Anthony Powell

But I, I believe this is very common.

I mean, the, uh, the, the novelist, uh, Alan Hollinghurst confided to me that he, he was so obsessed by the book a few years before that he, he, he wrote letters to friends in Elvish.

Oh, no. No. Um, [laughs] it makes my own enthusiasm seem quite modest and tame at university.

But David, I'm gonna throw the most difficult imaginable question at you right now at the top.

Um, we should also realize that most of the Brit- many large numbers of, um, British and Commonwealth and American writers of the mid-20th century also went through the Great War, and, uh, you know, although it's an e- an extraordinary experience, it was common to a very great number of people, and it, uh, you know, they, it worked its way through their, their psyches in, in, in sort of different, in different ways.

So I think the Great War was very important to Tolkien.

One of the things it was important for was that most of his fri- a lot of, most of his school friends died in it.

Yes.

I hadn't really, I hadn't really processed the centrality of the dinner scene as being the kind of, like, you know, narrative core, uh, of these shows, and it makes me think.

Uh, right now I'm reading, um, Anthony Powell's, uh, um, "A Dance to the Music of Time," which is a sort of mid-century British attempt to write Proust, I guess, in a way.

Um, and the thing that's, I think, most Proustian about it is, um, you know, it's, it's narrating decades worth of history in relates, related to a particular narrator and protagonist.

But it leaves out, um, all of the sort of normal things that would be the plot points in a novel, and instead the narrative arc is really organized around, um, a progression of, of dinner parties, which is, you know, same with Proust.