Wednesday’s Child: What Now?

I hope what I’m about to say will not make me sound like a luvvie – that untranslatable British term for an artist, especially an actor, who is embarrassingly effusive or affected – but finishing the Powell book leaves a great dark void in the mind. I got through the final, twelfth, volume yesterday, just as the aristocratic malaise that had kept me bedridden started letting up. Frankly, I hardly know what to do with myself now that I’m better, except to write this last in what is now a quintet of posts attuned to A Dance to the Music of Time.

Musically, the first volume has the plainness, lightness, and jocosity of Mozart, and indeed some of his triviality. A friend of mine, whom I had tried to induce into reading the saga some years ago, gave up half-way through A Question of Upbringing, saying he found it boring – an opinion one can easily imagine formed on hearing an early Mozart composition.  But already the next volume, A Buyer’s Market, exhibits the maturity and complexity of themes that we associate with the Jupiter Symphony and the later piano concertos, in other words, with what makes Mozart Mozart. And then it develops from there, all through the volumes that follow on to the sublime architecture of Beethoven’s quartets, to brooding Sibelius, to Bruckner and Mahler.

The progression can be viewed just as persuasively in literary terms, with the first volume possessed of triviality in the manner of Dickens, or Galsworthy, or Dreiser, but already the second a dense thicket of half-hints, half-revelations reminiscent of Henry James, a European selva oscura couched, however, in the ironic, sparse idiom of quintessentially British interwar writing. The narrative’s tension, undergirded by Powell’s prodigious syntax – in itself an English lesson for our grammatically enfeebled times, on a par, I would argue, with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall – mounts in subsequent volumes until, in Hearing Secret Harmonies, it very nearly breaks down as it reaches a pitch I can only describe as Dostoevskian.

Before this, English writers shied away from or were congenitally unable to describe “scenes,” episodes of social or amatory scandal and confusion involving actors as well as spectators, at which Dostoevsky, and Russian literature generally, so excelled. The scene in The Idiot when wads of banknotes are thrust into the fireplace is a classic example, as is the closing “dumb” or “mute” scene in Gogol’s The Inspector General.

I can think of no English writer apart from Powell who handles such subject matter with anything like Dostoevskian virtuosity. No sooner does Pamela Flitton enter the narrative in The Military Philisophers, volume nine of the cycle – not counting her cameo appearance as a flower girl at a church wedding in volume two, when she is sick into a baptismal font – than the reader is given to understand that some kind of violent climax involving her is in store for him. In fact, with Dostoevskian brazenness, the real climax is delayed until well after her death and the explosion only takes place in the closing pages of the novel.

As I say, that explosion leaves an emotional blank in its wake. It is difficult to think of something to write, or indeed to do, once the last page of Powell’s improbably glorious cycle of novels has been turned. Putting on the water for the pasta just doesn’t do it.