The conceit governing this short run of blogposts (that, in working through A Dance to the Music of Time I was reading a Peake-like High Fantasy novel) was always going to get tiresome, stretched across all twelve novels; and in fact At Lady Molly's strikes me as a good place to drop the gag. This is because this novel is the first in the series I've read during which I felt any kind of actual real-world connection. The effect here is less the disinterested fascination of a Gormenghastly world played out under my gaze, and something more recognisably like 20th-century Britain. Jenkins, the Powell-stand-in narrator, is working for the movies as a script writer and doctor; Hitler is in power in Germany and World War Two is brewing. Something about the way Powell treats all this shifts the timbre of the novel out of structured quasi-fabulation into something closer to life. It's a little hard to put my finger on what, mind.
I think it may have a good deal to do with the way Powell handles his roman à clef idiom. In the earlier books the fact that St John Clarke was a sour from-life portrait of John Galsworthy, or that Templar and Stringham were based on Powell's friends, did not intrude into the functioning of the novel. Because, to slip into the American vernacular, I could care less about John Galsworthy. But Erridge, Powell's portrait of George Orwell, is a different matter. This novel shows Orwell as a fool, a sort of Prince Mishkin (one character makes this comparison, actually) but without the redeeming spirituality. There's nothing remotely noble about Erridge's habit of leaving his stately home dressed as a tramp to sleep rough around the country. It's presented as eccentricity, marinaded in an uneasy guilt at his good birth and family money, iterated in practice through a preference for abstract ideals (Marxist ideals, presented by Powell as beyond ridiculous, in a not-even-wrong sort of way) over actual human interaction. Erridge is a dabbler, pottering at stiffly polemical journalism and pamphlets; ridiculous, priggish, absent-minded, a dull twit. If Powell's portrait of him isn't exactly that he is actively contemptible, that's only because there's not enough substance in Erridge to merit any emotional reaction so feisty. It is certainly outwith the ability of this novel to imagine, even obliquely, that a rich man giving up his wealth could be anything other than absurd. There's nothing of Tolstoy, Gandhi, or even Wittgenstein about Erridge. And, the more I read, the more profoundly irritated I became by Powell's satirical certainty in this matter.
It's perfectly possible that Eric Blair was, in life, just as ridiculous, priggish, absent-minded, foolish and self-deluding as Powell presents him as being. He was, though, a genius; one of the very few actual geniuses of 20th-century English literature. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a towering novel, the sort of book that changes lives (it had a meteor-crash impact on my own early reading) on the individual but also the social level. Animal Farm is a classic; his personal accounts (The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out, the Catalonia book) are marvellous; a healthy chunk of his (wide-ranging) journalism and literary criticism is still vibrantly alive. But there is there none of this in Erridge as he appears in At Lady Molly's; and Powell's rendering of Blair as another one of his petty grotesques, like a less-comical Widmerpool, left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. The point is: Powell missed something not only central and crucial but elephant-in-room-ish about Blair when he turned him into Erridge. The novel misses not only Orwell's perhaps chilly, unforgiving dignity; more to the point it misses that the century about which Powell is writing belongs much more to Orwell's vision of things than it did to Powell's own well-mannered superannuated dix-huitième siècleisme. It doesn't dispose me to trust the rest of his fictionalised autobiography. And Eric/George = 'Erridge' is lazy pseudonymising.
This is a shame, because there's a lot to praise in this book.
Love your essays. And Powell. And Orwell. I think you will be as pleased by the following as I was.
ReplyDeleteBarbara Wallraff said (in the Atlantic Monthly):
"In his memoirs Powell details specific connections between acquaintances and characters which demonstrate thoroughly that Dance is nothing so simple as a roman à clef: that would be the wrong way to read these books."
Powell and Orwell seem to have been good friends. Christopher Hitchins said (also in the Atlantic):
In point of his own political outlook Powell achieved some comparable understated effects. He seems at first glance to have been an axiomatic and inflexible young Tory. He described a contemporary as "given to singing the Internationale, a tune for which tone-deafness presented no handicap." Visiting Spain in 1933, he recorded the impression that "administration was breaking down everywhere"—as if this were a law-and-order problem rather than the stirrings of a republic. He evinced no apparent interest either in the social questions or in those who were occupied with them; the radicals in his novels and in these pages are mainly clowns or hypocrites. Yet for several crucial years he was extremely close to George Orwell, whose flinty socialist principles—and persistence in trying to live up to them—might well have invited Powell's gentle ridicule but (perhaps because they were not bogus) instead won his respect. The pages recollecting his friend are of interest and some beauty.
'Goodness knows what Orwell would have been like in the army. I have no doubt whatever that he would have been brave, but bravery in the army is, on the whole, an ultimate rather than immediate requirement, demanded only at the end of a long and tedious apprenticeship.'
Here again, reading that deceptively dense sentence, one is reminded of what it is to be molded by a very highly evolved and somewhat stratified society. In such a system courage is neither a sufficient nor even in the strict sense a necessary condition for the high calling of arms; a force that depended on mere bravery would be merely a militant rabble—subject to mood swings, perhaps, and indubitably depriving its officer corps of opportunities for understatement. Such almost invisible writing about the most palpable of questions is a continual distinction of Powell's work and an unending reward for the reading of it.
Powell chose the hymns for Orwell's funeral, in 1950.
'The Lesson was from Ecclesiastes, the grinders in the streets, the grasshopper a burden, the silver cord loosed, the wheel broken at the cistern. For some reason George Orwell's funeral service was one of the most harrowing I have ever attended.'