Naturalism v Realistm: in A Dance to the Music of Time

Books Do Make a Room, volume 10 of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, is so far the most "literary" of the series; Powell gives as an amusing an acerbic glimpse of the life of a small press and small left-wing literary magazine during the heyday of independent British publishing (ca 1948-50), days long gone, days when people read a lot and cared deeply about what they read, when publishers would take a chance on really obscure books and articles, and when, in London at least, the world of literature was very clubby and those with access published incessantly - stories, novels, memoirs, review, essays - think of Burgess or Naipaul and their writings about their literary origins. We also get, for the first time at any extended length in this series, discussions about literature - although again, surprisingly, little to nothing about the narrator's (Nick Jenkins') literary taste, habits, or publications - other than that he's working on a book on Robert Burton and the Anatomy of Melancholy, which he quotes a few times (in an  earlier volume, he quoted Proust, the obvious influence on Powell). The literary discussion is primarily a drunken monologue by the self-absorbed but talented writer X. Trapnel - who quote correctly distinguishes between naturalism, which he favors, and realism - arguing that no novel is precisely "real," that to record or transcribe a scenes as actually lived or spoken would seem highly unrealistic in print, in a work of fiction. I'd have liked even more from Trapnel - but he seems to be a one-volume character in this series, which ends quite sorrowfully with two powerful scenes: Jenkins and Widmerpool showing up at the decripit apartment where Trapnel was living with Widmerpool's wife - Trapnel stands up to the odious though wronged Widmerpool - arousing Pamela's sexual ardor (a rarity for this beautiful cold fish), and the second scene in which T finds that Pamela has abandoned him and, in jealousy, destroyed the only copy of his near-completed novel (days before laptops). He never recovers from this, we infer - understandably, a novel would be nearly impossible to re-create, and losing a novel has destroyed others (e.g., Ellison). I wonder if Trapnel is based on any known writer - in fact, if any of the characters in Dance are - it's hard to say but with his bombast and his walking stick affectation, perhaps Dunleavy comes to mind - or maybe he's a pastiche made up of many.