Just over a week ago things seemed so bad in the United Kingdom that, in addition to the specter of Scottish independence, some were even discussing the potential of Welsh nationalism. For the progressive, wealthy, European-oriented elite that runs Britain in the year 2014, this was seriously off-script. The Arc of History quite clearly dictates that nations—especially ethnically conceived nations—are meant to signify less and less in this twenty-first century of the Common Era. The Scots have always been trouble, so perhaps it was unsurprising that they wanted to be a perverse exception to the historical rule. But come on: the Welsh?
Welsh nationalism is not without content, and is inescapably tied to mixed feelings about the English. Of course, the Welsh are thoroughly interbred with the English, such that both feelings and blood are mixed. Housman summed up the awkward situation pretty well in ‘The Welsh Marches,’ which he published in his A Shropshire Lad:
Ages since the vanquished bled
Round my mother's marriage-bed;
There the ravens feasted far
About the open house of war:
When Severn down to Buildwas ran
Coloured with the death of man,
Couched upon her brother's grave
The Saxon got me on the slave. …
When shall I be dead and rid
Of the wrong my father did?
How long, how long, till spade and hearse
Put to sleep my mother's curse?
One quintessentially English man who took his Welsh heritage seriously was Anthony Powell. This appreciation was why he insisted on the peculiar pronunciation of his name (pole, not POW-ell) and it fit into his lifelong interest in the role of family and descent on character. In a sense, his masterpiece—the twelve-novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time—is about the end of the supremacy of a tightly interrelated set of families in Britain, and the rise of something awful and new: Today’s reigning elite, with its ostensible preference for (in Powell’s view) entirely questionable values like innovation, merit, and hard work.
In this, Powell had a lot in common with Waugh, his contemporary, who felt roughly the same way about Britain’s—and the world’s—direction in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike Waugh, most of whose novels seem neatly sortable either as farces or baroque dramas (the great exception being his Sword of Honour trilogy) Powell started as a comic novelist and never entirely ceased to write comedies, even when embarking on his epic in the early ’50s.
His early novels—some of which are now being re-issued by the University of Chicago Press—display many of the same stylistic and structural elements of the more mature work, though as yet undeveloped into the particular pathos-heavy, bone-dry, serio-comic blend that would make the Dance so remarkable. The wit of the later books is certainly there, typically deployed to deflate the pretensions of Powell’s own class of minor aristocrats and hangers-on. Take the depiction of the hapless and moneyed Pringle in Afternoon Men, Powell’s first novel, when he sidles up to the counter in a pub near where he has just purchased a country house:
Pringle leant at the bar. He said:
"Is Cheadle far from here?"
The barman said: "Couldn’t say. I’m a stranger in these parts."
Implying the climax of not a few generations of squirerarchy in the neighborhood, Pringle said:
"I have a house here."
"Oh yeah," said the barman…
There is a dark, even nihilistic tinge to the comic tone of these early efforts. Later in Afternoon Men, when it is suspected that Pringle has swum out to sea to drown himself following a romantic setback, the other young people gathered for a holiday at the new country house engage in a multipage debate about the propriety of having lunch, despite having not yet reported the apparent suicide.
The moral atmosphere of these books is reminiscent of nothing so much as the United States in the 1990’s—the lunch debate is a scene that could easily spring from the comic imagination of Larry David. The novels are full of unsympathetic characters doing unlikeable things—very often to raucous effect—in a world that feels metaphysically adrift. Casual references to Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell pepper the texts. The anti-hero of From A View To A Death is introduced thusly:
Zouch was a superman. A fair English equivalent of the Teutonic ideal of the Übermensch. No one knew this yet except himself. That was because he had not been one long enough for people to find out. They would learn all in good time; and to their cost.
The ritualistic demise of such a man as Zouch is a trope that Powell would continue to play with in the Dance. Ritual itself—the emphasis on patterns that stands as a central theme of the later epic—is already in evidence in the early novels, which also include Agents and Patients and What’s Become of Waring. But one has the sense that, despite the common elements, the difference between these savagely funny slender efforts and the Dance itself is that Powell did not yet understand the import of what he was describing, because he had not yet lived long enough to see that the story was going somewhere.
There is ennui in the early novels, but not much in the way of pathos. Re-embarking on his fiction after the Second World War, Powell was to find that dimension in the existence of the ritual itself—the metaphor of life as Poussin’s dance, where chance encounters and mysterious repetitions hint at the existence of invisible things. As Powell’s narrator puts it in the first paragraphs of the cycle’s opening novel, A Question of Upbringing:
The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.
There was also pathos in what, by the ’50s, was clearly the collapse of the same aristocracy Powell lampoons as merely decadent in the ’30s. In the early novels, the aristocrats are always hard up for cash or aware that the previous generation had a little bit more money than the current one. The First World War had slashed a mortal wound in the neck of their way of life, but they didn’t know it yet. After the rather gratuitous punishment of the Second World War the fatal character of the bleeding became clear. When Powell re-embarked on telling the story of that society in the ’20s and ’30s, his fiction took the form of a comic eulogy—like Proust’s Belle Époque, but funnier.
Along with an appreciation of a lost world and a defenestrated elite, by the ’50s it had become more obvious to Powell who the villains of the new world were—the class of strivers embodied in the ever-humiliated Widmerpool of the Dance. American readers may miss that Widmerpool is destined for great evil when they first encounter him jogging early in A Question of Upbringing. For an American, exercise on a damp winter’s day is likely to be a sign of good character. For Powell, it marks Widmerpool as the sort of man who might one day do you in.
The strivers—not to mention the Americans—have been in charge for some decades now. They are very wealthy, they don’t care about what family a man comes from (or, at least, they claim that they don't) and—like the elite that preceded them—they are persuaded that they are here to stay: that history is not a cycle of rises and declines, but an evolutionary tale of progress. Powell would see the pathos in that belief.