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My brother’s yahrzeit – the first anniversary of his death last summer – is approaching. His death was the most intimate I have experienced. I spent most of the last two weeks of his life with him, in hospital and hospice, and observed the moment of his death.  Ken could be difficult. He was contrary and often bitter. We several times went years without speaking, and our relations were often a test of character. He brought out some of my own bitterness, but also our blackest senses of humor.  He started smoking cigarettes at age twelve, never seriously gave them up, and they killed him at age sixty-nine. In hospice I offered to buy him a carton of Raleighs (our mother’s brand: “Save the coupons!”) and that was the last time I saw him laugh. We were brothers and blood won in the end.   Thanks to Mike Juster I’ve learned of the poet Jean L. Kreiling who has just published a seven-poem sonnet sequence, “My Brother’s Last Year,” in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. In the first sonnet she writes:   “But he retains his reason and his wit, so much so that it seems clear he’ll survive; they say he won’t.”   Kreiling’s poems are a detailed account of the mundane things surrounding dying and death. I remember in the hospital my brother was still reading books, able to hold his granddaughter and talk about Montaigne. His mind was intact, which, despite all the evidence, suggested he would eventually get out of bed and return to his life. As Kreiling puts it, “He’s still him.” By the time he entered hospice he could no longer speak or, apparently, listen. His son and I sang to him but I don’t think he heard.   Survivors savor their survival. We can’t help it. The life instinct is powerful. Kreiling tells us: “To grow old is a gift.” She writes:   “This may assuage my sense there’s nothing I can do, although a visit’s nearly nothing. Yes, I care; that’s what my presence demonstrates, I know, but it will make him strain for things now rare or difficult: the teasing repartee, a walk outdoors, shared meals and memories. He reassures me that he feels okay, though I watch him declining, by degrees.”   The death of a loved makes us pause to assess the state of our own values. We ask, “What is Important?” Kreiling’s final sonnet:   “Not long before the end, he made it clear: there was so little that he wanted — just  to stay with those he loved, not disappear into the latter part of dust to dust. So many of us want so much: we crave the shiny toy, the extra buck, and more when less would do — stuff that will never save our souls or bodies. I knew that before my brother’s diagnosis, and today I can’t claim to have unlearned pointless greed. I find, though, that it’s easier to weigh the worth of things desired, to measure need, to understand there isn’t much I lack. He wanted only time. I want him back.”

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My writing here is often about what surprised me or did not.  So let’s have that about the first four novels of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve volume sequence published from 1951 to 1975 and covering a refracted version of Powell’s life from his later schooldays in the 1920s up to somewhere close to the completion of the series, if not to the narrator’s actual death, although why not, really  (“And now I am a ghost dictating to a terrified typist”).  Four volumes, 1951 to 1957, gets me up to the mid-1930s in the novel’s timeline.  World War II will get going two or three novels later.  That ought to be interesting. “Interesting” is an interesting word as applied to A Dance.  It is the purest comedy of manners I have ever read.* For my own part, I always enjoy hearing the details of other people’s lives, whether imaginary or not, so that I found this side of Lovell agreeable. (At Lady Molly’s, Ch. 5, 185) Like its direct forebear In Search of Lost Time, parts of the novels are patience-testing, particularly some of the party business.  One of the lessons Powell learned from his beloved Proust was the endless novelistic uses of parties: I can recall a brief conversation with a woman – not pretty, though possessing excellent legs – on the subject of cheese, which she alleged to be unprocurable at the buffet. (A Buyer’s Market, 2, 139) That line is a good test of Powell’s humor.  Those who find it hilarious may find A Dance to be a favorite book; those like me who find it more amusing than funny will want to keep reading the novels (this party is in the second book); no comment on those who do not see why this might be called humor. But my point is that the humor, the interest, and I am becoming convinced the point of this sequence of novels is all of the interconnected minutiae.  Writing a roman fleuve, allowing time to pass, in the novel and perhaps in real life, increases the complexity of the connections. The “details of other people’s lives” accumulate. I suppose, given the debt to Proust, that Powell would have more of a metaphysics or at least aesthetics, but it is not that kind of book.  He does have a metaphysics.  He is searching for truth in some sense: I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed…  Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.  (The Acceptance World, 2, 32) A Dance has plenty of irony, but at this point I do not sense much distance between the narrator, a novelist, and author in passages like this. Not that I know a thing about the narrator’s novels.  Another trick Powell learned form Proust is to skip all kinds of seemingly life-changing events that would be major features of conventional Bildungromans: I was then at the time of life when one has written a couple of novels, and moved from a firm that published art books to a company that produced second-feature films.  (ALM, 1, 16) You know, that time of life. I want to write about that narrator tomorrow, his style and temperament.  By the end of this thing I will have spent 2,500 pages with him. *  On a hunch, I have begun Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence (1953) to test this idea of the pure comedy of manners.  I’ve never read Pym.  Forty pages in, it is awful pure.

“You either fell under his spell and loved the wild ride of his prose, or you shunned or ignored it.”   Infatuation of the literary sort is likely possible only among the young. That’s my experience. I have discovered good writers in recent decades – Yvor Winters, C.H. Sisson – but the attraction was more balanced. I could see their weaknesses while continuing to read and admire them. While still in my teens and twenties, I would fall hard for certain writers and almost subconsciously rationalize their failings. I think of Thomas Pynchon and Sherwood Anderson, an unlikely pair. But my hardest fall was for Edward Dahlberg, a writer unknown to most readers.   Dahlberg (1900-77), an American, defied categories and most literary expectations. Between 1929 and 1934 he published three novels usually labeled “proletarian.” If that had been all he published, I would never have fallen for him. He knew all the Modernists in Paris, including Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. By 1941, when he published Do These Bones Live (retitled Can These Bones Live when republished in 1960), Dahlberg had transformed himself into -- what? In the words of Jules Chametzky, a writer of “[a] wildly baroque, some would say ornate and affected high style.” Dahlberg wrote prose in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, John Donne and Robert Burton, writers I was reading around the same time.   I wrote my name and the date of purchase in my copy of Can These Bones Live: “8-6-75.” Much of the text is underlined and annotated. Here’s a typical marked passage, from a chapter titled “Randolph Bourne: In the Saddle of Rosinante”: “All dogmas lead men to the Abyss; doctrine is the enemy of vision and the denial of the past.” By Dahlberg’s customary standards, that’s both thoughtful and moderate. He could be a real crank, like one of his heroes, Henry David Thoreau, of whom he writes:   “Great lives are moral allegories and so soon become deniable myths because we cannot believe tat such good men could have existed in such an evil world.”   The guy who first introduced me to Dahlberg, in 1974, was Mike Phillips. Eighteen years ago I wrote a post on this blog asking if anyone knew Phillips or his whereabouts. So far, silence. I’ve read most of Dahlberg’s published work. Especially good is his 1964 autobiography, filtered through the unhappy life of his mother, Because I Was Flesh. Dahlberg’s essential theme was himself. The memoir works because the focus is shifted to his mother. I’ve shed my infatuation and can value for his best work. Here is another underlined passage accompanied by a half-century-old exclamation point: “There are no abstract truths—no Mass Man, no proletariat. There is only Man.”     [Two quotes, including the one at the top, are taken from Jules Chametzky’s Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers: a Cultural Memoir (2012).]