Dancing with Lady Molly

The fourth book in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series is called At Lady Molly’s.  This novel picks up two or three years after the last one.  Our narrator, Jenkins, is now at the end of his 20s and entering his 30s.  He has moved from working in the publishing industry, where he published art books, to the film industry, where he now earns his keep as a scriptwriter.  It all takes place sometime in the latter half of the 1930s, as the characters discuss Hitler and the possibility of war on the horizon, but that larger social context is not particularly relevant to this episode of Powell's tale. 

Each book in the series focuses on a different stage in Jenkins' and his friends' personal lives and simultaneously in the national growing pains as Britain enters the modern period.  In the first book, Jenkins and his classmates were still in school, finishing up their undergraduate lives.  The country was also at the start of something new as the old class structure was wearing away and the middle class worker could rise as the aristocrats fell.  In the second, they were young men new to the world of business and relationships.  In the third book, the young men are more established and a few are beginning to stake out political grounds.  There is a great focus on the political forces working away in British culture.  The fourth book takes a step back from politics to focus on marriage. 

I have found each novel to be more enjoyable than the preceding ones.  I’m not sure if that is because I am each time more familiar with Powell’s style and world or because Powell’s writing gets sharper and more enjoyable itself.

One of the things I have come to appreciate through this project is the power of longer narratives.  I was honestly of the opinion not too many years ago that if a writer couldn’t tell her story in 350 pages or less, then she needed to reconsider what she is saying.  But from An American Tragedy to The Lord of the Rings to The Recognitions to A Dance to the Music of Time, there have been a number of 1,000 page stories that I have read and even more that clock in around 600 pages.  Some stories require the scope of all those hundreds of pages to make the characters and curves of plot ring true and have the proper weight and meaning. 

As I pointed out in my post regarding the first book in the series, A Question of Upbringing, Powell’s intention in composing this long story was to get at something real, to avoid the conventions of common plotting and describe something larger.  I think his method begins to pay dividends by this point in the series.  The characters of a long work have the potential to carry more flesh and bones than can usually be held together in a shorter work.  In shorter fiction, characteristics sometimes necessarily replace character.  Powell is in no danger of doing so here.  The danger of this approach is that the author may end up creating a soap opera that gets caught up in the daily personal dramas without ever going anywhere of value.  Powell adroitly avoids the pitfall by having a definite sense of what to include and what to exclude from his narrative.  In this book, for example, the narrator falls in love, courts, proposes, and gets engaged to a woman—and we never see ANY of it! 

Another thing that I love about this project is the effect of reading these books in chronological order.  When you realize that The Recognitions and At Lady Molly’s came out in the same year, you get a real sense of all the literary traditions and practices that overlap and interweave.  While it is true to say that literature moved from Victorian to Modern to Post-Modern, it gives a false impression of how non-uniformly things moved.  Stylistically, The Recognitions and At Lady Molly’s could not be further from each other.  In fact, I think there is a fantastic study to be made in comparing the two books, for for all their differences, the two books are dealing with a lot of the same cultural issues.  Every book from the 30s on makes some reference to Freud, Jung, and/or psychoanalysis.  In Gaddis’s world, everyone is casually getting analyzed to solve their problems (which analysis can never and will never solve).  In At Lady Molly’s, General Conyers speaks at great length about psychoanalysis and tries it out in his approach to understanding Widmerpool.  Moreover, the hipsters who are playing the social game in search of recognition and fame in Gaddis’s novel are every bit as socially eager in Powell’s.  Powell feels just as critical of their pretensions, though he is certainly a lot more charitable toward them.  Anyone want to work that comparative analysis out for me?  Anyone?

I am already looking forward to 1960, when I get to read the 5^th book, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.