Between Proust & Waugh

CASANOVA'S CHINESE RESTAURANT (229 pp.)--Anthony Powell--Little, Brown ($4).

Anthony Powell, a novelist whom British Critic V.S. Pritchett has ranked with Evelyn Waugh, and whom Evelyn Waugh has ranked with Proust (though "more realistic and much funnier"), is almost totally neglected in the U.S. It is not that Powell is dull; he is indeed much funnier than Proust (though not, perhaps, to the French). It is not that his subject matter is so special as to be outside U.S. sympathy; by now, British upper and middle class life should be less exotic to the U.S. reader than Yoknapatawpha County or the gas-filled pads of Jack Kerouac and his pals. The reason must lie in the curious economics of publishing, which dictate that his current work be issued as a separate novel. It is not a novel. It is the fifth installment* of a work-in-progress titled The Music of Time, which is being imported piecemeal, under what seems to be a secret treaty between the U.S. and British publishers imposing a limitation on the tonnage of newly launched authorship.

Readers unaware of the Powell (rhymes with Lowell) plan may feel aggrieved at the apparent inconsequence of episodes in which characters appear for no other reason than that they are well known to the author and he has not yet decided on the manner of their deaths. Powell's esthetic argument seems to be that this is how people run across each other in life--why not in a book? Once this convention is accepted, the reader will be richly rewarded if he succumbs to a Powell addiction.

Philosophical Conundrum. For those who came in late, it should be explained that The Music of Time is narrated by Nick Jenkins, who, like Powell, is of Welsh origin, with family connections with Army and "County," went to Eton and Oxford, and is currently engaged in literary criticism. Previous installments have taken Nick through school and university, and have looked fixedly at English high life and business. The current episode concerns that curious interbellum miscegenation between Society and the Arts dealt with so brilliantly in the satiric masterpiece of Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God. Its period is that Slough of Despond known as the Late Thirties, and nowhere else has the moral despair of that time been better described. It calls to mind the philosophical conundrum: "If a man tossing a coin to a one-eyed beggar blinds his good eye, is his action praiseworthy?"

The scene is London, and Nick Jenkins is still the sad Seeing-Eye dog for a troupe (if that can be imagined) of comic blind men. Stringham, a once-brilliant fellow and his close friend at school, is now under virtual house arrest as an alcoholic by his sister's former governess. Widmer-pool, a great comic creation who represents Business in Powell's mind, has soared to the skirts of Mrs. Simpson's "set." The Tolland family, whose head is Lord Warminster, illustrates the vast confusion of the British ruling class at the time. ("I haven't been in Spain for years," says Lady Warminster. "I liked the women better than the men. Of course they all have, English nannies.") Depression, the approach of war, the abdication, all are enacted in the wings; Powell's characters, like those of Jane Austen (who never bothered hers with the Napoleonic wars), are at center stage, though they always seem to be talking about someone in the audience.

Civil Observation. What of the future of The Music of Time? It may confidently be predicted that deaths in the cast of characters will be more frequent. They are getting no younger, and besides, they cannot all come through the war with a whole skin. Will we learn anything about Nick's marriage to Isobel Tolland except that she had a miscarriage? How will "Chips" Lovell get on with Priscilla Tolland? The addicted reader can hardly wait. Meanwhile it would seem to be a safe bet that Narrator Nick Jenkins will be commissioned, like Author Powell, in a posh regiment (Powell was an officer, first in the Welch Regiment, then in intelligence), and will later continue, in London and in the vanishing English countryside, Powell's own course as gentleman of letters.

For those with a taste for such things, Powell's Music of Time is brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times. Nothing like Powell's enterprise has been seen in English letters since Dickens and Trollope went bashing out their three-decker serials. His talents are rare without being exotic. He is neither a visionary nor a voyeur, but an observer--civil, ironic, amused, curious. By now, he seems to know his characters so well that he has developed a sort of courtesy toward them. Critic Pritchett has warned him of this danger--of the "risk that his characters will become so familiar and real to him that he will cease to make them important to us."

The warning is perhaps too late. In Casanova's Chinese Restaurant,* too many events happen offstage (people get married and die, as it were, in parentheses), and Powell seems to have thrown away the novelist's Godlike privilege of always being in at the kill. But he retains other advantages: he does not fake, he does not invade bedrooms or invite others into his own; he is an artist of the public event. Powell seems to be giving an account of events that are still current, of living while he writes--unlike Proust in his cork-lined room, who evoked things past in order to live again when life itself was done and over with. Powell has not yet created one of the mountains of literature, but his molehills, for those with the leisure to watch, can be quite as interesting as the moles are when they are seen heaving up their moving midget tumuli under the surface of an English lawn.

* The others: A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, The Acceptance World (TIME, Feb. 20, 1956), At Lady Molly's (TIME, Aug. 11, 1958).

* A London restaurant with an Italian name, Chinese cuisine, French decor, English waitresses and interracial clientele, taken by Powell as a symbol of his theme of cultural confusion.

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