The Ballad of Pamela Flitton: The Classic had it Coming

One of my favorite poems since my youth has been The Ballad of Reading Gaol; its strong rhythm, its depth of feeling, spoke to me right away. And the verses beginning from stanza 7 ("Yet each man kills the thing he loves...) to the end of part I were among the very few poems I had by memory.

And then, of course, I heard the bloody John Denver/Placido Domingo duet, Perhaps Love (the 80s have a lot to answer for) which, if you just add the closing line of each sung verse "My memories of love will be of you" as sung, completely scans to Wilde's text.

No, seriously, it does. Open the link to the poem in another window, click the YouTube, and sing along--and know horror that only Cthulhu can surpass.

Once I realized this, of course, I was doomed to hear the frakking song every damn time I read the poem. And so, I fear, are you now.

Sorry about that.

Anyway, years later, when as a fledgling member of the Anthony Powell Society, I was tempted by a writing contest for the annual luncheon, and was inspired to revisit Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. There I re-encountered the femme fatale Pamela Flitton (who also destroyed great art on a whim, so, yeah, in keeping with the subject of this post), and, for the contest, sacrificed poor battered Reading Gaol:

For each man kills the thing he loves.
Well, that’s what Oscar said.
But Pam Flitton never cared to love,
And still a lot of chaps are dead.
There was, we know, X Trapnel,
With his ring and fancy cane,
He could handle the wandering of the gel,
But not the papers in the Seine.

Yes, Pam ended poor old Trapnel’s plight,
With his book drowned in water cool
But the heaviest loss of those she wrought
Was that of Kenneth Widmerpool.
What’s that you cry, but poor old Ken
Lingered a volume—or was it two?
And died of spite his death at twilight
To escape Scorp’s bitter rule.

And yet I say Pam claims the palm,
For it was she who broke the pith
Of Kenenth’s soul so Scorp could calm
his followers by giving Ken the Bith.

The lady's trail of death and strife,
may have ended with poor Ken,
It's said that Powell drew her from life
depicting Babs Skelton,
Years after our dear Pam was gone,
her memoirs can be read,
The pages rich with malice,
about the men who loved and fled.

Perhaps unurprisingly, I did not win.

Who Will Walk Through the Mirror Door?

This song from the Who's 2006 album Endless Wire (which doesn't get enough love, by the way; see David Fricke's perceptive review) gets something about the creative process, as far as I can see.

There's an unpredictability, and a vulnerability, when you--ok, when I--undertake something creative. I don't know what's coming out. Oh, I have a vague plan, some bullet points, I admit--but something takes over; a typo leads to a whole new digression, a prior character changes from his planned arc, an unplanned character announces her arrival.

The mind and spirit are effervescent, I follow, as bemused any future reader will ever be.

And, like the Who in "Mirror Door," I find myself invoking my specters--my predecessors in writing, my teachers, even though I have only met them from their books.

They enter through my own mirror door….

Tony Trollope, RFD;
Powell, A and Snow, CP;
GBS and Mark Twain;
Saki bearing extra dry champagne.

Simon Raven, still unhailed;
Oscar Wilde, who thought he'd failed;
Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy, J;
Alex Dumas, Bronte,A;
Jane Austen by no means least,
Make room for TH White at the feast.
AS Byatt and Barbara Pym,
Conan Doyle and Newman, Kim.

There are legions more, of course, but I'm no Townshend. It's just that his song gets across the strange solitary intimacy of writing better than anything else I've ever read.

But enough--time to start the next chapter...

Ricki-Ticky-Tickle, Darling

(A Soliloquy for Lady Molly, with apologies to Anthony Powell)

Poor Jeavons! He never did understand, poor lamb, but just accepted the little fellow in his kindly, somnambulistic way.

Ricki just didn’t like Jeavons hanging around me, back then, you see. Didn’t understood what I saw in him, I suppose. That hardly made Ricki unique, of course. Jeavons was, shall we say, not out of the top drawer. He’d had style once, though. And dash—my old friend Mildred Blaides could tell you something about that, if she thought hard about it, and could see the man in front of her. Yes, Jeavons made sense back then. And he still does, damn it! I’m fond of him, and he’s … restful.

But Ricki tried to make trouble when we were first married. No man would do for me but Ruddy, as far as Ricki was concerned. Oh, the time he gave Jeavons, and me come to that. Because, after all, Ruddy had meant a great deal to me, and I was sorry I had to break it off—but there are limits, you know.

Oh, a girl likes a bit of poetry, and a bit of romancing, but enough is as good as a feast, my dear, and Ruddy could, if he got started, bore for England. And India, too, come to that. Still I remember his bristly little moustache and—oh, yes, he had his talents, did my Ruddy.

But too clingy, too needy, too clever by half. He didn’t blub when I gave him his notice, though. Left Ricki behind, and went out again to the Punjab. But I had Ricki to remember him by. Oh, the pranks he would play on Jeavons! Tripping him, pouncing on him in bed, gnawing his ankles—

They do that, you know. Gnaw things, I mean. All very well if he’s in a book, slaying King Cobras—Nag and Nagina, was it? Splendid creature in the subcontinent. But in London? Nothing worse than waking up with a bit of a head early some morning, but unable to lie abed because you can hear it—no matter how you try to not hear it!—again and again:

Rick-tick-TICK TICK!

Well, my dear, you try sleeping through that, if you can.
Rick-tick-TICK!

I ask you.

Ruddy claimed he was the original, the one in the story. That clever Nick Jenkins laughed at that, saying it couldn’t be. That the story had come out in 1894, and that Ricki couldn’t have lived thirty years later.

So Ruddy was a bit naughty, and lied to me, I suppose.

I wouldn’t have paid to have him stuffed if I knew that, of course—Ricki, I mean, not Ruddy. Ruddy wasn’t stuffed. Although he could be very formal.

Still, he could do such lovely things with his moustache—

I’m not sorry I had Ricki stuffed, anyway. He was a sweet little fellow and became much nicer as he got older. Jeavons cried like a child when he died.

That’s why I keep him, I think.

Jeavons, not Ricki, I mean.

I keep Ricki because he was sweet and cute, when he wasn’t biting Jeavons, at least, and Ruddy was a famous man, who fell for me when I was a pretty young thing, and he gave me the very animal he’d made a hero in one of his books. Let’s see Mr. Nicholas Jenkins top that!

But neither of them could top my Jeavons. It takes a special man to weep for a little animal who ate his carpet slippers, and bit his ankles, and was given to his wife by a famous man who was her—friend, long before he came on the scene.

And Jeavons learns, you know. His moustache has made splendid progress in our years together, you know. He’s not quite in Ruddy’s class but—oh, Alymer! How nice of you to drop by! Have you met General Conyers, Isobel?

C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell: Friendly Enemies?

According to the Dance to the Music of Time list of character models of the Anthony Powell Society, the character of J.G. Quiggin is

"A conflation of Powell's two enemies, CP Snow, author of Corridors of Power, and FR Leavis, the implacably influential literary critic and don".
[AN Wilson, London Evening Standard, 24 Sept 1997]
There are some remarkable similarities also to AP's nephew-in-law, Harold Pinter, the gloomy left-wing dramatist, although AP has denied that he is the main source.

I read this, and was rather puzzled. There are a fair amount of differences between Snow and Quiggin that are quite striking; most importantly, where Snow was a prolific author (his own novel sequence Strangers and Brothers falls only one volume short of the 12 volume Dance, and was started earlier). Quiggin--well, let Professor Sillery speak for me:

JG's abandoned the pen, I hear, perhaps wisely. A literary caesarian was all but required for that infant of long gestation Unburnt Boats, which I often feared might come to birth prematurely as a puling little magazine article. Now JG's going to promote literary works, rather than write them himself. In brief, he's to become a publisher.

(Books Do Furnish A Room (1971))

More to the point, while Snow leaned left in his politics, he was quite comfortable with many moderate conservatives, of the type Powell strikes one as--Snow dedicated The Light and the Dark to Sydney Grose, the model for the avuncular, conservative Arthur Brown, political fixer extraordinaire in the unnamed Cambridge College where narrator Lewis Eliot is a fellow, and other sympathetic conservatives are to be found throughout the series. Snow was, as his Francis Getliffe might say, "a man of the Left," but hardly as hard-left as Quiggin.

Now, F.R. Leavis, was much more of a Quiggin-style provocateur; his bust-up with Snow, whom he gratuitously attacked in terms that even those who agreed with his critique found offensive, led Snow to the attack). Indeed, as Timothy Sandefur points out, Snow turned Leavis's argument turtle by using Lawrence against him:

The dispute over modernity that gave rise to “The Two Cultures” began, of course, in the Industrial Revolution itself, when Romantic writers like Matthew Arnold, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edgar Allen Poe led a reaction against the rational and systematic philosophy—as well as the technological progress—of the Enlightenment. That reaction had been carried forward into the literary culture in the works of D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and others. In one especially effective passage, Snow illustrated the brutal reality beneath romanticism by drawing from Lawrence, Leavis’ favorite writer. In a commentary on Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before The Mast, Lawrence defended the flogging of a seaman which Dana, firmly rooted in Enlightenment rationality, recalled with indignation. For Lawrence, Dana’s disgust revealed a failure to appreciate the spiritual value of the master-servant relationship, which, “like love,” is “essentially a polarized flow…a circuit of vitalism which flows between master and man and forms a very precious nourishment to each, and keeps both in a state of subtle, quivering, vital equilibrium.” But for Snow, Lawrence’s attitude was a disgusting indulgence by a comfortable onlooker who did not feel the wrong end of the whip. “That illusion is open only to those who have climbed one step up and are hanging on by their fingernails.” Lawrence’s, and Leavis’, lyrical view of a social hierarchy based on force and servitude was the ultimate expression of anti-rationalism, the same anti-rationalism that looked upon poverty as charming and which retarded the progress of both material and spiritual growth.

While Snow is out of fashion these days, I will say that I have read his works with great enjoyment, and, in his own way, I consider him to be among the "first rate second-raters" I deeply love--the novelists who, without the flash and dazzling style of some, excel in patient, detailed excavation of character. Think Trollope as opposed to Dickens; Powell as opposed to Proust. I don't mean to suggest that they are not great writers--Trollope, Snow, and Powell are among my very favorites. But they are not showy, or headline grabbing in the way Leavis's beloved D.H Lawrence is. But I digress.

While Leavis was dyspeptic, left-wing, and disagreeable, Powell appeared to have a pretty decent rapport with Snow. In "Anthony Powell and C.P. Snow," (Anthony Powell Newsletter, No. 46 at 7-11 (2012)), Keith Marshall summarizes the evidence of their dealings. They seemed to get on well enough when traveling together to Sofia, Bulgaria, discussing books together, Powell quotes Snow as denying that he was a Dickensian, but admitting "if required to nominate the writer in English next to Shakespeare in stature, he would find difficulty in thinking of any other than Dickens." Powell comments "That struck me as a sound appreciation; one that defined my own feelings."

When Snow was made a life peer, Powell wrote him a teasing note suggesting the heraldic possibilities of the Supporters for his arms--"Do not rule out a stranger or a brother, which would tax the artist's invention, and have enigmatic charm as that part of the achievement." Snow wrote back in a similar tone, opening his letter with "It was like you to write so generously."

Of course, as Nicholas Birns points out, Quiggin isn't portrayed as an enemy of Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins; "Quiggin is represented as an individual--one with the wrong politics, with a reverse-snobbish personal myth that in many ways masks conventional snobbery, but still an individual Jenkins likes, whose presence in Jenkins's lfe is, despite all, to the good.) (Birns, Understanding Anthony Powell at 128) Indeed, Quiggin's "rare and unpredictable grace catalyzes the moment in which Jenkins is able to achieve personal grace" by clicking with Isobel Tolland, who becomes his wife. (Id. at 129-130) So, the identification of Snow with Quiggin, leaving out the suggestion of enmity between Powell and Snow, may have some heft to it after all. It's just that--well, as a reader of both authors, Snow just doesn't feel Quiggin-like to me.

Hearing Secret Harmonies

I spent a part of the day at the Anthony Powell Birthday Luncheon hosted at the Grolier Club by the Anthony Powell Society. This was, I was told, the 13th year the Society has given such a luncheon, and, as someone pointed out, it was Friday the 13th in the year 2013.

Now, as I was a first-timer to this event, I kept my mouth firmly closed, but I was tempted to wonder what Mrs. Erdleigh, the rather charming, but somewhat dubious psychic, fortune teller, and seer who ends up with narrator Nick Jenkins's Uncle Giles (also sometimes rather charming, but somewhat dubious) would have made of that.

Discretion prevailed, however, and I contented myself with enjoying an excellent lunch, and, far more, the company of my fellow Powell enthusiasts.

In discussing the character of Isabel Jenkins (née Tolland) with one of the other attendees, I was struck by a thought that true Powellians may find heretical: For all his sending up of John Galsworthy, Powell seems to me to have borrowed a literary stratagem from him. In the Preface to the Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy writes that "[t]he figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world." We get an "inside look" at almost every other character in the Saga--I'm leaving out the "extras"--but not of Irene.

So too Isabel.

She is elusive because she is closed off from us; our first-person narrator manages to let us know the internal workings of so many of the characters of the Dance, but not of the one he knows best. Not for Galsworthy's rather programmatic reasons, of making Irene a totemic figure, but nonetheless, both narratives have, as one of their pivots, a woman who keeps her own counsel, and cannot be known to the reader.