My family and other monsters

David Sexton

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ANGUS WILSON

Seeker, L12.95

Anita Brookner once explained that she began writing fiction in order 'to control rather than be controlled, to ordain rather than be ordained, and to relegate rather than be relegated.' Sir Angus Wil- son also began writing relatively late in life on the sidelines of a scholarly career. On the evidence of these stories he had a similar motive; he wanted to place, if not put down, his enemies.

But Wilson's stories do not try to achieve this by contrasting a central character with everyone else. His method is rather, with- out self-revelation, to nab specimens of the opposition and put them on show. His Collected Stories is a compendium of mons- ters, an exhibition, a menagerie.

In the first, 'Fresh Air Fiend', Mrs Searle is dealing with the herbaceous bor- der after rain. It is the more ostentatious flowers, such as the top-heavy oriental poppy, that she sees to have fared worst as she does the rounds, wielding alternately the secateurs and the sticks and bast.

It was at once one of the shames and one of the privileges of gardening, she thought, that one was put in this godlike position of judgment, deciding upon what should live and what should be cast into outer darkness, delivering moral judgments and analogies. It was only by a careful compensation, an act of retribution, such as preserving the poppies she had condemned, that she could avoid too great an arrogance. She fingered the velvety leaves of the agrostemma sensuously, there were so few flowers of exactly that shade of crimson . . .

So Mrs Searle in her garden; so Sir Angus in his fiction. It is this rich apprecia- tion of grotesque detail that animates his writing and saves it from being simply destructive. His people, however horrible, remain living beings. He is a collector, not a killer. This new omnibus brings together The Wrong Set (1949), Such Darl- ing Dodos (1950) and A Bit Off the Map (1957), adding to them only one uncol- lected story, a rather thin fable from 1980. Wilson started as a short-story writer partly for practical reasons; he wrote the first two collections, one story per weekend, while working for the British Museum. By 1957 he had not only become a fulltime author but had three novels behind him. It shows — several of the stories in A Bit Off the Map are really novellas. But the earlier books contain that rare thing: short stories that do not want to be anything else. They are exceptionally well-turned, always read- able and amusing, freely indulging Wil- son's gift for reproducing the awful things people say and specifying the appalling things they do.

He is good on bad food, clothes, furni- ture, on ageing, on genteel poverty — all observed with painful precision, marked down bit by bit.

Her muscular, almost masculine arms and legs seemed to emerge uneasily from the cosy chintz-covered chair, her broad, thick- fingered hands moved cumbrously among the Venetian glass swans and crocheted silk table mats,

runs one characteristically off-putting sent- ence. Another: 'She selected three brussels sprouts and, cutting them very exactly into four parts each, chewed them very careful- ly with her front teeth.'

Sometimes he does lapse into cheaper, broader gibes: `. . . not that she any longer really noticed his infidelities, her mind was too intent upon the cultivation of a Knightsbridge exterior with a Kensington purse. . .'. Hardly necessary, since his account of time's injuries is so relentless: `His smile, the very centre of his charm, had grown too mechanical, gum recession was giving him an equine look.'

The only thing that makes this at all tolerable is that the stories do work as stories; this is more than a treasury of bitching. Wilson is expert on a particular kind of family nightmare, the way ties are never loosened, dependencies never out- grown at any age. His stories typically move to expose such a situation laid down in the past. At worst nothing seems to come between being one's parents' child and death, between perpetual bondage and final isolation. What for most people is the great intervening story of becoming a parent oneself, does not enter into Wil- son's writing — which makes his sharp reports on ageing and its shifts all the more pointed.

In 'Mother's Sense of Fun' the matter is explicit enough.

The contest between Mrs Carrington and her son for the prize of the latter's independence was an unsatisfactory one to the spectators, for the fight was very unequal. Mrs Carring- ton, though a veteran in the ring, showed her old undiminshed energy, whilst her punch seemed to have lost nothing of its force.

So thinks her son to himself. When she dies he feels 'an ashamed relief. But he ends crying with loneliness.

He told himself that this sense of solitude would pass with time, but in his heart he knew that this was not true. He might be free in little things, but in essentials she had tied him to her and now she had left him for ever. She had had the last word in the matter as usual. 'My poor boy will be lonely,' she said. She was dead right.

In 'Mummy to the Rescue', the theme is even more cruelly put. A girl ties herself up in bed for reassurance with her 'mummy', a wollen jacket. As she wakes in a nightmare it strangles her and she dies of heart failure. The cruel twist is that at the end of the story one is told suddenly that the girl is no child but a retarded adult,

the wreck of a great Britannia blonde, thirteen stone at least — she had put on weight ever since her twenty-fifth year — the round blue eyes might have fascinated had they not stared in childish idiocy, the masses of golden hair won praise had they not sprouted in tufts on the great pink cheeks . . .

Her death has saved her from institutiona- lisation. 'It's almost as though her mother had come to help her when she was in trouble', concludes her nurse.

Though the stories repeatedly portray oppressive family situations, they are saved from being oppressive themselves by the vivacity, and sometimes malice, of their telling. This applies no less to the way Wilson records the overall dreariness of the post-war era. The only distinctly unsuc- cessful stories here are those (including the title story of A Bit Off the Map) that try to achieve a more expansive effect by mixing first person and third person narrative. Sir Angus does not have Sir Victor Pritchett's poetic gift for showing from within how different people make themselves different worlds. But when it comes to describing from without how ghastly the results can be, he has few peers.