The Heroism of Ordinary Life

Like many 15-year-olds I dreamt of understanding myself better. I knew my background was ‘bourgeois’ and thought I was probably gay. Did this mean that I ‘fitted in’? Or not? My English master lent me a story by Angus Wilson called ‘Fresh Air Fiend’, and this encouraged me to read Wilson’s landmark collections The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950). I felt attracted by his mind: he seemed to have the social world thoroughly mapped and to be writing simultaneously with an insider’s confidence and an outsider’s sharp insights. There was a certain bitterness in these stories that both attracted and disturbed me.

Wilson’s novels, by contrast, deal with the courage needed for the simple day-to-day task of living. He started writing after a wartime breakdown brought on by the strain of working at Bletchley Park, and his best novels concern people whose lives also collapse so that they have to re-invent themselves. This ordinary courage he exemplified himself, as a writer. Angus’s sympathetic ability to inhabit female characters was impressive. Tolstoy notably succeeded with Anna Karenina – but how many other male novelists really manage it? The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) is a moving account of the life of Meg Eliot after her husband is suddenly gunned down in an Asian airport. ‘Mrs Eliot, c’est moi,’ Angus would announce to friends, as Flaubert also said of Emma Bovary. Into her he put his own strengths and weaknesses, a depressive with a strong sense of literary tradition and a sense of humour. Meg’s marriage had been sexually happy and yet – she now, after Bill’s death, begins to understand – in need of repair; and she comes to see how life had gone sour on him so that, unhappy and unfulfilled, he gambled much of their money away. For her part Meg comes down in the world and so learns how she has used her class and sexuality to get her own way in life. Wilson’s novels have a panoramic social sweep that reminds one of Dickens, whom he admired and of whom he wrote an excellent study – as he did of Zola and Kipling. Yet like all his best work, Mrs Eliot concerns the need to embrace aloneness within this populated social world. Meg Eliot’s brother, David, whose life-partner also dies, provides a passive and nostalgic model of bereavement which Meg rejects. The ending is very moving, with David awaiting Meg’s return, while she in Hong Kong is increasingly sure that this would be the wrong choice for her, and strikes out instead for a new life. Nowadays many creative writers are attached to British universities. Angus Wilson was the first. He had had a rackety childhood, attended Westminster School, read History at Merton College, Oxford, and worked for many years in the British Museum Reading Room before making the break and going freelance. Rose Tremain and I – and surely many others – went to the new-ish Department of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia because Angus was teaching there, for one day a week. His seminars were refreshingly free from lit-crit. cant, and his breadth of interest was remarkable. He was a generous friend and took all his students out for lunch, either solo or in pairs, which no other don did. Of course he was also ‘researching the young’ for his fiction – the young people in the final section of No Laughing Matter (1967) are recognizable as ‘my’ generation at UEA. For so compulsive a talker Angus listened attentively, and I was startled to hear my grandmother speaking through Lady Mosson in his last novel, Setting the World on Fire (1980). Angus admitted as much to me himself. Every year Angus gave a famous party at his Suffolk home, Felsham Woodside. White posts marked the entrance through a field along a lime-tree avenue leading to the two tied cottages ‘knocked’ into one, hidden in ancient coppiced woodland. Out of this woodland Angus and his partner Tony Garrett – with whom he lived for forty-five years – had created a legendary and magical garden, the cottage walls laden with climbing roses and clematis. Here you might meet Robert Carrier or Christina Foyle or Rosamond Lehmann: there seemed nobody who did not know Angus, or wish to. During the year when I went up to UEA he published Late Call (1964), one of his best novels. Set during the Macmillan ‘You never had it so good’ years of post-war affluence, it has a working-class heroine called Sylvia Calvert – based partly on Tony’s mother – who feels beached and pointless after she retires from managing a seaside hotel and moves to live with her priggish schoolmaster son Harold on a New Town estate. Describing the inner journey of this simple woman while neither patronizing nor sentimentalizing her must have posed challenges, but Angus succeeded magnificently. Harold is a control-freak, and his three children who suffer his manipulations are wonderfully drawn. His daughter Judy escapes into snobbery, Mark into teenage self-consciousness, while Ray, who is gay, gets away to London. Most of Angus’s novels have at least one gay character for whom he makes no special pleading, locating them believably within a bigger world. This was brave in its time. Late Call is a moving book, funny and compelling. In 1975 Dennis Potter adapted it for TV, with Dandy Nichols playing Sylvia. It was wonderfully done – simultaneously comic and deeply embarrassing. I remember finding Potter’s version of the tensions of family life in Late Call so painful that I once had to leave the room. After I graduated I spent a night at Felsham Woodside most years. Angus was an ideal uncle-figure, offering life-advice rarely, and then always with great accuracy and lightness of touch. He was also a performer, an accomplished mimic with a vast repertoire of voices and personae into which he would disappear for minutes at a time. It was only after I had known him for many years that I wondered what private urge underlay his need to keep us all so extravagantly amused, often exhausting himself in the process. Angus’s career is sobering to contemplate. When he started writing just after the war his short stories were greeted with delight and Evelyn Waugh hailed him as a successor. By the 1970s he was President of the Royal Society of Literature and reviewing for the Observer, and in 1980 he was knighted. Then both his reputation and sales of his novels plummeted, and his last years were marked by depression, perhaps despair. To escape Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, where he felt the arts no longer mattered, he and Tony moved to a flat in St Rémy in France. But he soon fell ill and into confusion, and in 1989 they moved back to Suffolk where he died in 1991. Angus Wilson was a good man who wrote well about the heroism of ordinary life. When, in May 2008, writers were asked who they would like to see back in print, it was fiction by Angus Wilson that was nominated by Margaret Drabble, P. D. James and Susan Hill. Surely, one day, his work will come back into favour.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Peter J. Conradi 2011