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”?