Talk:A Dance to the Music of Time

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Development of pages[edit]

The development of this entry, and the linked pages on Powell and his works, is the subject of ongoing discussion on the Anthony Powell Discussion list hosted by the Anthony Powell Society. It is possible to participate by sending an email to aplist-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

External link[edit]

Balliol 17:46, 21 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Dance" as Satire[edit]

The article summarises "Dance" as "a satire on English political and cultural life in the mid 20th century." The series includes satire, but that's only one of its strands, and by no means the chief one. I'm not sure how one would do justice to its complexity and subtlety in a one liner, but feel that this brave attempt falls short. Any suggestions? Countersubject 15:38, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not only is satire not the chief strand, it is not even a minor theme. Satire exposes and mocks vice and folly; this is very far from the tone of the series: it is more often inquisitively and tolerantly comic. I'll attempt a change that I feel is slightly more accurate.

--Waring 15:50, 22 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To expand and justify slightly the above comments the entry in Kingsley Amis's The King's English on satire is pertinent:
'Satire is amusing only incidentally, if at all, and has or used to have a moral intention, to expose vice and folly as a means of correcting them, in theory at least. [...] the word is at its most precise in a literary context, referring to the works of the classical writers and Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. In recent years almost any old TV show put together in a jeering or mocking or generally 'irreverent' spirit gets called satirical or a satire. The same thing happens to any reasonably diverting novel that treats of some particular environment, like an advertising agency or a school. In my opinion this is all mistaken. Let Anthony Powell put t he point in the course of his remarks on Ronald Firbank. Powell describes "an inept, not to say fatuous form of contemporary criticism to which Americans are peculiarly subject", and goes on:
"This lack of contact derives from an inability to disinguish between comedy and satire. When a comedian imitates a drunk man, he is not miming a tract against alcoholism. He is being funny. Mr Micawber is not a 'satire' against improvident officers of Marines. He is a great comic figure. Thus with Firbank. He was being funny about priests, and - dare one hint it? - about Negroes."'--Waring 07:29, 23 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

'Roman a clef' or not[edit]

Some anon changed

is a twelve volume roman à clef by Anthony Powell

to

It is often, erroneously, refered to as a roman a clef

So, which one is correct? --Dart evader 05:45, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]


ADTTMOT contains portraits of people Powell knew and met, but not all of the characters were based on actual people. So, while X Trapnel is very clearly Julian McLaren Ross, a number of different sources, including Maurice Bowra, went in to the make up of Sillery.
Powell often denied the presence of an exact 'key' to the characters. See [1]

--Tom Wootton 14:45, 17 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The question is a red herring. Trapnel, by the way is not MacClaren Ross. He shares some characteristics is all.



You people don't understand what roman a clef means. It doesn't mean that every single thing a character does is the exact equivalent of what a real life person does. It DOES mean that various characters are based on real people. Just because some characters are entirely fictitious does not keep it from being a roman a clef. Anyway, in terms of the internal logic of the actual entry page, it doesn't make sense to declare in the first paragraph of the page that it's NOT a roman a clef, and then have an extensive chart in which the characters are equated to real life persons. Either it is or it isn't. Saucybetty 19:17, 23 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sillery[edit]

I thought Sillery was a depiction of Maurice Bowra?

Although Powell often strenuously denied that he was a portrayal of Maurice Bowra, readers have frequently associated Sillery with him. However, he certainly wasn't a portrait of FR Leavis: if anything, Quiggin is a closer likeness to Leavis. --Waring 07:10, 27 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]


This is a discussion that has entertained several Oxbridge high tables. In his journals AP admits to Sillery being partly drawn from the Oxford don FF 'Sligger' Urquhart; however he says the principal source was Prof. Sir Ernest Barker, the political scientist and Fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge.
[Anthony Powell, Journals 1982-1986, p 273-4]
As the AP Society researchers point out Powell was very clear that, contrary to widespread Oxonian belief, the model was not the noted wit and string-puller, Sir Maurice Bowra, one time Warden of Wadham College.
[Anthony Powell, Journals 1987-1989, p 163; Journals 1990-1992, p 274]
Waring is almost certainly correct about Quiggin who A N Wilson has described as "A conflation of Powell's two enemies, CP Snow, author of Corridors of Power, and FR Leavis, the implacably influential literary critic and don".
[AN Wilson, London Evening Standard, 24 Sept 1997]
There are some remarkable similarities also to AP's nephew-in-law, Harold Pinter, the gloomy left-wing dramatist, although AP naturally denied that he was the main source. --Balliol 20:49, 7 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Two questions about Sillery and his world:

  • Quiggin calls him "Professor Sillery" (p. 175 of A Question ...) but in the next line Sillery makes "a deprecatory gesture in our direction to suggest his own unworthiness of this style of address". In other words, he isn't a professor, and only someone from a different planet (that's how Quiggin is portrayed in this episode, more or less) would address him as such. Am I right there? Or is he called Professor somewhere else as well?
  • Is it Oxford, or just "the university"? When I read the books, I imagined it as Cambridge, but that's probably because I went there. Is Oxford named? Andrew Dalby 13:14, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Good questions which I have put to the experts on the AP discussion list. My own assumption was that Sillery either held a minor chair or was a professor emeritus still accorded the title, like say, Prof. Jonanthan Riley-Smith at Cambridge today. From memory Spurling (in her Handbook/Invitation to the Dance) is silent on Sillery's precise status. He is said not to publish research.
It is indeed Oxford, where AP was up at, ahem, Balliol, but like Eton it is not named. Internal evidence (eg the motor accident) and AP's journals support this. Which is not to say that nothing has been drawn from Cambridge though. -- Balliol 14:18, 13 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
In response to your queries the scholars on the Powell discussion list observe that while Sillery is nowhere else described by the author as "professor", Sillers adopts an equally self-deprecating attitude when granted a peerage. However Dr Clarke from Canberra University raises two questions:
1. Is it likely that Sillers could have got a chair on the strength of one book, even at Oxford in the 1920s?
2. How would an Oxbridge undergraduate in those days have addressed a professor at an informal gathering?
Nonetheless Spurling (who appears to have cleared her material with Powell) does list him as "Professor Sillery" in her 'Handbook/Invitation to the Dance'
Dr Clarke adds that Quiggin's "faux pas is probably due to the much wider application of the title in the United States (Associate Professor, Adjunct Professor, Lulubelle Z. Furtwangler Professor, etc., etc.) than at Oxbridge. He naturally assumes from past experience that anybody of Sillery's position and influence would have professorial status."
While Oxford, like Eton, is not named in the text Rhodes scholars are.
--- Balliol 21:53, 17 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My thanks to those who responded! In reaction to Dr Clarke's questions:

1. You could become a don without writing even one book, but to become a professor I suspect you would need more than one. Bowra (to take a name that crops up in this context), whatever else he did, spent a good deal more time writing books, some of them about his subject, than Sillery appears to.
2. In the case of a real professor you would indeed say "Professor Sillery", I guess, until you learn to, or are encouraged to, adopt a more familiar form.

But it is true (I was trying to remember if this was so) that Sillery "adopts an equally self-deprecating attitude when granted a peerage". Therefore, admittedly, his reaction to Quiggin's form of address doesn't prove that he wasn't a professor. Andrew Dalby 12:55, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Character Models[edit]

Thanks to 79Spirit for some useful additions to the entry. I have however taken the liberty of reverting two of the amendments in line with the research, usually regarded as definitive, into the Dance character models by Dr Keith Marshall and Julian Allason, which have been extensively discussed. Bobby Roberts was in fact a source for Books Bagshaw rather than Peter Templer. While Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller was originally believed to be the character model for Widmerpool Powell was clear that this was not so and subsequently admitted that Widmerpool was based upon Denis Capel-Dunn. See http://anthonypowell.org/ --Balliol 18:06, 31 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

See new entries for both Kenneth Widmerpool and Denis Capel-Dunn -- Balliol 22:42, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Adaptations[edit]

Added details of the original Classic serial version - with casr lsit from Anthony Powell Society site. Arachrah (talk) 20:31, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Page count[edit]

How many pages in all? How many for each novel? C'mon... how epic is this novel set really?Dr. Locarno (talk) 15:18, 15 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In the University of Chicago paperback editions, the twelve-novel cycle is packaged into four volumes, incorporating three novels each. Each of these novels averages about 225 pages, thus about 700 pages per three-novel volume. The later novels (and obviously the last volume) are a bit shorter.PVarjak (talk) 00:12, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Illustrations[edit]

Is there a reason the cover illustrations haven't been discussed? --JESL2 (talk) 01:47, 15 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]


Representations of historical characters[edit]

I've added back in the table with references to historical figures that helped inspire the fictional characters. There has been ample scholarly work on the various figures that inspired Anthony Powell when writing these novels. I don't want to re-hash the 'roman a clef' debate; but while Anthony Powell did say he didn't want the book scene ONLY from that light, it's apparent that actual people had a hand in forming the fictional characters in the novels. It's a very helpful resource for those reading the novels for the first time as well.PVarjak (talk) 00:12, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

longest works?[edit]

I'm very skeptical of the claim that the "novel series" is "one of the longest works of fiction in literature." For starters, the linked article explicitly focuses on single novels, which seems like a reasonable criterium; if we're going to measure novel sequences, this particular series probably doesn't hold a candle to several series I have on my shelves. I think the "longest" claim smells more like puffery than actual, objective information. 74.232.78.141 (talk) 01:22, 23 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

On this note, I don't like the infelicities introduced into this article with the phrases "novel sequence" and "novel series". There seems to be a lack of consensus on whether Dance is one long novel that happens to have been sliced into 12 separate physical volumes, or whether it is 12 separate novels. A third possibility is that those aren't the only two options and that there is a third metaphysical entity, which is a bunch of novels that mostly revolve around the same characters, and that there ought to be (is there?) a word or phrase that literary critics use to describe such situations. I see that the New Yorker in 2018 described it as "an immensely long, multivolume novel". Novellasyes (talk) 15:17, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment comment[edit]

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:A Dance to the Music of Time/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

This article has been extensively reworked, and in my opinion, improved. A higher grading may now be in order. -- Balliol 22:48, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Last edited at 22:48, 12 November 2006 (UTC). Substituted at 06:16, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

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Jenkins personal life[edit]

This sentence from the intro seems (obviously) wrong to me: "Little is told of Jenkins's personal life beyond his encounters with the great and the bad." It's true that the miscarriage is handled highly elliptically. But we know a vast amount about his personal life: Visits, interchanges, meals, parties with family members, school mates, his social circle. Novellasyes (talk) 15:06, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Expand the analysis section[edit]

I think that the section of the article currently called "Analysis" ought to be expanded. I propose that it be renamed "Interpretation, literary critique and background" and that it be significantly expanded. If it were significantly expanded, it could incorporate a variety of interpretations, literary critiques and background that will indicate to any readers of the article what the most prominent and interesting perspectives are on what Powell was trying to do in the sequence, its main themes, and so on. It should also draw out where critics/analysts differ (such as the interpretation that says that the first three books in the sequence constitute a Bildungsroman versus those who say that it does not. That's just one example. Presumably, it would take some time to build up the content in this way. Novellasyes (talk) 19:00, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Scholarship to draw on: (added Novellasyes (talk) 16:07, 30 April 2020 (UTC) )[reply]

Having discovered Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Novels it looks like the preferred way to get into the type of content I'm advocating for is with a section called "Themes" which then has as many subsections as one needs (for each different theme to which one is drawing attention). I'm not 100% sure that "themes" in that sense is the right way to approach Dance (as opposed to, say, "interpretations") but I think it is an okay starting point. Novellasyes (talk) 20:59, 12 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Bucket of burning coal[edit]

@Karoly Cornis: and @Xxanthippe:. Karoly Cornis edited the article to say "At the beginning of the first volume, Nick falls into a reverie while watching snow descending on a bucket of burning coke" instead of what it had previously said, which was, "At the beginning of the first volume, Nick falls into a reverie while watching snow descending on a coal brazier." I was curious about that so I looked up exactly what Powell did write, and it was "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." So, I agree with Karoly Cornis's edit there. Novellasyes (talk) 13:20, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well done in finding the accurate source. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:18, 29 August 2020 (UTC).[reply]
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