Books: The War of Total Paper

THE SOLDIER’S ART by Anthony Powell. 228 pages. Little, Brown. $4.95.

When the time comes for the historian to get the sense of what life was like for the British between and during the two big wars, he will be better off turning to fiction than to journalism. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy will serve for a start. For a finish, he can wrap up the whole era with Anthony Powell’s incalculably brilliant series, The Music of Time. In The Soldier’s Art, the eighth novel in this marathon enterprise,* Powell, now 61, brings his narrator hero, Nick Jenkins, into his second year of World War II. Jenkins carries on with his task of scoring for conversation the operatic ballet that keeps Powell’s 50-odd characters dancing eccentrically until war imposes its own choreography.

Less Blood, Much Bumf. “Awfully chic to be killed,” remarks one of them, Charles Stringham. In the first novel, Stringham was an elegant, clever schoolboy at Eton. Now, after walk-on parts in later books as a sophisticated, droll, despairing alcoholic, he appears as a wry, dry, still witty private working as a waiter in an officers’ mess at a divisional headquarters in Northern Ireland. Here, as in other scenes, the denizens of Powell’s world—upper-class intelligentsia with outposts in the City, the aristocracy and in the upper bohemia of the theater, journalism, painting and music—find their highly contoured personalities flattened into military shape.

At this stage, the war calls less for bloodletting than for form filling. There are no battles but plenty of bumf—British army term for paperwork. Powell’s people move through “the backwoods of this bureaucratic jungle,” and it is a novelistic miracle that he keeps their old characters vivid and alive while they are being bored to death. If not bored, embarrassed. “Embarrassed” rather than “afraid” is the word one character finds for his feeling when his bathroom is bombed.

Rötterdämmerung. Some are embarrassed to death—mostly civilians. Lady Molly Jeavons’ town house cops a packet; the hostess goes with it, and so does Priscilla Tolland. In fact, a head count shows that six previous survivors of the Powell epic are killed off in this novel. In Powell’s war, only the rotters flourish—notably Kenneth Widmerpool, whose humorless egomania and bounderish one-upmanship have won him critical status as one of the great comic creations of modern English fiction. He is now on the make as a staff major, a virtuoso of bumf, and he chews poor Jenkins’ ear in a war of total paper.

The time is approaching when the instrumentalists of Powell’s Music fall silent, and what is called for is a long, critical view of Powell on his podium. That “character is fate” is a cliché; the fate of Powell’s characters is, like a capricious bomb, historical chance. There is really no sense in any of his creatures except their determination to make their folly explicit in their own words and actions. They live to die. Yet for many years to come, they will also live in the compelling echo of Powell’s funereal dance for a dead generation.

* The first seven: A Question of Upbringing (1951), A Buyer’s Market (1952), The Acceptance World (1955), At Lady Molly’s (1958), Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), The Kindly Ones (1962), The Valley of Bones (1964).