Kenneth Widmerpool
Kenneth Widmerpool is a fictional character in Anthony Powell's novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, a 12-volume account of upper-class and bohemian life in Britain between 1920 and 1970. Regarded by critics as one of the more memorable characters of 20th century fiction, Widmerpool is the antithesis of the sequence's narrator-hero Nicholas Jenkins. Initially presented as a comic, even pathetic figure, he becomes increasingly formidable, powerful and ultimately sinister as the novels progress. He is successful in business, in the army and in politics, and is awarded a life peerage. His only sphere of failure is his relationships with women, exemplified by his disastrous marriage to Pamela Flitton. The sequence ends with Widmerpool's downfall and death, in circumstances arising from his involvement with a New Age-type cult.
Literary analysts have noted Widmerpool's defining characteristics as a lack of culture, small-mindedness, and a capacity for intrigue; generally, he is thought to embody many of the worst aspects of the British character. However, he has the ability to rise above numerous insults and humiliations that beset him to achieve positions of prominence through dogged industry and self-belief. In this respect he represents the meritocratic middle class's challenge to the declining power of the traditional "establishment" or ruling group, which is shown to be vulnerable to a determined assault from this source.
Among the more prominent names suggested as real-life models for Widmerpool have been Edward Heath, the British prime minister 1970–1974 and Reginald Manningham-Buller who was Britain's Attorney General in the 1950s. Others of Powell's contemporaries have made claims to be the character's source, although Powell gave little encouragement to such speculation. Widmerpool has been portrayed in two British Broadcasting Corporation radio dramatisations of the novel sequence and in Channel 4's television filmed version broadcast in 1997.
Context: ''A Dance to the Music of Time''
The novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time comprises 12 volumes spanning a period of approximately 50 years; from the early 1920s to the first years of the 1970s. The series itself was published between 1951 and 1975. Its title is taken from Nicolas Poussin's 1634–1636 painting of the same name. Through the eyes of a narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, the reader observes the changing fortunes of a varied collection of mainly upper-class characters. Their ambience is a bohemian world of art, literature and music, intermingled with the more practical spheres of politics, business and the military. In a 1971 study of the novels the journalist and editor Dan McLeod summarised the theme of the sequence as that of a decaying establishment, confronted by "aggressive representatives from the middle classes elbowing their way up". The latter are prepared to suffer any number of indignities in their pursuit of power but the establishment proves capable of resisting the advance of "all but the most thick-hided and persevering" of outsiders. Kenneth Widmerpool becomes the principal embodiment of these incomers.The first three volumes are set in the 1920s and follow the main characters through school, university and their first steps towards social and professional acceptance. The next three are placed in the 1930s; the protagonists become established, put down roots, watch the international situation anxiously and prepare for war. The background for the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes is the Second World War, which not all the characters survive. The final three books cover the 25 years from the early days of the post-war Attlee government to the counterculture and protests of the early 1970s. During the long narrative, the focus changes frequently from one group to another; new faces appear while established characters are written out, sometimes reappearing after many volumes, sometimes not at all, though news of their doings may reach Jenkins, through one or other of his many acquaintances. Apart from Jenkins, Widmerpool is the only one of the 300-odd characters who takes part in the action of each of the 12 volumes. Richard Jones, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, suggests that the novels may be regarded as "the dance of Kenneth Widmerpool, who is Jenkins's fall-guy, tormentor, and antithesis". Widmerpool dogs Jenkins's career and life; in the opening pages of the first book at school, he is encountered running through the mists, in the vain hope of athletic glory. In the final stages of the last book he is running again, this time at the behest of the quasi-religious cult that has claimed him.
Character
Origins, appearance, personality
The name "Widmerpool" was assumed by many critics to derive from Widmerpool, a Nottinghamshire village. In a 1978 interview, Powell said he first came across the name in a 17th-century book, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, which features a Captain of Horse, Major Joseph Widmerpoole, who served in Cromwell's army under John Hutchinson during the English Civil War. Powell viewed this Widmerpoole as a mean-spirited and disagreeable character and "had his name down for really quite a long time as a name I was going to use".The fictional Widmerpool's background is meritocratic rather than aristocratic. His paternal grandfather was a Scottish businessman surnamed Geddes, who on marriage to a woman of higher social standing, adopted her name as his own. The family appears to have settled in either Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire; Widmerpool's father trades as a fertiliser manufacturer, a matter of extreme embarrassment to his son, who never mentions him. His mother is a woman of strong opinions and a great admirer of Stalin; her passion is her son's career and advancement. Mother and son live together, from Widmerpool père's death in the mid-1920s until Widmerpool's marriage in 1945.
Jenkins's descriptions of Widmerpool's appearance are unflattering; at school he is painted as "heavily built, thick lips and metal-rimmed spectacles giving his face as usual an aggrieved expression ... he suspected people of trying to worm out of him important information ..." A few years later, he is wearing more fashionable spectacles but Jenkins notes that he still has a curiously fishlike countenance. He has a propensity to put on weight; although barely 30, Widmerpool appears to Jenkins as portly and middle-aged. At the outbreak of war in 1939, in a badly cut army uniform, he resembles a music-hall burlesque of a military officer or else "a railway official of some obscure country". After the war as an MP, his demeanour and shape are "demanding of treatment by political cartoonists". In 1958, meeting Widmerpool after some years, Jenkins is shocked by his elderly appearance. His clothes are ill-fitting through weight loss, giving him the look of a scarecrow; his grey hair is sparse and his facial flesh hangs in pouches. The final glimpse of Widmerpool, in his cult milieu, reveals him as a physical wreck, looking aged, desperate and worn out.
Widmerpool's chief characteristic in his youth is an exaggerated respect for and deference to authority. This is first indicated by his obsequious response to being hit in the face by a banana, thrown by the school's cricket captain. It is further shown by his outrage over a prank played by his schoolfellow Charles Stringham on their housemaster, Le Bas. He has a craving for acceptance, even at the price of humiliation, and has a natural talent for aligning himself with the dominant power. Many of Widmerpool's traits are evident quite early in his career: his pomposity, his aversion to all forms of culture, his bureaucratic obsessions and his snobbishness. He is politically naïve and his contribution to the pre-war appeasement of Nazi Germany is to suggest that Hermann Göring be awarded the Order of the Garter and given a tour of Buckingham Palace. Yet, as the novel sequence progresses, Widmerpool emerges as far less of a buffoon and becomes, against all expectations, powerful and power-obsessed. In his analysis of Powell's fiction, Nicholas Birns identifies an incident in The Acceptance World as the point at which the assessment of Widmerpool by his contemporaries begins to change. Widmerpool takes charge of a drunken Stringham after a reunion dinner, guides him home and despite resistance puts him firmly to bed: "Widmerpool, once so derided by all of us, had in some mysterious manner become a person of authority. Now, in a sense, it was he that derided us".
Widmerpool's egotism and will-power enable him, once set, to carry all before him, although before his ultimate downfall his powers develop in somewhat sinister directions. In a review of the early novels in the sequence, Arthur Mizener wrote: "Powell makes his great egoists, for all their absurdity, something not essentially different from all the rest of us; even Widmerpool, the most extravagant of the lot, is not. However sublimely ridiculous he becomes, he continues to remind us, not so much, perhaps, of what we have done, as what we have, in our time, known we might do".
Career
At school, Widmerpool is undistinguished academically and athletically, a "gauche striver" in the words of one literary commentator. He is the object of some ridicule, chiefly remembered for wearing the "wrong kind of overcoat" on his arrival at the school. Driven by ambition, instead of going on to university he is articled to a firm of solicitors, declaring this to be a springboard to wider horizons in business and politics. When Jenkins encounters him a few years after school, Widmerpool has achieved some social success and is a regular invitee at dinner-dances. He has also acquired a commission as a lieutenant in the Territorial Army.Through his social contacts Widmerpool secures a job in the politico-legal department of the Donners-Brebner industrial conglomerate, a post that brings him into close contact with Sir Magnus Donners, for whom he exhibits a respect bordering on reverence. He develops a talent for intrigue, which irritates Sir Magnus to the extent that Widmerpool is asked to leave the organisation. He joins a City firm of bill-brokers and still under the age of 30, becomes an influential and respected figure in the financial world. By the late 1930s, Widmerpool is advising Donners-Brebner again. Just before the outbreak of war in September 1939, he oversees a scheme on behalf of Donners to corner the Turkish market in chromite and emerges unscathed when the project collapses.
At the beginning of the war Widmerpool joins the army and with the advantage of his Territorial commission is rapidly promoted. By mid-1940 he holds the rank of major and is serving as Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General at Divisional Headquarters in Northern Ireland. Jenkins becomes his junior officer and observes Widmerpool's industry and his skill as a manipulator. Among the rank and file troops at headquarters, serving as a mess waiter, is Charles Stringham. Widmerpool is embarrassed by the presence of his former school-fellow, and engineers his transfer to a mobile laundry unit, which is sent to Singapore where Stringham meets his death. In June 1941, Widmerpool is transferred to London as a Military Assistant Secretary at the Cabinet Office. Promotions to lieutenant colonel and colonel follow and he is appointed an OBE. In his new post he is close to the centres of power and is able to influence war policy and settle old scores. He is complicit in the death of another school rival, Peter Templer, who as the result of a policy recommendation by Widmerpool, is abandoned while on a secret mission in the Balkans. Just after the end of the war, Widmerpool surprises his acquaintances by marrying Stringham's niece, Pamela Flitton, an ATS driver, whose sex life is rumoured to be "gladiatorial".
Since the mid-1930s, Widmerpool's political leanings have been generally to the left,. In 1945 he becomes a Labour Member of Parliament during the postwar Attlee government and eventually receives minor ministerial office in the administration. He is also one of the backers of a left-leaning magazine, Fission, through which he hopes to propagate his economic and political views. He is an assiduous promoter of good relations with eastern European countries and is suspected by some of a secret communist allegiance. After losing his parliamentary seat in the 1955 General Election Widmerpool continues to promote east–west friendship and trade and is thought to have become wealthy as a result. Doubts as to his motives remain and rumours connect him with Burgess and Maclean. In 1958, Widmerpool is appointed a life peer and takes his seat in the House of Lords. His eastern European activities again arouse suspicion, questions are asked in parliament and it seems likely that he will be charged with spying but the investigation is dropped without explanation. His marriage to Pamela is disintegrating; for years he has tolerated her constant infidelities and she publicly accuses him of voyeurism. After Pamela's sudden death in 1959, Widmerpool leaves the country to take up an academic post in California.
In America Widmerpool becomes something of a figurehead among youth protest movements; there are suggestions that his earlier problems may have resulted from a CIA plot. He returns to England in the late 1960s and is installed as Chancellor of a new university. During the ceremony he is pelted with red paint but immediately identifies with the demonstrators and becomes a central figure in the counter-culture movement. He resigns the chancellorship after a year, to run a commune for dissident youth. By late 1969, he has been drawn into a more sinister cult, led by the young mystic Scorpio Murtlock, which gradually overwhelms his life and independence. He is last heard of late in 1971, when during a ritual dawn run through the woods he collapses and dies.