The hunt for models takes its strangest turn with the series' central character, Kenneth Widmerpool. One of the great grotesques of English literature, there seems no shortage of people eager to propose themselves as the "true Ken."
Widmerpool is the bore who won't quit. He opens the novel sequence, running in the mist, practicing for teams for which he is never selected. And at the very end, at his death, some 70 years later, he's again running in the mist, still aiming beyond his reach. His last recorded words -- "I'm leading, I'm leading now" -- are both bathetic and tragic.
When he first looms out of the mists of school, he's the boy whose many peculiarities find expression in an overcoat of legendary oddness. His name is already synonymous with monstrous items of clothing -- "I'm afraid I'm wearing rather Widmerpool socks today" or "I've bought a wonderfully Widmerpool tie."
In typically elliptical Powellian fashion, nobody can quite remember exactly what was wrong with the legendary overcoat. Widmerpool is neither bullied nor ragged, but he's defined and placed, his character and role established through a series of reported reactions to a half-remembered item of clothing.
So many disagreeable qualities converge in the person of Kenneth Widmerpool, lesser hands would have made him a buffoon. But Powell never dismisses him. Pompous, self-obsessed, delighted in his own progress, by turns obsequious and groveling, Powell clearly shows his virtues, his ambition and toughness -- admired by his colleagues even when they hate him. Highly successful in the war, grotesque, sexually complex, serially cuckolded, but never insignificant.
Unlike most of his generation, Powell was excellent on women. Public school-educated English authors are famously incompetent at creating credible female characters, but Powell was an exception. The "Dance" contains a score of memorable women, most notably the archetypally disruptive and almost mystically oversexed Pamela Flitton (later, almost inevitably, Lady Pamela Widmerpool). A celebrated beauty, indifferent to money or property, whose sole treasured material possession is her sketch by Modigliani, Pamela is as irresistible to the reader as she is to most of the men and many of the women she encounters.
Powell's material is so well organized that the 6-year-old "monster" bridesmaid who disrupts a wedding reappears volumes later as the wartime femme fatale. Wife (of sorts) to Kenneth Widmerpool, lover (and destroyer) of X. Trapnel and many others, Pamela eventually makes her exit, gratifying the necrophiliac urges of an American academic, professor Russell Gwinnet. Taking to her bed awaiting him, she times a suicidal overdose of morphia precisely so as to satisfy his taste. Or to allow herself one last triumphal seduction, even in death.
Nick Jenkins' affair with Jean Templer is less torrid but exquisitely handled. A recent TV adaptation of the "Dance" understandably made much of a scene in which Jean opens her apartment door naked, but the novels trace the growth of love with far greater refinement. Jean is first glimpsed as a girl of 19, attractive but intimidatingly adult to the 19-year-old undergraduate Jenkins, who "decides" he is in love. Of this stage Powell writes:
Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned ... persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.
Jean drifts out of Nick's range, though never out of the picture, for nearly 10 years, until a chance meeting at the Ritz reintroduces her, married to a bore from whom she's recently separated.
The chance meeting develops into an impromptu weekend at her brother's house, where the relationship finally ignites. The description of the first kiss, in a car gliding along the Great West Road under cold, glittering stars, the mundane buildings transformed by a heavy snowfall, is beautiful -- a moment one might wish on any of one's friends. "Although not simultaneous in taking effect ... the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest."
The lovers derive equal pleasure from a meal, talking in a cafe or playing Russian billiards: The lineaments of gratified desire are evoked more keenly for the lack of any literal description of sex. Jenkins' ruminations on the nature of attraction take place outside of linear time: The relationship is patently authentic and the pacing satisfyingly, like that of a real affair.
Later, after they split up, Nick discovers that even as they were lovers she was starting an affair with Jimmy Stripling, a crude motor-racing enthusiast for whom Nick had nothing but contempt. He realizes that despite the closest imaginable relationship with Jean, he never fully knew her.
Fifteen years later he meets her again, now the wife of a personable South American dictator ("looks like Valentino on an off day," remarks her ex-husband) who, in a typical Powellian touch, we have seen in passing, many books earlier, as a young man dining at the Ritz amid a large family group. Jean is now a sleek, thoroughly modern grande dame, barely recognizable and almost as frightening in her friendly remoteness as she had seemed to the young Nick the first time they met.
How could this chic South American lady have shared with me embraces passionate and polymorphous? Had she really used those words, those very unexpected expressions, she was accustomed to cry out aloud at the moment of achievement? Once I had thought life unthinkable without her. How could that have been, when she was now only just short of a perfect stranger?
As with Widmerpool, the characters are complex, their relationships circular and ultimately unfathomable.
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