Anthony Powell’s “A Question of Upbringing” is the first part of his gargantuan twelve-novel epic “A Dance to the Music of Time.” He writes with wit, humor and not a little sarcasm, describing a quintessential Englishness that was perhaps never representative of society and has certainly disappeared. He wrote this first volume in 1951, and although the book opens with a London scene from that time, most of the book deals with the characters’ school and college experiences and reminisces about a time long gone.
The main character is Jenkins. I will follow the author’s lead and use surnames only for males, surnames and titles for women who are married, older, or otherwise unavailable, and given names for eligible women, whether of a certain class or prone to wearing flowery dresses while out. standing next to the post. boxes on the street. As his friend Stringham found out, even some of the most titled surnamed women can sometimes turn out to be highly eligible.
The form of the book is both simple and intriguing. It is so effective that we almost lose the ingenuity of its construction. There are only four chapters, each over fifty pages long and each focusing on a particular episode. We have school, a social gathering, a vacation in France and a university life. Powell’s writing has such a lightness of touch that we forget how intensely we are invited to analyze the circumstances of each chapter and how penetratingly we discover the lives of the characters. There is considerable innuendo, lots of gossip, and usually lots of money, along with the social status and influence involved in each household.
The quintessence of his English character, like the characters in Evelyn Waugh’s novels, stems from his seeming inability to question, or even notice, his privilege. It is a state they inhabit without reflection or gratitude, so taken for granted that it is beyond question, its achievement seemingly assumed, not expected. School means one of the best “public” schools. Going ‘to university’ assumes Oxbridge as a right, although Powell nuances this with the perennial plague of the English upper classes, intellectual scarcity, by having several of his enthusiastic participants ‘decide’ not to complete a degree. Many of the others are expected to take thirds before assuming their company presidencies or ministerial portfolios. The army occupies an important place in family stories, always in the category of officers, of course, and also the City, where one can always become “something”. Even Americans, however, can be described as having “millionaire pedigree” on both sides, an economic status that presumably makes up for what is otherwise a palpable lack of breeding. When family members don’t assume the expected and assumed heights they are mentioned in hushed tones, the words “black sheep” maybe not politically or at least socially correct even then.
But if this really was quintessentially English, it was a pretty rare ingredient. Perhaps one or two percent of the population went to the right school. Only about five or six percent attended higher education of any kind, let alone a college they “went” to. Neither Sandhurst nor the corporate boardrooms were populated by the masses. (They still aren’t!) And so, this was the quintessence of separation, of rarefied heights in an extended class system, and certainly by the 1950s some of these peaks had been scaled by other aspirants, using new Climbing techniques avoided by the incidents of years.
And so, “A Question of Education” reveals its duality. It is a story that celebrates a lost time, a nostalgic glimpse into a remembered adolescence where a hand placed seemingly carelessly and always momentarily on top of that of a member of the opposite sex remained a bold highlight of adolescence.
However, nostalgia is always tinged with loss. At the beginning of the book, Powell describes the school thus: “Sedimented residues of the years burned uninterruptedly, and not without melancholy, in the maroon brick of these medieval locks: beyond the cobblestones and arches of which (in a direction more to the north) memory also pondered, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, between meadows of water and avenues of trees: the dark demands of the past became at times almost suffocating in their insistence.
And how about this for a conceit of wealth: “It was a rather gloomy double-fronted façade on a small street near Berkeley Square: the entrance pillars flanked on either side with hollow cones for the liaison workers to blow out their torches” . And we realize we’re in a different era when Powell has his boys pick up two girls off the street for a ride in a new Vauxhall. Without a hint of irony or, indeed, pleasure, he may write that: “The girls could not have made more noise if their throats had been slit.”
When I first read Anthony Powell, I couldn’t get over my deep-seated hatred of this class and its inhabitants who seized power and inherited wealth. It was a country that was not mine. Now I come to it a little wiser and a little richer, at least richer in experience, and now I can appreciate the irony that my earlier naivete ignored. I am now looking forward to the next eleven episodes. “A Dance to the Music of Time” is surely a masterpiece that needs to be revisited.