Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  He had been a fishmonger, too, in the 1930s, though he knew nothing about selling fish, buying a fish-shop in Ely as a parliamentary candidate there to keep its manager, another under-cover communist and his election agent, from being moved by his firm to the Midlands. Routine bored him utterly, whether in work, friendship or love; and he sought the condiment of danger in everything he said and did. His role-model was a cab-driver he had once fished with whose previous job had been in a circus, riding a motor-bike on the Wall of Death, until he started to have black-outs and had to give it up. ‘You can’t have black-outs on the Wall of Death: besides, I had a lioness in the sidecar.’ Hugh wanted a lioness in the sidecar in everything he did. Hence his sorrow. His gaiety masked melancholy, and it was a melancholy born of unfulfilment, and of an unfulfilment born of tedium. He would always rather start than finish. His notable Wordsworth and the Worth of Words lay unpublished at his death, though a publisher had accepted it; and it did not appear till two years later in 1986, when a colleague edited it from his papers. As always he had lost interest and moved on.

  Melancholy cannot be healed, only lightened; and his gaiety, in the end, had something heroic about it. In the choices a lifetime offers he had ultimately left himself nowhere to turn, except to the consolations of talk – anecdotage at its richest, in full flood. I never dared to tell him, in our quarter-century of friendship, that he reminded me of a Swiss tale about another great clown who veiled himself in laughter, since he would have seen the point all too quickly and all too clearly. Someone once visited a doctor to find a cure for depression. ‘Do something amusing,’ said the doctor, ‘like going to the circus – the great clown Grock is in town.’ The patient looked infinitely sad: ‘But you see, doctor, I am Grock.

  24. Angus Wilson

  In 1952, when we first met, he was a lively, youngish sort of middle-aged man, and the gap of years survived, as such things do, but never seemed to matter. At all events he went on for years being lively and youngish. As his novels demonstrate, Angus Wilson was above everything a funny man, and he had a habit of turning any encounter, even a chance meeting on a train, into a party.

  Anecdotes were his forte, and they poured out of him. Once, when he was in charge of the reading room of the British Museum in Bloomsbury, he noticed a reader at the end of a long desk opening an orange, and sent an assistant to remind him that eating was not allowed in the library. ‘The reader is not eating, sir,’ he was told. ‘He is squeezing the juice on the pages.’

  In those days he was slim and vital, until a fondness for food enlarged his girth. ‘I know I shouldn’t,’ he would say, accepting a second helping. But all that went with an inborn gusto and in no way abated it. His gestures were detailed and precise. Christopher Isherwood in his diary (February 1956) called him ‘prissy and high-voiced like a silver-haired lady,’ which is a striking way of putting it, though it leaves out the fun. Prissy old ladies do not want you to guffaw, and he did. Isherwood also called him sympathetic and sincere, which is right. But he loved above all to play the clown.

  ____

  Born in 1913 on the south coast of England of a Scottish family, he had been a schoolboy at Westminster after a South African childhood and had studied medieval history in the 1930s at Oxford with Sir Maurice Powicke. His erudition was serious, so that he never needed to train as a librarian. He could find you a book, or an essay in a book, if you were lost. Colin Wilson – no relation – has told how, when he was sleeping rough in London and writing a bestseller on Jack the Ripper called The Outsider (1956), Angus showed him where to find an essay on William Blake by T.S. Eliot explaining why any writer, even Blake, needs a borrowed mythology to give structure and purpose to his ideas. As his studies of Dickens and Kipling show, he knew his way around books.

  But what you noticed about him was less his erudition than his strictly practical sense of what a life of authorship really means. He had no time for the romance of creativity. ‘I am wondering if I should give up my job at the British Museum,’ he told me at our first meeting. He was finishing his big comic novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and considering whether its sales would justify sacrificing his civil service pension-rights. I still do not know why he would think my opinion of any value, but I asked how long he would have to stay to qualify for a pension. ‘Eighteen more years,’ he replied. He was not trying to be funny, for once, but I still felt like laughing. In fact he was right to be concerned. His last days in a nursing home, down to his death in 1991, were plagued by poverty, since his novels sold respectably rather than well and declined in his last years. But he had long since taken the plunge to be a professional writer and had never wanted to be anything else. It sustained his middle years in some affluence, with an apartment in London, a cottage in Suffolk and winters in warm places, but in the end it was not enough.

  His practical sense could shock student audiences, who are inclined to see creativity as a sainted thing set beyond and above the vulgar needs of a material world. He loved writing novels, he would tell them, because a novelist is in control, and he might have relished Vladimir Nabokov’s remark that characters are like galley slaves, with the novelist standing on a raised deck holding a whip. He greatly preferred them to plays, and was offended when a stage director told him to remove a grim passage about the holocaust from The Mulberry Tree. ‘People don’t like that sort of thing, you know.’ No publisher, I remember Angus saying, would dare to order a novelist about like that.

  His concern for money was ultimately intelligible. Alain Robbe-Grillet once made him realise how lucky he was to write in English by quoting how tiny his own sales were in the French-speaking world. ‘I wouldn’t set pen to paper for that,’ said Angus. His financial caution, he once explained to me, was a reaction against his parents. His mother had trifled away a small fortune at bridge and his father a larger one at poker, and he had no intention of managing his affairs with such folly. So his business sense was acquired early, and it may help to explain his boundless admiration for Charles Dickens. Dickens, too, had been a good businessman, in reaction to the folly of his parents: his mother had been Mrs Nickleby, his father Mr Micawber, Dickens visiting him as a boy in a debtors’ prison across the river in London. It was a humiliation Angus had no wish, however remotely, to re-enact. Writing is a business, if you are trying to live on it, so a writer has to be a businessman. In fact he needs to be more. Businessmen have secretaries, after all, and there can be few if any aspiring authors who do.

  His student audiences could look shocked or uncomfortable as he spoke of contracts and agents’ percentages. He also loved to speak of the immediate practicalities of a writer’s daily existence: how he should ideally have one home in town and another in the country, as in his affluent years he did; how helpful it could be to share a home with someone who could type; how you should write as early in the day as possible; how you should travel a lot but not live abroad and lose contact with your own social world. Writing, as he knew, was mostly revision, and his own drafts were a mass of afterthoughts, rather like Proust’s, with long interpolations in vast shapeless balloons that his companion Tony Garrett, who typed, had to decipher from a hand that was never easy and learn how to insert. He was worldly-wise, too, in a wider sense, and would advise beginners to take an office job when young, as he had once done in the civil service, and learn by experience how easy it is to take orders and give them. ‘If you don’t,’ he would say, ‘you will spend the rest of your life thinking that hierarchy is difficult, and in fact it isn’t. It is easy.’ Then you quit when you can.

  ____

  His grand design as an author was to revive the classic tradition of English fiction that had once stretched imposingly from Samuel Richardson to Charles Dickens. Late in his life, in 1983, an American academic, Kerry McSweeney, collected the liveliest of his essays as Diversity and Depth in Fiction, so his critical mind is easily consulted; and like the essays of his older contemporary V.S. Pritchett it disp
lays the practical sense of a working novelist. The classic tradition of fiction had been demolished in its critical reputation, in his own lifetime, as he feared, by James Joyce’s word games and Virginia Woolf’s radical shift of emphasis from narrative pace to the nuances of a cultivated inner life. The experiment had proved near-suicidal, and it had threatened to reduce the audience for fiction to an elite to an extent that imperilled the livelihood of honest fiction-mongers. Experimental can so easily be a euphemism for unreadable. Such fiction seldom, if ever, tells you anything. It weakens or annuls the supreme function of fiction, which is to inform, and in an indispensable way, about the social world you live in. As Kingsley Amis used to say, experiments are always about technique and never about substance: in other words, they are often the last resort of those who have nothing to say.

  They are also, unless in the hands of a rare master, boring, and Angus Wilson sought a return to the big baggy monsters of English fiction, as Henry James once called them, before critics and novelists around the turn of the century had fatally concluded that the novel is less an entertainment than a work of art. Graham Greene’s distinction in his own fiction between novels and entertainments suggests, after all, a fatal disjunction. Why should a great novel, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, not be entertaining? Why should fiction only evolve one way?

  If English fiction is a contest between Middlemarch and maverick, as a clever reviewer once remarked, all that amounted to a reversion to Middlemarch – to George Eliot, and still more to Dickens. When Angus was finishing Anglo-Saxon Attitudes he was emphatic his model was Dickens, with lots of highly individuated and eccentric characters and masses of incident. The public wanted it, to his joy, and the book survives as a long divertissement with a serious point to make about the links between academic and private life. It is the perfect book for a convalescence, and anyone who thinks that a condescending remark should try to write one.

  Baggy novels about modern social life began in the eighteenth century, and Angus Wilson’s preference for Richardson over Fielding is perhaps, on reflection, unsurprising. Fielding was the first English novelist, after all, to write fully shaped fiction in classically imposed forms, as in ancient epic, and Angus may have felt that shapelessness had been underrated for too long. The roominess of Richardson’s Clarissa appealed to him, its riot of happenstance. Besides, he found Fielding too commonsensical. Common sense, though amiable, is something he had enough of, and what he loved above all in books and in people was exuberance and ebullience, if only as a warning. Anyone, he probably felt, can be sensible. Oddly enough his own writing is said to have begun, long before I met him, through neurosis. While working as a young man during the war at Bletchley Park, in the highly secret code-breaking section of British intelligence, he would hurl inkpots at his colleagues, throw off his clothes and run naked around the lake. His fits of insanity, however, did not impress all his colleagues. ‘Angus isn’t really mad,’ one of them said. ‘He threw inkpots at all the right people.’ At all events an analyst suggested he write down his dreams as a form of therapy, and the art of composing narratives so intrigued him that he decided to go on with it. His first novel was Hemlock and After, in 1952. Three years later he resigned from the British Museum.

  By the 1960s he was a famous man, spending his winters in warm and sunny places like Sri Lanka and California and much spoken of by those who had never set eyes on him. I remember once, on a San Francisco bus, overhearing two strangers mention he was spending the winter there, as if dropping the name of a celebrity. He loved lecturing, too, which he performed energetically, to the delight of large audiences around the world, and enjoyed no less the convivial dinners that followed. Whatever unhappiness he suffered was largely invisible. He was a social being, adored parties and delighted in honours. On being asked in 1980 if he would accept a knighthood while he happened to be on a visit to Canada, he complied with alacrity, and made no pretence of mock-modesty as he did so. If it was fun to be Angus Wilson, it was even more fun, he no doubt felt, to be Sir Angus Wilson.

  His sense of the comic extended into what might once have been the most secret places of his private life. ‘I have decided to come out,’ he once told me over a Bloomsbury lunch, having lived with the same companion for some twenty-five years. So he accepted the presidency of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, addressing them at their conference in Sheffield in 1975 on a theme about which he felt deeply – the virtues of monogamy. A young man deeply moved by his address spoke nervously to him afterwards. ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Wilson – quite like a page from history. Mind you, you must have suffered many anxious moments during the trial of Oscar Wilde.’

  His best anecdotes, like this one, usually had a chaser. A group of cleaning women were overheard discussing the event in the entrance to Sheffield City Hall. ‘Who are all these people?’ ‘They’re heterosexuals, and there’s a lot of it about nowadays.’

  He despised poseurs, in the solemn sense, though he enjoyed and encouraged showing off, in himself and others, provided it was well done. His novels excel in the waspishly comic. In the 1960s some American critics decided he was a profound thinker, and he took perceptible pleasure in his new campus reputation. British critical opinion, by contrast, almost always saw him as a social satirist, and I remember one London critic cheerfully quoting Mae West: ‘When I’m good I’m very, very good, and when I’m bad I’m better.’ It is not a judgement he would have resented, though he took some delight in his transatlantic reputation for profundity. He adored naughtiness still more. Grand theories, he very likely felt, can easily lead to grand crimes, and he would quote with derision, and impeccable mimicry, C. P. Snow discussing the future with his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson in their communist days. ‘In a country like England,’ Snow would say in his slow, heavy voice, ‘it might be possible to have the revolution without violence.’ ‘No, no, Charles,’ Pamela would reply briskly, ‘you’re quite wrong – there are about ten thousand people whose heads will simply have to be chopped off.’ Angus would luxuriate in pronouncing the last word ‘awf’ to emphasise Pamela’s insistent social pretensions. He had no patience with gin-and-tonic socialists, in any case, describing himself cheerfully as right-wing Labour, and not much with conservatism; a brother who emigrated to Portugal after the war to escape high taxes always seemed to him to be living in cloud-cuckoo-land. He was commonsensical. Perhaps he found the common sense of Fielding’s novels too obvious to be interesting.

  ____

  His greatest achievements were as a teacher. He was a superb and lastingly influential instructor in creative writing, after 1962, at the new University of East Anglia in Norwich, and novelists like Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain have often acknowledged their debt. In fact there are those who believe that his influence as a teacher will outlive his fame as a novelist, and time will show.

  A certain reserve surrounds creative writing courses in British universities, unlike those in America. They were, until recently, uncommon. But the first professor of English at Norwich, Ian Watt, was an Englishman who had taught at the University of California; he noticed that Angus was living within reach and asked him to teach. The effects were sensational, and it is appropriate that his critical essays, Diversity and Depth in Fiction, should be dedicated to Ian Watt, who ‘first invited me to teach literature.’ Rose Tremain became his student there in 1964, the year he published Late Call, his fifth novel and his best. During his last, long illness in the 1980s she wrote lovingly of his ‘acts of generosity, both spiritual and material,’ and delighted in his openness of spirit. He loved to tell students of his South African childhood. In those flourishing years he would hold an annual champagne party in his much-loved Suffolk garden, with strawberries, wearing a white summer suit and a purple bow tie. Inebriation was not disallowed, and he would chat amiably about J. B. Priestley, an old enemy, and Evelyn Waugh, who had been unfailingly kind to him but brutal and alarming in his behaviour to others.

 
His teaching style was original, but then there are few ground-rules to courses in creative writing, and his example inspired. Aspiring young novelists were urged to read and reread classic English fiction and talk about the characters in Jane Austen or Dickens as if they lived next door: ‘rather as if we were a jovial family gathered for a wake,’ as Rose Tremain put it. You speculated about what sort of neighbours they would be and whether Steerforth in David Copperfield would make much of a lover. He once remarked of Joe Gargery’s ‘What larks, eh Pip?’ in Great Expectations: ‘I know of no more convincing statement of simple happiness, simple pleasure, than this.’

  ____

  Classic fiction was the bedrock of his critical mind. He reread Dickens, Jane Austen and George Eliot every two or three years, and among his contemporaries E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh and Saul Bellow. Above all other novelists he admired Dickens and Dostoyevsky for mixing the comic with the black, for showing the ultimate profundity of the absurd. He loved the tragi-comic mix, which takes the argument back to dreams. Any dream is likely to be both, but Angus believed that dreams infect our lives, and often to our hurt. The point took hold. In Restoration Rose Tremain wrote a novel about a physician in the reign of Charles II called Merivel who falls into a trance of self-delusion, giving up medicine for buffoonery, until the king rescues him by sending medical instruments with the message ‘Merivel, do not sleep.’ Fiction too can help you to wake up and induce you to shed your illusions.

  His talent for creative encouragement started early, during his days as a librarian. Colin Wilson has told how it was Angus who read an early draft of Ritual in the Dark – the vast, overloaded novel out of which he carved his bestseller The Outsider – and encouraged him to go on with it, though not before he had dispatched The Outsider to a publisher. By the end of his life Angus had launched more successful novelists than anyone you can easily think of: Rose Tremain, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan among them. That happened at a point when the revival of realism initiated by Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis in the England of the 1950s was taking second breath. After Angus creative writing at Norwich was guided by Malcolm Bradbury and Andrew Motion. But, most improbably, it was a middle-aged retired librarian trained in medieval research who had started it all.