Here’s a leaning of the spirit

A figurehead, by Angela Leighton

Angela Leighton is an interesting poet, one whose work speaks to me. I hope soon to write about one of her collections, Sea Level, but in the meantime (and while I slowly work through Swann’s Way) I thought I’d share a poem that’s not in that collection but which captures why I like her work so much.

The story behind the poem is at this webpage here. Essentially, Hull City Council commissioned four poems to commemorate the the unveiling of a statue – one of a pair with the other in Iceland.

I don’t know Hull as a city, but I think it’s council did well with the statues and the poems. Both were signs of an optism of future links with Iceland, and I fear that optimism may have been a victim of Iceland’s economic misfortune and the UK’s part in making it worse. Still, the spirit was right and the statues and poems should both outlive our present troubles.

Here’s the poem, I’ll speak a little about it afterwards:

Hull, Immingham, Grimbsy, Spurn—
in the set sun’s spilt cordial
P&O’s big ghost goes out
night after night, like the dead from home.

Here’s a leaning of the spirit, drawn
out from upright, off from true,
a header into the wind, full-tilt,
the bent of going, at a stroke, stopped still.

Exchange and pact, sagas of return,
a sea-sickening in the ear’s dark hold—
yet out, out, sea-farer, wanderer,
Njal, Unn, old comers and goers,

like birds that trade their lands each year:
whooper, diver, plover, eider,
sandpiper, snow-goose, tystie1, tern—
that urging back, that longing to be gone.

Is it this compass needle of the north
that sets the heart at ice and snow,
that draws towards its zero point,
and rocks our stand, unfathoms our roots?

Like I in italics, this bowsprit figure,
clean as a sloping drift of snow,
looks out and shows how close we are,
how far, how cold, the last sea goes.

I don’t intend to talk about the poem too much. Responses to poetry are inevitably personal, and I have no great qualifications in the subject anyway. For me though, it brings out a sense of connections through time. The incantation of place names at the beginning, the reference to a modern cruise ship, these are combined with a sense of the passage of the otherworldly – a ghost going out like the dead from home.

Coupled with those contemporary references, we have names like Njal of The Saga of Burnt Njal (and if you haven’t read that, you should), and the sense of passage back and forth. Exchange and pact, migrating birds, there’s a sense of journey to it but a journey in cold waters.

As well as imagery of travelling, of the timeless sea present in our bodies (the ear’s dark hold) as well as beyond our shores, there’s imagery of death. The zero point, the cold last sea. The poem for me draws parallels between journeying on the icy waves and death, a long cold journey this time without return. There’s a reminder too how little separates us, in the face of that vast emptiness how close we are. The gap between people, as between Hull and Iceland, is not so great.

What I love about this poem is it captures for me something of the feeling of the sea: the restlessness, the longing to be gone I experience when I look upon it. There’s a sense of yearning to the poem, a lure, as I write it I can hear the cries of the sea birds.

Writing about poetry is difficult. It’s hard not to sound pretentious (but I do hear those seabirds), and there are rules and language I’m simply not equipped to address. Still, poetry when its good is a sort of condensed emotional truth. It’s hard to unpack it. It has resonances which can’t easily be explained. Often too it has allusions and references which the lay reader simply won’t notice (this poem could easily have references to other poets’ work, I wouldn’t necessarily know).

Still, like any literature, like any art, one shouldn’t get intimidated because there are levels of the work that one might miss. Few of us on looking at a painting we lack the training to fully understand feel because of that we can’t enjoy the composition and the colour, the same’s true of poetry. I don’t know why it’s not more popular than it is as a form, but I find work like Angela Leighton’s a strong argument that it should be wider read than it is.

A Proustian excerpt

I’m reading Proust at the moment. Swann’s Way, the first volume. That’s also the most popular volume I understand – apparently more people buy it than the rest put together…

Anyway. It’s brilliant. That’s not a surprise, after all it’s famous for a reason. But it’s also dense. It demands a degree of concentration, of attention. It repays that, but it’s best if you’re reading it to make sure you have some free time to do so. Lately I’ve been working long hours, and that makes reading Proust a challenge.

What I’ve been most impressed with so far is how funny much of it is. It’s actually one of the funnier books I’ve read recently (not hard I admit, I’ve read some Derek Raymond not that long ago after all). What’s also fascinating is its style. It’s discursive. It wanders off in tangents. When you start a paragraph it’s wholly unclear how it will end up.

All that said, I came across one passage that reminded me irresistibly of my own childhood. Like many children I was discouraged from reading. It was seen as unhealthy. Reference was made to “having my nose always stuck in a book”, and I was regularly commanded to go out and play.

That all sounds a bit Dickensian. It wasn’t. It was just that most of my family weren’t readers. To them, it seemed a waste to sit indoors reading a book when I could have been outside playing football or whatever. They meant well, but the result was I’d just go and read outside somewhere instead of reading inside.

If there aren’t many readers in your family then you may well recognise all that. Certainly Proust would have:

While I was reading in the garden, a thing my great-aunt would never have understood my doing save on a Sunday, that being the day on which it is unlawful to indulge in any serious occupation, and on which she herself would lay aside her sewing (on a week-day she would have said, “What! still amusing yourself with a book? It isn’t Sunday, you know!” – putting into the word “amusing” an implication of childishness and waste of time), my aunt Léonie would be gossiping with Françoise until it was time for Eulalie to arrive. She would tell her that she had just seen Mme Goupil go by “without an umbrella, in the silk dress she had made for her the other day at Châteaudun. If she has far to go before vespers, she may get it properly soaked.”

It’s somehow fitting that while reading Proust I was suddenly transported back to my own childhood, and reminded of arguments with aunts who I love to this day but who couldn’t for the life of them see what on earth I was wasting my time with a book for. Across barriers of country, culture, time and indeed class, people remain much the same.

More on Proust soon. There’s a lot to talk about in this book. I’ve not finished it yet (and this is just the first volume), but I can already say that In Search of Lost Time deserves its fame.

‘Krak-uuuf,’ they said, all together, as their verdict, and then again ‘Krak-uuuf’.

Even the Crows Say Kraków, by James Hopkin

Picador Shots is a clever little idea where Picador publish two short stories in a single back-pocket-sized edition. The book costs around £1.99, and gives you a chance to sample a writer and see if you like them. It’s also something you can easily put in a pocket or drop in a handbag, in case of an emergency need for something to read.

I recently read about James Hopkin, although I forget where. He came recommended for the beauty of his language, and for his evocation of Poland. He’s an English writer, but that’s not where his heart is. When I saw there was a Picador Shots issue of two of his stories I couldn’t resist picking it up to see what they were like.

Even the Crows Say Kraków is a short story that won Hopkin an Arts Council competition – the first Norwich Prize for Literature. It’s accompanied in the Picador Shots edition with another story set in Poland titled Apple Sauce. I liked Apple Sauce much more than I did Even the Crows, so no job on the Arts Council for me I suspect.

Anyway, James Hopkin. Here’s the thing, Hopkin is a poetic writer. I vary in my fondness for that. Dense language I’m comfortable with. I enjoyed for example Milcé’s marvellous Alphabet of the Night. Flowery language I fare less well with. That’s a peculiarity of my tastes, but one that meant I didn’t like the first of these two stories. Others may vary, a lot of people clearly love Hopkin’s prose, so I’m going to try to go into what I think worked and why I didn’t ultimately like it.

The conceit of Even the Crows is of a young woman, “Alina, Alinka (that’s little Alina)” who is flying unseen through the Kraków night sky in a large chair she relaxed into in a coffee shop. She swoops about, among buildings and trees, observing passers-by but not observed by them. Is she actually flying? Is it all her imagination? As Hopkin says, “Do you really need the details?” Not really, no, the point is her mood, her reflections, and more than any of it her city which she is about to leave for Paris.

Hopkin is excellent at describing Kraków, and by far the best part of the story is the evocation of the city itself. There’s a love that shines through the whole thing. We learn of Alina’s failed relationship with a man fond of blue drinks who drinks himself into hallucination, and of her concerns about leaving for a foreign country. We see squares, coffee shops, there are excellent descriptions of waitresses’ uniforms. It all feels surprisingly real given how fantastical it all is.

Stylistically, the language swirls around just as Alina’s chair does. There’s internal repetition, the chant of Alina, Alinka (that’s little Alina) repeating itself throughout and three crows (three times is the charm of course) who act as a corvine chorus to her flight (in both senses).

At times though that language got too much. It worked for me describing the magical atmosphere, and the city itself. Where I was less persuaded was when it was used to describe Alina herself. This quote is an example:

She thought at one point she might have to keep her heart in her purse for safe keeping because her purse had a good strong clasp, and she’d never lost a single grosz, while her heart was threatening to spill its contents, not all of which she was aware of or yet ready to reveal.

Has anyone ever thought such a thing? It’s a novelist’s conceit. A metaphor swamping the reality of a character. I’ve seen that sort of sentence many times in many books, and each time it reminds me that I’m reading a story. Hopkin might not mind that. He’s clear here that this is a story. The whole thing has a feeling of fairy-tale to it, but I found it jarring and I’m afraid overwritten.

There’s a risk of being unfair to Hopkin here. It’s difficult to quote where the story works, because it’s a result of cumulative mood. It’s easy to pick a duff sentence and highlight that. Here’s a quote I think does work even if it’s not quite to my tastes:

A few minutes later, and Alinka sweeps in low down ulica Szewska, and, unseen, drops a coin in the accordionist’s tin. Eyes closed, he nods in gratitude to the clamour of the coin. Down every street a flap of wing like a rug being shook of dust as birds scattered to accomodate Alina. But the accordionist played on. And the man scraping music with a big old saw, well, he played on, dragging his bow across the wobbling blade as if his supper depended on it, and some days it did, and really it wasn’t much like music, more of a windy whine, which Alinka thought might be how the old man sounded inside. He didn’t see her because he was almost blind with cataracts which sat like milk spots on the seats of his eyes, and no one else saw her because they’d never believe that such a feat is possible.

If that spoke to you, and you’re happy with melodies that rush up streets, “making nonsense of the cobbles”, then you’ll likely enjoy this more than I did.

The second tale is more prosaic. A young man, Szlak, has inherited a house from a “long-forgotten” relative. He takes the bus out to the countryside, getting off when he sees a roadside shrine described to him in a letter, finds the house near derelict and along the way reflects a little (he’s not a hugely reflective chap) on his life so far. It’s a compact little story, and again it’s rich with description. I enjoyed it. It had a good feel for place and character. Like Alina, Szlak is a person in transit, but he stays more rooted on the ground.

Here’s the opening of the story:

Drops of rain, as thick as the fat from a frying pan, leak through the slat in the roof. An old man swears and reaches up to close the hatch. As he does so, he loses his balance and bumps into a squat woman made of fruit sacks and yellow teeth and the smell of all things past. The woman screws up her face like a used tea bag, and lets out an almighty curse, the force of which, combined with the collision and the vehicle’s jerky progress, sends her stumbling backwards, her barely assembled bulk landing on the toes of a teenage girl who cracks her heavily applied foundation with a scowl and a burst of expletives. Soon enough, like a foul-mouthed version of Chinese Whispers, the twenty or so people packed in the aisle of the minibus are each cursing the day they were born.

There’s an almost cinematic quality there. It’s intensely visual. There’s still lyricism – an old woman who smells of “all things past”? But here it’s more contained and more focused. The story is in places absurd, but it’s an absurdity I’ve seen before in Eastern European fiction. It’s born of a recognition that life is absurd, and that we just have to make the best we can of it while we’re here.

In the end this wasn’t entirely my sort of book. I found the language at times evocative, but at other times merely distracting. It’s easy to see why some readers are so fond of Hopkin, there is a beauty there and a real sense of place, but it’s prose which makes its presence felt and for me at times a little too much so. All that said, if you enjoy the quotes more than I did then £1.99 is a very reasonable price to try out a new writer and I’m pleased Picador gave me the opportunity to do so.

Even the Crows Say Kraków

For the curious, here‘s an article by Hopkin at the Guardian detailing his top ten list of Polish fiction.

Lovecraft on Hodgson

I found this interesting excerpt online. It’s taken from HP Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature.

He’s rather scathing of the Carnacki stories, which I’m rather fond of. Oh well. I think the professional occultism of the Carnacki stories is key to their charm personally, but I’ll leave further comment on that until I write up the stories themselves.

In the meantime, here’s the man from Providence himself:

Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man’s relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings.

In The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.

The House on the Borderland (1908) — perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson’s works — tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator’s spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system’s final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author’s power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.

The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with the two previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.

The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth’s infinitely remote future-billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig.

Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort — the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid — are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author’s touch. Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years — and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole. Mr. Hodgson’s later volume, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, consists of several longish short stories published many years before in magazines. In quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the “infallible detective” type — the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence — moving through scenes and events badly marred by an atmosphere of professional “occultism.” A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power, and afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.

I love Lovecraft dearly. A flawed writer, but one who deserves his recent and very belated recognition by Penguin Modern Classics. At his worst, his writing was racist and overwrought. At his best, it was weird in the finest sense of that word. I’ll write about him more another day, though I have an adolescent fondness for him which makes impartiality difficult.

Philip Hensher corrects me on my commas

Correctly, to be fair to him, if unkindly.

It’s in the context of a discussion of Orlando Figes’ wife’s Amazon reviews and the defensibility of anonymous online reviews more generally. The discussion is over at the Guardian’s book blogs, here.

Ghosts in the machine

Epublishing and the short story

Publishers don’t like short stories. Why? Because the public don’t like them. Short stories don’t sell.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a kid, I only read science fiction (well, and some fantasy and horror but let’s not let facts get in the way). Every now and then a science fiction writer would bring out a short story collection, but science fiction fans seem to like short stories even less than other people, how to sell them?

The answer used to be to pretend they were novels. The back cover would talk about one of the stories as if it were the whole book, any trace of evidence that it was a short story collection was expunged. You bought a book about strange discoveries on a Jovian moon or whatever and it was only when you started reading you made your own strange discovery, that you’d bought a short story collection.

Times haven’t changed that much, I don’t think that sort of outright deception is common now (though it wouldn’t surprise me if it came back), but the antipathy to short stories is still with us. Except, and so far it’s only a little exception in the West, there’s a new medium which is perfectly suited to the short story.

At the moment, I’m reading Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. It’s brilliant, but it needs attention and I’m working long hours. I’m not getting time to get stuck into it, so in the meantime I’ve been reading some short stories. That’s not so unusual, what’s unusual for me is where I’ve been reading them – on my phone.

I recently bought an iPhone, it has ereader software on it, so I browsed online to see what was available free. While there, I spotted an old favourite, William Hope Hodgson’s Edwardian ghost stories, Carnacki the Ghost Finder. I downloaded it, and just finished the last story in the download.

Now, Carnacki was published in two editions, the 1913 edition with six stories and a 1947 edition with nine. The version I downloaded was the 1913 one, so I’ve ordered the 1947 version in normal book form and I’ll write up the whole thing as soon as I’ve read the last three. For the moment though, I thought it worth a post about reading on the iPhone.

The first thing is, you have a pretty small screen, about two paragraphs worth at a time. The visual display isn’t nearly as friendly as paper either, so you don’t want to read it for too long at a sitting. That makes novels a drag, I read a while back Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage on my then PDA, but the format did the novel no favours.

Short stories though, that’s a different matter. They don’t take that long to read, they also don’t benefit from reading too many at one sitting. In fact, my problem with short stories normally is that I struggle to stop myself reading a collection like a novel, so diminishing their individual impact.

With the Carnacki stories, I read one at a time, days apart, when I had a spare moment. I was stuck working long hours, opportunities to read rare, but I had my phone on me. When tired, travelling in a taxi home, the light’s not good enough for a book but the phone is backlit. Put simply, it works.

Now, I’m not the only one discovering that short stories work ok on a phone. There are dedicated apps, both general ereaders and now one designed for short stories. Publishers are starting to look closely at iPhone releases. Some are already arguing that smartphones are the real ereading revolution, bypassing Kindles and Sony eReaders and the like. People like their phones, increasingly they’re accustomed to consuming content (to use a horrific phrase) on them. Novels don’t work, but short stories do.

And of course I’m not even talking here about the Japanese experience, where there’s been an explosion in mobile phone based short story collections (mostly I’m not talking about it as I’m not persuaded it’s transferable outside Japan actually).

Here‘s a link to Ether Books, a company hoping to make a living by publishing short stories on mobile phones. Note the author list, Hilary Mantel, Alexander McCall Smith, the company’s still in the process of its launch but what’s immediately noticeable is that the author list isn’t just the usual bunch of out of copyright material taken from Project Guttenberg. Some of these are living authors I’ve actually heard of…

So, the smartphone, a new venue for the short story. I don’t think it’s guaranteed, but I think it’s a definite possibility as a new market, a new way of bringing short stories to people. And it frees the story from the collection, a format which isn’t always to an author’s benefit.

On a last note, apart from smartphones and digital delivery, I’m also reading a format called Picador Shots. Tiny format books containing a couple of short stories, essentially a sampler for a writer. Penguin has of course tried similar concepts, taking a small excerpt of a larger work or a single short story and publishing that in a back-pocket-sized paperback. It works, but it’s not as good as the smartphone option. The book doesn’t fit well on a shelf, it’s lost among its neighbours, but on the plus side it’s a quick read and easily thrown in a pocket or bag.

Going back to the ’80s, I recall we liked science fiction short stories in magazines, there was appetite for the form. Just not for collections. Sometimes a collection exists because of a thematic unity, but more often I think it’s just because books are sold in certain sizes and to get a short story to the desired size you have to package it with several of its fellows. Trouble is, when people buy a book of that size, they tend to expect a single narrative they can immerse in.

Free the short story of the collection, and you might encourage people to read them a bit more.

For the curious, here‘s a Guardian article about that Ether Books company, they’re not unique though, they just seem so far the most ambitious.

Classical associations

A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell

Twelve volumes, around 3,000 pages, those are daunting numbers. It’s not surprising that A Dance to the Music of Time isn’t as widely read as it should be. That said, it’s bloody good. It’s also, actually, very easy to read.

It’s been a few months now since I finished the series, enough time for my thoughts on it to settle a bit. What strikes me now, with a little distance, is the extraordinary consistency it shows in terms of themes and characters. There’s a logic to the sequence, a whole which is greater than the sum of the (individually excellent) parts.

Here’s a paragraph from the opening of the first novel. In it, an elderly Nick Jenkins (the sequence’s narrator) sees workmen gathered around a fire in a coal bucket, warming themselves against the winter.

For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seeminly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

At the end of Dance, the centaur reference returns, and it’s not until the penultimate page of the final novel that we learn the circumstances in which Nick sees those workmen. The end of the series is the beginning, a literary Ourobouros capturing in its form one of its key themes – the cycle of time. In a sense, the paragraph above contains the whole work.

Dance is, however, about many things (chiefly old age, madness and death, as Hilary Spurling memorably put it). At the more obvious end, there’s the whole circle of life motif (cue swelling Disney music), in which generations arise to replace the ancients they find already populating the world on their arrival, grow older themselves until they become those they supplanted, and then are replaced in turn by yet newer generations.

Dance is also about the importance of the myth of self, of sustaining a personal narrative – a fiction one tells oneself about one’s own life so as to make sense of the world. It’s about too those who are able to force their personal narrative upon the world, to shape the world according to their own illusions, people who live the life of the will.

And then, of course, there are the characters. I recall most of their names even now, without needing to check them. They’re a memorable lot, Moreland, Sillery, Uncle Giles, Charles Stringham, Roland Gwatkin, Barnby, Pamela Flitton… Each of them is credible, yet ultimately unknown, we form views of them as Nick does, but a key point the sequence makes is that ultimately other people’s lives (and particularly their relationships) cannot ever be wholly understood. We see a fraction of each person we meet, we know them only as they are with us at a given time, which may not be how they are with others or even how they will be with us later. People don’t change, but circumstances do, presenting different facets of the same individual each time.

Among all these characters though, one stands out in particular. Kenneth Widmerpool. It could be argued that Nick is the Greek chorus to Widmerpool’s life, fate (authorial fiat) bringing them together time and again over the years so that Nick sees him from his earliest days at school through his business and political careers and his later entry into academia. Here is Widmerpool’s first appearance in the sequence:

By this stage of the year – exercise no longer contestable five days a week – the road was empty; except for Widmerpool, in a sweater once white and cap at least a size too small, hobbling unevenly, though with deterrmination, on the flat heels of spiked running-shoes. Slowly but surely he loomed through the dusk towards me as I walked back – well wrapped up, I remember – from an expedition to the High Street. Widmerpool was known to go voluntarily for ‘a run’ by himself every afternoon. This was his return from trotting across the plough in drizzle that had been falling since early school. I had, of course, often seen him before, because we were in the same house; even spoken with him, though he was a bit older than myself. Anecdotes, relating to his acknowledged oddness were also familiar; but before that moment such stories had not made him live. It was on the bleak December tarmac of that Saturday afternoon in, I suppose, the year 1921 that Widmerpool, fairly heavily built, thick lips and metal-rimmed spectacles giving his face as usual an aggrieved expression, first took coherent form in my mind. As the damp, insistent cold struck up from the road, two thin jets of steam drifted out of his nostrils, by nature much distended, and all at once he seemed to possess a painful solidarity that talk about him had never conveyed. Something comfortless and inelegant in his appearance suddenly impressed itself on the observer, as stiffly, almost majestically, Widmerpool moved on his heels out of the mist.

So enters Widmerpool, one of the most memorable characters I’ve encountered in literature, absurd, pitiful, slightly monstrous.

There’s a sense, of course, of middle class soap opera to it all. The novels trace the lives of various, mostly upper middle class, people as they grow up, marry, have affairs, pursue careers and so on. Part of the interest is who ends up with whom, for how long, what happens to so and so. That’s the same interest which keeps viewers tuned in to soaps, week in, week out. The difference, if there is one, is partly in the wider themes mentioned above that the novels contain, but also just in the sheer quality of the writing and the ambition of it all. Yes, it’s interesting to see what happens to Mark Members and how his early promise pans out, but there’s more to it than that. There’s a sense of timelessness embedded in time, of patterns recurring, individuals coming and going but the nature of human experience remaining the same.

The Anthony Powell Society on one of the pages of its website comments that no “… volume-by-volume summary seems to do justice to Dance, only make it sound like a soap-opera. In summarising such a complex and lengthy work one is bound to remove not just the great writing but all the nuances and the majority of the characters.” That’s very true, in fact having written a volume by volume summary I’m painfully conscious how true that is. Whole books have been written about the sequence, I’m not going to even attempt to address its complexities in this one blog post, but I do think it’s worth quoting what the Anthony Powell Society view “probably one of the best ever summaries of Dance.”

This twelve-volume sequence [A Dance to the Music of Time] traces a colorful group of English acquaintances across a span of many years from 1914 to 1971. The slowly developing narrative centers around life’s poignant encounters between friends and lovers who later drift apart and yet keep reencountering each other over numerous unfolding decades as they move through the vicissitudes of marriage, work, aging, and ultimately death. Until the last three volumes, the next standard excitements of old-fashioned plots (What will happen next? Will x marry y? Will y murder z?) seem far less important than time’s slow reshuffling of friends, acquaintances, and lovers in intricate human arabesques.”
[Robert L Selig; Time and Anthony Powell, A Critical Study]

I don’t use the term masterpiece much. A Dance to the Music of Time is though just that, a masterpiece. Yes, it’s daunting to start a series that long, that many volumes and pages. But if you read it as I did, a month or so between each book, it’s actually surprisingly easy. Time and again I found myself intimidated by the size of it all, but each individual novel was delightful, funny and clever and well written. If I read a bad book, I’d read a Powell afterwards to refresh myself. There’s no need to sit down and decide to dedicate yourself to reading them all, you just need to read the first, then if you like it (and you likely will) some time later the second. And so on. Anthony Powell took years to write them all, there’s no hurry to read them all. But, if you do, it will be worth it.

And well, I’ve not even touched on the connections with Proust, the use of Poussin’s painting and other artistic references, the often strong parallels between the characters and real individuals in Powell’s life (and with Powell himself). As I said above, whole books have been written on Dance, there’s a limit to what I can do here.

While writing this blog entry, I came across this article in Salon magazine (which contains spoilers). It’s an excellent piece, well worth reading if you’re already familiar with Dance’s storyline. And if you’re not familiar with it, well, there are far worse companions to be had as we take our own places in the dance and await our own turns for old age, madness and death…