Respectfully Submitted

By Christopher Porterfield

BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM by Anthony Powell. 241 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

Minutes of the biannual meeting of the Anthony Powell Club:

The occasion was the publication of Books Do Furnish a Room, the tenth in the master's projected twelve-volume series, A Dance to the Music of Time. After the induction of new members, the chairman noted that our rolls were moderate in England and small in America, but growing. A motion was defeated to lower the entrance requirement from a close reading of six volumes in the series to a close reading of three. During the discussion it was pointed out that the series so far had covered a span of more than three decades of English life and that the Characters Committee had annotated no less than 300 characters and was still going strong.

An American member questioned whether Powell readers should be a club at all, observing that it was snobbish and tended to make us take the master too seriously. He complained of comparisons to Proust. The Chairman ruled him out of order, saying that Powell was a clubbish sort of writer, and that anyway we were all too addicted to consider whether this was a good thing. [Applause.] A dissident younger group demanded a debate on the proposition that The Music of Time was altogether too cultivated and leisurely, neither as trenchantly funny as Evelyn Waugh nor as morally serious as Graham Greene. They were shouted down.

There was one announcement--the party for the master's 66th birthday in December will be held in a replica of Dicky Umfraville's nightclub in At Lady Molly's, after which the literary director read his report on the new novel:

"With Books Do Furnish a Room. Powell's rornan fleuve moves on from its wartime trilogy to chronicle the fitful resurgence of normal life in drab postwar England. Old members will know what to expect and will not be disappointed. Once again the narrator is Nick Jenkins, out of the army and back in London as literary editor of a new little magazine. Once again the plot proceeds not so much by incidents as coincidence. In a series of set pieces --a funeral, a literary cocktail party --characters bob up from the past, intermingle, realign themselves and caper off. As they pass, the inexhaustibly observant Nick murmurs his commentary with a rueful smile. All rather contrived, perhaps, but as Powell has one of his characters say: 'Human beings aren't subtle enough to play their part. That's where art comes in.'

"Two of the major parts are played by familiar figures from previous volumes. Kenneth Widmerpool, who epitomizes all that is obnoxious and pathetic in people who get ahead in the world, is now M.P. His newly acquired wife is the fabled Pamela Flitton, as bitchy and beautiful as she is promiscuous. Widmerpool is backing Nick's magazine and its editor, a furtive, bibulous literary hack known in the trade as Books-Do-Furnish-a-Room Bagshaw. Pamela is backing a gifted, eccentric writer in the magazine's stable, X. Trapnel, to the extent that she leaves Widmerpool and moves in with him. Ultimately she destroys him and returns to Widmerpool, while the intrigues surrounding the liaison cost Bagshaw his job.

"In the background, Nick works at a book about Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. In Powell, no such detail is ever incidental, and indeed, most of this novel's characters are pervaded by melancholy--in a Burtonian sense of the word--being in the grip of some disabling passion such as sorrow, fear or especially love. Powell's intricate music is still scored for a faintly ridiculous comic dance, but as it launches into the final movement there is a crescendo of grave, dark chords of mortality."

The meeting was adjourned. Members retired to the lounge for port, but the dissidents created a ruckus in the library, cackling and hooting over some novels by Waugh.

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