Different Speeds, Same Furies: Powell, Proust and other Literary Forms

Different Speeds, Same Furies

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Different Speeds, Same Furies

Powell, Proust and Other Literary Forms

Perry Anderson

First published by Verso 2022

© Perry Anderson 2022

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The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Names: Anderson, Perry, author.

Title: Different speeds, same furies : Powell, Proust and Other Literary Forms / Perry Anderson.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022025010 (print) | LCCN 2022025011 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804290798 (hardback) | ISBN 9781804290828 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern –

History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays.

Classification: LCC PN37 .A47 2022 (print) | LCC PN37 (ebook) | DDC 809.3 – dc23/eng/20220728

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1. Two Conjurors of Time

2. The Longevity of Powell

3. From Progress to Catastrophe

4. Persian Letters

Notes

Index

Authors et alia

Critics

Characters

FOREWORD

Comprising four essays dealing in different ways with literature, this book is unlike my previous writing, concerned with historical and political questions, though these are not altogether absent here. I owe my interest in literary issues to undergraduate years in Oxford, where I studied French and Russian. There I had the great luck of being taught – I had no prior conception of either – by two scholars, each unusual, perhaps unique, in England at the time: Dickie Sayce (1917–1977) and Richard Freeborn (1926–2019). Sayce was the author of Style in French Prose: A Method of Analysis, whose second impression (1958) appeared while I was studying with him: a work that introduced the continental tradition of Stilistik to England, where it was largely unknown at the time, and is still little practiced today. Introducing it, he distinguished his own approach from that of Leo Spitzer, the Austrian master of this kind of study. Years later I discovered that Spitzer had responded to Sayce with a courteous but sharp rejoinder in Critique, the ‘general review of French and foreign publications’ founded after the war by Bataille, his reply ending with a bravura analysis of baroque rhetoric in Bossuet’s sermons.¹ Freeborn too, recently arrived in Oxford from a posting with the British embassy in Moscow, where he had witnessed the obsequies of Stalin, had an intellectual background unfamiliar in the England of the fifties. Among his enthusiasms were White emigré scholarship on Dostoevsky, about whom he would later write, and the tradition of Russian formalism, on which he directed me to Erlich’s classic work.² So I had the good fortune of early acquaintance with two European approaches to literary criticism, each of them exotic and stimulating, in a period where contemporaries studying English literature – in much greater number than those concerned with foreign languages – were confined to Anglo-American schools of thought. The same kind of luck held after I left university, in friendships formed with Roberto Schwarz, Franco Moretti and Fredric Jameson, in their respective generations three of the world’s greatest thinkers about literature. Without always agreeing with them – they often disagree with each other – I have since been indebted to them in whatever I’ve made of cultural questions.

The first essay below takes the form of a comparison between two novelists, Anthony Powell and Marcel Proust. At any sustained length, close comparative criticism in literature is perhaps rarer than it should be – certainly than comparative studies in history or sociology. Soon after leaving Oxford I came upon the work of Peter Stern, which made a lively impression on me, partly by awakening curiosity about German literature, partly by the fluency with which Stern conjoined literary and political interests – the first book of his I read was his succinct tour de force on Ernst Jünger. But I suspect that the assurance of his comparisons – Effi Briest, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, for example, brought together in a single frame³ – also exerted an unconscious influence on me. In the particular case of Powell and Proust, similarity – which is not identity – of background and project is so close that comparison seems obvious. It is a closeness that makes the ways they differ from each other the more interesting, and the contrast in their receptions all the more striking.

Reaction to what I write of these differences has been strong among Proustians, who have tended to regard my treatment of Proust as a dismissal. It is far from that. Some, more defensibly, have observed that its tribute to Proust nevertheless falls short of the homage warranted by the grandeur of À la recherche. There, context matters. Historically, the ever-increasing mass of writing Proust’s novel has produced is put into perspective by the two German Romanists who recognized its stature very early on: Curtius, whose consideration of Proust dates from 1922–1924, before its final volumes were even published, and Spitzer who took his inspiration from Curtius some years later.⁴ Today, the cult of Proust is its own worst enemy. The volume of adulation surrounding his novel has warped judgment to a point where a rational assessment of it, taking stock, along with its majesty, of limitations and defects to which its devotees are blind, is bound to seem unworthy of its object. That said, moderate objections to what I remark of Proust need to bear in mind two points. Commissioned to write on Powell, I decided to compare him to Proust. But in the nature of the commission, Powell’s writing remained the principal object of consideration, so there is an asymmetry of treatment in my account of the two. That might have troubled me, had it not been for the one great exception to the ruck of late Proustiana, Malcolm Bowie’s Proust among the Stars, a work whose scintillation – warmth and acuity married without fissure – is so outstanding that as a comprehensive view of À la recherche it leaves little more to be said, other than to single out its preeminence, which I do.

Soon after the appearance of the essay in the London Review, I was asked to give a lecture to the Anthony Powell Society, which forms the second chapter of this book, and considers the four volumes of his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling. These have been much less discussed than Dance, but in the literature of recollection – as opposed to imagination – represent a distinctive achievement of their own. In talking about them, I touch on some of the reasons why Powell meets resistance from readers today, and how I myself too reacted when I first started reading him. Taste in literature is a question of temperament, which is individual and untransferable. But it is also a question of background and period, to which belong some of the reasons why my initial resistance to Powell passed – that is, of historical location in place and time, conditions that are social and communicable. These change, and with them taste. Significant art, of course, outlasts such changes. As to how long, Powell and Proust were each, in their different ways, non-committal.

The following chapter turns to the historical novel as a literary form. Powell’s Dance, for all the length of time it covers – over half a century – is not one, being rather what German criticism terms a Zeitroman: a novel covering periods through which the author has lived, and recreated in characters and situations expressive of them. Conspicuous in the record of the historical novel as a form have been two features. The first is its mobility across cultural registers, from high art through mid-cult to low commerce, setting it apart from any other sub-genre of the novel. The second is the paradox of its postmodern revival – explosion, even – in the upper registers of the form, after long relegation to the lower depths of popular fiction. Starting from Lukács’s classic account of its rise in the early nineteenth century, and looking at its fluctuating fortunes thereafter, what explains its proliferating recrudescence today? Originally a response to a talk by Fredric Jameson in Los Angeles, I have added a postscript on his subsequent reflections about the historical novel, which take the story of its arc up to its latest twist in the present century.

The book ends by going back in time to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Though not the originator of the epistolary novel as a form, this was its detonator to dominance in the fiction of the eighteenth century, precursor to the hegemony of realist fiction in the nineteenth. Persian Letters owed that role not only to the gifts of its author, but to the way it formulated key questions for the Enlightenment, which acquired its first approximation to a name soon afterwards. The epistolary novel became in due course an archaic form, yet Montesquieu’s use of it, I suggest, anticipates modernity in two ways. It introduced Europe to the novel of ideas, whose heyday would come after an interval of another hundred and fifty years; and its ideas – of sexual liberty, gender equality, demographic decline, proto-nuclear annihilation – remain of arresting contemporary resonance.

1 March 2022

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The original version of ‘Two Conjurors of Time’ was published in the London Review of Books on 6 and 19 July 2018; of ‘The Longevity of Proust’, given as a talk at the Travellers Club on 17 December 2018, in Secret Harmonies, no. 9, Autumn 2020; of ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’ in the London Review of Books, 28 July 2011; and of ‘Persian Letters’ in Il Romanzo, II, Turin 2001. I owe invitations to produce the first to Mary-Kay Wilmers, the second to John Roe, the third to the UCLA Comparative Literature Program, and the fourth to Franco Moretti, who edited the five-volume Einaudi edition in which it first appeared.

1

TWO CONJURORS OF TIME

I

Are there any appropriate dimensions to literary biography as a form? The stature of a writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some coordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred less from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at fifty-one, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at fifty-nine, eight hundred from Richard Ellman. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was sixty-two; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a miniscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.

Spurling’s ‘Life’

Hilary Spurling’s life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern.¹ The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his ninety-four years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of postscripts. Yet his memoirs, which run to nearly double the length of her biography, stop at much the same cut-off point. Did they cover so much ground that little was to be gained by treading it again? By no means. In the four volumes of To Keep the Ball Rolling, riveting portraits of his contemporaries screen notable discretion about himself. Nor has Spurling’s own practice as a biographer in the past been so succinct. Her double-decker lives of Compton-Burnett and Matisse, each of them outstanding, are considerably longer than of Powell. Would the difference be due to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but on the whole, in the warmth and grace of Spurling’s account there is a kind of natural tact but little sign of inhibition. Perhaps simple consideration of sales was a factor: over a certain length, publishers rarely break even. Aesthetically speaking, at all events, the economy of her study is not out of keeping with its subject: Powell, a disciplined writer with a laconic streak of his own, would have appreciated it.

What does Spurling add to the story outlined in Powell’s memoirs and projected in his fiction – military father, excruciating prep school; happiness at Eton, depression at Oxford; job in publishing, deadpan early novels, marriage into the Pakenhams; war service in Northern Ireland and Allied Liaison; post-war triumph with A Dance to the Music of Time? The most striking revelations come where he said least, of his childhood and his loves. The finest thing in Spurling’s book is her delicate portrait of the extraordinary union that produced Powell and shaped his infancy. Though both parents came from gentry families, their marriage defied convention, since his mother was fifteen years older than his father, who wed at the age of twenty-two – an age gap frowned on enough in civilian life, but virtually unheard-of in the army. Breaking a still greater taboo, she even travelled on her own to South Africa to join him during his service in the Boer War before they were yet married. Sadly, however, the price of such daring was thereafter, in Spurling’s surmise, her all but complete withdrawal from society out of timidity at being taken as a cradle-snatcher, which Powell’s father – opposite in temperament in every other respect – did little to offset, given his own volcanic temper with the world at large. Within the nuclear cell, the marriage itself was a success, though the social isolation of the family was compounded by the uprooted, nomadic character of army life. As to its consequences for the future author, Spurling opens her book: ‘Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child’s point of view.’²

Such, at the outset, was his external environment. Within the family, the extreme contrast between his parents – his father ‘a champion grudge-bearer, liable to resort at the smallest real or imagined slight in public or private to hysterical rage’; his ‘calm and generous’ mother ‘a born peacemaker’ – left a two-fold mark on him: on the one hand, acquiring as a baby ‘the rock-bottom security that came from being unconditionally loved by his mother’, who bore him when she was thirty-eight; on the other, learning as a boy from the spectacle of his father the need for ‘strategies of discipline and restraint’.³ Arrival at the age of thirteen at Eton, a year after the Great War had come to an end, brought him in Spurling’s view

the underlying stability and continuity that came from a sense he had never known before of belonging to a community that accepted him, the nearest thing to a place where he felt at home. The school became from now on a kind of virtual extended family whose members – however rebarbative, reluctant or remote – stood in all his life for the actual relatives he hadn’t got.

Fortunate in finding himself in an unpretentious house, ‘with a poor reputation and no standards to keep up’, presided over by an easy-going master, he flourished as a member of the school’s Arts Society, did well academically, and emerged more polished and confident socially.⁴

Oxford was an abrupt reversal: depressed and inchoate, he got little out of the university, and left with a poor degree. Remarking that his subsequent accounts of his time at the university were ‘both vague and characteristically harsh’, Spurling conjectures that with ingenuous good looks, he may have suffered from predatory advances in a setting where homosexuality was not unusual. Certainly his main later complaint was the impossibility of any relation with girls, under vigilant bar by the authorities. There was also his lack of money for the kind of lavish living affected by smart undergraduates, and his relative modesty of