Jenkins Ear Again

TEMPORARY KINGS by ANTHONY POWELL 280 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

Anthony Powell's roman fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, is turning into a dance of death. With this eleventh of a projected twelve volumes, the series--chronicling the ebbs and flaws of English upper-class life since the first World War--is nearly played out. Already the narrative extends across 40 years to about 1958, outdistancing many of the lives it recounts. Powell's narrator and alter ego, Nicholas Jenkins, is now in his 50s, an age that, he ruefully notes, confirms one's "worst suspicions about life."

The setting for most of the new installment is Venice--Thomas Mann's Venice as well as, say, Casanova's--where Jenkins and the other major characters have assembled for an international conference. For the moment they are living like kings in sinking palazzi, but Jenkins reflects that they are only temporary kings like those in The Golden Bough: marked, after their brief ascendancy, for death. By the end of the book that death proves to be literal for several; for others, it takes the symbolic form of loss of virility, humiliation or merely a return to everyday life.

Powell is hardly a writer to get lugubrious about all this. As in his earlier volumes he maintains, through Jenkins, the tolerantly amused air of a man who can come to terms with almost anything, preferably over drinks and with some gossip and a laugh or two thrown in. He can even endure Kenneth Widmerpool, that bumptious, obtuse careerist who has moved like an inexorable force through the entire series. Widmerpool, it now appears, is never going to get the comeuppance he deserves. In Temporary Kings he has a close scrape over a bit of cold-war espionage, but extricates his questionable honor and career, typically, at the expense of someone else's reputation.

It is Widmerpool's wife Pamela, an elegant harpie who was visited upon him like a judgment in Powell's previous volume, Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), who now moves to center stage. As promiscuous and frigid as ever, she lends a macabre sexual touch to dreadful Widmerpool's international intriguing. She also ensnares Powell's two important new characters--Louis Glober and Russel Gwinnett.

This pair, both Americans, illustrate Powell's penchant for isolating national and temperamental types. Glober is a sixtyish, playboy film producer, a self-made man up from Jewish-immigrant slums, who takes a snippet of pubic hair from every woman he seduces. Gwinnett is a withdrawn, thirtyish academic, a descendant of Button Gwinnett, the first signer of the Constitution, who has a whiff of necrophilia in his makeup. Both are drawn to Pamela partly because of her infamous liaison (in Books Do Furnish a Room) with the late writer X. (for nothing, not for Xavier) Trapnel, the possible source of a film for Glober, a biography for Gwinnett.

The interlocking motives of the Widmerpools and the two Americans suggest that Powell is heading toward some conclusion about sex, death and power. By the end of Kings it has not emerged clearly. Will his finale be an elegiac, dying fall? A vest-pocket apocalypse, with history hounding his characters as relentlessly as mortality? Hard to say. But he leaves his characters frozen in poses and gestures that have enough teasing significance to keep readers ruminating until the final volume comes out.

Naked Wife. For all his use of musical metaphors, Powell really works like a painter. His characters do not so much act within his frame as carry their histories in with them. Powell rearranges them, models and highlights them, then steps back to give a leisurely commentary on his composition. In Temporary Kings, as if to underline the affinity, he creates an imaginary Tiepolo based on the ancient Lydian legend about Candaules, the king who exhibited his wife naked to his friend Gyges, only to be killed and succeeded by Gyges.

The way in which Powell invests the whole of the book with parallels, variations and ironic reversals of this legend is wondrously rich and subtle. For the reader, however, the pleasure of tracing all these connections has a price: care, patience and a knowledge of several previous volumes. One of X. Trapnel's dicta was: "Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them." A half-truth, but never truer than with Powell. . Christopher Porterfield

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