O, how the wheel becomes it!

by Anthony Powell

Powell, Anthony, O, How The Wheel Becomes It!

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, British Literature, 20th Century

140 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

People best know British writer Anthony Dymoke Powell for A Dance to the Music of Time , a cycle of 12 satirical novels from 1951 to 1975.

This Englishman published his volumes of work. Television and radio dramatizations subjected major work of Powell in print continuously. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "the fifty greatest British writers since 1945."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony...

Reviews

[Abigail Bok · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Furies of ancient myth were the embodiment of the forces of justice. Whoever harmed a woman (in later, more patriarchal times, whoever harmed any person) found themselves touched by a taint—the miasma—that attracted the Furies like an irresistible scent, so that no matter how the perpetrator attempted to flee, they remained in relentless pursuit. Something of the sort is the premise of this novel.

Geoffrey Shadbold is an independent academic, a public intellectual of a sort not seen so much today but still a thing in 1983, when this book was published. The author, Anthony Powell, gives the impression that he himself was one of that dying breed, flatteringly inviting readers into his erudition while simultaneously putting us in our place by opening his narrative with an oblique explication of the obscure quotation of the title. Thus properly bewildered, at best we are left with the impression that the book is somehow about how we bring our fate upon ourselves, but we don’t quite know how.

Shadbold—once the author gets down to business—had an intimate relation in his schooldays with a friend, Cedric Winterwade, and although both as men have moved on to the opposite sex, they remain friends with an uncomfortable undertow of competition and secrets to conceal. In fact, the entire plot turns on Shadbold’s impulse of competitiveness and the pusillanimous things that impulse leads him to do. Academic types and their petty jealousies give me a pain in the stomach, so I was not able fully to relax and enjoy the satirical misadventures that followed. Winterwade wrote a novel that Shadbold, by profession mostly a reviewer, damned with faint praise; Winterwade kept a journal that Shadbold attempted to keep from publication after Winterwade’s death. The fact that the journal, while revealing nothing untoward about their childhood relationship, does betray the secret that Winterwade later slept with a woman Shadbold was in love with at the time, causes Shadbold to behave in ways unbecoming a gentleman.

The miasma having become attached to Shadbold as a result of his base behavior, it is inevitable that Shadbold will be thereafter relentlessly pursued by people taking an excessive interest in Winterwade, from the flame of his young adulthood to his wife’s ex-husband and even his publisher. In a work of unforgiving satire like this, there is no escape for the malefactor, as his littleness becomes its own prison.

O, How the Wheel Becomes It! is a perfect exemplar of its type, so although I did not entirely enjoy it, I have rated it highly. It is perhaps able to maintain its perfections only by virtue of its brevity. Along its relentless path it skewers endless little pretensions of the erudite, the selfish vanity of those trying to live by their reputation, and the ways we use other people’s lives to make points about our own. For me, such a transactional view of life is little mitigated by the charm I found in the author’s involutions of diction; I need someone or something to attach to if I am to find a book truly satisfying. So I was impressed by my first foray into the work of Anthony Powell but not panting for more.

[Laura]

4* A Question of Upbringing (A Dance to the Music of Time, #1)
4* A Buyer's Market (A Dance to the Music of Time #2)
4* The Acceptance World (A Dance to the Music of Time, #3)
4* At Lady Molly's (A Dance to the Music of Time, #4)
4* Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (A Dance to the Music of Time, #5)
4* The Kindly Ones (A Dance to the Music of Time, #6)
4* The Valley of Bones (A Dance to the Music of Time, #7)
4* The Soldier's Art (A Dance to the Music of Time, #8)
4* The Military Philosophers (A Dance to the Music of Time, #9)
4* Books Do Furnish a Room (A Dance to the Music of Time, #10)
3* Temporary Kings (A Dance to the Music of Time, #11)
4* Hearing Secret Harmonies (A Dance to the Music of Time, #12)
TR O, How the Wheel Becomes It!

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt unfinished, like an incomplete early-ish draft of a novel. The opening chapters are extraordinarily distant, a long synopsis of the characters' backstory that, by chapter four, had me planning to put the book down if it went on in this style for another page. It's as though Powell wanted to write something like the later volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, which benefit from the vast backstory of the previous volumes, and couldn't come up with a way to capture these new characters' backstories in a way that would be entertaining and novelistic. That might have come in a later draft.

A later draft might also have produced a better title, one that doesn't seem calculated to put people off with its incomprehensible obscurity. (It may be the one line in Hamlet that hadn't previously been used as a book title.)

Things pick up quite a lot, and the later chapters are quite entertaining, until suddenly it's all over, as if the author ran out of energy.

The novel focuses on a fairly unsympathetic character, who is not very funny. He's not a monster. Just mildly, ordinarily, awful. This makes it feel more like a very long short story than a short novel. At novel length a sufficiently funny character can get away with just about anything. Not this one. The author plainly did not like him, and based on past form you can suspect he is based on a real-life person the author disliked, whose awfulness he enjoyed exposing.

It seems odd that such an underdeveloped and unfinished novel could be published at all, but Powell's reputation, and the success of A Dance to the Music of Time, must have made it seem viable. Just don't expect anyone to buy the next one...

[David]

As with most of Powell’s novels, this one ages well, growing funnier and sadder simultaneously. The sense of life slipping away past the last attempts at control by an elderly protagonist, like a football twisting past the grasp of a desperately earthbound keeper, means something different to a reader approaching 65 than it did to a reader at 23. The details of the (absent) antagonist’s death seem, again, both more hilarious and more sordid as the years go. There is a link to A Dance to the Music of Time in the setting for that death, though in the Dance everything is much more marginal. The title is drawn from Ophelia’s final lines in Hamlet as she spirals towards self-destruction; it is, despite criticism of its length and obscurity, well-chosen.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a pretty big difference between this and Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time.' DMT is enormous, and this is short; DMT is fantastic, and this is okay. On the other hand, they both deal with the strange break between the early to mid twentieth century and the last decades of it, so it's in some ways not so different. If you liked the last volume of DMT, I would definitely recommend this; and this would be a reasonable place to start, to see if you want to make the investment in the series. As a stand alone book, it's okay; the start is incredibly confusing, but after the first few chapters it settles into nice prose. A quick, funny read.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shadbold, elderly literary hack, suffers an exhumation of things past when the diary of an old and long deceased acquaintance falls into the hands of a London publisher. Asked to read over the manuscript with a potential view to editing it, Shadbold painfully discovers its author (Winterwade) enjoyed a consummated relationship with an old flame of his own. Things worsen when a professor-friend suggests he might initiate a critical resuscitation of Winterwade's lone novel from the 1920s. Suddenly it seems as if Winterwade's reputation, hitherto safely obscure, might eclipse Shadbold's. A climax comes in the form of an interrogative T.V. interview, in which Shadbold is goaded into admitting admiration for Winterwade.

Thematically Powell is in familiar territory - the realisation that the Past is always malleable, and that Time has a funny way of upsetting one's expectations: people long written-off may yet resurface in roles hitherto unforeseen. The television interview recalls to mind Evelyn Waugh's Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (a novel Powell praised), but this being Powell, things are never allowed to become grotesque or farcical: situations are kept eminently plausible. The problem here is that the book is so slender that invariably a disproportionate part is given over to the backstory of Shadbold's career and relationship with Winterwade. The exposition is so lustreless it feels as though Powell deemed it a mere obligation to be gotten through until the main event could be ushered in - but just as soon as things get going, they end. Contrast this to the revelation in his Dance series, when narrator Nick Jenkins learns retrospectively, and by accident in conversation, that his great love Jean Duport had been unfaithful to him - an almost identical sentiment, conjured so succinctly yet effectively, precisely because we have already spent five or six books getting to know him. Perhaps one might take it as further evidence that the structure of that series was perfectly tuned to Powell's style. His restrained approach works when it is allowed to be adapted to the natural rhythms of life; when confronted with the blunter plot mechanics demanded by the stand-alone novel, it languishes, seemingly embarrassed by the necessities of invented drama.

There are occasional gems - Shadbold 'manages' to write the obituary of a colleague - but mostly this reads like a condensed and floundering appendage of his magnum opus.

[Nick Tramdack · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this novella on the recommendation of fellow library employee and UChicago 2007 alum Ben Nelson. I had always intended to tackle Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time" and this seemed like a good way to get into Powell's work. (I later started the series and preferred it to this by far.)

The plot of this book is engaging and funny, dealing with a feckless academic hack's attempt to whitewash the posthumous papers of a dead, now admired friend and writer... including those parts of his friend's papers that reflect very, very badly on him. Of course, everything quickly gets complicated and embarrassing. But Powell's quintessentially English restraint (am I essentializing? okay, I am) seems to have restrained his plotting powers. The complications never reach the level they could, and I finished the novella with the sense that the situation could have been taken still further. Maybe Powell didn't want to write a full-on academic farce; nevertheless, I walked away cold.

Your mileage may vary.

[Quentin Wrgiht · Rating 5 out of 5]

The settings, plot (suppressing the publication of a memoir, actually two memoirs) and the characters (lady novelist, Oxford don, rural innkeeper etc) are straight out of Wodehouse. The tone is comedically erudite and ironic throughout. Great language, good jokes and generally very clever.

[John Reis · Rating 4 out of 5]

GFH Shadbold and Cedric Winterwade knew each other in college and their acquaintance continued into their 30s. They both had literary aspirations. They had both written some badly received fiction. The war intervened and Winterwade died.

Decades later, Winterwade’s son finds a diary his father had kept through the 30s. He sends it off to a publishing house to assess its chances of being published. As Shadbold knew Winterwade he is asked to assess the scribblings for publishability.

Shadbold is horrified to learn that Winterwade had been familiar with several of the women he knew, especially a woman he was madly in love with at the time, Isolde Upjohn. He had taken her on a trip to Paris. Shadbold is surprised that the diary is so good. He sends back a report to Jason Price that the diary is unpublishable.

Ironically, Shadbold is invited to give a talk by the head of an English Department Horace Grigham, who happens to be his wife’s ex-husband. At dinner afterwards, Grigham mentions that he is taking a look at novels from the 20s and 30s and wondered if Shadbold knew of a novel written by a guy named Winterwade.

He replies that he knew the man and had read the book, but it was so long ago that he didn’t quite remember it, although he had an inkling that it was not that good. Then he begins to think about what he can do suppress the memory of Winterwade.

Then, to add to his woes, Shadbold receives a phone call from that old girlfriend Isolde Upjohn. She wants to come and visit. She has written a memoir and she wants him to write an introduction to it.

Just as Isolde is about to give Shadbold her second reason for the visit, Rod Cubbage arrives for a pre-scheduled interview with Shad. Cubbage wants Isolde to take part in the interview.

As far as Shadbold is concerned the interview ended up a disaster. Isolde revealed that she had an affair with Winterwade in Paris. She also reveals that Shadbold had loved her but nothing happened.

Major Crowter, the owner of a local tavern, comes to see Shadbold and mentions that after seeing Winterwade‘s name mentioned in the television interview he wanted to tell how Winterwade died. It was an ignoble death.

Shadbold reaches out to Jason Price to inquire whether the diary was still available. Price reports that the son had thrown it in a fireplace.

I very much enjoyed the first half of this book. It was comic and a farce and quite amusing. I thought it was going to take a certain turn but it went in a completely different direction.

This book is in part about petty literary rivalries amongst the unsuccessful. I am impressed that Powell wrote in in his late 70s. At least, the first half is better than the last book in the Dance to the Music of Time cycle: Hearing Secret Harmonies.

[Richard Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Powell is a particularly guilty pleasure of mine. "What's he like?" asked a curious bookseller in the place where I'd finally managed to get hold of a copy of the elusive Agents and Patients.
"PG Wodehouse on downers," I replied - quite fairly, I think.
"Er - then I don't think I'll bother," he said.

And there's nothing here to make me revise that opinion. Here we have a squabble involving a superannuated English public intellectual (anybody remember English public intellectuals? Didn't think so) and an unearthed diary from fifty years before that he feels might cause him some embarrassment. I was able to feel that, yes, I could understand how he might be embarrassed - but I am in my 60s: anyone much younger will be left gaping in incomprehension. Unless they've taken the time to swot up on the cultural quirks of Powell's time and very particular social class - which I strongly advise them not to bother doing: it's all too bloody toxic.

Still, for those of us old enough that this sort of thing makes any sense, it has its hilarious moments.

I need to mention that I remembered very strongly an assessment of Powell by John Carey in The Sunday Times, ten or twenty years ago. It was harsh and it needed to be: Powell had, in the past been misidentified as a very serious writer with universal appeal. The year, 1975, when Powell's Hearing Secret Harmonies (which I like very much) and JG Ballard's High Rise (which I revere) came out, few critics in the broadsheets would have been in any doubt at all as to which was the more Deeply Significant Work. Today, the consensus has been reversed absolutely. But maybe now he's no longer being overestimated so preposterously, we can finally begin to appreciate Powell's works as, yes, lightweight entertainments, but beautifully crafted and bittersweet ones.

[Eyejaybee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been a huge admirer of Anthony Powell’s wonderful novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. Indeed, for many years I intended to write a series work about it, and may still do so. After all, I have read the whole sequence more than twenty times.

I have, however, been a bit ambivalent about Powell’s other novels. He wrote five novels before the Second World War and I suspect, without the wonderful Dance to the Music of Time sequence. They might well have been largely overlooked nowadays. There are some fine moments, but not enough, in my view, to render them especially memorable.

He wrote a further two novels after completing the sequence: this one, and The Fisher king. As with the first five books, I fear they struggle to match the glory of his greater work. This novel followed the tribulations of a critic who finds that an old novel by a former friend, or at least acquaintance, has been ‘rediscovered’ and may be given a new lease of life. There are some very amusing scenes and lines, but, even though it is a very short book, weighing in at a mere 150 pages of fairly large print, it was rather turgid overall.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very slight novel that has its moments of humour and satire, but rather fizzles out in the end.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

more like a semi-farcical novella, but definitely fun

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly light and frothy English comic novel which I mostly read as a testing ground to see whether it would be worthwhile my taking the plunge of the dance

[Jan-Joost · Rating 3 out of 5]

De lezer vliegt door de 140 pp. heen, ondanks het labyrintische, zwaar gelatiniseerde proza, doorspekt met ironie en zelfspot. Die kenmerken zijn bekend van de late Powell maar hier toch wel dikker aangezet dan in zijn magnum opus, de twaalfdelige cyclus A Dance to the Music of Time. Wellicht om te verhullen dat de ‘body’ van het verhaal achter die grote woorden zo mager is als goede pastrami? Toch blijft er voldoende te genieten, al was het maar om te zien hoe een ervaren schrijver van niets toch nog iets kan maken.
Ook komt voor de doorgewinterde Powell-fan terstond herkenbare thematiek voorbij: de Engelse literaire wereld tijdens het interbellum, met alle jalousie de métier, de frigide (?) mannenverslindster, de vette knipoog naar Proust, overspel waar de ‘cuckold’ veel te laat in z’n leven achterkomt… Ook zijn we weer getuige van een diner met slechte wijn, de Londense clubwereld, academia vol hoogleraren die elkaar niet kunnen luchten of zien. Leuk hoor.
Powell was een ras-Tory dus zoals gebruikelijk krijgen hippies en punks en alles wat maar riekt naar progressieve maatschappijontwikkeling ervan langs.
En achter de accolade dan het besef dat men het lot niet kan ontlopen, hoe hard je het ook op een lopen zet in de, hopelijk, ‘goede’ richting.

[Bookguide · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fantastic satire of the publishing industry. Geoffrey Shadbold, an author with modernist literary pretensions, earns his living as a literary critic. He also has a sideline as a contestant on panel shows and his wife is also a successful author. When he is asked to assess a diary written by a contemporary of his who died during the war, he initially relishes the idea of deciphering it and realises that the author, Winterwade, had been a gifted diarist. Much to his annoyance, he discovers that Winterwade had managed to sleep with a woman he had been pursuing himself. To add insult to injury, he had taken her to Paris to a hotel recommended to him by Shadbold. In a fit of pique, he tells the literary agent that the diary is unsuitable for publication, banking on the fact that the handwritten diary is virtually illegible. Unfortunately for him, he is about to be interviewed on television by a sadistic chat show host who loves to spring surprises on his interviewees in the shape of people from their pasts. Shadbold’s life is about to turn into a farce. It is delicious! I really must find more by Anthony Powell.

[Jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pedantic professors must publish or perish. There is envy of course, and a little bit of scandal too.

[Gary Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the best that I've read from the man, but solid effort none the less.

[JW van der Merwe · Rating 1 out of 5]

oNE OF THE WORST BOOKS I HAVE EVER READ. STAY AWAY FROM READING THIS.

[Deborah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I guess Powell really gave his all to Dance.