Opening Passages: The First Movement consists of three short novels, A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World. From A Question of Upbringing:
The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a mocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakesperian clown, suddenly stepped forward, and, as if performing a rite, cast some substance--apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper--on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind.... (p. 1)
From A Buyer's Market:
The last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon's work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death. The canvases were none of them familiar, but they recalled especially, with all kinds of other things, dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons', reviving with a jerk that phase of early life. They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises made between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain. Outside, the spring weather was cool and sunny: Mr. Deacon's favourite season of the year. Within doors, propped against three sides of a washstand, the oil-paintings seemed, for some reason, appropriate to those surroundings, dusty, though no displeasing; even suggesting, in their way, the kind of home Mr. Deacon favoured or himself and his belongings: the sitting-room over teh shop, for example, informal, not too permanent, more than a trifle decayed. His haunts, I remembered, had bordered on these northern confines of London. (p. 1)
From The Acceptance World:
Once in a way, perhaps as often as every eighteen months, an invitation to Sunday afternoon tea at the Ufford would arrive on a postcard addressed in Uncle Giles's neat, constricted handwriting. This private hotel in Bayswater, where he stayed during comparatively rare visits to London, occupied two corner houses in a latent, almost impenetrable region west of the Queen's Road. Not only the battleship-grey colour, but also something at once angular and top-heavy about the block's configuration as a whole, suggested a large vessel moored in the street. Even within, at least on the ground floor, the Ufford conveyed some reminder of life at sea, though certainly of no luxuriously equipped liner; at best one of those superannuated schooners of Conrad's novels, perhaps decorated years before as a rich man's yacht, now tarnished by the years and reduced to ignoble uses like traffic in tourists, pilgrims, or even illegal immigrants; pervaded--to borrow an appropriately Conradian mannerism--with uneasy memories of the strife of men. That was the feeling of the Ufford gave, riding at anchor on the sluggish Bayswater tides. (p. 1)
Summary: In A Question of Upbringing, Nicholas Jenkins, whose family may or may not be related to the Robert Jenkins of the War of Jenkins' Ear, notices a fire in the snow, which reminds him in turn of Nicolas Poussin's painting, A Dance to the Music of Time, which in turn leads him to think of mortality and the march of time. He thinks back to his school-days, when he was friends with Charles Stringham and Peter Templer; he remembers in particular their discussions of an older student, Kenneth Widmerpool. After they leave school, Jenkins visits both Stringham and Templer, and meets Templer's sister, Jean, with whom he imagines himself to be in love. At university, Jenkins meets a number of other people, and in particular, Mark Members, J. G. Quiggin, and Bill Truscott, and eventually witnesses the end of Stringham's and Templer's connection. Thus they end up going their separate ways; it was all perhaps always destined for collision, but one of course never knows that at the time.
In A Buyer's Market, Jenkins happens to meet up with Kenneth Widmerpool when they attend the same dinner party. Jenkins has become involved in art publishing, which has resulted in his crossing paths with the painter Edgard Deacon, who weaves in and out of the story, and his pacifist activist friend, Gypsy Jones, who also weaves in and out of the story. Widmerpool and Jenkins happen to both be interested in the same woman at the party, Barbara Goring; Barbara ends up embarrassing Widmerpool (and herself) in public when she accidentally pours an entire pot of sugar over his head. Afterward, Widmerpool becomes interested in Gypsy Jones; he ends up paying for her abortion, but the relationship goes nowhere, and Widmerpool becomes focused on his work because of it. Jenkins meets up with Stringham as well, who is engaged to and eventually marries Lady Peggy Stepney. Deacon happens to die on the same day; Jenkins attends his funeral, and afterward sleeps with Gypsy Jones.
In The Acceptance World, Jenkins, having recently published a novel, is caught up in a set of problems arising from his work in the publishing industry; his firm has engaged a famous novelist, St. John Clarke, to write a preface to a book on a painter who has recently died, Horace Isbister, whom St. John Clarke had long known. It turns out that St. John Clarke's secretary is Mark Members, with whom Jenkins meets up. This happens to lead to Jenkins meeting Peter Templer again. Templer, who had always been a lady's man, has married a model famous for toothpaste ads. Members happens to be outmaneuvered for his position as Clarke's secretary by J. G. Quiggins; through Jenkins, Quiggins happens to meet Templer's wife, who eventually leaves Templer for him. Templer happens to have come across Widmerpool, who is now employed by a firm of bill-brokers, also known as a discount house. Bill-brokers negotiate the sale of bills of exchange, providing investors with ready money while using the buying and selling to make a profit, an early form of what is today often called futures contracts; Templer calls it 'the Acceptance World'. Jenkins meets up with Jean again, who is married, and begins to have an affair with her. By happenstance, Jenkins meets up with Widmerpool again, and they in turn happen to meet Stringham, who is divorced and has ever since been heavily drinking.
If this makes it sound like the books are lists of characters, in some sense they are. This is not a plot-focused book. The plot, such as it is, could be summarized as 'Something happens to happen', often in the form of 'Nick Jenkins introduces two people and something happens to happen' or in the form of 'Nick Jenkins is introduced to someone and something happens to happen'. Likewise, although the story covers the period of the 1920s and the 1930s, for practical purposes it might as well all occur in a timeless void; you get occasionally references to the Great War, and the Bolshevik Revolution, and various economic events and fashions, but for the most part, these could just be anything. The story is really just the people, moving in and out of each other's lives. They more or less run in different parts of the same circles; it could be years, but inevitably you hear bits and pieces about each other and eventually cross paths in one way or another. It's the description of the characters from different angles that is the interest. In the first two books, this seems to me to be somewhat tentative and exploratory; it is with The Acceptance World, I think, that things start coming together in a more natural way.
It also becomes clear by this point that what we see in the stories is as much about Nick Jenkins as it is about anyone described; Jenkins sometimes attributes to other people things that seem clearly to be projections from his own attitudes. This is not consistent, but in a sense, Jenkins approaches everything in the way he starts in A Question of Upbringing, reflecting on the events as if they were a painting and the people as if they were portraits. In a painting there is a fact on the canvas, the paint and the color and the texture; but when contemplate a painting you also contribute something to the viewing.
Favorite Passage: From The Acceptance World:
When, in describing Widmerpool's new employment, Templer had spoken of 'the Acceptance World', I had been struck by the phrase. Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities. The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element--happiness, for example--is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that. (p. 170)
Recommendation: Recommended. I liked The Acceptance World the best, since it is in that work that the story really seems to come into its own, but it presupposes the other two.
*****
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago: 1995).