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July 7, 2006
OGIC: Two trains and a turn
Normally I walk to work, but this morning I had to take a train to a meeting downtown. During the ten-minute ride, I pulled out my current reading, the first volume of Anthony Powell's novel A Dance to the Music of Time, and ran headlong into this account of another railroad trip: Jenkins's train ride to Touraine.The journey was being undertaken in fiery sunshine. Although not my first visit to France, this was the first time I had traveled alone there. As the day wore on, the nap on the covering of the seats of the French State Railways took on the texture of the coarse skin of an over-heated animal: writhing and undulating as if in an effort to find relief from the torturing glow. I lunched in the restaurant car, and drank some vin ordinaire that tasted unexpectedly sour. The carriage felt hotter than ever on my return: and the train more crowded. An elderly man with a straw hat, black gloves, and Assyrian beard had taken my seat. I decided that it would be less trouble, and perhaps cooler, to stand for a time in the corridor. I wedged myself in by the window between a girl of about fifteen with a look of intense concentration on her pale, angular features, who pressed her face against the glass, and a young soldier with a spectacled, thin countenance, who was angrily explaining some political matter to an enormously fat priest in charge of several small boys. After a while the corridor became fuller than might have been thought possible. I was gradually forced away from the door of the compartment, and found myself unstrategically placed with a leg on either side of a wicker trunk, secured by a strap, the buckle of which ran into my ankle, as the train jolted its way along the line. All around were an immense number of old women in black, one of whom was carrying a feather mattress as part of her luggage.
At first the wine had a stimulating effect; but this sense of exhilaration began to change after a time to one of heaviness and despair. My head buzzed. The soldier and the priest were definitely having words. The girl forced her nose against the window, making a small circle of steam in front of her face. At last the throbbings in my head became so intense that I made up my mind to eject the man with the beard. After a short preliminary argument in which I pointed out that the seat was a reserved one, and, in general, put my case as well as circumstances and my command of the language would allow, he said briefly: 'Monsieur, vous avez gagné,' and accepted dislodgment with resignation and some dignity. In the corridor, he moved skilfully past the priest and his boys; and, with uncommon agility for his age and size, climbed on to the wicker trunk, which he reduced almost immediately to a state of complete dissolution: squatting on its ruins reading Le Figaro. He seemed to know the girl, perhaps his daughter, because once he leaned across and pinched the back of her leg and made some remark to her; but she continued to gaze irritably out at the passing landscape, amongst the trees of which an occasional white château stood glittering like a huge birthday cake left out in the woods after a picnic. By the time I reached by destination there could be no doubt whatever that I was feeling more than a little sick.
Now that's a train ride, miserable but vivid. I especially appreciated this passage, with all its brilliant details and deft little sketches, because for as long as I can remember I've loved and romanticized train travel. In high school I write a poem, which you will not be subjected to, about riding a train and staring out through the window intently, hoping to catch sight of...what? I didn't know. Whatever it was, I never saw it. Here the narrator follows the girl's gaze to the moving landscape outside, but the birthday-cake chateaux seem to be his vision alone; if she saw them that way, it would surely snap her out of irritability.
Until this week, I'd owned the University of Chicago Press's gorgeous edition of Powell's masterpiece for a decade or more without once cracking it. If ever there was a book whose physical beauty was enough to make me buy it, this is it. In case you haven't seen it, each volume in the set pictures, on cover and spine, one of the dancing figures in Nicolas Poussin's painting for which the novel is named. Upright on a shelf, the spines of the four books make up a detail of the painting, a wonderful effect. When it was published I was working at the U of C Press as a student assistant. I remember filling in at the front desk one day during the receptionist's break and spotting the Powell in a display case, instantly infatuated. I ordered it the next day.
Now, thanks to the compelling testimonials of Terry and a few other Powell devotees of my acquaintance, I'm finally reading it. I immediately caught on that it isn't at all the dour and ponderous slog I was expecting, for some reason--perhaps simply because the sheer bulk of it is so cowing. Not at all. It's instead dry and witty and disarming, and somehow sly and innocent at the same time (I'm only a hundred pages in, and the characters are still very young). All this week I've been strolling through it with real pleasure. But it was when I reached the two wondrous paragraphs above that my feelings sharpened and I started to love it.
Posted July 7, 2006 1:02 AM
