Anthony Powell's Music of Time: Chronicle of a Declining Establishment

Abstract

With the publication of Valley of Bones (Little-Brown, 1964), the seventh and most recent installment of his continuing novel entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell has opened a new phase in the experience of Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator-hero through whose eyes readers have been witnessing the steady disintegration of the English upper classes between the two great wars. This latest installment, like the previous six (twelve are projected), presents a telling comic portrayal not only of upper-class decline, but also of the relentless interpenetration of the upper crust of English society by yeasty elements breaking through from below. But these are not the only thematic threads. Throughout the series, without a hint of moralism, Powell traces the effects on the lower classes of the moral rot spreading from the privileged classes. Novels of manners of earlier centuries-Richardson's are a relevant case in point-accustomed generations of readers to look for the cleansing effects on the decadent upper classes of uncompromising middleclass virtue. In the Music of Time, on the contrary, upper-class moral failings which would have seemed monstrous to Richardson's admirable characters are cultivated assiduously by lower-class figures. Indeed, the moral backdrop against which the action is carried out is radically different from that of the 18th or 19th-century novelists. Powell's upper-class figures find no joy in their vices. Ambitious elements pushing up from below, propelled by lust for power and money, live in a world that deprives them of self-justifying religious sanction. Their worlds are so different that it would be absurd to strain to find parallels between the worlds of Richardson's and Powell's characters. But the latter's major figures, like Richardson's, represent the social classes merging and interacting. The society of the Music of Time, however, is not ripe for regeneration. Instead-and herein resides historical irony-a distinctly amoral tone seeps downward to corrupt the mercantile lower classes, who, no longer champions of moral reform, are devoted solely to getting ahead, and are even desirous of earning the cachet consequent upon fashionable looseness of conduct. Have we