Not minding his Fs and Qs
Antony Lambton
GENTLEMEN IN ENGLAND by A.N. Wilson
Hamish Hamilton, f9.95
Nomenclature is an art which Mr A.N. Wilson has not mastered, as in his Victo- rian pastiche he has labelled his characters with such names as Egg, Gutch and Goe which, alas, he must think comic, as in six lines he refers to Severus Egg, Old Egg and Eggy. The book's foundation is two char- acters, a Mr Waldo Chatterway and the Mr Severus Egg previously mentioned, and to each we are introduced by pages of charac- terisation which made me sit up as it became perfectly plain that neither are imaginative creations, but Waldo Chatter- way is based on a Mr F, and Severus Egg on a Mr Q, both of whom I have known for decades. Both are laboriously built up as remarkable personalities in Victorian soci- ety, but again and again we are let down with a bump as they have been sent back a hundred years by Wells's time machine and in no way resemble the generation they would have lived among. Then Wilson tries too hard, and attempting to describe Q, whose distinction as a writer of beautiful English prose he ignores, he writes: . . . held his shoulders very high, even when sitting down, as though they bore the weight of a wooden yoke such as a milk-boy might carry from his cart. Egg had the appearance of perpetually shrugging. The resolute refus- al of his shoulders to decline spoke of arrogance; or, if not arrogance, exasperation inexhaustible, at the vulgarity, the lack of humour, the absence of bon ton manifested by the times into which he survived.
This is a pretentious, heavy-handed and laborious description, ridiculously ineffec- tive when compared to Daphne Fielding's casual remark, `Q is the only man I know who leaves his coat hangers in his coats when he puts them on.'
Waldo Chatterway gets an almost bigger build up and is presented to the reader as a Victorian intellectual 'Shane'. Alas, it is plain that while Mr Wilson hero-worships him with the Tatler-gossip half of his mind, the other disapproving-curate half is censo- rious. But nevertheless there's no doubt he is giving us a picture of Mr F, a remarkable conversationalist and a writer of brilliant and cruel postcards, but again comes the bump, a vignette of conversation:
'Indeed,' confirmed the irrepressibly poly- syllabic Chatterway, `was it not I who, on their very lune de miel in Napoli, tore myself away from the dear old King and escorted them to see Vesuvius itself?'
Now this sentence could only have been spoken by a common, pretentious and vulgar snob which F is not, nor would he have referred to Bomba as 'the dear old King', and so the props of the story receive another shuddering blow, to be added to when it is apparent Wilson does not begin to understand the Victorian class structure. The story revolves around a family living in St John's Wood. The father is a professor and yet the wife at one stage writes, after reading the usual offensive card:
`If London did not say it before he wrote, they would most certainly be saying it after.'
A hundred years ago 'London' would neither have known nor cared a damn what a St John's Wood professor's wife did or said
This is stupid, but worse are the frequent interpolations of authentic backgrounds and characters, a typical example of which is a glimpse we are given of Archdeacon Gutch being shocked in the Athenaeum when he is conscious that 'from a neigh- bouring cluster of gentlemen came the roar of unrestrained gossip about George Eliot who the previous week had married a man twenty-five years her junior.' This is embarrassing enough but does not equal for awfulness the picture we are given of the author of Marius the Epicurean: 'Now, now!' Mr Pater wagged a delighted finger [how?] at Gutch and, still not releas- ing Lionel's elbow, he fixed his grey-green eyes upon the lad and said, 'He likes to miss the essence. He does it, do you not suppose, to vex us? Just a little? You and I, Mr Nettleship, sense surely the medieval atmos- phere here. Is it not a place where exotic flowers of sentiment might expand, among people of a remote and unaccustomed beau- ty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous . .
As if himself sleepwalking, Mr Pater, who had relinquished Lionel's sleeve, raised an arm in benediction and clambered into a waiting fly.
All I would say about this is that those who wish to know how Walter Pater wrote should forget every word of this paragraph and read any of his works, and those who wish to know what he was like should read Lord David Cecil's essay which clearly defines the difference between the sedate, restrained, soberly-dressed — except for a green tie — little don and the hidden man who wrote, 'All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.'
I am afraid my criticisms cannot end here, for some truly dreadful ecclesiastics keep appearing which makes me wonder if A.N. Wilson is not trying to step into the drab, flat-heeled shoes of the late Miss Pym. This is bad; suggesting that he realises he is possessed of neither original- ity nor imagination and has to borrow from the dead as well as the living. But I am being too unkind. He has observed a world to which he does not belong or understand, and which will never accept him. Therefore, while he is able to draw from life physical characteristics and
idiosyncrasies and to paint recognisable exteriors, when it comes to characterisa- tion he has nothing to contribute except what he has read, which he cannot digest, or what he thinks, and his thoughts appear to be those of a frustrated schoolmaster cleric with a desire to be considered a wag by his class. Since starting this review I have heard Mr Wilson is in the habit of wearing clerical purple socks. If he thinks of writing another book resembling Gentlemen in England, he would be wise to take them off his feet, put them on his hands, think hard, take them off and put them over his head.
Previous page
