“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 18th
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.
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