A Literature of High Toryism

To many people’s minds, Powell came to epitomize what it meant to be High Tory. He came from privilege, belonging on both sides of his family to the minor gentry; he was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he frequented the Hypocrites’ Club. But his financial security shouldn’t be overstated, nor should his snobbishness. Unlike Marcel Proust — Anderson’s point of comparison throughout Furies — Powell had to work to pay his bills; though, as is so often the case for those raised adjacent to power, jobs fell his way without him even trying.

Still, Powell had no trouble socializing outside his class or portraying credible non-aristos in his fiction. Certain provisos notwithstanding — the lower middle class isn’t exactly prominent in the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time — Powell, more than Proust, had an impressive social range. In Dance, he wrote that

All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

Anderson, who finds Proust’s aphorisms both untenable and dogmatic, might’ve noticed that the same could be said of this one of Powell’s: behind the classical rhetoric hides the plain fact that everyone is not, in fact, “equally extraordinary” — that phrase, embraced with uncharacteristic credulity by Anderson, is more than a little self-contradictory. Nonetheless, Powell can rightly be called a democratic novelist. Those critics who have thought his use of recondite terms or his artistic references to be elitist or patrician only evince their own hauteur: they take for granted that learning, love of language, and an appreciation of art belongs to the bailiwick of the upper classes, where “ordinary” people can only be interlopers. Powell, by contrast, had no such sniffy conceits.

Different Speeds, Same Furies collects four of Anderson’s literary essays: the first, roughly one hundred pages long, compares Powell to Proust; the second, originally a talk given to the Anthony Powell Society, is on Powell’s memoirs Keep the Ball Rolling, though in large part it merely restates the first rather less brilliantly; the third is a theory-laden reflection on the historical novel as a literary form; and the fourth treats Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. The chief subject of Different Speeds, Same Furies is the Powell-Proust comparison, with Powell often coming out better, especially in terms of characterology.

Powell, Anderson contends, took more interest than Proust in others, and it shows when one considers side by side the characters they created. Powell is the sharper social historian. Proust registers the passage of time merely by changing fashions and technological progress — electrical lights replace gas lights; motorcars take the place of coaches. His society is in stasis: time signifies only life’s slow crawl toward its terminus. Powell, however, captures how the structure of society changes from the interwar to the postwar era.

Anderson is capable of saying much in a few words — Powell fought a “battle against sonority”; nescience is “the natural epistemology of an artless narcissism” — but this fondness for the intricately coiled phrase can approach the ridiculous. In place of “Powell’s parents” one reads the ungainly, “the extraordinary union that produced Powell and shaped his infancy.” In another passage in the book’s third essay one reads the following pronouncement about the historical novel:

Properly aesthetic are not their referential dimensions, so often shabby ideological messages . . . but their reminders of the plenitude of all human impulses, which along with the blackest of these include the revolutionary-utopian and the temptation of the good.

For fans of Anderson passages like the above are all par for the course. So, too, is an iconoclastic dismissiveness. He is capable of incredible high-handedness toward even the most respected of writers. Philip Larkin and V.S. Naipaul are dismissed as stupid “right-wing cronies,” while “language sheds all compunction in the foul-mouth chic of the best literary periodicals.” I can’t say that I mind such condescension because I’m sure that, if pressed, he could marshal supporting evidence. There is something of a schoolboy’s playfulness in these remarks that is part and parcel of Anderson’s love of the baroque sentence.

For Anderson, Powell created characters that were far more complex and believable than Proust’s. Of course, several critics have found the narrator of the Dance, Jenkins, rather vapid. Anderson concedes that Jenkins may be no Marlow, but his personality is “inseparable” from the novel’s power. It is the wealth of his reflective mind that makes the novel feel so vivid. But he is by no means emotionally frigid, nor is he a mere cipher: the plot, Anderson observes, revolves around him, with the first four volumes of the series forming a classic bildungsroman. It is only in the postwar trilogy that he becomes a passive onlooker. “Prior to these,” Anderson notes, “a wide palette of feeling is at work.”

Round and Flat

Good literary criticism, I often think, requires little more than selecting the right passages to put in block quotes, and Anderson is a master of it. Anderson cites several examples that illustrate Powell’s remarkable talent for encapsulating characters with a few well-chosen words: isn’t, for instance, Powell’s one-sentence portrait of Sunny Farebrother just perfect?

There was a suggestion of boyishness — the word “sunny” would certainly be applicable — about his frank manner; but, in spite of this manifest desire to get along with everyone on their own terms, there was also something lonely and inaccessible about him.

That’s enough to tell us who Farebrother really is, and what it must feel like to be in the same room as him. Or take Powell’s sketch of Dicky Umfraville:

Trim, horsey, perfectly at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf him, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity when the crash came.

Powell also created memorable female characters. To take but one example, Moreland’s wife, Matilda, is sympathetically portrayed. But, as Anderson notes, it is only in the postwar trilogy that women are shown to be intellectually equal to the men. Emily Brightman, a historian of late antiquity, is the most erudite character in the whole novel, and Ada Leintwardine’s repartee is second to none; but in the preceding volumes, all professional women are either actors or models. They may be “tough” like Madam Leroy or Mrs Erdleigh, but they don’t discuss politics or art like the men. Anderson is at his best when he’s noticing such social markers. He observes that practically every man is referred to by his surname, while women of the narrator’s generation are addressed by their first names, and those of older generations invariably have their surnames escorted by honorifics. This does not, as Anderson writes, show the narrator’s informality with women but his reserve.

Visually, too, Powell is less sharp with women. To be sure, the male characters spend much time remarking on women’s looks, but their “beauty” stays vague. “Females are very hard to do,” Powell himself said. “I don’t think any male writer has ever done one right.” If every novelist is equally culpable, why single out Powell for criticism? But he couldn’t have believed his own excuse. The passages on women in the Dance can’t compare to the ones on men — even its most lively portraits of women feel blurred. Powell often likened his characters to paintings, usually with great precision, but when it comes to women, he seemed to struggle to pick the right one. Thus, he compares Jean Templer to a whole string of portraits that she can’t possibly resemble all at once. “Each vivid enough in itself,” Anderson writes, “the multiplication of it yields no cogent physical image: Rogier van der Weyden, Noël Coward, Rubens, Delacroix, Goya cancel each other out.”

Anderson claims that Powell’s characters are “round” while Proust’s are “flat” — they may have “plenty of life, but they lack any depth.” They’re mere caricatures, “garish dummies that are a feature of Dickens more than anything in prior French fiction.” The Verdurin salon is full of caricatures repeating their taglines: there’s the poseur Bloch and the snob Legrandin. On the more elevated levels one finds Norpois and Madame de Villeparisis. But even Proust’s most vivid characters — Duc de Guermantes, the Verdurin couple, even the Baron de Charlus — can’t be said to be “credible” human beings, or so Anderson says.

Many of Proust’s characters do have a Dickensian vitality, but why should that make them improbable or uninteresting? Who hasn’t met a figure like Madame Verdurin, the social climber who speaks in clichés? Or seen a hanger-on of Dr. Cottard’s ilk, who’d gaze at Madame Verdurin “with open-mouthed admiration and studious zeal as she skipped lightly from one-stepping stone to another of her stock of ready-made phrases”? Caricature isn’t boring if it illustrates some essential human vice or folly. Personally, I find many “flat” characters more interesting and believable than round ones.

The essence of caricatures is that they do not change. “I never will desert Mr. Micawber,” says Mrs. Micawber in David Copperfield, and of course she doesn’t. But Proust’s characters keep surprising the reader. To Anderson’s mind, this mutability isn’t proof that they’re subtle; rather, it signifies “abrupt characterological capsizal.” Thus, he thinks that Saint-Loup, who goes from being the “impassioned lover of the actress Rachel” to a “brutish pursuer of men,” is totally incredible. But I, for one, see nothing fanciful in the idea that a man who likes a woman is sleeping with other men. Here the lack of imagination is Anderson’s and not Proust’s. Anderson misses the point: it’s not that Proust’s characters change their personalities ex nihilo but that the narrator’s image of them changes. Consider, for instance, Legrandin — whom Anderson calls one of many “grotesques pure and simple.” Legrandin is seen by the narrator bowing in a curious way:

This rapid straightening-up caused a sort of tense muscular wave over Legrandin’s rump, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency devoid of spiritual significance . . . awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one we knew.

The clumsy gesture collapses the narrator’s mental image of Legrandin. It reminds me of the moment in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, where Herzog’s hatred of Gersbach evanesces when he sees Gersbach, with his fleshy chest, bending over in the bathroom. If the shift seems abrupt, it is only because false impressions shatter abruptly: it is not that Legrandin has metamorphosed into something new; rather, the narrator had fooled himself into thinking that his image of Legrandin corresponded perfectly with the real Legrandin.

This is, of course, one of Proust’s leitmotifs — the risk of lulling ourselves into the belief that others are what we want them to be. Swann thus falls in love with Odette because she reminds him of a woman in a painting. He imposes his own misconceptions on her, and inevitably has to face the fact that she isn’t as he had imagined her. But it is precisely in moments like these, when I disagree with Anderson, that I enjoy reading him most. He is, consistently, one of our time’s most stimulating intellectuals.