Powell's Piano Concertos

THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS by Anthony Powell. 244 pages. Little, Brown. $4.95.

Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, a serial novel issued in fairly regular installments for more than 18 years, can now be seen for what it is: a great prose composition in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Powell invites his dedicated (though still small) readership to think of his work in musical terms. The descriptive form that suggests itself for his nine novels is a series of piano concertos with variations on a single complex theme. Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, is, of course, at the piano.

The period covered in Military Philosophers, the ninth of the series, is roughly from 1942 to V-E day, an era that would seem to call for the verbal equivalent of massed bands, with effects by real cannon in the manner of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Though Powell's narration continues pianissimo, the result is far from flat. His prose is a percussion instrument, delicate but forceful because precise.

Byzantine Labyrinth. In The Valley of Bones (the seventh novel), Nick Jenkins was an officer in a Welsh regiment training for the invasion. Now he has been transferred to the offices of the British general staff in Whitehall. In that bureaucratic maze, Powell's khaki characters may seem less military than dilatory. But anyone who has inhabited the Byzantine labyrinths of noncombat wartime staff headquarters will recognize the wry truth of Powell's picture of intrigue, futility and boredom.

Powell's human comedy exploits to the full the incongruities of manner and matter inherent in his jumble of diverse characters, classes and accents. It seems surprising that even the British Empire could have converted such a collection of civilian highbrows, esthetes and scholars to effective military ends. Outside Whitehall, bombs are succeeded by rockets. The London toll of death and damage mounts. Throughout there is a sharp impression that what Powell refers to as "our incurable national levity" is a strong clue to the British survival. It is a specific against too much hope, and thus against bitterness at hope defeated. "Not all the fruits of Victory are appetising to the palate," an esthete says after V-E day, as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are transformed from Nazi-occupied countries into Communist satellites. "An issue of gall and wormwood has been laid on."

Jenkins' position as liaison officer with various Allied military missions gives Powell a chance to extend his insular comic powers to foreign fields. It also allows a sidelong glance at some of the larger tragic ironies of World War II. With remarkable feeling, Powell conveys the consternation of those concerned with Anglo-Soviet relations when chilling evidence comes in that the Russians have massacred 10,000 Polish officer-prisoners in the Katyn Forest.

One of the pleasures of any roman-fleuve lies in keeping track of the pasts and permutations of vast numbers of characters. One way and another, the war introduces and eradicates many of Powell's figurants. The ditching of the Yugoslav Chetnik Leader Mihailovich in favor of Tito costs the life of Peter Templer, one of Jenkins' oldest friends (and a veteran of novel No. 1, A Question of Upbringing), who fought with the wrong partisans. The Malayan debacle takes another of Powell's veteran characters, Charles Stringham, P.O.W. and presumed dead. The officer indirectly responsible for the orders that killed both men turns out to be the egregious Kenneth Widmerpool, whose fatuous careerism and brassbound egotism have provided veins of comedy running through all nine books. Widmerpool, an ambition addict who flourishes amidst the adversities of the rest of the world, turns up as a colonel, squeezing the epaulettes of power until the pips squeak. These exits and re-entrances emphasize that it is high time for Powell's publishers to provide a score to The Music of Time--not a musical score but a box score, giving the family trees and vital statistics of the more than 100 characters involved.

Family Jokes. The question arises: Why has Powell's splendid fictional achievement not won wider popularity in the U.S.? Some British critics feel that the difficulty lies in unfamiliarity with the moods and mores of the British upper classes. Others suggest that some acquaintance with the flesh-and-blood originals of Powell's fictional characters is necessary to savor his prose. But would it really help to know that Moreland, the intelligent musician who provides such a sparkling commentary on this world, was perhaps drawn from Composer Constant Lambert, or that the vastly comic Widmerpool was lovingly conjured from the fatuous figure of a minor Tory Cabinet Minister? It seems most unlikely.

Powell's world is special, as special as Proust's. In Evelyn Waugh's much-quoted observation, Powell has even been rated Proust's equal--with the qualification that he is much funnier. All the best jokes are family jokes, and the British Establishment is one of the closest of all cultural families. One no more needs to be a member of it to relish Anthony Powell than one needs to be a French homosexual with aristocratic friends to enjoy Proust. Like the peculiar British fondness for cold toast, though, a taste for Powell's prose is best acquired through prolonged exposure.

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