A Buyer's Market: Book 2 of A Dance to the Music of Time

By Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

The second volume, A Buyer’s Market (1952),finds young Nick Jenkins struggling to establish himself in London. Amid the fever of the 1920s, he attends formal dinners and wild parties; makes his first tentative forays into the worlds of art, culture, and bohemian life; and suffers his first disappointments in love. Old friends come and go, but the paths they once shared are rapidly diverging: Stringham is settling into a life of debauchery and drink, Templer is plunging into the world of business, and Widmerpool, though still a figure of out-of-place grotesquerie, remains unbowed, confident in his own importance and eventual success. A Buyer’s Market is a striking portrait of the pleasures and anxieties of early adulthood, set against a backdrop of London life and culture at one of its most effervescent moments.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

 

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780226677354

Book preview

A Buyer's Market

Book Two of

A Dance to the Music of Time

BY

Anthony Powell

The University of Chicago Press

A Buyer’s Market: Book 2 of A Dance to the Music of Time

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

Copyright © 1952 by Anthony Powell

Copyright renewed 1979 by Anthony Powell

All rights reserved.

University of Chicago Press electronic edition 2010

Information about the complete series, A Dance to the Music of Time, can be found on our website: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67735-4

ISBN: 0-226-67735-4

Contents

Dedication

1. THE last time I saw any examples...

2. UNCLE GILES’S standard of values was...

3. I USED to imagine life divided into separate compartments...

4. A SENSE of maturity, or at least of endured experience...

A Buyer’s Market

For

Osbert and Karen

1.

THE last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon’s work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death. The canvases were none of them familiar, but they recalled especially, with all kinds of other things, dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons’, reviving with a jerk that phase of early life. They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain. Outside, the spring weather was cool and sunny: Mr. Deacon’s favourite season of the year. Within doors, propped against three sides of a washstand, the oil-paintings seemed, for some reason, appropriate to those surroundings, dusty, though not displeasing; even suggesting, in their way, the kind of home Mr. Deacon favoured for himself and his belongings: the sitting-room over the shop, for example, informal, not too permanent, more than a trifle decayed. His haunts, I remembered, had bordered on these northern confines of London.

Accumulations of unrelated objects brought together for auction acquire, in their haphazard manner, a certain dignity of their own: items not to be tolerated in any inhabited dwelling finding each its own level in these expansive, anonymous caverns, where, making no claim to individual merit, odds and ends harmonise quietly with each other, and with the general sobriety of background. Such precincts have something of museums about them, the roving crowd on the whole examining the assembled relics with an expert, unselfconscious intensity, not entirely commercial or acquisitive.

On these particular premises almost every man-made thing seemed represented. Comparatively new mowing machines: scabbardless and rusty cavalry sabres: ebony fragments of African fetish: a nineteenth-century typewriter, poised uncertainly on metal stilts in the midst of a tea-set in Liverpool ware, the black-and-white landscapes of its design irreparably chipped. Several pillows and bolsters covered with the Union Jack gave a disturbing hint that, somewhere beneath, a corpse awaited burial with military honours. Farther off, high rolls of linoleum, coloured blue, green and pink, were ranged against the wall like pillars, a Minoan colonnade from which wicker arm-chairs and much-used pieces of luggage formed a semicircle. Within this open space, placed rather like an emblem arranged for worship, stood the washstand round which the pictures were grouped. On its marble top rested an empty bird-cage, two men-at-arms in lead, probably German, and a dog-eared pile of waltz music. In front of a strip of Axminster carpet, displayed like faded tapestry from the side of a nearby wardrobe in pitch pine, a fourth painting stood upside down.

All four canvases belonged to the same school of large, untidy, exclusively male figure compositions, light in tone and mythological in subject: Pre-Raphaelite in influence without being precisely Pre-Raphaelite in spirit: a compromise between, say, Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema, with perhaps a touch of Watts in method of applying the paint. One of them—ripping away from its stretcher at the top—was dated 1903. A decided weakness of drawing was emphasised by that certitude—which overtakes, after all, some of the greatest artists—that none of Mr. Deacon’s pictures could possibly have been painted at any epoch other than its own: this hallmark of Time being specially attributable to the painter’s inclination towards large, blank expanses of colour, often recklessly laid on. Yet, in spite of obvious imperfections, the pictures, as I have said, were not utterly unsympathetic in that situation. Even the forest of inverted legs, moving furiously towards their goal in what appeared to be one of the running events of the Olympic Games, were manifested to what might easily have been greater advantage in that reversed position, conveying, as they did, an immense sense of nervous urgency, the flesh tints of the athletes’ straining limbs contrasting strangely with pink and yellow contours of three cupids in debased Dresden who tripped alongside on top of a pedestal cupboard.

In due course two bucolic figures in cloth caps, shirtsleeves, and green baize aprons held up Mr. Deacon’s pictures, one by one, for examination by a small knot of dealers: a depressed gang of men, looking as if they had strayed into that place between more congenial interludes on the race-course. I was not sure how this display might strike other people, and was glad, when exposure took place, that no unfriendly comment was aroused. The prodigious size of the scenes depicted might in itself reasonably have provoked laughter; and, although by that time I knew enough of Mr. Deacon to regard his painting as nothing more serious than one of a number of other warring elements within him, open ridicule of his work would have been distressing. However, all four elevations were received, one after another, in apathetic silence; although the ‘lot’ was finally knocked down for a few pounds only, bidding was reasonably brisk: possibly on account of the frames, which were made of some black substance, ornamented with gold in a floral pattern, conceivably of the painter’s own design.

Mr. Deacon must have visited the house at least half a dozen times when I was a child, occasions when, by some unlikely chance, I had seen and spoken with him more than once; though I do not know why our paths should have crossed in this manner, because he was always reported ‘not to like children’, so that our meetings, such as they were, would not have been deliberately arranged on the part of my parents. My father, amused by his conversation, was in the habit of referring to Mr. Deacon’s painting without enthusiasm; and when, as he sometimes did, Mr. Deacon used to assert that he preferred to keep—rather than sell—his own works, the remark usually aroused mildly ironical comment at home after he was gone. It would not be fair, however, to suggest that, professionally, Mr. Deacon was unable to find a market for his classical subjects. On the contrary, he could always name several faithful patrons, mostly business people from the Midlands. One of these, especially, spoken of as a ‘big iron man’—whom I used to envisage as physically constructed of the metal from which he derived his income—would, for example, come down from Lancashire once a year: always returning northward in possession of an oil sketch of Antinous, or sheaf of charcoal studies of Spartan youth at exercise. According to Mr. Deacon, one of these minor works had even found its way into the ironmaster’s local art gallery, a fulfilment which evidently gave great satisfaction to the painter; although Mr. Deacon would mention the matter in a deprecatory sort of way, because he disapproved of what he called ‘official art’, and used to speak with great bitterness of the Royal Academy. When I met him in later life I discovered that he disliked the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists almost equally; and was, naturally, even more opposed to later trends like Cubism, or the works of the Surrealists. In fact Puvis de Chavannes and Simeon Solomon, the last of whom I think he regarded as his master, were the only painters I ever heard him speak of with unqualified approval. Nature had no doubt intended him to be in some manner an adjunct to the art movement of the Eighteen-Nineties; but somehow Mr. Deacon had missed that spirit in his youth: a moral separateness that perhaps accounted for a later lack of integration.

He was not rich; although his income, in those days, allowed the preservation of a fairly independent attitude towards the more material side of being an artist. He had once, for example, turned down the opportunity to decorate the interior of a fish restaurant in Brighton—where he lived—on grounds that the sum offered was incommensurate with the demeaning nature of the work demanded. His means had also enabled him to assemble what was said to be an excellent little collection of hour-glasses, silhouettes, and bric-à-brac of various kinds. At the same time he liked to describe how, from time to time, in order to avoid the expense and responsibility of domestic staff, he deliberately underwent long periods of undertaking his own cooking. ‘I could always earn my living as a chef,’ he used to say; adding, in joke, that he would look ‘enormously ornamental’ in a white cap. When travelling on the Continent he commonly went on foot with a haversack on his back, rather than by trains, which he found ‘stuffy and infinitely filled with tedious persons’. He was careful, even rather fussy, about his health, especially in relation to personal cleanliness and good sanitation; so that some of the more sordid aspects of these allegedly terre-à-terre excursions abroad must at times have been a trial to him. Perhaps his Continental visits were, in fact, more painful for managers of hotels and restaurants frequented by him; for he was a great believer in insisting absolutely upon the minute observance by others of his own wishes. Such habits of travelling, in so much as they were indeed voluntary and not to some degree enforced by financial consideration, were no doubt also connected in his mind with his own special approach to social behaviour, in which he was guided by an aversion, often expressed, for conduct that might be looked upon either as conventional or conservative.

In this last respect Mr. Deacon went further than my Uncle Giles, whose creed of being ‘a bit of a radical’ was also well publicised within his own family circle; or, indeed, wherever he might find himself. My uncle, however, dealt in substance he knew and, although he would never have admitted as much, even to some extent revered, merely desiring most aspects of that familiar world to be more nicely adjusted to his own taste. Mr. Deacon, on the other hand, was in favour of abolishing, or ignoring, the existing world entirely, with a view to experimenting with one of an entirely different order. He was a student of Esperanto (or, possibly, one of the lesser-known artificial languages), intermittently vegetarian, and an advocate of decimal coinage. At the same time he was strongly opposed to the introduction of ‘spelling reform’ for the English language (on grounds that for him such changes would mar Paradise Lost), and I can remember it said that he hated ‘suffragettes’.

These preferences, with the possible exception of decimal coinage, would have been regarded as mere quirks in my uncle; but, as they were presented in what was almost always a moderately entertaining manner, they were tolerated by my parents to a far greater degree than were similar prejudices disseminated by Uncle Giles, whose heartily deplored opinions were naturally associated in the minds of most of his relatives with threat of imminent financial worry for themselves, not to mention potential scandal within the family. In any case, aggressive personal opinions, whatever their kind, might justly be regarded as uncalled for, or at best allowed only slight weight, when voiced by a man whose career had been so uniformly unsuccessful as had that of my uncle. Mr. Deacon’s persuasions, on the other hand, could be regarded with tolerance as part of the stock-in-trade of a professional artist, by no means a failure in life, and to be accepted, however unwillingly, as the inevitable adjunct of a Bohemian profession: even valuable in their way as illustrating another side of human experience.

At the same time, although no doubt they rather enjoyed his occasional visits, my parents legitimately considered Mr. Deacon an eccentric, who, unless watched carefully, might develop into a bore, and it would not be precisely true to say that they liked him; although I believe that, in his way, Mr. Deacon liked both of them. The circumstances of their first meeting were unrecorded. An introduction may have taken place at one of the concerts held at the Pavilion, which they sometimes attended when my father was stationed near Brighton in the years before the war. During that period a call was certainly paid on Mr. Deacon in his studio: several small rooms converted to that use at the top of a house in one of the quiet squares remote from ‘the front’. He had chosen this retired position because the sight of the sea disturbed him at his work: a prejudice for which psychological explanation would now certainly be available.

I never saw the studio myself, but often heard it spoken of as well stocked with curiosities of one kind or another. We moved from that neighbourhood before the war came in 1914, and, I suppose, lost touch with Mr. Deacon; but for a long time I remembered the impression of height he gave when, one day after tea, he presented me with a wooden paint-box—the pigments contained in tubes—the heavy scent of the tobacco he smoked hanging round the pleats and belt of his Norfolk jacket, a garment already beginning to look a little old-fashioned, and the sound of his voice, deep and earnest, while he explained the range of colours to be found within the box, and spoke of the principles of light and shade: principles—I could not help reflecting as I examined the canvases in the sale-room—which his brush must have so often and so violently abused.

By the stage of life when I happened on these four pictures, I had, of course, during our brief latter-day acquaintance, had opportunity to observe Mr. Deacon in surroundings rather different from my parents’ domestic interior, where I had first heard his peculiarities discussed; and I had also, by the time I found myself in the auction-room, talked over his character with persons like Barnby, who knew him at closer range than I myself ever experienced. All the same, I could not help pondering once again the discrepancy that existed between a style of painting that must have been unfashionable, and at best aridly academic, even in his early days; and its contrast with the revolutionary principles that he preached and—in spheres other than æsthetic—to some considerable extent practised. I wondered once again whether this apparent inconsistency of approach, that had once disconcerted me, symbolised antipathetic sides of his nature; or whether his life and work and judgment at some point coalesced with each other, resulting in a standpoint that was really all of a piece—as he himself would have said—that ‘made a work of art’.

Certainly I could not decide that question there and then in the auction-room among the furniture and linoleum, to the sound of bidding and taps of the hammer, even in the light of later circumstances in which I had known him; and I have never really succeeded in coming to a positive conclusion on the subject. Undoubtedly his painting, in its own direction, represented the farthest extremity of Mr. Deacon’s romanticism; and I suppose it could be argued that upon such debris of classical imagery the foundations of at least certain specific elements of twentieth-century art came to be built. At the same time lack of almost all imaginative quality in Mr. Deacon’s painting resulted, finally, in a product that suggested not ‘romance’—far less ‘classicism’—as some immensely humdrum pattern of everyday life: the Greek and Roman episodes in which he dealt belonging involuntarily to a world of cosy bar-parlours and ‘nice cups of tea’—‘At least when thought of,’ as Barnby used to say, ‘in terms of pictorial reproduction in, say, photo-gravure’—even though Barnby himself, in some moods, would attempt a defence at least of certain aspects of Mr. Deacon’s art. In short, the pictures recalled something given away with a Christmas Number, rather than the glories of Sunium’s marbled steep, or that blue Sicilian sea that had provided a back-cloth for the Victorian Hellenism propagated at school by my housemaster, Le Bas. Mr. Deacon’s painting might, indeed, have been compared, though at a greatly inferior level of the imagination’s faculties, with Le Bas’s day-dreams of Hellas; and perhaps, in the last resort, Mr. Deacon, too, would have been wiser to have chosen teaching as a career. Undeniably there was something didactic about his manner, although, as a child, I had naturally never speculated on his idiosyncrasies, of which I knew only by hearing them particularised by my parents or the servants.

This touch of pedantry had been apparent at a later date, when we ran across Mr. Deacon in the Louvre, during summer holidays taken soon after the termination of the war, when my father was still on duty in Paris. That afternoon, although I did not immediately recognise him, I had already wondered who might be the tall, lean, rather bent figure, moving restlessly about at the far end of the gallery; and his name, spoken again after so many years, at once identified him in my mind. When we had come up with him he was inspecting with close attention Perugino’s St. Sebastian, for the better examination of which, stooping slightly, he had just produced a small magnifying-glass with a gold rim. He wore a thickish pepper-and-salt suit—no longer cut with belt and side-pleats—and he carried in his hand a hat, broad-brimmed and furry, the general effect of the whole outfit being, perhaps intentionally, a trifle down-at-heel: together with the additionally disturbing suggestion that his slightly curved torso might be enclosed within some form of imperfectly fitting corset. His grey hair, which needed cutting, was brushed straight back, showing off a profile distinguished rather than otherwise: a little like that of an actor made up to play the part of Prospero, the face heavily lined and grave, without conveying any sense of dejection.

He recognised my parents at once, greeting them with an odd, stilted formality, again like an old-fashioned actor’s. My father—who was not in uniform—began to explain that he was attached to the staff of the Conference. Mr. Deacon, listening with an absorbed expression, failed or, perhaps it would be truer to say, pretended for reasons of his own to misunderstand the nature of this employment. In his resonant, faintly ironical voice, he asked: ‘And what might you be conferring about?’

At that period Paris was full of missions and delegates, emissaries and plenipotentiaries of one kind and another, brought there by the traffic of the Peace Treaty; and probably my father could not imagine why Mr. Deacon should appear to want further details about his job (which had, I believe, something to do with disarmament), a matter which could, after all, at least in its details, be only of professional interest. He certainly did not guess that Mr. Deacon must have decided for the moment to close his eyes to the Conference, together with much—if not all—that had led to its existence; or, at least, preferred, anyway at that juncture, to ignore all its current circumstances. My father’s reply, no doubt intentionally discreet, was therefore worded in general terms; and the explanation, so far as could be seen, took Mr. Deacon no farther in discovering why we were at that hour in the Louvre.

‘In connexion with those expositions the French love so much?’ he suggested. ‘So you are no longer militaire?’

‘As a matter of fact, they have not given nearly so much trouble as you might expect,’ said my father, who must have taken this query to be a whimsical manner of referring to some supposed form of intransigence over negotiation on the part of the French staff-officer constituting his ‘opposite number’.

‘I don’t know much about these things,’ Mr. Deacon admitted.

The matter rested there, foundations of conversation changing to the delineation of St. Sebastian: Mr. Deacon suddenly showing an unexpected grasp of military hierarchy—at least of a somewhat obsolete order—by pointing out that the Saint, holding as he did the rank of centurion—and being, therefore, a comparatively senior non-commissioned or warrant officer—probably possessed a less youthful and altogether more rugged appearance than that attributed to him by Perugino: and, indeed, commonly, by most other painters of hagiographical subjects. Going on to speak more generally of the Peruginos to be found throughout the rest of the gallery, Mr. Deacon alleged that more than one was labelled ‘Raphael’. We did not dispute this assertion. Questioned as to how long he had himself been living in Paris, Mr. Deacon was vague; nor was it clear how he had occupied himself during the war, the course of which he seemed scarcely to have noticed. He implied that he had ‘settled abroad’ more or less permanently; anyway, for a long time.

‘There really are moments when one feels one has more in common with the French than with one’s own countrymen,’ he said. ‘Their practical way of looking at things appeals to a certain side of me—though perhaps not the best side. If you want something here, the question is: Have you got the money to pay for it? If the answer is yes, all is well; if no, you have to go without. Besides, there is a freer atmosphere. That is something that revolutions do. There is really nowhere else in the world like Paris.’

He was living, he told us, ‘in a little place off the Boul’ Mich’.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t possibly ask you there in its present state,’ he added. ‘Moving in always takes an age. And I have so many treasures.’

He shook his head after an enquiry regarding his painting.

‘Much more interested in my collections now,’ he said. ‘One of the reasons I am over here is that I have been doing a little buying for friends as well as for myself.’

‘But I expect you keep your own work up now and then.’

‘After all, why should one go on adding to the detritus in this transitory world?’ asked Mr. Deacon, raising his shoulders and smiling. ‘Still I sometimes take a sketch-book to a café—preferably some little estaminet in one of the working-class quarters. One gets a good head here, and a vigorous pose there. I collect heads—and necks—as you may remember.’

He excused himself politely, though quite definitely, from an invitation to luncheon at the Interallié, a club of which he had, apparently, never heard; though he complained that Paris was more expensive than formerly, expressing at the same time regret at the ‘Americanisation’ of the Latin Quarter.

‘I sometimes think of moving up to Montmartre, like an artist of Whistler’s time,’ he said.

Conversation waned after this. He asked how long we were staying in France, seeming, if anything, relieved to hear that we should all of us be back in England soon. On parting, there was perhaps a suggestion that the encounter had been, for no obvious reason, a shade uncomfortable; in this respect not necessarily worse than such meetings are apt to turn out between persons possessing little in common who run across each other after a long separation, and have to rely on common interests, by then half-forgotten. This faint sense of tension may also have owed something to Mr. Deacon’s apparent unwillingness to go even so far in comparing autobiographical notes as might have been thought allowably free from the smallest suggestion of an undue display of egotism; especially when conversation was limited chiefly because one side lacked any idea of what the other had been doing for a number of years.

‘I was glad to see Deacon again,’ my father said afterwards, when, that afternoon, we were on our way to tea at the Walpole-Wilsons’ flat in Passy. ‘He looked a lot older.’

That must have been almost the last time that I heard either of my parents refer to Mr. Deacon or his affairs.

However, the meeting at the Louvre, among other experiences of going abroad for the first time, remained in my mind as something rather important. Mr. Deacon’s reappearance at that season seemed not only to indicate divorce of maturity from childhood, but also to emphasise the dependence of those two states one upon the other. ‘Grown-up’ in the ‘old days’, Mr. Deacon was grown-up still: I myself, on the other hand, had changed. There was still distance to travel, but I was on the way to drawing level with Mr. Deacon, as a fellow grown-up, himself no longer a

Reviews for A Buyer's Market

[therebelprince · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"This is perhaps an image of how we live."

There are occasions when I look back at previous reviews and feel somewhat naive. When I read A Question of Upbringing in those heady days of November 2016, I didn't warm to much in Powell's literary toolkit. Now that I've read A Buyer's Market, although I fully stand by that review and my analysis of the author's shortcomings, I appreciate him all the more. This review is a high 3 stars, but I can't yet offer him that much-ballyhooed fourth.

Aside from some flashbacks to Paris after "the war", we are mostly situated at the end of the '20s, as Nick and Widmerpool attend a variety of social functions, from grand dances to awkward dinners and finally a funeral, along the way running into everyone they met in the first book, and being forced to constantly reassess their approach and point-of-view.

Although Powell and Proust share a connection, it's becoming clear that Powell is as far from modernism as one can be while still writing literature in the mid-20th century. Powell's interest is in our personal development, and how we interact with society, but I think less with how society forms us, and especially less with the idea of human memory and fallibility. When Powell deals with character growth, he does not primarily mean internal growth - aside, perhaps, from Nick Jenkins himself - but instead with how we change as viewed by others.

The received wisdom about these books is that Jenkins is something of an audience surrogate, but I see him as a fully-fledged character. What works best about these novels is the wry understanding Jenkins develops about himself, and the way he viewed the world. I think what people mean is that Jenkins' life remains opaque. He is constantly reflecting on how separated he has become from those school and university chums we met in book one. But we really have little idea of which people he is spending his time with.

What else works? Powell's ability to conjure up ambience in just a few sentences, his gradual comic Jenga puzzles, as in the first event the lads attend which culminate in little moments of comedy like the forgotten pile of Deacon's anti-war magazine. And his light skewering of the upper classes, always with affection but never with a blind eye.

What doesn't work? Well, Powell's prose meanders between the sublime and the utterly mundane. Maybe up to 10 times in this novel, Jenkins sees someone in the distance, or hears a voice, and tells us how it was vaguely familiar. Sometimes Powell will devote a whole paragraph of inane reflection, only to gradually reveal a character we've met before. If thinking cynically, I wonder if this was Powell attempting to formulate the actions of the mind and memory on the page but if so, he is far from successful.

In his satire of the lower classes, from the insufferable Quiggins to the constantly aggressive Gypsy Jones, Powell reveals his own biases in a way that - unfortunately - is setting him against the zeitgeist, and I suspect it's the reason these famous books have stunningly few reviews on Goodreads, especially as the series moves toward its end.

There's also the problematic nature of older writing, which I'm not going to keep bringing up in these reviews, but here black people, Jewish people, and not infrequently women get a bum rap, and - unlike in the writing of Powell's great, humanist contemporary Barbara Pym - one cannot write these bigotries off as the voice of characters. Still, Powell existed in his world, and his writings are not intending to stir up hate or disenfranchisement, so I'm not going to hold him in contempt just because his views do not match mine.

Powell and Art

Art continues to play a crucial role in Book Two, and I think any reader is well-advised to engage with the works mentioned. The Pre-Raphaelites;the porcelain Staffordshire dogs that tell us so much about character; Jenkins' view of Le Bas as a figure from the Bayeux Tapestry; Mr. Deacon's strong dislike of the Impressionists; Degas; Mestrovic; and the Haig Memorial. Art inhabits and surrounds these characters, and interpretations of art are one of the key methods by which Powell distributes characterisation to the ever-expanding supporting cast. It's one of his greatest attributes.

So, it's fair to say I won't be waiting another two-and-a-half years to dip into the Dance again. At the same time, what surprised me most when I skimmed through Book One before starting this one was that I remembered it so well. Not just the plot but so many specific incidents and conversations. If Powell can linger with me so strongly after one book, I imagine I can string out the Dance over a number of years and be richly rewarded.

[booksfordinner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Read about half of this a couple of years ago, and got bored and stopped. I read my review it’s pretty funny. Home sick from work, so decided to try again, and basically read the book in a day.Not sure why I was so impatient the first time I read it.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps the most surprising characteristic of A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s sweeping twelve volume autobiographical novel, is how little one learns about the narrator. The books take the form of reminiscences by Nick Jenkins, and extend to well over a million words, but the focus is steadfastly upon the people whom he encountered rather than on himself. The second volume of the roman fleuve opens with Jenkins, presumably in middle age or beyond, looking through the wares on offer at a downmarket auction and recognising a lot of four paintings by E Bosworth Deacon. This prompts him to recollect his earliest encounter with Mr Deacon, who had been a friend of his parents, and whom they had chanced upon during a visit to the Louvre shortly after the end of the First World War. (Jenkins’s father had been a delegate at one of the plethora of conferences that were held in Paris after the war, and whose work ultimately fed in to the Treaty of Versailles). During that period, Mr Deacon was living in Paris, and seemed to be in a state of denial about the recent conflict.Jenkins is then moved to recall one of Deacon's paintings in particular, "The Boyhood of Cyrus", which had hung in the hall of a house where he had attended dances during his early years living in London. This brings us back to "real time" in the novel sequence, with Jenkins now in his early twenties (probably around 1926/27) and living in a shabby set of rooms in Shepherd Market, then a run-down area of London close to the smart neighbourhood of Mayfair. He mentions, almost in passing, that he is working for a firm that publishes art books ... and that is about all we find out about his day to day life.He is, however, in love (or at least he thinks he may be ...) with Barbara Goring, a rather noisy, hyperactive girl who plays a prominent part in the world of society dances and debutantes’ balls. Jenkins hovers on the fringes of this world, and at one ball has a chance encounter with Widmerpool, whom he had last seen four or five years ago in France where they had both passed a summer staying with the LeRoy family while trying, with limited success, to learn French. It is only at this meeting that Jenkins learns that Widmerpool’s forename is Kenneth. Widmerpool is now moving forward in life, having established himself as a solicitor but with designs to enter the world of business.The ball takes an unexpected and (for Widmerpool, at least) traumatic turn, and at the end of the evening Widmerpool and Jenkins find themselves walking through the back streets of Piccadilly when they literally bump into Mr Deacon. With his gamine and forthright companion, Gypsy Jones, Mr Deacon has been selling pacifist newspapers at Victoria Station. While still conversing with Mr Deacon and Gypsy Jones, Jenkins and Widmerpool are hailed by their former school companion Charles Stringham, who encourages them to join him at a party being given by his current partner Mrs Andriadis. What seems a mere chance encounter detonates a serious of reverberations that will resound through the remaining volumes of this immense, elaborate and enchanting saga. We are also treated to the welcome reappearance of some characters from the previous volume (including Uncle Giles, who has always been one of my favourites!).Powell's style is always understated, and it is, perhaps, only on a re-reading that the true intricacy of the sequence becomes evident. The books are never full of incident. Indeed, this novel takes the form of three or four set pieces, including the ball describe above, a social visit to the home of a leading industrialist, a bohemian birthday party and the aftermath of a funeral. They are, however, richly stowed with acute observation and a laconic, sardonic encapsulation of the hopes and fears of the decades between the wars. The humour is exquisite, but always underpinned by a strong current of melancholia.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The second book of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time has the young Jenkins entering life as a young adult, starting in business, entering society and surveying the available girls. This is a time where there is a shortage of men following WW2. Jenkins feels he is starting to live life.

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nothing in the first novel of ADMT really prepares you for this. There you get short introductions to characters, traditional plot movements, transparent prose and above all variety. With A Buyer's Market we're suddenly in the realm of Proust volume three, which is pretty much a party described over hundreds of pages. Say what you will about Powell. This is shorter than Le Côté de Guermantes. I wonder if Marias, anglophile that he is, took as much from Powell as from Proust to write Your Face Tomorrow?

Anyway, as in Proust (and Marias), we're pretty much without plot, something of which I often disapprove. Things happen, but they're reported in dialogue rather than narrated, and the things that happen are, unsurprisingly given that the narrator is in his mid twenties, mostly sex and drinking and the results of sex and drinking, until Mr. Deacon dies, probably due to drinking. There's no grit here, just humor. It could easily be Wodehouse, with less plot.

But the form of the novel is breath-taking. We begin, for no obvious reason, with Mr. Deacon, his late-decadent, Alma-Tadema-esque painting, and his antique shop. We conclude with his death, which is followed, uncomfortably, by the narrator fucking Mr. Deacon's young lady friend (who, uncomfortably, has fooled Widmerpool into paying for an abortion, probably by promising him her favors, and then not actually given him any favors) in Deacon's antique shop.

So the narrator's generation takes over from that of their parents: Deacon dies, Uncle Giles is rendered more and more silly, and even the high and mighty end up looking much more down to earth. Characters from 'A Question of Upbringing' have attained some notoriety in their fields. The musical analogy starts to make sense, too, both with the 'return' of Deacon at the end, and with motifs from AQU showing up again (notably the car accident).

In short, ABM is funnier than AQU, but not as entertaining. As an artifact to think about, though, it's much more impressive. Also, Powell's prose becomes more Jamesian here. I can't remember if that keeps up through the other volumes, or not.

[jeffome · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

OK book....not great.....i suppose a logical sequel to the first and knowing there are 10 more.....i guess not that much can happen. I enjoyed the first quite a bit, and i do definitely relate to the narrator Jenkins and his general sense of always being a bit behind the curve in all that develops in his life....i still feel like I'm there quite often. A lot of coincidences that are obviously the point, but i did not expect quite so many. But I guess that early career phase where you are finding your feet is not the most exciting part of our lives, so it is rather accurate. I am still very interested in continuing through this series and i do enjoy the subtle humor that is gently inserted throughout. Gonna take a little break from Powell, but i will be back soon.

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I did enjoy this 2nd book of "A Dance to the Music of Time" more than the first one (A Quesion of Upbringing) so I'm glad I persevered and I will read more of this series. It definitely needs to be read in order so don't start with this one!

Anthony Powell's dry humor took me a while to warm up to... I sometimes feel that he is writing to show off his vocabulary: "Whatever solution was, in fact, found to terminate the complexities of that moment, Mr. Deacon's immediate expulsion from the house at the command of Mrs. Andriadis was not one of them; because, when I looked back - after proceeding nearly a hundred yards up the road -- there was still no sign of his egress, violent or otherwise, from the house." However, that said, I didn't find the prose difficult to read, just dry in places.

[devenish_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The second (of twelve)of the books following the life and career of Nick Jenkins. The most memorable event here is the incident in which Widmerpool gets a full container of sugar poured over his head. Apart from that the 'dance' describes a party,a country weekend,an wedding and the funeral of one of the main characters,all in great detail. Anthony Powell writes with great skill and indeed his writing is unlike any other. If you are looking for a quick paced novel with lots of action,do not attempt this series as you will be sadly disappointed as very little happens at all.If however beautiful writing style and witty dialogue is your thing,then do try them.

[jonrob_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The second book in the "Music of Time" series find Nick Jenkins working in London, but the action concentrates on his leisure time. A very long sequence sees him attending a series of functions on the same evening: firstly dinner at the Walpole-Wilson's, at which the ubiquitous Widmerpool turns up, as well as Barbara Goring with whom both he and Nick are in love; then on to a ball at the Huntercombes', at which occurs the incident with the sugar; afterwards Widmerpool and the narrator encounter firstly Mr. Deacon (an acquantaince of Nick's parents) and the urchin-like Gypsy Jones, and then Charles Stringham; finally Stringham takes all of them to a rather more bohemian affair given by Milly Andriadis. The interactions of these and other characters are starting to form the pattern of recurrences which is one of the sequence's themes, and include Nick's discovery of why Mr. Deacon spent some years abroad and Widmerpool's uncharacteristic behaviour in helping Gypsy to have what is clearly an illegal abortion. Basically, if you liked "A Question of Upbringing" you should definitely progress to this one next.