Book Review : Enchanting Dance of an Age Going By

Incline Our Hearts by A.N. Wilson. (Viking: $17.95. 250 pages)

With “Incline Our Hearts,” the prolific and talented A. N. Wilson has begun a trilogy of a traditional English kind.

The narrator, Julian Ramsay, looks back over his life to set down not simply a personal biography but the life of his society over the previous decades. It is not a pure looking-back but a juxtaposing of two awarenesses: That of the boy as he grows, apprehends and misapprehends; and that of the middle-aged man, commenting on the boy’s progress, foreshadowing what awaits him, implying that there will be more to say.

“Later he was to” and “later I was to” are characteristic tropes. It is a method that can be spacious, that can touch an early incident or passion with the light or shadow of what it will become. On the other hand, it risks a loftiness that can be precious and portentous.

The master of the method was Anthony Powell with his many-volumed “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Powell made us hear the music. His people would reappear over the years in strikingly different lights; nothing was fixed, and each movement built upon and reflected back upon previous ones.

Flourish and Decline

England wheeled slowly about from the 1930s to the 1970s; the characters flourished, declined, took on new life or altered suddenly. All the while, Widmerpool, Powell’s creepy protagonist, evolving from repellent nerd to repellent man of power. It was slow, and at times paralytic, but it was a real dance of an age going by.

Wilson’s writing is never less than graceful and sometimes it is evocative. He has constructed some striking figures and scenes; but, at least in this first volume, he has not found a music to carry them along. It is a collection of isolated dance steps, but not a dance.

Young Ramsay, an orphan, is brought up in a vicarage. His Aunt Deirdre is kind and forthright, wears mannish tweeds, and regards herself as the arbiter of village life. She goes about “disseminating and suppressing news.”

Uncle Roy, dreamy and flowery, runs his small congregation with High-Church ceremonial. His real passion is for the Lampitts, the minor aristocrats of the area. Uncle Roy has immersed himself in the family; he stops strangers and tells them of the fortunes of its various members.

A Wider Social Focus

His particular attachment is to the resident squire, Sargie. Most evenings, he dons an ancient dinner jacket and slips away from Aunt Deirdre’s cottage-pie to go dine at the manor. He and Sargie are close friends, in a way, yet Uncle Roy is also a senior factotum; continually attentive to a man who turns out to be capricious, weak-minded and selfish.

One theme of Julian’s growing up, in fact--and of the book’s wider social focus--is his discovery that the Lampitts are mediocrities. And that Uncle Roy, whom he had despised as a snob is, in fact, an artist: Single-handedly turning these unpleasant people into a legend of English graciousness.

Another theme is provided by Julian’s education at boarding school. The rigors have been described better elsewhere. Wilson sounds a note of cheerful extremity by comparing it to the Soviet Gulag. The only difference, he writes, is that the Soviet government is ashamed of its labor camps, whereas the English system of private schools is openly boasted about, one of the glories of the world.”

One of the best portraits in the book is of Treadmill, an English teacher whose languid ferocity mesmerizes his students. He teaches by mannerism and asides; he makes learning something both stylish and dangerous. “It was not long after I started to be taught by him before I started to search the libraries and identify the source of all his allusions.” It was education by ambush.

A third major theme is the emergence of Raphael Hunter. He has some of the same reptilian unscrupulousness of Powell’s Widmerpool; like the latter, he becomes the narrator’s obsession. Only, he is far more extreme.

He first appears seducing and discarding Julian’s first love, the French teacher at his school. Later, he seduces Julian’s cousin while researching the Lampitt family papers. He writes a scandalous biography of Petworth Lampitt, an effete writer more or less modeled on Lytton Strachey. In the process, Hunter manages to destroy the friendship between Uncle Roy and Sargie.

There is a splendid interlude, in which Julian spends a summer in France. He has his first sexual experience there, but it means little to him. What means a lot is his discovery of French civilization: Its grace, style and discrimination. It comes largely through the charmingly portrayed Grande Dame with whom Julian stays to learn French.

Wilson’s feeling for France is genuine and lively. It seems more genuine, or at least stronger, than his feeling for his own society. There is more music in the few months in Brittany than in the whole complex dance that the author is trying to get under way in this first book about Julian’s life, and England’s.