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July 20, 2004
TT: Quotations from Chairman Nick
As I mentioned a week or two ago, I've been rereading Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time in preparation for writing a review of Michael Barber's Anthony Powell: A Life, out in September from Duckworth Overlook. At lunch with Maud the other day, I was trying to describe Powell's technique of alternating Hemingway-like naturalistic dialogue with discursive commentary by Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Dance and Powell's fictional alter ego. I've been posting quotations from Dance as almanac entries of late, but I've dogeared so many pages since I started rereading it that I thought it might be fun to go ahead and empty the whole bag.Forgive me if some of these quotes have already been posted. As an old Powellian, my experience has been that they profit from repetition!
- "Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction." (A Question of Upbringing)
- "I felt unsettled and dissatisfied, though not in the least drunk. On the contrary, my brain seemed to be working all at once with quite unusual clarity. Indeed, I found myself almost deciding to sit down, as soon as I reached my room, and attempt to compose a series of essays on human life and character in the manner of, say, Montaigne, so icily etched in my mind at that moment appeared the actions and nature of those with whom that night I had been spending my time. However, second thoughts convinced me that any such efforts at composition would be inadvisable at such an hour. The first thing to do on reaching home would be to try and achieve some sleep. In the morning, literary matters might be reconsidered." (A Buyer's Market)
- "These hinterlands are frequently, even compulsively, crossed at one time or another by almost all who practise the arts, usually in the need to earn a living; but the arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk." (A Buyer's Market)
- "Prejudice was to be avoided if--as I had idly pictured him--Members were to form the basis of a character in a novel. Alternatively, prejudice might prove the very elemtn through which to capture and pin down unequivocally the otherwise elusive nature of what was of interest, discarding by its selective power the empty, unprofitable shell making up that side of Members untranslatable into terms of art; concentrating his final essence, his position, as it were, in eternity, into the medium of words." (The Acceptance World)
- "I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary' world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary." (The Acceptance World)
- "Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one." (At Lady Molly's)
- "A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise." (Casanova's Chinese Restaurant)
- "Erridge, a rebel whose life had been exasperatingly lacking in persecution, had enjoyed independence of parental control, plenty of money, assured social position, early in life. Since leaving school he had been deprived of all the typical grudges within the grasp of most young men. Some of these grudges, it was true, he had later developed with fair success by artificial means, grudges being, in a measure, part and parcel of his political approach." (The Kindly Ones)
- "One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people can be. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be." (The Kindly Ones)
- "One never takes lessons to heart. It's just a thing people talk about--learning by experience and all that." (The Valley of Bones)
- "I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already." (The Valley of Bones)
- "Lovell was an odd mixture of realism and romanticism; more specifically, he was, like quite a lot of people, romantic about being a realist." (The Soldier's Art)
- "How one envies the rich quality of a reviewer's life. All the things to which those Fleet Street Jesuses feel suprior. Their universal knowledge, exquisite taste, idyllic loves, happy married life, optimism, scholarship, knowledge of the true meaning of life, freedom from sexual temptation, simplicity of heart, sympathy for the masses, compassion for the unfortunate, generosity--particularly the last, in welcoming with open arms every phoney who appears on the horizon. It's not surprising that in the eyes of most reviewers a mere writer's experiences seem so often trivial, sordid, lacking in meaning." (Books Do Furnish a Room)
- "You know growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed." (Temporary Kings)
- "People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reserve is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect." (Hearing Secret Harmonies)
Posted July 20, 2004 12:02 PM
