At Lady Molly's: Book Club

“All the same, you may find absolutely anybody at Aunt Molly’s”

The reality of Chips Lovell’s comment about who you could bump into at his aunt’s gatherings is that actually it’s largely the same crowd simply in a different set of rooms with Tuffy, Mark Members, Widmerpool (naturally), Alfred Tolland, et al, swinging back into the dance. I don’t mind this at all. I know some people find this book unexciting and one of the weaker books in the series (we’re now technically into the ‘Summer’ books trilogy or what Powell called ‘the second movement’), and it’s true that there are no big set piece excitements, but it’s actually one of my favourites, a gossipy comedy of manners in which Nick seems to blossom. Nothing happens and everything happens.

As always, at the centre of it all is Kenneth, and while Nick has alluded to their connection before, he really spells it out this time:

“Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road; perhaps it would be more apt to say that his course, as one jogged round the track, was run from time to time, however different the pace, in common with my own. As an aspect of my past he was an element to be treated with interest, if not affection, like some unattractive building or natural feature of the landscape which brought back the irrational nostalgia of childhood.”

Now in his late 20s, his lunch with Widmerpool underlines that Nick is feeling happier in his skin, more able to get a grip on the kind of chap his old school contemporary has become, and with a more comfortable relationship with the world in general. He’s a proper adult now. I particularly enjoyed him niggling Kenneth when his newly engaged friend asks him to forget all about his previous passion for Barbara ‘sugar bowl’ Goring. Nick replies of course he will, adding mischievously: “And I presume you want Gipsy Jones forgotten too?”.

But he still maintains the same understated presence as narrator. His breakup with Jean is passed over swiftly with no bleating, no fuss, and no detailed explanation, Widmerpool’s unwitting yet decisive action in saving her marriage all the more devastating for the lack of analysis of his throwaway explanatory remark. At the end of the last book the illicit love birds looked a bit doomed, and so it has turned out, and there’s no need to spend endless pages examining and reexaming it.

Similarly, Nick’s relationship with Isobel (“A bit of a highbrow when she isn't going to night clubs”) is barely detailed at all, bar some nervous philosophising about marriage (pictured top are James Purefoy and Emma Fielding playing the two parts in the television adaption of Dance which has also indelibly imprinted Adrian Scarborough as Quiggin on my mind whenever he turns up). It’s so removed as if (to coin one of Powell’s favourite linguistic motifs) to be almost written in the third person. Personally, I love this approach. It’s why I like Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical-ish narrator figure in Prater Violet, Goodbye to Berlin, and Mr Norris Changes Trains, as well as Garrison Keillor’s in his series of Lake Wobegon Days semi-memoirs. Nick is far more Hildegard of Bingen’s ‘feather on the breath of God’ drifting through life compared to the endlessly tiring battle of wills exhibited by others who are the focus of the book.

But Chips is not entirely wrong. There are some marvellous new introductions too and indeed the cast list is expanding rapidly (I kept having to remind myself of the almost incestuous Sleaford-Tolland family tree’s layout - the Tollands are based on the real life Pakenhams whom Powell married into). Smith is a superb newcomer, on a par with Jeeves’ temporary replacement Brinkley as Bertie’s valet in P.G. Wodehouse’s Thank You, Jeeves.

“It was impossible to tell from Smith’s vacant, irascible stare whether he had never before been asked for sherry since his first employment at Thrubworth, or whether he had himself, quite simply, drunk all the sherry that remained.”

Powell is not always praised for his witty writing, but I found myself laughing/smiling quite regularly in ALM.

Most enigmatically of all there is the multi-faceted General Conyers, not at all sure about Virginia Woolf though game to give her a fair trial (Powell was not a fan of hers at all) and the antithesis of good old Uncle Giles, linked by Nick with Widmerpool as “men of the will”. While there is a little of the soap opera about the book, it also contains an examination of forcefulness (or lack thereof).

It’s also clear that we’re heading towards war, although we’re still some way from actual hostilities breaking out. Widmerpool is in full appeaser mode, suggesting Goering be given a meaningless gong to satisfy him in the same way that Trump might be bought off with a chat with King Charles. Ted Jeavons, for my money a much less interesting character than Nick seems to think, has no time for such mullarkey though. “Declare war on Germany right away. Knock this blighter Hitler out before he gives further trouble.”

As always, there is a mountain of quotes to savour including Nick’s observation on realising the identity of Mildred’s betrothed (“Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.”) and another of Powell’s sidelong observations of life’s Dance:

“Everyone knows the manner in which some specific name will recur several times in quick succession from different quarters; part of that inexplicable magic throughout life that makes us suddenly think of someone before turning a street corner and meeting him, or her, face to face.”

Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is next, with a whole set of genuinely new partners introduced into the Dance, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with the quasi-documentary film Nick goes to see at the cinema, 1934’s Man of Aran, when his unnamed date tells him to stop being so philosophical.