Peter Kislinger: "Punching authors – the novelist [Anthony Powell] as critic and parodist"

Peter Kislinger

Punching authors – the novelist as critic and parodist

Paper presented at Anthony Powell Conference April 8 to April 10, 2016, at the King's Manor, University of York. The collected papers from the 2016 Anthony Powell Conference: https://www.anthonypowell.org/proceedings-of-the-anthony-powell-conference-york-2016-251

ABSTRACT: Anthony Powell´s "A Dance to the Music of Time" reflects and charts social change; on another level Powell reflects, and at times parodies, most of the narrative devices (fashions and fads) of his contemporaries. He does so in such an understated – underhand – manner that most (first-time) readers will miss the brilliance, the virtuosity and “modernism” of the writing. In some 20 parodies written for the satirical magazine "Punch" between 1953 and 1958, Powell is an accomplished parodist, a quality attributed in Dance to the fictitious novelist X. Trapnel. Powell has (narrator-figure) Nicholas Jenkins use overt and covert both parody and pastiche on a far larger scale than most (first-time) readers would suspect.

Punch, the “British weekly magazine of humour and satire”, first appeared in 1841. After the 1940s, when its circulation peaked, it “went into a long decline”, closing in 1992. It was revived in 1996, but closed again in 2002. Circulation broke the 100,000 mark around 1910, and peaked in 1947–1948 at 175,000 to 184,000. Sales declined steadily thereafter; ultimately, the magazine was forced to close in 1992 after 150 years of publication.[1]

In 1951, A Question of Upbringing, volume 1 of Powell’s Dance, had been published, volume 4, At Lady Molly’s, followed in 1957, volume 5, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, in 1960. During his five years, 1953-58, Powell was hired as “Literary Editor” of Punch at a salary of £1500 a year[2], a purchasing power of nowadays approximately £42,600[3]. Powell wrote hundreds of reviews and 22 sketches, parodies, or pastiches. The first Punch historian, avoiding pedantic classification, called them “articles in other parts of the paper”.[4] The 1953-index is divided into “Criticism” as well as “Pictures and sketches”; from then on Powell’s contributions are indexed under “Criticism”, his sketches, or parodies, under the heading “At the Play”. While Powell was still in office he

… did most of the long articles […[] and with gentle persistence accustomed readers to the scholarly discussion of books that could support scholarship. It was the first time that Punch readers had been addressed in that tone. His writing is much quieter than the rest of the paper and until one is used to it, the jokes, often complex, may be invisible. His articles in other parts of the paper are private, amused and sometimes, like his Steerforth on Copperfield, brilliant.[5]

Powell was an accomplished parodist, a quality attributed in Dance to the fictious writer X. Trapnel.

[Trapnel] reviewed fairly regularly for Fission, wrote an occasional story, article or parody – he was an accomplished parodist of his contemporaries – and on the whole, in spite of friction now and then, when he lost his temper with a book or one of his pieces was too long or too short, the magazine suited him, he the magazine. [BDFR 165]

In Powell’s reviewing career outside the TLS[6], we seek in vain for reviews of contemporary fiction, so his parodies of Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly (twice), Kingsley Amis, signed by name, may come as a surprise.

At a first reading, the tenor, the tone, the stance of (the narrator or the author of?) the sketchesis anti-German, anti-French (i.e. anti-intellectual, anti-existentialist)[7], anti-“Hottentots” and anti-“Carribees”[8]; anti-north and anti-scholarships (for sons of Cambrian miners and “simple Scottish lads”[9]); anti-duffle-coats[10]; anti-feminist and anti-Espressos (i.e. “coffeehouses” with women hanging around and not minding being chatted up without “laborious introduction”, then paying for the coffee[11]); anti-Labour and anti-proletarian[12];anti-reform; anti-expropriation[13].

In Angus and the Rag, there is a foretaste of the “revolting students” assaulting Widmerpool and the Quiggin twins in HSH; and, of course, of Quiggin himself and Mark Members and their snobbish competing over which of them was born with fewer silver spoons in his mouth.

Some of the jokes and puns would be unacceptable today, would not be PC; a Scottish undergraduate is called “Angus MacAbacus”[14]. Was Powell pandering to Punch readers’ expectations? In his critical writings, Powell is almost a different person. The impression one might get from reading Powell’s sketches is that he is an arch-conservative, “reactionary”, died-in-the wool Tory; a country squire; a retired colonel, moustachioed etc., slightly grumpy; irascible,jingoistic, finding the post 1945-period all a bit revolting, fings ain’t wot they used ter be (as sung by Max Bygraves in 1960)[15], “Disgusted [of ]Tunbridge Wells”[16].

Yet who is this “he”? Who speaks? Is it the Literary Editor himself? Are we dealing with a Swiftian “projector” with Powell impersonating a clichéd Tory character, a blimpish country squire, speaking with tongue in cheek? In a letter to Evelyn Waugh, Ann Fleming, who met Powell on the board of Punch, was not willing to make the distinction: “What do people see in Anthony Powell? I find him a hearty [B]limp – or do you like him because his wife is a catholic?” Waugh corrected her – on Lady Violet, Powell’s wife, “Lady Violet is a pillar of the Church of England. Powell I suspect of agnosticism.”[17] It was beneath Waugh to correct her on the “Blimp”.

I do not think it will come as a surprise that I am rather inclined to suggest a slightly more “sophisticated” reading, prejudiced as I am by my relative familiarity with Dance; and I take my cue from Jenkins’s “exegesis” during the Thanksgiving Service at St. Paul’s. [MP 221-227]

R.R.G. Price does not tell us why he bestowed the epithet “brilliant” upon the Steerforth sketch[18]. It may well be because it allows at least two readings. On the one hand, the sketch presents a topsy-turvy world: in post-war England, it is the Steeerforths who have gained the upper hand and are being listened to. On the other hand, it can be read as Powell’s critique of the typical (Dickensian) 19th-century first-person narrative, and its epistemological limitations.

The Steerfoth piece is a monologue quoted by an anonymous narrator, a reporter who has come to interview Steerforth about “young Copperfield”. Powell picks out six characters and some incidents, all seen from Steerforth’s perspective, who, now grey-haired and a “confirmed bachelor”, did, of course, not drown. At “Old Salemite dinners” all, according to Steerforth, agree that Copperfield “was always a thruster”. Everybody at school was afraid of him, “including the Head, poor Mr. Creakle – an old woman, in spite of being a fine scholar.” Boy Traddles – now “Sir Thomas Traddle, Q.C.” – was “unmercifully” bullied by Copperfield. “He’d have bullied me too, if I hadn’t been tall for my age – though my health had never been good.” It was Copperfield who was behind the “dormitory feast” forcing Steerforth to spend most of his money to “produce most of the viands” out of his own pocket, and to buy “a lot of currant wine and biscuits and cake”, at a time when Steerforth’s mother “had particularly asked” him to be “economical before going up to Oxford”, and Salem House “wasn’t a bad little school in its way.” Copperfield was overambitious. His stepfather Murdston – “an able fellow in his way but weak” – kept a good opening for him in his firm, yet, says Steerforth, was not “good enough for Copperfield.” So he turned to his aunt (“got hold of an aunt of his”), Miss Trotwood. “And look where he is now.”

The second half of the sketch centres on the Peggottys, who “caused me a lot of trouble.” Steerforth was “whisked down to Yarmouth” by Copperfield, who was “devilishly keen on little Em’ly.” Steerforth took her on a Grand Tour, only because Copperfield insisted, and Steerforth needed the money. In Steerforth’s report “Emily” was bored, hated sight-seeing, “talked to the fishermen a bit, picked up some of the language.” Steerforth accuses Copperfield of spreading the rumour that it had been his idea to take her abroad – and is “inclined to believe” that he was responsible for “an extraordinary rumour that I myself had been drowned.” I was typical of Copperfield, says Steerforth, to omit the fact that his special subject was “navigation”. The last paragraph concludes “[D]on’t mistake me. I like Copperfield. […] He is a famous writer. But sometimes I think, ‘Ah, Copperfield, Copperfield, I wonder whether you ever recall your old friend James Steerforth.’”

Powell employs a pincer movement, i.e. the attack is both anti-Dickens (targeting his social sentimentality and falling prey to the limitations of a first-person narrative) and seemingly anti-upwardly-mobiles. I say seemingly, because in his reviews and his memoirs, Powell rather than complain about change and social mobility, is not tiring of pointing out “the complexity and unexpectedness of society in this country, where impassable social barriers have never existed […].”[19] In Dance, this stance is fully developed, both “objectivised”, implied as it were: Jenkins’s character portraits are not intended, and cannot be read, as satires of members of the “lower”, the “middle” and even the “upper middle” classes. It needs the whole sequence to understand that neither Powell nor Jenkins are taking it out on those classes, a criticism levelled at Powell by Mary Eagelton and David Pierce in their Attitudes to Class in British Novels apropos Powell’s supposedly cruel treatment of Le Bas and Widmerpool. Powell’s Dance and Evelyn Waugh’s novels, too, are crudely (mis-)represented as satirical disparagements of “outsiders” and “members of the upper middle class”, with “author and reader join[ing] in a narrow pact against the hackneyed, the oddballs, the black sheep and the plain boring.”[20]

For readers tending to identify with a first-person narrator, the most sophisticated, surprising, shocking examples of transcending a Dickensian use of the first-person narrative situation are Jenkins’s encounters with Duport and Brent during World War II and allowing them to tell their “versions of the affair” (we are given their “views” and “voices” in narrating in what I have called the Jean [Templer/Duport]-plot).[21]

Bob Duport who, during an evening’s drinking, tells Nick of Jean’s series of lovers, a revelation Jenkins finds at the same time painful, embarrassing and fascinating. It is a lesson in humilitas both for Jenkins and for readers identifying with heroes and heroes’ perspectives (i.e. narratives) as well as their opinions, their moral or aesthetic judgements. Because Jenkins is part of the narrated world he, as narrator, cannotclaim a privileged position among the other characters.Jenkins’s “unreliability”, however, is on the whole confined to his opinions, moral andaesthetic judgements etc. A reader must – and can – rely on Jenkins’smimetic statements.[22]For Powell, what constitutes experience, “reality”, is not the sum total of all perspectives, i.e. not an object, but a potentially infinite, open-ended process.[23] In HSH, Powell has the narrator express what in former volumes was approached from aesthetic and philosophical angles when he is musing about the few advantages of growing older:

The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one’s own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add. (HSH 31)

It is Dickens’s belief in “finality” that comes under attack in the Steerforth sketch, Steerforth’s embellishments adding another dimension to Copperfield’s narrative. True, telling a story from different perspectives is as old as story-telling. Yet one point that Powell found challenging in Dance was to approach multi-perspective telling within the plausibility-restrictions of auto- and homo-diegetic[24] narratives. One of his solutions was to embed three perspectives in Jenkins’s narrative and allow (at least) one story turn against its narrator, who is not your classical “unreliable” one. I find the results in Dance are more stunning than ostentatiously modernist, ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’ writing.[25]

In Dance, Jenkins is musing on “what constitutes experience” [TK 57]. The “inner truth”, the “essence”, of characters, of the story and the narrative, elude us all if taken at surface value, and relying on a first-person narrator’s version of the story. In Dance, these epistemological complexities are typified – symbolised –by (three perspectives on) the Jean-plot, i.e. Jenkins’s, Duport’s [KO 175-185] as well as Brent’s [VB 124-134]. For a reader identifying with the after all not altogether disagreeable I / eye of a narrator, i.e. Jenkins, who is one of the “heroes” of his own narrative, this “charming love affair” (KO 183; Jenkins’s own words) is slipping into a story, and a narrative, of a complex web of betrayals. Jenkins, after being forced to listen to Brent’s narrative of his affair with Jean, cannot avoid admiring “Brent’s lack of vanity in so absolutely accepting Duport’s low estimate of his own attractions, even after causing Duport’s wife to fall in love with him […]” [VB 133]; moreover he is forced to admit that he, like Jean’s husband Bob Duport, “had little cause for self-congratulation.” [VB 132] Brent’s narrative is immediately juxtaposed by a “tramp of Sappers” marching by and chanting a song ending on the line “… they don’t know mud from shit.”[VB 134] Powell, the author, as opposed to Jenkins, “the experiencing self”, has no chip on his novelistic shoulder, has no axes to grind (at least not blatantly, though he may not like the Widmerpools, the Donners etc). Jenkins (“the experience self”) often acts “snobbishly”, cruelly even, is wrong in his judgements; in other words he is unlike Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus who, in Powell’s own words, is “romantically conceived” and who is “always treated as if he necessarily belonged to a higher plane than those who surround him.”[26] The fact that Jenkins is not on a higher plane than Duport or Brent is most brutally – and amusingly – brought home to both Jenkins and the reader: “If her lovers were horrifying, I too had been out of their order. That had to be admitted.” [KO 180]

An author, for Powell, needs to resist the temptation to give vent to his personal and ideological biases, which was one of his major objections to Jean-Paul Sartre[27] and, though to lesser degree, Camus, too. Sartre´s alienated protagonist of the 1938 novel La Nausée (Nausea) Roquetin...

[...] is conceived in the romantic tradition. He is, as it were, recognized by the author as a superior being, not to be judged by the same standards as the other characters, who have indeed no life except in him. [...] [T]he generally pretentious tone of the book seems to claim merits, that, it is difficult to avoid feeling, neither construction nor dialogue ever fully justify. (Powell, “Superior Being“. In: TLS, 26/3/1949, 197)

A few years later, Powell’s punches hit even harder, at the same time, indirectly, stating one of his own novelistic intentions:

[Sartre’s] inability to ‘create character’ and [...] his desire for ‘commitment’ merely means being committed to his own opinions [...]. (Powell: “French Without Tears”. In: Punch, 9/7/1958, 55)

Jenkins, the narrator, is a Musil-like Man without Qualities, i.e. “more correctly the man without parti pris”[28], which is an approach and attitude reserved to the writer rather than the individual person. One of the major themes of Danceis Jenkins’s coming to understand 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, as he sees it, stance of 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)[29]

Another piece neatly exemplifying Powell’s pincer movement is the two-page sketch Greyfriars nationalized[30]. Harry Wharton & Co, the “Famous Five”, particularly Billy Bunter & Bo Cherry, are discussing Orwell’s “giddy essay” in Cyril Connolly’s “simply frabjous mag” Horizon (1940), and the impact Orwell’s essay might have both on the public school and subsequently the boys’ careers. Powell takes the mannerisms and phrases put in the mouths of the “Famous Five” straight from the Orwell essay. Thus, it is not so much a parody of Wharton & Co as of George Orwell’s essay, the sketch rather lampooning Orwell’s serious attempt at Ideologiekritik (“critique of ideology” / “criticism of ideology”).

The conceit of Powell’s Greyfriars nationalized: what will the Education Act 1944 mean for a public school like “Greyfriars”? It will be converted, perverted even, into “The “Grey School”, and finally “The Grey School of Social Significance.” One of

…the ground-breaking results of the Act was to educate and mobilise women and the working class. It opened secondary schools to girls, and the working class, and as a result, a far higher percentage attended higher education after secondary school. This newly found education increased working class awareness of their disadvantaged social position and created a bitter class division between the working and middle class.[31]

Bunter is preparing to see “the Head” over “a soya-bean jam”[32] crisis stuffing “several numbers of the New Statesman into the seat of his striped trousers,” plus copies of Tribune. Orwell was hired as literary editor of the magazine, 1943-45.[33] It comes as a bitter disappointment to the boys that the Head is a turncoat and is all for the reform, accordingly welcoming the “socialist paper”.

Billy Bunter is the fattest and funniest member of the Remove (or lower fourth form). He was introduced in The Magnet 1, 1908, as a minor character, but soon developed into one of the principal characters of the stories as his comic potential was realised. He is described as foolish, greedy, self-important, deceitful, comically conceited, but apart from a tendency to gossip, essentially harmless. Could some of his traits have found their way into Dance, used for and developed in Widmerpool? Bunter’s “big round spectacles” and “rolling gait” have earned him the nickname “the ‘Owl of the Remove’”; he is aspiring to become a stockbroker. While Bunter comes across as an obnoxious anti-hero, he is, in his own mind, an exemplary character, handsome, talented and aristocratic, and dismisses most of those around him as “beasts”. Among his few virtues is a genuine love and (Widmerpudlian sort of) concern for his mother.

The boys are discussing the consequences of the 1944 reform in the light of the Orwell essay. Which of them will be in danger of being sent down?

The advent of the “century of the common boy” might threaten Arthur Augustus D’Arcy, who fears for his status; he attacks “the fearful outsidah”, Bo Cherry, but whose father, it comes to light, is “Lord Westwood, a Labour peer (“Labah peer”) with “a seat on the Coal board”. Vernon-Smith’s, “the Bounder of the Remove”, “the millionaire’s son and heir” reaction: “Go and eat coke --- if his father is really on the Coal board, he’ll probably get it more easily than the rest of us.”

Maybe the American scholarship boy Fisher T. Fish? No fear. He is leftish too, “a sartin New Dealer”, boasting about his “Pop’s currency”, which is “cute and hard”.

Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, “Nabob of Bhanipur” (though deploring the fact that “the implementiveness of the Education Act 1944, the barkfulness and bitefulness of Privilige had its teeth removed by the painless dentalism of Equal Opportunities. As the English proverb has it, Leftfulness has become Rightfulness […]”) can safely ignore any future “greyfulness” since his “esteemed family is far too lovesome with the esteemed Mr. Nehru for any troublesomness.” Powell has the whole rant from Orwell.[34]

Housemaster Prout has already secured himself a cushy job with the British Council. “The honourable Arthur Augustus” is shocked by this news.

The punch line is that Bunter, spreading “wads of marmalade on thick slices of meat loaf”, announces that he has “passed the interview for the Ministry of Food! And the Intelligence test, too! They say the elevenses there are simply frabjous!” This may well be a pun on the “eleven plus”-exams introduced in the 1944 Education Act.

A straight parody would exaggerate characteristics of the model; Powell, however, plagiarises its language quoting verbatim the phrases which were already quoted in full, and ridiculed, by Orwell (“wrathy and worried”; “landed and stranded, diddled, dished and done”; “jolly pleased” etc.)[35]

In the Orwell sketch, Powell already applies a Burtonesque collage-technique, which will be perfected in Dance in pastiches, allusions, and in overt as well as covert quotations from dozens of sources,[36] resulting in a text written “comme mosaique de citations.”[37] In Dance, it is the modernist novelist X. Trapnel who is very much aware of very modern, and very old literary devices. The myth of Isis and Osiris is both used literally (Pamela’s destruction and scattering of Trapnel’s manuscript in the Maida Vale Canal) andas a meta-fictional model for the technique of quoting and alluding as well as using fragments of other writers’ works. Not surprisingly, it is Bagshaw who is well aware of the, then fashionable, structural potential of the myth: “Looks as if someone’s dumped their unit’s paper salvage. Obsolete forms waiting to be pulped and made into other forms. An eternal reincarnation.” (BDFR 235[38]). Allusions to the Egyptian myth were ubiquitous in the 1960ies– one might even be tempted to say obtrusively so – in French contemporary novels.[39] Robert Burton stated that “to invent is to reweave the web that others have already woven.”[40] His Democritus then adds that “the composition and method is ours only”.

George Orwell in his 1940 essay, published in Horizon, described Hamilton’s style as “easily imitated (to facilitate substitute writers), plagiarist, and largely comprising shallow right wing content.”7 Powell’s starting point and target is the key passage in Orwell’s essay, which argues that the stories do not go “with the times”.

The year is 1910, or 1940, it is all the same […] [W]e are settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea, we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week’s match against Rookwood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.[41]

In Powell’s sketch, the public school boys of the 1950s are “socially aware” in that they have read Orwell’s essay. Both the boys and The Boys’ Weekly’s ideologies have moved with the times. Orwell’s leftist criticism is both debunked as illusionary and, paradoxically, justified. I would argue that the entirety of Dance is Powell’s response to Orwell’s partisan view:

I am merely pointing to the fact that, in England, popular imaginative literature is a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter.Allfiction from the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored in the interests of the ruling class. And boys’ fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no impression behind.[42]

Both “Disgusted Tunbridge Wells” and Orwell are kept in check after Jenkins’s long reflexion (a “first-person”; or “self-narrated [interior], monologue”, i.e. what we read is neither solely the narrator’s view or his words; he is rather focussing on his former self’s perspective[43]) during the service on Thanksgiving Day, musing on life and art, death and war, as reflected in, among others, Isaiha, Blake’s Jerusalem, Cowley’s Pindarique Odes, finally extending his “exegesis” to “all three verses” of the National Anthem, which he first describes as “[r]epetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination nor subtlety of thought and phraseology”, before, typically, modifying his judgement, looking at it from a different angle, first conceding that

[…] the words possess at the same time a kind of depth, an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment. […] Language, pronunciation, sentiment, were always changing. There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when […], in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had established less of a stranglehold on the public mind […]

… eventually arriving at the conclusion that 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, thraldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was. [MP 227]

In the first chapter of QU, readers are first led into expecting a cosy boys’ weeklies-story. Both the careers of four public schoolboys, four “infants of the spring” (Widmerpool, Stringham, Templer, Jenkins) seem “to start so well”. In 1945, it is Stringham’s and Templer’s stories that “end so badly”[44], with Widmerpool’s luck finally running out in 1971. Readers witness their journey from post-WW1 juvenile innocence, from paradise, (with some early indications of corruption already in the first volume) to [post-] WW2 apocalypse, quite a different kind of change from the one that had been envisaged by Orwell.

[1]“At the turn of the century, Punch had already become a national institution and the writers and artists were household names. Readers would crowd outside the offices before the weekly lunches to see their favourite contributors.” PUNCH Magazine Cartoon Archive, www.punch.co.uk/about (accessed 9 March 2016).
[2] Michael Barber, Anthony Powell. A Life. 2004, 200
[3] Stephen Morley, Historical UK inflation rates and calculator, inflation.stephenmorley.org (accessed 26 October 2016).
[4] R .G.G. Price, A History of Punch, 1957, 330, quoted by Barber, 201
[5] Ibid.
[6] “In the early TLS days as much as later, [Powell] was no less happy writing about new books, in some cases the first, by R. K. Narayan or Amos Tutuola, Arthur Calder-Marshall or Truman Capote, Antonia White or Paul Bowles, than about the latest translation of Balzac. Then, of course, there were his particular hobby horses, especially genealogy and heraldry. Above all there was the not unrelated opportunity to write about those with whom he shared a genealogy of friendship: Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, Philip Toynbee, Evelyn Waugh – many others.
In terms of his responses to his contemporaries, Powell’s time at the TLS was unique in his career because – unlike later, when he served for many years as chief reviewer of the Daily Telegraph – he was working anonymously.” (Jeremy Treglown, Our secret harmonies: The TLS life of Anthony Powell. In TLS – The Times Literary Supplement, 20 January 2006)
[7] “The T*M*S Literary Supplement: AVANT-GARDE EN AVANT”,Punch 27/04/1955, 52
[8] “Chesterfield Writes Again”, Punch, 15/02/1956, 220-221
[9] “Angus and the Rag”, Punch, 05/03/1956, 326
[10] Ibid.
[11] “Chesterfield Writes Again”. Is there [sexual] innuendo in “if she [the “woman at the “Espresso”] offers to pay at least her own reckoning”? “He” is advised to be “suaviter in modo” [gently in manner], which ought to be ideally combined with “fortiter in re” [firmly in action] “later in the taxi, or even the bus.” Surely the Espresso woman prefigures Pamela Flitton?
[12] Lord Chesterfield’s “great-great-great-great-great son [is] not lucky enough to possess an amiably proletarian origin, or an ornamentally alien elocution”; he lacks “the looks set in the physiognomy of the Palatinate or the Americas”; he is “not unpunctual”, so if he wants to have a career in 1950s’ Britain, or rather the City, he is advised not to keep his opinions to himself so as to show that “he’s unimpressed by tedious social convention.”
[13] “Hal o´ the Ministry. Rudyard Kipling’s daughter, Mrs. Bambridge, is fighting to recover the requisitioned land round her 17th-century home in Cambridgeshire occupied by the United States Air Force.” Punch, 09/02/1955, 196-197
[14]“Angus and the Rag”
[15] Stanley Green,Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre, 1980, 126
[16] The line Disgusted, [of] Tunbridge Wells has become English (British) shorthand for a grumpy “anonymous stuffy newspaper-letter-writer” complaining that “fings ain’t wot they used ter be.” [e-cylopedia, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1999/02/99/e-cyclopedia/318036.stm (accessed 09/03/2016).]
[17] Price, quoted in Barber, 204
[18] “Steerforth on Copperfield“, Punch, 29/07/1953, 136f.
[19] “Genealogy teaches the complexity and unexpectedness of society, especially in this country, where impassable social barriers have never existed […]“ [Anthony Powell: Review of Anthony Wagner, Pedigree and Progress: Essays in the Genealogical Interpretation of History. In: Anthony Powell, Miscellanous Verdicts. Writings on Writers 1946-1989, 1990, 32]
[20] Mary Eagelton and David Pierce: Attitudes to Class in the English Novel from Walter Scott to David Storey, 1979, 126f.
[21] Peter Kislinger, Dance for Readers, Trilogy Two: Dance for Readers: Flashback, Flashforward.In: Secret Harmonies. Journal of the Anthony Powell Society4/5. Summer 2011, 106 (paper originally presented in January 2006 in a series called Dance for Readers at the Wallace Collection.)
[22] For a detailed discussion of“theoretical” and “mimetic” sentences in “auto- and homo-diegetic narratives” see: Kislinger, Dance for Readers, 102
[23] See the form of Plato’s dialogues, particularly Symposium [http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html].
[24] For a discussion of the terminology see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, N. Y, 1980 (= Discours du récit, Paris 1972), 184
[25] Kislinger, Dance for Readers, 112-116
[26] Anthony Powell, “Exagmination [sic] of Joyce”. In: TLS, 30/9/1948, 610
[27] Anthony Powell,
- "Superior Being“. In TLS, 26/3/1949, 197)
- “French Without Tears”. In: Punch, 9/7/1958, 55)
[28] Anthony Powell, The Strangers All Are Gone. Vol. 4 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1983, 69. The German title of Robert Musil’s novel is misleading, too.
[29] In Punch, February 20 1957 (pp. 270 & 272), there are two (Powellian self-?) parodies and cartoons of a fence-sitter, “Algar Björnstöm”. The pseudo-photographs bear some resemblances to Powell, although I would not put my hand in the hermeneutic fire. Both brief articles and cartoons are part of whole-page parodies of “The S*ND*Y T*M*S (AN INDEPENDENT JOURNAL) and THE OBS*RV*R (ANOTHER INDEPENDET JOURNAL)”.
[30] “Greyfriars Nationalized”, Punch, 15/04/1953, 458-459
[31] Peter Gordon and Denis Lawton,Dictionary of British Education. London 2004, 74–76.
[32] An echo of Stringham’s “jam crisis” in QUUP, 12
[33]
- Douglas Hill (ed.),Tribune 40: the first forty years of a socialist newspaper, 1977
- Paul Anderson (ed.), Orwell inTribune: ‘As I Please’ and Other Writings, 2006
[34] In Dance, Powell does not allow his characters to be caricatured. True, there are mimetic copies of foreigners speaking English, for example Kucherman, Siegfried, Theodoric’s “perfect”, though stilted and old-fashioned English – yet these are acute observations; and there’s Colonel Flores in MP.
[35] In a work fiction with a homo-diegetic narrative situation, both parody and pastiche are of particular interest to the reader. Why? Because it is where the author’s world and the fictional world meet and because mimetic recreations of “dialogues” are fore-grounded, i.e. any discourse, any rendering of a person’s idiolect (see Colin Donald’s seminal paper Awfully chic to be killed: Linguistic register and the comic art of Dance, Proceedings of the Anthony Powell Centenary Conference Third Biennial Anthony Powell Conference, 2005, 37-48) can be understood as pastiche, or parody. All dialogues in Dance are Jenkins’s creative re-creations. Gérard Genette, speaking about Proust’s narrator-figure touches on this very paradox: “The narrator is present as source, guarantor, and organizer of the narrative, as analyst and commentator, as stylist [...] and particularly – as we all know – as producer of metaphors [...]: what we are dealing with is not the story, but the story’s ‘image’, its trace in a memory. But this trace, so delayed, so remote, so indirect, is also the presence itself. [...] Extreme mediation, and at the same time utmost immediacy.” (Genette, Narrative Discourse, 167; my italics).
[36] Peter Kislinger, 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’. Ph. D. dissertation Universität Wien/ University of Vienna 1993, 166-274
[37] Julia Kristeva, Semeiotikè, Paris 1969, 146
[38] It is not quite clear who speaks these words, Bagshaw or X. Trapnel.
[39] Jean Ricardou, Problèmes du nouveau roman, Paris 1967
[40] Quoted in Philip Holland, Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’and Menippean Satire.Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1979, 387
[41] wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_School, (accessed 9 March 2016).
[42] George Orwell, “Boys’ weeklies”. First published in Horizon No. 3, March 1940. Reprinted in: Inside the Whale and Other Essays, 1940 |Critical Essays, 1946 | Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, 1950 | A Collection of Essays, 1954 |Collected Essays, 1961
[43] A first-person interior monologue implies retrospection, a re-creation of earlier memory, implying both a narrative distance from that earlier self and the possibility for a dynamic rearranging of memories. (Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton 1978, 14 & 166)
[44]“It seemed to start so well, and end so badly. Perhaps that’s how well constructed stories ought to terminate.” (HSH 223)