THAT MARXIST HISTORIAN and mainstay of the New Left Review Perry Anderson is an ardent advocate for A Dance to the Music of Time may not be as surprising as it was that Fredric Jameson thought well enough of Wyndham Lewis to write a short, brilliant book about him, but even so, it is...you know...surprising.
Anderson reviews Hilary Spurling's new biography of Powell in the July 19 issue of London Review of Books, whose editors give him plenty of room--nine LRB 4-column pages--to pay the book some mild compliments (two pages) and then take the Proust-vs.-Powell question head on (seven pages).
In Proust, "the external and internal chonologies do not fit," characters are "garish dummies" or "remain curiously blank," and "his representations of homosexuality coulod never accord with his actual feelings about it." And Anderson is just getting started--there are a few more columns of this.
However, "In scale and design, the architecture of A Dance to the Music of Time is unique in Western literature." In its dialogue, its characters, its attention to history, and its observations on human experience, Anderson considers it distinctly superior to À la recherche du temps perdu.
(By the way, is the architecture of Powell's sequence really unique? Isn't it similar to the roman-fleuve productions of Roman Rolland, John Galsworthy, and quite a few others?)
Number of people I expect to change their minds about Proust's standing in relation to Powell as a consequence of Anderson's essay: zero. It is interesting, though, that one of Gramsci's closest analysts came to the same conclusion as Evelyn Waugh on this particular point.
Did NYTBR decide not to review Spurling's biography? That's surprising, too.
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