The Steps of the Dance

By the time they are half a century old, most books have ceased to be subjects of critical controversy. Their reputations are generally agreed upon: masterpiece or minor classic, obscurity or oblivion. But while Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time began to appear in 1951, and its author died in 2000, critics still don't seem to know quite what to make of it. It can hardly be ignored, if only because, in terms of sheer scale, it is without rival in twentieth-century English fiction.

The Dance is a series of twelve novels that totals more than twenty-five hundred pages and a million words. The only modern work that compares is Proust's In Search of Lost Time; and it is not just their scale that unites them. Powell was consciously indebted to Proust for the whole conception of the Dance, and the series is punctuated by allusions to its French predecessor. Like Proust's sequence, Powell's charts the life of its narrator from boyhood to middle age as it intersects with the lives of his friends and with historical events.

The publication of Hilary Spurling's new biography, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, has provided an occasion for critics to relitigate the question of Powell's achievement and its relationship to Proust's. In an essay in the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson argued at length that Powell was actually the superior novelist: "Quantity is one thing, quality another. There Powell stands alone." Yet as Anderson granted, this is far from being a consensus view. Proust is ensconced at the center of world literature, the subject of countless studies in many languages. Powell, meanwhile, remains a parochial phenomenon, bulking much larger in the view of British readers than he does elsewhere — including the United States, where his readership by now must be minute.

The truth is that the comparison with Proust does Powell no favors, for it encourages us to look to the Dance for a kind of experience it was never meant to supply. Proust is analytical and deductive, using the material of his experience to arrive at general principles about desire, memory, happiness, and time. He strives for, and achieves, qualities of profundity and exhaustiveness that are foreign to Powell, whose approach is much more empirical and observational. Powell records the human comedy without pressing and squeezing it for meaning; the general conclusions about life and society that emerge from the story mainly do so indirectly. If this makes Powell finally a less rewarding writer than Proust, it also makes him a less demanding one. People don't write books about the experience of getting through the Dance, the way they do about In Search of Lost Time, because the reading bears less resemblance to scaling Everest.

A good gauge of the difference between Proust and Powell is the way they deal with naming their fictional alter egos. Proust famously avoids telling us his narrator's name, suggesting only once that he is so close to the author that the reader will inevitably think of him as "Marcel." The effect is to bring the reader entirely inside the narrator's consciousness: he is not one person among many in the story, but the medium through which human nature itself is scrutinized. This is one of the ways in which In Search of Lost Time approaches the condition of autobiography or confession.

Powell, on the other hand, takes a more conventionally novelistic approach. The Dance's narrator is Nicholas Jenkins, whom we first meet as a teenager in the year 1921. The son of an army officer whose career failed to flourish, Nick attends Eton and Oxford, where he meets many of the people whose lives will be entangled with his for the next fifty years. He then moves to London and embarks on a haphazard literary career, working first for a book publisher, then as a screenwriter for a movie studio, and later as a magazine editor and freelance book reviewer. During the Second World War he puts writing aside to join...