‘Oh, I know all about goats,’ Sonia was saying. ‘People give them the same recommendation as the billeting officers did with evacuees – they’re no trouble. For all I know it may be true of goats. But then, like evacuees, they smell, and that’s quite enough for me.’ – Hemlock and After, 1952, Angus Wilson .
It’s Britain post-war, and the Conservatives are back in power. Who better to capture the middle-class angst and zeitgeist than that meticulous observer and dissector of manners and morality – Angus Wilson?
In Wilson’s daring (bold?) debut novel, the insufferable Sonia is married to the equally insufferable wannabe Conservative MP, James – the son of the novelist Bernard Sands. The plot centers on Sands who is undergoing a moral and psychological crisis. He learns that his own good intentions are hollow as he confronts his homosexuality and discovers his own failings as husband and humanist.
Sands has been granted the money to start a writer’s colony at Vardon Hall. (Julian and Sandy anyone? You know that Wilson would have been fluent in Polari.)
His neighbor – the simpering Mrs. Curry – also wanted the house for her own purposes. She is a procurer for pedophiles. There’s a wonderful set-piece at the official opening where everything goes wrong and the gay young things take over the top storey for an orgy. Oh! and there’s also a predatory clergyman, a pedophile architect, a failed and failing writer, a rent boy on the make, and a young man with an overbearing mother. Not to mention lots of camp chatter and theatrical and catty posers at a performance of Ibsen.
“He probably didn’t see very much of it. He’s always too busy thinking of what he’s going to say.” – the insufferable Sonia again.
Hemlock and After was written in 1951, the year when the Atlee government that created the welfare state fell to the return of the Tories. And many found it – the novel – shocking. Publication was, after all, fifteen years before the Sexual Offenses Act decriminalized male homosexuality in 1967. Some libraries refused to stock it. In America, the publisher William Morrow declined it.
John Osborne – who was soon to lob his own grenade into polite society of the 1950s with Look Back in Anger said: “The whole nation was having a little lie-down. Angus woke people up.”
Wilson has gone out of literary fashion in the past few decades. Time to do some reading and re-reading. And Margaret Drabble’s biography of Wilson is now on my must-read list.
I want to know more about his growing up in hotel rooms and boarding houses and how he fended off the school bullies at Westminster with wit and mimicry. About his feckless parents who flitted from boarding houses and hotels living above their means, and his brothers, two of whom – Dilly Boys – trolled Picadilly Circus in drag. And about his time at Bletchley Park where he translated Italian Naval codes and had a crack-up that saw him throw himself fully clothed into the lake.
But back to Hemlock which I thoroughly enjoyed as a good old-fashioned period-piece romp through middle-class sensibilities and the depravity of an English village. And the After bit? Well, Wilson ties it up all neatly with a satisfying moral ending. He called it Dickensian, and so it is.
Thanks for reminding us all of Angus Wilson, Josie. You’ve inspired me to return to him. I read all his work at university and made my poor tutor do so as well. I wonder what I’d make of it now. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes sticks in my mind the most, but my memory is hazy on them all. I too have Margret Drabble’s biography on my shelf, but haven’t read it yet. Perhaps I’ll start with that. Hemlock and After was daring, but as I recall, was off its time with that moral ending you mentioned.
One thing I remember was how he started writing quite late while he had a fulltime job. He found that he could write a short story over a weekend and did so until he hit his stride and was able to quit his job and start writing fulltime. He never looked back.
I found this in the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4848/the-art-of-fiction-no-20-angus-wilson
I never wrote anything—except for the school magazine—until November 1946. Then I wrote a short story one weekend—Raspberry Jam—and followed that up by writing a short story every weekend for 12 weeks. I was then 33. My writing started as a hobby: that seems a funny word to use—but, yes, hobby. During the War, when I was working at the Foreign Office, I had a bad nervous breakdown, and after the war I decided that simply to return to my job at the British Museum would be too depressing. Writing seemed a good way of diversifying my time. I was living in the country and commuting to London then and I could only do it on weekends. That’s why I started with short stories: this was something I could finish, realize completely, in a weekend.
Some re-reading for me needed here, I think. Margaret Drabble adored Wilson and her biography is splendid. I once thought that Wilson’s short story ‘Raspberry Jam’ was the best story I’d ever read but this was all years and years ago.
Gwen.
I’ve ordered the book!
I’ll be interested to hear what you make of it. It creaks a bit toward the end with all the deep meaningful guff about humanism etc. but still a great read.
I’m currently almost finished with “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” borrowed for free from the online library. And then I have to find a copy of Margaret Drabble’s biography.
I see you’ve hit a ‘seam’. I’ve just started Henry James’s Roderick Hudson. That’ll take a while.
Never got round to Wilson, nor felt the need to. I’ve now revised my opinion, thanks, anything that satirises the hypocrites of that truly snobby period.
Just finished “A Bit off the Map” and am now page-turning my way through “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes”. That might be a good one to try first. The Gerts wrote about it here: https://gertloveday.wordpress.com/2021/03/07/angus-wilson-anglo-saxon-attitudes/
Yes, I saw that, thanks, which was when the metaphorical tide turned in my awareness 😁
Sounds like fun! I’ll add it to my list.
Angus Wilson was an interesting character all round and one of the famous group of homosexual code breakers at Bletchley. What would we have done without them!
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Without the code-breakers the war could have been lost. Certainly prolonged.
We loved Anglo Saxon Attitudes and I have on my pile the very large biography of Angus Wilson by Margaret Drabble. Isn’t it extraordinary how he has faded from view? Such a good writer and so relevant. (Not to say funny.) I love the Ronald Searle cover image.
Currently reading “A Bit off the Map” which is brilliant and “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes ” deserves a re-read. And yes on the fading literary star. Time for a revival.