A Dance to the Music of Time: First Person

Abstract

This encounter, in Chapter 3 of A Question of Upbringing (1951), is the beginning of a debate which lasts throughout the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. The sequence can be seen as a massive reply, a work written ‘against Widmerpool’, a defence of fiction, literature, the imaginative life, the narrator’s mild, speculative, sceptical, poetic, humanist habits of mind, against everything that Widmerpool represents.

‘It doesn’t do to read too much,’ Widmerpool said. ‘You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.’…

There was not much for me to say in reply.