Kenneth Young, Daily Telegraph, 25 October 1957
Satire? Yes, but of a curiously unemphatic kind. For one thing Mr. Powell’s narrative is never louder than a discreet chat in the library of a London club, and he prefers the soft impeachment to the brazen denunciation. The omission of any reference to religious experience, metaphysics or the less obvious motions of the human heart is not accidental: it is an example of the cool obliquity of his comment on the “civilised,” middle-class life of the ’30s.
But now, too, he sees round his characters, and what he finds at the back of them prevents his presenting them as entirely ludicrous or hateful. A retired general who plays the cello and takes up psychoanalysis is an obvious target for satire: in fact, it is his genuinely inquiring mind and his modesty that Mr. Powell emphasises. Understanding and pity, astringent though it is, now humanise even the uncouth, time-serving Quiggin and the alternatively assertive and crestfallen Widmerpool.
Anonymous, Times, 31 October 1957
Mr. Anthony Powell brings his Grand Design one step nearer completion with At Lady Molly’s, the fourth novel in a series which goes under the general title “The Music of Time.” The dance is still on, a thronging, latter-day form of minuet with a crowd of participants from the other volumes joining hands, turning away, advancing, retreating, drifting off, or flitting, fugitive presences, on the outskirts; a crowd absorbed in family and personal relationships and drawn from that stratum of society where class has no meaning, down through grades of upper-upper- rniddle to middle, but not so far as that other extreme where, once again, the word itself loses all significance. Mr. Powell is fascinated by class, only he does not find it something to roll about the ground about; he uses its fine distinctions, its subtle graduations, as material for his theme, as pigments for his mural, painted with a watercolour brush, of the social manners of the period between the wars.
He makes, with the ghostly and surely appreciative figure of Proust at his elbow, Jenkins both an observer and a part of the kaleidoscopic pattern. Jenkins seems, on occasion, deliberately negative, yet he can act positively enough and he has only to see Isobel Tolland, one of the sisters of that eccentric peer, Warminster, to know at once that he is destined to marry her. The ground is beginning to tremble and there is mention once or twice of Dollfuss and Hitler.
Although the name of Lady Molly—whose first husband was Sleaford, and who is now married to a somewhat mysterious man called Jeavons (middle class, and a triumph of sympathetic insight)—appears in the title, it is, somehow, Widmerpool “grinning agitatedly through the thick lenses of his spectacles” who forces his way through genealogical forests into the foreground of the book. He becomes engaged—the engagement is afterwards broken off—to Mrs. Haycock, a sister of old General Conyers’s wife, but it is not this interlude that is important Widmerpool, large, uneasy, faintly sinister, untiringly thrustful and ambitious, represents the money power, the City as against the County (the contrast is not, of course, as simple as that) which is advancing to finish off, with the formidable help of the war, the upper-upper-middle class for whom Mr. Powell is tolling his elegant, mellowing bell.
R. C. Churchill, Birmingham Post, 19 November 1957
Nothing crude here, and plenty of dry wit to savour. Yet those who find it difficult to take Mr. Powell’s world seriously have at the back of our minds a simple equation which might thus be expressed in the algebra of fiction: HJ/PGW = AP. Certainly Mr. Powell’s style, at any rate, is true Henry James: “Quiggin caught her eye, and, with decided disloyalty to Erridge, smiled silently back at her: implying that he too shared to the fullest extent the marrow of that particular joke. The trouble is that this Jamesian style is used to deal with as eccentric a range of upper-class characters as any in P. G. Wodehouse.
Elizabeth Bowen, The Tatler and Bystander, 4 December 1957
Anthony Powell’s At Lady Molly’s is the fourth novel in his “The Music Of Time” sequence. Some of you may find it the most enjoyable—it is a shade less aseptic lighter in touch and more largely written in dialogue than its predecessors. One should, too, take into account the fact that enjoyment, when books form a series, is cumulative: there is the pleasure (resembling that in real life) of meeting already-known characters in fresh situations. And the best of all is, one knows there is more to come.
Our narrator Nicholas Jenkins, first met at Eton (in A Question of Upbringing), in At Lady Molly’s reaches the brink of marriage. His own courtship is, however, obscured by events in the personal circle round him—most notably the immortal Widmerpool’s engagement to a tough Riviera widow, ex-V.A.D. of World War One. To relish the whole of that comedy one should, perhaps, glance back at the spoor of Widmerpool across the two intervening novels, A Buyer’s Market and The Acceptance World. (You can, of course, if you enter the story late, read the Jenkins annals backwards. I recommend this, though At Lady Molly’s is able to stand alone.)….
The outstanding scenes in this novel (as the title suggests) takes place in Lady Molly’s Kensington drawing-room. Here the human habitues, mixed in status and character—this is a house where you may meet anyone!—show themselves as jumpy and temperamental as the cats and monkeys crowding the nooks and stairs. The hostess, formerly Lady Sleaford, has married on Jeavons, an ex-officer. She herself is kindly, noisy, a tease. “There is no greater sign of innate misery,” Mr. Powell remarks “than a love of teasing.” This is one of the knife-sharp generalizations with which this author constantly makes one sit up. His position in English writing remains unparalleled.
Kingsley Amis, selecting it as his book of the year for 1957 in The Observer, 22 December 1957
The entry of the legendary Widmerpool, that nefarious buffoon, is a beautifully prepared comic bombshell, and the final scene, in which he is anatomised by an ex-Army man with a taste for psychoanalysis mingles hilarity with a scrupulous refusal to overstate anything.
James Stern, New York Times, 27 July 1958
While I was reading about the youngish, tramp-like character Lord Warminster and his Innumerable upper-class sisters, as well as the more familiar figures of the stockbroker Tempter, the critic Quiggin, the ambitious, middleclass business man Widmerpool, and above all the maddeningly self-conscious narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, something occurred to me. It was that, in spite of their endless misalliances, their divorces, their changes of jobs and heart, these characters of the late Thirties are possessed of less genuine passion for life or each other than were Galsworthy’s creations of a previous age. Mr. Powell’s are people from whom all heat appears to have petered out in puberty.
Or is it that the author himself has grown weary in the middle of his marathon? Signs of this possibility are noticeable in the style of At Lady Molly’s. On one page alone are no fewer than five examples of what might be called the Uncertain Approach—“in no small degree,” “not without a look,” “if not precise disapproval”— a school of writing which the late George Orwell once described as that of “the not ungreen grass.”
Nevertheless, I for one would buy this book simply for the pleasure of reading and re-reading, aloud, the results of the old General’s lifelong efforts to keep “abreast of the times.”
Anne Freemantle, Saturday Review of Literature, 4 September 1958
Mr. Powell’s characters—like the frogs in the haiku that were all cousins of cousins—all talk; and occasionally he catches the inflections, the moods, that echo the fountains within from which flow the passion and the life. Jenkins, for example, in the midst of a plethora of engagements and affairs, which he is watching from the side lines, finds himself one evening “kicking my heels in one of those interminable cinema queues, paired off and stationary, as if life’s co-educational school … had come to a sudden standstill.” But he puts in these shocks of recognition almost too deliberately—like the raisins Aunt Tabitha Twitchet put in the dumpling offered the rescuer at the end of “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers”—“to hide the smuts.” When Mr. Powell’s relationships have become too static, his atmosphere too rarefied, he offers a sudden vista, as when Nicolas Jenkins first sets his eyes on Isobel Tolland (one sister batty, one a lesbian) and knows he will marry her.
Richard McLaughlin, The American Mercury, September 1958
At Lady Molly’s is the fourth in the series of books to which Mr. Powell has given the general title “The Music of Time.” He suggested, when one or two books in the series had been published, that the whole work might consist of five volumes: but at the end of this book, in which several new characters have been introduced, and the eventual fates of Widmerpool, Templer and Stringham—not to mention the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins— are left altogether unresolved, ten volumes seems more the mark.
Yet to make such a suggestion, to imply that the characters have “fates” that will be “resolved,” is in a way to misunderstand Mr. Powell’s intentions, to conceive The Music of Time as a sort of Forsyte Saga. It is very likely that the series will end without formal tidiness, leaving the principal characters frozen in single, symptomatic attitudes: Widmerpool with the sugar poured over his head or (in this volume) terminating his engagement to a forceful hard-bitten aristocrat through the revelation of his sexual incapacity; Uncle Giles eternally telling slightly unconvincing stories, moving from one financial crisis to another; J. G. Quiggin fixed in the pose of Left-wing critic; Mr. Deacon accidentally distributing bundles of his pacifist pamphlets over Mrs. Andriadis’s hall. In this catalogue, which could be much extended, there are no women, and it is a fact that Mr. Powell’s women are much less memorable than his men. The most convincing and interesting of them are the sluts, like Gypsy Jones in A Buyer’s Market, or the beautiful, strident Mona who, having already left Peter Templer for Quiggin, in this book leaves Quiggin for the eccentric Left-wing peer, Lord Warminster.