`Literature is Not Always Like Life'

On Tuesday, with the gift cards I received for Christmas from my brother- and sister-in-law, I bought the four-volume edition of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, published in paperback by the University of Chicago Press. I never thought I would own Powell’s great 12-novel cycle, originally published between 1951 and 1976. It seemed too expensive, too extravagant, not the sort of gift I’m likely to lavish on myself. I’ve read the entire series twice, in 1980 and in 1999, and it’s one of those rare books that is so true and compelling, so inevitable in its fictional solidity, that it induces dread as you approach its conclusion and homesickness once you have finished reading it, and for years afterwards.

Critics of Powell’s novel tend to focus obsessively on the supposed living models for his characters, reducing his majestic architecture to a tiresome roman a clef. James Atlas followed a similarly reductive strategy in his biography of Saul Bellow. Knowing who Widmerpool “really” was contributes nothing to our pleasure or understanding. American readers shouldn’t be discouraged by the novel’s bulk or its intransigently English character. A Dance should be read as great comedy, regardless of the reader’s nationality, not as a transcription of English social history. In his essay “Tom Wolfe’s Shallowness, and the Trouble with Information,” James Wood dismisses the conventional wisdom among reviewers that Wolfe’s characters resemble Dickens’ in their vividness and grotesquerie. He writes:

“Literature is not always like life. Why should it be? Sometimes the real itself is not always realistic, because it is incredible . . . . What is good `documentation,’ good reporting, may be lousy literature. And there is another way, of course, in which the heavy documentation of detail is not necessarily realistic: it is not through documentation that most of us absorb or present or remember detail. We do not boil in a fever of petits faits vrais; we shiver in the cool temperature of particulars.”

Wood’s judgment is shrewd and elegantly phrased, and is helpfully apropos of Powell’s fiction. Powell is not a journalist out to pin his generation in a specimen drawer.

A Dance holds manifold pleasures for well-read readers, including the quietly unobtrusive theme of Robert Burton (1577-1640) and his Anatomy of Melancholy. Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, writes a book about Burton, just as Powell himself wrote one about Burton’s younger contemporary, John Aubrey (1629-1695). At the conclusion of the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Powell has Jenkins write:

“For some reason one of Robert Burton’s torrential passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy came to mind:

“`I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, firs, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed. And then again of fresh honors conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbor turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.’”

One more paragraph, narrated by Jenkins, remains at the close of A Dance, but you must have read the preceding 12 volumes to hear the no-longer-secret melodies and all the themes resolved. That’s what I plan to do again this year.