Jenkins Marches On

By MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

Life itself need not do so, of course: it may lead nowhere, and appear disappointing as a result. Such a reader might often kick himself for wanting to know what is going to happen in this series: why should I bother, he might pro- test, when no one is going to change dramatically, become a Buddhist monk, go to discover his soul in Antarctica or even live happily ever after? And yet the storyteller's spell, indispens- able to the genuine novelist, is there. The tension that is thus created, and it is created with an educated thoroughness unique in modern fiction, is fundamental to Mr Powell's art, and is comic in the most honoured sense, which is as serious as it is funny. For there is much food for thought about novel-writing in this comic dialogue be- tween story and reality as there is in Edouard's Journal'or Gide's Les Faux-monnayeztrs.

Mr Powell's type of comedy has been com- pared to Evelyn Waugh's; but the hypomanic and often wanton cruelty of Waugh is absent from his work: his comedy, while razor-sharp, is probably the least idiosyncratic in modern literature. A comparison may serve to illustrate this. The effect of Lord Tangent's death in Decline and Fall is in one way funny; but it is also extremely cruel, not least because of the casual way in which it is stated (incidentally, in dialogue). It has an explosive significance within Waugh's own comic world; outside this it exists only as callousness. Waugh's early novels succeed only by their brilliance. At best they convey the over- and undertones of a peculiar type of hatred.

At the end of the new, eighth instalment of The Music of Time,* which covers the year between the occupation of Paris by the Germans in June 1940 and their invasion of Russia, a year later, an officer called Biggs hangs himself in a cricket pavilion of whose key he has charge. All we know about Biggs is that his eating habits are unpleasant and that he is a thoughtlessly sadistic bully (he picks on Stringham, who here reappears, cured of alcoholism, as a mess-waiter). His possible motives are revealed within a few sentences on the last page:

* THE SOLDIER'S ART. (Heinemann, 21s.)

[Soper's] heavy simian eyebrows contorted in agitation, he looked more than ever like a professional comedian.

'A fine kettle of fish,' he said. 'Never thought Biggy would have done that. In the cricket pay, of all places, and him so fond of the game. Worrying about that key did it. More than the wife business, in my opinion. Quite a change it will be. not having him grousing about the food every day.'

The effect of this death might reasonably be callous—Biggs is a much more credibly un- pleasant social entity than Tangent, for Waugh's world is never real—but, by its placing, and its reporting, it underlines, succeeds in defining, the more profound tragedy of the social un- pleasantness of Biggs and such cronies of his as Soper.

This death achieves a poignancy that for Soper himself it lacks, inasmuch as it acts as a suitably grotesque counterpart to the deaths by bombing of Lady Molly and Chips and Priscilla Lovell; Nicholas had seen the latter two, separ- ately, within hours of their deaths; he and the reader have been intimate with their affairs—of Biggs he and we know nothing. But it is all, we are made to feel, a part of the same universal sadness. This much, and more, is conveyed with- out a descriptive hint of what Nicholas himself may actually feel. The 'message' is directed to the sensitive reader, who knows how to fill in such gaps. Where Waugh was frenetically glee- ful Mr Powell is thoughtful, as if in his attitude he were trying to define what sanity might consist of. That is, perhaps, the basic pattern of his dance.

Mr Powell is admired by his fellow writers for his technique; but few have tried to define it, or to comment upon its significance, beyond alluding to its remarkable emotional detachment. Action, including dialogue, in one kind of cur- rently admired form of modern fiction, often operates as little more than a symbol for what is going on inside the minds of the protagonists: novelists have ignored what they regard as sur- face realism in the interests of a supposedly deeper realism. The dangers of this approach, which has not, of course, been altogether un- fruitful, are that the art of narrative has tended to fall into disuse, and interest in human motives is diminished—behaviour itself ceases to matter. This concentration upon 'inner' realism makes day-to-day reality look, not chaotic (which it is), but different from what it is. The whole question of human motives is thus dismissed from fiction, which is surely a serious loss.

Mr Powell's technique is opposed to this; one feels that he is determined to preserve the novel proper, if in a developed form; he is anti- romantic in the most respectable (rather than the superficial Amis-Bond) sense. The wholly

introspective novel sometimes actually distorts behaviour, or makes what patently does exist appear not to exist; it is thus anarchically, im- possibly, committed against all behaviour—and in a polemical manner that may well, ultimately, be inimical to literature. A realism controlled as cleverly and as deliberately as Mr Powell's may, indeed, indicate inner states of mind more exactly than descriptions of them can—for, in one eminently practical sense, only behaviour can be said to exist: the mind is in perpetual flux, and can describe itself even less surely than it can describe the actions it creates.

Mr Powell, then, is a classicist, and not with- out good reason in the contexts of modern litera- ture, in which less stringent and more fashion- able approaches attract a score of inferior talents for every real one. He has chosen an objective technique that no dishonest or inferior writer would dare to choose, and has distinguished it with success. For no novel of our own time so uncannily conveys the sense of life as it actually passes before us as The Music of Time: hence the plotlessness, the wild improbabilities and co- incidences, the flatness of narrative manner. That this does not conceal a naïve lack of plotting ability, that it is not merely an overrated adven- ture in meticulous autobiography, is testified to by the effect it has upon the reader—the 'middle- brow' reader as much as the critic. The span of life, the passing of time, so elusive, are for a moment captured, are seen strictly as they are-- without metaphysics or passion, without even such feelings about them as Mr Powell himself may possess.

Thus he does not create a sense of boredom, or express a criticism of the quality of a conver- sation or of the people who are holding it, by causing his narrator to express an opinion. He conveys boredom by concentrating upon trivia and by slowing down the pace of his narrative (a technique he may have learned from Swift's letters), and he implies criticism of bad behaviour only by using Nicholas Jenkins's actions as a counterpart to it; for Jenkins is less passive than he has been supposed to be. The moral in- feriority of Widmerpool, who is well in evidence in The Soldier's Art, as a staff major at Jenkins's Divisional HQ, is exposed by Jenkins's own humane and, above all, civilised attitudes and actions. A study of what Nicholas actually does, through these eight novels, is in fact highly in- structive, and gives the lie to those who claim that he is hardly a protagonist. Both the quality of Mr Powell's characters as human beings and the extent to which their qualities or lack of them are recognised by others are main, and subtle, themes of The Music of Time.

But Mr Powell's basic preoccupation in terms of character is the exposure of sorts of vulgarity or (as in the case of such a fascinatingly 'seam- less' person as Widmerpool) of what can only be described as profound moral shortcomings. Be- hind the comedy and the irony, often gay, lies a serious concern with what human obligations are, and how they may or may not be fulfilled. The virtue of these novels is that one can com- ment upon the actions of their protagonists just as one does upon those of one's neighbours; and in place of moral comment, which is certainly a form of vulgarity, one has the few but highly evocative actions of the narrator to use as a kind of intuitive yardstick—for Nicholas Jenkins is the only character in The Music of Time who is wholly stage-managed by the author, whose surrogate he is.

The Soldier's Art, needless to say, further ripens the saga. As always, every word counts, and every incident tells.