Reviewed by Harriet
I had never heard of Janet Burroway until Mike Walmer recently republished her 1965 novel, The Dancer from the Dance. It was the second of her eight novels. Considering that she was born in 1936, making her currently 88, that seems like a small number until you remember two things. She also published poetry, plays, essays, short stories, children’s books (one of which, The Giant Jam Sandwich, entertained my own children enormously) and two important books on writing fiction. But above all, her process of writing, as she described it to an interviewer in 1997, was that she wrote about eighty pages in a two-day period, then revised the material down to nine pages that ‘worked perfectly well as narrative’. If you started reading The Dancer from the Dance bearing this composition method in mind, you might be prepared for the astonishing density and complexity of this remarkable novel.
The bare bones of the plot are not difficult to describe. The narrator Stanford Powers is an American diplomat based in Paris, where he and his wife Laura have made a circle of friends with assorted backgrounds and nationalities. Among them are the elderly widow Madame de Verbois and Herr Riebenstahl, an eccentric artist/inventor and the tenant of the small, almost un-inhabitable house she has inherited from her husband. From their love of theatre the Powers have also met and befriended an aging mime artist, Yves Adam and his successful protégé Jean-Claude Bastien, who has a supposedly open marriage with his Spanish wife Elena. They live a pleasant enough life of parties, theatre-going and socialising, and perhaps would continue to do so but for the appearance in Paris of a young mixed-race woman from New Orleans, Prytania Scott-Obée. Prytania has been described to Stanford by his stolid son-in-law Harold as ‘pretty enough’, but when he eventually meets her, he sees that this is an inadequate description:
She had straight black hair that hung forward onto the tablecloth, and dark translucent skin laid over bones of uncanny regularity; the features of a skilfully made wax doll. It was the sort of face that one calls inexpressive, but had a quality that I can only describe as tactile. Like apricots or wax Italian matches, or certain miniature dictionaries that yield to the shape of the palm, it invited touch. The skin was malleability in repose, as if it would retain the imprint of a thumb.
Although not classically beautiful, Prytania has a powerful effect on all the men who meet her. Mme Verbois’ English nephew Edward falls for her and she soon, without much enthusiasm, accepts his proposal. Riebenstahl secretly worships her. And Jean-Claude is completely captivated, and soon the two have begun an affair which will have massive repercussions for all those concerned.
The ‘introductory note’ to this new edition is by the distinguished American fiction writer Robert Olen Butler. Unlike most introductions, this one does not discuss the author or say much about the plot of the novel. Instead he gives a dreadful warning to its reviewers, who he says are usually ‘unfit reviewers’ (his italics) whose ability to judge is overshadowed by the inevitable question in their heads: ‘What am I going to say?’: ‘The reader is meant to thrum to a work of literary art, like the string vibrating on a stringed instrument’.
Well, I’m not sure about thrumming, but I think I managed to appreciate at least some of what makes this an undoubtedly great novel. Burroway’s use of language is exceptional – there’s so much that could be quoted but here’s something from near the end of the novel:
Prytania, like one of those limp marionettes whose sagging joints deny the inflexibility of the parts between, stood in no particular place with her attention somewhere else, on one foot to the other, vaguely chattering without a pause into a group that listened with intense uninterest. Kenneth had lost the energy of his angles; no extraneous gesture, no gratuitous flexing of the knees or ankles marred his deliberate glide of middle age as he carried a brimful glance across the lawn. He paused, exchanged with Elena a greeting wordless on both sides, and continued towards some old lady gaunt with the gauntness of formerly full flesh, who sat consuming a green pear with a fork.
Of course this is told, as is the whole book, by Stanford Powers, who, as becomes clearer as the novel moves forward, is an unreliable narrator. A review of the book in Punch, quoted at the start of this edition, describes him as ‘an outstanding three-dimensional Iago’, and his multi-faceted personality becomes increasingly apparent as the plot develops. Any doubts on the subject would certainly be resolved in an episode in which he chooses to spend a night in a locked up park close to the house where Prytania is living, and the final scene reveals what will remain his tragedy for the rest of his life.
Set at the end of the 1950s, the novel peels back the layers, and shows the dangers, of what would soon become the permissive society of the 1960s. A very impressive novel.
Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny.
Janet Burroway, The Dancer from the Dance (Walmer, 2025). 978-176356561, 262pp., paperback original.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)
