BOOKS

PEN mightier than the word

Philip Hensher

ANGUS WILSON by Margaret Drabble Secker, £20, pp. 714 Academics are fond of making the claim that all writing is political in implica- tion. Not all writers, however, are political in temperament. Angus Wilson emphati- cally was, and had an inexhaustible appetite for an official and a public life. PEN — the club for poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists — chairman of the Booker panel, Public Lending Right, British Council, gay rights; Wilson was for- ever ready to go to unspeakable places for public causes, and drink endless cups of cold coffee on endless committees, and stand in the rain, as one observer said, looking rather sweet with a piece of card- board with all his demands on it.

Some writers throw themselves into public life; others can imagine nothing more frightful. Public life was fundamental to Wilson's world from the beginning. Not that he was especially public-spirited. He was a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the war, and afterwards a librarian at the British Library. He is remembered, though, as a private face in a public place; conducting endless telephone conversa- tions with his grander friends from the Reading Room, or dashing over to some nattering readers, not to silence them, but to join in the conversation. And the best of his fiction draws on the poignant situation of irreproachable public figures whose private lives rise up and threaten their equilibrium.

What was initially a fruitful subject- matter for the novelist became, in the end, a problem. From the start, Wilson liked to hang out with the great; if the index of Drabble's biography is anything to go by, his address book must have been one of the wonders of the age. But when an appetite for public causes was added to a busy social life, it clearly grew harder to find quiet in which to think and write. Many of the later novels must have been written in snatched moments; Drabble's account of how Setting the World on Fire was finished is probably typical:

On Sunday, 11 March 1979, both Angus and Tony noted in their diaries 'Novel finished.' At what time of day this completion took place is not clear: Angus had spent the Friday being interviewed by Christopher Bigsby of UEA and visiting Peter and Eve Hampshire at Stowmarket, on the Saturday he had lunched with Jorn Langberg and his friend Ivar, and on Sunday he had lunched with the Corkes.

It would be wrong to complain about the social life, and still more wrong about the public works; the writing school at UEA and Public Lending Right are very largely memorials to Wilson's efforts. Still more Angus Wilson, 1954 admirably, Wilson campaigned for the legalisation of homosexuality, and the equal treatment of homosexuals, with an openness about his personal position which might easily have put him in jail. With his partner, Tony Garrett, Wilson went some way to embarrass a hostile society into acceptance, not through dissimulation and disguise, but simply by not troubling to dis- guise what they were.

Not everyone, however, thought that all this was helping what Wilson, after all, did best. In 1979, Wilson visited Harold Acton at La Pietra at Florence. It doesn't seem to have been very enjoyable. At one point in the day Acton remarked loudly to another guest, 'That's Angus Wilson; he once wrote a novel called Anglo-Saxon Attitudes which had quite a success, but he's not done any- thing much since.'

Well, did he? There isn't going to be much disagreement about the quality of the early novels and stories. Particularly in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Wilson brought something fresh to fiction. His macabre, shabby-genteel wit occupies something of the same ground as E. M. Forster — ironi- cally, since Wilson didn't care for Forster — but rarely in fiction had people been so pointlessly, exhilaratingly, rude to one another. Nothing like the unspeakable pro- curess and blackmailer, Mrs Curry, in Hemlock and After had ever been in fiction, and in that decade or so between the end of the war and the rise of the professionally Angry, Wilson stood out as nastier, sharper and funnier than anyone else.

With hindsight, there are problems even with these books. A certain monotonous misogyny; a certain sense of duty and unreality when good characters start to speak to each other. The scene at the end of Hemlock and After between Bernard and his wife could be confidently recommended as a perfect example of a particular sort of ludicrous dialogue — 'But God help me! I cannot hurt those he loves for, although I know their motives to be wrong, I cannot fight them while I am uncertain of my own'. Try saying that with any conviction. Only Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, perhaps, among the novels, has no fault; and, for once, in the figure of Rose Lorimer — a character Drabble improbably identifies with Frances Yates — Wilson created a convincing and sympathetic female charac- ter.

There's something wrong with almost all of them, but after Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, there is no book without its very consider- able fascination. Even a chaotic mess like As If By Magic, an interminable account of a lot of frankly incredible people in flow- ered shirts wandering around the globe in search of fulfilment, has at least one glori- ously shocking scene. Few novelists could have thought up a middle-aged Dutch pederast blowing out the candles on his boyfriend's 14th birthday cake by farting at them; fewer would have had the nerve to put it between hard covers. A really com- plex and subtle piece of work like The Old Men at the Zoo, with its richly detailed tale of office bitchery and staggeringly unpleas- ant narrator, continues to vex its readers with sheer strangeness. Not a likeable novel, but, strangely, an enviable one.

But Acton's gibe has a fundamental truth to it. As time went on, and Wilson looked more and more extraordinary (a small girl once, in Sri Lanka, started screaming uncontrollably at the mere sight of him), his novels grew more and more wilful, eccentric and, often, quite baffling. Wilson's biggest and most ambitious novel, No Laughing Matter, feels much more like a triumph of conscious will and planning over Wilson's narrative ability. The six children of the family are gone into at tremendous length, but some of them are detailed rather than credible. His last novel, Setting the World on Fire, just feels like the result of research; a marvellous trick, of course, but the psychology gives the sense, just like the descriptions of architecture, that it's been got up for a specific purpose, and not truly understood or imagined. And as the novels grew less secure, and sold less and less well, the hectic official life grew. It stopped him writing; it was something which could readily be blamed for getting in the way of writing; and that, perhaps, was the point of it.

Drabble's biography is the officially sanc- tioned one, and a workmanlike effort. The events of the life are indubitably there, but there's a certain lack of life, a slight failure to communicate what Wilson was like. He comes across, often, as simply pompous, and I doubt that's the whole story. Clearly he took himself and his writing enormously seriously, and was quick to respond to slights. A bizarre story here has him walk- ing out of a PEN dinner in protest at the placement. Ironically, he was placed next to Natalia Ginzburg, one of the greatest Italian novelists. But in the light of his declining sales, and the fear of eclipse he increasingly felt, it was understandable that he took to promoting himself. Often one feels that Drabble misses a touch of irony here; friends of Wilson tell stories of his pronouncing grandly on his own genius, but, if someone from outside the literary world simply said, 'Oh, come off it,' he would almost always give way, shrug and giggle.

Drabble presents Wilson as intensely competitive, and with other writers he cer- tainly was. When not shortlisted for the Booker prize, not on a preposterous offi- cial list of the 20 best writers since the war, he took umbrage; he was too ready obses- sively to measure the success of Malcolm Bradbury or Martin Amis — who ridiculed him in Dead Babies — or his near-name- sake A. N. Wilson. But Drabble, who prob- ably saw a good deal of this side of Wilson, perhaps doesn't understand what other friends of his insist on, that outside literary society he was quite ready to be treated less respectfully. When she reports a friend of Wilson's saying to him, 'Why do we all have to get dressed up when you come to dinner, Duchess?', she hasn't quite caught the tone of barbed teasing, and can only think of it as an attack.

There is a general problem with the book, weirdly highlighted by Drabble's inability to decide whether to call herself `I', `Drabble' or 'Maggie'. Drabble knew Wilson well, and their encounters loom dis- proportionately large in the book, consider- ing what they tell us about Wilson. At one point, rather shockingly, we learn what Drabble's income was in 1976 (£12,216, if you're interested). But a large part of Wilson's life, inevitably, is something she experienced only vicariously. We are told about riotous all-male parties and occa- sional affairs, in a rather disappointingly general way; In February 1962, Angus and Tony held their most notorious party at Felsham Woodside . . . there was music and dancing in the clearing in the wild, as professors and anti- quarians and eye-surgeons .. . mingled with friends from Bury and the villages around.

Mingling? My goodness. Perhaps out of consideration to Tony Garrett, these thrilling hints of debauchery are largely passed over in favour of bickering on com- mittees. Which, presumably, is what Drab- ble does know about.

Still, Wilson's friends continue to talk about him and swap their Angus stories. Drabble's heavy volume, good on dates, guest-lists and travel arrangements, but rather anecdotally challenged, is always going to be useful. Occasionally one groans at the effortful turning of file-cards and tit- bits into a semblance of continuous prose:

On 24 April 1985 Angus spoke wittily and well as he presented prizes for a charity .. . and on 30 April Angus, along with many past dignitaries of the National Book League, appeared at a celebratory dinner . . .

It would be nice to see it supplemented soon with a volume of memoirs. While reading Drabble, I came across a story about Paul Bailey in America. This is Drabble's version:

Angus and Tony threw a drinks party for [Bailey] on 28 October, and introduced him to some not very entertaining townsfolk and students: Paul Bailey had to sing for his sup- per (which he ate, with Angus, Tony and creative writing student Charles Clayton, at the Carrousel).

I was puzzled by what Bailey did to 'sing for his supper' — juggled kippers? sang `Mad Dogs and Englishmen'? — so I rang him up. `Oh,' he said, 'I had to talk to the most unbelievable bore. Someone who was writing the Great South African Novel. Anyway, I'd been at it in a corner for an hour and a half 'before Angus swanned over and rescued me. "Sterling work," he said to me as soon as we were safe.' Some- how a tiny anecdote like this conveys Wilson's grandly giggling personality much better than the laboriously assembled details of Drabble's biography.

Writings on Walls

The ones you can read are fakes, really the genuine don't communicate, don't name; you may guess at a letter or two, but you are wrong, don't fall into self-deceiving.

Only the fakers are caught, fined, cleared off the streets with their sprays, only they fall onto high voltages, under the lasts of the late trains, the firsts of the early; `person under train' (without legs, you may shudder).

The mainline — so to say — imagemakers are otherworldy and descend in squadrons to hover before the walls, bridges, brandnew garage doors, carriage-sides, you know the places.

Floaters invisible, they keep trying — predicting, warning giving otherworld-weary directions, they hope, to us (the deluded, Suicidal, murderous illiterati).

Throughout the quiet hours they labour at their grotesqueries, their inflated, distorted, overlapping Linear Z syllabaries, duplicating, revising, updating their wasted starshine warnings that we solvent-swill, but never quite destfoy, and never understand, at great, and growing fatally, expense..

Ted Burford