W.H. Auden died in Oxford a few years ago, leaving his reputation as untidy as his personal habits. There were those who believed him to be the greatest English-speaking poet of the century, after Yeats and Eliot; there were others who lambasted his work as slick, brittle, cerebral, excessively voulu. Hailed as a poetic revolutionary, Auden was also pilloried as an intellectual flirt, a brainy exhibitionist whose scintillating technical virtuosity conceals a merely adolescent smartness. If Eliot and Yeats are the revered masters of 20th century English poetry (neither of them, significantly, Englishmen), Auden has been seen as the upstart, too clever by half, thumbing his nose at received pieties, pathologically incapable of resisting the private joke or smart crack even if it ruins a poem. Placed beside the rhetorical resonances of a Yeats or the cryptic metaphysics of an Eliot, Auden can seem light-weight, flippant and garrulous; put beside the fertile resources of feeling of a Hardy, Edward Thomas or Lawrence, Auden seems clinical, anaesthetised, intellectually top-heavy, damagingly retarded in certain crucial areas of sensuousness and sensibility. Yet the judgement can be as easily inverted: compared with the hollow posturing and hairbrained mythologising of a Yeats, or the Olympian distaste of an Eliot, Auden emerges as our kind of man: materialist, democratic and subversively shrewd, with an uncanny eye for the telling contingent detail and a hardnosed sardonic realism which no soft-bellied Romanticism can seduce.

Perhaps in some set of legends there is a story of some book that shrank or swelled according to the capacity of the person handling it to draw knowledge from it. If so, Victor Turner’s new book is of the same stock, since, approaching it at different time, I seem to find some different message in it. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors looks at first sight like a string of separate essays on matters ranging from the cosmology of the Dogon to the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket. On a second glance, it becomes clear that, while several of the chapters did originally appear separately, this is no mere collection of warmed-up leftovers, but does present a set of related themes which run, albeit with varying stresses and counterpointing, throughout the book. But even to describe the themes will be deceptive, since it might seem that Victor Turner has not really moved beyond the positions taken in his earlier books, notably The Ritual Process. It may be granted that Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors largely makes explicit ideas which were implicit in the earlier books; but, even so, the book is certainly not deja vu.

I write ‘the book’, and physically, there is only one book; but one has an uneasy feeling that perhaps there are three books trying to get out of this one volume, the first a treatise on sociological method, the second an attempt to apply this method to particular historical episodes and social experiences, and the third a hymn to the power and value of ‘communitas’.

In 1951, after a twelve-year silence, Anthony Powell, who had produced several Waugh-like novels in the Thirties, published A Question of Upbringing, a gently witty and evocative meditation on the past in which Nicholas Jenkins, soon recognisable as a Powell self-portrait, reviews the course of his life from his late teens at Eton, through Oxford, and into the London social and literary scene of his early twenties and this century’s thirties. The novel, which was well received by the usual people—V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly, Waugh himself—turned out to be the first instalment of an immense roman fleuve, entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, comprising twelve novels, the last of which, Hearing Secret Harmonies (William Heinemann, London, 1975), has now appeared. The first six, in two trilogies, cover the 1930s; there is a war trilogy; and a final trilogy in a rapidly developing time-span covers the post-war years up to the late Sixties. The series deserves attention, apart from any other reason, as probably the last major flourish in the long, honourable tradition of English social fiction.

The books are mostly about people meeting and trying to deal with one another—as friends, enemies, rivals, sexual partners, spouses. Jenkins develops and observes a network of relationships both tenuous and intense, friendships and loves that ripen and fade and fall. All this is presented in a huge casual anecdotal recit, a series of largely comic social encounters in which each character is present as himself or herself and also present as a social force, with the narrator’s voice providing the balancing clues about the situation.