Books Do Furnish A Room

“The grotesquerie and pathos of the literary scene have rarely been better caught”

Is it possible to have a favourite book? Mood is everything and while some days you might revel in The Inimitable Jeeves, on others The Road might be your required dish. However, any desert island selection of mine would have to include Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor and the Tintin two-parter The Secret of the Unicorn/Red Rackham’s Treasure. Then I would cheat slightly and include the remarkable A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell - it’s actually a series of 12 books, but I count it as one story and it’s my list so that’s fine.

It’s hard to condense the action pithily but this by Robert L Selig in his book Time and Anthony Powell, A Critical Study is endorsed by The Anthony Powell Society and strikes me as a decent stab at it too.

This twelve-volume sequence traces a colorful group of English acquaintances across a span of many years from 1914 to 1971. The slowly developing narrative centers around life’s poignant encounters between friends and lovers who later drift apart and yet keep reencountering each other over numerous unfolding decades as they move through the vicissitudes of marriage, work, aging, and ultimately death. Until the last three volumes, the next standard excitements of old-fashioned plots (What will happen next? Will x marry y? Will y murder z?) seem far less important than time’s slow reshuffling of friends, acquaintances, and lovers in intricate human arabesques.”

It’s hard to pick out one of them as a favourite but a strong contender would be Books do Furnish a Room (1971). At this point in the roman fleuve, the second world war has just finished. As is the case throughout the Dance, familiar characters from previous books reappear. But here the focus is on a new face, X. Trapnel (inspired by the writer Julian MacLaren-Ross), famous for his semi-autobiograpical novel Camel Ride to the Tomb and his swordstick with a carved skull-shaped knob.

Indeed, the book is the most literary in the cycle, with narrator Nick Jenkins researching a book on Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, the destruction of a manuscript in tear-inducing style, and our first sight of revolutionary magazine editor Lindsay Bagshaw whose rather long nickname (there are two, equally strange, explanations) gives the book its title. “The grotesquerie and pathos of the literary scene have rarely been better caught,” suggests Powell’s biographer, Hilary Spurling.

“Anthony Powell's novel sequence has always been popular among book collectors for its subject matter,” Adam Douglas from London rare book specialist Peter Harrington told me. “Steeped as it is in the world of 20th-century literary publishing in Britain, it offers a number of interesting disguised and composite portraits of such denizens of the literary demi-monde as Sonia Brownell, Aleister Crowley, Augustus John, Constant Lambert, Christopher Millard, FR Leavis, Peter Quennell, and Barbara Skelton, as well as better known figures such as John Galsworthy and George Orwell. Those are all either collectible names in their own right, or figures on the fringe of literary movements.”

X. Trapnel is a particular favourite of Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and co-host of the popular UK books podcast Backlisted (“giving new life to old books”). “This volume is his chance to shine, decline and fall,” says Andy, who a few years ago co-hosted a very popular live public recording of the podcast about Books do Furnish a Room at the London Review Bookshop.

“The books may no longer be fashionable in literary circles but they are still surprisingly popular because they are good,” he says. “People read the whole thing repeatedly. And ‘Books do Furnish a Room’ is often very funny. It's interesting, this. When you read something funny out loud to a room full of people who have only previously heard it in their own heads, you tend to get a good response. The personal experience becomes a shared one.”

The book’s title certainly resonates in the book industry. Journalist Leslie Geddes-Brown reused it wholesale for her 2009 illustrated survey of books as interior design objects, and it is also the name of a bookshop in Durham, North Carolina. A couple of years ago scientist Richard Dawkins adapted it for his latest essay collection, ‘Books do Furnish a Life’. When he asked on Twitter if people got the allusion, Dawkins concluded from the responses that they didn’t, but Andy Miller isn’t so sure.

“I think its popularity is underestimated. I'm always seeing people say something along the lines of, "Does anyone today read Anthony Powell?" The answer to that is, well yes actually, they definitely read him and in significant numbers. In critical terms, I suppose, it depends on who is doing the estimating.” 

Adam Douglas is also sure of its continued appeal. “Books Do Furnish a Room,” he says, “is the rueful cry of many a book collector when confronted by a spouse who, for some unaccountable reason, is keener on empty walls and expensive uplighting.”

So if you’re looking for a new reading challenge, I’d strongly recommend you have a go at the Dance. I don’t think it’s really beach material, but on the other hand it is very readable and each volume is quite slim.