I'm sad. After about six months of reading, I'm about to crack open the twelfth and final book of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. The books have gotten better as they went along, not just because I got
more into it, but also, I suspect, because the process of writing them
must have taught Powell a lot. He published the first in 1951,
and continued to pop out a book every two years or so until the final
volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, appeared in 1975. They follow the life of Nick Jenkins, a mildly successful British writer, through school, WW2, and the world.
Somebody was telling me about a poem about number theory that contains the line "Twelve is like a chandelier."
Twelve is divisible by all the important numbers. It is also, Ethan points out, the basis for the blues. There are four seasons of Nick Jenkins's life, each of which is a trilogy. The first three books are a tiny bit boring, dealing with Nick's
schooling and early development. Summer warms up, as Nick
knocks around pre-war London with his best friends Barnby and Moreland. The series peaks with the WW2 trilogy, which shows the
boredom and silliness of Nick's war experience. The tenth and eleventh
book have been delicious, Powell's comic powers at their peak.
Knowing what you do best and sticking to it is something I admire. I've been noticing what Powell chooses to leave out of the books. There is barely any mention of family life, Nick's wife one of the minor characters in the books, the genders and ages of their children barely mentioned. There is a great deal of satire about political machinations in London society, but there's no actual treatment of politics or history. People die during the war, but there's no mention of the Holocaust, no battle scenes.
"The author is the protagonist's witness," Donald Westlake once told my husband. But we're not qualified to testify about everything. After I got mugged years ago, a fairly extended combat which ended in a draw (he got my purse but I got his bike), the cops took me to the station to look through books of mug shots of black men over 40 and under 5'9". I gave up after a while, not wanting to ID the wrong person. Had the mugger been white, I doubt I would have had a problem.
Every time Powell brings in the one Jewish character, Rosie Manasch, he mentions her glittering black eyes, plumpness, and air of being the mistress of a harem. And the only place where he ever seems out of tune is in the climax to book 11, where the characterization of the villainous Pamela Widmerpool tips over into absurdity, as if he let his misogyny get the better of him just a touch.
In general, Powell is smart enough to avoid his blind spots. He knows what he was put on earth to witness and sticks to it: the way mythological imagery guides our lives; the dominance hierarchies of the literary world; society gossip; old hotels; the etymology of family names; the tyranny of narcissism; the lurking iceberg of sex; and the music of time, largely manifested through the entrances and exits of friends from our lives, a tune which is too faint for us to hear when we are young but grows increasingly intense as we age.
My Dad died while I was reading these books. Donald Westlake died, too. He was the one who recommended them to us, a recommendation I took very seriously, since Westlake was probably the best writer I'll ever get to know personally, and since the books were so very different from Westlake's own work. When a fine pastry chef recommends a barbeque place, you drop everything and go.
Don's advice about the series was "Start with book four."
He said that Powell was dangerous for a writer, because you would be tempted to imitate his rambling, semicolon-filled sentences. He said he loved this description of the Ufford Hotel, from the beginning of book 3, The Acceptance World. Dig the rhythm, especially of the last sentence.
Not only the battleship grey colour, but also something at once angular and topheavy about the block's configuration as a whole, suggested a large vessel moored in the street. Even within, at least on the ground floor, the Ufford conveyed some reminder of life at sea, though certainly of no luxuriously equipped liner; at best one of those superannuated schooners of Conrad's novels, perhaps decorated years before as a rich man's yacht, now tarnished by the years and reduced to ignoble uses like traffic in tourists, pilgrims, or even illegal immigrants; pervaded -- to borrow an appropriately Conradian mannerism -- with uneasy memories of the strife of men. That was the feeling the Ufford gave, riding at anchor on the sluggish Bayswater tide.
It was hard to get Westlake to talk about what you wanted him to talk about. After a few glasses of wine, Ethan and I would try to double team him and get him to answer questions about craft, but Don was cagey, and who can blame him. He wrote over 100 books under various pseudonyms. I think the more you write the less you like to talk about it. Anything we needed to know, really, was already there in his books.
A few years ago, my dad sat me down and asked me, sort of formally, "Is there anything you want to know about our family and its history? I want you to ask me now, while we have the chance." He said that he wished his own father had given him this same opportunity.
I felt embarrassed because I couldn't think of a single thing to ask. Now I will have to pick up what I can by rereading and remembering, since he and Don are gone, in Mrs. Erdleigh's words "looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies."
