First published in 1955 (London: Heinemann, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy)
In The Acceptance World, almost all of Nick Jenkins’s contemporaries seem to be well on their trajectories toward success or failure. Everyone seems to be involved in affairs, whether business deals (Templer, Widmerpool, Bob Duport), literary politics (Mark Members), romantic entanglements (Nick and Jean Templer (now Duport)), or some combination of these (Quiggin). Charles Stringham, already struggling with a drinking problem in A Buyer’s Market, is now an apparently hopeless alcoholic. Nick’s relationship with Jean, though intense, proves temporary and at the end, Nick’s future in all spheres — business, literary, and romantic — is just as unclear as it was at the start.
The Acceptance World is structured in five chapters, each taking place in large part within a day or part of a day, but in this book, Powell relies less on set pieces, aside from the Old Boys’ dinner in Chapter 5:
- Chapter 1. Nick meets Uncle Giles at the Ufford, a cheap hotel in Bayswater, for tea. There, her meets Mrs. Erdleigh, who reads his fortune, predicting a romance. Later that day, Nick visits Barnby, the painter, where they talk of various people and, in particular, of St John Clarke and the influence of Mark Members.
- Chapter 2. Nick goes to the Ritz to meet with Members about St John Clarke’s introduction to the Isbister book Nick’s firm has long been trying to publish. Instead, he runs into his old schoolmate Peter Templer, and later Templer’s wife Mona and his sister Jean, now married to Bob Duport (see car crash in A Question of Upbringing). Quiggin arrives in Members’s place but little is accomplished aside from his leaving a positive impression on Mona Templer. Nick accompanies the Templers back to their house in Maidenhead, which gives him a chance to get reacquainted on a more intimate basis with Jean.
- Chapter 3. The next day at the Templers’. Mona insists on inviting Quiggin, on short notice, to lunch, and he arrives an hour or so later. The party includes Jimmy Stripling and Mrs. Erdleigh, and the group tries its hands at planchette (a Ouija board to Americans). Some amusing though cryptic messages are written. Quiggin has to rush back to London to deal with some crisis involving St John Clarke. Nick and Jean arrange to meet in London.
- Chapter 4. This is almost a daytime equivalent of the odyssey of nighttime parties in A Buyer’s Market. Nick goes from a showing of Isbister’s paintings to an encounter with Mark Members in Hyde Park, where they both watch a protest procession including St John Clarke, in a wheelchair pushed by Quiggin and Mona Templer. Nick and Jean spend time together, then go out for a late dinner at Foppa’s restaurant. There, they meet Barnby, Anne Stepney, and Dicky Umphraville, who persuades them all to pay a visit to Millie Andriadis’s flat.
- Chapter 5. Nick attends an annual dinner for the alumni — the Old Boys — of Le Bas’s house. He meets Peter Templer, who brings him up to date on his marriage (ended with Mona’s moving in with J. G. Quiggin) and on the latest manoeuvres between Quiggin and Mark Members for the favor of the aging novelist St John Clarke. In the course of the evening, after several speeches, Widmerpool begins a long and tedious talk that’s interrupted when Le Bas appears to suffer a stroke. Finding Charles Stringham drunk, Jenkins and Widmerpool take him home; then Nick continues on to Jean’s flat, likely for the last time.
In Invitation to the Dance, Hilary Spurling dates the events of the book as follows:
- Chapter 1. Late autumn 1931, sometime around the end of the First National Government (i.e., coalition government) under the leadership of Ramsay Macdonald.
- Chapter 2. December 1932, specifically the evening of the first Saturday after Christmas, or New Year’s Eve.
- Chapter 3. The following day (1 January 1933).
- Chapter 4. A day in early spring 1933.
- Chapter 5. An evening in July 1933.
The Acceptance World takes its title from a type of trade arrangement explained to Nick by Peter Templer:
“But what is the Acceptance World?”
“If you have goods you want to sell to a firm in Bolivia, you probably do not touch your money in the ordinary way until the stuff arrives there. Certain houses, therefore, are prepared to ‘accept’ the debt. They will advance you the money on the strength of your reputation. It is all right when the going is good, but sooner or later you are tempted to plunge. Then there is an alteration in the value of the Bolivian exchange, or a revolution, or perhaps the firm just goes bust—and you find yourself stung. That is, if you guess wrong.”
Ironically, though, the “Acceptance World” is one Nick stands completely outside. Indeed, the world of business remains largely a mystery to Nick throughout A Dance. He hears reports of people like Sir Magnus Donners, Peter Templer, Bob Duport, and Widmerpool and matters like base metals, chromite, and letters of credit without the least understanding of what they are, let alone how they are involved in trade and manufacturing. In this and other ways, Nick (and many of the characters in A Dance) seem to be heeding the opposite of Henry James’s call, “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.” What matters for Nick (and Powell) are movements and interactions, and the ones he observes directly matter most of all. When a scene involving a character ends, or the character leaves, he or she disappears almost as completely as an actor walking offstage disappears to the audience.
By this third volume in the novel, Powell seems to have eased into his approach. Though A Dance is sometimes described as Nick Jenkins’s memoirs, there are some marked differences from a conventional memoir. Most noteworthy are the extended conversations. Human beings simply don’t recall reliably conversations from years or decades past, and certainly not in the detail we see here. Compare A Dance with Powell’s own memoirs, and the contrast becomes stark: Powell virtually never attempts to recreate more than a sentence or two from his memory and even that almost never. A Dance, on the other hand, would be half as long without the conversations.
But we would lose so much without them. With Powell, every conversation conveys so much information: plot (who, what, when, where); character (mannerisms, prejudices, insights, and blind spots); class and culture; Nick’s attempts to piece together motivations (whys); and most of all, clues to those movements that have taken place off stage. With The Acceptance World, it becomes clear why Nick is not an action figure in A Dance: to get too involved into any events would distract him from the intensive job of observing.