with? Jameson is forthright: ‘The Books of Jacob takes its place alongside the great postmodern meganovels’, to be set beside those of Pynchon, Perec, García Márquez, Bolaño. Of its literary calibre, there is indeed little doubt. If Mitchell is not an insignificant author, Tokarczuk is a writer of another order. Are her novels postmodern? She doesn’t like talk of genres, comparing critics who go in for it to commentators on just one sport or, worse still, purveyors of brands, a pestilence of capitalism, and the forms of her own fiction, as so far translated, are notably various.³⁸ But its nonchalance with time, ease with pastiche, transgression of biology and physics have generally earned her the designation postmodern in Poland, which she has not always rejected. Is the sheer size of The Books of Jacob, its girth unlike anything she has previously written, another such attribute? Very much so, would suggest the gifted younger Italian critic Stefano Ercolino, in a recent study of The Maximalist Novel, defining it by a distinctive combination of some ten salient features. Together, these make this form ‘the most mature and controversial fruition’ of the ‘broad postmodern cultural horizon’.³⁹ Whether or not The Books of Jacob corresponds to such a claim, it is fairly clear that the enthusiasm of Jameson’s reading of it has other sources.

One of these may be a little known, or at least little noticed, affinity. At some point in his past, Jameson spent time in Poland, even picking up a bit of Polish, and taking the measure of all that was most original, and often least widely appreciated abroad, of its culture: ‘the oldest Slavic literary language, with a rich Renaissance literature dating from a period in which Poland was the largest country in Europe’, generating traditions ‘beside which a late developing Russian literary language is little more than an upstart’, and producing ‘a very different novelistic discourse’ from which ‘the mystical and transcendental overtones of Dostoevsky (or in a different way Tolstoy) are wholly absent’.⁴⁰ The passage comes from Jameson’s remarkable and en cours de route pointedly political essay on Prus’s masterpiece of 1890, The Doll, still little known outside Poland. In it he quotes at length the central figure’s reaction to the ‘new urban and industrial miseries’ on display in the streets of late-nineteenth-century Warsaw – ragged men and women, piteous children, weary dray horses, despairing dogs, bark-slashed trees, pavements like broken teeth, every object looking ‘sick and wounded’. In the same year Jameson was citing this, Tokarczuk published a book-length essay on The Doll, in commenting on which a compatriot dwells on the same passage.⁴¹

The Books of Jacob is, of course, in one sense, from its biblically inflected title onwards, ‘all about religion’. Not the Catholic sort so much, although that certainly appears, as do Jewish variants, and with it flights of the transcendental to which Jameson had thought Polish literature traditionally immune. These license postmodern farewells, of many kinds, to the natural laws of the world: voyages of the undead, magic amulets, mystical trances, sudden clairvoyance. But they do so less in either a fideistic or frivolous spirit than as part of the subjective universe of the groups and characters of the time. Tokarczuk herself, a calmly declared atheist, neither coquettes with nor scants its beliefs, treating them with respect but without reverence, in a tone of benevolent good humour and sympathy that Jameson captures well, comparing the rotations of all-seeing Yente, a living corpse, around the life below her to a kind of pre-modern Sputnik. The serious side of Tokarczuk’s treatment of religion lies elsewhere, in her radical reversal of her country’s long traditions of antisemitism, and tolerance for capsizals of belief between the three major faiths of the region and the period.

Jewish conversions to Catholicism were often, moreover, the product of land-hunger among the poor, as Jameson emphasizes. Poland was ruled by wealthy magnates, flanked by lesser gentry who could be needy and were usually greedy, grinding the downtrodden. Class was everywhere, and nowhere more so than in the condition of those who were not even Christian. Jameson:

‘We’re not allowed to buy land, settle down permanently. They chase us off in all directions’; ‘A man who does not have a piece of land is not a man.’ And this is the drive behind the sham conversions: to get the Polish aristocracy, to get the Church, to give the community their own land on the aristocrats’ great estates; this is the deeper promise of Jacob, the drive behind the longing for the Messiah, however personal the fascination he exerts, his charisma, may seem.

Those who felt that longing were neither blind nor dumb. The inhabitants of this world are like previsions of Gramsci’s dictum, born of his own background in the Sardinian peasantry, that everyone is in their own fashion an intellectual. Jameson comments: ‘As in few other novels, they all think all the time; stubbornly they all have their opinions on everything and anything, and are prepared to argue them vociferously at a moment’s notice.’

Not just theological niceties, but more material matters arouse them too. For what Jacob brings with him is not just an inter-rabbinical dispute about the laws of Moses, but an overthrow of the Law itself – whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, political, sexual or dietary, as fore-shadowed a hundred years earlier by his predecessor Sabbatai Zevi, who lives again in Jacob. His appeal is antinomian, inspiring the vision of a rebellion against all the rules and constraints, the institutional cruelties of hierarchy, property, matrimony in the existing world, in the hope of a better one. It is easy to see why this dimension of Tokarczuk’s story – the flaring of a spirit of untamed insurgency – should be so attractive to Jameson. Here, after all, is a major fictional representation of his most abiding object of reflection and attachment, the imagination across successive epochs of fundamental alternatives to the established order. That Jacob’s version ended as it did, the rebel transformed into everything his promise rebelled against, a liberating messianic desire ultimately degenerating into petty baronial privilege, is no surprise to author or critic. Neither is downcast by that fall. Jameson ends his tribute to the strange incandescence of The Book of Jacob on a note all his own:

The glimpse of an old and prosperous Jacob in Offenbach, checking his investments on the newly established Frankfurt stock exchange, may well lead Messianists sadly to conclude that he was, after all, just another fraud and conman, merely the most recent of false Messiahs. Yet hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays virtue, and it is no small thing to found a movement that sweeps across whole landscapes, languages and generations. Even the false Messiah glows with that Messianism on which we warm our hands. Never mind! What is important here is that Olga Tokarczuk has learned to do the impossible: to write the novel of the collective.

2022

4

PERSIAN LETTERS

Montesquieu thought that his novel founded a genre, its success inspiring the wave of epistolary fiction that followed it.¹ Historians have often seen it as the opening shot of an age, the era of the Enlightenment. It is doubtful whether any other work of European fiction could make such a double claim. Neither, certainly, can be accepted without qualification, and the validity of the first may look less clear-cut than the second. The origins of the epistolary novel are famously remote and heteroclite: straggling from Ovid’s Heroides or Cicero’s correspondence to Abelard and Heloise, Renaissance manuals of etiquette to romances of the précieux. Real and fictional letters were long contiguous as forms, with moralism, sentiment and satire overlapping as successive impulses. The first pure epistolary fiction, whose title speaks for itself, Juan de Segura’s Processo de cartas de amores que entre dos amantes passaron (1548) had a real-life sequel in Alvise Pasqualigo’s Lettere amorose (1563). Satirical uses of the form, again pioneered first in Spain and then in Italy, came later with Quevedo’s Cartas del caballero de la tenaza (1627) and Ferrante Pallavicino’s Corriero svagliato (1641). Employed as a subsidiary device within narratives, the number of letters steadily increased in novels of French gallantry over the same period. The first two European best-sellers, widely translated and repeatedly reprinted, were Pierre de Guilleragues’s Lettres portugaises (1669) and Giovanni Marana’s L’Esploratore turco (1684), both anonymous texts purporting to have been composed from the social and geographical margins of the continent, by a Portuguese nun and an Ottoman spy – setting new standards in turn for confessional intensity and satirical ambition.

So Montesquieu’s novel by no means came out of the blue. Much in its formula had already been tried out: an anonymous finder or presenter of missives from another language – Greek (Processo), Portuguese, Arabic, now Farsi; an ironic gaze at Europe from Asia; a mixture of registers, assorting the quotidian with the exotic, the affective with the philosophical. Montesquieu drew directly on Marana, even borrowing occasional details from the ‘Turkish spy’. But he was not wrong in thinking Persian Letters represented something new, that would give birth to a genre. His novel appeared in 1721. Narrowly construed, simply as the device of a regard éloigné, it engendered a tidal wave of imitators – Russian (1735), Jewish (1736), Chinese (1739–40), Peruvian (1747), Siamese (1751), Iroquois (1752), Moroccan (1768), Indian (1769) Polish (1770), African (1771), Tahitian (1784) Letters. Among those who tried their hand at these exercises in a perverse Eurocentrism were Goldsmith, Voltaire, Marat. But more broadly considered, Persian Letters initiated the generic hegemony of the epistolary novel across the century, which counts among its landmarks: Pamela (1731) and Clarissa (1748); La Vie de Marianne (1731–41) and Le Paysan parvenu (1732); La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774); Humphrey Clinker (1771) and Le Paysan perverti (1775); Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) and Hyperion (1797); ending perhaps with Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1799) and Delphine (1802). Fielding and Prévost might complain of the artifice of the form, but even with Defoe, Voltaire and Sterne at their side, they were no match at the higher end of prose fiction for the combined forces of Richardson, Marivaux, Crébillon, Rousseau, Goethe, Smollett, Restif, Laclos, Hölderlin, Foscolo, de Staël.

What made Persian Letters a turning point in this development? In the first place, a technical innovation. Structurally, epistolary fiction permits of five sender-to-receiver variations, although one of these has always remained a null class. Novels composed of letters may contain: a single correspondent and single recipient; two reciprocal correspondents; a single correspondent and multiple recipients; multiple correspondents and multiple recipients; and multiple correspondents and a single recipient (of which there seems to be no example). Processo de cartas established the second. The Lettres portugaises consecrated the first. L’Esploratore turco exemplified the third. It was Montesquieu who introduced the fourth, with a polyphonic correspondence of twenty signatures exchanging 161 letters. The possibilities of this more complex form were not to be fully explored until Laclos. In Persian Letters, it remains highly asymmetrical, in keeping with the narrative structure itself. Two Persian nobles, Usbek and Rica, travel by stages from Ispahan to Paris, where they reside for eight years, reporting their observations of French life and customs to compatriots in Venice and Smyrna, or each other, with occasional messages between Usbek and his wives or eunuchs at home. The great bulk of the letters, both in number and length, are descriptions or reflections from Paris to correspondents in the Adriatic or Aegean, without interlocution: their recipients may write in their turn, but do not reply to them. True exchanges occur only between Paris and Persia, and these alone detonate actions. The ‘performative’ potential of the letter, in other words – its most dynamic function – remains underdeveloped: the traditional ‘constative’ register still has the upper hand. Dissociated from conduct, most of the correspondence moves on the plane of reflection: social comment or intellectual speculation without specific narrative force. In this mode, characterization – deprived of incident – inevitably remains weak. Rica is younger and supposedly more adaptable than Usbek, but there is little sustained difference between what they write to each other; while Rhedi and Ibben are simply names. We are a long way from the personalities of a later novelistic world.

The fictional structure of Persian Letters, however, is more than a flimsy vehicle for philosophical disquisitions. Montesquieu’s narrative framework is far from perfunctory. He took great pains with its temporal and spatial coordinates, using a composite of the Muslim solar and lunar years, and calculating travelling times between cities with precision, for greater verisimilitude. Moreover, he deliberately used the imbalance between performative and constative elements of the correspondence for heightened dramatic effect, by placing the stationary central mass of political and philosophical reflections between two sequences of precipitating passion – Usbek’s initial departure from Persia, prompted by curiosity and fear of court intrigue, and the final revolt by his wives against the oppression of the seraglio. The sudden outbreak of violent turbulence at the end of the story is all the more arresting for the ostensibly placid tenor of what precedes it. The generic discontinuities of the epistolary form were, of course, well-suited to administer this kind of shock. But here their effect is intensified by the peculiar rhythms of Montesquieu’s own style, whose principle he defined himself: ‘il faut sauter les idées intermédiaires’. Conjunctions all but banished, the signature of his laconic sentence construction is the semi-colon – typically marking an abrupt swerve or ellipsis of thought, bringing a train of it to some crisp, unexpected conclusion. The staccato elegance of such gestures not only ensures the discursive side of Persian Letters against longueurs. They give a powerful kick to its narrative dénouement.

Over a hundred and fifty years, the various strands of epistolary fiction – sentimental, didactic, satirical – had developed at different tempos, and combined in any number of unstable mixtures, without real synthesis. The ingenious design of Montesquieu’s novel permitted for the first time a kind of fusion. The key to it lay in a substitution: the displacement of the sentimental by the erotic as means of intellectual seduction. The brief opening of the Regency – France’s moral equivalent of the English Restoration – allowed a freedom of sexual expression in polite culture that made Persian Letters possible. Montesquieu was in his twenties when he embarked on it, and the atmosphere of the work is best described as gracefully libertine. Its audacities, of suggestion and situation rather than literal description, are not adumbrations of the pornographic writing that proliferated as the century wore on. But they were piquant enough to inflame readers of either sex: lyrical representations of female desire, a tranquil defence of incestuous love, uncensorious allusions to sapphic embraces, glowing dreams of troilism. The literary strategy of Persian Letters depends on this calculated eroticism. Montesquieu went out of his way to underline it: the stories of Apheridon and Astarte, sibling lovers, and of Anaïs, basking in a polyandrous paradise, are inserted hors-série in the correspondence, tales within the tale that offer reveries of license beyond even the first-order narrative itself.

The pretext for such erotica was furnished by Orientalism. French fascination with Ottoman institutions went back two centuries by the time Montesquieu was writing. The seraglio had always been a focal point of it, fantasies of polygamy irresistible to a monogamous society. For a long time, the military slavery and administrative efficiency of the Porte attracted awed fear and curiosity too. Marana’s novel appeared at the high point of Turkish pressure on Christendom, as Ottoman armies were at the gates of Vienna. But by the time of the Regency, Turkish power was visibly decaying and in retreat. Within another few years China would become the new lodestar for Orientalist projection – Bayle had already singled it out for attention, and Leibniz looked forward to a description of the oddities of Europe by missionaries from the Heavenly Kingdom; by mid-century Chinese allusions or fixations saturated the culture of the Enlightenment. Montesquieu’s novel was written in the interval between the capture of the European imaginary by these two great Empires. Persia could play the role of an intriguing, more indistinct third – close enough in culture to Turkey to retain the motif of the seraglio, distant enough to represent no threat to Europe, unfamiliar enough to offer no alternative model as sharp and definite as the mandarinate in China. Two Huguenot travellers, Chardin and Tavernier, had described the country in 1676 and 1686; a Persian envoy had visited Paris in 1715; the Safavid dynasty was nearing its end, at the hands of Nadir Shah in 1730. All this was enough to arouse curiosity about the land of Cyrus and Shah Abbas, without imposing any too determinate image of it. Persia was an ideal template for Montesquieu’s exercise.

The Orientalism of Persian Letters is, of course, first and foremost a device of estrangement. Shklovsky’s ostranenie has had many claimants to first use. If we set aside Antiquity, La Bruyère’s famous description of the misery of the French peasantry, perceived as a subterranean race of animals, is a plausible candidate. Significantly, it was he too who wondered how the French would see it if the Siamese attempted to convert them to Buddhism, and build pagodas in France. In fact, the idea of the inverted gaze from afar was in the air by the end of the seventeenth century – Leibniz suggesting in all seriousness what La Bruyère had ridiculed. Without resort to the East, Swift would eventually go much further. Historically, however, it was Montesquieu who first systematically and self-consciously set the procedure to work. The term he used to describe the effect of his Persians’ vision of Europe was stronger than strangeness. ‘The Persians’, he wrote, ‘suddenly found themselves transplanted to Europe, that is, to another universe’. In consequence, ‘their first thoughts were bound to be odd [singulières]’, while they in turn ‘sometimes find our dogmas odd [singuliers]’, a source of ‘feelings of surprise and astonishment’. Here, Montesquieu insisted, lay the charm of his book. ‘The whole effect was due to the perpetual contrast between the reality of things and the odd, novel or bizarre [singulière, neuve ou bizarre] way in which they were perceived’.² Oddity is the keynote. What is strange may be common to a set. What is singular is more disconcerting: without antecedent, bizarre. The force of Montesquieu’s travesty of Western conventions lies in his trio of adjectives – ‘les choses réelles’ are no more than a defence clause to parry clerical indignation.

The mask of Orientalism not only operated as the first sustained device of defamiliarization in fiction. It also unified the novel. For its substitution of the sentimental by the erotic allowed a natural movement to the political, within a single framework, that no previous epistolary novel had achieved. Sentimental fiction could, of course, offer tacit social criticism; but its range was limited, since appeal to the sentiments was inevitably to existing moral codes, however flouted in practice or secondary in standing – witness Richardson. Its earnestness, moreover, excluded the comic register of satire – indeed, even provoked it: Shamela. Combinations of the two within single works, not unknown, were inevitably disjoint. The door to moral conformism, on the other hand, was barred to erotic fiction, which by definition mocked earnest and hypocritical norms alike. Sexual liberties and satirical impulses were always more likely allies. Didactic intentions were, of course, another matter – they cohabited with tales of sentiment quite naturally, proving perfectly capable of supporting even the enormous edifice of Clarissa without strain. But the range of instruction was narrow. It could not extend to fundamental questioning of the established order without contradicting its own good intentions. Obviously, erotic fiction laboured under no such inhibitions – already in defiance of ethical taboos, it could corrode political pieties much more readily.

This generic potential took a highly specific and focussed form in Montesquieu’s case, where the sexual and political were directly linked through his theory of despotism, a term that he invented. The tyranny of the seraglio, imprisoning women for the dwindling pleasures of one man, was the domestic image of the dominion of the sultanate, monopolizing wealth and power in the hands of a single ruler, and reducing society around him to a desert in which his subjects were as passive and prostrate as women. Slavery at home and slavery in the state were one. The natural habitat of this despotism was the Orient, whose torrid climates enervated rulers and ruled alike. Such is the developed doctrine of The Spirit of the Laws, at which Montesquieu arrived a decade later. Persian Letters is usually, and understandably, seen as the direct precursor of The Spirit of the Laws – an early fictional draft for the later theoretical masterpiece. But the fit between the two is not so complete. For an image of the Orient as the natural terrain of despotism, from which Europe is climatically delivered, does not square with an intention to use the Orient as an estranging device to criticize Europe. Leibniz and Bayle had wanted a vision of Europe from China, as a civilization in many ways superior to it. Persia possesses no such advantage in Montesquieu’s novel. Nor, on the other hand, does it figure as a political bugbear either. The Safavid state is absent, the cause of Usbek’s exile a mere court intrigue of vaguely European stamp. It is despotism of the household, not of the palace, that sets the narrative scene.

For all its anticipations, the tenor of Persian Letters thus differs significantly from The Spirit of the Laws. It is more radical. The first manifesto of the Enlightenment still remains the freshest, in the range of its reflections on leading themes of the age, and the mordancy of its conclusions. Absent as yet the full theory of Oriental despotism, Montesquieu’s political taxonomy acquires a sharper edge in Europe. The three fundamental types of government of The Spirit of the Laws – despotism, monarchy, republic – are already present, together with the contrast between the limited power of European monarchs and the unlimited tyranny of Eastern rulers. But here Montesquieu ascribes a fundamental instability to monarchy alone, that always tends to reduce it to one of the other two. As Usbek remarks: ‘Monarchy is a state of tension, which always degenerates into despotism or republicanism; power can never be divided equally between prince and people; it is too difficult to keep the balance. The power must necessarily decrease on one side and increase on the other; but the ruler is usually at an advantage, being in control of the armed forces’.³ A monarchy, in other words, is always closer to a despotism than to a republic. In his survey of the ancient world, Montesquieu could take ‘love of freedom and hatred of kings’ as virtually indistinguishable.⁴ Expressions of republican sentiment are much stronger in his novel than in his treatise. In the fable of the troglodytes – another ‘gratuitous’ insertion in the sequence of the letters – the elder asked by his fellows to become their king weeps for them: ‘You bring me the crown, and if you insist on it absolutely I shall certainly have to take it. But be sure that I shall die of grief, having seen when I was born the Troglodytes in freedom and seeing them subjects [assujettis] today’. ⁵

If the Orient figures politically only in the novel’s discursive register, without incidence on the action, in the domain of religion it serves a narrative as well as analytic function. Islam generates the seraglio, and the drama that follows from it, as structural elements of the work. Otherwise, rather than representing a more rational Eastern alternative to Christianity, as Confucianism was to do for Leibniz or Wolff, it offers instead a disturbing mirror image of Western superstition and irrationality – beliefs summed up by Usbek: ‘I see Islam everywhere, though I cannot find Mahomet’.⁶ Montesquieu’s scathing comments on the Trinity, transubstantiation, the Papacy, bishops, monks and confessors, are put in the mouths of Muslims, no kinder to the inanities of their own faith. ‘In our Koran, you often find the image of God and the ideas of men, as if, by a remarkable act of caprice, God had dictated the words, while mankind provided the thoughts’.⁷ Montesquieu’s own convictions are calmly outlined: the evils of intolerance, the legitimacy of suicide, the impossibility of divine omniscience, the insignificance of the earth in the cosmos. Religion is allocated a purely civic function, as a cement of social cohesion – the path to Durkheim.

Laws, formally the great theme of the later work, are handled in similar spirit. Most are the product of arbitrary whims and prejudices; some of them are detestable; all are changeable. None can be compared to the dignity and immutability of the other kind of laws, that scientists discover in nature. The worst – not for the last time Montesquieu strikes a pointedly contemporary note – is international law. ‘In its present state, this branch of law is a science which explains to kings how far they can violate justice without damaging their own interests’.⁸ But, just as even superstition can serve as a social bond, even bad laws may be better than disobedience to them. If this conclusion anticipates the quietist note in The Spirit of the Laws, it is striking that the novel exposes to full view the deepest contradiction in Montesquieu’s later work, which haunts his mature theory without ever being brought to the surface. Is justice purely conventional, contingent on particular periods and settings, or does it answer to universal and immutable principles? The whole of The Spirit of the Laws equivocates: if title and treatment appear to speak of facticity and diversity, declarative assertions insist on necessity and uniformity. In his youth Montesquieu was franker and less guarded. ‘Even if there were no God, we should nonetheless still love justice’, writes Usbek. ‘Even if we were to be free of the constraints of religion, we ought not to be free of those of equity. It is this, Rhedi, which has led me to think that justice is eternal and does not depend on human conventions; and if it were to depend on them, this would be a terrible truth, which we would have to conceal from ourselves.’⁹ The semi-colon is, as so often, a signal of the blow to come: a confession in advance of the operation The Spirit of the Laws would perform.

Politics, religion, law, justice. Persian Letters has much to say about all of them. But organizing and dominating its discursive expedition as a whole is the question that releases the narrative: relations between the sexes. The very first observation of the first letter sent back by the travellers from Europe, when they reach Livorno, gives the key-note: ‘the women here enjoy great freedom’.¹⁰ The second, when they get to Paris, speaks of Louis XIV, of the pope, and of the Gallican uproar against the bull Unigenitus, only to add: ‘The instigators of this revolt are women’ – forbidden by the bull to read the Bible, ‘indignant at this insult to their sex, they have started a whole movement against the Bull; they have put the men, who in this case do not want to be privileged, on their side’.¹¹ Not long after, male domination at large is mocked with arguments that have no counterpart till the final episodes of the Enlightenment, if then.

It is a different problem to decide whether women are subject to men by the law of nature. ‘No’, a very chivalrous philosopher said to me the other day, ‘nature laid down no such law. Our authority over women is absolutely tyrannical; they have allowed us to impose it because they are more gentle than we are, and consequently more humane and reasonable … Why then should we be privileged? Because we are stronger? But that is completely unjust. We use all sorts of methods to reduce their courage. If our upbringing were similar, our strength would be also. Test them on the kinds of ability that their upbringing has not impaired, and we shall soon see if we are so superior’.¹²

The tone is distinctively Regency – a long way from the sérieux of Condorcet or Wollstonecraft: gallantry rather than fervour or solicitude as the password to equality. But the logic is what would become theirs.

What then of marriage? As practised, an object of raillery: ‘Frenchmen hardly ever talk about their wives; they are afraid to do so in front of people who may know them better than they’, or, ‘here a husband who loves his wife is a man who has not enough merit to make another woman love him; who abuses the obligations imposed by law to compensate his own lack of attraction’.¹³ But if the intellectual centre-fold of the novel opens with caustic or playful reflections on the life of the sentiments and the senses – sexual relations subjectively considered – it ends with historical considerations on their objective structures that form the most sustained of all arguments in the book. In a bloc of eleven successive letters, that breaks completely with the normal rhythm of the correspondence, Montesquieu contemplates a demographic enigma – what he took to be the decline of the world’s population since Antiquity. His error is more interesting than would have been its opposite, in illustrating at its very origins the extent of the misconception that the Enlightenment can generally be characterized as an optimistic doctrine of progress. Comparing Greece, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, North Africa with classical times, Rica terms the depopulation of the earth ‘the most terrible catastrophe that has ever happened to the world; but it has scarcely been noticed, because it has occurred gradually, in the course of a great many centuries’. ¹⁴

Usbek’s extended reply lays out Montesquieu’s explanation of the decline, which turns essentially on the institutions regulating relations between the sexes. The Romans flourished because they banned polygamy, but allowed divorce; whereas Christians banned divorce and Muslims permitted polygamy. Christian prohibition of divorce took all the pleasure out of marriage, incapacitating both partners for reproduction. ‘On an act so freely undertaken, in which emotion should play so large a part, were imposed constraint, necessity, and the inevitability of fate itself … People were coupled together irrevocably and hopelessly, a mutual burden, almost always ill-assorted; it was like those tyrants who had living men tied to dead bodies’.¹⁵ Muslim sanction of polygamy, on the other hand, exhausted its practitioners – ‘It seems to me a Muslim is like an athlete doomed to compete without respite, who is soon weakened and overcome by his initial efforts, and languishes on the very field of victory, lying buried, so to speak, beneath his own triumphs’.¹⁶ Monks in the one culture, eunuchs in the other, were so many further deductions of vitality. Colonies were yet more subtractions, without compensating gains: the slave trade had laid waste Africa without filling the Americas. In China alone was there major population growth, because ancestor worship made the lineage essential in this world and the next. The comparative cast of the argument makes this sequence of Persian Letters closest to the procedures of The Spirit of the Laws, though there, as one might expect, the problem is prudently skirted.

In Europe at any rate, Montesquieu’s demographic pessimism, for which commentators have profusely apologized, no longer looks such an anachronism, as negative rates of reproduction – in Italy, Spain, Germany and beyond – haunt public debate today. More striking still, as a direct premonition of the future, and token of reserve towards any confidence in technological progress, is an earlier letter from Rhedi: ‘You wrote at some length about the development of the arts and sciences in the West. You will think me a barbarian, but I do not know whether the utility we derive from them compensates mankind for the abuse that is continually made of them … I am always afraid that they will eventually succeed in discovering some secret which will provide a quicker way of making men die, and exterminate whole countries and nations’.¹⁷ Usbek’s reply, in its weak reassurance, has an even more contemporary ring: ‘No: if such a fatal invention came to be discovered, it would soon be banned by international law, and with the unanimous consent of every country would be buried’. ¹⁸

Placed towards the end of the philosophical correspondence in Europe, these reflections signal a shift in tone, that prepares the descent towards narrative ruin. The final letters, exchanges between Usbek, his wives and eunuchs from and to Persia, are grouped together out of temporal sequence. Though they spell misfortune for all concerned, their tenor could not be more affirmative. Montesquieu spoke of the secret chain of his construction, and the juxta-position of the last letter about France, denouncing Law’s system, with the first news of the wives’ revolt in Persia, has often been noted – and sometimes taken as a displacement of political to sexual rebellion, a remote household revolt acting as surrogate for an impossible overthrow of the local state. There is little doubt Montesquieu intended a parallel between the disorders of the budget and of the bedchamber, but this reading mistakes the priority of the novel. The sexual may mirror the political, but in this fiction also commands it. The ending of the tale is in place, affording Montesquieu the logical envoi.

For the revolt of the seraglio is a liberation in more than one sense. In the grieving words of one of the eunuchs: ‘There is a new atmosphere of gaiety everywhere here, which in my view is a sure sign of some new-found contentment; in the most trivial matters I notice liberties being taken which were formerly unknown’.¹⁹ The link – gaiety-contentment-freedom – might be called the real secret chain of the novel. Sexual passion is a source, not of servitude, but of moral independence. For Zelis, early on, adolescence was expressly ‘that critical moment when the passions begin to show themselves and encourage us to be independent’.²⁰ Roxane’s farewell to life makes the same connexion. ‘Yes, I deceived you. I suborned your eunuchs, outwitted your jealousy, and managed to turn your terrible seraglio into a place of delightful pleasures’, she tells Usbek. ‘I may have lived in servitude, but I have always been free. I have amended your laws according to the laws of nature, and my spirit has always remained independent’.²¹ Pleasure-nature-independence. The Enlightenment would ring many changes on these terms, but they are all echoes of this first, terse cry of emancipation. The closing lines of the novel are aware of what it has said: ‘Such language, no doubt, is new to you …’²²

Reflecting on Persian Letters thirty years later, Montesquieu wrote that it differed from ordinary novels – where ‘serious discussion has to be excluded, since none of the characters having been introduced for the purposes of discussion, it would be contrary to the nature and intention of the work’ – in what he called its ‘digressions’.²³ The epistolary form, however, freely permitted these, allowing him ‘the advantage of being able to include philosophy, politics and moral discourse in the novel, and to connect everything together with a secret chain which remains, as it were, invisible’.²⁴ By later standards the chain is too loose: thoughts and deeds essentially inhabit separate planes. One way of closing the gap was the conte philosophique, in which a single motivating doctrine generates a parable that illustrates it: Robinson Crusoe, Candide, Rasselas. Montesquieu’s novel is one ancestor of this form, not an example of it. A better term of comparison is the modern novel of ideas, in which characters both articulate and embody different standpoints, whose conflicts detonate the action – Dostoevsky, Musil, Malraux, Sartre. Their narrative superiority is enormous, to the point where we are tempted to deny the term ‘novel’ to any work, like Persian Letters, which falls so far short of it. But a price came with the gain. The range and originality of the ideas that animate these works is less – had to be less, to shape a compelling plot – than those which the president of the Bordeaux Parlement offered so disarmingly to the public three centuries ago.

Notes

Foreword

1 ‘Stylistique et Critique littéraire’, Critique 98, July 1955, pp. 595–609.

2 Admiring equally Konstantin Mochulsky’s study of Dostoevsky, published in Paris in 1947 (translated into English twenty years later, Princeton 1967), and Victor Erlich’s Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine, The Hague 1955.

3 J. P. Stern, Re-interpretations: Seven Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature, London 1964, pp. 316–33.

4 Ernst Robert Curtius, ‘Marcel Proust’, Französischer Geist im neuen Europa (composed 1922–24), Berlin-Leipzig 1925, pp. 9–145, translated into French as a book: Marcel Proust, Paris 1928; Leo Spitzer, ‘Zum Stil Marcel Proust’s’, Stilstudien, II, Munich 1928, pp. 365–497. Neither made any impression in France, then as later largely impermeable to foreign reflection on native writers.

1. Two Conjurors of Time

1 Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, London 2017. Henceforward, AP.

2 AP, p. 1.

3 AP, pp. 17, 13.

4 AP, pp. 61, 39.

5 AP, pp. 63, 82.

6 Michael Barber, Anthony Powell: A Life, London 2004, p. 51.

7 AP, pp. 165, 200, 180, 409.

8 AP, pp. 265, 275.

9 AP, p. 121.

10 Lynn Barber, ‘A Voyeur at the Ball’, Independent on Sunday, 8 March 1992.

11 Interview with Duncan Fallowell, Time Out, pp. 4–10 August 1983; AP, pp. 218, 279; Powell, Infants of the Spring, London 1976, p. 123.

12 AP, pp. 61, 237, 305, 362, 422.

13 AP, pp. 332–4.

14 AP, pp. 165–7.

15 Barber, Anthony Powell, pp. 269–70.

16 Isabelle Joyau, Investigating Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, London 1994, p. x; Nicholas Birns, Understanding Anthony Powell, Columbia, SC, 2004, p. 18.

17 Powell disliked lazy linkages of the two, but made an exception for Philip Thody’s discussion, ‘The English Proust’, in Robert Gibson (ed.), Studies in French Fiction in Honour of Vivienne Mylne, Valencia 1988, pp. 323–37. ‘My heart sank at the title, because comparisons with Proust, if flattering, are rarely made with intelligence’, but on finding that the piece, after noting ‘certain similarities’, pointed out ‘a great many fundamental differences in most respects’, was reassured: Journals 1987–1989, London 1996, p. 165.

18 Adam Watt, The Cambridge Introduction to Proust, Cambridge 2011, p. 104.

19 William Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, New Haven 2013, pp. 205, 247.

20 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle, New York 1931, p. 189.

21 Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars, London 1998, pp. 3–2.

22 Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, Paris 1996, p. 70.

23 Proust among the Stars, p. 221.

24 Proust among the Stars, pp. 242, 266.

25 William Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, New Haven 2013, p. 580; À la recherche du temps perdu, IV, Paris 1989, p. 461. Henceforward RTP. [Translations: by Scott Moncrieff, eleven volumes, London 1941; the last by Terence Kilmartin, London 1992 – SM and K. Above, K, p. 287.]

26 RTP II, Paris 1988, p. 367 [SM 5, p. 84]; RTP IV, p. 34 [SM 11, p. 47]; RTP VI, p. 138 [SM 11, p. 194]. Apologists have sometimes sought to distance Proust from such pronouncements, as no more than the fallible and often changeable opinions of his narrator. Since no other voice in the novel ever contradicts them, there is little reason to doubt it is at bottom the author speaking, even without the external evidence confirming this. Ingenious glosses wishing away them away as playful gestures of a writer who was at heart a sceptic break on the barrier of Proust’s own avowal to Jacques Rivière in 1914: ‘At last I’ve found a reader who has grasped that my book is a dogmatic work with a structure’, a ‘search for the Truth’ [capitalized], which ‘if I had no intellectual beliefs, simply attempting to recall the past and duplicate experience of life with these memories, I would not, ill as I am, take the trouble to write’: Correspondance XIII, Paris 1985, pp. 98–9. Proust could certainly be playful, and allow his narrator contradictions and self-criticisms, but these possess no cumulative force. The best case to have been made for them is Christopher Prendergast’s invariably subtle and enjoyable Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Sceptic, Princeton 2013, which holds Proust ‘obliquely self-ironizing to the last’: p. 212. Of much of the extensive literature along these lines, the phrase of another distinguished Proustian scholar, Gérard Genette, comes to mind: ‘La complaisance a des détours infinis’: Nouveau discours du récit, Paris 1983, p. 8.

27 RTP IV, p. 479 [K, p. 306].

28 RTP I, Paris 1987, p. 504 [SM 3, p. 119].

29 RTP III, p. 780 [SM, 10, p. 95].

30 RTP II, p. 578 [SM 5, p. 388]; RTP III, p. 569 [SM 9, p. 72].

31 RTP III, p. 602 [SM 9, p. 120].

32 RTP II, p. 260 [SM 4, p. 287].

33 RTP IV, p. 454 [K, pp. 268–9]. ‘No-one – except occasionally the hero under certain conditions – is able or allowed to contest the narrator’s privilege of ideological commentary’ in a ‘speculative imperialism’ that ‘lays out all humanity, from Bergotte to Françoise and Charlus to Madame Sazerat, before him like a natural world whose function is to elicit thought, not to express it’, observed Gérard Genette, the most intelligent French writer on Proust: Figures III, Paris 1972, pp. 264–5. For biting comments of a more hit-or-miss sort on Proust’s outlook on friendship, see earlier remarks by Jean-François Revel, Sur Proust, Paris 1960, pp. 192–3.

34 RTP I, p. 614 [SM 3, p. 282]; RTP IV, p. 486 [K, p. 316].

35 RTP IV, p. 488 [K, p. 319]; RTP IV, pp. 474–5 [K, pp. 298, 301].

36 RTP IV, p. 488 [K, p. 320].

37 RTP IV, p. 615 [K, p. 516].

38 Albert Thibaudet, Réflexions sur la littérature, Paris 2007, p. 1129.

39 ‘Which the hero does not approach with a gradual and continuous movement, but on the contrary, despite the omens and notices that have here and there preceded it, overpowers him at the very moment when he feels most distant from it’: Figures III, p. 260. Proust made no secret of this side of himself, writing to his banker: ‘I have no faith, as you say, on the other hand not for a single day are religious preoccupations absent from my life’: Correspondance XIV, Paris 1986, p. 218. Among admirers, his cult can exceed anything to be found in his own writing. ‘Set against the background of the Western tradition, he achieves an absolute, unchallenged status’, affirms the translator of Kristeva’s lectures Proust and the Sense of Time – he is a ‘a guide to psychic survival’. Outdoing this with ease, Kristeva explains that Proust’s aim is ‘to establish a world in which his readers can come and communicate as if they were in a sacred place’, for what he offers them amounts to this: ‘Read me, and you will be part of the world but without being taken in by it. I can give you the Divine Comedy of the life of the psyche, not just mine, but yours as well, ours, that is the absolute’ [italics in original]: see Proust and the Sense of Time, London 1993, pp. x, xiii, 6, 7.

40 RTP III, p. 303 [SM 8, p. 79].

41 RTP II, p. 100 [SM 4, pp. 53–4].

42 RTP IV, p. 548 [K, p. 411].

43 RTP II, p. 105 [SM 4, p. 61].

44 Infants of the Spring, p. 147.

45 ‘True interest in yourself is comparatively rare, sharply to be distinguished from mere egotism and selfishness, characteristics often immoderately developed in persons not in the least interested in themselves intellectually or objectively’: Infants of the Spring, p. 123.

46 Terence Kilmartin, A Guide to Proust, London 1983; Spurling, Invitation to the Dance, London 1977. The indexes to the 1987– 1989 Pléiade edition of À la recherche are more complete than Kilmartin, but also more promiscuously organized. Tadié counts over five hundred persons ‘met’ by the narrator.

47 For these inconsistencies, see Genette in Figures III, pp. 221–3, who values them as such for liberating a ‘polymodality’ that, even if Proust was unaware of it (and would have been unlikely to appreciate it being pointed out), helped to ‘father modern literature’, while disarmingly admitting that this was a ‘perhaps somewhat unsophisticated and altogether romantic viewpoint’, if one which the authority of Barthes taught ‘nobody can entirely escape’. That was an ‘avant-garde prejudice’ he was subsequently somewhat more sheepish about, if still cleaving to the master who prompted it: Nouveau discours du récit, p. 108. At the time he was writing, Powell’s Dance had already eluded another: ‘It is as if the narrator cannot be an ordinary walk-on character in his narrative: he can only be star, or a mere bystander’: Figures III, p. 253.

48 RTP II, p. 88 [SM 4, p. 36].

49 A Question of Upbringing, London 1951, pp. 8–9.

50 RTP III, p. 606 [SM 9, p. 126].

51 At Lady Molly’s, London 1957, pp. 60–1.

52 A Question of Upbringing, p. 86; The Soldier’s Art, London 1966, p. 196.

53 At Lady Molly’s, p. 180.

54 The Military Philosophers, London 1968, p. 60; Books Do Furnish a Room, London 1971, p. 192.

55 ‘Au fond, je suis une tête jacobine, vous le savez’, RTP I, p. 126; rendered by Scott Moncrieff as ‘At heart, you know, I’m a bit of radical’, Swann’s Way I, London 1922, p. 174; see Uncle Giles in A Question of Upbringing, p. 67. For the two diplomats: RTP I, p. 453 [SM 3, p. 45}, and The Kindly Ones, London 1962, p. 206.

56 The Acceptance World, London 1955, p. 85; ‘The Passing of Powell’, Prospect, June 2000.

57 A Question of Upbringing, pp. 59, 55.

58 A Question of Upbringing, p. 74; A Buyer’s Market, London 1953, pp. 191, 216; The Acceptance World, p. 58; The Military Philosophers, pp. 233–4; Hearing Secret Harmonies, London 1975, p. 253.

59 The Acceptance World, p. 69.

60 Interview with Douglas Davis, College English, April 1963, p. 536.

61 The Valley of Bones, London 1964, p. 171.

62 Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, London 1960, p. 157.

63 Joyau, Investigating, pp. 129–30.

64 The Novels of Anthony Powell, London 1976, p. 185.

65 A Question of Upbringing, p. 49.

66 A Buyer’s Market, p. 249.

67 The Kindly Ones, p. 180.

68 The Soldier’s Art, p. 223.

69 ‘A Great Catch’, TLS, 12 September 1952; Journals 1987–1989, London 1996, p. 175: ‘the love affair awful twaddle’.

70 Koyama Taichi, The Novels of Anthony Powell: A Critical Study, Tokyo 2006, p. 12. Powell has been better served by the handful of studies on him, nearly all capable of genuine criticism, than Proust by the vast throng of hierophants queuing at his altar.

71 Faces in My Time, London 1980, pp. 88–9.

72 Hearing Secret Harmonies, p. 15; A Buyer’s Market, p. 217; The Valley of Bones, pp. 76, 158; At Lady Molly’s, p. 26; A Buyer’s Market, p. 226; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, p. 34.

73 A Question of Upbringing, pp. 52, 229; The Soldier’s Art, pp. 190–1; The Acceptance World, p. 64.

74 ‘Even someone believing himself convinced of the non-comparability of works of art will find himself repeatedly involved in debates where works of art, and precisely those of the highest and therefore incommensurable rank, are compared and evaluated one against the other. The objection that such considerations, which come about in a peculiarly compulsive way, have their sources in mercenary instincts that would measure everything by the ell, usually signifies no more than that solid citizens, for whom art can never be irrational enough, want to keep serious reflection and the claims of truth far from the works. This compulsion to evaluate is located, however, in the works of art themselves. So much is true: they refuse to be compared’: De gustibus est disputandum, in Minima Moralia, London 1974, p. 75.

75 The One vs. the Many, Princeton 2003, p. 14. Woloch takes a telling illustration of the dichotomy in his title from Proust’s treatment of grandmother and gardener in Du côté de chez Swann: pp. 27–8.

76 See Geneviève Henrot Sostero and Florence Lautel-Ribstein (eds), Revue d’études proustiennes, 2015–1, no. 1, ‘Traduire À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust’, Paris 2015. Setting aside partial versions, usually of earlier volumes of the novel, complete translations started to appear in roughly this chronological sequence: 1920 to 1939 – Spanish, English, Czech and Polish in that order; 1945 to 1959 – Portuguese, Italian, Japanese; 1960s – Danish, Croat, Swedish; 1970s – Dutch, Arabic, Korean, Finnish; 1980s – Norwegian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Chinese; 1990s – Russian, Farsi, Turkish.

77 ‘Call it cynical commodification or geek chic, either way the Proustian “brand” sells’: Adam Watt, The Cambridge Introduction to Proust, Cambridge 2011, p. 117. ‘Could the notion of a “kitschified” Proustian text help explain this pop-cultural Proust?’ asks Margaret Gray, devoting a not excessively troubled chapter to specimens of the same: The Postmodern Proust, Philadelphia 1992, pp. 152–76. ‘No high-cultural writer more amenable to pop-cultural appropriation than Proust’, notes Prendergast, ‘a phenomenon worth investigating in its own right’: Mirages and Mad Beliefs, p. 24.

78 Proust among the Stars, p. 318.

79 The Acceptance World, p. 32.

80 Interview with Michael Barber, Paris Review, no. 73, 1978, p. 68.

81 The Acceptance World, pp. 32, 34.

82 Messengers of Day, London 1978, pp. 112–13; Journals 1987–1989, p. 4: ‘He knows it, he watches it from the outside, is not incapable of making it dramatic, but he cannot really grasp the way it works’.

83 Joyau, Investigating, pp. 124 ff.

84 The Military Philosophers, p. 109.

85 ‘Romantic Agonies’, TLS, 10 August 1951; ‘ “Anger’s self I needs must kiss” ’, Punch, 4 June 1958.

86 Messengers of Day, p. 112; ‘To What Red Hell?’, TLS, 18 November 1949; Journals 1990–1992, London 1997, p. 54; Journals 1982– 1986, p. 86; ‘Period Piece’, TLS, 8 July 1949; ‘ “A way alone” ’, Punch, 27 March 1957.

87 Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writing on Writers 1946–1989, London 1990, p. 434; Journals 1990–1992, pp. 51–2.

88 ‘Marcel Proust’, TLS, 18 August 1950: in many ways his most considered judgment of Proust’s achievement, puzzlingly not included in the long section – sixty pages – devoted to him in Miscellaneous Verdicts.

89 Miscellaneous Verdicts, p. 213.

90 At Lady Molly’s, p. 136.

91 Distant Reading, London-New York 2013, pp. 98–9.

92 Though the status of Dream of the Red Chamber in China compares with that of À la recherche in France, readings of it are mercifully more various. The two most distinguished Chinese literary scholars of modern times, C. T. Hsia and Yu Ying-shih, held diametrically opposite views of the Daguanyuan, the interior landscape garden within the clan compound, scene of central themes and episodes of the novel: for Yu, the construction of a utopia of beauty and purity, concealing the degradation and squalor on which it is built; for Hsia, even before tragedy overtakes it, a keep of oppressive constraint and boredom for its lively young inhabitants. For the former, see ‘The Two Worlds of Hung-lou Meng’, Renditions, Spring 1974, pp. 5–21; for the latter, ‘Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber’, in C. T. Hsia on Chinese Literature, New York 2004, pp. 180–7.

93 ‘Painting Time: The Pictorial Power of Powell’s Imagination and the Creative Origins of the Dance’, Proceedings of the Anthony Powell Centenary Conference, 2005, Greenford 2007, p. 213.

94 Miscellaneous Verdicts, p. 9.

95 ‘A Family and Its Fictions’, TLS, 12 September 1975.

96 Journals 1990–1992, p. 206.

97 Journals 1982–1986, p. 163; Under Review: Further Writings on Writers 1946–1990, London 1991, p. 427.

98 ‘Villain’s Talk’, London Review of Books, 17 April 1986.

99 The Strangers All Are Gone, London 1982, p. 163.

100 Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, p. 15: contrasted with music, which mattered little to him – a big difference with Proust.

101 Contre Sainte-Beuve, Paris 1971, pp. 221–2. The prologue to this hybrid text as a whole expounds another key tenet of Proust’s aesthetic. Opening with the words ‘Every day I set less store by the intellect’, he explains that it is sensations alone which allow a writer to repossess his intimate reality: p. 216. What he made of these, literally and metaphorically, in the countless exercises in ekphrasis of his novel is unsurpassed. Perception is, of course, inherently more tied to the subject than comprehension: ideas can be shared in ways that sensory impressions cannot. Proust’s elevation of the first faculty over the second was one of the conditions of Bowie’s ‘inward rapture’.

102 Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 266.

103 Messengers of Day, p. 112; ‘Tales from Kipling’, TLS, 10 October 1952; Journals 1990–1992, pp. 66–7.

104 Messengers of Day, pp. 151, 153; ‘Satire in the Twenties’, TLS, 13 September 1947.

105 ‘The Classical Manner’, TLS, 22 January 1949; ‘Boyhood of Beyle’, Punch, 23 November 1955; Under Review, p. 375; Journals 1990– 1992, pp. 15–16; ‘Apostle of the Future’, TLS, 20 March 1948; Under Review, p. 409; ‘A Spanish Classic’, TLS, 28 December 1951; ‘ “Where Venice sate in state …” ’, Punch, 11 December 1957; ‘Letters from Flaubert’, Punch, 14 April 1954; Journals 1982–1986, p. 282; Journals 1986–1990, pp. 171–2.

106 ‘Everyman in Trieste’, TLS, 24 July 1948; ‘An Austrian Proust?’, Punch, 25 March 1953; ‘A Study in Intimacy’, TLS, 2 March 1951; ‘A Secret Agent’, TLS, 7 March 1952; ‘Honi Soit Qui Malaparte’, Punch, 4 September 1952; ‘Tsarist Russia’, 3 July 1948; ‘Noble and Tragic’, TLS, 18 April 1952; ‘Condemned to Be Free’, TLS, 10 January 1948; ‘German Abstractions’, TLS, 6 May 1949; ‘Parisian Episodes’, TLS, 27 October 1950.

107 RTP II, p. 34, RTP IV, p. 498.

108 The single exception is self-pitying use of lines from Petrarch by the elderly St John Clarke, a humbug supposedly modelled on Hugh Walpole, the only character in the novel treated, as Spurling observes, with complete lack of sympathy: Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, p. 84.

109 The Kindly Ones, pp. 84, 139.

110 The Soldier’s Art, p. 221.

111 The Military Philosophers, pp. 181–2, 203, 221–5.

112 Books Do Furnish a Room, p. 52.

113 Journals 1982–1986, p. 223.

114 AP, p. 425.

115 RTP II, pp. 41–2 [SM 3, p. 363].

116 RTP II, pp. 746–7 [SM 6, p. 203]; RTP IV, p. 340 [K, p. 104]; RTP III, p. 542 [SMS 9, p. 33].

117 Proust subsequently promoted himself to ‘the first Dreyfusard’, on the grounds that it was ‘I who asked Anatole France to sign the petition’: Correspondance XXVIII, pp. 535–6, even claiming that he ‘organized the first list in L’Aurore demanding a revision’ of the verdict on Dreyfus: Correspondance VI, p. 155. ‘In fact’, as Carter notes, ‘he participated only briefly in the first part of the campaign’: Marcel Proust, p. 249. He would later say Dreyfus was a ‘tactless idiot’ to seek an official rehabilitation, see Correspondance VI, p. 127.

118 ‘La Mort des Cathédrales’, Figaro, 16 August 1904, revised in Contre Sainte-Beuve, pp. 141–8; Correspondance VI, p. 85.

119 Contre Sainte-Beuve, pp. 365–6.

120 ‘Here as always, Proust is completely detached from moral considerations. There is no right and wrong in Proust nor in his world. (Except possibly in those passages dealing with the war, when for a space he ceases to be an artist and raises his voice with the plebs, mob, rabble, canaille)’: Proust, London 1931, p. 49.

121 Correspondance, V, Paris 1979, p. 284, allowing that ‘I’m pleased there should be workers in factories, sailors in ships and monks in convents’: Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust. Biographie, Paris 1996, pp. 233, 508.

122 Cherwell, 14 June 1924; see Barber, Anthony Powell, p. 46.

123 ‘The Wat’ry Glade’, in Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands, London 1934, p. 150.

124 Interview with Michael Barber, Paris Review, 1978, p. 55.

125 ‘Marginal Comments’, Spectator, 3 December 1937: ‘The whole enjoyment of the publication is marred by their truancy’.

126 AP, p. 234.

127 The Soldier’s Art, p. 227.

128 Faces in My Time, pp. 175–7.

129 Miscellaneous Verdicts, pp. 428, 3.

130 Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, London 1981, p. 332.

131 Journals 1982–1986, p. 54.

132 Journals 1982–1986, p. 262.

133 Birns, Understanding Powell, p. 233.

134 ‘Powell inherited an ineradicable military gene, an obsessive fascination with all the routines, shibboleths, and impedimenta of military life’: Ferdinand Mount, ‘A Time to Dance: Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and the Twentieth Century in Britain’, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), Yet More Adventures with Britannia, Austin 2005, p. 75.

135 Journals 1982–1986, p. 257.

136 See Journals 1982–1986, p. 257; ‘Apollinaire in His Letters’, TLS, 26 December 1952.

137 Interview of 1983 with Fallowell.

138 ‘Boy into Author’, Punch, 9 December 1953.

139 Some Poets, Artists and ‘A Reference for Mellors’, London 2005, p. 162.

140 Under Review, p. 365.

141 The Military Philosophers, p. 225.

142 Like It Was, p. 277.

143 Some Poets, Artists, p. 62.

144 Barber, Anthony Powell, p. 109; Journals 1990–1992, pp. 124, 196, 219; Journals 1987–1989, pp. 70–90.

145 ‘Taken from Life’, The Twentieth Century, July 1961, p. 52; Some Poets, Artists, p. 269.

146 Journals 1982–1986, pp. 38–40; Journals 1990–1992, p. 113.

147 Journals 1990–1992, p. 82.

148 Journals 1986–1989, pp. 10, 86; Journals 1990–1992, p. 194.

149 The Novels of Anthony Powell, pp. 173, 140.

150 Journals 1982–1986, p. 269.

151 Books Do Furnish a Room, pp. 50–1.

152 Pritchett, Bookman, April 1955; Bergonzi, Anthony Powell, Harlow 1962, p. 22; Mount, ‘A Time to Dance’, pp. 79–82.

153 The Military Philosophers, p. 227.

154 The Strangers All Are Gone, pp. 193–4.

155 Davis interview with Powell in 1962, p. 534.

156 Muggeridge: Evening Standard, 3 March 1964; Larkin: Required Writing, London 1983, pp. 221–3; Naipaul: A Writer’s People, London 2007, pp. 35–41, 60–73. Had he lived longer, Amis would no doubt have joined them, Powell belatedly realizing that ‘he is more spiteful than I thought’: Journals 1990–1992, p. 98.

157 The Broken Estate, London 1999, pp. 174–5. Later, of course, came redemption with Sebald. But could this portentous figure really be counted as English?

2. The Longevity of Powell

1 Messengers of Day, London 1978, pp. 108–9.

2 The Strangers All Are Gone, London 1982, p. 3.

3 See The Acceptance World, London 1955, pp. 66, 68.

4 The Soldier’s Art, London 1966, pp 11–12; for contrast, see Time Regained (translation Stephen Hudson), London 1931, p. 73.

5 Faces in My Time, London 1980, p. 112–13.

6 Journals 1987–1989, London 1996, p. 162.

7 The Strangers All Are Gone, p. 116.

8 Journals 1987–1989, p. 162.

9 A Question of Upbringing, London 1951, p. 176.

10 Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, London 2017, p. 412.

11 Messengers of Day, p. 200; Temporary Kings, London 1973, p. 224.

12 Time Regained, p. 427.

13 The Strangers All Are Gone, p. 194.

14 Messengers of Day, p. 31.

15 See Journals 1982–1986, London 1995, p. 79.

16 Journals 1982–1986, p. 247.

17 The Strangers All Are Gone, p. 4.

18 For a decisive objection to the view that in the history of modern literature only significant formal experiment has mattered, see Benjamin Kunkel’s reflections on the ‘perennial novel’, n+1, no. 4, Spring 2006, pp. 102–9.

19 Faces in My Time, p. 11.

20 Time Regained, p. 428.

21 The Strangers All Are Gone, p. 201.

3. From Progress to Catastrophe

1 Der historische Roman, Berlin 1955; English translation, London 1955.

2 The Historical Novel, pp. 184–99.

3 ‘O romance histórico ainda é possível?’, Novos Estudos Cebrap 77, March 2007.

4 Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, New York 1963, pp. 150 ff.

5 Shklovsky, Mater’ial i stil’ v romane Leva Tolstovo ‘Voina i Mir’, Moscow 1928. See particularly the fourth chapter, ‘Bogucharsky bunt’, pp. 77–85, for contemptuous treatment of the riot by peasants on the Bolkonsky estate against orders to abandon it as French troops approach, put down with admirable resolve (‘Caps off, traitors!’) by Nikolai Rostov, breathless with fury in his rescue of Princess Maria from her serfs. Also the eighth, ‘Deformatsiya istorickeskovo materiala v romane’, for manipulation of the sources Tolstoy consulted – Thiers, Bogdanovich, De Las Cases – to belittle Napoleon (his ‘pampered body’ doused with eau de cologne on the eve of Borodino) and to dignify Alexander I, pp. 152–219. Shklovsky’s suggestion that the historical material which super-vened in the final version of War and Peace dislodged it from the family novel it started out as being into a new genre has sometimes been thought the main interest of his study, as a good example of his originality as a literary theorist. The general judgment of his quality as a thinker is perfectly valid, but not this case as particular grounds for it. Tolstoy himself described his completed work as a historical novel, by the 1860s a long-established genre, on whose development War and Peace, partly because it was so hybrid a form, had rather little impact.

6 Composed between 1896 and 1904, published posthumously in 1917. For Harold Bloom, ‘my personal touchstone for the sublime of prose fiction, to me the best story in the world’: The Western Canon, New York 1994, p. 336.

7 Subtitled A Cultural History of Russia, London 2002. For tart comments on Tolstoy’s presentation of his heroine’s performance: Elena Tsembaeva, ‘Historical Context in a Literary Work (Gentry Society in War and Peace)’, Russian Studies in Literature, 2007, 1, pp. 24–7. For the reception of Mrs Braddon’s fiction, not only by Tolstoy, in the Russia of the 1860s, where Aurora Floyd was translated within a year of its appearance in England, see C. J. G. Turner, ‘The First Kind of “Novelist’s Poetry” ’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Tolstoy Symposium, September 1979, pp. 380–7.

8 Letters of 1856 to Count Dmitri Bludov, one-time secretary to the Supreme Judicial Commission that sentenced the Decembrists in 1826, later minister of the interior under Nicholas I, and to his future biographer, Egor Kovalevsky, an officer at Sebastopol – for which see Kathryn Feuer, Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace, Ithaca 1996, p. 168, the outstanding work of scholarship on the formative processes of the novel. Building on what she terms the ‘critical masterpieces’ of Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum: pp. 216–18, Feuer’s study showed how illusory is the common belief that Tolstoy nourished any favourable opinion of the Decembrists, against whose destructive follies his original plans for a novel were aimed.

9 For the ensuing distortions, see Dominic Lieven, ‘Tolstoy on War, Russia and Empire’, in Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin (eds), Tolstoy on War: Narrative Art and Historical Truth in ‘War and Peace’, Ithaca 2012, pp. 12–25.

10 See the fine pages on the novel by Gordon Craig, Theodor Fontane: Literature and History in Bismarck’s Reich, New York 1999, pp. 154–63, and the judgment of Count Bninski: ‘All that flourishes here is class and petty formality, number and routine, and along with it that hateful poverty that breeds, not simplicity, but only cunning and wretchedness’ [Before the Storm, London 1985, p. 45, trans. modified].

11 Divided into five sequences, composition of the series, which began in 1873 and initially ended in 1879, was then resumed after an interval of twenty years, set in motion once again by disillusion, now at the debacle of Spain at the hands of the US in 1898. By the time the last volume appeared in 1912, Galdós had become a republican. The span of the whole series covered Spanish history from 1805 to 1882. Breaching Lukács’s rules, it includes major historical figures as active characters, their names giving titles to five of the novels – three military rulers of the country: Narváez, O’Donnell, Prim, and two civilian: Mendizábal and Cánovas.

12 Jameson, ‘O romance histórico ainda é possível?’, p. 200.

13 Respectively: The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar (Brecht; begun in Denmark), The Death of Virgil (Broch; completed in California), the two volumes of Henri IV (Heinrich Mann; composed in Nice).

14 Detroit 1997, ed. Daniel Burt, vol. I, p. xxxiii.

15 Elio Vittorini, 2 July 1957: ‘come modi, tono, linguaggio e impostazione narrativa può apparire piuttosto vecchiotto, da fine Ottocento’.

16 Arabic publication: 1956–1958; French translation, 1985–1989; English translation, 1990–1992.

17 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham-London 1991, p. ix.

18 ‘O romance histórico ainda é possível?’, p. 202.

19 English translations, respectively: The Kingdom of This World (1962), Explosion in a Cathedral (1963). Born in 1904, son of a French architect who emigrated to Cuba, Carpentier was active as a journalist in the island until 1927, when he moved to France, returning to Cuba in 1939. Relocating to Venezuela in 1945, where he completed both of these novels, he went back to Cuba after the victory of the revolution in 1959, and ended as the country’s ambassador in Paris.

20 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, Cambridge, MA 2003, p. 392.

21 Respectively, ‘O romance histórico ainda é possível?’, and ‘Trajetos de uma forma literária’, Novos Estudos Cebrap 77, pp. 185–203 and 204–20.

22 ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’, LRB, 28 July 2011, subsequently translated in Berlin as ‘Vom Fortschritt zur Katastrophe: Über den Historischen Roman’, Sinn und Form, no. 1, 2013, pp. 15–29.

23 The Antinomies of Realism, London-New York 2013, pp. 266–9; 116, 281–4; for generous comments on the LRB essay, pp. 147, 259.

24 See, for example, Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, Durham 2010; and by way of reaction, Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Enquiry 37, no. 3, 2011, pp. 434–72.

25 A feature of Jameson’s own writing, from early on, has been a gift for vivid evocation of these: see The Origins of Postmodernity, London-New York 1998, p. 76.

26 Asked at a roundtable on The Antinomies of Realism why he had not included American fiction in his survey of the nineteenth century, Jameson explained in a rare concession to autobiography the distance of his writing from the literature of his native land – texts on Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler excepted – with an analytic verve and touch of acerbity that make for one of his liveliest statements: Journal of American Studies, November 2014, pp. 1086–9.

27 Presumably: because Jameson, who devotes some magnificent pages of Antinomies to Galdós – ‘full of curiosity about servants and of sympathy for women of all classes, as exploratory of the lower depths as Dickens, as sympathetic to his ambitious young men with more indulgence for the slackers than Balzac himself, as alert to the vibrations of civil war and political tension as Stendhal, as ironic as Thomas Mann, as gossipy as Proust, as familiar with the urban terrain and the streets of the city as Joyce, as prolific as Trollope, he felt the energizing influences of French naturalism and Russian spirituality as enlargements of his outsider’s view of the prosperity of bourgeois Spain’ (pp. 95–6) – deals with his novels of contemporary realism, not the historical cycle of Episodios Nacionales. Though his discussion of ‘the waning of protagonicity’ in the former, a character-system in which ‘putative heroes and heroines’ recede into the background, minor or secondary figures colonizing the foreground, could be held a distant relation of the blurring of the same in Tolstoy’s ostensibly historical novel.

28 Antinomies, p. 298.

29 Antinomies, pp. 301–2.

30 Jameson has returned to the structure of Cloud Atlas as a set of pastiches in his subsequent Allegory and Ideology, London–New York 2019, contrasting it as a ‘maximalist’ form with Tom McCarthy’s more avantgarde ‘minimalist’ Remainder, completed a few years earlier, but published a year later: pp. 335–44 – a contrast consorting nicely with the distinction between ‘citra’ and ‘ultra’ versions of the postmodern proposed in The Origins of Postmodernity, pp. 101–12 ff.

31 Antinomies, pp. 307–8.

32 Antinomies, pp. 312–13.

33 For the first, see Rose Harris-Birtill, David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion, London 2019. For the second, Martin Paul Eve, Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Stanford 2019. The latter, billed as ‘the first work to bring techniques of the digital humanities to bear on a single novel for close reading’, issuing perhaps appropriately from the press of the university home to the United States’ leading Literary Lab, from whose first pamphlet, ‘Quantitative Formalism’, its title in part derives: p. 156. There is no conflict between the two studies, the latter justly describing the former as ‘perhaps knowing more about the whole body of David Mitchell’s writing than any other living writer’: pp. 92–3.

34 David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World, pp. 206–7.

35 Edward King, ‘The World-Historical Novel: Writing the Periphery’, Yale Ph.D 2017, pp. 223, 226.

36 ‘The Fog of History’, London Review of Books, 24 March 2022.

37 The work’s full title reads, The Books of Jacob, or: A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects, New York 2022.

38 See her Nobel address, ‘The Tender Narrator’, where if anything she looks forward to a ‘neo-surrealism’.

39 The Maximalist Novel, New York–London 2014, p. 84. The examples taken by Ercolino to illustrate his case are heavily weighted towards the United States as home of the form – Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Underworld, The Corrections dominating the list, White Teeth and 2005 dopo Cristo afterthoughts as evidence of its spread to Europe, Bolaño’s 2666 as a cross-border outpost in Latin America. Its thematics? ‘Paranoia is the motor of the maximalist literary imagination’, playing ‘a fundamental role’ in the poiesis and plots of all seven novels (p. 106). Why this kind of maximalism should be so archetypally American lies beyond the scope of Ercolino’s study, though he refers to the connections between paranoid fantasies and apocalyptic traditions in the Protestant culture of the US. Given the lack of much religious background in his batch of authors, a more compelling link might be made between the political impotence, from the Carter years onwards, of any radical opposition to the established order in the US and phobic visions of a hidden omnipotence holding the country in place. The depoliticized results of a paranoid imagination are on prominent display in the ‘thematic field’ of maximalism as enumerated by Ercolino. Between them, his seven authors muster twenty-three principal themes. Of these, one preoccupation alone features in all seven writers – drugs. After them, come technology (six) and the sacred (five). Of issues of concern to at least half the company, capitalism comes in last (four). Of maximalist novels that do not make the shortlist, Harlot’s Ghost (1991) is substantially longer – 1,300 pages – than any of those that do, but presumably Mailer’s too-political, near-realist optic excluded it as insufficiently postmodern.

40 ‘A Businessman in Love’, Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, Vol. 2, Forms and Themes, Princeton 2006, pp. 436, 438, first published in the Italian original of the set Il Romanzo, II, Le Forme, Turin 2001.

41 Compare ‘A Businessman in Love’, pp. 440–1 and Katarzyna Zechenter, ‘From “Poland’s Genius’’ to the World as a ‘‘living, single entity”‘, Polish Review, no. 2, 2021, pp. 140–1.

4. Persian Letters

1 See his reflections on the work, completed three decades after it had appeared in 1721, which figure as an appendix in the edition of Persian Letters translated by C. J. Betts, London 1973, pp. 283–4; references to the latter henceforward PL.

2 PL, p. 284, trans. modified.

3 Letter 102, PL, p. 87.

4 Letter 131, PL, p. 233.

5 Letter 14, PL, p. 60.

6 Letter 35, PL, p. 89.

7 Letter 97, PL, p. 182.

8 Letter 94, PL, p. 176.

9 Letter 83, PL, p. 162, trans. modified.

10 Letter 23, PL, p. 71.

11 Letter 24, PL, p. 73.

12 Letter 38, PL, pp. 92–3.

13 Letter 55, PL, pp. 118–19.

14 Letter 112, PL, p. 204.

15 Letter 116, PL, p. 210.

16 Letter 114, PL, p. 207.

17 Letter 106, PL, p. 194.

18 Letter 106, PL, p. 194, trans. modified.

19 Letter 151, PL, p. 273.

20 Letter 62, PL, p. 128.

21 Letter 161, PL, p. 280, trans. modified.

22 Letter 161, PL, p. 281.

23 PL, p. 283, trans. modified.

24 PL, p. 283, trans. modified.

INDEX

Authors et alia

Abelard, Peter 175

Ackroyd, Peter 152

Ainsworth, Harrison 140

Aldanov, Mark 81

Alexander I 135, 168

Alexander II 135

Amis, Kingsley 1, 104–5

Amis, Martin 105

Apollinaire, Guillaume 95, 122

Arendt, Hannah 130

Arnold, Matthew 26

Asquith, H. H. 96

Attlee, Clement 92

Aubrey, John 8, 10, 55

Auden, W. H. 90, 100

Austen, Jane 80

Babel, Isaac 134

Balzac, Honoré de 13, 32, 63, 76, 79, 80, 111–12, 124, 125, 128, 140, 155, 156, 157

Barker, Pat 152

Bataille, Georges viii

Baudelaire, Charles 78, 83–4

Bayle, Pierre 180, 184

Beckett, Samuel 59, 88

Benjamin, Walter 153

Bernal, J. D. 11

Biddulph, Adelaide 6

Blake, William 85

Bloch, Ernst 133

Bludov, Dmitri 137n7

Bogdanovich, Alexander 131

Bolaño, Roberto 168, 169

Borges, Jorge Luis 59, 150

Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne viii, 118

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 136

Brecht, Bertolt 105, 143

Broch, Hermann 143

Brontë, Charlotte 32, 80

Brontë, Emily 80

Browning, Robert 84

La Bruyère, Jean de 56, 181

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 141

Burton, Robert 104

Byatt, A. S. 104, 152

Calvino, Italo 59

Campbell-Bannerman, Henry 96

Camus, Albert 81

Cánovas, Antonio 139

Cao Xueqin 32, 72, 73–4

Carpentier, Alejo 150, 151

Capel-Dunn, Dennis 8

Carey, Peter 152

Carter, Angela 104

Carter, Jimmy 169

Chandler, Raymond 156n25

Chardin, Jean-Baptiste 181

Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de 27, 63, 78

Christen, Miranda 11

Churchill, Winston 61

Cicero 175

Coates, Marion 6, 10, 11, 90

Cobden, Richard 96

Combes, Émile 87

Compton-Burnett, Ivy 2

Condorcet, Nicolas de Caritat 188

Connolly, Cyril 100

Conrad, Joseph 80, 117, 142

Constant, Benjamin 32, 80

Cooper, James Fenimore 132

Coward, Noel 45

Cowley, Abraham 85

Crane, Hart 122, 124

Crébillon, Claude Prosper 177

Crémieux, Adolphe 16

Cummings, E. E. 54, 122

Cusk, Rachel 123

Davidson, John 84–5

de Gaulle, Charles 61

Defoe, Daniel 177, 193

Delacroix, Eugène 45

de las Cases, Emmanuel 131

DeLillo, Don 152

de Staël, Germaine 177

de Tabley, John 82

Dick, Philip K. 156n25

Dickens, Charles 19, 76–7, 80, 156, 157

Döblin, Alfred 144

Doctorow, E. L. 152, 158

Donizetti, Gaetano 129

Donne, John 124

Dos Passos, John 158

Dostoevsky, Fyodor viii, 50, 78, 80, 96, 98–9, 124, 125, 170, 193

Drabble, Margaret 104

Dreyfus, Alfred 87

Dujardin, Édouard 33

Dumas, Alexandre 132, 140, 141

Durkheim, Émile 186

Eco, Umberto 166

Eliot, George 32, 78, 80, 154, 154–5, 156, 157

Farrell, J. G. 152

Faulkner, William 143, 156

Faure, Félix 16

Ferguson, Adam 133, 135

Fielding, Henry 177

Figes, Orlando 136

Firminger, Enid 6

Fitzgerald, Scott 14, 70

Flaubert, Gustave 27, 81, 125, 129

Fontane, Theodor 138

Ford, Ford Madox 69, 142

Ford, Henry 158

Forester, C. S. 145

Forster, E. M. 96

Foscolo, Ugo 177

Fowles, John 152

France, Anatole 87, 142

Franco, Francisco 90

Frank, Jakob 167–8, 172

Fuentes, Carlos 150

Galdós, Benito Pérez 13, 80–1, 138–9, 154, 156, 157

García Márquez, Gabriel 105, 150, 168

Garnett, David 95

Gauguin, Paul 124

George VI, King 97

Gerhardie, William 80

Gide, André 21–2, 76

Gissing, George 80

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 78, 156, 177

Gogol, Nikolai 80

Golding, William 104

Goldsmith, Oliver 176

Goncharov, Ivan 59

Goya, Francisco 45

Gracq, Julien 59

Gramsci, Antonio 172

Grass, Günter 152

Graves, Robert 143

Green, Henry 42

Greene, Graham 1, 10, 69, 80, 89, 90

Grosz, George 98

Guilleragues, Pierre de 176, 177

Gyges 12

Hahn, Reynaldo 21

Halévy, Daniel 87

Hamnett, Nina 6

Hanotaux, Gabriel 16

Hardy, Thomas 80

Hawkes, David 74

Hayek, Friedrich 96

Hazlitt, William 96

Heath, Edward 99

Heidegger, Martin 158

Héloïse 175

Heti, Sheila 123

Hemingway, Ernest 33, 54, 122, 134

Herbert, George 85

Heygate, John 90

Hitler, Adolf 90, 93

Hobsbawm, Eric 97

Hobson, J. A. 96

Hölderlin, Friedrich 177

Horkheimer, Max 163

Hugo, Victor 82, 140

Humboldt, Alexander von 158

Ingelow, Jean 82

James, G. P. R. 140

James, Henry 1, 32, 68, 80

Jarry, Alfred 124

Jókai, Móric 132

Joyce, James 1, 33, 69, 80, 125, 157

Jünger, Ernst ix

Kafka, Franz 1

Kehlmann, Daniel 158

Kipling, Rudyard 80

Kleist, Heinrich Wilhelm von 132, 144, 156

Kluge, Alexander 156

Knausgaard, Karl Ove 123

Koestler, Arthur 93

Kovalevsky, Egor 137n7

Kutuzov, Mikhail 129–32, 135, 155, 158

Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de 63, 136, 177

Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di 145–6

Larkin, Philip 104

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 180, 181, 184, 185

Lermontov, Mikhail 14

Lewis, Wyndham 54, 122

Louis XIV, King 187

Mahfouz, Najib 146–7, 149

Mailer, Norman 152, 169

Malaparte, Curzio 81

Mallarmé, Stéphane 27

Malraux, André 81, 193

Mann, Heinrich 143

Mann, Thomas 81, 157

Manning, Mary 6

Manzoni, Alessandro 129, 132, 139–40

Marana, Giovanni 176, 177, 180

Marat, Jean-Paul 89, 177

Marivaux, Pierre de 177

Matisse, Henri 2

Maupassant, Guy de 156

McCarthy, Tom 160

Mendizábal, Juan Ávarez 139

Meredith, George 80

Michelangelo 125

Mitchell, David 159–67

Mitchell, Margaret 143

Modigliani, Amedeo 6

Moncrieff, Scott 40, 74

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat xi, 175–93

Moravia, Alberto 81

Morrison, Toni 152

Muggeridge, Malcolm 92–3, 96, 104, 115

Munif, Abdelrahman 149–50

Murdoch, Iris 105

Musil, Robert 1, 81, 113, 193

Naipaul, V. S. 104

Napoleon 129–31, 136–7, 138, 139

Napoleon III 137

Narváez, Ramón Maria 139

Nero 120

Nerval, Gérard de 27, 63, 78

Newton, John 85

Nichols, Beverly 90

Nietzsche, Friedrich 124

Nievo, Ippolito 81

O’Brian, Patrick 145

O’Donnell, Leopoldo 139

Oedipus 120

O’Rourke, Juliet 6

Orwell, George 11, 97

Orwell, Sonia 10

Oscar II 18

Ovid 175

Owen, Wilfred 95

Pallavicino, Ferrante 176

Pasqualigo, Alvise 175

Paso, Fernando del 150

Pasternak, Boris 81

Peele, George 82

Perec, Georges 168

Petronius 120

Pitt, William 95

Poe, Edgar Allan 85

Pope, Alexander 85

Potter, Dennis 107, 120

Powell, Anthony

admiration for Proust 69–71

architectonic skills 115

background 3–12, 15–16, 42

characterization 32–41

comparison with Proust ix, x, 13–16, 29–41, 58–61, 86–8

critique of romanticism 68–9

cultural horizon 124

death 118–19

debt to Proust 14–16, 56–8

European 105

father 3–4, 94–5

first published pieces 88–9

gender 121–2

handling of change 41

impact of First World War on 94–6

impact of Second World War on 55, 90–2, 110–11

inner turbulence 9–10

insomnia 9

laconic streak 2

literary culture 78–81

literary influences 122

literary prejudice 124–5

literature on 14–15

longevity 107–25

marriage 6–7

memoirs 7, 9, 29, 116–19, 124–5

mistresses 6, 11

most sympathetic characters 47

outsider 5

Oxford 4–5

politics 86–100

pre-war novels 109–10

reflective generalization 56–8

relationship with Violet 10–12

reputation 119–25

resistance to xi

sentence length 56

social range 41–8

sources 82–3

Spurling’s ‘Life’ 2–12

status 105–6

stylistic change 53–8

treatment of women 42–8

upbringing 4

use of poetry 83–5

values 102–3

Violet’s infidelity 10–11

writing pace 114

Powell, Tristram 7

Powell, Violet (née Pakenham) 6–7, 9, 10–11, 121

Praz, Mario 69

Prévost, Antoine François 177

Proust, Marcel 125, 157

achievement 17, 62

aim 27n39

apologists 23–4n26

background 15–17

characterization 32–7, 40–1

comparison with Powell ix, x, 13–16, 29–41, 58–61, 86–8

conservatism 103–4

cult of ix–x, 27n39

disappointments 24

father 16

and friendship 25–6

handling of change 41

handling of narrative 60–1

handling of time 17–19

homosexuality 21–2

immersion in the self 22–7

impact of First World War on 55, 88

inheritance 16

as late Romantic 27

literary biography dimensions 1

literary culture 78–9

literature on 14

milieu 121

narcissism 83

politics 86–8

popularity 62

Powell’s debt to 14–16, 56–8

and realism 20–1

romanticism 63–4

sexual desire 24–5

social range 41

sources 82–3

status 14, 105

suffering 26

Prim, Juan 139

Prus, Boleslaw 170

Pynchon, Thomas 152, 168

Queneau, Raymond 81

Quennell, Peter 100

Quevedo, Francisco de 176

Racine, Jean 82

Raleigh, Walter 85

Ranke, Leopold von 104

Richardson, Samuel 177, 182–3

Rilke, Rainer Maria 59

Rimbaud, Arthur 83

Roa Bastos, Augusto 150

La Rochefoucauld, François 56

Restif, Nicolas 177

Ross, Alan 11

Rossini, Gioachino 129

Roth, Joseph 144–5, 146

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 135, 177

Rubens, Peter Paul 45

Russian formalism 60, 140

Sabatini, Rafael 142

Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy 82

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 78–9

Saramago, José 151

Sartre, Jean-Paul 81, 91, 105, 130, 154, 193

Sassoon, Siegfried 95

Savanarola, Girolamo 157

Scott, Walter 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133–4, 135, 144, 154, 155, 156

Sebald, W. G. 105, 152

Segura, Juan de 175, 177

Shakespeare, William 124, 125

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 96

Sienkiewicz, Henryk 132

Simpson, Wallis 9

Smollett, Tobias 177

Spark, Muriel 104

Spender, Stephen 100

Spenser, Edmund 84

Sidney, Philip 84

Sontag, Susan 152

Stalin, Josef viii, 93

Stendhal 80, 81, 135, 136, 157

Sterne, Laurence 59, 177

Steuart, Sir James 135

Stevens, Wallace 119

Stevenson, Robert Louis 141

Stewart, Dugald 133

Stone, Robert 152

Strachey, Lytton 96

Styron, William 152

Swift, Jonathan 181

Sykes, Christopher 2

Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 181

Thatcher, Margaret 98–9, 102

Thiers, Adolphe 131

Tokarczuk, Olga 167–73

Tolstoy, Leo 77, 78, 88, 128, 129–32, 134–8, 139, 154, 156–7

Tournier, Michel 152, Trodd, Kenneth 120

Trollope, Anthony 81. 157

Twells, Henry 85

Ubaldo Ribeiro, João 150

Valéry, Paul 124

Varda, Dorothy 6

Vargas Llosa, Mario 150

Vasari, Giorgio 125

Vidal, Gore 152

Vittorini, Elio 146n14

Voltaire 176, 177, 193

Wallenstein, Albrecht von 154

Walker, Alice 152

Walpole, Hugh 123

Ward, Georgina 11

Waugh, Auberon 10

Waugh, Evelyn 1, 2, 54, 80, 99

West, Nathaniel 69

Weyman, Stanley John 142

Wheatley, Dennis 145

Wilde, Oscar 69

Wilder, Thornton 143

Wilmot, John (Earl of Rochester) 84

Winn, Godfrey 90

Wolff, Christian 185

Wollstonecraft, Mary 188

Woolf, Virginia 33, 96, 144, 150

Xanthippe 46

Yourcenar, Marguerite 145

Zevi, Sabbatai 172

Zola, Émile 13, 42, 87, 156

Critics

Adorno, Theodor 58–9, 162, 163

Barber, Lynn 8n10, 11n15

Barber, Michael 5n6, 66, 89, 90, 97

Barthes, Roland 33n47

Bayley, John 75–8

Bergonzi, Bernard 100

Betts, C. J. 175

Birns, Nicholas 12, 93

Bloom, Harold 134n5

Bowie, Malcolm x, 18–19, 22, 65

Burt, Daniel 145

Carter, William 1, 16, 23–6, 87

Corino, Karl 1

Craig, Gordon 138–9

Curtius, Ernst Robert ix–x

Edel, Leon 1

Eikhenbaum, Boris 137

Ellman, Richard 1

Ercolino, Stefano 169

Erlich, Victor viii

Eve, Martin Paul 163–4n32

Fallowell, Duncan 9n11

Feuer, Kathryn 137n7

Freeborn, Richard vii, viii

Genette, Gérard 25n33, 27n39, 33n47

Gibson, Robert 13n17

Gray, Margaret 64n77

Gregg, Melissa 155n23

Greimas, Algirdas Julien 60

Harris-Birtill, Rose 163–4n32, 165n33

Horkheimer, Max 163

Hsia, C. T. 73

Jameson, Fredric viii, xi, 129–31, 142, 144, 146, 148–9, 152–3, 153–73

Joyau, Isabelle 12n16, 48, 68n82

Kilmartin, Terence 31

King, Edward 167n34

Koyama, Taichi, 54–5, 99

Kristeva, Julia 27n39

Kunkel, Benjamin 123n18

Lautel-Ribstein, Florence 61n76

Leader, Zachary 1

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 60

Leys, Ruth 155n23

Lieven, Dominic 137n8

Lukács, György xi, 127–30, 132, 133, 139n10, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 155, 167

Mochulsky, Konstantin viiin2

Mount, Ferdinand 42, 93, 99, 100–1

Moretti, Franco viii, 72–3, 142, 170

North, Joseph 15

Prendergast, Christopher 24, 64

Pritchett, Victor 100

Propp, Vladimir 60

Revel, Jean-François 25

Rivière, Jacques 23–4n26

Roe, John xiii

Sayce, R. A. vii–viii

Schwarz, Roberto viii

Seigworth, Gregory 155n23

Sherry, Norman 1

Shklovsky, Viktor 130–1, 138, 181

Sostero, Geneviève Henrot 61n76

Spitzer, Leo vii–viii, ix–x

Spurling, Hilary 2–12, 31, 74–5, 86, 90, 116, 117, 119, 121–2, 122

Stach, Reiner 1

Stannard, Martin 1

Stern, J. P. ix

Tadié, Jean-Yves 1, 22, 28, 31n46, 40n55, 88

Thibaudet, Albert 26–7

Thody, Philip 13n17

Tolkien, J. R. R. 162

Tsembaeva, Elena 136n6

Tucker, James 48, 99

Turner, C. J. G. 136

Wang, Guowei 73

Watt, Adam 14n18, 64n77

Weyden, Rogier van der 45

White, Hayden 153–4

Wilson, Edmund 17, 28

Woloch, Alex 32, 60

Wood, James 106

Yu, Ying-shih 73n92

Zechenter, Katarzyna 170

Characters

Powell

Aberavon, Lord Rowland 41

Akworth, Bertram 116

Andriadis, Milly 50, 51

Barnby, Ralph 46

Billson 36, 37, 43

Bithel, Lieutenant 37

Blaides, Mildred 121

Bracey, Private 36

Bridgnorth, Lord 41

Brightman, Emily 48

Clarke, St John 83

Conyers, General Aylmer 36, 37, 93

Creech, Albert 36

Deacon, Edgar 36, 50, 51

Donners, Sir Magnus 37, 50

Duport, Bob 36, 37

Erdleigh, Myra 36, 48

Farebrother, Sonny 38–9, 49

Fenneau, Canon Paul 116

Flitton, Pamela 39–40, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 77, 84–5

Foxe, Amy 43–4

Foxe, Buster 43–4

Giles, Uncle 37, 40

Gwatkin, Captain Roland 52

Gwinnett, Russell 52

Huntercombe, Lord Walter Lord 41

Jeavons, Molly 47

Jenkins, Nick 10, 12, 30–1, 37, 43, 46, 49, 93, 100, 108, 121

Jones, Gypsy 51

Le Bas, Lawrence 52

Leintwardine, Ada 48

Leroy, Madame 111

Maclintick 37, 52, 53

Mona 36, 37

Moreland, Hugh 37, 83–4

Murtlock, Scorpio 115

Quiggin, J. G. 36, 37, 40

St John Clarke 122–3

Sleaford, Geoffrey Marquis of 41

Sillery, Professor 96

Stringham, Charles 34, 36, 37, 40, 49, 50, 52, 53, 84

Templer, Jean 10, 11, 36, 37, 44–7, 50, 51, 52, 53, 111–12

Templer, Peter 50, 51, 52

Trapnel, X. 52, 53

Umfraville, Dicky 39

Walpole-Wilson, Sir Gavin 40

Warminster, Lord 41

Weedon, Tuffy 43, 48

Widmerpool, Kenneth 7–8, 36, 37–8, 40, 41, 47, 49, 50–1, 51–2, 52, 53, 58, 76, 84–5, 93, 97, 99, 116

Wilson, Matilda 47, 50

Proust

Adolphe, Uncle 18

Bloch, Albert 20, 29, 35, 40

Brichot, Professor 19

Charlus, Palamède Baron de 19, 29, 35, 36–7, 40, 41

Cottard, Doctor 19

Françoise 35–6

Guermantes, Basin Duc de 19

Guermantes, Oriane Duchesse de 19

Legrandin 35, 40

Morel, Charles 20, 28, 36–7

Norpois, Marquis 40

Octave 20, 38

Odette, de Crécy 18, 19–20

Rachel 20

Saint-Loup, Robert de 20, 29, 34, 36, 40

Saniette, Palaeographer 19

Simonet, Albertine 19–20, 21, 35, 36, 37, 40

Swann, Charles 18, 19–20, 20, 32–3, 36

Swann, Gilberte 20

Verdurin, Gustave 19, 29

Verdurin, Madame 19, 20, 29

Villeparisis, Madeleine Marquise de 19

Vinteuil, Mlle 20