Michael Ratcliffe, The Times Saturday Review, 6 September 1975
Widmerpool is dead, piteously destroyed by fanatic self-determination. There could be no other final measure to A Dance to the Music of Time and when Hearing Secret Harmonies is published on Monday, Anthony Powell’s incomparable sequence of 12 novels, begun a quarter of a century ago, will be complete.
The new novel ends, as A Question of Upbringing (1951) began, with the spectacle of snow descending on life. Interring his most notorious character to sonorous enumerations from The Anatomy of Melancholy, Powell returns his narrator, Nicholas Jenkins to his country home and to echoes of Poussin, whose painting in the Wallace Collection first: announced the theme of cyclical patterns, giving the whole sequence its title:
The thudding sound from the quarry had declined now to no more than a gentle reverberation, infinitely remote. It ceased altogether at the long-drawn wail of a hooter — the distant pounding of centaurs’ hoofs dying away, as the last note of their conch trumpeted out over hyperborean seas. Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.
English critics have persistently compared Powell, to his disadvantage, with two other novelists who appear to have used similar techniques in covering some of the same social, military and Bohemian ground—Proust and Waugh. To read the entire, sequence, however, and to talk with Powell himself, is to feel beyond doubt that A Dance to the Music of Time conjures entirely its own vision of Life and Death from a kind of chemical wedding between seventeenth century magic and twentieth century urbanity. The result is. a personal mythology of our time, a comedy on the nature of change itself. There is no “correct” view of The Music of Time. Bijou Ardglass and Buster Foxe, Uncle Giles and Tuffy Weedon, Dicky Umfraville and Mr. Deacon, Quiggan, Flora Wisebite and Mona are all gone into the world of light.
Kingsley Amis, The Observer, 7 September 1975
The rounding-off of a fictional sequence must pose special problems of selection and emphasis, which ends must be carefully tied up and which call for the most perfunctory of knots or can be left loose, how to tackle all this while keeping two stories going at once, that of the series and that of the volume. Mr. Anthony Powell brings off these difficult feats without any sign of strain. He has always been a master of the arts of transition and of persuading the reader to accept unlikelihood, to such a degree that every encounter or reminiscence or piece of news, however eccentric, seems inevitable….
Despite his “run-of-the-mill nutlandishness,” Scorpio Murtlock very soon reveals himself as one of that tribe who live by the will rather than by the emotions or senses. Power people of all sorts, sometimes bossing their more compliant fellows, sometimes competing with one another, are the dominant figures in A Dance to the Music of Time: an example from the first volume is Sillery, the wire-pulling don (dead at not quite 100 years old in the present one). Measured in terms of results, Murtlock is the most formidable of them all. After his first appearance, he returns in the flesh only once, and that briefly, but his presence is felt throughout, and in the end he accomplishes the overthrow of Widmerpool, hitherto a power man in complete steel.
The decline and fall of Kenneth (more recently Lord) Widmerpool is the main theme of Hearing Secret Harmonies. Kenneth—was it that weird prevision sometimes granted novelists that led Mr. Powell, some time before 1951, to bestow a Christian name not only appropriate to the point of unalterability (real-life Kenneths please excuse), but also awaiting trendy truncation to Ken under letters to the Press in the early seventies? Well, anyway, Ken, suspected of being a bit barmy near the end of the previous volume, goes all the way downhill in this. The various stages are precisely charted in terms both comic and horrible: it has been a distinction of this author to blend the two, but he has never before achieved so rich a mixture as here….
Mr. Powell’s energy is unabated. He handles his large scenes—the dinner at which Russell Gwinnett receives an award for his book on X. Trapnel, Sebastian Cutts’s wedding at Stourwater—with all the old confidence and cunning. Over the years, the style of the sequence has changed a good deal, from sometimes elaborate periods, full of suspensions and parentheses, to assemblages of short clauses, now and then rather summarily linked. (A comparison of the paint-throwing episode with the sugar-pouring episode will show what I mean.)
Hearing Secret Harmonies as well as being a worthy conclusion to A Dance to the Music of Time, is its best volume for some years. The ending, not surprisingly, is sombre, but my feeling when I laid the book down came partly from another source. It was the sadness that descends when the last chord of a great symphony fades into silence.
Auberon Waugh, Evening Standard, 9 September 1975
In the last novel of his epic dodecalogue, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Anthony Powell murders his chief comic character, Lord Widmerpool, with a sadistic relish which some of his more precious admirers may find extravagant and self-indulgent. I see it as no more than the normal irritation of an author who has been saddled with a character for too long….
As always. my enjoyment was slightly marred by an acute personal antipathy for the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins. This may seem strange, as Mr. Powell is at pains to keep him as characterless as possible, a featureless impersonation of Civilised Man, through whose cultivated, mature intelligence the extravagance of the Dance of Time is put into perspective. I see him as an odious poseur, a ponderous and conceited public school show-off whose ludicrous one-man act can appeal only to the socially and intellectually insecure. I wish that what happened to poor Widmerpool might have happened to Jenkins. But apart from that, I thought it a jolly good book.
Now we must leave it to American academics and suchlike to suggest the Dance is some sort of Bayeux Tapestry of our times. I see it not as a tapestry so much as one of those marvellously ingenious things done with pins and a cotton-reel which used to be called French Knitting when I was a boy. I never mastered the art, but those who had enough wool and enough patience could make miles and miles of delicately variegated colours in a long worm which could later be trained into table mats, egg baskets and even tea cosies.
Roy Fuller, Daily Telegraph, 11 September 1975
The new book, aptly and beautifully titled, brings, as Mr. Powell has said it would, “everything right up to date.” The children or grandchildren of familiar characters appear as drop-outs or student rebels. The narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is of an eminence to be invited to the Royal Academy dinner….
The hallmark of this book, as of the others, is (to put it banally enough) plausibility. The now enormous cast and long time perspective of the enterprise is managed not only with skill but also with tact and restraint. At the end of Hearing Secret Harmonies, the narrator is approaching 70. He has quite a bit to say about the habits and feelings of that time of life. New characters appear, notably a poet-executive and a domineering young mystic. But I suppose the book must be said to be Kenneth Widmerpool’s. Far back in 1921 we first met him as a schoolboy jogging through the winter dusk, “fairly heavily built, thick lips and metal-rimmed spectacles giving his face as usual an aggrieved expression.” Our last glimpse of him, reported in the manner of Greek tragedy by a messenger (and what a messenger!), is of him jogging still, this time naked….
The American critic Allen Tate has finely said (about quite another writer) that “to bring one’s affection and admiration together so that these emotions, rare even in isolation, are indistinguishable, is a privilege enjoyed not more than three or four times in one’s life.” I must admit to such sentiments apropos of the author of A Dance to the Music of Time.
Malcolm Muggeridge, New Statesman, 12 September 1975
With the publication of Hearing Secret Harmonies, the twelfth and last novel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, the great work is now completed. Surveying it as a whole, the opinion I formed some quarter of a century ago when Powell was engaged on the opening volume, A Question of Upbringing, is confirmed. I thought then, and think more than ever now, that his picture of the contemporary scene will prove to be of lasting interest and an authentic contribution to literature. It is petit point, but wonderfully observed, and, above all, wonderfully funny.
He said once that as a child, and subsequently, he had spent a lot of time looking out of windows; the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time are essentially the fruit of this practice. He is an observer, but how sharp and careful a one! Of all the intricacies of social and amorous relationships, as well as of clothes and gestures and nuances of speech and expression; but as these reflect a total reality. He remarks in The Military Philosophers, in the person of Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, that the greatness of Blake eludes him (“I always felt, never quite for me”), but what an exponent he is of one of Blake’s favourite propositions: “A World in a Grain of Sand, and Infinity in the palm of your hand.”
It is true, of course—the point has been made often enough—that the world Powell so aptly and wittily describes is a very restricted one. Roughly speaking, it consists almost exclusively of smart or upper-class people and artistic or bohemian people, with eccentricity as the social passe-partout, and sex as the universal adhesive, ranging between the girl who was “done” by Louis Glober, the American film-maker and playboy, on the dinner table among the liqueur glasses, and subtler couplings in and out of bed. Earning a living in the ordinary sense does not loom large; there is little dancing to Powell’s Music of Time on the commuter trains and factory shifts, and the ploughman homeward plods his weary way to other rhythms, if any. In other words, Powell deals with what is called, in public opinion poll jargon, a sample—in his case, admittedly, a highly specialised and idiosyncratic one, but nonetheless indubitably a sample. After all, the world of Jane Austen was similarly restricted; likewise Proust’s and Henry James’s, both Powellian Masters….
In Hearing Secret Harmonies, as is fitting, the survivors of the large cast make their bows; loose ends are tied up, the definitive taking of partners is settled, and some of the great events in the earlier volumes are recalled—for instance, the portrayal of the Seven Deadly Sins at Stourwater Castle under the auspices of Sir Magnus Donners in 1938. Nicholas himself played Sloth, which means, he explains, Accidie too. A significant admission, perhaps, in that the whole work’s gathering atmosphere of sadness is more akin to Accidie (defined as spiritual torpor) than to despair or frustration.
I first made Powell’s acquaintance at such a house-party as the Stourwater one, though in decidedly less grand circumstances, the host being no Sir Magnus, admittedly, yet with certain points of resemblance. A photograph album, now quite historic, records these gatherings, which were like a curtain-raiser or preview of A Dance to the Music of Time. Some of the regular guests—Moreland, the composer, for instance, and Barnby, the artist—appear in their fictional versions more or less exactly as in life; others, like Mark Members and J. G. Quiggin, considerably modified. Powell’s method appears to be either to take his characters just as they were—the novelist, X. Trapnel, the fine arts publisher, Tokenhouse, the popular portrait painter, Isbister and, for that matter, Jenkins himself—or to construct them out of diverse elements gathered from here and there and made into a composite figure. This applies to his masterpiece, Widmerpool, in whom one can detect different strata or deposits as in geological specimens….
Certainly, for those that have eyes to see, the life story and character of Powell is unfolded with extraordinary clarity and vividness in Nicholas’s narration—his lonely childhood at military stations, the curious character of his father, portrayed to the life, and the relations between them (how well I remember Powell mournfully polishing his father’s Sam Browne in 1939), his bachelor life in London and work in a publishing office, his marriage and writing career, his participation in the world of letters, such as it is, with half an eye on the social scene, and vice versa, his war service and, finally, the splendid resolution and dedication with which he has pulled off his greatest achievement, A Dance to the Music of Time, doggedly keeping at it until triumphantly concluded, for which he deserves the highest praise and admiration.