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.

 

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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.