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 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP” by W.H.Davies (written in 1907; first published in 1908)  - and sundry other prose works by the same author.

 

            There are some books that live an odd sort of afterlife. They were once huge bestsellers and admired even by some of the literati. They were praised for their style. They might have been set as texts suitable for schoolchildren. Then their time passed, they were no longer mentioned in manuals of literature, and they entered their afterlife. They became “cult” books, still in print, still admired by some readers, but no longer regarded as serious literature. All these things are true of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by the Welshman W.H. (William Henry) Davies (1871-1940) which, for reasons I’ll make clear later, would certainly not now be set as a text for schoolchildren. The internet tells me that The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is still in print, but not as frequently as it once was. I have a very battered copy of the book, dated 1928, which tells me that it had been reprinted at least 23 times since it first appeared in 1908.

Some background: Davies used to be a well-known, but minor, Georgian poet, best remembered for his simple jingle called “Leisure” (“What I this life so full of care, We have no time to stand and stare” etc.). He’s still anthologised occasionally but, as I found when I tried to read more of his poetry, he has dated badly. He wrote some few effective poems but his childish simplicity and forced prettiness soon pall and degenerate into doggerel. He really does belong to the very junior classes of school. Before he got going as a published poet (he had had one slim volume published at his own expense), Davies had lived a vagrant life and washed up in a dosshouse in London’s East End where he wrote his memoirs of being a tramp. In the 1890s, when he was in his twenties, he had been a hobo in America and England. Knowing nothing of the publishing world, he sent a copy of his manuscript to a famous writer to see if he would help him get it published. This was George Bernard Shaw, who was impressed by the book’s clear and uncluttered prose style, its apparent candour and the tramp’s nose-thumbing at respectable society. GBS agreed to write a preface, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp was published and it was an instant hit. Edwardian and Georgian readers saw it as a great lark, a delightful excursion into bohemia.

Shaw was right to praise the clarity of the prose, but an alert modern reader quickly understands that under his account of a lively life on the road, Davies is in fact masking, euphemising or minimising many sordid things.

As a young man Davies left Wales after getting involved in boozing and petty theft. He scarpered from his small town and took a ship (cheapest ticket) from Liverpool to the USA. He fell in with a bum called Brum who taught him how to ride the rails (even if guards with billy-clubs were ready to knock bums off speeding trains) and how to panhandle most efficiently. He fell in with other hoboes like Baldy and Australian Red.

In Michigan and other states, they taught him the art of getting arrested for petty misdemeanours so that they could be safely locked up in jail for the winter and get food and a bed for free. Apparently some small-town judges were perfectly aware of how the bums managed this, but they’d worked out a corrupt scheme to make the temporary incarceration of hoboes pay. (All this reminds me of O.Henry’s contemporaneous short story “The Cop and the Anthem” about a hobo trying to get locked up for the winter.)

 Occasionally Davies and his chums had to do honest work, like picking berries in harvest time. He joined a gang digging a canal near Chicago. He went down South in a houseboat and spent some time working on the levees of the Mississippi, but he had a bout of malaria. For a while he begged on the streets of Memphis, Tennessee. But it is clear that as soon as he had much money in his pocket, he would go on titanic benders, get smashed and return to panhandling. Sea-ports were especially the places for easy pickings and a big piss-up, and Davies headed for Baltimore.

Some of the most vivid chapters in the book concern the time he spent working, with fellow vagrants, on cattleboats sailing between Baltimore and Liverpool. He records the rough treatment that was given to the cattle, the way they were tethered in small pens, their bellowing, and the fact that sheep (kept on a different open deck) were often washed overboard in heavy seas. But – his euphemising kicking in – he nowhere mentions what must have been the stench. Interestingly, in Liverpool the crude and underpaid American cattlemen and hoboes were appalled at how much poorer their British counterparts were.

After five years of bumming in America, Davies went back briefly to his Welsh home to see his aged mother who (he says) had clairvoyant powers and foresaw his unannounced visit. He returned to North America, still drinking heavily, and thought he’d try his luck in the gold-rush then going on in the Klondike. But his luck ran out when he was crossing Canada. He tried to jump on a moving train, fell, and had his right foot sliced off by the wheels. He had to have the whole leg amputated.

So he returned to Britain, slowed down, but still being a tramp. As often as not, though, he now depended on going from door to door in England as a pedlar, selling essentially worthless goods. He at least implies that his injury enabled him to win some pity when he begged. The chapters set in England are neither as raucous nor as eventful as those set in America. Davies was twice arrested unjustly in cases of mistaken identity, when he was taken to be a notorious thief who was doing the rounds. He does report how, when he was in London, he sometimes tried to sleep standing up, when he had nowhere to doss, as police always hustled on tramps who lay down and slept in public places. (This system is also described in Jack London’s account of London’s lower depths, The People of the Abyss). A number of times Davies expresses contempt for Salvation Army shelters and their brisk ways with vagrants when they dish out charity. He also locks horns with a charity organization which won’t give him a hand-out. (I wonder how much GBS warmed to this as he had already written a critique of the Salvation Army in his play Major Barbara. ) There are some colourful and some unsavoury characters whom he meets in doss-houses and shelters, such as the fraudster who tricks people out of their money by claiming he has an inheritance coming his way. There are also notes on the varieties of tramp –there are “gridlers” who deliberately sing loudly and badly in the hope that people will pay them to go away, and there are “downrighters” who are unashamed about begging without doing anything else. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp fades out on Davies beginning his literary career and taking his first stab at settled respectability.

While much of this may sound like a rough-house, unbuttoned, frank account of a life, there is something that stands as a barrier between the text and a reader over a century later. Davies’ language is always restrained and polite. Of course four-letter-words and basic Anglo-Saxon-isms couldn’t be printed in 1908, so we can’t blame Davies for being euphemistic. Even so, when his fellow bums and hoboes are given dialogue that sounds just like the way the author himself writes, we sense that something is not quite right. It’s not as if Davies wouldn’t have known how to swear a blue streak. He confesses that, when he was put under chloroform as his leg was being amputated “I have a faint recollection of struggling with all my might against its effects, previous to losing consciousness; but I was greatly surprised on being afterwards told that I had, when in that condition, used more foul language in ten minutes delirium than had probably been used in twenty-four hours by the whole population of Canada.” (Chapter 20) Later he tells us of his own linguistic fastidiousness when he describes a doss-house acquaintance thus: “I have become accustomed to foul language from one man to another, but his bold way of directly addressing his blasphemy to his Maker, stiffened the laughter on my lips, and shocked me, in spite of an indifferent faith.” (Chapter 25) Then there are those moments when he appears to write a very softened version of what hard men actually said. Here is the

supposedly strong language used by a labourer who can’t get any sleep in a noisy dosshouse: “Give over, will yer: when are you coves going to sleep? I ain’t done any labour for three weeks, and now as I’ve got a chance at four in the mornin’, blow me if I ain’t robbed of my slumber. Take care I don’t set about you at once, yer blooming lot of bleeders. “ (Chapter 21). “Give over”? “Coves”? “Blow me”? “Yer blooming lot of bleeders”? My guess is the the annoyed labourer is more likely to have said “Shut up you ********. F**k me you ******ng ****ers. I’ll **** you if you don’t shut up.”

            And, apart from its antiquity, what of the parts that would now have The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp banished from the classroom? Again, we can’t blame Davies himself for the attitudes and assumptions of his own age. Even so, the memoir’s casual racism is hard to ignore. Reporting negatively on a fellow hobo who has been stingy and greedy, Davies declares “Scotty, to our unfeigned disgust, acted the Jew in this matter of trade…”  (Chapter 14). Later, travelling in steerage, he notes

 “the disgusting, filthy habits of the great majority, who were a low class of Jews and peasantry from the interior of Russia… haters of soap and water [who] jabber and wildly gesticulate…” (Chapter 18).

This is mild, however, in comparison with his attitude towards blacks in America. South of the Mason-Dixon line, he gives a very ambiguous account of the lynching of a black man which he watched as if it were almost a public entertainment. He adds “Many a sheriff, I believe, has surrendered his prison keys to the lynchers and the lawless mobs, forgetting his duty in disgust at the exhibition of fear in one for whom he is responsible. And many a sheriff would lay down his life to protect a criminal who with cool nerve faces his cell, callous and indifferent” (Chapter 8). After travelling down some of the Mississippi looking for work, he stops at a camp on the banks where there are both black and white casual labourers. This is how he describes what is clearly a race riot:  “Unfortunately the ill feeling which invariably exists between these two colours, came to a climax on the first day of our arrival. The negroes, insulting and arrogant, through their superiority of numbers, became at last unbearable. On which the white men, having that truer courage that scorned to count their own strength, assembled together, and after a few moments’ consultation, resolved to take advantage of the first provocation.” Eventually the “black murderers” are chased away. (Chapter 14). Later, when he sees a black man dragged from a jail, quivering with fear and begging for mercy, Davies says it aroused him “more with disgust than pity”(Chapter 15)

Finally, there is something that is not mentioned in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp but which I think is now a glaring absence. Again, of course, it is something that could not be published in 1908. Every historical account I have read of American tramps, bums, hoboes and vagrants in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries tells me that their world was a very homosocial world – a world of men only. And much of this homosocial world was also casually homosexual. Put simply, older hoboes would often entice younger men to come along with them by promising the easy life with no hard work, but with a sexual relationship in mind. Probably the best-known American song about hoboes is “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”, which was first sung in the 1890s. Over the years it was bowdlerised (as in Burl Ives’ famous – and very enjoyable – 1950s version) and finally demoted to being a children’s song with completely sanitised lyrics. In the kiddie version even the “cigarette trees” became “lollipop trees”. But the original version was the frank lament of a young hobo who has been led astray by an older man who promised him the fantastic pleasures of the Big Rock Candy Mountains. It includes the chorus

“I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore

And I'll be damned if I hike any more

To be buggered sore like a hobo's whore

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”

In his introduction to The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, George Bernard Shaw says “As to the sort of immorality that is most dreaded by schoolmistresses and duennas, there is not a word in the book to suggest that tramps even know what it means.” This seems a polite way of saying that there is no hint of sexual activity in the book. To his credit, Davies does show that the tramps and hoboes are not necessarily a merry band having only innocent adventures. There is no honour among thieves, and the bums he describes often steal from one another and cheat one another. He also recounts sheer criminality, with a gang of hoboes near Chicago waylaying and murdering employed labourers for the pay they might be carrying. I am also not suggesting that Davies himself necessarily had sexual exploits of any variety – though it is tempting to wonder what a wandering young man in his twenties might have been up to. Even so, in the early 21^st century, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp seems like a book designed for an earlier, and perhaps more innocent, readership than now exists. Heigh-ho for the open road and let’s not emphasise the sordid realities too much.

 

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

Just to show you how much I care for you, dear readers, I did something that very, very few people ever do. I read other prose works by W.H.Davies to make sure I wasn’t underestimating the man. Perhaps other accounts he wrote of his rambles would be more forthcoming and more attuned to modern sensibilities. Years ago, I used to be a regular visitor to second-hand bookshops, and I bought odds and ends in the hope of one day getting around to reading them. I am now at the age when I am slowly emptying my shelves of books I know I will either never read, or will never read again. Among books so purchased were three obscure works by W.H.Davies, which I’ve only recently got around to reading. Here’s my report on them.

Despite its twee title, Davies’ A Poet’s Pilgrimage, published in 1918, has a certain, limited amount of charm. It is Davies’ account of spending a month or so tramping around Wales and a small part of the west of England before catching the train back to London. Here, given that he always has money in his pocket and is already a minor celebrity, he is not so much a tramp as a tourist on foot, attempting to keep up his image as a gentleman of the road. It is all very self-conscious. He is at his best when he is away from the cities (Swansea, Cardiff). He says many negative things about the dirty Welsh children in the cities and how Welsh workmen are overpaid anyway and how sheep near coal-mining towns are covered in soot. He prefers enjoying country pubs where, apparently, Welshmen all spontaneously burst into song and there are always colourful characters. He likes quaint inns, well-built country houses and picturesque hills. In short, he peddles the picture-postcard image of the country. He resents these new-fangled motor-cycles and motor-cars that are ruining the pastoral peace. As in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, many of the conversations he records as if verbatim sound suspiciously formal and bowdlerised. By the time we are given the lengthy confessions of wandering eccentrics it is hard to see them as anything more than fiction. There are a handful of anecdotes worth remembering – the old sea-dog from the days of sail who rails against steamships; the tramp who is obsessed with hunting for fleas; the accordionist who has delusions about being a virtuoso. But the good anecdotes are few and far between. A Poet’s Pilgrimage is a bland exercise in trying to maintain a reputation.

Later Days, first published in 1925, is even worse, being little more than self-puffery. Each chapter begins with a piece of sheer doggerel. Davies is always ready to invite praise while pretending to denigrate his own work (“If my poems are remembered” etc. etc.)  He tells a few inconsequential anecdotes he left out of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, relates a tale of walking from London to Bristol, complains about eccentric and annoying neighbours in London during the Great War, and tells us hastily that he has recently got married. But Later Days swiftly sinks into a series of name-dropping anecdotes about the literary and artistic celebrities of his day whom he has met. So on come pallid tales of meeting Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, Edward Garnett, W.H.Hudson, Hilaire Belloc, Joseph Conrad, GBS, Alice Meynell, Rupert Brooke, Ralph Hodgson [and his dog], the political and social grandees Lady Cunard and ex-prime minister Balfour, and the artists and sculptors Sickert, Epstein, Rotherstein and Augustus John. Only one tale he tells of these people has any punch – and it is a rather snarky put-down aimed at him by Max Beerbohm. So little does Davies say about any of these people one is left with the distinct impression that they all really saw him as a “character” to be humoured rather than as an intellectual equal – a colourful old former tramp who could be painted or sculpted. (And, says one source, despite his limited literary achievement, he was one of the most painted and sculpted figures of his day). Later Days is a really vacuous piece of work.

When I began reading The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp, first published in 1926, I thought that at last W. H. Davies was going to indulge in frankness. The very first chapter has him entering a brothel in America. But he quickly tells us that he was there by accident, not knowing what the establishment really was, and having only been told that it was the best place to get soup for free. And that is all he says about it. This book is a re-hash of left-over bits and pieces. Davies’ preface tells us that he simply put together and re-wrote what could be salvaged from two earlier books that had not found an audience. The title apparently comes from an English tramp’s joke that he was an employee of “Johnny Walker, the road surveyor.” Included are improbable tales about American hoboes admiring the greater begging skills of Cockney tramps; the boldness of American tramps in approching the homes of the rich to beg; and the way real tramps look down on “stiffs”, meaning part-time tramps who sometimes actually work for a living. Dirty navvies, we are told, are not real tramps. “Narks” are semi-permanent residents of workhouses and doss houses who make life difficult for real tramps. Tramps sometimes play nasty tricks on one other and steal one another’s food when they’re in lodgings, and some tramps practise various frauds, such as pretending to collect money as workers forced out on strike. And that, really, is as much as you will get from this book, where Davies stretches the little he has to say as far as it can possibly be stretched.

Having read these three additional books, all I can see is a man flailing around desperately trying to repeat the success of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, but simply not having enough interesting material to do the trick.

I have saved you the bother of hunting for these forgotten books in second-hand bookshops, or reading them. Shortly I will be throwing them out.

 

 

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

RIDICULOUS MISCELLANY 

I’m sure you’re used to those clever lists of one-liners and wise sayings that are often presented in magazines. Usually they have been plucked by their compilers out of dictionaries of quotations, the same source that is often plundered by speechmakers who wouldn’t know their Candide from their Republic but who will say airily “As Voltaire said…” or “As Plato said…”, as if they have been deeply immersed in such literature. Compiling quotations and one-liners in this way can be fun, but it often results in only the more familiar, glib and brief quotations getting an airing.  

Which brings me the ridiculous miscellany of quotations I am about to unload on you. Always eager to find material for these “Something Thoughtful” sermons, I have often copied out quotations and passages from books I am reading or reviewing. My aim was to make any such quotation the nucleus of one of my longer musings. But recently I looked again at some of the passages I had compiled and thought – why not just let each of them be read for itself, with minimal commentary? So here we go [noting that the highlighted titles refer to books that have been reviewed on this blog].

 

Take this offhanded remark, made in A.Alvarez’s treatise on suicide, The Savage God, : “The Anatomy [of Melancholy] is an addict’s book, like the Faerie Queen, more or less unreadable to those who have not joined the club.”

I hooted with laughter as I read this. As one who has never read The Faerie Queen and who has only dipped into Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (though both books sit accusingly on my shelves), by reading this I felt absolved of the necessity to read either book.

 

            Now for a similarly inconsequential statement. In Unconditional Surrender, the final novel in his Sword of Honour  trilogy, Evelyn Waugh lets rip at the way some people, even if they have apparently fine aesthetic tastes, can switch their allegiances rapidly if their masters tell them to. In this case he is referring to doctrinare left-wingers who condemned avant garde art in the 1930s, because they admired the Soviet Union, which insisted on “socialist realist” representational painting. But the situation changed in 1939. Hence “… the Ministry of Information in the early days of ‘Survival’, before the Russian alliance, had pointed out that since Hitler had proclaimed a taste for ‘figurative’ painting, defence of the cosmopolitan avant garde had become a patriotic duty in England.”

 

Okay, if the specific historical context of that one didn’t mean anything to you, try this, which is a little more testing for the brain. In his incredibly eccentric treatise on clothes SartorResartus , Thomas Carlyle comments on how his fantastical character Herr Teufelsdrockh grew mentally in a small town setting and interpreted the world in terms of it. Stick with it, and you will see this statement is an intelligent reflection on the persistence of early impressions in the way we imagine the world:

“These things were the Alphabet whereby in after-time he was to syllable and partly read the grand Volume of the World: what matters it whether such Alphabet be in large gilt letters or in small ungilt ones, so you have an eye to read it?”

Not too cryptic for you, was it? 

 

Now for something rather more straightforward, as is my reason for preserving it.  David Coventry’s debut novel The Invisible Mile (2015), is set in 1928, exactly ten years after the end of the First World War. In it, the young narrator visits what were battlefields a mere decade previously. He is surprised at how peaceful and gentle the landscape now is, and has to force himself to picture what a terrible scene it would have presented when the war was in progress. To put it simply, that is exactly the reaction I had myself when, three or four years ago, I looked over the placid Flemish countryside where the Battle of Passchendaele was fought.:

“It’s the gentle rolling hills that get me, the undulations that seem quite unlikely to hide armies and artillery and guns. I grew up with the name of ridges and towns inked into memory: Messines, Vimy, Verdun, Flanders. I had imagined great rising lands, precipices to conquer and fortify, but I am reminded that their part of the war was a front of gentle mounds on the apron of some poor farmer. It was desperation that made these hillocks into mountains, these gentle rises into great ridgebacks on which life was fought and held.” 

 

And here is something I preserved simply for its accuracy of observation in its description of an octopus, its awareness on our essential incommunicability with another species, and perhaps also for its strong sting in the tail. It comes from Richard Hughes’ classic A High Wind in Jamaica :

“When swimming under water, it is a very sobering thing suddenly to look a large octopus in the face. One never forgets it: one’s respect, yet one’s feeling of the hopelessness of any real intellectual sympathy. One is soon reduced to mere physical admiration, like a silly painter, of the cow-like tenderness of the eye, of the beautiful and infinitesimal mobility of the large and toothless mouth, which accepts as a matter of course that very water against which you, for your life’s sake, must be holding your breath. There he reposes in a fold of rock, apparently weightless in the clear green medium but very large, his long arms, suppler than silk, coiled in repose, or stirring in recognition of your presence. Far above, everything is bounded by the surface of the air, like a bright window of glass. Contact with a small baby can conjure up at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain.”

Also from A High Wind in Jamaica, I enjoyed this brilliant reversal of the reader’s expectations:  “Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.”

 

Then there is this interesting observation from Oliver Schreiner’s melodramatic, preachy and very imperfect 1883 novel TheStory of an African Farm. It nevertheless says something truthful about the retention and priority of early childhood memories:

“The year of infancy, where from the shadowy background of forgetfulness start out pictures of startling clearness, disconnected, but brightly coloured, and indelibly printed in the mind. Much that follows fades, but the colours of those baby pictures are permanent.”

 

I will end this ridiculous miscellany with two quotations which do not come from anything reviewed on this blog. First, the opening lines of “Beauty”, a poem by Abraham Cowley (1618-1667). Does not this poet, over three hundred years ago, rightly perceive what is now a commonplace – to wit, that ideas of what beauty is are different in different cultures, and there is no one universal cultural measure of what beauty is? Behold:

“Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape,

Who dost in ev’ry country change thy shape!

Here black, there brown, here tawny, and there white;

Thou flatt-rer which compli’st with every sight!”

 

And of course, to round off this pointless bookish ramble into which I have heartlessly drawn you, let me end with the ultimate comment on books, the wise words of Ecclesiastes 12:11-12 in the RSV translation. The second sentence is, of course, my own reaction to much that is placed before me:

“The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails fixed firmly are the collected sayings that are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh”.

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“MAP FOR THE HEART – Ida Valley Essays” by Jillian Sullivan (Otago University Press, $NZ35); ”BILL & SHIRLEY – A Memoir” (Massey University Press, $NZ35)

“Late autumn, and once again it’s time for the firewood we gathered through summer – jaunts across the paddock to the old willows, cracked and split in storms, for the branches they delivered on top of fence lines and into the damp gullies. Fire crackles and brightens the room at night, though in Auckland perhaps, warm still rules. Here the wind presses up to the windows, whoos and blusters around the house. The clouds foretell a time soon to come when snow will lie on the hills and rocks and, if the wind is from the north, on my boots on the verandah and the twigs for the fire.”(p.19)

These are the opening words of the opening essay, “Becoming Something Other” in Map for the Heart, Jillian Sullivan’s collection of eighteen essays and a poem. At once it tells us where we are. This is the cold south of New Zealand – in fact the Ida Valley in Central Otago - because “in Auckland perhaps” it’s still warm. We also know at once that the essays will have much evocation of landscape and weather, and it is an isolated and perhaps low-tech way of life that is observed. After all, it’s a crackling fire that “brightens the room”. And maybe there will be some self-consciously elevated vocabulary. Clouds “foretell” the coming of snow – they don’t warn of it.

I admit that I am a newcomer to the work of Jillian Sullivan. Poet, teacher of creative writing, essayist and author of chilldren’s novels, Jillian Sullivan has already written extensively about the part of New Zealand she chose to settle in.

In these essays she writes candidly about four things.

Some essays are confessional autobiography, concerning her family circumstances and the life she now chooses to live. In the opening essay “Becoming Something Other”  she touches briefly on the breakup of her marriage and other personal troubles that gradually persuaded her that she needed to radically alter her life. “Between Lands” talks of visiting a granddaughter in Auckland and remembering her own earlier days in the North Island. “Running Barefoot”, the most personal of all her essays, is a kind of apologia for her life – her parents’ breakup, her being a solo mum with four children after her own marriage breakup, and how all this has shaped both her and her children’s lives and made her see the world in a new way, so that she eventually found her “true life” as a writer. While mainly about her strawbale house and her life in the Ida Valley, the essay “A Privileged Job” notes how she supplemented the benefit she received by working in a country hospital. “The Art and the Adventure of Subsistence” gives another view of trying to live on a benefit,  and finally discovering that all the bureaucracy involved got in the way of her writing.

Then there are the essays about the strawbale house she now inhabits in the remote Ida Valley and her commitment to the use of “vernacular” materials in the construction of houses – that is, materials provided by nature and drawn from the locality of the house. (In 2016, Sullivan wrote A Way Home, a whole book about her strawbale house.) In the essay “A Roof Over Our Heads”, she declares “We desire shelter, protection from the elements. But a shelter can stifle our awareness of where we live – the sky, the terrain, the weather, the plants, animals and birds that live alongside us in their own place. Our place – that something that watches over us, lasts beyond us and participates in our moments.” (p.54)  The opening essay “Becoming Something Other” describes her domicile made of natural and accessible components – mud, straw, clay and lime – and she expands upon these themes in the essays “In the Midst of My True Life” “The Primitive Hut” and even “Lifting Walls”, about building a mudbrick wall with the help of her friend Graeme Male. While all this suggests a “getting back to nature” outlook, it does not mean the abandonment of available modern technology – Jillian Sullivan writes on a laptop, after all.

More important than either autobiography and commitment to simple nature-formed housing, however, are the essays that focus on the environment, nature and the natural world inasmuch as they can be perceived or saved by us. These are her most impassioned essays, revealing a very committed environmentalist. The essay “Ancient Land” is her lament about those who wish to “use” and monetise Central Otago, rather than allowing it to flourish as a natural environment. (Her tone here reminds me very much of the environmentalist poetry of Richard Reeve , in which he ridicules the impulse to “call in” land to make it “useful”.) Jillian Sullivan is a member of the Central Otago Environmental Society along with Brian Turner, Michael Harlow and other literary luminaries. She speaks of her vegetarianism and the way indigenous small plants – including indigenous grasses – are being muscled out by invasive species. The essay “The Hawkdun Range” becomes a reflection on the ancientness of what was sea-bed millions of years ago and makes it clear that some plants we barely notice are essential to biodoversity. She writes of human intervention that has led to ecological disruption – as in overgrazing. “Growing Closer” takes Goethe’s theories of becoming aware of nature, not just by observing and noting characteristics of plants and animals, but by cultivating feeling – and hence becoming more aware of animals’ sentience. As she narrates in “What if a River Wants to Sing?”, she joined a party of freshwater ecologists and a hydrologist, to explore the length of the Manuherekia River (which feeds into the Clutha) to note all habitats en route that were in danger of being destroyed by irrigation schemes,  fertiliser etc.

Inevitably, thoughts on the environment overlap with a sort of social critique. You cannot discuss the impact of human beings on the land without discussing the human beings, and here Sullivan’s tone is not always accusatory. In “Love, Loss and the Fraser Basin”, a long walk becomes a reflection on injustices done to 19^th century workers, such as gold-stampers and others underpaid for their labour and exploited in various ways. In this she perceives the foundation of New Zealand’s economic and social structure: “What I’m looking at here is a history of subjugation. I begin to see that the foundations of our society and culture were laid within a framework that saw wealth as taking precedence over the rights of others, land included.” (p.109). Similarly,“Blackstone Hill” considers the human past of the land she now identifies with. She does not look at (Pakeha) pioneers negatively, knowing they had to make their way in their own time by the means they had to hand. This is not one of those smug exercises in assuming that people in the past were wilfully ignorant of their environment, but it is still a reasoned view of their imprint on the land. Speaking of people who are dead and gone, it is fitting that the last essay in the collection, “Across the Whited Fields” is focused on a graveyard and a consideration of the dead, especially a much-abused young woman who tried to make her way in the community but died of an overdose.

It is quite clear from these essays that Jillian Sullivan is friends, not only with fellow writers and environmentalists in Central Otago, but also with farmers, whose industry and needs she understands. Her environmentalism does not come with a prejudice against farming, but an awareness of some of the negative environmental impacts of farming.

You will note that, as is my wont, I have so far neatly noted the contents of this collection of essays without making any critical comment upon it. So here are a few personal reflections.

I identified with some of the moments when Sullivan had to teach herself about local botany. In “The Hawkdun Range”, she remarks “But I don’t know the names of the plants on the mountains where I live. I walk through their beauty in a state of ignorance” (p.37) May I say that I know the feeling? When I’ve taken bush walks or guided tourists around Tiritiri Matangi, I’ve often had to rack my brains to remember the names of certain plants.

In parts of Map for the Heart, I found a kind of Thoreauvian echo – the outlook of a town-and-city dweller who has decided on a more isolated life. In “A Roof Over Our Heads”, Sullivan writes “Mud walls surrounded me, and as the firelight and candle flames flickered over them, creating small shadows and gleams of light, I had the distinct feeling of being inside a living, breathing structure.” (p.54). This reminds me strongly of the moment in Walden (reviewed on this blog) where Thoreau, looking at shadows in his rafters, remarks “Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?”

There are moments in this collection where I agree with Jillian Sullivan’s agenda, but might take issue with her underlying assumptions. Take this passage from the essay “What if a River Wants to Sing?”: “I have seen how humans stand apart from the natural world and say: this is not us but for us. To say the river has rights and needs, to say the river deserves our responsibility to further generations, to say the river is one being from mountain torrent to the wide, luminous stretch between shingled banks, is to go against those who have the voice of power, against those who say we need ‘the courage to dam the rivers.’ I have lost my faith with those in power…”(p.165) Very well, I accept the need to clean up rivers and respect the natural environment, but I reject the anthropomorphism. To assert a river has “rights and needs” is to give it a consciousness and a personhood it does not have; and such anthropomorphism often leads to a downgrading of respect for real human beings. Clean up the river but don’t assume it is a person.

Enough of my grumpiness. Reading much description and evocation of place can clog the mind. It is hard to form mental patterns from the profusion of precise and specific details of the landscape that Sullivan gives. Perhaps for this reason, I warmed most to one of the longest essays in the book “Cycling With Bartali: a Year in the valley”, because it gives a narrative covering a year when Sullivan and her cycling partner explored and rode up and down the hills of the Ida Valley. This means the essay is enlivened by the interaction of the two cyclists in their conversations as the seasons turn and conditions change. There are conversations and interaction with other people in the valley too. The valley is realised for us in more than evocation and description only.

 

Footnote: Two very small matters which have nothing to do with the high quality of Jillian Sullivan’s essays. By a small editorial glitch, the page numbers given on the table of contents do not quite correspond to the pages on which each essay begins. Also – and others might disagree with me – I find the term “village” rather quaint and forced when describing small New Zealand settlements; but apparently that’s the term some people use in Central Otago.

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

            If I were to write a memoir of my family, how would I approach it? To the best of my knowledge, there have been no great scandals connected with my family, but there have been the arguments and clashes of personality that every family experiences. Even so, I think I would write with great tact and caution.

Keith Ovenden often writes with tact and caution in Bill & Shirley – a memoir, especially when it comes to controversial matters. And sometimes he glosses over, or strains to put a particular construction on, things that he finds unpalatable. Ovenden, now in his late 70s, is the son-in-law of the late Bill (William Ball) Sutch and Shirley Smith. His wife Helen Sutch is the only child of the Sutches. Bill and Shirley were, in effect, family to Ovenden. As Ovenden says, he knew Sutch  personally only in the last four years of his life; but he knew Shirley Smith as his mother-in-law and as the grandmother of his and Helen’s children for decades before her death in 2007. He admires Sutch as the outspoken economist, civil servant and author of many books, who advanced to being Permanent Secretary of Industries and Commerce under various governments. He finds much to admire in Shirley Smith’s many careers too. But he had a bumpy start with both his parents-in-law.

Ovenden stresses that Bill & Shirley – a memoir is a memoir and not a biography. Titled “Between memoir & biography”, an overlong and rather pompous essay near the end of the book tells us the difference between the two genres, separating this work from such productions as Ovenden’s biography of Dan Davin. So Bill & Shirley is Ovenden’s memories and a personal view of his experience and interactions with Bill Sutch and Shirley Smith.

Or is it?

For there is a very big elephant in the room.  Ovenden says he had considered writing this memoir for some decades. Last year there appeared Sarah Gaitanos’ detailed biography Shirley Smith – An Examined Life (reviewed on this blog 1 July 2019). There is no bibliography in Bill & Shirley, but there are a number of end-notes. It is interesting to see, in both text and end-notes, how scrupulously Ovenden avoids naming or referring in any way to Gaitanos’ book, which reaches radically different conclusions about the Sutches and  “the Sutch case” from Ovenden’s conclusions. Even if he considered writing it for years, was Ovenden finally spurred to produce Bill & Shirley now as a riposte to Gaitanos? This is pure, undocumented speculation on my part, but much of Bill & Shirley reads like damage control.

Three chapters, called “The Lion and the Weasel”, deal with Bill Sutch and three chapters, called “If only, if only…” deal with Shirley Smith.

Purely for my own convenience, I’ll deal with the Shirey Smith chapters first. Ovenden notes Shirley’s privileged upbringing and her commendable academic career, studying at Oxford and being a lecturer in Classics before, some years later, becoming a highly-esteemed lawyer who took up many social causes. Ovenden notes her feminism, driven by the desirability of equality between the sexes. Says Ovenden: “It was this sense of equality that dominated her understanding of feminism. She had no truck with the radical cutting-up-men mobsters. The point was to achieve equality and to ensure that men could enjoy it too. She detested discrimination.” (p.107) She joined the Communist Party when she was a student at Oxford, but eventually gave it up in the 1950s. Ovenden makes an ambiguous statement about this when discussing the memories Shirley shared with him in later years: “In the deep crevasses of these recollections I detected Shirley re-examining her commitment to communism as an intellectual choice she now understood to be unrelated to her social upbringing, but each a form of hypocrsiy, and each feeding off the other to leave her embarrassed and ashamed of both.” (p.123) I wish readers well in trying to unpick the full meaning of this tangled sentence.

Much of what Ovenden writes about Shirley sounds like a polite euology, such as might have been delivered at a funeral. He does, however, have to deal with the fact that in her later years, she had many regrets, which is why this section is called “If only, if only…”.

He suggests that in old age, Shirley regretted three things.

One was her oppostion to Helen’s marriage to Ovenden, when Ovenden first came into the Sutch family orbit. Shirley’s reasons for disapproving so much of the young Ovenden are not clear, but Ovenden confirms some bizarre details that have already been made public in the Gaitanos book – that when Helen Sutch and Keith Ovenden were courting and newly married, they regularly took tranquillisers (Ovenden is not sure whether it was lithium or valium) to calm them down when they went to fractious family dinners with Bill and Shirley. In later years, Shirley regretted her hostility to Ovenden as she gradually befriended him. Another regret had to do with some unpleasant dealings Shirley had with her brother over property they shared. And she seems to have also regrettted her youthful enthusiasm for Communism.

However, it appears that, years after Bill Sutch died, Shirley also reassessed her relationship with Bill and, now being aware of a number of untruths Bill had told,  may even have come to believe that he was guilty as charged in the matter of his trial for espionage when, in 1974, he had possibly passed on information to Dimitri Razgovorov, the “rezident” (i.e. KGB man) at the Russian Embassy. This, at any rate, is the conclusion reached in Sarah Gaitaonos’ biography of Shirley. Ovenden, however, chooses to smoothly glide over this when, in what I can only interpret as a slap back at the unmentioned Gaitanos, he declares that only prejudiced people of ill will would draw such a conclusion from things Shirley wrote and said late in life. “It could be made to fit their case,” asserts Ovenden. “At the end of her life, they might say, she had seen [Bill] for what he was. What they might also be saying… is that she was taken for a fool.” (p.140). I’m taking a shrewd guess here as to whom the pronoun “they” might be designating. This really is damage control at its slippery-est.

Turning to the three chapters on Bill Sutch, Ovenden declares in his preface  “It is not my purpose, as others have felt free to do, to root among his remains” (p.12). But root among the remains he does to make his case. While praising Sutch in detail for his eminent career, many achievements as a senior civil servant and many influential published works, Ovenden does frankly deal with the negative side of the man. This includes Sutch’s huge ego, his tendency to speak in monologues rather than actually engaging people in conversation, domineering aspects of his relationship with Shirley and, sometimes, his economy with the truth. On p.42, Ovenden affirms (as Gaitanos did) that Sutch for years spun a yarn about having trekked his way across the Soviet Union when he was a young man. This proved to be a lie. But, calling this untruth a “brag”, rather than really calling Sutch to account for his foolish dishonesty, Ovenden uses Endnote 20 (p.191) to massage this into “proof” that Sutch could never have been recruited by NKVD (KGB) agents in the 1930s as some have suspected.

Ovenden assumes, without proof, that the SIS (New Zealand’s security service) leaked negative information about Sutch to the right-wing populist newspaper Truth when Sutch’s trial (and acquittal) were over (p.50). Again, of course, he scrupulously declines to engage with Sarah Gaitanos’ very different account of this matter. As for Sutch’s repeated meetings with the Soviet Rezident, Ovenden says that Sutch “had been naïve” (p.53) and goes on to spin the suggestion that Sutch’s meetings with Razgovorov could not have been clandestine because Sutch noted them in his diary and met Razgovorov in the street and out in the open. (I wonder, wouldn’t they have been more conspicuous if they had met in a pub or café?)

It is in his second chapter on Sutch that Ovenden is at pains to nail in his argument that Sutch was merely “naïve” in his actions. He goes on to discuss Sutch’s mental deterioration and lack of judgement in his later years. He surmises that Sutch might have had some sort of breakdown (not that Ovenden uses that word) when he discovered, late in life, that his sister was a lesbian; and not only that, but that she had had an affair with a woman with whom Bill Sutch himself had had an affair. (Discreetly, but nevertheless perceptibly, Ovenden suggests that Sutch was a philanderer).

The third chapter on Sutch is about his trial in which, following the advice of his defence team, Sutch declined to take the stand, which was his right. He therefore never faced a searching cross-examination on his actions. In this third chapter, Ovenden shows what a good debater he could be – but if a debater is in a tight corner, a handy skill is to deflect attention away from the matter on hand. Like an octopus squirting its ink, Ovenden deflects attention away from the material facts of the Sutch case by rhetorical trickery. First (pp.68-70) he launches into a tirade on how spy services achieved nothing during the Cold War (and therefore, presumably, even if Sutch did “spy” in any way, it didn’t really matter). Then (pp.74-77) he tells us how unreliable the Mitrokhin archives are, and of dubious provenance, in order to dismiss a negative piece of evidence about Sutch. He moves on (pp.77-81) to telling us once again how unreliable all information given by spies is. Finally (p.83) he presumes to psychoanalyse those who saw Sutch and his activities in a negative way. He asserts “the reasons for Bill’s value to a certain kind of opinion as ‘spy’ seem to me psychological. Here he can serve as a relief valve for that sense of semi-educated bourgeois propriety that, stuffed with rectitude and right thinking, impervious to the nuance and ambiguity of others’ circumstances, fuels its daily life with the stale fodder of received opinion.” So please note, people are obviously not up to Ovenden’s high standards if they think there was something at least very fishy in Sutch’s (repeated) meetings with a KGB man. Such people are merely “semi-educated” and have “bourgeois” propriety and thrive on “received opinion”… so let us ignore the hard facts of the case.

All of this, I believe, is what experienced debaters call “poisoning the well”. Without actually addressing the matter on hand, you set up a barricade of assumptions and innuendo to create a prejudice against any contrary evidence or views.

Yet in considering this there is a major factor which I neither deny nor belittle. Keith Ovenden is, after all, married to Bill Sutch’s daughter, and I am sure that having the Sutch trial raked over again and again must be distressing for the couple. Says Ovenden: “No one has suffered more from this than Helen, my wife of all these years, who knew of her father’s love and has responded to it with poised and eloquent loyalty throughout her life” (p.87) It is both understandable and commendable that Ovenden stands by his wife and is attentive to her feelings. But understandable feelings do not get us any nearer to the truth of the Sutch case.

In her biography of Shirley, Sarah Gaitanos notes that Bill Sutch’s papers have been promised to, and are embargoed by, Sutch’s designated biographer Rosslyn Noonan. Perhaps one day Noonan will produce a book about Bill Sutch which plausibly exonerates him of all charges. Meanwhile, Keith Ovenden’s Bill & Shirley – a memoir is not a book that achieves this goal.

Or maybe I’m only saying that because I’m semi-educated, bourgeois and filled with received opinion.

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.