Word: widmerpool
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...flesh-and-blood originals of Powell's fictional characters is necessary to savor his prose. But would it really help to know that Moreland, the intelligent musician who provides such a sparkling commentary on this world, was perhaps drawn from Composer Constant Lambert, or that the vastly comic Widmerpool was lovingly conjured from the fatuous figure of a minor Tory Cabinet Minister? It seems most unlikely...
...novel No. 1, A Question of Upbringing), who fought with the wrong partisans. The Malayan debacle takes another of Powell's veteran characters, Charles Stringham, P.O.W. and presumed dead. The officer indirectly responsible for the orders that killed both men turns out to be the egregious Kenneth Widmerpool, whose fatuous careerism and brassbound egotism have provided veins of comedy running through all nine books. Widmerpool, an ambition addict who flourishes amidst the adversities of the rest of the world, turns up as a colonel, squeezing the epaulettes of power until the pips squeak. These exits and re-entrances emphasize...
...Molly Jeavons' town house cops a packet; the hostess goes with it, and so does Priscilla Tolland. In fact, a head count shows that six previous survivors of the Powell epic are killed off in this novel. In Powell's war, only the rotters flourish-notably Kenneth Widmerpool, whose humorless egomania and bounderish one-upmanship have won him critical status as one of the great comic creations of modern English fiction. He is now on the make as a staff major, a virtuoso of bumf, and he chews poor Jenkins' ear in a war of total paper...
Patterned Spectacle. An officer sitting with his back to Nick suddenly swivels in his chair-and turns out to be Widmerpool, that inspired clown who appears in all his novels as Powell's satiric image of England's "new man." Some characters will presumab y never reappear. Others, notably Lieut. Odo Stevens, who falls in love with another of Nick's sisters-in-law, will obviously glide into view again in later chapters of the saga...
...seldom been done so well in English. There is a party at the castle of Sir Magnus Donners, "the great industrialist," who is widely suspected of odd but harmless sexual deviations and is easily persuaded to photograph a charade in which his guests represent the seven deadly sins. Kenneth Widmerpool, whom Pow'ell addicts have already enshrined as one of the great ones in the long waxwork gallery of English comics, appears as an ambitious officer with a rich, newly acquired military vocabulary. In his own phrase he is "up to his arse in bumph" (i.e., a busy desk...