If numerous reviewers found the publication of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant as evidence of the seriousness and scope of Anthony Powell’s project, the publication of The Kindly Ones, with which Powell committed to a series of a dozen books, was seen as something of a milestone: the halfway point. (With the exception of Philip Toynbee, an otherwise astute reviewer, who concluded that The Kindly Ones marked the end of A Dance.)
Evelyn Waugh, The Spectator, June 29, 1962
Mr. Powell has called the entire work The Music of Time. I think this is a slightly misleading title; partly because, it seems to me, he relies more than any other living English writer on his visual sense. The ‘composition of place,’ to use a term from old-fashioned books of devotion, is always complete and faultless. We know much more about his characters’ appearances than their souls. Indeed we have no confidence that the narrator recognises the existence of the soul. But we know everything that is visible. Again and again the bioscope stops and gives place to the magic-lantern slide; the characters arc suspended motionless in their peculiar postures surrounded by their properties and scenery and the pointer moves from spot to spot calling our attention to detail.
Secondly, to one ignorant of music the title suggests that the whole seemingly haphazard succession of events is contrived as part of a grand design which will eventually appear. Now that the sextet is terminated we can see that this was never in the intention. In an earlier volume he writes of “the formal dance with which human life is concerned…. Nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.”
We should have noticed that clue earlier. There is no distinction of major or minor characters; all are equally important. As he has remarked in another unobtrusive but essential clue: “How mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings … are at close range equally extraordinary.”
Less original novelists tenaciously follow their protagonists. In The Music of Time we watch through the glass of a tank; one after another various specimens swim towards us; we see them clearly, then with a barely perceptible flick of fin or tail they are off into the murk. That is how our encounters occur in life. Friends and acquaintances approach and recede year by year. Mr. Powell has eschewed contrivance. And he is not afraid of what sometimes seems an extravagance of coincidence. In The Kindly Ones, for example, it is quite probable that Uncle Giles should go to die at a boarding house kept by a former servant of Captain Jenkins. To a conventional novelist it would seem impossible that two other unrelated characters should have sought refuge in the same place at the same time. But it is the kind of thing which does in fact happen. Many novelists exert themselves to reduce the element of chance. Not so Mr. Powell. Similarly there is no reason why Quiggin and Anne Umfreville should be dining in the same little restaurant as Moreland and Jenkins. There is no reason why they should not. Their presence there has no particular significance; certainly no finality; it is recorded as part of the permeating and inebriating atmosphere of the haphazard which is the essence of Mr. Powell’s art. As may be said of the scholastic proofs of the existence of God, the argument from Design fails; the argument from Contingency stands.
Bernard Bergonzi, The Guardian, June 29, 1962
Parallel with the changes in Jenkins’s world, there seems to be a certain change in Mr. Powell’s attitude to his characters. Is he, improbably, becoming a moralist? Previously his attitude could be summed up by the title of an earlier volume—The Acceptance World—a wry, amused tolerance of even the most boring or odious figures, and a steadfast refusal to pass judgments. Now, however, I feel that characters such as General Conyers, and perhaps Ted Jeavons and his brother Stanley, are seen as embodying positives, while Widmerpool, appearing as an obstructive Army officer, has become disagreeable beyond even the point of his creator’s copious toleration.
The Kindly Ones shows that The Music of Time is continuing to develop, to reveal fresh aspects. It leaves me more than ever convinced that Mr. Powell is writing a comic masterpiece, and the major achievement in post-war English fiction.
Philip Toynbee, The Observer, June 24, 1962
With this volume the sextet is brought to an end: The Music of Time now lies before us as a completed work. Many judgments have, of course, been made as the individual books appeared, and the great majority of them have ranged from the favourable to the enthusiastic. In theory it should now be possible to make a judicial summing-up, and I am a little bewildered to find myself quite unable to do so.
I am reasonably sure of a few things about The Music of Time; but I remain hopelessly uncertain about its survival-value. Will this work be seen as an idiosyncratic, though fascinating, epigone; a strange translation of the Proustian method and attitude into the ironic terms of mid-century England? Or will it survive merely as a rich mine for future social historians in their investigation of upper-class English Bohemia between 1914 and 1939? Or will it be seen as a great literary monument which reasserted the traditional values of prose fiction—though, of course, in a new form—at a time of general literary disintegration? At the moment of writing I find it utterly impossible to choose between these prophecies….
My wider doubt is simply whether the ultimate intention of the book—which is, indeed, to reveal the music of time, the musical nature of human life with its themes repeated in different keys, in different contexts— whether this intention is fulfilled. Penguin Books have now issued paperback editions of the first three volumes, and when I refreshed my memory with these I began to feel that the total effect of the whole work may well be much greater than the effect of reading each volume in succession.
Yet I am not sure that Mr. Powell has sufficiently involved us in his characters to move us by their expanding destinies. We look at the portraits in a gallery from a different dimension from their own. 1 am amused by what happens to the unspeakable Widmerpool; am I deeply concerned with the misfortunes of the sympathetic and intelligent Moreland? These are doubts—and, as I have insisted, they are no more than doubts. When Penguin have completed their reissue of the sextet it may be possible to come down on one side of the fence or the other. And in the meantime nobody who knows the earlier volumes will fail to read and enjoy this one: it is one of the best.
Julian Symons, Times Literary Supplement, June 29, 1962
Each book consists of no more than some half-dozen scenes directly observed. These are linked with one another, and with the passage of time, through Nicholas Jenkins’s reflections and recollections. The distinction is between what we see happen and what is discussed or described. In The Kindly Ones the first scene creates an incident of Nicholas’s childhood, just before the outbreak of the First World War. For the first time in the whole series we meet his father and mother, and see the particular ambience in which he grew up. The heart of the incident is a comical-dramatical-tragical disaster below stairs, efficiently handled by General Conyers, who is paying a visit to Nicholas’s family. The second incident is a dinner party at Sir Magnus Donners’s place at Stourwater late jn 1938, the third a visit by Nicholas to Brighton(?) on the eve of war in 1939 to superintend the funeral of Uncle Giles, who has died of a strake in a shabby hotel, and the fourth takes place at Lady Molly’s shortly after the beginning of the war and is concerned primarily with Nicholas’s attempts to get into uniform. Yet to speak of the incidents in this way is deceptive, for the very essence of them is that they are interspersed with passages of discussion and reflection which reach a long way backwards and forwards in time, passages which are so finely woven into the general fabric that they are unnoticeable.
For example, what one remembers about the party at the Donners is the finale, in which the guests dress up and represent tableaux of the Seven Deadly Sins. But this scene, the thing that we see happen, has been most carefully prepared for by what seems merely casual conversation between Nicholas and his friend, the composer Moreland. This conversation is further illuminated by Nicholas’s recollections. Moreland and his wife, one of Donners’s former mistresses, are also guests at dinner. Without all this introductory material the dinner party and its aftermath would lose much of its meaning. During the enaction of the tableaux one of the guests, Betty Tern pier, becomes hysterical and rushes from the room while her husband is posing as Lust. Then comes the climactic moment: Before an extreme moral discomfort could further immerse all of us, a diversion took place. The door of the dining-room, so recently slammed, opened again. A man stood on the threshold. He was in uniform. He appeared to be standing at attention, a sinister, threatening figure, calling the world to arms. It was Widmerpool.
Widmerpool’s entrance is symbolically ludicrous and menacing, but the scene’s effectiveness depends upon the slow-motion technique which is used frequently in these books. Perhaps “slow motion” is not quite right. What Mr. Powell does is to describe everything that happens during a short period of time with extreme particularity. Nothing very much really happens at this dinner party. Ordinary conversation, a sort of charade, the hysteria of a guest, the appearance of Widmerpool. It is nothing out of the way. yet the total effect is grotesque and memorable….
The great events of our time appear in the books, in a sense they are even vital, but they are kept at arm’s length. One keynote of the books is their extreme, deliberate emotional detachment.
Yet of course that cannot possibly be a final criticism, for, as with James or for that matter even with Firbank, the limitation is necessary to the achievement, and with each successive book the achievement appears more considerable. There is no other living British novelist whose sense of social nuance (a sense not limited, as this volume shows, to a particular class) is so delicate or so subtle, or whose comic range is so wide, and none except Mr. Waugh whose power of comic characterization is so great. And there is certainly no other novelist whose work gives so much or such consistent pleasure through his concern for the pure texture of writing, for the shape of phrases and the feeling of words.
Frederick Karl, The New Republic, September 24, 1962
There is, doubtless, a certain slightness to the surface of a Powell novel. One may wonder what Powell can possibly do with such people, who seem incapable of setting their own houses in order, no less their nation. And yet beneath, there are resonances and tones which Powell catches so perfectly that his most trivial people take on significance and withstand the burden they are expected to bear. None of them ever disappears from view; their appearances in the most unexpected places give continuity to the series and allow Powell to merge past experience into present time. Accordingly, as the series continues, the reader becomes increasingly aware of the music itself, of the frequent variations and modulations on a basic theme, of the counterpointing of motifs and characters, of the rich harmonic chords suggested by the author’s close orchestration, of the subtle melodies that result from precise notation. The result is a thickness of event and characterization that never becomes heavy, and a density of social fact that never becomes sociological.
Jenkins himself, the ubiquitous barker at the side show of upper class eccentrics, often seems thin, but this is mere appearance. True, he rarely takes a strong stand on any issue, and he frequently fits himself into whatever role is expected. Also, he tolerates unpleasantness beyond the point that the reader wishes him to lash back. In most ways, his “cool” behavior counterpoints Widmerpool’s brash insistence and surges of nasty ego, and Nicholas creates the impression of lackluster will-lessness. Nevertheless, he remains himself despite the weight of social pressures upon him.
Ironically, he must preserve his integrity even while he suffers the partial loss of his will. As Powell charts the decline of the various social orders, he is also concerned with the loss of will in people of decent ‘tendencies. Clearly, the power of will—and the ambitions that go with it—has passed to the Widmerpools, those mechanical men of the future. There is, accordingly, a great deal of sadness in a Powell novel, although it never passes into sentimentality or nostalgia. There is sadness in Nicholas Jenkins himself, for here is a young man who tries to retain his individuality in the teeth of considerable pressure to the contrary and yet, almost unknowingly, suffers the loss of his will. There is sadness implicit in the fact that power, will, ambition are all becoming increasingly important. Nicholas is shocked when he meets former friends and acquaintances—like Peter Templer and Bob Duport—for they have toughened, become vulgar, somewhat inhuman. All illusions have been smashed, all hopes frustrated by forces working within and without. Even Nicholas’ fond memories of Jean Templer-Duport become dust when her former husband informs him that she was carrying on with Jimmy Brent, an odious creature, at the same time that Nicholas thought she loved only him.
In this whirl of time and changing fortunes, there are no constants. People can never be accepted for what they seem to be, for beneath there are forces driving them which remain mysterious and inexplicable. The title, The Kindly Ones, itself refers to the Greek Eumenides or Furies, those mysterious carriers of war and disaster whom the Greeks could not satisfactorily explain to themselves. Instead, in a kind of blind devotion to what would never become intellectually clear, they appeased them by calling them “kindly,” “gracious,” and “well-disposed.” And yet the Eumenides were fearful figures, with serpents twined in their hair and blood dripping from their eyes. As goddesses of vengeance, they were absolutely implacable in their sense of justice, pursuing their quarry both on earth and after death. There was no escaping them. As soon as Powell introduces them, he consolidates his position as a tragicomic writer of the first rank, for he catches the terrible sadness that lies beneath frivolity and recognizes that the Eumenides are upon us even as we comport ourselves as if they never existed.