Accepting the Dance: A Look into Book III of A Dance to the Music of Time

The time has come again to revisit the ever-evolving epic, A Dance to the Music of Time.  In 1955, Powell published Book III, titled The Acceptance World.

At the end of my last post about the series, I posed a question concerning Powell’s titles.  Here at last we have a title that makes perfect sense, capturing the heart of the novel.  In The Acceptance World, Nick Jenkins, our narrator, now brings us into the 1930s.  The roaring ‘20s are behind us and there is much talk of the “slump.”  Jenkins and his contemporaries are now in their late twenties and early thirties, no longer in the bloom of youth, weathered and battered about a bit by the world.  The title comes from a phrase delivered by Templer (one of Nick’s university friends and one of the central figures of the series) when he describes the profession that Widmerpool is moving into.  When Nick asks what the Acceptance World is, Templer replies:

If you have goods you want to sell to a firm in Bolivia, you probably do not touch your money in the ordinary way until the stuff arrives there.  Certain houses, therefore, are prepared to ‘accept’ the debt.  They will advance you the money on the strength of your reputation.  It is all right when the going is good, but sooner or later you are tempted to plunge.  Then there is an alteration in the value of the Bolivian exchange, or a revolution, or perhaps the firm just goes bust—and you find yourself stung.

What a wonderful phrase to seize on!  Clearly, Powell knew how good the phrase was too, not simply because he made it the title of his novel.  He couldn’t resist drawing the connection between the phrase and the content of the novel in plain bold lines.  He begins the final chapter thus:

When, in describing Widmerpool’s new employment, Templer had spoken of ‘the Acceptance World’, I had been struck by the phrase.  Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities.  The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element—happiness, for example—is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill.  Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed.  Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions are discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.

That discarding of illusions is largely central to this novel.  In the earlier volumes, Nick falls in love with great passion, but little comes of it.  There are marriages and affairs and promising futures.  There is love in The Acceptance World, and much discussion of love, but it is a sadder and wiser narrator who tells the tale, one more concerned with the limitations and deficiencies of love than its promise and power.  Stringham, who has only a small role in this volume, appears as an alcoholic after the dissolution of his marriage with Peggy Stepney.  Anne Stepney leaves Barnby for Dicky Umfraville.  Mona leaves Templer for Quiggin.  Even Mrs. Erdleigh has moved from Uncle Giles to Jimmy Stripling.  None of the relationships seem to be holding up, and there is not much hope for the new relationships that have formed.

Even beyond the world of love relationships are dodgy.  Quiggin and Members are friends from university, rival poets and philosophers.  Members has been working as secretary to St. John Clarke, an elderly popular novelist who has, under Members's tutelage, lately become political.  Members is unseated as secretary by Quiggin as Clarke’s preferences shift.  And by the end of the novel, Quiggin himself is ousted and replaced by Guggenbuhl, a Trotskyist. 

Nick himself finds love with Templer’s sister, Jean.  He fell in love with her in the first novel, but she was distant and his love was unrequited.  In the second novel, Jean married one of Templer’s friends for whom Nick didn’t much care, Bob Duport.  In this third novel, Duport has fallen on hard times due to the “slump,” and his marriage has suffered as well.  Duport is having an affair with another woman, and Jean takes up with Nick.  By the end of the novel however, Duport is looking to have a change in his finances with the help of Widmerpool, which means rough waters ahead for Nick and Jean. 

In short, this is a world of personal upheaval and unrest.  And it is only with this novel that I can truly appreciate Powell’s skill and plan.  All the strands that have been laid out in the last two novels are intertwining and forming an impressively complex and riveting world.  All the storylines are coming together and moving in the same direction with all the depth of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  There is not the heroism, magic, or adventure of Tolkien’s tale, but there is the same epic scope.  It is a realist’s epic without crossing into the tawdriness of a soap opera.  Moreover, the story of these individuals, as I speculated in my earlier posts, mirrors the movement of London society and culture between the wars.  The shift in class that I referenced in my discussion of A Buyer’s Market continues to play out here, as Widmerpool becomes a man of greater power, even as he remains something of an ass.  In the final scene, the aristocratic Stringham is forced by Widmerpool to stay in bed to sleep off his drinking, and Nick reflects:

I was thinking of other matters: chiefly of how strange a thing it was that I myself should have been engaged in a physical conflict designed to restrict Stringham’s movements; a conflict in which the moving spirit has been Widmerpool.  That suggested a whole social upheaval: a positively cosmic change in life’s system.

This was by far my favorite book in the series so far, and I am looking forward to reading more.  I will pick up the series again in a few books when we reach 1957.  For now, it is on with 1955 and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a book I am very excited to reread after all these years.