Dancing an antick hay

L. R. at Hollywood Party, May 2014

May 26, 2015
Satyres Dancing an Antick Hay 

Quelque prétext que nous donnions à nos afflictions, ce n’est souvent que l’intéret et la vanité que les causent. (La Rochefoucauld, V:232)

Whatever excuse we may find for our sorrows, often it is only self-interest and vanity that cause them. (E. H. & A. M. Blackmores’ translation)

I was looking back over all twelve volumes – or the twelve novels I have in four volumes of three apiece – of A Dance to the Music of Time. I read them just a year ago, and I was thinking I might read them again, even if I still can’t quite figure out why I like Anthony Powell so much. He doesn’t really tell stories: it’s more a matter of stringing incidents together. But I opened the first novel in the second series, At Lady Molly’s. I started leafing through, looking at passages I’d underscored; and I found myself laughing again – out loud and several times in the space of a few pages.

The setting: Britain, between the wars but the second is looming. Powell’s characters are a mixture of England’s upper class and the intelligentsia that hang onto it – artists, writers, and so forth.

What Powell is so damn good at it is turning an ordinary conversation into something extraordinary – usually extraordinarily odd or foolish – by a single insight from the narrator, Nick Jenkins. Jenkins has an ability 

The Jenkins Crater

to see through things, or maybe only to pay attention. The reader is thinking to himself, "You know, there’s something off about this" – whatever is going on. He (the reader) is like the disciples from the road to Emmaus, except instead of saying to each other when Jesus disappears from sight, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us when . . . .” one asks the other, “Is the wine going sour, or is it just me?”

   Nick sees that things are going slightly awry, and he conveys what he is seeing calling attention to a particular character's gesture or tone. (If it’s paying attention, it’s better attention than most of us pay; it’s as if he has dog’s ears or vulture’s eyes – or Powell does – hearing or seeing what most of us can’t quite – it’s too high-pitched or far away.) For instance,

Frederica Budd, who had been listening to all this with a slight smile, imperceptibly inclined her head, as one might when a clown enquires from his audience whether they have understood up to that point the course of the trick he is about to perform.

Or: Here’s Nick, waiting in a cinema queue back in the days when one set of movie-goers had to empty the theatre, come out the street, before the next group could go in. There are those that burst out to get on to the next thing, but there are many more in 

the long serpentine of spectators to whom expulsion into the street means no more than a need to take another decision in life; who, accordingly, postpone in the foyer any such irksome effort of the will, by banding themselves into small, irregular, restless groups, sometimes static, sometimes ineffectively mobile.

On a weekend – Nick is visiting the too serious writer J.C. Quiggin and the vacant Mona whom he introduced when the latter was still married to his school chum Peter Templer with no sense of what was to happen, that she would run away with Quiggin, for who would?

        ‘Have you been seeing anything of Peter?’ she asked, without any self-consciousness.

        ‘Not for some time, as it happens.’

        ‘I suppose he has found a new girl?’

        ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

        She did not pursue the subject. It was just as if she had said, ‘Have you change for a pound?’; 
    and on learning that I had no silver, immediately abandoned the matter.

Finally,  Erridge (Frederica Budd’s reclusive brother) suddenly drops in on Quiggin, Mona, and Nick, who are eating dinner. 

                ‘I haven’t butted in, have I?’ he said. He spoke not so much to Quiggin [the
             host] as to the world at large, without much interest in a reply. .

The examples could be multiplied, many times. The question is what allows Nick to see and hear as he does, both perceptively and, to use Emily Dickinson’s image, with eye and ear so bent it must both see and hear aslant. It’s the quality or point-of-view I mean by “antick.” There is in it, whatever we call it, this marvelous ability to see that everything happening normally is not – ever. There’s always subtext, and those that are most deep, serious, and guarded about theirs – the people that use words like “subtext” and say afterward things like, “I wasn’t about to reveal my hand.” – are the biggest clowns with the most transparent tricks.

   But, there is no one that doesn’t have a place in that tiny car.

The reader is certainly squeezed in, because he is so delighted with Nick’s “reveals,” which are not shared with the other characters but only with him. Comedy works first for those that are in the privileged position of on the outside looking in. But it works best when we stop laughing and look away from the book and listen to ourselves.

        Then, . . . well the best of us start laughing again; the rest of us become pundits and politicians, preachers and professors of literature, art history, and philosophy, aware that we have our motives, but no one else is onto them.