Sphinx

One of my least favourite novels in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence is the sixth, The Kindly Ones. I’m not entirely sure why; it offers one of his most sustained bits of classical reception, the Kindly Ones being of course the Eumenides or Furies – but my love of Powell, and personal response to this book, long pre-date any serious classical interest – and is just as full of unforgettable scenes and character sketches. More than likely it’s my habit of over-identifying with certain characters and then feeling vicariously miserable, and perhaps I simply shouldn’t enquire too closely. But in the last year or so it’s been difficult to avoid being reminded of the book on a regular basis, and that is Not Good – finding oneself in The Kindly Ones is akin to the Chinese curse of living in ‘interesting times’.

The Kindly Ones is set in the period around Munich, with flashbacks to the eve of the First World War. It’s permeated with a sense of impending doom; in the flashbacks, this is entirely a matter for the narrator and the reader, with only a few characters seriously worried about the state of European affairs, whereas in the main narrative only a few – for reasons which are very revealing of their natures and/or ideological prejudices – think that war is avoidable. Disaster looms inexorably; people feel paralysed and helpless, at the mercy of events, and for the most part unable to ignore them.

The passage which keeps coming to mind is a conversation between the narrator, a writer, and his close friend, a composer, who is trying to work on a ballet but finds himself completely stuck. The key line: “It’s impossible to write with Hitler about.” I’m not (yet) risking the invocation of Godwin’s Law by claiming that Johnson and Cummings’ latest wheeze is a fascist putsch, but rather that this has, on and off, been my psychological state since mid-2016; the sense of being at the mercy of inexorable external processes and malign forces (not only political; climate change and the environmental crisis have the same effect), unable either to take constructive action or to ignore them, and so getting on with writing about ancient economic history or classical reception or whatever seems pointless and trivial.

Yes, first world problems and all that – being able to assume a relatively stable and predictable society, with collective norms respected by the majority of people (including those in power), or at least being able to believe in the possibility of such stability, is indeed a western middle-class privilege. All that is solid evaporates, until we are confronted with the real conditions of our existence etc. But that doesn’t help with the demoralisation and listlessness, the low-level miasma of depression – and the feeling that you wouldn’t start from here, so to speak, that if I were younger or a different sort of academic or a different kind of writer I might be coping less badly, but instead I find myself committed to a discipline that is perhaps at best a luxury in the world in which we find ourselves, and at worst is already doomed except as part of the ideological system of our rulers.

What did you do in 2019, grandad? I switched to a more plant-based diet and wrote some snarky blog posts about Dominic Cummings’ reading of Thucydides, because trying to get on with any proper work felt impossible, and darkest Somerset is not a great place for finding protests against the prorogation of Parliament…