Anthony Quinton, Sunday Telegraph, 17 June 1973
In this, the eleventh, and penultimate, volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence the essentially pictorial character of his conception of the novelist’s art is even more apparent than usual.
It has often been his technique at crucial moments to freeze his creations into a strikingly dramatic tableau and then to convey the causes, effects and general significance of the memorable event by way of an interpretative commentary, in which, first, the appearance of the participants is described with an abundance of simile and allusion and then the narrative setting and the symbolic meaning of the situation ace tentatively explored. He considers his fictional world not with a God’s-eye. but with an art-critic’s-eye view.
Auberon Waugh, Evening Standard, 19 June 1973
In the latest, last but one of Powell’s achievement, Widmerpool is revealed as a Communist agent, a sexual voyeur and a patron of prostitutes. He spies on his wife, Pamela, in bed with a French Communist writer who dies on the spot; she then has an affair with a new character, a philandering American millionaire who collects the pubic hair of his mistresses in a cushion and is killed in a motor car accident; she pursues a serious young American writer, also new, who is writing a life of X. Trapnel, who has died in what must be thought hilarious circumstances after buying everybody drinks in a pub; then she, too, commits suicide, on which sad note Mr. Powell concludes that life is “a Lamentable Tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth.”
I do not apologise for revealing these events because, as everyone knows, the charm of a Powell novel does not lie in the narrative so much as m the way it is told. Moreover, any reader who allowed his attention to stray for a moment might easily miss several of these developments, lost in the magic of Powell’s discursive style, his use of rare and beautiful words, his delicate allusions to previous novels by himself and other European masters.
If one analyses the pleasure which tills series affords, I think a large part must be in flattering people’s intelligence who are able to pick up references to characters and situations in the earlier novels. They feel alert, socially in the swim, and no doubt the exercise does wonders for their self-confidence. Alas, this is not a satisfaction available to those like this reviewer who has a memory like a sieve. Slightly ashamed, out of the swim and with my self-confidence in shreds, I must admit that I found the first half almost completely incomprehensible….
I only hope in revealing that I found the first half of it completely incomprehensible I will not tie mistaken for the little boy who shouts that the Emperor has no clothes. Mr. Powell, as it happens, has more layers of clothing than there are skins on an onion—the greater difficulty sometimes being to spot the Emperor underneath. He has a bland, humorous outlook, an excellent sense of timing which only occasionally deserts him in the present book and all the essential equipment of a novelist except, apparently, any desire to write novels, to get on and tell the story.
Personally, I am sad that he chose to write Music of Time—whether a grand social panorama of the twentieth century or an extended parlour game—instead of writing novels. But there can be no doubt that he gives great pleasure to many intelligent and cultivated people, and we should be grateful for that.
George Hill, The Times, 21 June 1973
Advancement of a kind for Widmerpool, fulfilment of a kind for the unappeasable Pamela, sudden death for Buster Foxe: many readers will seek out the book just from the urgent necessity of discovering what happens to them all next. A reviewer need only offer them the reassurance that a certain staleness detectable in the previous volume in the series, Books Do Furnish a Room, dealing as it did with the shop-talk of literary London and the misfortunes of X. Trapnel, a figure not altogether plausible nor, one supposes, characteristic of the hungry 1940s, is quite absent in this, the last but one. We have a new scene and new characters, and, within, the very definite conventions Mr. Powell set himself 20 years ago, a new style….
The manner, like the scene, is new. The story, with its hints of espionage and brandishing of film-contracts, is relatively sensational. As for the detail, he is decidedly more specific in sexual matters than before. Readers who have wondered for years about the unusual preferences of Sir Magnus Donners will have their curiosity satisfied here. Both the Americans have tastes still more unusual. These are not trivial changes. The sense of gossip has always been important in these books, and gossip’s charm lies largely in vagueness and speculation (and because gossip and self-revelation are opposite impulses, the narrator has always been a reticent spectator). These new excitements mean that fresh readers will find plenty to entertain them, but they create a pace where the underlying rhythm of the series is somewhat jostled, and a suspicion that characters so patiently established are being manipulated a little cavalierly for effect.
With 11 out of the 12 books in the series now before us, it is possible to speak fairly confidently of the work as a whole. In spite of that air of being our English Proust which has sometimes grated on those who like the French one, Mr. Powell is unlikely to imitate the obsessional heightening in late Proust, nor to spring a redemption on us. His nature is to be uniform: there is hardly a ragged edge or an uncalculated incongruity anywhere in this urbane discourse, where the catastrophes are never witnessed, only inferred from scenes in themselves comic. If the new characters have not quite the flavour of the earlier Gileses and Jeavonses, and the range of the social panorama now appears less than it once seemed, the flow of reappearances and transformations is powerful enough to carry the senes through—that A Dance to the Music of Time, whose discipline and formal rhythm do recall Poussin, the artist its title invokes: except that it is a great deal more fun.
Roy Fuller, The Listener, 21 June 1973
The 11th volume of Anthony Powell’s roman fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, is unusually long compared with its predecessors, due perhaps not so much to the intricacies of the final terpsichorean figures as to a remarkable upsurge of creative vigour. The first two-thirds of it takes place in Venice at an international literary conference whose delegates, with their access to free food, drink, culture, hotel accommodation and an exotic setting, are the Frazerian “temporary kings” of the title. The phrase has further significance as the story unfolds. The legend of Candaules and Gyges, depicted on a painted ceiling by Tiepolo visited by the delegates, symbolises the Widmerpools’ marriage—the king killed and succeeded by one to whom he has shown the naked queen. The downfall or death of other characters is recounted. This sombreness of theme (probably inevitable, with the narrator now in his fifties) doesn’t in the least mean that the book is less funny than the others. The comedy is simply on the highest level: this, with the rich Venetian background (and other set-pieces), and a rather harsher and even more subtle portrayal of personal relations, makes it arguably the greatest book of the series….
While on the crabbing side of things, I ought also to mention a somewhat increased gaminess of style. Over the years Powell has been less and less inclined to use the conjunctive “that”: now, articles and auxiliary verbs are also likely to be missing, as in Auden’s earliest verse. Devotees, like devotees of late Henry James, will accept, even welcome this, happy with the density and even the fleeting puzzlement thereby achieved. It must be hoped that new readers will not be put off. The question generally of new readers is a difficult one. There are passages in the books (though fewer in this, I think, than in any except the earliest) that read like gossip—the bringing of the reader up to date about events and characters not intended at that moment to be treated to the benefit of fully narrated incident. These may be objected to by those not familiar with what is now an immense web.
The present volume introduces an unusually large number of fresh personages, and does it with masterly skill and resource. Dr Brightman, a formidable female don; Louis Glober, the “playboy-tycoon”; Professor Gwinnett, a young American litterateur; Tokenhouse, the ex-publisher and amateur painter—all these are as solid and as memorable as any in the series. But the final distillation of pleasure is had from their interaction with characters already familiar. Moreover, there are legitimate (and illuminating or amusing) references which will be lost on newcomers: e.g. to Sillery’s 90th birthday party.
All one can do is to urge an attack from the beginning. “Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them,” was one of Trapnel’s dicta, reported here. Temporary Kings seems to me one of the finest novels of my time. Its construction is complex but lucid, its observation and analysis mature; it has wit, breadth of cultural reference, symbolic reverberations —yet it never forsakes naturalism and the down-to-earth standpoint that is the hallmark of the best fiction. However, it will only yield its full essence by being encountered as the penultimate—as we understand—link in a chain. The reader must exercise his talent for recalling the rest of the chain.
Susan Hill, Daily Telegraph, 21 June 1973
People are either totally committed to Anthony Powell, or they do not read him at all. The books in the Dance to the Music of Time sequence do not stand up independently and this penultimate volume would be incomprehensible to anyone unacquainted with all the characters and their past histories.
Newcomers must begin at the beginning, as I did when I was 15. I was absorbed and admiring immediately, but adolescence is a darkly serious period of life and I did not fully value the comedy of the books; appreciation of the vein of satire, deft, sharp wit and richly funny situations, all came later. But the comedy is only a vein, and in Temporary Kings it is, as in Shakespeare’s late comedies, the obverse side of melancholy….
A recurring pleasure for Powell devotees is catching up on gossip since the last book; who is married, divorced, bankrupted, dead? It would spoil things to reveal more than the delicious fact that Widmerpool is now a life peer….
Jenkins and his friends are ageing, changing, decaying, though traces of their former glories remain visible. And it is pertinent that the book’s opening scene features an elderly troupe of Venetian musicians, performing from their gondola; no one here dies In Venice, but many are preoccupied with thoughts of mortality.
There are marvellous comic scenes, but nostalgia mutes them. This is one of the best volumes, but I await the last apprehensively, because it will be the last. Yet winter’s consolation is the promise of spring; one can re-read the whole sequence. The music of the dance is a round.
Times Literary Supplement, 22 June 1973
The dance of Anthony Powell’s characters to the music of time has now become grimly autumnal. In this eleventh novel of the planned twelve, his fascination with the inexorable development of these people in the fulfilment of their life roles has turned, of necessity, into a sad contemplation of the varying degrees of their decay. As always, the novel ultimately pivots on a concept of the profound comedy of all human postures and strivings. But the humour is indisputably darker; the wry, funny glances at everything from the vanity of the highest ambitions to the merest minutiae of individual behaviour are pervaded by a sense that soon, now, careers will be concluded, aspirations wither away, the places at the dinner tables be filled only by ghosts….
If Temporary Kings is the saddest novel in Mr. Powell’s sequence—sadder even than the war novels in the series, where death was less an approaching inevitability than a sudden, tragic curtailment—it is also one of the most rich, complex and original volumes, showing consummate narrative skill of a kind different, in various respects, from before. One new feature is the use of a single (fictitious, and brilliantly invented) work of art to symbolize a large part of the action. Mr. Powell has, before now, used paintings placed in significant positions to evoke in Jenkins’s memory thoughts of people and periods. He has never before done what he has here with a Tiepolo ceiling in a Venetian palazzo, “the very existence of which was unknown” to Jenkins, though Tiepolo ranks with Poussin as one of his “most admired masters.”
The ceiling depicts King Candaules contriving to exhibit his wife’s nudity to the voyeuristic Gyges. In the legend, Candaules is murdered by Gyges, who becomes king in his stead. In Temporary Kings, it is a voyeuristic Widmerpool who more than exhibits his wife Pamela to a left-wing French writer, Ferrand-Seneschal; in fact the latter dies in her embraces, before Widmerpool’s eyes. From this symbolic painting and all that it symbolizes in the life—and the death—habits of Jenkins’s friends, radiates a new and startling set of revelations about the characters in The Music of Time. To accommodate this sudden, alarming knowledge of what was hintingly described as “the underclothes” in The Military Philosophers, Mr. Powell has admitted an unusual sexual explicitness into his writing—another new feature. Hidden and unpalatable facts, scarcely treated with overt humour, are coming to light as the dance transmutes into a Dance of Death.
The most skilful, and in a sense the most surprising, innovation, however, is to be found in Mr. Powell’s narrative technique. Outwardly it is the same method: long passages of elaborate, yet meticulously polished and finely reticent, prose advance the story in a gradual unfolding of incident and character, interpolated references bringing readers up to date with the latest fortunes of the whole gallery of Jenkins’s acquaintances.
The difference here is the way in which the most crucial facts are built up piecemeal over the entire course of the narrative rather than presented as conclusive surprises. Temporary Kings requires attentive reading on another level than that needed simply to recall “who is who” from previous books. It is an accumulating jigsaw in which every piece requires to be remembered as it is set carefully, in place, with nothing complete or explicit until the end. In terms of construction, it is a narrative feat of a new and fascinating kind, something unexpected from Mr. Powell at this stage of his enterprise. Yet it fits perfectly into his scheme at the same time as it varies the texture. And it has the effect of leaving the final volume unpredictable as regards the way in which all the drawn-out threads will be finally cut, even if one might guess at the mood and atmosphere of the conclusion. The most avid follower of Jenkins’s saga could not wish better from Mr. Powell than this.
Peter Lewis, Daily Mail, 28 June 1973
Addicts will need no prompting to plunge in to this, the eleventh volume out of twelve in Anthony Powell’s Proustian saga, A Dance to the Music Of Time. If you start reading here and get hooked, there’s a lot of catching up to do on the immense cast of characters who are threaded through the previous volumes. The whole thing is a comment on cultural chic among the literary intellectuals, with their tangled sexual lives, disporting at a conference in Venice in the late 50s. Theirs is a sombre, faintly-ridiculous dance. Powell’s coolly sardonic tone and subtle, mandarin style makes you ask yourself not whom you like most but whom you detest most. Indeed, if you go along with him, you positively look forward to the satisfaction of seeing everybody meet a bad end.
Peter Jaszi, Newsday, 4 November 1973
In a fit of self-denial, it would undoubtedly be possible to read the penultimate entry in A Dance to the Music of Time as an isolated work. The effect, one imagines, would be at once pleasurable and disconcerting—rather like attending an unobtrusively brilliant party on a last-minute invitation and eavesdropping on an accomplished raconteur’s anecdotes about the guests to whom one has not been introduced. Severed from its larger context, Temporary Kings would stand as a demonstration of the qualities which mark Powell’s unique narrative style: syntactic complexity without opacity; precision of detail and ordering, masked by an appearance of nonchalance; and an approach to the observation of behavior which stresses the comic perspective, while affording glimpses of tragic vistas and bathetic dead ends.
Unfortunately for the reader only now joining the Dance, however, Powell is also a master of the internal allusion. His passing references to characters and events chronicled in earlier volumes, although strictly incidental to the enjoyment of Temporary Kings, lend it a richness and complexity altogether out of proportion to its length….
In his one extended work of nonfiction, a scholarly biography of John Aubrey, the 17th Century antiquarian and professional house guest, Powell demonstrated that high gossip—of which Aubrey’s own Brief Lives is the type—can fulfill the purposes of history and autobiography without adopting the depressing seriousness of tone to which these works are prone. In shaping the Dance, Powell filters his material through a narrator who shares both Aubrey’s predilection for the peculiar and his devotion to hearsay. No character remains a stereotype for long; the unregenerate individuality of each is established and reaffirmed by Jenkins’ memory for minutiae….
With Temporary Kings, Powell has entered the last phase of his enterprise. In each of the early volumes of the Dance, the passage of time operates to expand the circle of Jenkins’ acquaintance, and to increase the potential for new combinations and permutations within it Then, exercising the cruel prerogative reserved for gods, tyrants and novelists. Powell reversed the process. The decimation of the dramatis personae began in earnest with the wartime novels; it continues unabated in Books Do Furnish a Room and now, in Temporarv Kings. The highly unnatural death of Pamela Widmerpool (nee Flitton) removes a character who has represented the disquieting essence of malice and misrule. Even more important for the pattern of the Dance, the natural death of Hugh Moreland—prefigured in a remarkable extended passage which consolidates Powell’s stature as a tragicomic writer—separates Jenkins from the last of his temperamental allies. Throughout the Dance, Powell’s narrator has been permitted to define himself in vicarious terms. Suddenly and irrevocably, at the conclusion of Temporary Kings, he appears as a lonely survivor….
If A Dance to the Music of Time is indeed a contemplative novel, concerned primarily with one man and the human ties which chafe or comfort him. Something more can be expected from its conclusion. In Temporary Kings, Powell has brought Nick Jenkins almost to the point of self-disclosure; the last volume should bring him out. And if Powell’s narrator at long last is to be revealed. a guess can be made as to the form that revelation may take. Aside from Jenkins himself, the fate of only one major character remains to be resolved. Graceless, obvious, ever-striving and in Jenkins’ words, “never greatly interested in other people’s doings,” Lord Kenneth Widmerpool is—in every sense—the narrator’s antithesis. Literally and figuratively, his comic-grotesque figure has haunted the 11 volumes which Jenkins’ intelligence has dominated. It would be surprising, and perhaps disappointing, if the final volume did not place Jenkins and Widmerpool—and the principles they represent—in direct opposition.
Annette Flower, Baltimore Sun, 25 November 1973
Suffocation by nostalgia is, in one way or another, everyone’s end in Temporary Kings. The deliberate allusions to literary classics, to the sacrificial kings of ancient fertility rites (the “temporary kings” of the title as well as the subject of an opening conversation, and to the most death-preoccupied tragedies of the Jacobean period form one strand of nostalgia. The anecdotal reminiscences form another: various long-dead members of the circle are evocatively recalled as exemplars, and each character (though most especially Lady Pamela and Glober) is shown to repeat incessantly and perhaps obsessively patterns of behavior which lead, ultimately, to destruction.
Finally, both nostalgia, in its many forms, and voyeurism (multifarious, but focused in the concentration of various characters upon the apocryphal Tiepolo ceiling depicting King Candaules displaying his wife naked to his rival Gyges) merge in the figures of Jenkins and Moreland, who between them end the narrative. Neither has been intimately involved in the action, both have observed it; both see in it a significance beyond the particular and connect voyeurism with the creation of art itself. As observer and rememberer, the artist preserves what otherwise is lost in the flux of time and gives enduring form to what, in Lady Pamela or Glober, is formless.