A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

First published: 1976; includes A Question of Upbringing, 1951; A Buyer’s Market, 1952; The Acceptance World, 1955; At Lady Molly’s, 1957; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, 1960; The Kindly Ones, 1962; The Valley of Bones, 1964; The Soldier’s Art, 1966; The Military Philosophers, 1968; Books Do Furnish a Room, 1971; Temporary Kings, 1973; Hearing Secret Harmonies, 1975

Type of work: Novels

Type of plot: Tragicomedy and social realism

Time of plot: 1914-1971

Locale: London and Venice

Principal characters

• Nicholas Jenkins, a novelist
• Kenneth Widmerpool, a school acquaintance
• Peter Templer, a school acquaintance
• Jean Templer, his lover before his marriage
• Charles Stringham, his school friend
• J. G. Quiggin, a fellow student, and later a left-wing critic
• Mark Members, a fellow student, and a poet
• Giles Jenkins, his raffish uncle
• Sir Magnus Donners, an industrialist
• Myra Erdleigh, a friend of Uncle Giles, and a clairvoyant
• Chips Lovell, a friend of Jenkins and a fellow scriptwriter
• Lady Molly Jeavons, Lovell’s aunt by a former marriage
• Lady Priscilla Tolland, a debutante, later married to Lovell
• Lady Isobel Tolland, her older sister, who marries Jenkins
• Erridge, their eldest brother, later Lord Warminster
• Hugh Moreland, a composer and one of Jenkins’s closest friends
• Matilda Wilson, an actor, who later marries Moreland
• Maclintick, a music critic and admirer of Moreland
• Dr. Trelawney, a cult leader and magus
• Rowland Gwatkin, Jenkins’s company commander at the outset of World War II
• Pamela Flitton, Stringham’s niece who marries Widmerpool
• X Trapnel, a novelist and short-story writer
• Russell Gwinnett, an American professor who writes a biography of Trapnel

The Story:

Nicholas Jenkins is in school at Eton College along with three other youth, Charles Stringham, Peter Templer, and Kenneth Widmerpool. Jenkins uses his friendship with the other young men to cement his acquaintance with various areas of life: Widmerpool’s ambition, Stringham’s aristocratic connections, and Templer’s social ease and familiarity with sex. A visit from Jenkins’s scapegrace uncle, Giles, forecasts unstable elements in the adult world.

On a visit to Templer’s family, Jenkins meets Templer’s sister Jean, for whom he develops a crush. He then goes to France to practice the language in a French home, only to encounter Widmerpool, who is the object of jest and abuse on the part of the French people who know him. Jenkins also falls in love with the daughter of his host. Returning to England, he enters Oxford, where he becomes initiated into literary circles, meeting two young writers, Mark Members and J. G. Quiggin, who seem to have an odd love-hate relationship with each other.

Jenkins moves to London and works for a publisher of art books. He encounters a bizarre array of people ranging from the artist Edgar Deacon to the industrialist Sir Magnus Donners. He attends a whirl of parties and initiates several unsuccessful love affairs, encountering Widmerpool several times along the way. He spends a weekend at Peter Templer’s country house, where he once again meets Jean and begins a serious relationship with her. Jenkins decides on a career as a writer of fiction, even as Members and Quiggin vie for the patronage of a prominent novelist. Stringham, meanwhile, begins his descent into drunkenness and depression. Jean abruptly leaves Jenkins and returns to her husband, accompanying him to South America.

Jenkins begins encountering various members of the large, aristocratic, and quite eccentric Tolland family. Through the offices of Quiggin, he meets the family’s head, the left-wing gadfly Lord Erridge and, eventually, Erridge’s sister Isobel. Jenkins knows as soon as he sees Isobel that he will marry her, and indeed the two do marry some months later. Widmerpool also gets engaged, to an older widow, but the outcome is disastrous. Widmerpool emerges humiliated and chastened, causing amused comment on the part of Jenkins’s family friend, the octogenarian General Aylmer Conyers.

Composer Hugh Moreland is probably Jenkins’s best friend. Moreland’s wife, Matilda, is the former mistress of Donners, and she helps Moreland secure patronage in the aristocracy. Stringham’s mother holds a party for Moreland, at which Stringham momentarily shows some of his old vigor. The darker side of the Bohemian world, however, is revealed when Moreland’s friend, music critic Maclintick, commits suicide.

It is the late 1930’s, and war clouds are gathering. Jenkins thinks back to the beginning of World War I in 1914, when a disturbance in the domestic staff of his parents’ household mystically heralded the instigation of the war, announced dramatically by Uncle Giles. Another element of the 1914 tableau, the mystical cult leader Dr. Trelawney, reappears mysteriously at the seaside in 1939, months after Jenkins has sensed the coming of the war in a masque of the seven deadly sins held at Donners’s castle in Stourwater. Widmerpool assists Jenkins in obtaining a commission in the army, and Moreland is shocked to find Matilda has gone back to Donners.

Jenkins is appointed a subaltern (second lieutenant) in a Welsh regiment stationed in Northern Ireland. He develops a close bond with the regiment’s ambitious but melancholy captain, Rowland Gwatkin, and generally adapts well, if unevenly, to army life. Isobel gives birth to a son just as Jenkins must end a leave and return to duty. Gwatkin compromises his army career by silliness over a woman, and the inattention to duties resulting therefrom. Jenkins is transferred to divisional headquarters, where, to his tremendous surprise, he finds his immediate superior is Widmerpool.

In a late night literary discussion with the divisional commander, General Liddament, Jenkins fears he has blotted his army copybook when he rashly finds fault with the work of the general’s favorite Victorian novelist. The case is quite the opposite, however; their talk will eventually result in a more satisfying posting. Widmerpool is not Jenkins’s only surprise from his past, as he discovers Stringham is a waiter in the division’s mess unit. Although his circumstances are reduced, Stringham has conquered his alcoholism and has regained his integrity. Jenkins goes back to London only to experience the height of the Blitz, in which several of his relatives and old friends are killed. On the same trip, Jenkins attempts to transfer into a liaison unit that works with the Allied Powers.

Jenkins meets Pamela Flitton, Stringham’s hostile and sexually aggressive niece. Pamela begins to cut a wide swath through Jenkins’s network of friends and acquaintances, having an affair with Templer, among others. Jenkins finds out that Stringham, eager to go to the front lines, has been sent to Singapore, where he is tortured and killed during the Japanese occupation. Templer dies while attempting to aid the Yugoslav resistance. Moreland lingers on, but is never the same and dies some years after the end of the war. The war ends, and Jenkins attends the victory celebration at St. Paul’s Cathedral. After the service, he meets Jean Templer, now the wife of a Latin American military attaché. Widmerpool, who has risen rapidly through the ranks during the war, amazes everyone by marrying Flitton.

The war changes Jenkins’s social landscape forever. Most of his close friends are dead. His literary career, however, continues, and he becomes involved with editing the periodical Fission. Through this post he encounters Quiggin and Members again, as well as meeting the prominent cultural opinion-maker Lindsay “Books-do-furnish-a-room” Bagshaw. Jenkins becomes friendly with the younger novelist X Trapnel. Trapnel is a tragic figure whose artistic talents are never matched by stability in life. He falls in love with Pamela Widmerpool, whose husband has been named a life peer. Pamela leaves Widmerpool for Trapnel, but then spurns Trapnel as well, leading him to suicide.

Widmerpool is found to have intrigued with a communist puppet government in Eastern Europe, and is disgraced. Pamela becomes involved with American academic Russell Gwinnett, who is writing a biography of Trapnel; she kills herself in the course of pursuing a relationship with Gwinnett. Gwinnett’s biography of Trapnel is eventually awarded the Sir Magnus Donners Prize (the financier had died some years previously). At the prize banquet, Jenkins encounters Widmerpool, who has become an enthusiast for the 1960’s youth counterculture.

Widmerpool eventually joins a cult led by the insidious and charismatic Scorpio Murtlock, a spiritual disciple of Trelawney. Murtlock abuses Widmerpool and finally causes his death. One of Murtlock’s disciples, however, escapes from the cult and rescues a painting by Stringham that came to Widmerpool through his marriage to Pamela. As this painting is exhibited at an art gallery, Jenkins encounters Jean and has a final meeting with his first love. Jenkins contemplates the course of his life and meditates on the nature of the seasons and the patterns that govern the music of time.

Bibliography

Barber, Michael. Anthony Powell: A Life. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2004. Barber chronicles Powell’s career and places him within the context of literary life in twentieth century England. Although Barber was not Powell’s official biographer, he was able to conduct several interviews with his subject. Includes photographs.

Berberich, Christine. “Dancing to the Music of Widmerpool: The Gentleman in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.” In The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Berberich’s discussion of Kenneth Widmerpool is included in her study of how the English gentleman has been portrayed in twentieth century literature. She demonstrates how writers use the gentleman character as a means to critique society and to represent changing concepts of gender, class, and nationality.

Birns, Margaret Boe. “Anthony Powell’s Secret Harmonies: Music in a Jungian Key.” Literary Review 27 (Fall, 1981): 80-92. Analyzes the psychological and discursive elements in Powell’s novel from the perspective of Carl Jung’s archetypal theories, focusing especially on the Jenkins-Widmerpool relationship.

Birns, Nicholas. Understanding Anthony Powell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Chapter 3 provides an almost two-hundred-page examination of A Dance to the Music of Time, emphasizing the role that both world wars and the Cold War played in Powell’s life and writing. Provides an extensive analysis of Widmerpool and his relations to the minor characters and the narrator, demonstrating how Powell did not create a single champion against evil.

Brennan, Neil. Anthony Powell. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1995. One-third of this introductory overview of Powell’s life and work is devoted to A Dance to the Music of Time. Contains a chronology of Powell that includes his family ancestry.

Joyau, Isabelle. Understanding Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Wide-ranging and full of provocative observations. Especially good on the minor characters, whose significance is often missed. Convincingly establishes Powell as a major modern novelist.

Russell, John. Anthony Powell: A Quintet, Sextet, and War. Bloomington: Indiana State University Press, 1970. This pioneering study of Powell remains surprisingly relevant, even though it was written when the series was only three-fourths complete. Good on the psychology of Jenkins and the moral significance of Charles Stringham.

Selig, Robert L. Time and Anthony Powell. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991. A skillful and comprehensive work, in which Selig artfully explores the novel’s relevance to contemporary narrative theory.

Spurling, Hilary. Invitation to the Dance: A Guide to Anthony Powell’s “Dance to the Music of Time.” Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. This useful guide helps readers to navigate the complexities of Powell’s series. Contains a synopsis of each volume, by chapter and time sequence, and an extensive character index.