"I left London one Saturday afternoon in the autumn to make some arrangement about a son going to school."
So begins the last chapter of Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish A Room, the tenth volume of his hypnotic, twelve-volume A Dance To The Music of Time, which I read every night during the twenty minutes when a son's nursing coincides with another son's bath.
Elsewhere Powell refers to his children as "it" or, mostly, not at all. Strange to be a father when so many of my literary role models have no kids, or had kids before kids were considered to be people, too. At the other extreme from Powell, Amy Fusselman writes well about parenting destroying her writing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
The kids really are almost completely excluded from Dance, but then again, so are Nick's parents except in his account of childhood. He doesn't even mention their deaths (assuming they're dead) and he never visits them.
In a novelistic world (aping a real world) that is multigenerational, with many friendships that include parents and their adult children, the almost total absence of Jenkins's family really stands out. I suppose it's a form of his general reticence about his own affairs throughout the book, but it's still odd that their absence isn't even really commented on.
It's actually my second time through ADTTMOT, and I'm even more vexed by Powell slamming the door on his personal after the albeit brilliant paragraph about meeting his wife, that the two of them immediately feel a sense of shared history and suffering, the very thing I felt on meeting my own wife.
The three volumes set during the war are my favorites, in part because the absence of his family makes sense here--Nick's too busy shuffling papers for Widmerpool to see them.
In the miniseries version, I believe we see Jenkins's son, _______, for about 6 seconds, playing soccer. (Or "football," as they say.)
It's possible that I'm confusing this with a similar scene in THE WIRE
Weirdly enough, the war volumes are where we get Isobel at her best, though very briefly: when Jenkins (and horrid Odo!) visit the family, he and she share a short conversation in her bedroom, during which it quickly becomes clear that she has the same sort of interest in people and eye for the complexities of relationships that he does.
I will admit that, though I share your frustration, I also have always sort of admired his line that goes more or less, "But what can one say about one's wife?" As he's showing us just how little we can know of the inside of other people's marriages, he's simultaneously telling us we can't really know his, either; we just have to trust that it's strong.
Post a Comment