Another summer, and another assault on the unscaled mountains of literature. Having woefully failed at 2017’s attempt on Henry James, who fell foul of a sudden addiction to his sleuthier cousin PD, I’m once again preparing to tackle Proust, courtesy of a 50th birthday present of a beautiful boxed set of In Search of Lost Time. Thank God I shan’t be doing it alone, but in the company of novelist Susan Hill, who explained in last week’s Spectator Diary that, having got so far and no further on multiple previous occasions, she too was going back in. She is now on Book 5, and I salute her.
Perhaps if we succeed, we can meet up, together with other Marcel completists, and debate the merits of the essay by Perry Anderson that recently featured in the London Review of Books. Anderson argued, at some length, that we should regard Anthony Powell, the author of the 12-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, in a kindly light, possibly even kindlier than that we reserve for Proust’s magnum opus.
The argument for Powell can be crudely summarised as an argument for the close, but crucially detached, observation of what Anderson called, way back in 1984, “the greatest fictional representation” of “the last true leisure-class in metropolitan history”. Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, goes to a lot of parties; Proust’s, not so much. Where Proust wove magical sentences around his alter ego’s profound interiority, Powell abandoned his to the cut and thrust of the elite’s social and political lives. What he was aiming for, wrote Christopher Hitchens in 1998, was “the harnessing of counterpoint”; he also quoted VS Pritchett’s description of Powell as “a Proust Englished by Wodehouse”.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
