Quote of the Day (Anthony Powell, on a Midcentury Cultural Philistine)

“[Kenneth] Widmerpool remained totally unimpressed by the arts. He was even accustomed to show an open contempt for them in tête-à-tête conversation. In public, for social reasons, he had acquired the merest working knowledge to carry him through a dinner party, content with St. John Clarke as a writer, Isbister as a painter.

“ ‘I don’t know about these things,’ he had once said to me. ‘If I don't know about things, they do not interest me. Even if artistic matters attracted me—which they do not—I should not allow myself to dissipate my energies on them.’”— English novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000), Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (Volume 5 of A Dance to the Music of Time) (1960)

An opportunistic businessman early in his career, Widmerpool changes ideologies along the course of the several decades covered in Anthony Powell’s sprawling 12-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time.

This cultural philistine has little to no use even for reading. But he carries an extraordinary vindictiveness against those he perceives as slighting him or standing in his way that can manifest itself unexpectedly and dangerously.

Oh, yes, he's also used by an authoritarian power based in Russia to subvert the West from within.

As this recent American news story demonstrates, Widmerpool is a type present in contemporary America as well as Powell’s midcentury Britain.

(The image accompanying this post shows Simon Russell Beale as Kenneth Widmerpool in the 1997 British mini-series adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.)