Peter Kislinger: "Epiphanies – Required inner processes, the coldest heart, and the marvellous road to the Hyperboreans" in Powell´s "A Dance to the Music of Time"

Lecture given at the 5th Biennial Anthony Powell Conference; Washington, DC; September 2009 [published in Secret Harmonies Double Issue 6/7, Autumn 2016: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.anthonypowell.org/files/37-1-1.pdf

Peter KISLINGER
Epiphanies – Required inner processes, the coldest heart, and the marvellous road to the Hyperboreans

One of the prejudices – and I am using the term with a Powellian undertone – of my PhD was that themes, motifs, imagery and narrative technique in Dance are part of a (developing) authorial choreography and should be seen as a unity. One of my main interests was the manifold thematic functions of the complex interrelationships between “story” and “narrative discourse”[1]. The title of my thesis, Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and Some Falsehoods almost Truths[2], had been inspired by Powell’s remark that Sir Thomas Browne’s paradoxical aphorism“contains in a sense justification of all novel-writing.”[3] Two chapters deal with explicit and implicit quotations from, and allusions to,hermetic, especially Gnostic and alchemical traditions. By allegorising the creative process they link the author with his novel’s narrator.

In VB, Jenkins presents Jenkins, the experiencing self, in two encounters which have a formative influence on him – one with Pennistone and one with Barnby. Jenkins first meets Pennistone on a “gruelling” nocturnal train journey during the war. Jenkins sums up his conversation about the French writer Alfred de Vigny with David Pennistone in words the far-reaching consequences of which for himself he does not fully comprehend until his encounter with Barnby: “[T]he individual still counts, even in the army.” Pennistone agrees: “Although consigned to circumstances in which, theoretically, no individuality – though much will-power – exists.” (VB 116)

I think I can safely assume we all agree that a mere summary of the themes and motives touched on, or alluded to, in the conversations with Pennistone and Barnby is crudely reductive and thus fails to give an impression of their naturalistic rendering.[4] The passages are prime examples of what I call either “spiritual naturalism” (I borrow the term from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s des Esseintes, the fictitious novelist in À rebours) or “extended naturalism” (borrowing the term from the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch [5]).

When Jenkins compares his career with how Barnby has fared in the army, he “felt a pang. Barnby was a few years older than myself. I had nothing so lively to report.“ (VB 118) What follows is a breathtakingly sober self-analysis, which marks a new stage in Jenkins’s development. Carl Gustav Jung, on the prerequisites of such a stage: “[T]he first step is to make oneself conscious of contents that have hitherto been projected. This endeavour gradually leads [...] to self-knowledge, and so to a distinction between what one really is and [...] what one imagines oneself to be.”[6] Jenkins may initially have felt envy of Pennistone’s capacity for work in spite of the war[7] but eventually accepts (his) dependence on social, historic and personal factors:

Whatever inner processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned, war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too. (VB 120)

His self-distancing comparison with Pennistone and Barnby culminates in a credo concerning the relationship between oneself and the times one is born into, an understanding of the requirements imposed on the individual by society in times of war and peace:

Why did one envy Barnby his operational flights? That was an absorbing question. Certainly not because one wanted to be killed, nor yet because the qualities of those who excel in violent action were the qualities to which one had any claim. For that matter such qualities were not specially Barnby's. There was perhaps the point. Yet it was absurd to regard war as a kind of competition of just that sort between individuals. If that was the aim in war; why not in peace? No doubt there were plenty of individuals who felt that sort of emulation in peacetime too, but their preoccupations were not one's own. Looked at calmly, war created a situation in which the individual – if he wished to be on the winning side – was of importance only in so much as he contributed to the requirements of the machine, not according to the picturesque figure he cut in the eyes of himself and others. It was no more reasonable, if you were not that sort of person, to aspire to lead a cavalry charge, than, without without [sic] specific training, split the atom. All the same, as Pennistone had said, these things are largely a matter of the will. I thought of Dr Trelawney, the magician, the night Duport and I had helped him to bed after his asthma attack, when he had quoted [Eliphas Lévi] as all that was necessary: ‘To know, to dare, to will, to be silent.’ Armed with those emblems of strength, one might, however out of character, lead a cavalry charge, perhaps even corner the pepper market and split the atom too. Anyway, I thought, it would be a dull world if no one ever had dreams of glory. Moreland was fond of quoting Nietzsche’s opinion that there is no action without illusion. Arrival at Aldershot brought an end to these reflections. (VB 120-21)

In terms both of content and form, the passage draws on key-figures of European thought. In seemingly ad-hoc phrases, Cartesian mediations and Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” join forces, achieving the intended result, in an ironic, roundabout, way, by being expressed in the hermetic mumbo-jumbo of the 19th-century “magus” Eliphas Lévi[8].

There is an essential parallel between Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode and Jenkins’s reflective discourse. The latter, too, can be read as a “history […], a tale […], a meditation”[9] on the ways and means of “finding [one’s] own true self.” Pennistone confesses to writing “something awfully boring about Descartes”, which he, self-deprecatingly, dismisses as “really not worth discussing. Cogito ergo sum, and all that.” (VB 114)

Descartes, raised and educated by Jesuits, uses secularized language insisting on the primacy of mutatio mentis[10]: “I have never contemplated anything higher than the reformation of my own opinions“[11] (in contrast to the Widmerpools of the world, “those restless and busy meddlers who, called neither by birth nor fortune to take part in the management of public affairs, are yet always projecting reforms”.[12]) Jenkins, in his train meditation, in fact comes close to what Descartes called his “provisory code of morals, composed of three or four maxims” concerning the relationship of individual and society:

The first was to obey the laws and customs of my country […] regulating my conduct in every other matter according to the most moderate opinions, and the farthest removed from extremes, which should happen to be adopted in practice with general consent of the most judicious of those among whom I might be living. For […] I was convinced that I could not do better than follow in the meantime the opinions of the most judicious; and although there are some perhaps among the Persians and Chinese as judicious as among ourselves, expediency seemed to dictate that I should regulate my practice conformably to the opinions of those with whom I should have to live […]. Also, amid many opinions held in equal repute, I chose always the most moderate, as much for the reason that these are always the most convenient for practice, and probably the best, (for all excess is generally vicious,) as that, in the event of my falling into error, I might be at less distance from the truth than if, having chosen one of the extremes, it should turn out to be the other which I ought to have adopted.[13]

The Moment of Primordial Choice: Søren Kierkegaard’s “instant”

In his Memoirs, Powell discloses a real-life model for Pennistone, who is “[a] faint projection of Alick Dru’s personality”[14] – an example of creative metamorphosis, a transmutation, an alchemical process of using biographical material in the framework of a novel, where every single detail is invested with “significance”. For Dru’s study on Kierkegaard, Powell has substituted Pennistone’s study of Descartes, retaining the Danish philosopher’s themes, as well as his narrator’s reflection on the philosophy of individual responsibility.

Jenkins finds himself confronted in the train episode by what Kierkegaard called “the instant”, “the moment of absolute choice“. The choice is between “the aesthetic”, which is associated with the constant search for novelty and pleasure[15], while “the ethical” is characterised by “responsibility” and “commitment”.[16] Commitments, for Kierkegaard, are made by becoming an active participant in society rather than a detached observer or outsider. Kierkegaard’s “ethicist” has a strong sense of responsibility, of duty and honour as well as respect for his friendships, family, and career. Kierkegaard’s Either/Or is also about the possibility of change that aims at achieving equilibrium necessary for moving on to the “religious sphere.”[17] Judge Vilhelm’s (i. e. the fictive persona in Either/Or) doubly ironic and strictly subjective formulation of “the ideal of the average” depends on the preceding “choice”, the “instant” (and let us keep in mind Jenkins´s Cartesian meditation). His “work has meaning for [him], and he believes “that to a certain degree, also has meaning for others”;

He loves his “native country” and his “mother tongue, which liberates [his] thoughts” allowing him to “express extremely well what [he has] to say in the world.”

“Amidst all this,” he adds, “I also live a higher life […]” (Kierkegaard Either/Or II 290), which is characterised by “intense inwardness.” (Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 298)[18]

Existentialist – i.e. Kierkegaardian – ideas were being bandied around in Dance, years before the train episode, being voiced by the clairvoyant Mrs Erdleigh, who admonishes Jenkins that “[p]eople can only be themselves [...]. If they possessed the same qualities you desire in them they would be different people.” (AW 21) Some time later, Jenkins “reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings are at close range equally extraordinary […]” (AW 91); which comes close to a direct lift from Either/Or: “The genuinely ordinary person is the genuinely extraordinary person. The more universally human an individual can actualize his life, the more extraordinary a human being he is […]” (Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 298) and that “[p]erhaps, after all, when closely examined, no sort of individual life can truly be […] labelled [conventional]” (LM 207), while, five years after the “instant” on the train, confronted with a spate of autobiographies by his middle-aged contemporaries, he first grumbles about those “on the whole unenthralling” chronicles, but then, having second thoughts, qualifies his stricture: “except insomuch as every individual’s story has its enthralling aspect [...] (BDFR 7) and that “… human life is lived largely at surface level […].” (BM 23)

Does this not sound like the apotheosis of the archetypal philistine petit-bourgeois? What is needed is an epiphany[19], in Kierkegaard’s terminology, the “instant”. Not only does Judge Vilhelm manage to survive but, what is more, he also feeds on that dreadful insight into some of the realities of “existence”. The suspicion that his insights are smug and complacent is refuted a few pages later by Judge Vilhelm:

What [a person] has lost in extensiveness he may win in intensive inwardness. In other words, not everyone whose life is a mediocre expression of the universal is […] an extraordinary person, for that would be an idolization of triviality; for him to be called that legitimately, some questions must be asked about the intense vitality with which he does this. (Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 298-299)

Judge Vilhelm “bears witness” that the “world” will change for a person choosing, by their own free will, a new “mode of life” (“existence”). By choosing the (subjective) form of a letter, Kierkegaard both offers and withholds an insight as well as avoids advancing normative or even “dogmatic ethics”.

I am no ethical rigorist, enthusiastic about a formal, abstract freedom. If only the choice is posited, all the esthetic [sic] returns, and you will see that only thereby does existence become beautiful, and that this is the only way a person can save his soul and win the whole world, can use the world without misusing it. (Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 161)
What I wanted to do was to show how the ethical in the mixed territories is so far from depriving life of its beauty that it expressly gives it beauty. With this I am through for now. It was never my purpose to present a doctrine of duty. […] Consider what I have written as a trifle […]. If I am anything at all, I am nothing more than a witness, and it is only in this sense that I thought this letter had a certain authority, because the words of one who speaks about what he has experienced have always authority. I am only a witness, and you have my deposition in optima forma. (Kierkegaard, Either/Or II 289-90)

Jenkins leaves the train awakened to a new relationship with society, “the world”, if only in the “war trilogy”. Although Powell does not deny the possibility of (individual) growth, he – and Jenkins, too – remains sceptical about the notion of linear development resulting in a final enlightenment of the self:“One never takes lessons to heart. It’s just a thing people talk about – learning from experience.” (VB 243) Yet readers have often denied to the “experiencing self” what Powell concedes to Jenkins and what has traditionally been at the heart of the European “Bildungsroman” (“novel of education”), i.e. the sceptical, yet profoundly humane insight that we cannot be at the peak of our intellectual powers and moral insights all the time.[20]

The content of the “instant” can be expressed by necessity only in strictly individual terms. Carl Gustav Jung, who was familiar with Kierkegaard’s writings, came to believe that Gnostic teachings originated in authentic psycho-spiritual experiences of Gnostic writers, that what originates in the psyche bears the imprint of that particular person’s psyche. C.G. Jung diligently compiled images from mythological, religious, orthodox as well as mystical traditions, describing the process of individuation, which often comes as a shock, a “brightening up”; he reminds us of “heroes” associated with “sun attributes”, and the moment of the birth of the “new person” being described as “illumination”[21](cf. the Mithras cult in VB). It is this birth of the “spiritual man” originally symbolized in the biblical, and later Christian, image of the baptismal act.[22] Here is Powell summing up his portray of Alick Dru:

Kierkegaard, like Blake, is claimed an early Existentialist, and Dru, believing passionately in individual choice, shared existentialist distaste for abstract thought [...]. Like Kierkegaard (in whom religious life was the aim), or Nietzsche (with a very different goal), Dru held that mysticism could be approached – was perhaps best approached – through the arts. [...] Dru would have enjoyed the American poet Delmore Schwartz´s observation: ‘Existentialism means that no one can take a bath for you’ [...]. (Powell, Faces in my Time, 141)

It is a quite ordinary experience during a humdrum military exercise in Northern Ireland – “naturalistically told” – that brings home to Jenkins that “no one can take a bath” for him. The episode of Jenkins’s failed attempt to cross the canal in Ireland in chapter 3 of VB turns out to be a baptism, while its concrete – “individualized” – result is the nocturnal train epiphany. But baptism, change into newness, is a very “ordinary” experience, too, yet “in a quiet way […] sufficiently dramatic.” (BM 130) Jenkins “started to make the transit,” but “fell in after about three or four yards.” He immediately resigns himself to, almost literally, going with the flow: the “water might have been colder for the time of the year,” so he “swam the rest of the way, reaching the far bank not greatly wetter than the rain had left me”. Then he “swam across again.” On his return to the cowshed “a wonderful surprise was waiting” for him:

“We saved a mug for you, sir. Wet you are,by Christ [!], too.”
I could have embraced him. [...] I felt immediately ten years younger […]. (VB 89-90)

Typically, Jenkins’s “transit” is later in the chapter merely alluded to – explicitly commented on by neither the experiencing nor the narrating self. First Rev. Popkiss, in his reading from Ezekiel 37, 1-6, refers to birth, baptism, and rebirth. “[...] Ezekiel´s vision in which the dry bones take on flesh [...]”[23] means development, and renewal, of a moral, ethical, psychological, spiritual (etc.) kind: “The promised land”, Canaan, the other side of the river, are synonymous with New Testament images such as “Kingdom of God” or “Heaven”[24]; then Jenkins, in the evening of the very same day, overhears Lance-Corporal Gittins “sing quietly to himself”:

When I tread the verge ofJordan,
Bid my anxious fears subside,
Death of Death and hell’s destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side […]. (VB 108-109)

Baptism in the River Jordan was originally understood metaphorically as a mutatio mentis. The Gospel of St. John 3, 5 speaks of being “born of water and of the Spirit,” otherwise we “cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (an image of inwardness, or consciousness); similarly, Romans 12, 2 admonishes the Romans: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind […].”[25]

Metanoia in everyday parlance has been narrowed down to a religious and moralizing cliché: repentance. What does Jenkins repent of? Jenkins´s deadly sin is of course “Sloth” - "acedia". (KO 129)[26] The “deadly”, or mortal, sins do not necessarily result in criminal or anti-social acts. Jenkins´s repentance/metanoia leads to “Death of Death” and “hell´s destruction” and finally (in the train epiphany) into the “kingdom of genuine identity”:

[O]rdinary human existence is spiritual death. But the ‘resurrection’ is the moment of enlightenment. "It is [...] the revealing of what truly exists [...] and a migration (metabole – change, transition) into newness." Whoever grasps this becomes spiritually alive. This means [...] that you can be "resurrected from the dead" right now [...].[27]

Jenkins’s crossing of the canal, which he calls a “transit”, is just such a metanoia and metabole (= “change, transition”). Both images, both terms (“migration into newness”/ “peregrination”) are re-awakened to their literal meaning, transformed into in a naturalistically rendered train-journey. The motif, and theme, is later varied by Erridge, who is “increasingly devoting himself to books about Anabaptists” – his interest is however in an entirely different sort of change, of “turn around”, i.e. in “revolutionary movements of the Middle Ages.” (VB 159)

Gnosticism maps out a four-stage process – metanoia, metabole, gnosis and “[w]hoever comes to this gnosis – this insight – is ready to receive the secret sacrament called the redemption (apolytrosis; literally: “release”).”[28]

After the nocturnal peregrination there is mention of a “release”; after returning from Northern Ireland to London, Jenkins resorts again to that word, this time going back to Greek mythology employing the archetypal complex of “renewal”: the London streets looked “incredibly bright and sophisticated, the tarts in Piccadilly dazzling nymphs. I knew how Persphone must have felt on the first day of her annual release from the underworld.” (VB 117) Jenkins is released from “anxious fears” and from a “hell” of quite a different kind; and Jenkins’s Normandy experience culminates in a “gigantic release”. (MP 163)

Powell burdens his narrator-figure with “the deadly sin” acedia (also accidie)/Sloth. Matilda Donners, decades after the charade, understands Sloth in its literal sense (sensu litteralis): “[…] Sloth’s absurd for you, Nick. Look at all those books you’ve written.” (HSH 60) Now, the New Testament term for sin is hamartia. It

[…] comes from the sport of archery; literally, it means ‘missing the mark.’ New Testament sources teach that we suffer distress, mental and physical, because we fail to achieve the moral goal toward which we aim [...]. Many Gnostics [...] insisted that ignorance, not (a moralized understanding of) sin, is what involves a person in suffering. […] Both Gnosticism and psychotherapy value, above all, knowledge – the self-knowledge which is insight.They agree that, lacking this, a person experiences the sense of being driven by impulses he does not understand.[29]

Years after his first skirmish with Myra Erdleigh and his self-identification as “the Archer”, and after Jenkins has become a liaison-officer with the allied forces, their paths cross again. Mrs Erdleigh now introduces him to new images, i.e. “the Centaur” and “exile”.

“[...] I can see at once from your face that you are well situated. The Centaur is friend to strangers and exiles. His arrow defends them.” (MP 136)

Not long before that encounter he had “missed the mark” because of Sloth in its everyday meaning of “indolence” or “laziness”. He failed to get a job as liaison officer with the “Free French” because of his poor command of French[30] and because his thoughts had been somewhere elsewhere[31].

The marvellous road to the Hyperboreans

Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?The ancient, and not so ancient, Hyperboreans do join Dance – offering imagery which ingeniously establishes links between the world of the author and the world of his novel sequence. Both the narrator’s and the author’s zodiacal sign is Sagittarius[32] – according to Mrs Erdleigh, “the Archer”, “the Centaur”, is “friend to strangers and exiles”. Whence and wherefore “hyperborean seas” at the end of the narrating act:

The thudding sound from the quarry had declined now to no more than a gentle reverberation, infinitely remote. It ceased altogether at the long drawn wail of a hooter – the distant pounding of centaur’s [sic] hoofs dying away, as the last note of their conch trumpeted out over hyperborean seas.(HSH 252)

Friedrich Nietzsche opens his last essay, The Antichrist, with an allusion to the Hyperboreans and with a quotation from Pindar´s Tenth Pythian Ode, referring to his sympathetic readers as “Hyperboreans”:

—Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how remote our place [much out of the way we live]. ‘Neither by land nor by water wilt thou find the marvellous road to the Hyperboreans’: Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness... We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have got our knowledge from thousands of years [found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth]. […] Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds![33]

Pindar had cautioned, “Never on land or by water wilt thou find // the marvellous road to the Hyperboreans.” For Nietzsche, isolation is the price exacted from those who opt for self-knowledge, individuality, rationality, those who have found a way out of the labyrinth of mysticism, metaphysics, doctrines and dogmas. It is a view of the world that transcends what Nietzsche famously called “European nihilism”. Remember the first apodictic, now no longer enigmatic, sentence of the (anonymous) authorial narrator of Powell’s valediction to novel writing, The Fisher King? “Exile is the wound of kingship.”[34] That wound is not a symptom of a specific 20th-century malaise or affliction, it is rather part of the human condition, it is a symbol “of the knowledge of the anguish of existence as a function not merely of this or that contingency, but of being.”[35] Both in Dance and in The Fisher King exiles, Hyperboreans are not only perceived to be indispensable and essential for independence of mind and creativity, but also as images of the work in progress we are reading.

Coldness – Snow – Lapis exilis

What have been described as purely atmospheric images[36] are placed at the beginning and end of the narrative act – those “centaurs” and “hyperborean” seas at the end of the narrating act and narrative are full of meaning for both Jenkins and Powell: “the distant pounding of centaur’s hoofs dying away, as the last note of their conch trumpeted out over hyperborean seas [...]” (HSH 252) and “centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea [...].” (QU 5-6)

Jenkins and Powell are also conjoined in the ambivalent, and ambiguous, image of “coldness”: coldness of the heart, lack of compassion, intellectual coldness, in a word acedia, the deadly sin. Powell links the images of the “seven deadly sins” – for Jenkins they are “symbolic moods” (KO 120) – with astrological imagery. It is Sloth, i.e. the arrogance of the intellectual, which the Greeks called hubris, resulting in retribution and nemesis, which Jenkins (and a reader identifying with him) suffers in the gradual unfolding of the Jean plot.[37] One of the major themes of Dance is the split between the man and the writer, Jenkins, the man, and Jenkins, the novelist; Anthony Powell and “Anthony Powell”; the writer needs to be objective, ironic and detached; “cold intelligence” may be a sine qua non for a work of art, for creating patterns (represented by the Poussin painting, QU 7) out of chaos (represented by the Burton quote, HSH 251), for “constructing one of those designs […] which […] afford an obscure satisfaction to the mind: making the more apparent inconsistencies of life easier to bear.” (LM 66); outside his work, however, the very same qualities will make him appear tactless and lacking in compassion – his arrow then “misses the mark”, i.e. he “sins.”

Yet there is, I think, even more to “coldness” and the “Hyperboreans”. Both are by a long-established tradition also positively charged images associated with the British intellect that has achieved some kind of balance – the virtue of “the happy medium”. The Greeks had a word for it: sophrosyne. Its components include moderation based on self-knowledge, moral sanity, self-control, and reason.[38] Robert Graves, too, described the motif and the imagery of the “Hyperboreans” – as well as “the Hypoborean Apollo” –, who were “without the shadow of a doubt Britons”[39] living “at the extremes”, i.e. the Poles. The image signifying “coldness”, isolation, Britain, and moderation/average, has been a topos signifying supposedly British national characteristics since Elizabethan times[40] and has become a cliché long since. For George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633-1695), England´s central role in the balance of powers was owed to its peripheral geographical position[41] and moderate climate – its true virtue was seen as the average between extremes.[42] Powell recycles the commonplace from the world of politics by tracing it back to its origins.

Motifs such as intelligence, moderation, individuality, isolation, coldness are in HSH explicitly associated with an alchemical image (and symbol): “the philosopher’s stone”. Its Latin name is lapis exilis. Its colour is yellow, gold and white – “that’s why white snow is a symbol of lapis exilis.”[43]

What (else) are we being told here? What becomes manifest in the image of the “frozen sea(s)” is, first of all, that for Jenkins “coldness” is ambivalent. In alchemical writings, on the other hand, “sea” is said to stand for “unconsciousness in its static condition.”[44] “Stagnation” then is intensified in the image of “frozen seas”. Water, snow, coldness, frozen seas/ice are a “network of relations through which […] the images reciprocally determine and comment on one another.”[45]

It is Mrs Erdleigh who neatly sums up the ambivalence of coldness (for the creative artist and the “man”) when she addresses Jenkins: “You are thought cold […]”[46] In order to be(come) “an artist” one has to die to everyday life (just in the right way) and exile oneself from reality. “You know”, Widmerpool says, “you sometimes make me feel that you must live completely out of the world.” (BM 270) Jenkins needs to reconcile “that hard, cold-blooded, almost mathematical pleasure I take in writing and painting” (CCR 20) with the Archer´s mission (“[h]is arrow defends exiles.”). Jenkins, the “man of intelligence”, often misses, due to Sloth and intellectual hubris, what Elain Pagels has called “the moral goal toward which we aim“, which for Jenkins is to become a “friend to strangers and exiles” (not just in his novels). General Conyers, dabbling in Jungian psychology, diagnoses Jenkins as “an introvert […] [i]ntroverted intuitive type […]” advising him to “keep an eye on not overcompensating.” LM 234-35)[47] One of the major themes of Dance, as I have said, is Jenkins’s learning how to dissociate the man from his art, from his persona. In Dance, it is Quiggin, the Marxist “committed writer”, who addresses the dangers of Jenkins’s cold intellect and stance of, as he sees it, non-commitment:

“The Lewis gun may be sounding at the barricades earlier than some of your Laodicean friends think,” [Quiggin] had announced at the climax of our controversy about Milton - or Meredith.
“I can never remember what the Laodiceans did.”
“They were ‘neither hot nor cold’.”
“Ah.” (LM 105)[48]/[49]

Jenkins understands at some point that irony can be “quite brutal in its unvarnished view of things.” (KO 143):

[...] I could not help thinking […] that facile irony at my uncle’s expense could go too far. No doubt irony, facile or otherwise, can often go too far. In this particular instance, for example, it was fitting to wonder what sort of figure I should myself cut as a soldier. (KO 162)

The existential significance of making the cold transit from sloth=arrogance=snobbery to the shore of inspiration=insight=analysis=pattern-making for both Jenkins and Powell can finally be illuminated by turning to J.W. Goethe’s famous distinction between symbol and allegory. The art of allegory, for Goethe,

... transforms appearance into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept can be grasped and can be had completely as something delimited in the image and can be expressed in it […].[50]

while symbolism

… transforms appearance into an idea, the idea into an image in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely effective and unreachable in the image and remains ineffable even if uttered in all languages.”[51]

A chapter in Powell’s first volume of his Memoirs is called From Whence Clear Memory, where he recalls his earliest childhood memory. The passage holds the most perfect key to an understanding of the symbolic meaning of snow (etc.) in Dance as one can only hope for.

My earliest recollection is of snow descending in small flakes outside the window of an hotel bedroom. [...] This was the winter of 1907, or early months of the following year. I was therefore two years old.[52]

Appearance

Powell’s 1st recollection: Winter, snow(fall), coldness | contrast of coldness/warmth | outside/inside |before/after Christmas & New Year

Idea

• (Sudden flashes of) insights, knowledge, Gnosis; self-awareness, inspiration
  beginning & end |“in the beginning shall be my end”
• creative & emotional stagnation | coldness = lack of warmth/ charity vs. coldness (= cool head) | Apollonian coolness, ratio; needed for creativity;

Image

• “For some reason the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world.”
• Arrested development, individuality, individuation (etc.)
• Beginning (“birth”, “baptism”), / ending (death, chaos)
• “frozen seas”
• Hyperboreans, exile(s)
• sloth, intelligence, ideal of moderation & the average
• Jenkins [according to General Conyers’s Jungian analysis] is “[a]n introvert, of course […] [i]ntroverted intuitive type […] keep an eye on not overcompensating.” (LM 234-35)
• Jenkins’s “cold-blooded […] mathematical pleasure […] in writing and painting.” (CCR 20)
• Widmerpool [according to General Conyers] “is a typical intuitive extrovert. […] Cold-blooded.” (LM 228); announced by a butler as “Mr Winterpool” (BM 64)
• Jenkins: “... I found myself almost deciding to sit down […] and attempt to compose a series of essays on human life and character in the manner of […] Montaigne, so icily etched in my mind […] appeared the actions and nature of those with whom that night I had been spending my time.” (BM 161);
  “sudden sensation of discomfort […] being dowsed with icy water […] an instantaneous realization” (BM 72);
  “I suddenly felt horribly uncomfortable, as if ice-cold water were dripping very gently, very slowly down my spine […]” (CCR 151)

“Because a novel’s invented it is true”, (the fictitious novelist) Trapnel says; and he continues,

“The novelist is a god, creating his man […]. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.”

Trapnel concludes that “only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by exact definition”. (HSH 80) Coldness, snow and fire mentioned at the beginning of the narration as well as at the end imply “certain truths” about both Jenkins and Powell; these allusive images and symbols accompany profound insights (or embarrassing experiences):

• The train epiphany (during a cold night on the train)
• Mention of “Budapest to Vienna by Danube” triggers a recollection of Bruegel’s painting Hunters in the Snow at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (“almost my favourite picture”, Jenkins says; it was, by the way, bought by a merchant, an art collector of Antwerp, called Nicolaas Jongelinck [!]; the painting was a part of a cycle of six or 12, depicting the seasons)[53] – amidst an allusive and dense texture of words: winter, snow/fire, cold, war, river (the River Danube, also mentioned by Descartes). (VB 112-13)
• The crossing of the canal
• Jenkins’s musings on “the complexity of writing a novel about English life” are placed within the context of a Janus-faced transition period, and creative stagnation as well as personal isolation: “I felt myself cut off from the rest of the world [...].”(AW 38). They are couched in terms of New-Year resolutions[54]. “Outside was the northern winter, here [at the Ritz] the climate was almost tropical.” (AW 31) Coldness and ice are invested with an emotional component at the beginning of the affair with Jean Templer(-Duport): “The night was very cold. (AW 64), and there is talk of “heavy snow”, “frozen air”, “a kind of glow”, “arrested development” and […] an Arctic city’s frontier forts. Veiled in snow, these hideous monuments of a lost world bordered a broad river of black, foaming slush, across the surface of which the car skimmed and jolted with a harsh crackling sound, as if the liquid beneath were scalding hot. (AW 70-71)
• Outside/inside: “It’s cold” versus “[t]here is a fire in here” (says Jean; AW 144-45)
• Jenkins’s (tactless) reaction to Trapnel’s love affair with Pamela Widmerpool in the notoriously cold winter of 1947: “Only Trapnel, in his tropical suit and dyed overcoat, seemed unaware of the cold.” (BDFR 151; my italics) [...] No comment seemed anywhere near adequate. This was beyond all limits. Burton well expressed man’s subjection to passion. To recall his words gave some support now. “The scorching beams under the AEquinoctial, or extremity of cold within the circle of the Arctick, where the very seas are frozen, cold or torrid zone cannot avoid, or expel this heat, fury and rage of mortal men.” No doubt that was just how Trapnel felt. (BDFR 172)

Thus I would argue that supposedly purely “atmospheric” images triggered by “the sight of snow descending on fire“ (QU 5) become, in retrospect, and can be shown to have been, invested by Powell (and by Jenkins, too) with specific meanings:

[...] mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life, and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. (QU 5-6)

Allow me three more observations before I “dare to be silent”. The first one is a quote I first found in the middle of the Eighties in one of Powell’s reviews for The Daily Telegraph (reprinted in Miscellaneous Verdicts):

In 1958, [Nancy Mitford] made a trip to England, staying successively with L.P. Hartley, Evelyn Waugh, and myself. "Leslie had the warmest house and Tony Powell the coldest heart […] I find all these writers take themselves very seriously.”

Powell comments that “[i]f kind hearts are more than coronets, cold ones are certainly less than bestsellers; but taking oneself seriously is perhaps another matter.”[55] Nancy Mitford was not the only one to find Powell’s manner “cold”: “His cleverness and learnedness fill me with veneration and awe. His personality freezes me up.”[56]

Second – though I am not entirely sure (what) it may add to our understanding of both Dance and its author – Anthony Powell’s wife, Lady Violet, reputedly hated snow.

Finally, what remains for a writer to do when The Strangers All are Gone? Powell ends this last volume of his memoirs with an exquisite, and moving, paragraph about a genuinely and inherently cold, as well as transient, work of art. He describes as it were his last recollection (as a matter of fact he recalls a passage out of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Arists[57]), 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. Notwithstanding those (like Constant Lambert) who dislike the High Renaissance one can scarcely doubt that the finest snowman on record took shape.[58]

Bibliography

Powell, Anthony

– A Dance To The Music of Time (in brackets publication dates of the “Fontana Books” paperback edition, from whence all Dance quotations):

A Question of Upbringing, London 1951 (Glasgow 1967)
A Buyer's Market, London 1952 (Glasgow 1967)
The Acceptance World, London 1955 (Glasgow 1967)
At Lady Molly's, London 1957 (Glasgow 1969)
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, London 1960 (Glasgow 1970)
The Kindly Ones, London 1962 (Glasgow 1971)
The Valley of Bones, London 1964 (Glasgow 1973)
The Soldier's Art, London 1966 (Glasgow 1968)
The Military Philosophers, London 1968 (Glasgow 1971)
Books Do Furnish a Room, London 1971 (Glasgow 1972)
Temporary Kings, London 1973 (Glasgow 1973)
Hearing Secret Harmonies, London 1975 (Glasgow 1977)

The Fisher King, London 1986

Infants of the Spring, Vol. 1 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1976
Faces in my Time, Vol. 3 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1980
The Strangers All are Gone, Vol. 4 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1982

Miscellaneous Verdicts.Writings on Writers 1946-1989, London 1990

"Jocelyn Brooke”. In: Jocelyn Brooke: The Orchid Trilogy. Harmonsdworth 1981, 1-3
Reviews

"Plague in Oran". In: TLS, 4/9/1948, 497
“Gods and Goddesses”. In: Punch (06/04/1955), 450
2Making Love Reputable", Daily Telegraph, 27/02/ 1959
"The Individual Artist", Daily Telegraph, 08/03/ 1963
"Art and Inspiration", Daily Telegraph, 06/12/ 1963
"Artists and Bohemiens", Daily Telegraph, 29/10/ 1964
"After Botticelli", Daily Telegraph, 27/04/ 1972
"Critic with a Cannon Ball", Daily Telegraph, 18/01/ 1973

Birns, Nicholas: Understanding Anthony Powell, University of South Carolina 2004.
Broch, Hermann: “Was sollen wir tun?” In: Gesammelte Werke in 10 Bänden, Band 6. Dichten und Erkennen, Essays Band I, Zürich 1955.
Campbell, Joseph: The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, New York 1976 (1968).
Clarke, Andrew: http://www.anthony.powell.org.uk. 28 December 2005.
Davin, D.M.: Snow upon Fire: A Dance to the Music of Time: Anthony Powell (= The W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture delivered at the University College of Swansea on 16th November 1976).
Descartes, Réné: Discours de la méthode (etc.)
http://www.literature.org/authors/descartes-rene/reason-discourse/chapter-02.html
http://www.bartleby.com/34/1/2.html
http://www.bartleby.com/34/1/3.html
Demus, Klaus; Friderike Klauner und Karl Schütz (ed.): “Die Zeiten des Jahrs”. In: Flämische Malerei von Jan von Eyck bis Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. (= Führer durch das Kunsthistorische Museum Wien Nr. 31), Wien 1981, 86-94.
Frye, Northrop: The Great Code, London 1983 (1981).
Genette, Gérard: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, N. Y, 1980 (= Discours du récit, Paris 1972).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Maximen und Reflexionen No 1113. In: J.W. von Goethe, Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, München C.H. Beck, 1973, Band 12, 470-71.
Harrington, Henry R.: “Anthony Powell, Nicolas Poussin, and the Structure of Time”. In: Contemporary Literature 24 (1983), 431-448.
Iser, Wolfgang: Der Akt des Lesens, München 1976.
Jacobi, Jolande: Die Psychologie von C.G. Jung, Frankfurt 1978 (Olten 1971).
James, Henry: Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1908): In: Theory of Fiction: Henry James (ed. by James E. Miller, Jr.) Lincoln 1972, 165-66.
Jung, C.G.: The Psychology of Transference, London 1983 (= “Extracted from Vol. 16 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung"), London 1966).
Kafka, Franz: “Brief an Oskar Pollak 27. January 1904”. In: Franz Kafka: Briefe 1902-1924. S. Fischer Verlag. Lizenzausgabe für Europa von Schocken Books New York 1958.
Kislinger, Peter: Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths. Narrative technique, mise-en-abyme, intertextuality, constructive irony and the truth of fiction in Anthony Powell’s “A Dance To The Music of Time”. Wien 1993 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna).
Kislinger, Peter: Dance for Readers, Trilogy Two: Dance for Readers: Flashback, Flashforward. In: Secret Harmonies. Journal of the Anthony Powell Society4/5, Summer 2011, 88-122.
Mitchum, James: James Lees-Milne, Diaries 1984-1997, ed. Michael Bloch, London 2009. In: The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter 36, Autumn 2009, 13.
Nietzsche, Friedrich: “Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christenthum”. In: Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA] in 15 Bänden (ed. Giorgio Colli and Marzzino Montinari), Band 6, München 1988, 165-254.
Pagels, Elain: The Gnostic Gospels, New York 1981 (19791).
Quesenbery W.D. Jr.: “Anthony Powell: The Anatomy of Decay”. In: Critique VII, 1964, 16-17.
Ranke-Graves, Robert: Griechische Mythologie, Quellen und Deutung Hamburg 1984. (= Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, London 1955).
Shelley, Percy Bysshe: “A Defence of Poetry”. In: The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, Oxford 1973.
Søren Kierkegaard: Either/Or II, edited and translated […] by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton 1987.
Swales, Martin: The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, Princeton 1978.
Wilhelm, Richard und C.G. Jung: Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte [= The Secret of the Golden Flower], Köln 1986 (Köln 1927).
Wind, Edgar: Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London 1958.

[1] Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, N. Y, 1980 (= Discours du récit, Paris 1972), 25; narratology, for Genette, is “[...] essentially [...] a study of the relationships between the narrative and narrating, and (to the extent that they are inscribed in the narrative discourse) between story and narrating.” Genette, Narrative Discourse, 29.
[2] Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths. Narrative technique, mise-en-abyme, intertextuality, constructive irony and the truth of fiction in Anthony Powell’s “A Dance To The Music of Time”. Wien 1993 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna).
[3] Anthony Powell, “Jocelyn Brooke”. In: Brooke, Jocelyn: The Orchid Trilogy. Harmonsdworth 1981, 1
[4] See Powell on Albert Camus’s novel La peste:

“[...] much of the time we feel that the writer is dealing with abstractions rather than with men. The author’s general thesis is that people are always ‘working from morn till night and then proceeding to fritter away at card-tables, in cafés and in small-talk what time is left for living.’ To cure the world of such behaviour would certainly be a tall order; and if we understand Mr. Camus rightly, it is only on obviously disastrous occasions such as the outbreak of plague that the way of duty is made clear to many who would otherwise have little idea what to do with their lives. This we take to be a distinctly romantic doctrine; and much of the dialogue, by its deliberate disregard for naturalism, supports this view:

‘You know, doctor, I've given a lot of thought to your campaign. And if I'm not with you, I have my reasons ... No I don't think it's that I'm afraid to risk my skin again. I took part in the Spanish civil war.’

‘On what side?’ Tarrou asked.

‘The losing side. But since then I've done a bit of thinking.’

‘About what?’

‘Courage. I know that a man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.’

‘One had the idea that he is capable of everything,’ Tarrou remarked.

‘I can’t agree: he’s capable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.’ He looked at the two men in turn, then asked: ‘Tell me, Tarrou, are you capable of dying for love?’

Such conversations surely belong to a romantic mood.” (Powell, “Plague in Oran”. In: TLS, 4/9/1948, 497)

[5] Broch contends that while naturalism tends to take into account only the “outer world“ (reducing people merely to products of their genes and their social as well historical circumstances) an “extended“ naturalism needs to include their “inner world“, too. (Hermann Broch, “Was sollen wir tun?”. In: Gesammelte Werke in 10 Bänden, Band 6. Dichten und Erkennen, Essays Band I, Zürich 1955, 227
[6]) C.G. Jung, The Psychology of Transference, London 1983 (= “Extracted from Vol. 16 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung2”, London 1966), 101
[7]) “I envied Pennistone, who could turn from war to Descartes, and back again, without perceptible effort. I knew myself incapable of writing a line of a novel – by then I had written three or four – however long released from duty.” (VB 120)[8] Lévi plagiarizes Plato’s scheme reason, courage, desire; which is echoed in the three stage-models of the Latin mythographer and allegorist Fulgentius (contemplativa, activa, voluptaria) and in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s reason, strength, sensibility. (See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London 1958, 99) For Powell’s knowledge of Edgar Wind’s study and other Warburg Institute scholars see his Daily Telegraph reviews: 27/02/1959; 08/03/1963; 06/12/1963; 29/10/1964; 27/04/1972; 21/12/1972
[9] http://www.literature.org/authors/descartes-rene/reason-discourse/chapter-02.html
[10] The Latin version for the Greek metanoia (changing one’s mind; in religious parlance “repentance“).
[11] http://www.bartleby.com/34/1/2.html
[12] http://www.literature.org/authors/descartes-rene/reason-discourse/chapter-02.html
13] http://www.bartleby.com/34/1/3.html
[14] Powell, Faces in my Time. Vol. 3 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1980, 137-143
[15] Some eight or nine years before the episode, Jenkins felt that “[p]erhaps I was irrevocably transfixed […] halfway between dissipation and diffidence”. (AW 21)
[16] “I myselfam the absolute, because I myself can choose absolutely; and this absolute choice of myself is my freedom […]”. (Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, edited and translated […] by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton 1987, 200)
[17] “Kierkegaard, like Blake, is claimed an early Existentialist, and Dru, believing passionately in individual choice, shared existentialist distaste for abstract thought [...]. Like Kierkegaard (in whom religious life was the aim), or Nietzsche (with a very different goal), Dru held that mysticism could be approached – was perhaps best approached – through the arts. [...] Dru would have enjoyed the American poet Delmore Schwartz´s observation: ‘Existentialism means that no one can take a bath for you’ [...].” (Powell, Faces, 141)
[18] Henry James, in the Preface to his The Portrait of a Lady (1908), on such an existence on two levels after Isobel Archer´s “turning point“: “I might show what an ‘exciting’ inward life may do for the person leading it even while it remains perfectly normal.” James mentions the “mystic conversion” of everyday life that, to Isobel Archer, all of a sudden will appear to be new, and the “rare chemistry” of that “choice”. (As quoted in James Miller [ed.]: Theory of Fiction: Henry James, 167)
19] Epiphanies are the “best and happiest moments [...], always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden [...]”, as Shelley in A Defence of Poetry defines those “evanescent visitations of thought and feeling [...].” (Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”. In: The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, Oxford 1973, 759)Jenkins (experiencing self) comes close to a definition of such a state of mind. After the Victory celebration at St. Paul’s, he regrets the absence of “those inner perceptions of a more exalted sort [...]” which are “[...] evasive by their very nature, at best transient enough, but not altogether unknown. They were, in fact, so it seemed to me – unlike that morning in Normandy – entirely absent.” (MP 222-23; my italics)
[20] Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, Princeton 1978
[21] As quoted in Jolande Jacobi, Die Psychologie von C.G. Jung, Frankfurt 19 (Olten 1971, 1st edition), 133
[22] Jacobi, Die Psychologie von C.G. Jung, 134
[23] Northrop Frye, The Great Code, London 1983 (19811), 72
[24] The Hebrew “Garden of God (Gan Edhen) is synonymous with the future Promised Land of Israel and the New Testament Apocalypse.” (Frye, Code, 72
[25] Greek metanoeite = “looking behind the scenes”; “a change of outlook or spiritual metamorphosis, an enlarged vision of the dimensions of human life. Such a vision [...] detaches one from one’s primary community and attaches him to another.” (Frye, Code, 130)
[26] “Mr Jenkins, I fear there is nothing left for you but Sloth. There are, of course, no personal implications. I am sure it is quite inappropriate, but like Avarice, it makes no great demands on the actor.” (Sir Magnus Donners in KO 129)
[27] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, New York 1981 (19791), 14
[28] Pagels, Gospels, 44
[29] Pagels, Gospels, 149-150
[30] “I was disappointed and furious with myself. […] I wondered why I had never taken the trouble in the past to learn French properly; as a boy, for instance, staying with the Leroys at La Grenadière, or in the course of innumerable opportunities.” (SA 102)
[31] “These were some of the thoughts [...] that passed through my head while I sat on a bench in the hall waiting to see Major Finn. [...] These rather sombre speculations were interrupted by a door opening nearby.” (SA 92-93)
[32] Pointed out first by Henry R. Harrington, “Anthony Powell, Nicolas Poussin, and the Structure of Time”. In: Contemporary Literature 24 (1983), 431-448. Powell was born “at the cusp of the Centaur and the Goat”, i.e. December 21, 1905 (Powell, Infants of the Spring, 1)
[33] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322.txt

„– Sehen wir uns ins Gesicht. Wir sind Hyperoboreer, – wir wissen gut genug, wie abseits wir leben. `Weder zu Lande, noch zu Wasser wirst du den Weg zu den Hyperboreern finden´: das hat schon Pindar von uns gewusst. Jenseits des Nordens, des Eises, des Todes – unser Leben, unser Glück... Wir haben das Glück entdeckt, wir wissen den Weg, wir fanden den Ausgang aus ganzen Jahrtausenden des Labyrinths. […] Lieber im Eise leben als unter modernen Tugenden und anderen Südwinden.“ (Friedrich Nietzsche, “Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christenthum”. In: Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA] in 15 Bänden (ed. Giorgio Colli und Marzzino Montinari), Band 6, München 1988, 169)
"Hypoborea" is figured geographically north of Purgatory in Dante’s Commedia; and great and little bears (symbols of the North Pole) appear above the summit of Mount Purgatorio;
Ishmael, in Melville’s Moby Dick, suggests that the painting in the Spouter Inn in Chapter 3 could be “a Hyperborean winter scene.”
[34] Powell, The Fisher King, London 1986, 7
[35] Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, New York 1976 (1968), 424
[36] See W.D. Quesenbery Jr., for whom snow, coldness and the “hypoborean seas” are “unfriendly images”. (W.D. Quesenbery Jr., “Anthony Powell: The Anatomy of Decay”. In: Critique VII, 1964, 16-17) and D.M. Davin, Snow upon Fire: A Dance to the Music of Time: Anthony Powell (= The W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture delivered at the University College of Swansea on 16th November 1976).[37] Peter Kislinger, Dance for Readers, Trilogy Two: Dance for Readers: Flashback, Flashforward.In: Secret Harmonies. Journal of the Anthony Powell Society4/5, Summer 2011, 88-122 [based on a talk presented at The Wallace Collection London, January 2006]), 18-21
[38] Often translated as prudence, self-control, moderation, restraint, and temperance. (http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Sophrosyne.html)
[39] Apollo, the personification of ratio and intellect, rose against Zeus and was humiliated and condemned to a year of physical hardship (“humilatio”-motif) only to become a representative of sophrosyne and of the arts. He was also a god of the Hyporboreans, who Hekataios identified as British. (Robert Ranke-Graves, Griechische Mythologie, Quellen und Deutung Hamburg 1984. (= Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, London 1955), 68. Powell, in Punch (“Gods and Goddesses”, 06/04/1955, 450) and Daily Telegraph (18/01/1973), is less impressed by Graves’ attempts to trace Greek myths back to historical events. He rather favours Sigmund Freud’s and above all Carl Gustav Jung’s interpretations and thinks that “the psychological side” of these stories were “more interesting to [their Greek] author[s], too.”)
[40] Wind, Mysteries, 259
[41] Wind, Mysteries, 259-60
[42] Wind, Mysteries, 262
[43] Richard Wilhelm and C.G. Jung, Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte [= The Secret of the Golden Flower], Köln 1986 (Köln 19271), 122 (my translation)
[44] Jung, Psychology of Transference, 47
[45] Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens, München 1976, 303. For Powell’s reliance on, and expectation of, reader participation and Powell’s “modernism”, see Kislinger, Dance for Readers, 113-116; Nicholas Birns, Understanding Anthony Powell, University of South Carolina 2004, 83-88
[46] “You are thought cold, but you possess deep affections, sometimes for people worthless in themselves. [...] You expect too much, and yet you are also too resigned. You must try to understand life.” (AW 21) See Kafka: “A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.” (= “Ein Buch muss die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.” [Brief an Oskar Pollak / Letter to Oskar Pollack, 27 January 1904, in: Franz Kafka: Briefe 1902-1924. S. Fischer Verlag. Lizenzausgabe für Europa von Schocken Books New York 1958, p. 27])
[47] Three more instances where Jenkins’s intelligence / intellect is addressed:
1) “He regards himself as tremendously intelligent.” (AW 84)
2) "You said the other day that you found it awfully difficult to get on with people who were not intelligent.”
“I only meant where writing was concerned.”
“It didn't sound like that.” (AW 147-48)
3) “We girls don't want to die of cold,” said Anne Umfraville. “Nothing too rough either. I'm not feeling particularly cubistic tonight.”
“Or too highbrow,” said Templer. “Nick will get out of hand. I know him of old.” (KO 126)
48] The passage alluded to is Apocalypse 3, 14-18:
14 And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.
15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.
16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.
17 Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked:
18 I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire [...].
[49] “The Laodiceans get a bad press because they are the only people in creation who make their Creator vomit. That is not because they lead quiet lives: it is because they cling to a narrow, unadventurous vision of life: they have courage neither to be great saints or great sinners, and the latter are often closer to sanctity than the blandly respectable... Even if the artist lives a quiet life in a semi-detached in Ruislip, the adventurousness, the openness, an unflinching vision of what is happening must still be there. The Laodicean imagination is sterile.” (Andrew Clarke, http://www.anthony.powell.org.uk., 28 December 2005) Surely the same applies for writers living for more than half century a quiet life in a “detached house” in Frome, Somerset?
[50] Maximen und Reflexionen No 1113. (J.W. von Goethe, Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1973, vol. 12, 470-71. Translated in: Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and Scenes of Modernity, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, p. 88)
[51] “[...] die Erscheinung in Idee, die Idee in ein Bild, und so, daß die Idee im Bild immer unendlich wirksam und unerreichbar bleibt und, selbst in allen Sprachen ausgesprochen, doch unaussprechlich bliebe.” (Goethe, J.W.: Sämtliche Werke in 18 Bänden [Artemis-Gedenkausgabe], Band 9: Maximen und Reflexionen 1113, Zürich 19772, 693)
[52] Powell, Infants of the Spring. Vol. 1 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1976, 41
[53] Klaus Demus, Friderike Klauner und Karl Schütz [ed.], “Die Zeiten des Jahrs”. In: Flämische Malerei von Jan von Eyck bis Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. (= Führer durch das Kunsthistorische Museum Wien Nr. 31), Wien 1981, 86. There are two hunters and, on the left, three small figures working around a fire in front of the largest house. The difference between the hunters and the figures tending the fire is that the latter are unaware of any higher purpose or quest beyond their daily tasks, while the hunters doggedly pursue greater meaning, symbolized by the distant, craggy peaks (they are “hunters”, after all, men who “hunt”, seek to find [...] not game in this instance but truth) […] based on iconographical conventions.” (see “Die Zeiten des Jahrs”; 86-94)
[54] “I felt suddenly determined to be no longer a victim of other people’s disregard for their social obligations.” (AW, 57)
“I made up my mind that this time I would not feel put out by her [Jean’s] behaviour, whatever form it took.” (AW, 65)
[55] Nancy Mitford, as quoted in Powell, Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford: A Memoir, 1975, Daily Telegraph 03/05/1975; also see Powell, Miscellaneous Verdicts, Writings on Writers 1946-1989, London Heinemann 1990, 335
[56] As quoted in James Mitchum, “James Lees-Milne, Diaries 1984-1997”, London 2009. In: The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter 36, Autumn 2009, 13
[57] Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times, or Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri, as it was originally known in Italian.
[58] Powell, The Strangers All are Gone, Vol. 4 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1982, 201