First published in 1971 (London: Heinemann, New York: Little, Brown).
A spectre is haunting Books Do Furnish a Room (and Temporary Kings): the spectre of a wrathful Pamela Widmerpool. She hovers over every scene from Erridge’s funeral on like the prospect of nuclear warfare. No one wants to be responsible for triggering an attack; everyone shudders at the thought of its destructive potential. Even the maliciously industrious Widmerpool seems at a loss to know how to deal with his wife, though he puts considerable effort into appearing to be unphased by her irrationality. Even our narrator, Nick Jenkins, is awed by the ferocity of Pamela’s power. Though she is never far from our minds in the book, none of Powell’s characters manages to grasp the consequences of her being part of their world. For them, trying too hard to understand Pamela is a bit like, to steal a phrase from Herman Kahn, thinking about the unthinkable.
Aside from references to paper rationing, German POWs, bomb damage, and a few belated casualties like Nick’s brother-in-law George Tolland, the war has receded from our attention, as have politics and world events in general. Widmerpool is elected to Parliament for Labour, and insinuates himself into Attlee’s Labour government; Roddy Cutts, another brother-in-law, is returned as a Conservative MP in the 1945 election that toppled Churchill and installed Attlee. History now serves more as backdrop than part of the stage set of Nick Jenkins’s life.
Before the war, Nick admitted, in passing, to having published “two or three books.” Now, he seems to have decided to embrace the profession of man of letters. The book opens with him arriving in Oxford to research a book — we later learn, with the title Borrage and Hellebore — about Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a parallel to John Aubrey and His Friends, the biography Powell published in 1948. Though nothing is said of it, we have to assume that Nick, like Powell, struggles for a period to find a way to return to fiction and relies on the Burton biography as an alternate creation. Nick does eventually take up novel writing again, but we are given no reason to believe his works bear any resemblance to the scope of A Dance.
And, as did Powell, Nick relies on book reviewing as a source of income, which — arguably more than his novels — brings him into London’s post-war literary world. He takes up the mantle as lead reviewer for Fission, the new monthly published by J. G. Quiggin and Howard Craggs, with some apparent support from Widmerpool, and edited by Lindsay Bagshaw, whose nickname, “Books Do Furnish a Room” (usually shortened to “Books”) provides Powell with his title. Quiggin & Craggs and Fission evoke the new breed of publishers, mostly left-leaning, that arrived on the scene in the 1940s: Allan Wingate; Andre Deutsch; Herbert van Thal; John Lehmann; New Writing; Horizon. Fission and Quiggin & Craggs bring Nick into acquaintance with such figures as Len Pugsley, L. O. Salvidge, Alaric Kydd, Bernard Shernmaker, and others who remain names without distinguishable personalities.
One figure, however, emerges as a dominant personality and plot force in the book: X. Trapnel. X. [for Xavier, left over from the Catholic Francis Xavier he was born with) Trapnel is, by Powell’s own acknowledgement, based on J. [for Julian] Maclaren-Ross, who was not only considered one of the better young English writers of the time, but (in the words of his Wikipedia articles) had by the late 1940s become “a ubiquitous and flamboyant presence in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho.” Flamboyant, in particular, by contrast with the generally dull standards of grey, ill-fed, ill-heated postwar England: sporting a beard, usually dressed in a massive old overcoat and sunglasses, and in Trapnel’s case, carrying a death’s-head walking stick that hides a dagger.
Trapnel takes the place of Nick’s prewar friends: Moreland, the composer, and Barnby, the painter. The literary characters have replaced the figures of art and music Nick came to know, drink, and converse with in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. In Trapnel’s case, however, conversation is replaced by monologue, and while the man obviously fascinates Nick, it’s clear that our narrator, now in his forties, has less patience with monologists. Trapnel wraps himself in an air of mystery (no one is quite clear on his origins until Bagshaw enlightens Nick near the end of the book), has a high opinion of his high opinions, sponges off all easy marks — but also seems pursued by black dogs of depression or ambition or both.
Powell performs a daring experiment in Books Do Furnish a Room, bringing X. Trapnel and Pamela Widmerpool together, almost as if simply to see what reaction might result. Before he combines the two, we might argue which character is catalyst and which is reagent, but by the book’s end, it’s clear that Pamela has primary responsibility for what takes place. If Trapnel had seen Pamela as a muse, he learns she is no Calliope but more like a harpy, a creature of malevolent and destructive force. Destructive, that is, to the point of tossing the manuscript of his novel Profiles in String into the Regent’s canal to punctuate her abandonment of Trapnel in favor of a return to life with Widmerpool.
If Books Do Furnish a Room opens with a return the Oxford of A Question of Upbringing, we come back to that first volume of A Dance in the book’s closing chapter, in which Nick visits his old public school to enroll his son and runs into his old house master, Le Bas, now in his eighties and unhappily serving as temporary librarian. After an awkward conversation in which the old man manages no more than a roughly approximate placement of Nick in his memory, Nick heads out into a chill, damp autumn afternoon that evokes that Sunday on which Uncle Giles appeared at the school in the opening of A Question of Upbringing. But then he runs into Widmerpool, waiting for his wife, and we get what, for me, is the least subtly worked ending in A Dance, managing to bring us up to speed on the reunited Widmerpools, the end of Fission, the latest releases of Quiggin & Cragg’s press, and the decline of X. Trapnel, all in the space of 3-4 pages.
Books Do Furnish a Room covers roughly two years, from the first winter after the end of the war to the autumn of 1947:
- Chapter 1. Winter 1945-1946. Nick, in Oxford during the winter break to research his Burton biography. He visits Sillery in his rooms, a reminder of his student days, and meets Ada Leintwardine, then Sillery’s secretary but preparing to move to London to work for Quiggin & Craggs. On the platform waiting for the train to London, he meets Bagshaw, who tells Nick he’s becoming editor of Q&C’s new magazine, Fission.
- Chapter 2. A week or so later. The funeral of Erridge — Lord Warminster — in a chapel near the family home at Thrubworth. A party including the Widmerpools, Quiggin, the Craggs, and, most surprisingly, Uncle Alfred Tolland. Pamela Widmerpool leaves the service abruptly. She is found afterwards at Thrubworth, where the mourners retire for tea. Alfred Tolland is in an unusually talkative mood. Quiggin invites Nick to work for Fission, then Nick finds himself trying to aid Pamela, who throws up in a Chinese vase.
- Chapter 3. Spring 1946/October 1946. The early days of Q&C and Fission. Among the acquaintances made or remade is Trapnel. Months later, at a part for Fission, Nick meets Odo Stevens, who’s written a novel about his time in the Balkans during the war, and Trapnel meets Pamela.
- Chapter 4. Early 1947. A sketch of Trapnel and his larger-than-life reputation among the London literati. Trapnel confesses a desire to meet Pamela. Nick dines at the House of Commons with Roddy Cutts. They meet Widmerpool, who invites them to his flat, only to discover that Pamela has left with all her luggage. Sometime later, Nick takes a book to Trapnel and finds him living with a Pamela no more or less discontented than she had been with Widmerpool…who arrives unexpectedly to confront the pair.
- Chapter 5. Nick travels to his old school to enroll his first son. In reflection, Nick relates the break-up of Trapnel and Pamela, a night on which she threw his manuscript into the canal and he later, in exasperation, threw his death’s-head stick. Nick runs into Le Bas in the school library. Leaving the school, he meets Widmerpool, who is waiting for Pamela, who is having a poorly explained rendezvous with a recently-graduated student. We learn of Trapnel’s decline since Pamela’s departure, of Q&C’s publication plans, and of the scheduled publication of Borrage and Hellebore.
When next we enter the dance in Temporary Kings, ten years have passed, a gap that suggests that Powell was growing anxious to reach the end of his work.