Alison Lurie, Daily Telegraph, 18 February 1971
However high their expectations … readers will not be disappointed by Books Do Furnish a Room. The most knowledgeable among them will certainly hear (or imagine they hear) in the music voices very those of old friends, acquaintances and loved ones, Those who know literary London in the years just after the last war only from the printed page will be impressed by the masterly way in which the moral, intellectual and political notes of that period are sounded again, though now with subtle irony.
But even readers who are not engaged in the literary game may well consider this one of the very best of Mr. Powell’s novels. His delicate observation, his wide range of sympathies, and his gift for scenes of high comedy which at the same time have tragic overtones, have never been greater. Many writers, even the most gifted, cannot so to speak compose for full orchestras.
At best the parties, the meetings, the crowd scenes in their books are blurred background music against which the protagonists speak; at worst, they are intervals of confused noise. (“When more than three people come into the room at once, I panic,” a famous novelist once confided to me.) Mr. Powell has never had this problem: after reading about one of his literary parties, you feel you have not only attended it but noticed far more than you would have ordinarily.
John Bayley, The Listener, 18 February 1971
Books Do Furnish a Room opens with Widmerpool a Labour MP and Pamela casting about for fresh experiences.
The secret of Pamela, as of all Anthony Powell’s most memorable characters, is inaccessibility. Widmerpool, for example, is identified only by anecdote on an appropriate formulaic pattern. The author never succumbs to the lure of close analysis—even through the medium of a sedulous narrator—or of taking possession of him for moral and intellectual ends. The high intensity of intelligence which produces—in James’s phrase—characters “deeply studied and elaborately justified” is wisely eschewed by pseudo-epic craft. And paradoxically, its formalism produces characters not only more lifelike than those who are studied for a purpose, but far more durable over a prolonged period of acquaintance. Our curiosity about Pamela, Jeavons and Widmerpool, as about Stringham and Templer (who have now died, respectively, in Singapore and Yugoslavia), is never satisfied, as it could not be in life. We welcome each meeting all the more because the genre in which they have their being is by definition not equipped to satisfy our curiosity, only to keep it alive.
Not that Nick Jenkins, the narrator, is sparing of comment and opinion, but his generalisations about life and literature, sex and society, do not impinge directly on the characters: they rather act as a kind of choric background. The author (again unlike Proust) has provided a contemporary Burton or Aubrey, with whom we are wholly at home but who has a better opinion of himself and his insight than we need to have. Apparently more co-existent with his creator than are Lockwood and Nelly Dean with Emily Bronté, or Marlowe with Conrad—for he also writes novels and works on 17th-century authors—he has much of their function: and this is ironically confirmed when he observes—inadvertently, as it were—on the last page of the novel, that “a novel is what its writer is,” and that “this definition only opens up a lot more questions.” Even so, this opinion is not his own but that of the writer X. Trapnel, another character who comes into the baleful orbit of Pamela Flitton.
Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1971
One need go no farther than the concept of melancholy to find the theme which characterizes the later novels of The Music of Time and introduces into the comedy a seriousness not altogether promised by the original programme: in such a way, perhaps, have twenty years’ work, developing the ideas which obsessed him at the start, led now to a finer, wiser, ultimately more serene view of human progress through the vicissitudes of existence. Sillery, the don intent on the power game he plays through his more influential students, is now a peer of the realm, publishing his ineffectual memoirs. Jenkins accords him not patronage, but a sort of genuinely affectionate pity. J. G. Quiggin, Howard Craggs (of the Vox Populi Press, and Boggis and Stone) and the new Bagshaw (whose nickname is the title of the novel) join together to launch a left-wing publishing house and an up-to-date literary magazine. The hopes expire in a welter of personal conflicts, prosecutions and general mediocrity.
But the atmosphere generated is one of a wise sadness rather than mockery or satire. Jenkins goes on a visit to his school and meets Le Bas, now well over eighty and acting as librarian. There is something of a feeling of wonder and respect at his sheer endurance, outlasting so many transient lives and fashions: Stringham’s and Templer’s lives in particular. Le Bas has even lived to see a son of the mysterious Akworth, disgraced by Widmerpool and expelled, coming to the school. Time has added a dimension of compassion to the theme which has in no way diminished the comic sharpness and resource; if anything, the new novel is a more finished, inventive and entertaining book on the purely comic level than several that have gone before, sustaining its humour through a series of scenes which rival in subtlety and surprise almost anything Mr. Powell has ever written. And the sea-change in his approach is possibly the most gratifying and heartening one that could have occurred: his comedy has become a high, serene art, increasingly able to encompass and interpret the gravest subjects, achieving and transcending the objectives he set himself at the beginning.
Philip Larkin, New Statesman, 19 February 1971
It is possible … for Mr. Powell to write at length about his characters without our ever getting to know them better. Nick Jenkins’s anonymity is privileged (though I wonder sometimes how much money he has, and where it comes from), but what of Widmerpool? From being a school butt his gradual assumption of authority (via the putting-to-bed of Stringham) was fascinating and convincing, and suggested that this sort of development was one of the “evolutions” promised in the key paragraph, but of late his “thing” seems simply to be the pompous man who is involved with fearful women for our amusement, with an increasing loss of credibility. (General Conyers’s diagnosis —“intuitive extrovert—classical case”—adds little artistic weight). In fact, a developing character with whom the reader becomes involved would, as argued earlier, damage Mr. Powell’s plan, which really requires no more than “characters” in the 17th-century sense—“humours,” almost. Some of his sharpest portraits—Stringham, Uncle Giles, Mrs. Maclintick—seem conceived on these lines, with corresponding success. On the other hand, a non-Theophrastian figure, such as Sir. Magnus Donners or General Liddament, emerges but pallidly: compare the latter with Brigadier Ritchie-Hook [the ferocious Commando general in Waugh’s Sword of Honour], for instance.
A final and fundamental reservation, which is in fact pointed up in Books Do Furnish a Room, is how far we are reading a work of imagination which will attain a cathartic climax and leave us feeling we have learned something of life. At first it seemed we were, the evolution of Widmerpool being a case in point. Later books suggest that we are simply reading what happens to have happened to Nick Jenkins, with the growing suspicion that something very similar also happened to Mr. Powell. The war novels began this disillusion, and now Mr. Powell goes out of his way to underline the kinship by making Jenkins write a book on Robert Burton to parallel his own work on Aubrey. Imagination must, of course, select and arrange reality, but it must be for imaginative ends: all too often the role of imagination in this sequence is to funny-up events and people whose only significance (think of all the droves of boring Tollands, for instance) is that Mr. Powell has experienced them.
These strictures may prompt the reflection that with a fan such as myself Mr. Powell needs no detractors: not a bit of it. Mr. Powell is writing an enormously long, varied, intelligent and funny narrative that will be a joy to us all for years to come, and his publishers are welcome to quote that on his next jacket if they wish. In pointing out its limitations I am not calling The Music of Time a failed War and Peace, simply saying that so far it hasn’t displayed the impact, the feeling or the comedy that may be found in at least three of Mr. Powell’s earlier novels, Afternoon Men, From a View to a Death and Venusberg, a fact I think less well known than it should be: but it may be the fate of a mural to lack the concentrated effect of a single canvas.
Auberon Waugh, The Spectator, 20 February 1971
Publication of the tenth in Mr. Powell’s series of twelve novels putting the contemporary scene in its place seems as good an occasion as any to urge him to give up the scheme while there is still time. What might have seemed a good idea twenty years ago must surely have gone stale by now. Mr. Powell is only sixty-five. If he lives to seventy, he will get his CH in any case. Nobody can really suppose that the philistine hacks in Downing Street who award literary honours will notice whether he has finished The Music of Time or whether he has moved to something else; they have already indicated that he is thought to be an honourable sort of chap by the surprisingly early award of a CBE.
My anxiety that he should abandon The Music of Time derives from an awareness that at sixty-five he is unlikely to have more than two original works of fiction in him. His early novels—Afternoon Man, From a View to a Death—caused and continue to cause immense pleasure, and The Music of Time has now reached such a point as to be almost completely incomprehensible to anyone like the reviewer who has a memory like a sieve and is reluctant to refresh his memory to the extent of re-reading nine, ten, or eleven novels on each occasion.
Mainline Powellites only need to be told that the Master has produced another book. For them, reviews are at best superfluous, at worst grossly impertinent. They will be delighted to learn, then, that the new book differs in no appreciable way from its predecessors. If their appetite needs further whetting, I can only say that I think there is a new character—that is to say, I can’t remember him in any other book, although I am not prepared to be dogmatic about it—called Francis X. Trapnel. He runs away with Pamela, wife of Widmerpool (now a Labour MP). But Mr. Powell makes less and less pretence that his novels in this series stand of their own. One needs an obsessive memory to understand half of what happens. Perhaps volume twelve will include an index for quick reference….
If … Mr. Powell is determined to persist in this matter, one can only applaud his humour, tenacity and realism, hope they get us into the Common Market aind wait until one is old and bed-bound before reading through the twelve. Meanwhile, of course, books do furnish a room, and Mr. Powell’s ingenious method of persuading us to buy his works, rather than take them out of a library one by one may even pay off. But at what a cost!
Anatole Broyard, New York Times, 8 September 1971
The title of Books Do Furnish a Room is a good example of Mr. Powell’s style and his people. The words were allegedly uttered by a ne’er-do-well editor named Bagshaw while seducing a drama. critic’s wife in her husband’s book-lined: study. In Afternoon Men, one of the characters is involved with a girl who, dresses like a cross between a Vogue model and a gypsy: he is warned by a more experienced friend that “you can never get rid of girls who wear clothes like that.” Mr. Powell has an infallible eye for the definitive gesture, the unconscious: confession of identity, that betrays us all.
When the social climber Widmerpool comes up the aisle of the church at Lord Erridge’s funeral, he is “carrying a soft black hat between his hands and in front of his chest … peering over it as he proceeded slowly, reverently, rather suspiciously” up the aisle. His bitchy socialite wife, Pamela, moves “at a stroll that suggested she was but by herself on a long, lonely country walk, her thoughts far away in her own melancholy day dreams.” Farther up the aisle, “Widmerpool turned sharply, grinding his heel on the stone in a drill-like motion, a man intentionally, emphasizing status as a military veteran … his back to the altar, he shot out the hand of a policeman directing traffic, to indicate where each was to sit.”
His wife, of course, ignores him and pushes on. She is a beauty who has raised bitchiness to the level of an art form, a theater of cruelty. When she leaves Widmerpool to live with X. Trapnel, the literary hero of the book, she adapts her castrating habits to literary criticism in a manner exquisitely her own, Avant-garde writing and its critics are subjected to some very deft satire all through the book. There are two principal-reviewers: Sheldon is an ‘old-time journalist who “probably ever read a book for pleasure in his life.” Shernmaker is of the new breed who believes that a book is only a nuisance committed on the doorstep of his standards, Another character, a musician, ironically contemplates a best-selling autobiography, to be called A Hundred Disagreeable Sexual Experiences by the author of Seated One Day at an Organ.
Somewhere in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, his hero looks out over his family’s country seat, which he has inherited, and reflects that he might well be the last Englishman ever to look at his land in precisely that way—with such a complex and historically rooted resonance of feeling. This is the way Mr. Powell looks at his people. He is like someone seeing his friends off—not on a boat or train but on the tide of history.
Cecil Eby, Chicago Tribune, 12 September 1971
Trying to make sense out of the latest volume without having read the preceding nine is like trying to master cube roots without a knowledge of numbers. For Powell develops his characters through the slow accretion of details reaching back to A Question of Upbringing, the volume that launched his series more than twenty years ago. The result is an added dimension—that of time itself—for a character stands not just alone but against the shadow of what we remember he was in a previous volume. Unlike Proust, who sought to recover the past by peeling away layers of memory in the manner of reducing an onion to its innermost seed, Powell starts at the beginning and ticks forward in time like a Greenwich chronometer. Charting the zigzags of the inner life—the stuff of most contemporary fiction—tempts him not at all. Just as Dr. Johnson kicked the stone to “prove” to Boswell that Berkeleianism was nonsense, so Powell seems to suggest that monsters buried deep in the psyche are better left where they are. Let sleeping souls lie and get on with the story….
The Music of Time is fox-trot, not acid-rock. To listen to it properly requires tuning-in rather than turning- on. Powell shows no inclination to wrestle with the monster Now in its lair. For him the competition offered by writers of the past like Dickens, Trollope, and Fitzgerald is quite enough. “How bored one gets,” says one of his characters, “with the assumption that people now are organically different from people in the past.” The music changes, but the dancers remain the same. Hysteria can only be put to good use when it is recollected in tranquility. For a writer, “getting-with-it” is easier than “getting-on-with-it.” These seem to be premises of Anthony Powell as he moves on to the eleventh volume. What he leaves in his wake are a host of full-bodied characterizations and a finely hammered prose. And, for a Powell-addict, a craving for more.