Corpse in the Garden

THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD (214 pp.)--Anthony Powell -- Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.50).

In two world wars Britain gained the admiration of the whole world, but in victory lost (or mislaid) the custodian of its own soul--the middle class. Historians of this civil-war-by-attrition have necessarily come from the ranks of the defeated; one of the most skilled and disenchanted of these is a dry-styled novelist and critic (Punch) named Anthony Powell.

Since World War II (he served in the Welch Regiment and in Intelligence), Powell has resumed writing a series of novels in which he looks back with wry hindsight on the middling years of his life and on the causes of the discontents gnawing away at his class. The low-decibel tone in which he has written his eleven books may explain why he has almost escaped attention in the U.S. The earlier installments of this series (A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market) never sold as many as 5,000 copies in the U.S. The latest installment may force a reassessment. Perhaps U.S. readers have been passing up one of the most astute and skillful regional novelists now working.

Enter, Marx. In A Question of Upbringing, Author Powell created a narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, who went to a school suspiciously like his own (Eton), and at first blink the book might have been dismissed as just another clever young man's attempt to settle scores with his old school. But Powell, at 50, still writes of young men like a young man--one who has mercifully lived down his youth. Narrator Jenkins has a remarkably good ear, and records middle-and upper-class conversation with comic precision. And he is presented as a descendant of that Captain Jenkins about whose ear a war was fought in the 18th century.* By this ancestry, Author Powell indicates that great events are to be set in motion by his apparently offhand trivia.

By now Powell's gaga saga has gathered an odd and diverting cast of characters who make their entrances and exits, as people do in life, with no particular design. In The Acceptance World he shuffles them in all their inconsequence into the Great Depression, or as the British prefer to call it, "The Slump." The early '30s have been both mourned and deplored, but never quite so coldly derided.

Karl Marx, who in spirit presided over this period, is introduced in a characteristically oblique Powell way. He makes his appearance over a ouija board (planchette in Britain) at a seance conducted by Myra Erdleigh, a figure like T. S. Eliot's "Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante," said to be "the wisest woman in Europe." She warns of the planchette: "The things it writes cause such a lot of bad feeling sometimes." The board says that "Karl is not pleased" and, ominously, "Force is the midwife."* Thus the bewhiskered ghost of Marx sets Jenkins' friends whirling about in new gyrations of folly and self-seeking. Among the cast:

P: A Marxist literary critic named J. G. Quiggin and a liberal named Mark Members, two broke and brilliant university men who symbolize the United Front. They contend for the job as secretary to a rich, vain novelist of inflated reputation. Quiggin, the Marxist, wins, and triumphantly trundles the senile genius in his wheelchair at the head of a workers' demonstration in Hyde Park.

P: Dicky Umfraville. one of a group of muddled sahibs back from Kenya, who was not exactly "sacked" from school or "hoofed out" of the colonies, but who turns up in London complaining that things are not as they had been.

P: Two Waugh-begone women, Bijou Ardglass and Baby Wentworth, who hunt their gross and boorish businessmen prey. One of the girls ends up in a bad marriage to an Italian. ("His profession?" "I don't think I know you well enough to tell you.")

P: Kenneth Widmerpool, who first appeared in the series as a clodhopping schoolboy, the butt of Jenkins' witty friends. But now those friends are ruined, bitter, broke or drunk. But Widmerpool, the earnest bore, alone seems to be making a go of it in a suddenly makeshift world. He works in a financial house that specializes in discounting bills. Widmerpool's job as a bill-broker becomes a symbol of Author Powell's thesis:

"It seemed to suggest what we were all doing, not only in business, but 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 . . . sometimes not."

Exit, Empire. Widmerpool, however, is in the midst of the Acceptance World without understanding it. At the Old School's annual Old Boys' dinner, Widmerpool, as the man of the '30s, horrifies all by making a long, uninvited speech on economics. The old housemaster, a neurotic, twisted pillar of the Old Order, salutes the onset of economics by suffering a stroke, and the Old Boys disband to their dim and several destinies.

The tone of Powell's books recalls Chekhov--the elegiac irony of a world where the last of the wormy, golden apples of Empire were falling from the tree. Yet the essence of Jenkins' war with the world is neither bound to a period nor insularly British. It is essentially a secular tragedy told in the idiom of understatement (which Novelist Powell admits "has its own banality"); there is a pit beneath the parquet floor and the Old School Tie may become a garrote. It needs all his well-tended prose to keep the corpse of nihilism buried in the garden.

*The War of Jenkins' Ear, a name popularly applied to the war between England and Spain, 1739-43. The incident that contributed to its outbreak: Captain Robert Jenkins' English brig Rebecca was plundered by Spaniards, one of whom cut off the captain's ear and handed it back, "bidding him carry it back to His Majesty, King George."

* Marx in Das Kapital: "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one."

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