You Should Read William Gaddis's The Recognitions. Right Now.

How has no one recommended this book to me before?!  How have I gone all these years with no one shoving this book in my hands and making me read the first 10 pages?  That is all it would have taken to get me hooked.  I would have read, for example, this:

 The Real Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de la Otra Vez had been finished in the fourteenth century by an order since extinguished.  Its sense of guilt was so great, and measures of atonement so stringent, that those who came through alive were a source of embarrassment to lax groups of religious who coddled themselves with occasional food and sleep.  When the great monastery was finished, with turreted walls, parapets, crenelations, machicolations, bartizans, a harrowing variety of domes and spires in staggering Romanesque, Byzantine effulgence, and Gothic run riot in mullioned windows, window tracings, and an immense rose window whose foliations were so elaborate that it was never furnished with glass, the brothers were brought forth and tried for heresy.  Homoiousian, or Homoousian, that was the question.  It had been settled one thousand years before when, at Nicaea, the fate of the Christian church hung on a diphthong: Homoousian, meaning of one substance.  The brothers in faraway Estremadura had missed the Nicaean Creed, busy out of doors as they were, or up to their eyes in cold water, and they had never heard of Arius.  They chose Homoiousian, of like substance, as a happier word than its tubular alternative (no one gave them a chance at Heteroousian), and were forthwith put into quiet dungeons which proved such havens of self-indulgence, unfurnished with any means of vexing the natural processes, that they died of very shame, unable even to summon such pornographic phantasms as had kept Saint Anthony rattling in the desert.

 Right?!  I cannot count the ways in which I love that passage—and that’s just one passage!  If that little sampler does nothing for you, you can walk away right now, because this is not the book for you.  But if the wit and the tone and the craft at all appeal to you, go now and procure a copy for thineself!

Why You Most Likely Won’t Actually Read The Recognitions

If you get yourself a copy from the library or ordered off the internet, there are some things you should know:

1)      The book is HUGE

This book is about as long as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, falling just shy of 1,000 pages.  And this is no tale of adventure and battles between good and evil.  It is an ambitious piece of literature; as Peter Dempsey accurately says in his biographical essay on William Gaddis, “It has now come to be seen as a Janus-faced text that looks back in its complexity to the great Modernists of the inter-war years such as Joyce and Faulkner and forward to the post-war American writers such as Barth, Coover, Pynchon, De Lillo and Gass in its taste for black humor, literary play and absurdity.”  Yeah, you’re scared now; aren’t you?

2)      There is not a wasted sentence in the book

I know that sounds like a good thing, and it is.  But the fact is your brain can’t go on auto-pilot when each and every sentence is thoughtfully constructed.  Passages of description, of introduction, reflection between bits of dialogue—it’s all rich, subtle, packed with meaning, and often relevant to maintaining your grasp of the plot down the road.  I have never read even a short story that didn’t feel like it had a fair amount of padding, of fat marbled in the meat.  But here, in one of the longest works of fiction I’ve read, Gaddis never puts his guard down.  He never writes without thinking, so you can never read without thinking—at least not without paying the price in comprehension.

3)      Gaddis assumes you are paying attention

Who is Eddie? Should I know Eddie? What? He appeared 300 pages ago in a subordinate clause that gave me no reason to think that Eddie might be important some day?  That there was a common line of thought for me while reading The Recognitions.  And in a book with over 50 characters, it’s easy to get lost.  I ended up keeping a number of 4x6 cards as a collective bookmark and writing the names of characters and a brief description as I came across them, even if they seemed insignificant.  Moreover, Gaddis enjoys subtleties and will sometimes have a character move through a scene who is unknown to the other characters, so the only thing that the others notice about him is his tie, his ring, or some characteristic tic, and if you’ve been paying attention you will remember that tie or ring or tic from a previous description of the character when he had a major scene 100 pages ago.  It is a lot to keep in your head—no, it is too much to keep in your head.  Actions and interchanges between characters are equally subtle and I often found myself saying, “Did he really just do that with a pen knife?!” “Was she really about to do that with the bull?!” “Did they really put that in the bread?!”

4)      There are a bazillion references in the novel

I remember characterizing Under the Volcano as the most international and referential book I had ever read.  I think Gaddis has Lowry beat.  There are a ton of languages without translation: German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and a few Middle East languages as well.  If you don’t speak 16 languages, you will need to do your best to understand what’s being said and move on.  The edition has no footnotes—but there is an awesome website that does: www.williamgaddis.org.  The site footnotes poetic references, art references, and as many of Gaddis’s allusions as it can find.  Many times I assumed that Gaddis had to be making up artists, poets, and historical facts only to discover later that he was dealing with real history.  You need to have either the patience to look things up or the temperament to roll with your ignorance.  I sometimes had the former but more often than not made do with the latter.

5)      Some entire scenes are befuddling

Gaddis’s subtle exchanges between characters cause you to read at high levels of alertness just to follow the suggestions and gentle curves of the plots, but some scenes are intentionally confusing.  There are recurring parties in which dozens of characters are all talking at once, and you are forced to rely solely on verbal cues as to who is saying what to whom.  There is line after line of dialogue as the hipsters of 1940s New York try to impress each other with their cleverness and reveal the inhumanity in their modern existence.  In other scenes, the characters are not in their right mind, and Gaddis communicates their confusion, incomplete thoughts, and failed comprehension directly to the reader. 

6)      The Recognitions is not the feel-good novel of 1955

The novel is a thorough study of our attempts to create something genuine or passably genuine from the mounds and mounds of bullshit that are piled high around us and that we keep shoveling onto our neighbors.  There is no triumph of the human spirit here.  There is instead an impressive number dead and injured bodies and souls by the end of the novel.

In short, you will work your ass off to follow and understand the sometimes labyrinthine plot and pinball-crazy encounters of dozens of characters only to watch those characters meet humiliating defeats.  You will not be allowed to fall back on auto-pilot and think about your to-do list while you read, and even with all that attention and devotion, you will be scratching your head occasionally.  But here’s the thing:  You will be so glad that you did, because the novel is brilliant and hilarious and profound and stunning.  Having just finished it, I cannot wait to re-read the novel.

Why, in Spite of All the Obstacles Described above, You Should Read The Recogntions

1)      Every one of those 956 pages is gold

The book is concerned with the line between imitation and originality, the counterfeit and the real, the genuine and the fools-gold-plated.  Gaddis mines this vein until every nugget of precious metal is stripped from the earth.  The main plot (to the extent that there is a main plot) revolves around a painter who creates original works in the style of the Flemish masters for a business man who then sells them as recovered lost masterpieces.  Gaddis covers poetry, playwriting, composing—through which he explores the question is anything original, or is everything borrowed, stolen, rewritten, repackaged, resold, and then stolen again?  Beyond the arts, he looks at counterfeit money, designer knock-offs, and all the ways we settle for an imitation of the real thing.  Is there any inherent value in “realness” or “originality”?  The market thrives on the circulation of fakes.

Gaddis looks at religious relics, historic sites, monuments, and the collective lies we tell ourselves about these objects and locations.  Behind it all is his real (fake?) focus on the lies we tell to each other and ourselves in presenting ourselves to the world.  We pass thoughts off as our own, vie with each other to appear knowledgeable without possessing any real knowledge.  The true burden of modernity is to live at a time when nothing is real and everything is propped up on permitted illusions.

Looking through this single lens, Gaddis makes sense of the entire modern world.  What shocks me is that he had three more novels left in him once he completed this one.  How could he have any knowledge or thoughts or even words left to say?

2)      The writing is GORGEOUS

Some passages are striking for their poetry, some for their insight, some for their wry humor and ironic punch, but they are all striking.  Your brain has an embarrassment of riches to revel in.  Sentences look forward and glance back, and you will be torn between mining the content and appreciating the form, all while you try to round up the various threads and see the patterns and meanings.  At its best, it stimulates every cognitive center in your brain.  I kept wanting to post passages on Facebook, but I couldn’t do so without wanting to explain the context and the richness and the references.  By the time I had made the entry I had an unreadable mess that I deleted in favor of getting back to reading. 

You may not be able to let the auto-pilot take over, but the rewards of active reading, unpredictable plot, and unconventional insights are irreplaceable.

3)      The writing is INTELLIGENT

Yes, it is work to look up the references, even if you only look up every 20^th one.  The main two foci in the book are Christianity and art, and to read the book is to get a course on comparative religion and art history.  The meeting of the imitative and the original, the fake and the genuine becomes a paradigm by which Gaddis makes sense of the entirety of modern existence.  It affects every description, every encounter, every exchange, and every action.  You can chase each lead and marvel to see the curving paths double back on themselves and connect up before parting and merging with the other paths.  It is positively dizzying in its intellectualism.  Far from making the material dry and academic, Gaddis uses black humor and dry wit give every observation simultaneous weight and levity.  It’s quite an artful trick to discuss art, religion, and history without slipping into pretentious and self-satisfied obnoxiousness.  It is simultaneously high-minded and visceral.

4)      The writing is HILARIOUS

No, the book does not make you want to reach out and hug your fellow man and woman.  No, you won’t get tears in your eyes as the characters struggle against their own limitations. You will, however, be laughing to yourself throughout every page.  You will laugh because the observations are so astute.  You will laugh because the understatements are cutting and artfully made.  You will laugh because the plots are so cleverly made to overlap, come in and run out again, and tie up in entirely unexpected ways.  You will laugh at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, and the whole.

I realize that it’s a book with a very particular taste.  It won’t be for everyone.  But for those of you to whom it does appeal, you will fall in love with this book and wonder why you haven’t read it earlier.  It is a novel that never had a huge following but which has been kept alive by a handful of devout readers who refuse to let the book fall into obscurity and out of print.  Most of you won’t even try it.  Of those of you who pick it up and begin, I suspect the majority will abandon ship without getting far into the story.  But the rest of you, the ones who get it and get it, as it were—it is a pleasure to be in your company!

It's Humbert Humbert's World

I was in a court reporter’s office last week chatting with the owner before setting up for a job, when my copy of Lolita slipped from under my arm to the floor.  Diana, the owner, said, “You are not reading that!” and gave me a knowing look, as if I had been caught with a smutty magazine.  Lolita is one of those books whose reputation far exceeds its reading public.  Everyone knows that Nabokov wrote a book about a pedophile and his pursuit of a 12-year-old girl, and everyone knows that the novel is erotically charged and has been banned by some more prurient groups for fear that readers will be sexually excited and share in the narrator’s lust.  But to say that the novel is about Lolita or about tabooed sexual titillation is to make an erroneous statement.  The novel is about one thing and one thing only: Humbert Humbert.

In my post about Under the Net, I talked about the power and wonder of a well done first person narrative.  In Nabokov’s magical hands, Lolita is the gold standard of first person narratives.  Here you have a narrator who is a brilliant character and can see and describe the world only from his own viewpoint.  Humbert, however, is a worldly traveler, a scholar, a speaker of several languages, highly educated, and aristocratic, so that he gives the illusion of being someone whose viewpoint is anything but limited.  Moreover, he goes through great pains to show us how honest and thorough he is in his portrayal of himself.  He tells us all his nastiness towards Charlotte, his fleeting plan to kill her, his hopes to have children with Lolita so that he can molest them when they too become nymphets.  But like all of us, Humbert can’t see what he can’t see.  He is as taken with himself as he hopes (nay, expects) we are, because Humbert is a sociopath with no emotion or genuine sympathy for anyone but himself.  As one of a million examples, he paints Lolita’s role in their relationship as one of a willing partner, to the point that he begs for sympathy from the reader for how he is cruelly treated by the demon in the body of a nymphet.  All the while he makes references to Lolita’s captivity, to her sobbing to herself after Humbert pretends to be asleep, to his blackmailing her for sexual favors—he references all these horrible things without any sympathy, and it quickly becomes clear that he isn’t even aware that sympathy is called for!  Here’s a sample passage:

I remember the operation [meaning sex] was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;--a salutary storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year!  I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of blind impatient passion, and there she was sprawling and sobbing and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss.

Here the word “forced” rings out since it is applied not to his raping of Lolita but to her forcing him to make promises!  That which is “atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable” and “eternal[ly] horr[ible]” is not Lolita's fate but his own.  He is incapable of seeing beyond himself and is unaware that he is doing anything other than garnering his reader’s support.

And that is what makes this novel so captivating.  We are in the poetic mind of a madman who believes that he is sane.  

In his effort to lay a historical and poetical foundation for his love of nymphets, Humbert makes allusions to Sade’s Justine, Dante’s young bride, and Poe’s Annabel Lee.  Of these references, he identifies most with Poe.  His first love is, in fact, Annabel Leigh, and he refers to her “kingdom by the sea” from the first.  While being interviewed by the Ramsdale paper, he gives himself the first name Edgar.  Obviously there is nothing accidental in connecting Humbert with Edgar Allan Poe, but what Humbert doesn’t know is that he is more reminiscent of a character created by Poe than of the poet himself.  In Chapter 13, Humbert has his first sexual encounter with Lolita, but he wants us to appreciate how clever he is to get what he wants without harming Lolita at the same time.  As a lead in to his tale, Humbert says:

I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, ‘impartial sympathy.’

When I read this line, I instantly thought of another narrator who was desperate to prove to his soundness of mind and character:

Now this is the point.  You fancy me mad.  Madmen know nothing.  But you should have seen me.  You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work!

Thus declares the narrator of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.”  To me, Nabokov is clearly echoing Poe's structure and language to unite the two narrators.

So what we get from Nabokov’s construction is the twin pleasure of being immersed in Humbert’s mind and seeing through it at the same time as though it were a cellophane wrapping.  Humbert is a monster of a human being who is simultaneously charming, witty, and at times downright hilarious (I particularly loved his fist fight with Quilty at the end), and we can experience the charm and the horror, the intellectual and the emotional, simultaneously.  

Seeing his tale as his defense, Humbert wants his readers, above all else, to understand that because he loves Lolita with a love that is endless and pure he is neither a monster nor a rapist.  No other nymphet does to him what Lolita does.  Even when Lolita is 17, well beyond the age of nymphets, and round with her pregnancy, he still wants her to come away with him.  What more proof do we need of his love?  Because in Humbert’s world, what more is love than the rapacious and consuming desire for someone?  He is as much a victim in his tale as Lolita—nay, an even greater victim!  Never mind (because he cannot mind) that when he overhears Lolita talking to a friend about death, Humbert reflects how little he knew Lolita’s mind.  This observation is a mere passing curiosity for him, an aside in his narrative.  Why would it be important for him to know Lolita?  He couldn’t tell you.

This tension between Humbert’s narrative and the real story that plays out unbeknownst to him between his words is the power that makes Nabokov’s novel so compelling.  And that tension is in the very title, because to Humbert, his tale is all about Lolita, but we know that through the cellophane of Lolita is the looming figure of Humbert Humbert, the only subject Humbert Humbert really has any interest in. 

Lord of the Flies: Lord of the Narrative

Sometimes when you approach something you loved as a child, you prepare yourself for the inevitable disappointment.  Your original experience is unrepeatable; you cannot step in that same river twice, as the saying goes, because it is not the same river, and you are not the same person.  So it was with both excitement and fear that I picked up my copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to read it for this list.

I may have mentioned in one of my other posts that I was not much of a reader as a child.  Reading was not something I typically chose to do on a Saturday afternoon, or even before bed.  So I don’t have a slew of children’s books that compete for my memory's affection.  The first book I remember being compelled by was Where the Red Fern Grows in 4^th grade.  And the book that stands out in my memory after that is Lord of the Flies, which I believe I read in 9^th grade.  That makes for a very short list of childhood favorites.

For how important the book was to me, I was surprised at how poorly I remembered it, and while I knew the large events that shook the plot, rereading the book was a lot like discovering it for the first time.  It was every bit as riveting as I remember, only now I was able to appreciate the language, the movement of plot, and the strength of character.  The book may be thought of as a Young Adult novel nowadays because every high school student in America reads it and discusses its symbolism, but in 1954, it was a novel written for an adult audience, and it rewards its adult reader with its masterful storytelling.

The story is about a group of British school boys (ranging from six to twelve years old) whose plane crashes on an island after it is stuck down, presumably due to a third world war.  With no adults around, the boys come together and form a plan for survival and, hopefully, rescue.  Ralph, the protagonist, is voted “chief,” and Jack becomes the leader of the “hunters,” the choir boys who were with him.  Through the course of the novel we watch as the boys’ “civilization” collapses and the schoolboys devolve into “savages.”  “Mankind’s essential illness,” as one character in the novel calls it, and the thin line that separates civilization from animal ferocity are rather heady topics for such a short novel, and there are a million ways to botch the story.  To make the story both believable and compelling, Golding has to show us the movement both within the individuals and the group that leads from Ralph’s rule to Jack’s.  We need to see Jack’s hunger for death and power grow.  We need to see fear spread throughout the group to lead them to Castle Rock.  And Golding does it all.  He cuts no corners in giving us the push and pull of Jack’s and Ralph’s respect for and antagonism of each other.  The characters’ developments are directly tied to the plot and the two move hand in hand. 

Golding rushes nothing in the dissolution of order, using Roger as the measure of the grip society exerts even across the ocean.  Roger is described as “a slight furtive boy whom no one knew, who kept to himself with an inner intensity of avoidance and secrecy.”  He follows a six-year-old who wanders along the beach, watching him from the jungles edge.  When nuts fall from a tree above him, he notices the rocks on the ground.  He picks one up

and threw it at Henry—threw it to miss.  The stone, that token of preposterous time, bounced five yards to Henry’s right and fell in the water.  Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them.  Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter into which he dare not throw.  Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of old life.  Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and schools and policemen and the law.  Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

These small stones are the heralds of the avalanche that will follow when Roger, perched at the top of Castle Rock throws first small stones at Piggy and eventually launches the boulder that will cause Piggy’s death.  Roger is a terrifying presence, and the arc of his arm describes the vanishing hold of civilization over the boys.

Things fall apart so logically and smoothly, that you never feel like you are being forced to swallow a sermon or a sleight-of-hand prophet.  On the level of simple plot and character—if the novel were trying to say nothing about people and our world—this work would be a resounding success.  But add to that the echoes, imagery, and subtleties of social commentary, and you have an incredible story, one that can be relished at any level of engagement.  Rocks are falling throughout the story.  The dead parachuter does an incredible amount of work in both the worlds of plot and symbolism.  As a manifestation of the beast, he is that which is rotten in human beings.  He is a symbol of the adult war that is merely a large and unseen version of what is happening on the island.  He is dressed in the clothes of society, but he is an “ape-like” figure.  The desire to control the lives—and deaths—of other creatures is present from Henry’s playing with the translucent miniscule creatures on the beach to the killing of the pigs and to the deaths of Piggy and Simon.  The destruction of society plays in every detail, even in the killing of the sow, whose head becomes the Lord of the Flies.  She is the sole image of femininity, of maternity, and the killing of her is incredibly graphic and rape-like: “The hungers followed, wedded to her in lust, excited by the long chase and dropped blood. . . .  The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her.”  And when Roger removes his spear from her, all the boys delight in seeing that he got her “right up her ass.”  Golding is in control of all his details and descriptions so that it all unfolds effortlessly and unpretentiously. 

How wonderful to rediscover something that I have loved and find that it is richer than I remember!  If you have not read the novel since you were young, I urge you to take it up again.

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.