The intellectual phenomenon called “anti-anti-communism” ought to be dead by now, along with the system that the anti-Communists successfully dele- gitimized even as the anti-anti- Communists were doing their worst to delegitimize them. But an essay in the December 18 issue of the New Yorker demonstrates that anti-anti-communism is unfortunately alive, though not very well. The occasion for the essay by the British critic Jeremy Treglown was the release, by the University of Chicago Press, of a new edition of Dance to the Music of Time. That is the collective name for Anthony Powell’s 12-novel cycle about the writer Nick Jenkins and his life among the U’s in Britain.
Treglown admires Dance to the Music of Time, and he should, because it is one of the great works of contemporary literature. He remarks on Powell’s ” comi-tragic diagnosis of English upper-middle-class life from the First World War through the sixties.” The novels, he says, are “a satirical elegy for an era marked by the Second World War, about which Powell’s historical sense is at its clearest and his social sympathies are broadest.” And yet Treglown fails to mention, let alone imply, anything about what Powell’s “historical sense” tells us and where the novelist’s “social sympathies” lie. Dance to the Music of Time is a portrait of an England that, sadly, will never return, an England peopled by upper-middle-class solipsists and their louche hangers- on. Powell devotes a good deal of time in the book to skewering those of his countrymen who indulged in the most destructive passion of our time: the passion for Communist ideology and the Soviet Union.
