Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS OF ANGUS WILSON

 

Last posting on this blog I dealt with the short stories of Angus Wilson (1913-1991) and asked if they had stood the test of time. This posting, boldly under my own arrogant and egotistical heading, I deal with his novels.

 It was only after Wilson’s first novel Hemlock and After (already reviewed on this blog) was published in 1952 that he became better known as a novelist than as a writer of short stories. His second novel. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was first published in 1956. Even more than Hemlock and After, it is clearly an attempt at a “Dickensian” novel. It is long (c.400 pages); it has a very large cast of characters and like many nineteenth-century novels it has a list of these characters at the beginning to prevent us getting confused. The fate of each character is neatly chronicled at the end of the novel to give a satisfying conclusion; and there are grotesque minor characters (usually lower-class or working-class) to provide a sort of comic relief. One such is a Mrs Salad, who seems modelled on something like Dickens’ Sarah Gamp, a garrulous, gossipy and totally unreliable rogue.

The dominant thread of “plot” is very simple. The protagonist Gerald Middleton, emeritus professor of early medieval history, is at the centre of a fractious academic debate. Over forty years previously (before the First World War), an archeological dig uncovered the grave of an early Christian bishop, credited with converting the pagan Saxons. But found in the bishop’s grave was a priapic pagan statue. Did this mean that the bishop himself was a covert pagan? And if so, did this also mean that early Christianity in England was therefore syncretic and a fraud? But there are doubts. Could it be that the statue was actually planted in the grave in modern times as a hoax? (Shades of the Piltdown hoax, which also predated the First World War). This controversy sets up a long-running academic comedy in which Angus Wilson enjoys himself by portraying the partisan, and in some cases fanatical, views of different academics. Pettiness and pomposity in academe are satirised, and to round things off, at the end of the novel Wilson presents us with cod academic papers, in tone-perfect academic-speak, arguing various views on the case.

As in both the earlier Hemlock and After and the later The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, the general arc of the story has the protagonist having to face up to his-or-her own intellectual weaknesses and “come clean” about his-or-her motives – for, as we learn early in the novel, the priapic figure in the grave was indeed a hoax and Professor Gerald Middleton has suspected this for years yet has not had the moral courage to research and expose the truth.

But this unifying thread is really just the shell for what takes up most of the novel. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes deals mainly with the quarrels and tensions within Professor Middleton’s own family. He himself long kept a mistress, even after he was married, and this has had an effect on his fluttery, neurotic wife, who was probably responsible for blighting the life of his daughter Kay. His elder son Robin, a businessman of hardy capitalist views, also keeps a mistress. His younger son John, a populist left-wing journalst who builds a career on claiming to be the champion of the common man, is covertly homosexual, “protecting” a rent-boy who is also a petty-criminal. (Once again, despite his own homosexuality, Wilson does not sentimentalise the gay demi-monde of his own day.) After all the family angst that runs through the novel, the climax is a riotous gathering at Christmas where members of the family verbally tear one another apart.

Hoax or not, the priapic figure hidden in a dark grave is the novel’s dominant symbol.  The hidden secrets (mistresses, rent-boys) point to upper-middle-class English hypocrisy, where illicit sex may be practised so long as there are public nods to received morality. These are the “Anglo-Saxon attitudes” of Wilson’s own day – the priapic paganism hidden under a veneer of respectability. This is a novel about “concealment like the worm i’ th’ bud”, regardless of what the attitudes were of the original Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago.

Regrettably, Anglo-Saxon Atttitudes is as much a chore to read as the last fifty pages of The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot. Wilson often goes for bravura effects, such as the chapter dealing with a gathering in which Gerald Middleton dozes and we cut between present conversation and his reveries of earlier days. This is very much the modernist technique of wrenching time-scales out of linearity (see Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse) but it makes for confusion in narrative clarity.

Worse, the novel is dated in other ways. Aiming to be a satirist, Angus Wilson is himself embedded in, and very comfortable with, the society that he is ostensibly satirising. He explores fine grades of social, academic and intellectual snobbery in his own class, condemning some of his fellow intellectuals while endorsing others. But his own prejudices and snobberies glare through whenever he deals with (crass, ill-spoken) working-class characters or (excitable, emotional) French people or a (coldly methodical) German academic or a (blarney-filled, treacherous, dishonest) young Irish man.

Perhaps, in 1956, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes seemed a witty take-down of academe and upper-middle-class hypocrites. But in doing so, it only cements in place that sense of superiority which knows what is best for the lower orders. So Bloomsbury, my dears.

Wilson’s next novel was The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (already reviewed on this blog), published in 1958. It was followed in 1961 by The Old Men at the Zoo.

Of all the five novels by Angus Wilson that I have read, The Old Men at the Zoo is the most muddled, the most ill-conceived in its intentions, and in the end the most hysterical. I cannot be swayed from this view, even with the knowledge that the late Anthony Burgess listed this novel in his idiosyncratic guide Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939. One gains the impression that Wilson intended some grand satire on the state of England, but it is not clearly articulated.

The novel is set in the years from 1970 to 1973, that is, the near future for readers in 1961.  For the first time in his novels, Angus Wilson uses the first-person voice. Simon Carter, secretary of London Zoo, narrates. He is caught between two men who have strong ideas about how the zoo should be managed. The zoo’s general director, Dr Leacock, wishes to abolish the traditional zoo with cages, and has a vision of a “National Zoological Reserve” – a wildlife park in which animals can roam freely. A multi-millionaire, Lord Godmanchester, supports this scheme and supplies a huge estate in Wales as the site of the reserve. In contrast the zoo’s curator of mammals, Sir Robert Falcon, wants to preserve the traditional Victorian-style zoo with cages; the type of zoo that can continue to be accessed easily by London holidaymakers. Other members of the board take sides and much of the novel is like a re-play of the bickering and self-promotion of academics in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. It also, presumably, is meant to symbolise the bickering of rival political parties in parliament, with England itself as the zoo. Especially when told in the fussy, self-justifying voice of Simon Carter, this makes for repetitive and tiresome reading. Some grotesque details are thrown in – the zoo setting gives us such things as a man being kicked to death by a giraffe.

Overlaid with this, and justifying the mildly futuristic setting, is the threat of nuclear war. In a most unlikely scenario (even for 1961) Wilson has the USA and (Soviet) Russia signing an agreement that they will both bomb Europe if European states are stupid enough to go to war with one another. But to war they go – Britain fighting against what were then called the “Common Market” countries. There is chaos and the last quarter of the novel has England massively bombed, the population starving, wild animals running free and mauling people, mobs ruling the streets and then a fascistic, dictatorial government taking over and gladiatorial shows being revived with political prisoners thrown to the wild beasts. This is where the hysteria comes in, not to mention Wilson’s penchant for the sadistic – first noted in his short story “Raspberry Jam”. The new government is sponsored by the “Uni-European” movement, set on blotting out local culture and uniting Europe as a single entity. Wilson’s apparent horror at this concept (even if filtered through the voice of his narrator) suggests that if he had been around a generation or two later, he would have been an ardent Brexiteer. At the very least, he asserts his own, rather tattered, version of “humanism”.

For those who wish to emphasise Wilson’s sexuality, be it noted that the narrator is a dedicated and rather randy heterosexual married to an American wife (so that Wilson can include some remarks on Anglo-American relations). Both of the more-or-less explicit sex scenes concern Simon Carter and his wife, and Simon Carter and a minor character, a neurotic nymphomaniac, who tries to seduce him. The novel’s only obviously “camp” character – the zoo’s curator of birds – is basically a figure of ridicule.

What is the purpose of this turgid tome? There is fear of all-out nuclear war, of course. Possibly caged animals and free animals have symbolic value with regard to human freedom and constraints on human freedom in Wilson’s imagined England. Lord Godmanchester is a newspaper magnate and there are a few satirical swings at the sensationalism of the press, slick advertising campaigns and alarmism. Despite his clear anti-Europeanism, Wilson also takes swings at nostalgic jingoism in passages where Sir Robert Falcon, champion of traditional caged zoos, attempts to re-design London zoo as a sort of Victorian fairground. Perhaps, too, the easily-changed loyalties of the narrator are meant to suggest how easily some people in the body politic can be bribed and swayed, even if they think they are above such things. Liberals who stand in the middle of the road tend to get run over.

But this is all a meagre harvest for a novel which is now horribly dated and lies dead on the page. And, as always, the lower orders are not to Angus Wilson’s taste.

When I turned to Wilson’s next novel, Late Call (published in 1964) I felt that I was returning to reality. Although it is not Wilson’s most esteemed novel (Wilson fans tend to point to Hemlock and After, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes or The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot as his best) I personally find it his most humane, for all its faults. For the first time, Wilson makes a lower-middle-class person his main character and does not ridicule her, even if her tastes are simple ones that would not have appealed to the fastidious author himself. Interestingly, too, Late Call begins with a 26-page prologue (counting the pages of my Penguin reprint), set in 1911, half a century before the early 1960s setting of the novel. It stands up very well as a short story in its own right. It is only late in the novel that we see how this story is related to the rest of the plot.

Sylvia Calvert, now in her sixties, has worked for years managing a private hotel (that very British institution of hotels with permanent residents); but she has to leave the work that she enjoys and retire. Partly this is the result of her declining health, but just as importantly it is the result of her feckless, gambling, drinking, garrulous saloon-bar jester of a husband Arthur, who has been annoying the guests. Sylvia and Arthur are taken in by their son Harold, the headmaster of a school in a “New Town”. This was the term popular in England in the 1950s and 1960s, designating new satellite suburbs beyond a larger city’s “green belt”. Harold has recently become a widower. He means well, but he is a very arrogant and very controlling man, both to his parents and to his three teenage children. He certainly regards himself as his parents’ intellectual superior.

 The main tension in the story is between mother and son, as Harold patronises both Sylvia and Arthur, and Sylvia tries to get used to an unfamiliar environment and overcome her wrenching nostalgia for the world she has had to leave. It doesn’t help that her husband is so unsupportive. A major satirical theme here is the nature of air-conditioned, all-mod-cons new housing, apparently seen by Wilson as a prime example of creeping Americanism in Britain. Oddly, the type of satire he produces in this area is very much like the satire of their Levittowns that Americans were already writing.

There are many familiar Wilsonian tropes in this novel. As in nearly all his other novels, there is a major public debate, in this case between property developers and people who wish to preserve a meadow on the edge of the New Town. There is the deflation of intellectual pretensions. Harold makes a public ass of himself when he argues about the planned destruction of the open meadow and when he sponsors and directs a production of the (then “daring”) play Look Back in Anger. Harold also can’t see what is going on under his nose, being the last to realise that one of his sons is homosexual. When he does find this out, he believes he can “cure” his son, despite his loudly-proclaimed progressivism. Wilson appears to be saying that liberal-minded people can also be self-deceiving twerps, especially ones who have grand plans to reconstruct the world. This is consonant with Wilson’s distaste for Marxism and its organised collectivism, although the arrogant Harold is no Marxist.

The novel moves towards the point where Sylvia adjusts to the unfamiliar New Town, gets to be taken seriously, heals at least some of the wounds in Harold’s family, and is able to make a new life without Harold’s support. How this happens requires something very like a deus ex machina, with the introduction of new and sympathetic characters about three-quarters of the way through the novel. Nevertheless, the portrait of the bewildered and relocated Sylvia is sustained very well, her tastes and her feelings are not patronised and this is the first time Wilson has not belittled the lower classes by caricature or condescension.

 

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Now I’m aware that Angus Wilson produced three more novels after Late Call, to wit No Laughing Matter (1967), As If by Magic (1973) and Setting the World on Fire (1980)   But even his admirers regard these as lesser works, showing a decline in quality. For myself,  having read all of his short stories and five of his novels (these being the best-known ones), I feel I’m able to make a fair judgement on Wilson’s work. Put brutally, his time is well past, and when I read him I feel very much as I did when I read all the novels of George Meredith  [look him up on the index at right], especially Diana of the Crossways. There are some very good things in his work. I can read Wilson’s prose with pleasure and admire the specificity of detail when he describes a setting (particularly a domestic one – and always indicating the class status of his characters). A few of his satirical barbs still mean something. But on the whole, like Meredith, he deals with intellectual issues that might have seemed urgent at time of writing, but which now mean very little to us. You do not read his novels to be enlightened about the human condition, for all the windy talk about a vaguely-defined “humanism”. You read them to discover what a very small, and somewhat arch, corner of the English intelligensia thought in the 1950s… and then you conclude that, on the whole, the issues that interested them were fairly trivial ones. I am tempted to the view that part of their appeal at the time was the entrée they gave many readers to the worlds of academe and the more privileged upper classes, no matter how much Wilson satirised these people. Also, they probably appeared daring and frank in their open references to homosexuality – but even these references seem guarded and timid now.

I hate to parrot somebody else’s views, but I draw your attention to D. J. Taylor’s negative view of Wilson that appeared in the Guardian in August 2013 (you can easily find it on the internet, as I did). Playing games with the title of one of Wilson’s short-story collections, the article was titled “Angus Wilson: from darling to dodo”. It chronicled Wilson’s own sad end - after traipsing out of England, complaining that he was under-valued and unloved, Wilson settled in France where he declined into dementia and died at the age of 77. But the movement “from darling to dodo” was really an acknowledgement of how Wilson, in the 1960s, had already lost contact with what England had become and continued to write as if it were still the early 1950s. Fewer people read him, and when enthusiasts promoted a collected edition of his works after he died in 1991, it sold so poorly that most of it ended up being remaindered. True, there were television adaptations of three of his novels in the 1980s and 1990s, but this was really his last hurrah. To emphasise how unreadable much of Wilson’s output now is, D.J.Taylor notes “the sheer efflorescence of their social detail, a determination to pin the characters down by way of supporting illustration that sometimes renders them stone dead” – this being the profusion of references to (unexplained) current events, public figures and movements that no longer mean anything to us. Taylor declares “his early work now looks to be of more interest to a social historian than a novel-reader”.

Having already reached this conclusion myself, I can only say I agree.

Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE SHORT STORIES OF ANGUS WILSON

            Once again, as with my postings on the novels of Dan Davin, I confront you with an incredibly arrogant and smug heading. How dare I claim that the few and brief things I have to say about the work of Angus Wilson (1913-1991) can sum up the man’s literary career? This can’t possibly be “all you need to know” about him. But please hear me out. Angus Wilson, apart from being (as all-knowing Wikipedia tells us) one of Britain’s first “openly gay writers”, was also highly-esteemed by British literati in his heyday, the 1950s and early 1960s. He was knighted for his writing, he became President of the Royal Society of Literature and his biography was written by the notable novelist Margaret Drabble. You have already seen on this blog my comments on his novels Hemlock and After and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot. But Wilson’s stock appears to have fallen and he is no longer exactly required reading, even by the literati.

            Part of what I do when I write these “Something Old” sections is to sound out whether older works still deserve the praise they once received. Are they living texts, meaningful to us now; or do they reflect tastes that can’t be revived? Wilson seems to me a good case for such inspection, and “all you need to know” is whether it would be profitable for you to read his work or not.

This week, I am considering his three collections of short stories. Before he wrote any novels, Angus Wilson first made his name as a writer of short stories, many of which were originally published in highbrow magazines like Horizon. 

His first collection was The Wrong Set published in 1949. The stories are densely written, often witty, giving fine details of setting and environments and usually satirising pretentious people and class snobbery and cultural snobbery – and yet often partaking of that snobbery themselves, so with a certain degree of bitchery. I will not irritate you by synopsising all the stories, as I have sometimes done, to deadening effect, when dealing with other collections of short stories (see my dismally pedestrian posting on D.H.Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer and England, My England).

Instead, let me just take note  of the subject matter of successive stories in The Wrong Set – a subservient Oxford don is married to a sarcastic, alcoholic wife, and the relationship leads him to a nervous breakdown. An uncomfortable family reunion in South Africa [in the 1920s] has English visitors patronising the colonials but the South African’s displaying their tight Calvinism (one of Wilson’s parents was South African, and Wilson spent a few of his childhood years there). A New Year’s Eve dance has upper-class characters mingling with their employees, the servants, but mutual contempt really underlies the festivities. The new director of a provincial art gallery outmanouvres, and patronises, his subordinates at a board meeting. The snobbish daughter of an invalided old father is painfully aware of her “shabby genteel” status and  easily takes offence when her social station is pointed out. A self-satisfied provincial family see themselves as non-conforming bohemians, but they really lead a smug, affluent life. A self-righteous woman of professedly liberal views turns her back on her brother when he returns after a spell in prison because his presence “poisons her”. In the south of France [in the 1930s] a young gigolo breaks with the older woman whom he has been servicing. 

You can see in all these scenarios some level of class tension and exposed pretensions of one sort or another (intellectual superiority, false claims to liberal views, apparent generosity which is really a mask for self-interest). However, Wilson rarely strays from the middle and upper-middle classes (the lower orders are at best the walk-on parts). The title story “The Wrong Set”, set during the government of Clement Attlee,  concerns a snobbish, anti-semitic, bibulous woman who plays piano in a sleazy nightclub and who wants to detach her nephew from “the wrong set” with whom he socialises – meaning Jews and left-wingers or “Reds”. The story’s obvious irony is that the “set” with which she herself associates is nothing to be admired.

            Possibly more naïve members of the reading public in 1949 would not have noticed the homosexual overtones in two or three of these stories. The story “Et Dona Ferentes”  has a family hiding in literature and reading rather than facing life itself, apparently because they do not wish to notice the reality of their parents’ marriage – for it is implied (if you are quick enough to notice it) that father makes a pass at a visiting Swedish boy and is really living only the charade of being heterosexual. The story “Mother’s Sense of Fun” concerns a sensitive young man trying to break away from an overwhelming, domineering mother who is moulding his sexuality. Most obviously the story “Raspberry Jam” concerns a litle boy who likes to dress up and paint his face. His bullying father fears he will become a “sissy”. The little boy finds solace by escaping from his strict family and socialising with two eccentric old women – but the tale ends with shocking violence – indeed, with an image that is sometimes cited as the most brutal in all Wilson’s work. While the social milieu reminds me of the covertly camp stories of Osbert Sitwell, the story’s intention is to suggest the brutal suppresion of a gay sensibility. Interestingly, in an interview with the Paris Review in 1957, Wilson said this was the first short story he ever wrote. He was obviously getting off his chest much that had been bottled up since childhood..

 

If I were really rude, I would say that Angus Wilson’s second collection of short stories Such Darling Dodos (published in 1950) should really be called The Mixture As Before. This was the ironical title W. Somerset-Maugham gave to one of his short-story collections after a reviewer had accused him of cranking out “the mixture as before” and just repeating himself. The stories in Such Darling Dodos are set in the same social milieux, often deal with similar fractious family quarrels and class feelings, and have very much the same tone of irony, envy and disgust as the stories in The Wrong Set. Again, I’ll forego synopsising stories and just present you with the topics of successive stories.

A bankrupt squire has to put up with a family of spongers waiting for the pay-out from the sale of his estate. A frumpy “old maid” with pretensions to refinement suffers the hallucination of an uncouth child plaguing her. In another story, an old woman behaves like a spoilt child, has tantrums and dies by accidental self-strangulation while dreaming of herself as a little girl. (Angus Wilson  had a penchant for stories caricaturing old, deluded and frowsty women.) After a funeral, men compiling an encyclopedia (something in which Angus Wilson was once involved) have bitchy exchanges with the widow of the deceased. In the guise of providing help and sympathy, a domineering woman, who puts on airs and pretends to be part of fashionable society, destroys her mousy sister’s domestic peace and fleeces her of her money. In a story set in wartime, called (rather obviously) “Christmas Day in the Workhouse”, hard class distinctions come to the fore when, at a Christmas dance, upper-middle-class women and lower-middle and even working-class women, all of whom have been drafted into uniform, have to mingle with one another. There are very mixed feelings, and rivalries, as a family gather around the deathbed of their mother. A broken-down officer, who pretends to gentleman status, is reduced to living in Earl’s Court (oh, the horror, my dears!) and, as they visit the zoo, tries to find ways to sponge rent-money from the lower-middle-class woman who is impressed by his gentlemanly airs.

All this sensitivity about class status in the various grades of the middle-class, all these attempts at dominance under the guise of family feeling, all this jockeying for power among colleagues in academic or art-related setting – it is all very Angus Wilson.

As in The Wrong Set, with its “Raspberry Jam”, Such Darling Dodos has a story about an alienated little boy called “Necessity’s Child”. A young schoolboy, neglected by parents who never wanted him in the first place, retreats into daydreams and telling tall stories. But this is no sentimental tale, as it could be chronicling the creation of a monster – because some of the tall stories the little boy invents are knowingly malicious ones which harm other people. The story’s title refers obviously to the old saw that “necessity is the mother of invention” – the boy feels forced to make things up when faced with possible rebukes or brow-beatings. Is the implication that the little boy is regarded as a “sissy” and is therefore the target of bullying? Does much fiction come out of feeling bullied or victimised? In short, is this the template for the making of Angus Wilson?

Surprisingly, the title story “”Such Darling Dodos” is one of the more obvious in its social critique. An aged, dandyish fop, obviously a left-over from the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, visits, in the late 1940s and after the Second World War, the home of people who held ardently “progressive” United Front ideas in the 1930s and during the war. The fop is a Catholic convert; the progressive couple are left-wing Utopians. Both, in effect, have their religions. When some students, of slightly conservative views, visit, the fop describes the progressives as “such darling dodos”, meaning likeable remnants of the past… which, dear reader, is obviously what the fop is too.

 

I’ve already made the gag about “the mixture as before” so I won’t repeat myself when I come to Angus Wilson’s third and final collection of short stories A Bit Off the Map (1957). A Bit Off the Map shares the same preoccupations with class as The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos. One difference is that it has fewer stories than the earlier collections, partly because some of the stories in A Bit Off the Map are longer – 30 or 40 pages, almost making them novelle. This was also Wilson’s last collection of short stories, though in later years various selections of his 1950s stories were published together under titles such as Death Dance.

Once again, avoiding plot summaries, I can give you the class-conscious tone of the stories by citing their general situations. Two married, social-climbing couples have a maudlin Christmas time in flat and dismal East Anglia, stressing over their social status. A pietistic, religious old biddy says something inappropriate to a woman who is dealing with a real family crisis, revealing how unsophisticated (and of the lower orders) she is. In a small village, a woman engages in nosey-parker-ism in the guise of doing philanthropc deeds for others. There are quarrels over money and status among the heirs of a megalomaniac, half-senile business magnate. In the shabby-genteel setting of a decaying house in the country, an older woman probes a younger man about his life – very, very discreetly suggesting that he is homosexual.

The title story “A Bit Off the Map” is one of the longer ones and is the most explicit in terms of its homosexual theme (i.e. very discreet by later standards). A naïve, young working-class Cockney larrakin is kept as the “mascot” of a clique of right-wing intellectuals, some of whom clearly have a sexual interest in him. The milieu so poisons the young man that when a dotty eccentric starts talking to him in a park, the larrakin assumes he is making an unwelcome pass and beats him up. Wilson obviously understands that the young man will not be convicted for this violent assault as, at the time the story was written, using violence to fend off a homosexual advance was regarded as a perfectly acceptable defence in a court of law. Wilson experiments by telling the first half of this story in the first-person voice of the Cockney kid, but the voice fails to sound authentic.

The sex in this collection’s other two novelle is heterosexual. In “More Friend than Lodger”, the wife of a publisher has an affair with a caddish author, but is able to cleverly extricate herself from the inevitable consequences. “After the Show” – one of the best stories in terms of clear narrative – has a situation that could have been devised by Guy de Maupassant. A callow 18-year-old kid is summoned to the bedside of his uncle’s young mistress, who has just attempted suicide. Of course the kid gets attached to her sentimentally but, in typically sardonic Wilsonian fashion, nothing comes of it as Wilson shows us that the mistress is, after all, just a tart on the make.

I have given you a confusing plethora of “situations” in explaining the nature of Angus Wilson’s short stories, but it is at least a reliable map to Wilson’s world and preoccupations. The England that is depicted is one that has largely vanished, as I said in my earlier review of The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot. Snobbery, social pretensions and class tensions still exist, but the map has changed considerably and most of these stories can’t help looking like antiques. Even more bothersome, Wilson often refers, without explanation, to public figures, commercial companies, slogans and acronyms which would have meant something at the time he was writing but which are fairly impenetrable to later generations.

Next posting I will deal with Angus Wilson’s novels.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE MIDDLE AGE OF MRS ELIOT” by Angus Wilson (first published in 1958)

A number of postings back, I produced a “Something Old” about Hemlock and After, the first and, some would argue, the best of the novels of Angus Wilson (1913-1991). I am confident in saying that, major literary figure though he seemed in the 1950s and earlier 1960s, he is somebody who is now rarely read. Yet for all its flaws, I found Hemlock and After to have an exemplary prose style, an acuteness of observation and the ability to make characters vivid by their surroundings and habits in an almost Dickensian way. So I decided to try Wilson again and sat down to read The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, Wilson’s third novel, published six years after Hemlock and After.

            I quickly found that the general arc of the story has much in common with the earlier novel. A main character goes through a traumatic event which causes him/her to reassess his/her life and priorities. Bernard Sands in Hemlock and After realised what a moral coward he was in a traumatic event, reconsidered who he was, settled up his affairs and found some sort of peace before he died. Meg Eliot in The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot suffers a bereavement and a major loss of status, has to change her life in a number of ways, and sets out on a new way of living. Being by Angus Wilson, both novels have homosexual characters and – regrettably, and deflating Wilson’s most acute style – both have overlong closing chapters which explain things in almost didactic ways by means of long conversations. Given that The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot is much longer than Hemlock and After, this makes for wearisome reading in the last section as the air goes slowly out of the cushion.

            To get down to specifics: Meg Eliot is aged 43, married to an older husband, 55-year-old Bill, who is very wealthy from his legal practice but who wastes much money in gambling. They have no children. Their affluence makes them, as upper-middle-class, better off than Meg Eliot’s faded aristocrat friend Lady Violet Pirie, who lives in humble London digs. Meg Eliot fills her time with charity work for the private society Aid to the Elderly. In the first 30 pages of the novel we follow her as she haughtily dominates a board meeting of the society; patronises a woman at a fashionable trading house; and talks down to an old school friend. She is rich, confident and comfortable in her well-furnished house in Westminster.

Then disaster strikes.

Less than a quarter of the way through the novel, Bill is killed as the two of them are travelling in Asia (he is apparently shot in error by an assassin who was aiming at a local political figure). Now widowed, Meg rapidly discovers that her husband was up to his neck in gambling debts and that the house she lives in is heavily mortgaged. So, most difficult of all, she has to find real paying work, for which she is not trained. The first long section of this novel is called “Humpty Dumpty” because, obviously, she has had a great fall. The second long section is called “Jobs for Job”. As she looks for work, she is like the Biblical Job, lamenting her loss and wondering why all this has happened to her.

This is essentially a character study of a woman trying to pick herself up and find a stable footing once again, so the minutiae of plot are not really what counts here. The general situations do, however.

Briefly put, Meg Eliot decides that the most desirable work would be secretarial, so she signs on with an agency that teaches shorthand and other secretarial skills. Meg receives much formal sympathy – acted out in her social class. As Wilson says: “Kind invitations came to her by every post. She dined in Belgravia and Chelsea, Knightsbridge and Kensington, Hampstead and even Highgate” (p.143 of my old Penguin paperback). Note “even Highgate” my dears, for it is clearly not as tone-y and exclusive as the other London areas mentioned. Meg at first rebuffs condolences from her three best friends Lady Viola Petrie, the hoydenish “bohemian” Poll, and her schooldays chum Jill; but she comes to understand that, for the time being at least, they are her main support in her distress. Losing her house, she even accepts for a while Viola Petrie’s offer to share her cramped flat. This puts her in touch with Viola’s layabout son Tom, who fancies himself to be a novelist but who never writes anything. Meg Eliot spends some time trying to “improve” the 24-year-old Tom, which leads her to accompany him in his social life – only to discover that she is too old for his beatnik set. Besides, when he makes a crude and rough pass at her, she more fully understands that she has been trying to control him as she controlled those people whom she patronised in her days of affluence. (She has already rejected what appears to be a lesbian pass from a Mrs Gorres, who runs an art dealership. Her status as a widow seems to make some people think she is now “available”.) Facing both her age, and how out of touch she is with younger people, Meg Eliot moves in with her old schoolmate Jill. But there are domestic tensions in this arrangement, and Meg proceeds to have a nervous breakdown.

There is a lifeline, however. As we have known since early in the novel, Meg has a homosexual brother David, who has rejected a life in academe and who works in a kind of cooperative as a nurseryman in rural Sussex. The novel’s third and final section is called, clumsily,  “Nursery Ins and Outs” and the whole nursery milieu appears to be intended as a major symbol in the novel, pointing to natural growth and healing. Of course, for those raised in the upper-middle-classes, like Meg and David, the word “nursery” has another meaning. The “nursery” was where upper-middle-class English children slept, were raised by a nurse or nanny and first educated. In reconnecting, brother and sister are returning to a sort of childhood and going through a new emotional education. David was in love with a man called Gordon Paget. Gordon has recently died, so both Meg and David are in the aftershock of bereavement. Gordon was a devout, church-going Christian. David, like Meg, is an agnostic and – as in the long conversations between Bernard Sands and his wife in the last section of Hemlock and After – they spend much time trying to define what exactly their “humanism” means. This involves much literary banter and quotation. Being upper-middle-class Meg, a collector of artworks in her more affluent days, reads high-brow fiction, as does her brother. So there are references throughout the novel to Virginia Woolf, E.M.Forster, Marcel Proust, Henry James, L.P.Hartley, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa etc. (Mainly writers of homosexual tendencies, please note). Meg and David toy with the idea of writing a book about the sexual content of minor 18^th century novels. In the midst of all this, their wits are sharpened by the fact that Gordon’s mother, Mrs Paget, a religious person, is no fool and points out the difficulty they have in explaining a “humanism” which has no firm and fixed values.

There are many difficulties with this last section of the novel. One is that Angus Wilson applies much “padding” to keep the narrative going. We have all the details of the politics of running a market garden where Meg does and does not connect with certain of the locals. But at least there is one character, the German woman Else, whose reproving practicality keeps Meg focused. Another problem is what I can only describe as the over-thinking and over-analysis of characters as Meg and David react to each other, diagnose each other, intellectualise, escape into literature, and generally reason towards Meg’s recovery, opening the way for her to reconnect with the wider world. There is some irony in that, as she does so, her brother’s withdrawal into country life comes to seem a form of self-indulgent quietism. Was this Angus Wilson’s intention? I don’t know.

Reader, I confess that I had to force myself to read the tedious last 50-or-so pages of this novel. It reminded me so much of the dreadful, over-thought passages in the later Henry James. An unholy bore.

Yet I am not fully applying the axe to this novel. Once again, at his best, Angus Wilson can present minor characters vividly, in an almost Dickensian way – such as the walrus-like old Donald Templeton, executor of Meg’s late husband’s will, who has to give Meg the bad news about her financial situation. Of course, when he isn’t over-analysing characters, Wilson’s prose is elegant and balanced. Yet there is something that does not gel in this novel. The cock-sure, patronising person that Meg is early in the novel is often repellent; and though we are meant to see her “healed” and returning to the world by novel’s end, we have little real sense that she will be anything other than the brisk, judgemental person she always was. Wilson has Meg declaring (on p.322 of my Penguin paperback) “Take my word for it. I’ve done such a lot of interfering for people’s good, and it’s been disastrous. I should be just the same now if it weren’t for David.” But this is a statement only – not convincing, dramatised proof that Meg has fundamentally changed. After reading this novel, I turned to a brief essay on Angus Wilson by one K.W.Gransden (a British Council pamphlet published in 1969, when Wilson was still active). Gransden points out that Wilson himself said he mainly identified with Meg in writing this novel, perhaps in part trying to exorcise his own hubris and tendency to look down on his intellectual inferiors, as he had done in the character of Bernard Sands in Hemlock and After. Grandsen also says that “Meg’s rehabilitation is depicted rather on the level of an article in a superior ‘woman’s page’: as a lesson in ‘pluck’, in ‘managing’ – the kind of attitude the earlier Wilson might have satirized.” This underestimates the novel’s subtleties, but there is an element of truth to it.

I can see why The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot was greatly applauded by British critics on its first appearance. It is intelligent and perceptive in much of its dense prose and through its fine-tuning of relationships in its observation of small things. But read over sixty years after its first publication, it now resembles an archaeological dig. It is the fine analysis of a world, a sort of society, that was always very small and that now no longer exists. Penurious fallen aristocrats (Viola Petrie); middle-class single ladies living in mews and heating their nights with gas fires (Jill); middle-class women pretending to be of aristocratic descent (Poll); earnest conversations about humanism and back-to-nature nurserymen; concerns about “Americanization, rock’n’roll, Teddy boys, angry young men, new towns, housing estates, television” (as listed on p.97 of my old Penguin copy). With all its acute class consciousness, it is sometimes like reading an old issue of the defunct Punch or Country Life.

Old novels expressing status anxiety and acute class-consciousness can transcend their era and continue to say things relevant to us. Think Jane Austen. Think George Eliot. Think Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert and even (God help us) the early- and middle-Henry James, before he became a chronic waffler. But The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot is not in this company. It is so deeply embedded in the anxieties of a small social group at a particular time that it is a period artefact.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“HEMLOCK AND AFTER” by Angus Wilson (first published in 1952)

           

         Aged 57, the famous and severely intellectual novelist Bernard Sands has managed to get a government grant to take over Vardon Hall, a stately home, as a retreat for young authors, where they can develop their talents without any censorious oversight. Bernard Sands, foe of the commercial bourgeoisie, regards this as a great blow against philistines. He sees his enterprise as upholding what he considers to be “humanism”. But before the opening day of Vardon Hall, which will be attended by the great and the good, Bernard Sands discovers things about himself that alter severely his world view. He becomes more melancholy, the opening day of Vardon Hall is a fiasco, and in the aftermath of this and other events, Bernard Sands, after settling various matters, doesn’t resist dying of a heart attack.

            There now. In one paragraph I have summarised the essential thread of “plot” in Hemlock and After. I do so unashamedly, not only because the novel is now nearly 70 years old and will be well-known to the cognoscenti; but because I think any good novel always has an essential, simple narrative arc like this – the backbone that holds together its various various interests, digressions and divagations. And Hemlock and After is certainly a good novel, with many divagations.

            If you go to what is now the Essential Source of Truth for the Superficial, namely Wikipedia, you will find that the first thing it says about the novelist Angus Wilson (1913-1991) is that he was  “one of England’s first openly gay authors.” So, apparently, Angus Wilson’s homosexuality, at a time when homosexual relations were still a criminal offence in Britain, is the main thing that defines him as an author. I do not agree with this reductive view of the man and his work. In both fiction and non-fiction, Wilson had many interests other than homosexuality. But it is one major focus of Hemlock and After, his first novel, published when he was nearly forty and after he had already produced two volumes of short stories.

To elucidate, Bernard Sands is married with two adult children, but after years of marriage, he is now admitting his homosexuality to himself and actively seeking male lovers. His wife Ella is, understandably, now chronically depressed and suffering from (by implication, psychosomatically-triggered) ill health. For most of the novel, Ella is under-characterised and left in the background, but Wilson clearly sympathises with her situation. If you are the type of person who interprets this novel solely as a piece of advocacy for open acceptance of homosexuality, then you might take this situation to mean that a homosexual man marrying a heterosexual woman can lead only to mutual unhappiness. Bernard Sands’ son James has political ambitions and is afraid that his public reputation will be damaged if his father’s proclivities are made public. James’ wife Sonia is particularly reproving. Bernard Sands’ journalist daughter Elizabeth, wasting her life writing trivial fashion columns, is also rather reproving, though not as vehemently as James and Sonia.

So much for Bernard Sands’ family situation. With the very many supporting characters, we also get a panorama of the homosexual underworld as it was in England seventy years ago. Angus Wilson is aware of the blackmail to which homosexuals were then vulnerable, and he sees much injustice and much harrassment of homosexuals by the police. In the character of Eric Craddock, he also shows how a young homosexual man can have his life blighted by an ambitious and over-protective mother. But Wilson also presents much that is either sordid or repellent in the homosexual mileu. Not all homosexual men in this novel are sympathetic characters. There is the Cockney rent-boy Ron Wrigley, permanently on the make and ready to compromise his male clients if it suits him. There is, late in the novel, the vicar who attempts, in a very old-fashioned way, to seduce a young man who is not seeking such attention. There are also the seedy and corrupt settings in which some homosexuals are involved. After all her faux gentility is pierced, a Mrs Curry is shown to be basically a procuress, making illicit connections for men of all sexual tastes, including homosexuals. She is Bernard Sands’ enemy, in part because she wanted to gain ownership of Vardon Hall herself, apparently to convert it into a sort of discreet brothel. By novel’s end, we understand that Mrs Curry has also been planning to facilitate an extreme case of paedophilia in the violation of a young girl.

In the novel there is also much conversation and interaction that can only be called “camp”, and we are gradually made aware that the sort of bitchiness this often involves is to the taste neither of Bernard Sands nor of the author. In a largely middle-class, theatrical and arty milieu, everyone is always acting a role rather than being sincere, and trying to come up with the next witty thing (or put-down) to say. Surprisingly, Angus Wilson gives it to the reproving Sonia to say (Book 2, Chapter 1) of one character who was at a performance of an Ibsen play “He probably didn’t see very much of it. He’s always too busy thinking of what he’s going to say.”  This is a fitting comment on much of the novel’s “camp” conversation. Such conversation is banter and falsity…. But then, of course, the whole novel is about play-acting, inasmuch as Bernard Sands, and other men in his situation, are constantly having to pretend to be what they are not. (And how often did we used to hear the observation that there are so many homosexuals in the acting profession because their lives are play-acting?)

In the course of all this, what is it that changes Sands’ view of both himself and his Vardon Hall enterprise? Almost halfway through the novel (at the end of Part One, Chapter 5), Bernard Sands realises that he is a moral and intellectual coward when he witnesses a young man being arrested for soliciting. Not only does he do nothing to prevent the young man’s being punished, but he positively enjoys the spectacle of the young man’s suffering. He realises he is worse than the police who at least are following some sort of law, flawed though it may be, in rounding up homosexuals on the street. “Truly, he thought, he was not at one with those who exercised proper authority. A humanist, it would seem, was more at home with the wielders of the knout and the rubber truncheon.” He understands that in his own heart, there is much vindictive sadism. As a haughty intellectual who belittles many acquaintances and sees them as his inferiors, he has enjoyed humiliating people. He is already in this embittered mood of self-awareness before the opening day of Vardon Hall. Instead of giving a positive speech about Vardon Hall’s prospects for budding writers, he gives a very negative speech. For a variety of reasons, the opening is a disaster. But at least one reason is the fact that many of the bright young men, who are the prospective writers, occupy the top floor of the stately home and proceed to have a sort of homosexual orgy (discreetly, but nevertheless clearly, indicated in this 1952 novel). So, it is implied, Bernard Sands also realises that in this Vardon Hall project, his concern for literature was really as much fired by his interest in a “camp” sort of young man. His intentions were not altruistic.

All this explains the title of the novel, Hemlock and After. Socrates took hemlock and died after he had been condemned for corrupting the youth of Athens. Bernard Sands metaphorically takes his killing hemlock, and dies, when he understands negative things about himself, including the way he has corrupted some youth.

But what is the “humanism” Bernard claims to uphold, and berates himself for not upholding? This question brings me to the “period” aspect of the novel – the way it is very much a product of the specific time in which it was written.

In the 1930s in England, it had been the vogue for young middle-class people getting a university education (including Oxford-educated Angus Wilson) to assume that the extreme left (i.e. Communism) represented humanist ideas, because Communism was then apparently in contention with Fascism. For some, joining the Communist Party was like joining an exclusive club, in rebellion from conformity; and this particuarly appealed to at least some homosexuals (one thinks of the Oxbridge-educated Soviet spies Burgess, Maclean, Blunt etc.), who saw themselves as an excluded group. It was the era in which E.M.Forster made his fatuous statement “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” One’s mouldy old country wasn’t as important as one’s pals. But by the early 1950s, when Hemlock and After was written, not only was the USSR no longer a wartime ally, and not only was the Cold War in progress; but it was already blindingly obvious to all but the totally committed, that, far from being the embodiment of humanism, Communism in practice meant a totalitarian state with none of the liberal freedoms. “Humanism” had to be re-defined, not only as loyalty to friends, but as a responsible sense of social duty in a humane society. In Hemlock and After, Bernard Sands pointedly rejects religion – and remember, this was at a time when there was a revival of Christianity in literature, with T.S.Eliot as the most esteemed poet in Britain. But Bernard Sands also rejects the extreme left, in scenes where he contends with his left-wing sister Isobel Sands, a stale and worn-out academic in English literature, implicitly lesbian; and Isobel’s more extreme colleague Louie Randall, who talks revolution. Greater decency in the world will not come from a Marxist revolution any more than it will come from a closed clique where one is concerned only with one’s immediate “pals”.  There has to be a social dimension. Having finally worked this out in himself, Bernard Sands, autocrat, snob, patroniser of his intellectual inferiors, at last does something genuinely altruistic. He leaves funds to help Eric Craddock pursue his studies, without in any way connecting this to romantic and sexual ambitions he had regarding the young man. He also helps to bring down, and set the law on, the paedophile activities that the reprehensible Mrs Curry facilitated.

And so I have done it again, haven’t I? I have “explained” what this novel is about by taking apart its ideas, like a good little high-school teacher – for notoriously, high-school teachers of English think that “meaning” is detachable from text, and in the process reduce all literature to propaganda. I have neglected to consider Angus Wilson’s great skill as a stylist.

Wilson’s prose is dense with physical observation of the appearance, habits, tics and modes of speech of each of his characters. He has the skill to make memorable figures of even those who inhabit only a few pages. I would have to reproduce many long paragraphs of his text to show how precisely Angus Wilson delineates the spiv quality of the rent-boy Ron; the walrus-like stupidity and self-pity of Bernard Sands’ brother-in-law the failed writer Bill Pendlebury; the shop-soiled “respectability” of Mrs Curry; and the stifling, wheedling, self-centred ambitions of Eric Craddock’s mother Celia Craddock. Each is more than a generalised Theophrastian “character”. Each has his or her precise individuality. Even so, some take on a universal quality and represent a general trend in society and culture. When Bernard Sands’ academic sister Isobel, lecturer in English literature, is introduced, Wilson describes her in ways that show her complete dienchantment with literature, which no longer moves or inspires her after years of teaching. “Though she never quite admitted it even to herself, she had ceased to respond to any work of literature soon after she began her academical career.” (Part 1, Chapter 4) I have seen these two pages fittingly extracted in an anthology of satirical pieces (Stephen Potter’s The Sense of Humour, published in 1954), whererin Isobel stands for the sterility of much academe. Like a Dickens or a Balzac, Wilson has created a large, varied and credible, even if sometimes grotesque, supporting cast. It is no coincidence that he was a lover of capacious 19^th century novels, in which a large cast of characters is allowed to display eccentricities. (Wilson wrote studies of Dickens and Zola among others.)

There are less successful qualities to the novel, however.  The longest single chapter of Hemlock and After (Book 2, Chapter 3) comprises 40 pages dramatising the fiasco that is the opening day of Vardon Hall. So many characters are introduced, representing all sides of the community Wilson has created, that the effect is very confusing. I found myself referring frequently to the list of characters – conveniently printed at the beginning of the battered old Penguin edition I was reading – to sort out which character was which. Such a list was often provided at the beginning of those nineteenth century novels Wilson clearly admired. Even so, Wilson’s attempt to picture a whole intellectual community in one event is far more successful than P. Wyndham-Lewis’ tedious attempt to do the same thing back in the 1920s in his The Apes of God.

There is another major flaw in Hemlock and After.  In the last two chapters (Part 3, Chapters 1 and 2), Wilson goes uncharacteristically didactic on us, in the long conversation between Bernard Sands and his wife Ella as they amicably sort of the problems between them, and mutually define a new sort of “humanism”. This strikes a very false note and sounds more like the characters in a Shaw play who conveniently preach what GBS himself wants to say. Then in the “Epilogue” after Sands’ death, we are neatly told of the fate of the main characters and have the pleasure of seeing some villains punished. Wilson himself admitted that this ending was “Dickensian” – a quick tidying-up after the novel is really over.

Despite this, Hemlock and After still stands up as a sophisticated piece of work which, while it reflects the specific time and place in which it was written, can still be read as a believable view of human flaws. I say this in spite of my knowledge that, by common consent, Angus Wilson’s career as a writer went downhill badly after the mid-1960s, when he failed to adjust to changed times and views, and came to seem the remnant of a past age. But I am judging Wilson’s first novel, not the products of his later career.

Two random and unhelpful footnotes: (i.) I am not a connoisseur of novels by or about homosexuals, but I have read enough in my reviewing years to make some comparisons. Hemlock and After is refreshingly frank after one has read something like Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Train, where the implicit homosexuality is hidden in a sort of camp code. I would also make a little comparison with Philip Hensher’s TheEmperor Waltz (reviewed on this blog in 2014). Over sixty years after Angus Wilson distanced himself from Marxist views, Hensher does the same thing when he has the owners of a gay bookshop finally kicking out a pair of gay Trotskyites who think a revolution is going to create a compassionate Utopia. Clearly Hensher doesn’t agree. (ii.) Just a silly thought here. Was the name “Vardon Hall” a hidden camp joke, given that in the camp-cant language Polari (made public by Julian and Sandy on radio), “vada” figures strongly as the verb “to see”?