Hearing Secret Harmonies
I reached the end of A Dance To The Music Of Time. It was a long canter round the Palais and I’m inclined now to go to the bar and give my legs a rest for a while. I have to say, though, that the final book, for which this post is named, is strange and not, for me, a wholly satisfying conclusion. That annoys me more than I expected.
Nick Jenkins is conscious of his own ageing as he recounts the deaths of contemporaries, the weddings of his contemporaries’ grandchildren (as always, we learn nothing of his own children, and only a little about his wife, Isobel), and a meeting with the object of what was once young love. He is, in the words of Thomas Vaughan,
Looking at the sunset towards the west wind
Hearing Secret Harmonies.
He is less inclined to leave home to go to London because:
In a writer’s life, as time shortens, work tends to predominate, among other things resulting in a reduction of attendance at large conjunctions of people.
That doesn’t, of course, preclude telling of some of those conjunctions of people that he does attend, and, in doing so, he brings the Dance sequence to an end which, rather like a progressive barn dance, is to bring it back to the beginning.
I’m pleased with myself for making my way through the Dance, although I suspect it was only because I got all the books together, used, cheap, that I felt inclined to persevere. And it was rewarding. It takes effort to adapt to Jenkins’s voice and style, but there is a fine return in terms of style, humour, and reflection. I’m not sure that I’ll ever take another turn through the sequence, although I might remind myself of the first three books – I read them so long ago that the memory fades.
One of the striking things about these books, despite the male narrator and the male-dominated world(s) through which the story progresses, is the agency of the women, especially sexual agency. Although the story is told largely through the voices of men, what Powell shows is often quite different from what the men tell, and I think that is deliberate. He is also, given that it was illegal at the time, clear that some of the characters are actively homosexual or bisexual or otherwise enjoying non-vanilla sex, and is non-judgmental about it. Rather like the norse sagas, the issue isn’t so much behaviour as character and context.
Having said that, the most sexually aggressive of all the characters, Pamela Flitton/Templer/Widmerpool is a blank space. It is clear that she has been ‘damaged’ in some way in childhood, but it is never made explicit what happened (though hints are dropped). Rather like Canon Fenneau (below), I should have liked to know more about her interior life.
Hearing Secret Harmonies, and the series, ends with an invocation of the cycle of endless return and repetition of life, but if the previous books in the series are tinged with tragedy, Hearing Secret Harmonies veers too much towards farce, and that’s a shame. I also have a problem with the through-narrative of the final story, which doesn’t ring true. The book is a somewhat slight satire on the late 1960s/early 1970s, that, for me, misses the mark, undercutting the fate of Widmerpool. Widmerpool may well have been, in the words of Bob Duport, 100% bastard and a château-bottled shit, but he deserved a better ending.
Throughout the series, the occult is a bit player, or at least occultists are: Dr. Trelawney, loosely modelled on Aleister Crowley, Mrs. Erdleigh, spiritualist and fortune teller, the somewhat sinister Canon Paul Fenneau, Russell Grynnett (by implication) and Scorpio Murtlock. Sometimes these are presented as figures of fun, sometimes not, and Jenkins maintains a distant, rationalist perspective on them all. Unfortunately, Murtlock is to the fore in the final volume, and it just doesn’t work for me, despite the usual display of Powell’s sly witticisms and ironies.
I might add that, of all the occultists in the books, Canon Paul Fenneau, strikes me as simultaneously the most interesting and the most under-developed. He’s the one who would be played by Peter Cushing.
The end of the final novel is, I think, pleasingly ambiguous. I am not sure if Powell is simply drawing a veil over proceedings, or if we are meant to infer that Jenkins has literally, as well as fictionally, breathed his last:
The thudding sound from the quarry had declined now to no more than a gentle reverberation, infinitely remote. It ceased altogether at the long drawn wail of a hooter—the distant pounding of centaurs’ hoofs dying away, as the last note of their conch trumpeted out over hyperborean seas. Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.
I am sufficiently engaged to hope that Nick and Isobel spent their last years in long and contented companionship.
***
On the subject of tragedy and farce, our ludicrous government continue to be an international embarrassment. I’m indifferent in some respects to the farcical shenanigans; I absolutely am not indifferent to the tragic outcomes that will follow – which will not be incurred by those politicians, of course. Many of the core characters of Powell’s Dance are products of a lightly fictionalised Eton, and it is notable that most of them are confident, articulate and content to trade on privilege, while also never quite being up to the mark.
The dance continues.
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