The publication of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant provided the occasion for the first in-depth critical essays looking at A Dance to the Music of Time as a whole, or rather, as a significant portion of a larger work in progress. One of the more noteworthy, if not uniformly enthusiastic, was by the writer to whom Powell had most often been compared in his career to date: Evelyn Waugh. The following article appeared in The Spectator on 24 June 1960.
Marriage à la Mode —1936
There is a phrase current among blurb writers, originating I suppose in some dark s corner of Cambridge (Mass.) or Cambridge (Eng.), which identifies certain books as inviting study “on more than one level.” I am not sure what they think they mean by this beyond the obvious statement that some readers are more intelligent and better informed than others and will therefore better appreciate the writer’s meaning. If they mean that the books they admire are replete with esoteric allusions, symbols and allegories, the natural conclusion is that (Holy Scripture apart) they are inferior exercises in the art of communication. Some novelists no doubt do play with such conceits. Mr. Anthony Powell is a happy example of a writer who works on a single level.
He is slightly my junior in years. 1 have few reasons to desire longevity. One of them is the hope that I (and he) may be spared to see the completion of the fine sequence which he calls The Music of Time and to sit (or he) back to read it continuously, for the annual installments he provides, eagerly expected and keenly enjoyed, do put something of a strain on an already faltering memory. The main characters, the brilliantly contrived dramatic episodes, the aloof and tolerant tone, the precise expression—all these remain with us during the long periods of waiting but the minor characters—Max Pilgrim, for instance, or Chips Lovell—tend, in my mind at least, to diminish and almost to disappear. Moreover Mr. Powell is not content to manipulate a single already numerous and diverse cast; more and more characters appear in each book, all intricately but tenuously connected with their predecessors. To borrow again from the blurb writers’ vocabulary, I do not think these characters exist fully “in the round.” They can be observed from one position only. We cannot walk round them as statues. They present, rather, a continuous frieze in high relief, deep cut and detailed.
The present book [Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant], more than any of its four predecessors, owes its value to its position in the series. It could not, I think, be greatly enjoyed by a reader ignorant of what has gone before. I enjoyed it rather less than them for a variety of reasons. The new characters are musicians and are (to me) much nastier and therefore less interesting than the painters, writers and men of the world with whom Mr. Powell has dealt until now There is a common scold whom I found so repellent that she stood out from the general easy-going acceptance of the bizarre which Mr. Powell has hitherto successfully inculcated. These may be complaints of the squeamish but all Mr. Powell’s devotees will, 1 am sure, feel disappointment in being denied their annual treat of Widmerpool. We wait and wait for him to appear, confident that he will precipitate one of his great catastrophes. At last we see him; he says a few words; he retires. And those few words leave us for the first time with a faint doubt of his reality. Could they really have been 1 spoken by a man in his twenties?
For a man to have shared one’s education is, in my eyes, no special recommendation to my good graces. I suppose I could have formed some early impression of his character and efficiency. I regret to say that few, if any, of my school contemporaries struck me sufficiently; favourably for me to go out of my way to employ their services.
An elderly understudy seems to have usurped the peculiar overcoat. It is Mr. Bultitude addressing Dr. Grimstone. Moreover, Widmerpool is represented as aspiring to be part of the shadow court of Fort Belvedere. This adds a further improbability. There were some queer fish in what the Archbishop of Canterbury denounced as an ‘exotic circle’ but, surely, no one remotely like Widmerpool.
The abdication of King Edward VIII is appropriately given greater emphasis than the Spanish civil war; appropriately, because the theme of this book is marriage. In its four predecessors the theme was success and failure in the various competitions of life, polarised in the success of the grotesque Widmerpool and the failure of the charming Stringham. Now Mr. Powells characters are less concerned with money and reputation. They are married and fretting under the restraints and disillusions of their state. What one is not told, and needs to know in order to understand them, is what they mean by marriage. None of them avows any religious belief or traditional, ethical code; they have no dynastic: ambitions of family alliances or heritable properties; no expectation of life-long companionship. All believe that marriage is terminable at will; most of them marry more than once. How do they distinguish the relationship from other forms of concubinage? That they do make a distinction is apparent from the gravity with which they discuss it, but Mr. Powell gives no hint of its origin and character. Is it purely superstitious and atavistic? The narrator writes:
To think at all objectively about one’s own marriage is impossible, while a balanced view of other people’s marriage is almost equally hard to achieve with so much information available, so little to be believed. Objectivity is not, of course, everything in writing; but, even after one has cast objectivity aside, the difficulties of presenting marriage are inordinate. Its forms are at once so varied, yet so constant, providing a kaleidoscope, the colours of which are always changing, always the same. The moods of a love affair, the contradictions of friendship, the jealousy of business partners, the fellow feeling of opposed commanders in total war, these are all in their way to be charted. Marriage, partaking of such—and a thousand more—dual antagonisms and participations, finally defies definition.
Mr. Powell owes us something more solid than this evasion of the novelist’s duty if he expects us to sympathise with the anxieties of his creations.
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is a cheap resort which some of the characters occasionally frequent. Nothing of importance to the story happens there. The incongruity of the name, which came about through the combination of two dissimilar establishments, tickles the narrator’s fancy, but it is not easy to see why Mr. Powell chose it as the title of the book.
Having made these few ungrateful comments I must deny any suggestion that the book is a failure. Mr. Powell knows very well what he is doing. All long works of literature have their periods of apparent stagnation. His purpose will become clear in subsequent volumes. Taken by itself it seems to me to lack structure, but no doubt it has an essential part in the grand design. Nor does it lack its own high drama. We have to wait for it. It is all in the third section, page 129 to page 190; the occasion is the performance of a symphony composed by one of the new characters and the party given to celebrate it by Mrs. Foxe, Charles Stringham’s mother, at which many of the old characters are gathered. It is invaded by Charles Stringham, who is now recognised as an alcoholic and held in gentle restraint by “Tuffy,” Mrs. Foxe’s former secretary. The scene of Stringham’s drunken but controlled mockery of the nagging Bohemian wife, of his momentary domination of the group and of his final act of non-resistance to Tuffy’s authority, is as finely conceived and finished as anything Mr. Powell has written anywhere
Nor should this book be regarded merely as an interim report of progress for in it the author has slyly inserted a sentence which I think will prove to be the key of the whole work. On the second page the narrator observes: “In the end most things in life—perhaps all things—turn out to be appropriate.” It is this realisation that separates the five novels Mr. Powell wrote before the war from those he has written after it. The first were brilliant studies of the grotesque; in the later books the characters behave as anarchically but they are seen as cohesive. They have not merely the adventitious connection of crossing the path of a single observer; they all hang together apart from him. There is homogeneity and rule in apparent chaos; and this is in the natural order of experience. No eschatological sanctions are invoked. In this essential respect Mr. Powell’s position may well be defined by contrasting it with that of his contemporary, Mr. Graham Greene. Mr. Greene’s characters never know anyone. Their intense, lonely lives admit of professional acquaintances, lovers and sometimes a single child but they are never seen as having ramifications of friendship, cousinhood and purely social familiarity. Their actions are performed under the solitary eye of God. Mr. Powell sees human society as the essential vehicle of the individual. Everyone knows everyone else, perhaps at the remove of one. Everyone’s path crosses and recrosses everyone else’s. There are no barriers of age or class or calling that can divide the universal, rather cold intimacy which the human condition imposes.