Backlisted - Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell

Episode Date: December 25, 2018

John and Andy are joined by novelist Philip Hensher and biographer Hilary Spurling for a discussion of Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell, first published in 1971, the tenth instalment of A Dance to the Music of Time. This special Christmas episode was recorded live at the LRB Bookshop in London on December 6th 2018.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)2'48 - A Dance To The Music Of Time by Anthony Powell17'41 - Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Some wine? Yes. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. See app for details. Hello and welcome to Backlisting, the podcast that gives new life to old books. We are here today for our Christmas episode in the London Review Bookshop in London, a place which I noted on TripAdvisor, no less, as an essential part of the capital's cultural life. Well, we shall see. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the

platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today are Hilary Sperling, one of this country's most respected biographers and literary editors. Her books have won multiple awards, including the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year for Matisse the Master, the second volume of her Life of the Artist. She is also the official biographer, as luck would have it, of the novelist Anthony Pohl. What a coincidence. An amazing coincidence.

And her book, Anthony Pohl, Dancing to the Music of Time, was published to Universal Acclaim last year. Hilary is also the author of Invitation to the Dance, an invaluable handbook for anyone preparing a podcast on the dance to the music of time. And also for readers of the 12-volume novel sequence that the author himself described this book as, quote, a master key. Delighted to be joined by Philip Hensher, the novelist and book reviewer. Philip's novel, The Northern Clemency, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and Scenes from Early Life won the Ondaatje Prize in 2013.

and Scenes from Early Life won the Ondaatje Prize in 2013. Earlier this year, Penguin released The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, edited by Philip, and Fourth Estate released his latest novel, The Friendly Ones, which was described in The Times as the book you should give someone who thinks they don't like novels. And we are here to discuss, of course, the famous unfinished book Profiles in String by the novelist X Trapp. But seriously, we're very, very pleased to have Hilary and Philip here to talk about Books Do Furnish a Room,

which is the 10th volume in the magnificent Romain Fleur by Anthony Pohl, A Dance to the Music of Time. This book, the 10th book, was published in 1971 by William Heinemann. How many people here have read in its entirety A Dance to the Music of Time? Wow. Everyone. That is amazing. Amazing.

And how many? This might be, I mean, that might be, we should have got the Guinness Book of World Records down. And how many people here, raise your hand, if you have read the Dance to the Music of Time this year following a foolish suggestion by me on that list? Oh, my goodness. There you go.

That's amazing. Is someone called rye limit here rye limit at the back when did you finish a dance to the music of time 11 o'clock last night good huh well done rye limit and also we're joined by three chaps could you stand up please john Rob and Adrian. Give them a round of applause now. So, John, Rob and Adrian, this is so impressive. Not only did they follow our suggestion

of reading the donks in monthly installments this year, but they also met intermittently to discuss it at the Ritz, at the pub in Fitzrovia, and this afternoon at the Wallace Collection. They met this afternoon. That is extraordinary.

Under Who Sounds the Dance. I'd like to know, did they go to Venice for the 11th? John Mitchison, you read it this year. So before I turn to our guest, did you enjoy it? I loved it. In fact, I found it, what I discovered was, Philip, rather interesting, just said to me, did you not find it difficult to, you know, it's rather slow,

which is true, to do it a book a month. But did you not lose your way? And the answer is yes, frequently. But of course, I had close by me just what I needed. I mean, it's not all, I don't think you have to have Hilary's brilliant invitation to dance near, but it really helps. But what I found was it was because I'm a publisher,

obviously I'm reading a lot of stuff all the time. And as you know, there's a lot of reading for the podcast. I found it was the book I went to in the dark, cold watches of the night for comfort. I found it immeasurably kind of reassuring and comforting as a book. I don't quite know why because it's funny. But it's also, I don't know, something about ageing as well, getting older and reflecting on one's life. You know that in the strange way that reading a novel becomes part of your own kind of autobiography in the same way.

I am very sad to have let it go, and I will now read the rest of Paul's fiction, which we might also talk about a little. Philip, can you remember where you were, who you were, when you first read A Dance of the Musical Time? Well, I grew up in Sheffield and I went to a comprehensive school there. And I think that one of the things that that sort of background encourages you into is exploring all sorts of existences that aren't your own, really.

And also, I was terrifically pretentious. I remember being hauled up with mockery in the press quite recently for remarking that in my sixth form we used to talk about things like the sitwells

all day long. And no one believed it. We genuinely did. And I think it's very underestimated how aesthetics emerge from these kind of backgrounds. And so I read Proust when I was 16. You know, the old Scott Moncrief editions that I borrowed from the City Library. It was absolutely murder trying to get the first three volumes from Sheffield City Libr. It was actually murder trying to get the first three volumes from Sheffield City Libraries

because everybody was constantly taking them out. If you got past volume three, you were all right. I read that and I thought, OK, I've done that. I've done Proust. I've got Proust under my belt. What's next? And this is the thing about public libraries. If you go along the shelves of public libraries, there are those kind of shelves that have kind of 12-volume novels,

and you think, oh, I'll have a bit of that. And I saw Anthony Pearl. I had a go at somebody called Maso de la Roche as well, who sort of disappeared, rather justifiably. There was feature backlisted everywhere. But then there was Anthony Pelt. And so I read Anthony Pelt when I was 16. And I would say that bits of it meant more to me than other bits.

The stretches that I loved immediately and have gone on loving are the fourth to sixth volumes, the real kind of party-going volumes. to sixth volumes, the real kind of party-going volumes. The volumes that I had to push through were the wartime volumes. It's only quite recently that I've liked those. But whenever I've gone back to it,

I've always found something different to like about it. And in the kind of periods between reading them, I've often found myself thinking, I wonder what Pamela fliton loves you now no good no good yeah um Hillary you of course for you and many years and he commissioned you to write his biography did he not right well it was kind of agreed between us but I think

that Anthony Pearl of whom I had become a friend having been a fan, and I'll explain to you how that happened later, that I was very useful to him because it meant that all the other people who wanted to write his biography, who were quite a few, quite a lot of people wrote to him about that, he could just say, no, sorry, I've got an official biographer. And he did that for years. And it used to drive me mad. And once, one of them, by this time, I had by then become a biographer. And a fellow biographer wrote me a very formal letter saying, you know, I have it in mind, it has been suggested to me, might write a biography

of Anthony Powell. But of course, I wonder how you would feel about that. And I thought, bloody hell, I am being used as a spoiler. I, in those days, absolutely didn't. It was the last thing I wanted to do, writer. And it is very, very, very difficult, I can assure you, to write a biography of a person that you're fond of. I've done it twice, and both times it was, it really, I was going to say it nearly killed me.

Well, that's a silly thing to say. It's the other person, Sonia Orwell. Yes. Yeah. And I only wrote her life because three, two, three, four, possibly five biographies of Orwell had trashed her and they were getting worse and worse, and they were making up things. And all of Sonia's friends, I was Sonia's friend quite independently, all of Sonia's friends

wrote to the newspaper, you know, the Times. I didn't think the literary London Reel was going then, but, you know, to every literary paper and to all the main national papers, didn't make a blind bit of difference. And finally, I was sitting, happened to be sitting at some literary dinner, I suppose, next door to Geoffrey Myers, who had written one of these. In fact, the worst of all these biographies of George Orwell. He writes a book in six months. Well, I take my hat off to him for that. But it does slightly show.

Anyway. It's all right. no one will hear this. So he just capped all the, and this is why they all did it, I think, because Dorwell's life was extremely well documented by the first biography, Bernard Crick, who is an economist and hasn't got a biographical bone in his body, but he is a good researcher and an academic, so he did do the legwork, and there it all was.

So all the other ones, I mean, this is no doubt, I'm libeling, I don't think I am. They had had all their research done for them. So then they just took a slightly different turn, and that was generally about Sonia. So Eileen Orwell, the first Mrs. Orwell, was sainted by biographer after biographer. And Sonia Orwell, the second Mrs. Orwell, was demonized. And in the end, it was just, it was Geoffrey Myers, of all people, who said to me, because we'd been getting

on very well, he's a funny, very funny man, telling me stories and so forth. And I said, by the way, I do have something I'm going to have to say to you before we go my oh I know he said it's Sonia Orwell isn't it and I said well yes you know your life of Sonia Orwell was I can't remember the word I used but trash twaddle made up from start to finish and he said well so it was more or less but he said why don't you write about her? And I must, I mean, that is why I did in the end write a short book about Sonia. It was a very good suggestion because since then I wrote a very short book about her.

Well, really, it was just that I wanted to scotch this, or at least say to all the people who put forward this view of her as someone who had exploited Orwell and squandered his money after his death. OK, then bring forward some evidence. No one had been able, of course, to bring a scrap of evidence that this was true. So my book was a very short book and had very long footnotes. I footnoted everything and I contradicted everything or more or less everything that they said.

And that worked. She hasn't been slandered or libeled since, I think. Before we go on to talking about Pohl, we have the great good fortune to have some recordings from 1975 from Desert Island Discs, which I am going to get Anthony Pohl himself to do the heavy lifting for me now. And he will describe to you, well, should we call it the dance or the music of time? I call it the dance, but you can call it what you like. The dance. The dance.

Well, I suppose that it really begins when the narrator is about seven or eight, and takes him on until he's about, well, in his late 60s. That is about the spread of it. But the first one came out in 1951, and the last one appeared in 1975, last year. Now, did you have a clear idea of just how many volumes this novel was going to take? No, I knew it was going to take a great many, but I didn't really know how many

until I really got within sight of the war, and I knew that I would want to write at least three volumes about the war. One of the things I think is remarkable about A Dance of the Music of Time, rather like the four rabbit novels by Updike is that it's quite difficult to read

them and feel he didn't know exactly where he was going from the very beginning which is of course part of the artistry of it in my view, Philip, what do you think does it hang, you've read it several times, does it hang together or does it feel I think that it does hang together.

I don't think it quite rivals the overwhelming narrative arc in Proust, but I do think it hangs together. The one thing that I would say is that there's a slightly strange quality that comes over the narrative when the time he's narrating overlaps with the time when he was writing the novel. So after the 10th volume, there's a kind of strange kind of speeding up of the episodes. I think the 12th volume is magnificent, but it's got a very different quality, I think, to the episodes. I think the twelfth volume is magnificent, but it's got a very different quality, I think, to the others. Now you can just regard that

as a sort of coda to the whole thing, but for me, I think that the main body of the arc is in the first ten volumes. Hilary, what do you... Come back and say.

If we're going to play numbers, my favourite volume is Temporary Kings, probably, which is volume 11. I think that might be mine. Yes, it's very, very rich. Not the one we're talking about. Ah, but I have reread this for tonight, and I must say I'm very, very touched by books to furnish a room.

It's, well I don't know if we're meant to start talking about this but we should be talking in general, but it touches me very strongly. It's a book in which he re-nits, picks things up after the war. Britain was picking things up after the war. Life was restarting, quite a lot about that. That was the period in which I was beginning my life so it's not really lot about that that was the period in which i was beginning my life so it's not really to do with that but when i came to london i worked first as a waitress in the tottenham court road three pounds a week and then i moved to the spectator for not much more

and became its art editor and then it's up to its literary editor and this book came out when I was still working at the spectator and so it it is about well it's about as far as it has a specific subject it is the publishing world and it's specifically it's not quite a lot of it is set in the magazine called vision which is as it were a latter-day London Review efficient I would say. Fission, yes. We were saying earlier, weren't we, it's imaginary Bloomsbury tonight in the heart of actual Bloomsbury. And so when I read this book,

it so much retrod the world that I'd been living in. And you know how when you become an adult, and I moved to London when I became an adult, that part of your life, you feel an adult, and I moved to London when I became an adult, that part of your life you feel very intensely, much more so than I would probably feel anything now. So books do furnish a room, which was writing about that period. I had just actually met Anthony Pearl in a scene setting certainly not unlike the book. In fact, I think he'd contributed to this book. Well, yes, I think he did. So you see, this book has a particular significance for me because of

that, because I knew the area he writes about. I knew the people. I didn't, of course, know McLaren Ross. We are talking about period even earlier than my own. But the seedy streets he writes about, I can't tell you how seedy this area was and a lot of you perhaps don't remember that but it was a very um grotty area indeed and that is the world that's really that's conjured up in this book that and the and the uh the staffage as it were the literary personnel the people who are gathered here tonight the people that frequent bookshops we'll be back in just a moment. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout.

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Sec. I'm going to ask you to read a little bit. But first of all, I just want to, I have the jacket that, we always read out the jacket, the blurb on Backlisted. And I have here the blurb from the front flap of the 1971 edition of Books to Furnish a Room, which I assume would have been written by Poll. Do you think so? Normally it is, yes. I mean, by an author, yes.

Here we go. Get ready, everybody. Hold on to your hats. The 10 tenth volume of Anthony Pohl's great novel, The Music of Time, note The Music of Time, begins the final trilogy of the sequence. The scene is London during the two or three years after the Second World War. The book's title is taken to some extent from the nickname of one of the characters, Books Do Furnish a Room, Bagshaw, all purposes journalist and amateur of revolutionary theory, but the phrase also suggests an aspect of that rather bleak post-war period, London's literary world finding its feet again.

For example, Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, who has begun work on a biography of Robert Burson, 17th century author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, gets a job doing the books on a little magazine, that's Fission that you were referring to. This brings about contact with persons known and unknown, including that talented writer of the war generation, ex-trapnol, always living on the edge of disaster. always living on the edge of disaster. Widmepool,

he's a sort of panto boo there. Widmepool, now a Labour MP, abuts on these activities with his young and beautiful wife, the former Pamela Fliton, a troublemaker. Books do furnish a room, throws vivid light on an important, neglected and sometimes slightly

sinister period what do you think well that's pretty much my my experience of this area and of that book yeah i mean you know we love a good blow the book is sort of structured around as a number of the novels in the sequence are brilliant set pieces. The funeral of Erich, the literary cocktail party, the fishing cocktail party. I think the fabulous scene towards the end where Widmerpool visits Trapnell and his wife, without giving too many spoilers away, Widmerpool's wife decides, takes a shine to Trapnell,

and they go off together to live in his grotty flat down in Maida Vale. The book is sort of structured around these brilliant comic kind of set pieces, but it's, and through this all, you've got Nicholas Jenkins, who, I mean, we talk maybe talk about jenkins and pole and how interchangeable they are observing and reflecting um it's i mean it's it's very intoxicating way of telling stories and i liked what you said before philip about the later books of fast-forwarding a little bit. A lot of it uses that brilliant technique of referring to something that's happened that you don't know yet what has happened.

And then the story unfolds, often through conversations with other people. It's just literary craftsmanship. It's beautifully constructed. It's like fireworks. Yeah. Like fireworks. Yes, I think, well, to me it is.

I haven't read any Pearl since I finished writing about him, which was two or three years ago now. So it was nice. It was very nice for me to rediscover that voice. And, yes, the voice is slow, steady, deceptively so, of course. It is extremely funny. But a lot of what is so funny is going on between the lines. And at the same time, I find it, as John said, quite intoxicating. And that's what I meant by it's like pyrotechnics. It's just so dazzlingly, you know, you stand and you look at fireworks and you think this cannot be happening. I cannot be seeing this. This is just not possible. Well, I do get that

feeling from Anthony Powell, the technical side, I suppose. Yeah, there are so many times when you think he's not going to get away with this. You can't bring, you can't bring Widmerpool into this at this moment and expect that this is going to work. The particular aspect to the technique, I think, is in a way against the general tendency that we're told the 20th century novel takes, which is more and more interiority, more and more

dwelling on the passages of the mind. And he doesn't do that, very much of that. We don't really hear a lot about Nick Jenkins' passages of thought. What we get is a lot of very close analysis of what we do in everyday life. We look at people's exteriors. We look at the way they carry themselves.

We look at the way they behave and the way that they react to each other and what they say. And what they say. And it's very much like going through life. There's a wonderful scene I absolutely adore when the ghastly Mrs McClintock meets Charles Stringer. And he's fascinated by the fact that he's dressed up as Little Bo Peep. And the way their surfaces bang up against each other

and everyone around them is just terrified of what is going to happen. We don't hear anything about what they really think at all. It's just what they are saying to each other about what the other one looks like. One's drunk, one's wearing a ridiculous dress and that's enough. And it makes you dizzy sometimes, doesn't it? Because it's so... And yet it's all so easy.

I find they run down very smoothly, those books. But when you know them, I do know them very well now, as you do, and therefore I notice things I certainly didn't notice before. And partly it's this... I mean, now, one of the things I mostly notice, and of course I've become a writer myself in that interval, and partly it's this I mean and now one of the things I mostly notice and I'm and of course I've become a writer myself in that interval is this this dazzling firework pyrotechnical power of just going from one impossible place to

another which you don't notice when you first read it because it runs so smoothly you know that is a very extraordinary friction, I suppose you could call it. I mean, different things pulling in different directions. Could you read us something? I asked you to choose a passage. While you're looking for it, I just want to quote X. Trachnell in Temporary King.

Jenkins remembers him saying, and you backlisted listeners will appreciate the truth of what X. Tr Extract says here, reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them. I love that. Having said that, Hilary, would you read for us, please? I found it very, very difficult choosing an extract from this book because it's, what volume is it? Anyway, it's quite far on in the sequence the people everything relates so much to each other so i've chosen a fairly self-contained little episode taking place

at a fishing party this is a party a gathering not unlike this one i would say in a bookshop a london bookshop except that at this party people move about with their drinks instead of having to sit still and listen to various people. It's a world you'll all be very, very familiar with. I think that, as I said, Fish and Liz, as it were, the London Review of 50 years ago, or very similar organ. And the other thing I should say is you must remember that the journalists in this episode, they are the equivalent of, I suppose, TV celebrities of today. That's to say journalists in those days were not, you know, clinging on the way journalists are today. They were very powerful people indeed. And this is about a couple of very powerful journalists. The narrator is arriving at a party in this area and not unlike this building.

It's actually a bookshop, I mean a publishing house he's going into, but they have a bookshop too. And the bookshop firm is called Quiggan and Craggs. Quiggan and Craggs are both present. No one was about by the trade counter. The doors were now all open, furniture pushed back against the wall, typewriters in rubber covers standing on steel cabinets, a table covered with stacks of the first number of fission. In the farthest room stood another table on which glasses but no bottles were to be seen. We move towards the drinks where were also standing Bernard Schoenmaker and Nathaniel Sheldon.

These characters have not appeared in the music of time before, and that's why I chose this extract. There's quite a lot of explanation now. It makes it easier to follow, I hope. This immediately suggested an uncomfortable situation, as these two critics had played on different sides in a recent crop of letters about homosexuality in one of the weeklies.

In any case, they were likely to be antipathetic to each other as representing opposite ends of their calling. Sheldon, an all-purpose journalist with a professional background, had probably never read a book for pleasure in his life. This didn't at all handicap his laying down the law in a reasonably lively manner and with brutal topicality in the literary column of a daily paper. He would have been equally happier, possibly happier, if that epithet could be used of him at all, in almost any other journalistic activity. Schoenmaker represented literary criticism in a more eminent form. Indeed, one of his goals was to establish finally that the critic, not the author, was paramount. He tended to offer guarded encouragement, tempered with veiled threats, to young writers. There was

a piece by him in Fission contrasting Rilke with Mayakovsky. Two long reviews dovetailed together into a fresh article. Schoenmaker's reviews, unlike Sheldon's, would one day be collected together and published in a volume itself to be reviewed, though not by Sheldon. I was quite certain. Yet was it certain. Their present differences could become so polemical that Sheldon might think it worthwhile lampooning Schoenmaker in his column. If Sheldon did decide to attack him,

Schoenmaker would have no way of getting his own back, however rude Sheldon might be. However, even offensive admission into Sheldon's column was recognition that Schoenmaker was worth abusing in the presence of a mass audience. That would to some extent spoil the pleasure for Sheldon, for Shurnmaker allay the pain. Publishers endlessly argued the question whether Sheldon or Shurnmaker sold any of the books they discussed. The majority view was that no sales could take place in consequence of Sheldon's notices because none of his readers read books. Schoenmaker's readers, on the other hand, read books, but his scraps of praise were so niggardly

to the writers he scrutinized that he was held by some to be an equally ineffective medium it was almost inconceivable for a writer to bring off the double event of being mentioned far less praised by both of them i think that just about gets the world that we're in the reason i chose or i particularly wanted to talk about this volume is because poll is such a brilliant writer even now as we read it now about the world of books and bookshops and publishing right I there's so many things that made me giggle or laugh out loud in this book he's also brilliant at inventing titles of fictional books if I ask each of you to nominate your favourite fictional title by Paul

Dogs Have No Uncles Well I think Camel Ride to the Tomb Yeah by X Trattnall Camel Ride to the St John Ada Lankwardine's I Stopped at the Chemist or if I'm going to get into later film Des sally goes shopping so i might give you my favorite my favorite is the left this actually has two titles it's

submitted to quiggan and cracks and left-wing novel with the title the pistons of our locomotive sing the songs of our workers which after a quick editorial turn is subsequently published as engine melody but i think i think the greatest fictional title in all of pell isn't it time and i think it's it will speak to everybody who's ever worked in a publisher and it's uh in what's become a wearing and one day the hero comes into work to find that one of his author authors has submitted a manuscript which is 30 000 words short and entitled than whom what other philip you mentioned that you had read both proust and and pole in the same year. And we have a clip of pole. We have a clip of pole.

The comparison is put to pole, and this is what he says about it. And I want then, Hilary, if you would respond to what Anthony Pole says, that would be great. You called the work The Music of Time. Now, there's an echo of Proust in that title, although neither your intention nor your style owes anything to Proust. Yes, well, I would quite agree about that.

It is simply a chance that there is this picture by Poussin, which is called A Dance to the Music of Time, which did seem to me to cover very much what I was going to write about. And it shows the seasons dancing to time, who is staying while they dance. And it was really purely chance, which I never thought about at all, that the title resembled Proust in any way.

Now, in that vast work, there are hundreds of characters. Do you think visually, do you know what all the characters look like? Well, yes, I think I do, really. I think I do see them visually. And I always remember my old friend Constance Lambert saying he always liked characters to be described. He liked saying he's a middle-aged man with a chestnut moustache. He then felt that he knew what the character looked like.

Hilary, that's rather disingenuous. The total coincidence of it being like Proust. It is partially inspired by Proust, isn't it? I'm not sure. I think he's been dogged as a novelist. He was dogged all his life by comparisons of Proust, especially sneering ones. You know, they've got Proust and he thinks,

some people think he's the English Proust, especially sneering ones. You know, they've got Proust and he thinks, some people think he's the English Proust. So, of course, it made him, he loved Proust, certainly, and indeed read the whole of Proust before he began to read. I think it was a preliminary, a training session, as it were. I think they're as unlike as the French are unlike us. I mean, there isn't very much in common. There was a, well... Long. They're long, they're in 12 volumes. It more or less stops there.

Pohl has a much, much broader social range in his novels. It's not generally attributed to him, but it's true. Proust writes about a very small section of aristocratic French life. And Pohl actually, in the old, what was it, News of the World slogan, all human light is there, in my opinion, if you're prepared to look for it and accept that.

I think the other thing is that Pohl is much, much more interested in the different ways that people talk. I mean, his dialogue is very much more to the point. Proust's dialogue, I don't think, is his selling point. I love Proust, but I don't think that there's anything like those snappy exchanges. There's certainly a Woodhouse-ian side, strongly. Woodhouse loved Pohl, didn't he? Woodhouse loved Pohl, but Pohl wasn't influenced by Woodhouse

because he didn't read him until much, much, much later. Pohl met someone who said, who had met Woodhouse in Paris and said he's going really crazy because he can't get I think it was, he can't complete his set. He's got the whole of the Music of Time up to the point at which the writing

had reached at that stage. And he's got all the early novels except for what's become of Waring. So Pohl, being polite and also also flattered as authors tend to be if people are reading never packed up a copy and sent it to Paris and then he got a marvelous letter from Woodhouse really absolutely laying out I think the the power and strength of the sequence and I excited he was by it and he said whenever i read your stuff i think why didn't i think of that and it goes on like that you know he just he was bowled over didn't say he looked at it and couldn't figure out how you got it how he got it to work

i just can't yeah can't figure out how you do it i don't think there are any woodhouse characters that would really go into dance i think well what about sheldon and sean maker the couple i just uh i think that's a fairly woodhousie next time i i agree with you it's only one layer of what pearl does i would i'm the one woodhouse character that i think would go in is eucharist i think that eucharist would just plop straight into this volume. Buster Fox is a tiny bit Woodhouseian, isn't he? You've got a bit of Dickie Umphreville. Well, Dickie Umphreville I absolutely adore.

I think that Dickie Umphreville was one of those characters that a novelist writes and just develops an unnatural fondness for. And Dickie Umph Everford is always... Despite the evidence. He's often kind of cropping up to say something totally scurrilous at the end of chapters. That's true. I thought I'd read this because I think it has the single best joke in Poe at the end. It comes after Erj's funeral.

A footnote to the events of Eridj's funeral was supplied by Dickie Umfraville after our return to London. It was to believed or not, according to Toast. Umfraville produced the imputation, if that was what it was to be called, when we were alone together. Pamela Widmerpool's name had cropped up again. Umfraville, assuming the manner he employed when about to give an imitation, moved closer. Lastly, Umphreville's character acting had come largely in person of himself, Dr. Jekyll, even without the use of the transforming drug slipping into the skin of the larger-than-life burlesque figure of Mr Hyde. In these metamorphoses,

Umphreville's normal conversation would suddenly take grotesque shape. The bright, bloodshot eyes, neat moustache, perfectly brushed hair, the formalised army officer of caricature suddenly twisted into some alarming or grotesque shape as a vehicle for improvisation. Remember my confessing in my outspoken way. I'd been pretty close to Flavia

Stringham in the old days of the Happy Valley. Put it more bluntly than that, Dickie, you said you'd taken her virginity. What a cad I am. One sometimes wonders whether you're a cad, Dickie, or whether you were the first.

Our little romance is scarcely over before she married Cosmo Fliton. Now, the only reason a woman like Flavia could want to marry Cosmo was because she needed a husband in a hurry and at any price. Unfortunately, my own circumstances were very inspiring to her hand. Dickie, this is pure fantasy. Umphreville looked sad. Even if she's the most boisterous, there was a touch of melancholy about him

that he was a pure Burton type when one came to think of it. Melancholy, as expressed by giving imitations, would have made another interesting subsection in the anatomy. All right, old boy, all right, keep your whip up. Cosmo dropped a hint once in his cups. Not a positive one. There was nothing positive about cosmo flitzen barring of course his wasselman test mind you it could be argued flavia found an equally god-awful heel in harrison f wise bite but harrison came onto the scene too late to have fathered the beautiful Pamela. I'm not prepared to accept this, Dickie. You've just

thought it up. Umphreville's habit of taking liberties with dates if a story could thereby be improved was notorious. You can never tell, he repeated. My God, Cosmo was a swine, a real swine. Harrison and I liked him this way. He mixed a refreshing cocktail of his own invention called Death Comes for the Archbishop. If regular backlisted listeners will recall, we did an episode on Willa Cather earlier this year. Not about Death Comes for the Archbishop, but nevertheless, it was very pleasing. You mentioned in that extract, or it's mentioned in that extract the anatomy of melancholy by robert burton which plays an increasingly big part in the dance as it goes on i just wanted to share this little piece that um this very short thing that um

paul wrote for the radio times imagine this appearing in the Radio Times now, in the Radio Times in 1977, about how he discovered the anatomy of melancholy. He said, when I was a young man working in a publisher's office, I shared with the manager a room surrounded by bookshelves that were closely packed with file copies of the books the firm had brought out since its foundation at the turn of the century. This would be Duckworth's, right? In the rare moments when all production was in the pipeline, there were no more manuscripts to report on, no ads to be made up, no authors dropping in to inquire about their sales. I used to read the less uninviting of these file copies. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I used to read them in preference to business activities. One of the firm's rather uncharacteristic publications of the early 1900s was a three-volume edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy,

a much-reprinted classic, first issued in 1621. On an idle afternoon, I took the first volume down, in due course getting through the whole of the anatomy a longish work in that way there are perhaps worse places to read about melancholy than a publisher's office I love he's very he's very good he's very good on publishers I want to say he's very good on melancholy you know jenkins is quite a i don't know what we think the difference is between jenkins as a narrator and paul but i think there is a difference isn't there when you were discussing jenkins just now you you left out his tone of voice which is the tone of voice of the 12 volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time.

And I think that is crucially important. I mean, if you try, as indeed I did, I read a whole book about it, summarizing these books and therefore leaving out the tone of voice, they're almost meaningless. I mean, you look at my retrospective summaries, because I don't think, I mean, I'm pretty sure he didn'taries, because I don't think, I mean, I'm pretty sure he didn't make any outline of a novel before he wrote it. It grew, as it were, organically. They grew, and it grew, the sequence too. But I, afterwards, summarized the thing, at his request, I may say. It was the most horrible job I've ever had in all my life. I felt as if I were taking, you know,

the car engine of a particularly beautiful and sleek and fast and elegant car to pieces. And there I stood with all these bloody pieces on the garage floor and absolutely no idea how to put them together. That's what I did in, well, as you've got the book somewhere, haven't you? But that's what it is.

It consists of the pieces. It's been taken to pieces and put on the garage floor. It has been a useful volume, I know, to lots of people. And it was very useful for me in writing his biography, certainly. That saved me a lot of trouble. But it was a horrible job. And I hated it. And what was absolutely missing, and that you cannot deal with in any compendium like that is the tone of voice, which is so crucial. It's a sort of, I remember the first time I went to a Picasso show, very, very young, and it was a huge show at the Tate. And it was the moment at which the British public got the hang of Picasso. Before that, there was always jokes about two eyes on one side of a nose and all the rest of it. I mean, he was, you know, he was just jeered at. And when you went in to the exhibition, you just heard a low

chuckle, a low sort of hum. I didn't know what it was at first. It was the hum of laughter as people were looking at these pictures and Sally got, oh, and they just laughed. I mean, it wasn't loud laughter. It was a low, humming laughter. And I think that is very much the equivalent of the tone of voice in Pearl. I don't want to say he's just a comic author. I mean, of course there is that. I think he's one of the,

well, he's a very deep and dark author, actually. But the process of when you jump into the water, it is very, very welcoming because of this humming laughter underlining everything. There is an answer, of course, to the question of how does the voice of Jenkins differ from the voice of Pohl and we actually know perfectly well

because after he finished Dance the Music of Time, Pohl wrote four volumes of memoirs and I, which I utterly recommend, I think it's a wonderful, wonderful set of memoirs. And it's got some things in common, but there is a sort of increased intimacy about domestic events in the memoirs. In the Dance of the Music of Time, it's pretty clear that we're going to be shut off from quite a lot of private things. There's a sentence when he just announces that around the same time I got married to, I got married. And we don't really, we're not really admitted to those kind of joys. That's another area where he really doesn't overlap with Proust.

He doesn't. We never learn the titles of any of Nick Jenkins' novels. It's a glorious sentence. And I laugh every time I come to this. He just says, I was then at the time of life when one has published a couple of novels. It's so grand. So we're just going to hear a list of the people

who have chosen A Dance to the Music of Time as their Desert Island book on Desert Island Discs. But let's hear from the first of them. Well, I wish I had more time for readings. I like reading and I'm always appalled by my own ignorance when I read about English literature. If I've won the football pools, I should like to spend the rest of my life just reading, I think.

Dance to the Music of Time would do very nicely because it's so long that my memory is so poor that by the time I got to the end of it, I could start again at the beginning and it would be as a new book to me. Well, it's taken us 82 episodes, but I finally got the voice of John Peel into this podcast so here's here are some of the other people who've chosen a dance the music of time it's been chosen by Jilly Cooper only on her first visit to the island. On her second visit, she chose an atlas. It was chosen by Joanna

Lumley. It was chosen by Ian Rankin, novelist Ian Rankin. And I regret to inform you, it was chosen by Tim Martin, founder of the Wetherspoon chain of pubs. But he in particular said, a bit like Peel did there, that, you know, it's nice and long and I'll be on the desert island. There's a reason why I didn't ask Tim Martin to be the guest on this podcast. And does anybody know the connection between Anthony Pohl and the Who? No one? Wow, that's amazing. No, do you know? think yes i know i heard you kit lambert the who's co-manager was you didn't get that i knew it but i didn't get it that was

the son of pearl's best friend constant lamb who is pretty much moreland in the books. Yes. In the way that Extracnol is very closely based on... I think there's almost more... Well, they were both written as memorials, as it were. I mean, that was an element of two friends of Tony's. Well, we have a clip. The last clip we're going to hear is Pohl talking about, reminiscing about Constant Lambert. Great.

If you could take just one disc of your eight, which would it be? Well, I think I would have Lambert's Rio Grande, which I think would have most of the characteristics which I like, showing up. And one luxury to take with you? Well, my luxury would be a bottle of wine every day, of red wine, and I would drink a third of it at lunchtime and two-thirds at dinner. We will arrange enough for you to cover the length of your sojourn.

That would be very kind. I don't mind perfectly ordinary rough red wine. Well, not too rough. Well, no, not too rough, because to recall Constantine Lambert again, I remember he and I once bought a bottle of wine called Tawny Wine Port Flavour one afternoon, and it is one of the few bottles of wine I have been unable to drink. I think there are only two others, as far as I can remember.

I love it. Of the two or three. He remember. I love the two or three. He's able to remember the two or three. I'm sure if you'd asked him, he could. He did have that kind of side, which is perhaps we haven't really talked about the fact that his reputation and how it's changed, but he was apparently the last person, the last member of the Traveller's Club

to still wear a hat in the coffee coffee house at lunchtime which was uh which was a kind of a tradition but which i mean he liked that kind of thing he liked it he liked i think order and conservative before we go on to talk about pole's relevance today we were having a slight dispute about this downstairs i would like to point out that I bought this on the way here. Look, the new issue of World of Interiors, published today, has got Paul's house, the Chantry, on the front cover. Paul's pinups. So he is on trend once again. Do you feel Paul is read now?

He was certainly read 30 years ago. You've got to say this is a bookshop. You should ask whoever runs the bookshop. I think he's read more than he certainly was. I first read him at Oxford when a friend of mine gave me a book of his, and I gave it back, and I said, well, frankly, my life is boring enough already without my having to read this stuff. I suppose it was the buyer's market.

And a few years later, he tried again. And that time, the penny kind of dropped. And what I mean is I think you need a shift of focus. I think Poe is, in fact, a very, very original writer and that it's misleading, all these comparisons with Woodhouse and indeed with Proust, or with Evelyn Waugh, for that matter. He is... There isn't anybody actually very like him. And so you can't read him with an ear or an eye

filled with any other writer. You have to... It's a sort of... Well, it was a readjustment. It was for me, and many readers of Pearl, I think, have found that. When you finally get your eye in, and it's the same looking at a difficult picture.

You can look at pictures, and there are certain pictures you just can't make it a sense of tale of and then suddenly one day the thing falls into place and you realize that you are looking at something it has a good deal to say to you and and he was i mean he wasn't he where he had it plenty of critics i mean he divided people i mean all his life he had critic when i was young marbridge who'd been his great friend, turned against him. Well, I think that was jealousy. Yeah. Philip Larkin panned this book.

The same thing. Philip Larkin wrote one novel and it wasn't a great success. That's what Kingsley Amis said. I don't think it's a panning, that review. I think it gives a very good flavour of it. I disagree. I don't think it's a negative review at all. He did refer to him regularly as the horse-faced dwarf. Not in print.

Not in print. But I think that, to come back to this, I do think that there are some things about literary culture now which seem opposed to everything that's really good about Poe and about what the novel does. I think that what seems to be coming to the prominence of taste is very solipsistic novels about oneself. And Poe is absolutely at the opposite end to Knausgaard, say. This isn't a book about the self.

This is a book, this is what Kingsley Ames called an allography, a book about other people. It's a book too that is very ready to find laughter at the most inappropriate ways. It's not something that, it's not a book that says, oh well no, you know, somebody's died so we're not going to find anything funny about that. Somebody's been sick in a vase at a funeral. That's a dreadful thing to happen. I feel that we would say this is a dreadful thing to happen. We must not laugh at this point. The other thing about it, I have to say, is that it's a little, I do think it's a little bit of a Tory book. I do think that the whole kind of dynamic of the book,

of people becoming what they want to be, of striving forward, is not very much in the tradition of the London Review of Books. Or Fission. Or Fission, yeah. I do think it's all about kind of independent life. in the tradition of the London Review of Books. Or Fission. Or Fission, yeah. I do think it's all about kind of independent life. And I think that, you know, I mean, I've had a book criticised in the press

for being right wing, you know, and I thought immediately, is that a rule now? We're not allowed to write, you know, conservative inclined books. I do think that it's that there are things about it which seem quite different to the predominant taste of today. But that doesn't mean that they're not great books. I think they are great books.

It's kind of us that's a little bit out of tune. But taste will come back. So we're getting near the end of the podcast now. And so if you're listening at home it's christmas day even if it's not christmas day if you're listening on boxing day or in the dead zone um before new year we're all going to the pub everyone in this shop is going to the museum tavern uh just down the road from the lrb bookshop and so it seems appropriate to for me to share this section this is a short paragraph about the writer X Trattner,

based on Julian McLaren Ross and his attachment to pubs. Like almost all persons whose life is largely spun out in saloon bars, Bagshaw acknowledged strong ritualistic responses to given pubs. Each drinking house possessed its special, almost magical endowments to give meaning to whatever was said or done within its individual premises. Indeed, Bagshaw himself was so wholeheartedly committed to the mystique of the pub that no night of his life was complete without a final pint of beer in one of them. Accordingly, withdrawal of Bagshaw's company, whether or not that was to be regarded as auspicious

could always be relied upon wherever he might be however convivial the gathering 10 minutes before closing time if an unlikely contingency the local were not already known to him Bagshaw when invited to dinner always took the trouble to ascertain its exact situation for the inaction of this last right he must have carried in his head the names and addresses of at least 200 london pubs heaven knows how many provincial ones each measured off in delicate gradations in relation to the others strictly assessed for every movement in bagshaw's tactical game. The licensed premises he chose for the production of Trapnil, and that's brilliant, the production of Trapnil. The licensed premises he chose for the production of Trapnil

were in Great Portland Street, dingy, obscure, altogether lacking in outer character, possibly a haunt familiar for years for stealthy BBC negotiations after Bagshaw himself had, in principle, abandoned the broadcasting world. I'm sure you'll like Trattnall, he said. I feel none of the reservations about presenting him sometimes experienced during the war. Trattnall managed to get on the wrong side of several supposedly intelligent people. And on we go. I wish we had time to give you some of Trattnall's wonderful books.

My favourite Trattnall line is the one. And it's really important. Hilary made a point which is crucial, is that Trattnall is very funny in this book. But ultimately, often the way the book, like musical themes, the comic themes come back in as sort of tragic motifs later in the book. And Chatham's story is one of those.

But I just love this, that Chatham's, going back to unfrivolent impersonations, Chatham was famous for one particular impersonation. It turned out in due course that Chatham impersonations of Boris Karloff were to be taken as a signal that a late evening must be bought remorselessly to a clerk to get one character with one of these brilliant well we must bring this we do this evening remorselessly to a close we've got time for a few questions yes gentlemen

there in the jumper question for Hillary you said you'd tell us how you got to know Antipol. Oh, yeah. And you didn't, so would you like to? Yes. It's a rather frightful story, really. I was still in my 20s. I was working for The Spectator as its literary editor. And it had in those days a basement dining room

that was put in by the proprietor for wining and dining, I suppose, members of the cabinet or whoever the front of the paper were interested in. I had it one day a week for the back. And that was just really my friends. And it was marvelous because I could ring up anyone I wanted to meet. So greatly daring, and I must say,

it cost me sleepless nights. I nerved myself and I rang Anthony Powell. I was so nervous I nearly dropped the phone. And I said to him, Mr. Powell, in that quavering voice that girls can have at that stage, I said, Mr. Powell, would he, Ivy Compton Burnett, whom I also hugely admired, and she was the subject later of my very first book, had just died. So I rang him up, desperately nervous. I was in my, you know, very, very young. I'd only just got the job.

And I said, would you believe Ivy Compton Burnett has died and I need someone to write her obituary. And I'm ringing you to ask you. I didn't say to have the great honour of writing an obituary of Ivy Compton Burnett on the page of The Spectator, but that's what I thought. And he said, no, absolutely not. He never wrote obituaries he didn't like and hadn't read Ivy Compton Burnett. And at that point, I really lost my temper. Having been so nervous, I just thought, well, I said, look, there are two writers whom I admire more, whom everybody under 25 in this country admires more than anybody.

It's a complete lie. It was me. I said, and they are Ivy Compton Burnett and you. And it's you. Absolute nonsense. If you had died, I would have rung her. That is brilliant. And asked her to write your obituary. So he was very taken aback. I mean, you know, when I came across Ada Lentwardine in his books,

I understood how he felt about pushy literary ladies. But there was a pause and he said, well, I don't think we have a book of hers in the house, which was absolute rubbish because his wife was a great expert and indeed wrote a book herself on Ivy Compton Burnett. She had all of Ivy's novels. I'll just have to go and see. And then he put the phone down. I imagine he was pretty much shattered as I was pretty much shattered by the turn that this conversation was taking. So I'll go and see if we have one in the house, he said. So there was a long pause. And then he came back and he picked up the phone. And he'd obviously had a word with Violet, who had said, look, pull yourself together. You're going to have to do this. And he said, yes, he would write the obituary, which he did. And it's a very good one. He described her, he said he'd met her at a boat race party just before the war, just after the war.

I can't remember. But he said she was then a quite unmodified pre-First War personality. I wasn't going to put it quite like that. But anyway, I remembered it always. Of course, they're very, very different, except that I love them both. And then the editor of The Spectator, who was Nigel Lawson, subsequently Tory Chancellor,

as you know. I may say I've never been more left-wing, I've been left-wing all my life, but never more so than when I worked for the Backstage. Anyway, Nigel had this brilliant idea. The spectator was tremendously hard up, always on the verge of closing. And his idea was that we would have a spectator book of the month. And he said that to me, and we'll put it on the cover,

and we'll have a sticker, and we'll say spectator book of the month, and all the rest of it. And I said, absolutely fine, but I'm your literary editor. I get to choose the books. So he said, all right. And the first book I chose was a short story by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who had never been published or translated into English, never published in this country, never translated. And I knew about knows. I got my Spanish correspondent. What's it? Jean Franco.

Jean Franco. I'm prompted. She reviewed Spanish books for me. She was an academic, I think, at London University and pretty good in her field. And she must have, well, did tell me about him. So I asked her to translate a couple of short stories. I said, if he's as good as you say,

we'll publish one. So she translated a couple so that I had a choice. And the first spectator book of the month was a short story by this completely unheard of Latin American author that nobody in the book world or elsewhere knew anything about. And it was, well, it didn't have the banner headline, but it was on the front page. So the next month came around, there had to be another one. So I chose, I'd just been sent the proof copy of Books Do Furnish a Room. Sorry, not Books, it was the Military Philosophers. And I chose a chapter of that. That was the second Spectator short story. I may say neither of these sold a single extra copy of the magazine. And the third choice, well, I looked everywhere for the book that I was going to choose,

and in the end I chose a second chapter of The Military Philosophers. And after that, the whole idea of Books of the Month was dropped. But that was the pretext on which I rang up Mr. Pearl and asked him to lunch, and he came to lunch in the basement dining room of The Spectator. And nervous though I was on that occasion, I invited all my friends. And I can't now remember who they were, except one was my husband, who just prompted me about Gene Franco, and one was our friend Jim Farrell, J.G. Farrell,

who was just finishing Troubles. He too, therefore, was quite unknown. And a couple of others. but we had a great time. And that's why I think that this meeting contributed something, possibly, to Books to Furnish a Room, because it was just the moment at which Tony was beginning to write it. And I have always thought that's why he accepted my invitation. He's rung up by a totally unknown girl that he's never heard of,

who seems frightfully nervous and unimpressive and ask him this silly question and he accepted. It was background material for Books to Furnish a Room. That's my view. Your question is very likely to make it into the finished podcast. Thank you sir. Does anybody else have another question? My question was about the TV adaptation of Dance the Music of Time, which I think was broadcast in the 90s. I think I saw it, so I must have been, you know, an adult. And I wondered if you'd seen it and what you thought of it as a production representation.

Sorry, it was broadcast on... Do you mean on the radio? It was on the TV. It was Channel 4, I think. Oh, I thought it was brilliant, but so truncated that anyone who hadn't read the novels couldn't possibly have made any sense of it. They gave it... I mean, how many episodes did they give? Four. Yes, and they gave, was it eight or 12,

to Evelyn Waugh's Bride's Head, which was one book. And this gives you some idea of how high or how low Earl's reputation stood, that Bride's Head was eight or ten episodes and his 12 volumes got four. The acting and the casting were impeccable, I thought, but otherwise it must have been gobbledygook. We were trying to remember who was in it, wasn't it?

It's Simon Russell Bill. Simon Russell Bill. It was quite an interesting technical discovery for a beginning novelist, which was that if you boil a novel down beyond a certain point, then the only thing left in the novel is people greeting each other. LAUGHTER Thank you very much, Philip Hensher, Hilary Sperling. Hilary's biography of Anthony Pole, Dancing to the Music of Time, has just come out in paperback uh the tills in this shop will be open ringing

with festive training with festive cheer thank you very much everybody listening at home for giving us such a brilliant year on backlisted we have had a fantastic time backlisted or as it as it was once originally called there probably won't be that much reading to do on this episode number 82. That's it, isn't it? That's it. Thanks very much, everybody. Thank you. Merry Christmas.

If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed

in the previous fortnight.