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.