Backlisted - Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

John and Andy are joined by writer, dandy and erstwhile musician Dickon Edwards to discuss Hemlock and After, Angus Wilson's debut novel, originally published in 1952. Wilson was considered one of the preeminent writers of his days but both his books and reputation have fallen into neglect - we consider why this happened and also what his work offers the contemporary reader. Also discussed in this episode are Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey ("her early funny one").Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)4'28 - Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger7'43 - Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen19'11 - Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books. You join us on a sunny June day in the early 1950s. Unremarkable English village just inside the commuter belt at a gathering full of wealthy professionals, the kind who change into tweed at weekends, and older villagers who tut quietly to themselves,

as the village's new and somewhat controversial Writers' Centre is about to be opened. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today is Dickon Edwards. Hello, Dickon Edwards. Hello. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for coming in.

Dickon is a London-based writer, dandy, occasional DJ and erstwhile musician. In the 1990s and 2000s, he toured and released albums with the bands Orlando and Fosca. He has kept an online diary, the diary at the centre of the earth, since 1997. And in 2017, it was recognised as the longest running of its kind by the Centre for Life Writing Research at King's College London. Well done. Do you call it a blog or do you prefer not to call it a blog? I think a blog is interactive.

It predates blogs. In fact, the word blog was coined after I started the diary. It's amazing. Yeah. And what's changed, if you can say, it's a silly question really, but when you started doing it,

presumably nobody else was... No, I had to write it in raw HTML code I had to learn how to write it with all the tags and so on in 1997 You've never written it on a handwritten diary in a sort of old school I do that as well I do a handwritten diary from which I then do the

more public extracts We published Sally Bailey who's been a guest on the podcast a wonderful book called the private life of the diary which is i've read it actually yeah it's so interesting and i'm glad you said that about blogs the diary i think is a bit more shaped isn't it i was inspired by public diaries i just love diaries as a form anyway from you know from jill orton to alan bennett to Virginia Woolf to Samuel Pepys. Also, blogs have risen and fallen.

Yeah, I reckon. They have. And you're still here. Well, they called Twitter microblogging when it started. I'd forgotten that. Remember that? Microblogging. They called it many things when it started.

They called it many things. Since 2011, Dickon has moved into academia, acquiring a BA in English literature, an MA in contemporary literature and culture, and winning the prize for the best student on both courses. Yeah. You swat. He is currently balancing freelance art journalism with researching for a PhD at Birkbeck University of London,

and his PhD topic is Ronald Furbank and the legacy of camp modernism. Marvellous. I'm sure Furbank's going legacy of camp modernism. Marvellous. I'm sure Furbank's going to come up in the discussion. One would hope. The book that Dickon is here to talk about is Hemlock and After, the first novel by Angus Wilson, published by Sackler and Warburg originally in 1952. It's funny doing Angus Wilson on Batlisted.

I'm sure when we first sat down, you thought about Backlisted. Right at the beginning. It's on my list. Angus Wilson would have been one of the names on the list. It's surprising that it took so long. Right up there with William Golding's The Inheritance, which we still not managed to find anyone to. And Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor.

Anyway. You have mentioned a story by Angus Wilson before in one of your Christmas editions of Backlisted. We did. Christmas Day at the Workhouse, which is set, though nobody would have known this, or few people would have realised this at the time, is set

at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, where Wilson worked. And we'll talk about that when we get onto it. But that is a magnificent story, Christmas Day at the Workhouse. I think I said on the episode, I read it and then I read it again because like the best of Wilson's short stories, the punches never land where you think they're

going to land. Do you know what I mean? So the first time you read it, you're kind of mapping out the terrain and then the second time you read it, I think you're enjoying the terrain. Anyway, we'll come on to that. John, before we move to Angus Wilson, what have you been reading this week? Well, one of the things I'm trying to do this year in my relentless quest for self-improvement is to read more books in translation. It's my own personal post-Brexit, pre-Brexit, during Brexit, if Brexit ever happens, even if it doesn't happen. The engagement with literatures from other countries is something I feel we should be doing more of generally because there's some amazing, and they don't, as we know,

tend to get translated. And if they do get translated, they don't tend to get the coverage. So I'm going to try through the year to keep a pile of books in translation. The book I wanted to talk about what is a book in translation, it's a book called Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Legere. It's the winner of the 2016 Scott Moncrief Prize. It's published by one of the most, I think, interesting and original independent publishers in the UK, Les Fugitives, which is essentially a one-woman publishing operation. Cécile Menon, who is one of the translators of the book, Suite for Barbara Loden, I'm talking about. But Les Fugitif published only from French and almost entirely women. This book is a curious, very French, one-off, I guess, kind of prose meditation on the need to create.ara loden was an american actress who uh was married for a while to

elia kazan classic kind of uh hollywood background she she started as a sort of a chorus girl she then became an actress and then in 1970 she made directed and wrote a film called wonder which has become a kind of a cult American underground film. It was never really released properly at the time. She died tragically at the age of 46, 47 in 1978. But she starred in the film Wanda. And this book started with Nathalie Béger being charged to write a short entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopedia.

And she starts and she becomes completely obsessed with. So what happens is a sort of Seyboldian, Parekhian journey of her attempting to write this short paragraph about Barbara Loden, becoming obsessed and traveling to America and going to all the original locations for the film. She has a meditation on her own relationship with her mother. It's, I think, a brilliant short book. It's a meditation on women. The film was hated by feminists at the time. It's about women and creativity and authenticity. It's wonderfully well written and brilliantly translated. That's won a prize, that book, hasn't it?

It's won the Scott Moncrief Prize prize but it also won a prize in france prix de livre inter 2012 voted by readers across france and she is impossibly french in that she's a novelist but she's also a curator and she's created two shows at the pompadour center one on roland bart and the other one on samuel beckett ah very good and one on jerry lewis that won the scott moncrief uh prize which was of course one of the judges for this year's Scott Moncrief prize. One of the people who awarded the prize to Sweet for Barbara Loden

was our guest last time, Katerian Patterson. Ah, great. So, if you don't believe John, believe Ian. Andy, what have you been reading? What have I been reading this week? I've been reading, I don't know if you've heard of her, it's a writer called Jane Austen.

Ah, yes. She was the Jilly Cooper of her day, was she not? She was the Jilly Cooper of her day. She was known only as a lady, though. A lady, yeah. It's the fourth of the ladies' books that I've read over the years. I've read Emma. The Bath Bonkbuster, isn't it? I've read Emma, years. I've read Emma. The Bath Bonk Buster, isn't it?

I've read Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. And I've written about Jane Austen. And I've said in my writing about Jane Austen, I don't really, I'm not mad about Jane Austen, but whenever I mention this, I usually get in trouble and people get cross with me. Whenever I mention this, I usually get in trouble and people get cross with me. I once had a very well-respected publisher.

I had an interview in a trade magazine in which I said, oh, well, I said something flippant about pride and prejudice along the lines of if anybody said what they meant in pride and prejudice, then the whole book would be over by page three. And I met this. The same could be said for normal people. Indeed. Well, I met this respectful publisher at a party and she said to me, I shall never forgive you for what you said about Pride and Prejudice. And that has 25 years on proved to be the case, as far as I know. Anyway, so I've read Northanger Abbey. Gothic?

Well, it's a parody of the gothic novel and in jane austen's work it's almost but not quite seen as juvenilia and it's seen as not being as sophisticated as the later novels yeah now i have a view on that, which is that it's very funny. It's far and away the funniest of the novels by Jane Austen that I've read. And as ever, as you will know, regular listeners will know, I have a chip on my shoulder and a bee in my bonnet about the way the literary world devalues writing that is actually funny as opposed to quote-unquote wickedly amusing, i.e. not funny. And Austen falls exactly into this category where there is a sense that the

broader, and let's be honest, we're not talking broad here, the broader humour of Northanger Abbey somehow disqualifies it from being taken as seriously as persuasion. And there is, I can see that argument, but at the same time, I can also see an institutional dislike of prose that makes people laugh. It's one of the reasons I always defend Pickwick, which gets the same kind of slightly faint praiseaint praise. Faint praise. But actually, to make people laugh with words is almost the hardest thing of all. Now, normally, I would read a bit of the featured book, but I don't think anybody really wants to hear me read Jane Austen. And also, I probably can't do justice to it. But what I have got is just a paragraph from an essay called Conflicts in Jane Austen's Novels by the writer Angus Wilson.

that he was, was a bibliophile, tremendously well-read, a lecturer, wrote, published books on Zola, on Dickens, and Kipling as well. So very much an expert view. And I think the text of this essay was originally a lecture. He's just been talking about how Jane Austen is seen by, in his words, he starts with Virginia Woolf, and then he moves on to Anglicans, materialists, Marxists, vitalists, quietists, and sceptics. And then he talks about Austen's reputation in the period that he was writing. I read this earlier and just thought, well, this is as true today as it was 50 years ago. So, Angus Wilson on Jane Austen. Ever since Victorian critics, rightly impressed by her comic genius, murmured Shakespearean comic characterisation with the same breath that they treated of her limited range, a curious dual process has gone on of proclaiming aloud Jane Austen's small world and at the same

time nudging her into the ranks of the very few gracedest masters of the novel. The motives for such promotion by stealth are very clear. Her extraordinary intelligence appeals to the many critics for whom intelligence is the first necessity of greatness. Her undoubted inner warmth compels admiration because of the rare sincerity with which its limits are announced. The pioneer complexity of her artistry demands recognition from every discerning reader. Above all, the pioneer complexity of her irony demands tribute from the vast army who now judge the novel by Jamesian canons, Henry James, a tribute given with an added piquant, rebellious flavour, because the master himself failed to rise above the less discerning standards of his time

in his judgment of her. Let me add to all these respectable reasons that her wonderful entertainment is a lawful feast today for those who are under vows to deny themselves such fare. In short, Jane Austen's charm, always so potent among certain middle-brow readers, operates quite as effectively among kindred spirits of higher intellectual pretensions. And to this must be added a natural desire among Anglo-Saxon critics to advance the international claims of a first-class English writer who largely resists translation, and a wish, in my opinion, less respectable, to canonise the foundress of the religion of the English novel, meaning by that religion a regard for all the qualities which the English novel does not share with the great novels

of other countries. Now that is a spectacular summation of critical perspectives on Jane Austen. And it also takes into account the thing that I like best about Northanger Abbey, as I tend to like most about all my favourite books. Northanger Abbey is a book about books and a book about reading. I mean, if this is a thing that Austen does in her other novels, Pride and Prejudice is a book about books and reading. But Northanger Abbey, in terms of its engagement with the reader consistently saying to the reader you're only reading a novel we've all read novels but reading novels is not perhaps a great activity or is it in there's a fabulous phrase in here um no novel reader uh which was later picked up by Colin McInnes my great favorite Colin McInnes, my great favourite Colin McInnes, for a long essay that he wrote about the attractions and problems of reading novels in the 1950s.

Dickon, I know you have something to say about Northanger Abbey. Well, one of the most quoted lines about reading fiction is in Northanger Abbey. It's only a novel. quoted lines about reading fiction is in Northanger Abbey. It's only a novel. And she says, oh, it's a little something. She goes into what's only, I haven't got the quote in front of me. Maybe I was hoping you were going to read it. I have got it. But it is really well known as in a great defence of reading novels. And it comes from Northanger Abbey. And it is probably, I would say, I think actually, if you look on goodreads.com under Jane Austen quotes, it is the number one quote from Jane Austen.

It's from Northanger Abbey. It's in chapter five, listeners. Right. And it sort of starts, if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt and shut themselves up to read novels together. Right. Yes, novels. Yes. to read novels together.

Right. Yes, novels. Yes. And off she goes for a full two pages in a kind of perfectly poised fulmination about how novels are as worthy as any other form of literature. And it's about the idea of novels being bad for you. And so she's defending it.

This is the Jane Austen who hasn't written Pride and Prejudice yet. I know, I love that. And the whole anonymousness of her during her lifetime is fascinating. I have told this story. I don't know whether I've told it on the podcast before, but one of my early breakthroughs for the idea of crowdfunding is that the only place in print that Jane Austen's name appears is Miss J. Austen as one of the subscribers listed in the front of a Fanny Burney novel. I can't remember which one it is now, but she was in an early –

there's something about that idea right at the beginning of – or near the beginning of the novel that crowdfunding was always being – was still being used as a legitimate way of enabling writers to write the books they wanted to read. Anyway, we've done that now. We've done Jane Austen on Backlisted. Well, do you prefer it to the other ones? Do I prefer it?

Do I? Well, yes. No Jane Austen fan will say that's the best Jane Austen novel. Well, I'm not a Jane Austen fan, so I float free. Because she hasn't quite found her voice yet. It's early Janeane austen when she's just defending the art of reading novels and joking about gothic novels but it's also it's written by a 25 year old yeah you know it's it's incredibly what's the word i want nimble that's

what i kept thinking when i was reading it there's such brilliant switchbacks in tone and in subject and also i've used this phrase actually um i think with lawrence in the lawrence episode or such brilliant switchbacks in tone and in subject. And also, you used this phrase, actually, I think with Lawrence, in the Lawrence episode, and probably the third episode in our own music, it's true, there's a lovely sense of somebody making it up as they go along. You know, the novel has not been overplanned. The novel is sit down, what shall I write about today? What's going to make me laugh?

What's going to make my readers laugh? That's what I thought I was going to say. You talk about the idea of books which make you laugh now you know those not those kind of spin-off novels which came out about 10 years ago like pride and prejudice and zombies yes and sense and sensibilities and werewolves or whatever yes well she beat them to it with north hang abbey yeah this is jane austen doing the gothic novel before she became jane austen yeah before she wrote pride and Prejudice and Sensibility, she did this novel which takes her out of the gothic genre like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

She had that idea before everyone else had that idea. So if you think you don't know Jane Austen or you don't find her funny enough, you should read Northang Abbey. And whatever, you know, making a perhaps tenuous link with Jilly Cooper. I mean, you know, Jilly Cooper's unimaginable

without jane austen i think just because she invented that she invented that how is it going to turn out how is this character going to end up with that character i mean i am a jane austen fan and i do i particularly like mansfield park fanny price who is not everybody's favorite jane austen character but i i just think she created something that was unimprovable, actually, in the end. I don't think anybody's done it better than she's done it. Whether you want to call them romances or whatever you want to call them, just call them novels, that's what she calls them.

Jane Austen requires no special pleading from us. She does. But Northanger Abbey probably does. And I am saying, if you are slightly Austen-phobic, then Northanger Abbey is a great way in. I think that's what Backbey is a great way in. I agree. That's what Backlisted is for, is brilliant. Now, here are our sponsors telling you what to do.

Let's move on to the main event. Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson. This was Angus Wilson's first novel. Published 1952 or 3? 52. 52. 52 and set in 51. And set in 51. Written in 51.

Written in four weeks outside. I think like NaNoWriMo. I'm going, before I ask Dick the magic question that we always ask, I would like to just say, before we started recording, I was saying to everybody that we prepared for the D.H. Lawrence episode and that was a piece of work, and we prepared for the Ginny Cooper episode and that was a very enjoyable piece of work. I could prepare for this episode forever absolutely i would the joy of of digging into

angus wilson's life and work for for me personally has been one of the most eye-opening things because of wilson's reputation compared with wilson's work is one of so it's wide apart as you could possibly possibly be, I think. And we will spend quite a bit of time talking about that gap. I went into reading this book feeling that it was obscure but maybe interesting. I came out of reading and thinking about it convinced that it is the missing link in the British novel of the 1950s and it's a disgrace

a disgrace that this book isn't much better known for reasons that we'll talk about I mean you know the the interesting thing is it was it was certainly seen as that at the time John Osborne said you know there'd been this 10 years where the English had basically gone to sleep and this book came out and was a scandal. But it was also a brilliant epoch-making novel for all kinds of reasons. We should just say that Angus Wilson is very significant in the joint life of myself and my colleague John Mitchinson

because we think the first time we ever met was at an event at Waterstones in Earls Court in 1992 to mark the republication by Penguin of Angus Wilson's back catalogue. Because I was the events coordinator at that shop and John was the marketing director of Waterstones at that point. And what was remarkable for me for the event is that our guest speaker

was Tim Waterstone, which as the founder and at that point, boss of Waterstones. So it was quite an anxious evening. Just to give you the full focus pull on that, Tim introduced me to Angus Wilson. He is the least read of, I think, genuinely great 20th century novelists that I know. And Tim Waterstone came to me and said have you read any Angus Wilson he said I love Angus Wilson we must do something about how could we do something about Angus Wilson I mean we must be able to help Angus he was I think if he wasn't maybe he'd just died he had just died yeah so anyway how do you get a writer like Angus Wilson to be read so we came up with the idea of Waterstones each month'd choose a book called the Waterstones Book of the Month.

And rather perversely, we didn't choose because we thought we couldn't choose a backlist book, but we chose Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters, which is slightly in the Angus Wilson sort of vein of kind of big novels taking on history, taking on social morals, taking in with a huge range of characters. But I discovered through Tim,

I discovered Angus Wilson and read in a short order, Anglo-Saxon attitudes, late call. I mean, I think my favorite is No Laughing Matter, but I didn't read Hemlock and After. So this has been the most brilliant re-engagement with Angus Wilson, who I still have to say is he's still not properly in print. I'm sorry to say that, Faber-Fiennes, but he isn't.

There are many, many writers from the 1950s who are less good, I think, who are. So, Dickens, when did you first read Hemlock and After or Angus Wilson? I was in a library. I just enrolled as a mature student at Birkbeck University of London, and they have a wonderful library there, and they have a very good range of all the novels that you might expect to study at a degree level. And I think I was near the war section.

I was looking at all the evelyn wars and all the wolf as well all the virginia wolves and quite close to both authors was angus wilson and i i was intrigued and he did seem to be one of those names that seems to fill up library shelves and angus Wilson books furnish secondhand bookshops. They really do. And I pulled out As If By Magic, actually. One of the late problematic books. And I dipped into it and I thought, this is interesting. And I thought, I don't know anything about this writer.

And then I started doing my research into camp and camp literature. I realized that Hemlock and after the debut novel is in the timeline of books which mention the word camp before susan susan sontag did in 1964 and i'm fascinated with the word camp and so i um i thought i'd read hemlock and after and then i also like alan hollinghurst ah yeah and i. And I love the idea of writing about gay lives in a commercial literary novel aimed at everyone. So gay lives for everyone, basically, not gay books for gay people. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

Well, that's one of the things. We will introduce the, we'll tell people what the novel is about in a moment. I learned a bit more about Angus Borson and that led me on to Hemlock. So by the time I got into studying camp and gay literature, and I also did an MA thesis on Alan Hollinghurst, that then led me to Angus Borson. But mainly to ask, why is he missing? Why is he left out? We will explore the reasons for that, I think. We've got several clips of Angus Wilson talking, and John and I were communicating earlier. And I'm already rubbing my hands in glee,

because I know what's coming up. The first one is a clip, I think he's talking in the 1960s here, talking about Hemlock and After, and he's talking about how he came to write the book. I was still at the British Museum, and I was by this time in the reading room, which I liked very much. I was the deputy there, and I dealt with all the scholars and their work and so on.

And I wanted to write a novel. The theme was in my mind greatly. Like all my novels, it was about somebody going back and wondering why their life had gone wrong. And I found that I had to write that in four weeks of holiday. We had four weeks holiday, and I wrote it in four weeks. And although I think it's not a bad novel, it's rather truncated. It's rather, you know, it's like a baby that isn't quite properly born. And I felt something was going wrong. And I knew also that my work in the museum would grow as I was getting more senior there. And I really thought I've got to choose. It was a hard job because I

had no pension, you see. If you're a civil servant, there's no contribution, so you get no pension. And I was then 45, I suppose, I think so, 1955. No, I was 43. And I resigned. And I had 300 pounds in the world. I often wonder how I dared to do it. I went down to a cottage in the country. I'd never lived like that. We had outside loo and everything. However, luckily it was a very hot summer and I wrote out of doors

and I always try to write out of doors. I like writing out of doors. I don't feel claustrophobic. That's why I write abroad a lot now. I go in the winter and go to hot places and write. And I wanted also to write a play. It was eventually put on the stage called the Mulberry Bush and it was this I saw would take me a long time and what happened was that the play was a

failure but I then wrote a novel called Anglo-Saxon Attitudes at the same time which was a great success so it was all right it turned out Cinderella story you know I mean I know that's a long clip but it's so wonderful and it's not sped up no no no he that's a long clip, but it's so wonderful. And it's not sped up. No, no, no. That's how you talk. I thought I was talking fast. High pitch, very fast, very short, immensely extraordinary hair, everybody says, you know, from his early...

Mine's going in that way, actually. Yeah, that's just me. I mean, we'll talk about heaven and the plot but just to say the life his life is it's um beautifully written life by margaret drab biography which is it seems insanely large rachel said to me this morning my god how why is it so big i said because i mean he lived. The man had an extraordinary life, I think. Codebreaker? Yes.

That alone is interesting. Well, let's just give you the positive biography. Yeah. Angus Wilson was born in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1913. Part of his childhood was spent in South Africa, and he was then educated at his brother's school in Sussex, Westminster School, and he went to Oxford. He joined the staff of the British Museum Library in 1937

and he rose to become superintendent of the British Museum Reading Room. When the Second World War came, he helped towards the safe storage of the British Museum treasures before serving the rest of the war in naval intelligence, which even in 1991 when this was written you couldn't say where that was bletchley park he was at bletchley park with alan turing he was a great friend of alan turing's um they didn't meet at the time because there's about 10 000 people employed by bletchley park they met afterwards to meet your friends and then and there's a ridiculous story about him at bletchley Park that he would take all his clothes off and run around the lake.

Nobody's been able to verify that. And then after the war, he has a... I mean, Bletchley Park, as I've said, we were talking about that story Christmas Day in the workhouse. It comes over as the most awful place to have to live and work. The pressure and the bitching and the... Anyway, so he has a period of depression and a near breakdown after the end of the Second World War

and it's in this period that he starts to write short stories. The first collection of which, The Wrong Set, is published in 1949. What is the fascinating thing about The Wrong Set? There are two fascinating things about it. Do you know what they are? Go on. It's discovered by Sonia orwell oh yes he gives it to sir economy yes the second thing is he writes the eight stories i think there's eight stories eight or nine stories

eight or nine weekends yeah emerges fully for voices fully formed short stories don't sell except these yeah They become a best-selling volume of short stories. It was. And really, amazing reviews. Even the people like C.P. Snow who didn't like it. Have you got that wonderful description?

C.P. Snow. Part bizarre, part macabre, part savage, part maudlin, there is nothing much like it upon the contemporary scene. It is rather as though a man of acute sensibility felt left out of the human party and was surveying it, half enviously, half contemptuously, from the corner of the room, determined to strip off the comfortable pretenses and show that this party is pretty horrifying after all. Sometimes the effect is too mad to be pleasant, sometimes most moving. No one could deny

Mr. Wilson's gift. Now the wonderful thing about the stories are he then writes a second volume of short stories called Such Darling Dodos and then as you've just heard him talking about he writes Hemlock and After. And Hemlock and After is recognizably an expansion on the type of characters you meet in the short stories as then in turn anglo-saxon attitudes his next novel is an expansion it seems to me on headlock and after yeah the title story of such darling dodos is almost you almost feel it's in embryo the the novels what you feel is into this tiny story there's a whole novel totally realized characters generational conflict very very funny but also very vicious well this is the thing dick and i want to ask you before we move on

to talking specifically about him looking after what you are the characteristics of the wilson voice that expresses itself in those in these early stories and novels. What are the things that would strike the first-time reader, do you think? It's a certain attention to Englishness and what makes the English character particularly unique and a daring observational level of wanting to get under the skin of these people that don't like being analysed at all. People who don't like being analysed are being analysed. But also, when we talk about post-war, in terms of Englishness, we have the idea of the middle

classes who basically voted to have less privileges because of the first Labour government, which came in at the end of the war, the first full Labour government ever to have a full term, which were voted for a lot of middle-class liberals, who were voting a lot of pre-war privileges out of their own lives. Isn't that amazing? A kind of big sacrifice. Major. You can't underestimate this. I mean, a tectonic shift, isn't there, in the middle of the 20th century?

So it's not just middle-class Englishness, it's liberal, slightly lefty liberal, let's face it, middle-classness. But just that terrible sense of trying to do the right thing, but whilst also realising that the old world has definitely gone for good. I think the voice that you get here with Wilson is also, as John says, I think the word I used to you when we were talking about it was nasty. He is a humanist writer, but he is very able to look hard at the man's inhumanity to everyone. I think in particular, we can jump ahead a little bit to his pupil, Ian McEwan, who was his own, he was a direct pupil of his creative writing option. We have to be careful because Ian McEwan has spent a lot of his life explaining that

he wasn't on a creative writing course. He was on a creative writing option on the MA English course at UEA in about 1970. And he was the only pupil which took this option. And since then, that was the very first degree-level creative writing work, you know, ever. And Ian McEwan's early short stories are very similar to the short stories of Angus Wilson in that kind of vicious, macabre, bleak, slightly disturbing look at English life. Raspberry Jam, which is the most famous story in the wrong set.

It could be an Ian McEwan story, I think. Here's a clip of Wilson talking about the sources of inspiration and what he felt he was writing about. Where do you get your stimulus as a writer from? Well, I live in a rather remote country. I live on the edge of a wood, and there I have long periods of great solitude. But I do, in fact, teach one term a year at the university where I meet a lot of young people. And in the periods when I'm not at home, I come to London or I go abroad a great deal. I've just been two months in Venice. And there I bombard

myself with people and always new kinds of people. I passionately enjoy being plunged into a totally new world and involving myself. Architecture at the moment is my great thing. I can't stop wanting to talk to architects and read about architecture. So my life is divided between absolute quiet and the total noise of a cocktail party. And my attempt in my books is somehow to find the meeting point between the sense that everybody has of their total alienation and solitariness, and their other sense that they have of being nobody in the room of thousands of somebodies. That's one of the greatest descriptions of somebody's own work I've ever heard. The gap between how you think of yourself and how you think of everybody else.

That's wonderful. I mean, we should say he's a bloody marvellous critic as much as anything. And he's so good about his own work. Well, here we go. Go for the blurb. We need to know about Hemlock and After. I'm going to read you the blurb from a 1971 republication of Hemlock and After. And we've all checked attribution. We've all thought, can we attribute

this to Wilson himself? And we all feel that this has certain hallmarks of a blurb written by the author. So this will describe the milieu of the book for you. Famous and deservedly successful, so appeared Bernard Sands in the eyes of English society. Novelist, publicist, supporter of the underdog, liberal humanist and democrat, Sands' career had been a splendid one and now in the maturity of his years he had crowned it by arranging that Varden Hall, a fine 18th century estate in the home counties, should be financed from government sources as a home for young writers. should be financed from government sources as a home for young writers. But Bernard is plagued not only by a neurasthenic wife and a fundamental contradiction in his own character, but by enemies and fake friends in many quarters. There is Mrs. Curry,

a fat and voluptuous lady whom he has deprived of Varden Hall, which she had wanted to buy and use for her particular and peculiar business purposes. There is Sherman Winter, about whom you wish to speak, I believe, the theatrical producer, waspishly jealous of Bernard's ability to win the affection of the young. The local Varden society too is ambivalent in its views of Bernard. His spinster sister, Isabel, blames him for not sharing her interest in the Communist Party, while his son, a snobbish young barrister, and daughter-in-law, Sonia, are annoyed by his failure to follow the right, that is, the Tory line. In his portraits of these and the other subsidiary characters, Mr Wilson excels. He displays them

with compassion, certainly, but with quite uncompromising frankness. They brilliantly illustrate the foibles and hypocrisies of middle-class society and form the perfect background to the novel's main theme. What is that theme? It is the contradiction between the need for authority and the distaste for power, which is here exemplified in the conflicts and uncertainties which beset Bernard Sands and bring about his death. And as a corollary to this, it is the choice between fighting cruelty and falsehood by passive resistance, the way chosen by Sands himself, or by direct action like his widow. This is the vital dilemma. I know, right? There's the spoiler there. This is the vital dilemma which Mr. Wilson states in a novel whose surface brilliance never obscures its power

and originality. Now I know that's not the most blockbusterish of descriptions. It is a really original book. He said about it, which I love, what I like about the book is that it has this strange sort of primitivism at the same time of sophistication and that I was too naive to be able to marry them. And so it makes a very odd book, a book in which all sorts of different modes are present on the same page. Mrs. Curry, who is totally gothic, Bernard Sands, who could come out of Gide, Ella Sands, whose extreme and sometimes unexplicable neuroticism and withdrawal might suggest Dostoevsky, and so on. And it is true. This is hilarious considering his position at UEA.

He describes it as a book to end all writers schools. All writers schools. And I'd rather love it for that reason. Dickham, could you read us a little bit of your choosing? Well, I'm fascinated with the idea of writing about gay lives in the past, which was alone incredibly daring. I think we can't underestimate this, that in 1951, it was basically illegal to be gay still. So writing a mainstream novel, he was openly gay himself, Angus Wilson, and he was quite... There was a photograph, a famous photograph in Vogue, wasn't there, where he was presented as kind of a man living with his longtime lover, Tony Garrett, and they were drinking a gin and tonic. Tony had to resign. In the end, he resigned from his job in the probation service because of village gossip, which is village gossip being a huge theme in this book.

And so he portrays gay men at a time when it's still illegal to be a gay man, essentially, which I think is an amazing thing about this book. He then goes on to tell you how some gay men are different to others, and some are more openly camp, and some are more respectable and amusing, is in inverted commas, and others are vicious spivs. I love the 1950s slang, spivs, butterfly spivs. Sherman Winter, already the name is already probably a giveaway. Sherman Winter, already the name is already probably a giveaway. He is one of the more spiv-based gay men in it. But then Wilson kind of gives you an idea of why people might be like this. He says, Sherman Winter had fallen into a conventional caricatured pansy manner when he was quite young and finding it convenient had never bothered to get out of it.

He had more to do with his energies than to use them up on external personality. That's what I love. The manner, too, fitted well with his neither striking nor unpleasant pink face, his receding fair hair and willowy shape, which all passed unnoticed in the world he frequented. People judged him to have the accepted hard surface and the accepted golden, if limitedly golden, heart of his type. This too was convenient. So what Wilson is doing there is telling us about how stereotypes happen in human behaviour and why

they appeal to some people as a kind of defensive habit and a shield. And as he says, he had more to do with his energies than to use them up on external personality. It's hard work not being camp for some people. So this is fascinating. He's not just saying he is a camp gay man, but this is why he might be the way he is. Crucial plot point in the novel, Bernard Sands is setting up this writer's retreat. And he's, you know, he's an establishment figure, and he's pulled this writer's retreat and he's you know he's an establishment figure and he's pulled all the strings and he's managed to see off the the National Trust who but he's being watched all the time by this Mrs Currie who's got to be one of the great characters in 20th century she's fiction he based her on a on a real person oh dear he's a real person he says imagine it's

a starting point for Hemlock a neighbor just down the road and little Haddam who said to him Oh dear. and he has a very nice young boy, Eric, who he's very fond of and he also has Terence who's a sort of slightly older, I think he's only 28, but slightly older, more worldly wise. Former boyfriend. Former boyfriend. And the crucial moment is he watches a scene in Leicester Square of a man being picked up for importuning. Yes.

And again, I mean, he's so brave to do this at the time, not only the scene. This is not kind of high-minded. This is down on the street getting done for importuning. And he finds the violence of it quite arousing. And this shocks him deeply about who he is. He's a man who's got to, he's been a successful writer, but he acknowledges that his wife

has had a fairly major mental breakdown. I have to say the portrait of her inner life, I think is one of the best. It's quite brilliant, isn't it? Strongest thing. Yes, I absolutely agree. As a presentation of depression. It's really a nuanced and original, I think, as well.

Really, really, and, you know, but that moment. Based on his own breakdown, I believe. That's right. But that moment is where the book changes. And somehow out of that darkness, he constructs the scene of the opening of the writer's centre. Yes. Well, I would like to talk a bit more about this idea

of Wilson writing about the lives of gay people in this era and also Wilson writing about women in this era. We have another clip of Wilson talking here about those very things. What I did, and I'm proud of this, I'm glad to have the opportunity to say it, I was able to be the first person, I think, to treat homosexual people as though they were part of the rest of the community. Up to that time, there had been what you might call, you know, novels, which everyone said, ah, that's about them. But this was my hero, and he was just one of the figures with all the other people, and this was about homosexuality.

And I think it was a very important moment. It was well-received, although there were some, you know, but it was well-received, and I think it was good because it meant that people suddenly saw, yes, of course, that's like Jimmy, isn't it? Or that's like Bobby, you know? Do you think you removed some of the taboos with Hemlock and After? I hope so.

I very much hope so. I didn't return to it as the sole theme because I think it's a bit boring, this pushing and pushing. But it occurs in most of my novels and because I had had experience of it as a young man in the days when this was... Well, it was against the law when I wrote that novel, indeed, and until much later.

I don't awfully like, inverted commas, gay literature. I think this is a pity. I don't like any kind of literature which is marked off as something quite separate. I think myself that I have brought a kind of perception about women which is rare from a man writer. Now, I think that is a very interesting... That interview is done in the 1980s. So he's talking about a novel that he had written 30 years previously. Opinion is divided about Wilson's attitude to women. Ella's mental state in this novel, as you were both saying, is truly groundbreaking.

But I wonder, Dickon, he said there he doesn't like gay novels, gay writing, but he was also a tremendous defender of certain nascent gay institutions, isn't he? In 1985, after he'd been knighted as, and he was the first openly gay man to receive a knighthood, which is a fact

which I think more people need to know about. I didn't know that. And it's a key to his importance full stop, I think. But in 1985, he,

the same government, the Thatcher government, their customs and exercise squad raided the gay bookshop Gays the Word in London and seized a huge

amount of books. And there was a quite well-publicized case at the time. Basically, the shop was nearly closed down. It was threatened with obscenity. And in 1985, and of course, you've got AIDS coming out here as well. So you've got a kind of beginning of the AIDS paranoia in Britain. And Angus Wilson wrote this angry statement about the raid where he said that it is intolerable that officials should have such wide-ranging powers of indiscriminate seizure of books. It is even more intolerable that those powers should be exercised. So even though he says he doesn't write gay books, he nevertheless was very much an advocate of gay rights. He was an early person to get involved with the campaign for homosexual equality in the 50s. And it didn't actually have an effect until 1967.

We should also say gay is the word, of course. And it's still there. It's still just celebrated 40 years. 40 years. Absolutely brilliant. And you were saying, if you go in, that statement of Wilson's in their defence. They have it on a bit of paper and they will show it to you. Which is marvellous.

Because they're really proud. He did a decent thing, like an Angus Wilson character. The short stories are full of, as you were identifying them, different types of gay man. Yes, yes. Some of whom, this is one of the things I find so fascinating, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, the novel that follows Hemlock and after, has a variety of almost at the Julian and Sandy end of portraits of gay men,

which had a heterosexual writer produce them. You might suspect malice. Well, can I read another part? might suspect malice. Well, can I read another part? Yes. There's a party scene, a kind of literary salon or just a kind of London party scene hosted by a woman called Evelyn,

who is a kind of 1920s survivor. And Bernard Sands, the main character in Hemlock and After, goes to this party. And he goes there with his old boyfriend, Terence. And he talks to the people of his own age and slightly older who are from the 1920s and 1930s who are kind of an Oscar Wilde style, feet aesthetic style of campness. But then, as Terence says,

he slips away to join in what Wilson describes as the languorous but staccato gossip of the Golden Spiv group. These are the younger gay guys. Like many of the things which teased Terence in Bernard's behaviour, he attributed his refusal to ignore the camp end of the room to sentimentalism. He supposed that since Bernard knew many of these beautiful young men

to depend upon their wits and their social success to maintain themselves, he thought himself obliged to lend them his support as a brother homosexual. Having himself at last, after great struggle, almost succeeded in leaving the golden spiv world behind, Terence did not realise that it still possessed great attractions for so comparative a newcomer as Bernard. That's a reference to the fact that Bernard has sort of come out, as it were, quite late in life. He's had a wife and children, and now he's had quite openly gay affairs. So you have this party where Bernard Sands is moving, physically moving, between these two groups of gay men, older and younger. The Spivs are the younger ones, and they're more overtly, viciously bitchy in camp. And the older ones are a bit more Verbankian, a bit more Wildean, a bit more effete and amusing in inverted commas.

That's his phrase. And he describes it wonderfully. He says that Evelyn, who's the hostess, completely so she assumed or often actually was in total ignorance of this gap. It grew yearly. And with each year, the queer, more louche, more cosmopolitan element drove out, like the tough tree rats whose grace disguises them as grey squirrels, the older, more effete, more established, more indigenous fauna. If it lasted a few years longer, thought Bernard,

Terence would be scuttling over the side with the rest of the old order. He himself would remain to make havoc with the destructive invaders. It was was after all only a question of which kind of rat he preferred to be, he decided bitterly. That's so good. That's the point.

The change in the book is when Burden has this kind of moment. That's before he has a nervous breakdown, by the way. He's kind of skating between all these different worlds. There's also a tremendous set piece in Henry Carver. Oh, I mean, on Petronius, I think. As a writer, you've got the sense that once he launches

into this enormous, ghastly village fate stroke launch event for the hall, a writer who has been holding been holding themselves ready to then he has one job he has one job yeah and it's so good it is so funny and it's so dark and it's it's it's just as a piece of bravura writing that that i mean the village speech bernard has to what they what does it say a clear humor, high-minded speech from Bernard would have saved the occasion. Well, reader, that isn't what they get. There is an interesting contrast in this novel

between how Wilson appears to feel about the ghastly Mrs. Currie and, on the other hand, how he feels about a character that it would be much harder to treat in modern fiction, which is the paedophile character. I mean, do you think that's one of the reasons why the book is, it's not ignored, ignored isn't right, but there is an element around Hubert, around that character, is not ignored. Ignored isn't right. But there is an element around Hubert,

around that character, which I think probably would strike the modern eye as being quite... It's compassionate. It's compassionate. I mean, I think the only character I feel in this book that doesn't get much compassion is Sonia. The wife of his son. The wife of his son yeah

but the whole book is about bernard having fucked up his children yeah and his guilt about having done that and having poor relationship with his children and through almost all his fiction his genius is for i mean when i say we're talking about late call which is about a a woman-class woman who ran a hotel, and she's given the inner life, rather like Fultner, of a huge Shakespearean kind of range of emotion. He's pretty brilliant at inhabiting different consciousnesses and make them. And I think Hubert Rose, the paedophile in this book,

is, yeah, there's a lot of compassion. The last thing I think we should talk about is um why is he not why is he not read but but before we get on to that we should also just say that that along with malcolm bradbury angus wilson had a huge effect on the cultural life of this country on and on the on the development of fiction in this country by being one of the founders as you said of the creative writing option option it was an option i think it became a university of east anglia that's what in mckeown always likes to remind people and mckeown published a novel in 2012 called sweet tooth which is a quite peculiar

combination of a spy novel and a literary memoir yeah and he's in it isn't he really yeah yeah and i'm just going to read you a tiny bit because angus Wilson makes a cameo in Ian McEwan's novel. So the year is 1972. The heroine, Serena Frome, is being briefed about setting up a scheme for MI5. And she suggests, wouldn't it be possible to simply make some friendly recommendations to the, I don't know, you know, the government department that hands out money to artists? The Arts Council? Nothing let out a pantomime shout of a bitter laugh.

Everyone else was grinning. My dear girl, I envy your your innocence But you're right, it should have been possible It's a novelist in charge of the literature section Angus Wilson Know of him? On paper, just the sort we could have worked with Member of the Athenaeum Naval attaché in the war Worked on secret stuff in the famous Hut 8

On the, well, I'm not allowed to say I took him to lunch Then saw him a week later in his office. I started to explain what I wanted. Do you know, Miss Frome, he all but threw me out of a third floor window. One moment he was behind his desk. Nice white linen suit, lavender bow tie. I should have worn my white linen suit.

I've got two. Clever jokes. The next, his face was puce and he had hold of my lapels and was pushing me out of his office. What he said, I can't repeat in front of the lady and campers a tent peg. God knows how they let him over naval codes in 42. I mean, so that's McEwan writing a burlesque of what Wilson was like,

who he knew. But he also, McEwan tells a brilliant story about handing over an early short story to his tutor, Angus Wilson, and Angus Wilson handing it back and saying, well, I think the story is rather good, but I'm afraid it's rather homophobic. And McEwan says, it had never occurred to me that it was homophobic, but I saw that Angus was right.

And in that gesture, he changed my writing, but also how I saw the world. And by example, he re-educated me about the role of gay people with whom I had had very little contact up to that point. Wilson does 10 years at UEA. Do you know who replaces him directly? Angela Carter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's handing the baton on, even though as writers they're different.

He was very generous. He reviewed Angela Carter's, one of her novels, very generously. Why, why, why is there a problem with Angus Wilson? Why is he not? Why is, for the 50s novelists who we admire and love, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark. All of them. Iris Murdoch. All of them. Well, we'll come on to it. Oh, we've got one more clip.

This is Wilson talking to Joan Bakewell in the late 1960s. You teach great figures of our literature, Dickens and Kipling, as you say, Virginia Woolf. Does posterity matter to you? Oh, yes, I must say it does. I would love to have large sales, but I don't. But I've always been interested in the novel and I teach the novel. So I see the novel as I was trained as a historian. I see it as a kind of historical succession, that something for me represents our culture. And I'd love to think that i would be a name on a in a page at any rate in the literary history of the future and that there would be people who enjoyed some of my novels that's very poignant i think we can have a great theory about

why he's not he accepted the honors when he should have turned them down he accepted the cbe and the knighthood because he was a gay campaigner and he paid the price for this by being uncool because to accept these things is to be uncool he was never cool like Joe Orton and William Burroughs those are cool authors gay authors because they're outlaw gays he was never an outlaw gay he was an establishment he was an establishment gay and I think that's kind of what scuppered him he also has theortune, he has a twin misfortune. It's perceived that his 60s and 70s novels take on board a rather self-conscious experimentalism.

Oh, he's trying too hard. Jonathan Rabin says he catches from UEA. So that's the first thing. The second thing is he has the misfortune to lose his fashionability in the era of Martin Amis, Barnes, McEwan to some extent, Rushdie, where the venerated older writers are the Americans and Nabokov. It's funny, for all his campaigning, literal campaigning for homosexual equality, he was seen to be part of the establishment and part of the old guard. Isn't that funny? He kind of opened the way for the angry young men, for social realist novels of the 1960s. At the end of the 60s, I think he writes

too, I think Late Call, which is sort of mid 60s and No Laughing Matter, they're masterpieces. And you name the numbers of books that have been set in new towns english novels that have been set in new towns which is where late call is he's always pushing himself no laughing matter it's an amazing novel of the 20th century it goes from 1919 to 1967 there's the sense already though he lives quite a long time he lives to watch his own downfall he's famously thin-skinned. There are two things that stand out. You know, when he's the Booker judge in 75,

where he basically gives a really ill-judged speech where he... Like his own character. Yeah, he prepares a speech in which he attacks the NW3 middle-brand novel, speaks of the dislike of the smart icy winds around Hampstead Pond and the tedious subject matter of rows looming between estranged NW parents, both working in the media or in advertising. So he goes off on one. And then there's an obvious froideur in the room. And he's told by various friends that some people haven't liked the speech, including Claire

Tomlin, who it's not clear whether she'd like the speech or not, but he loses his rag and shouts at her. And he gets the reputation for being difficult and thin-skinned. So he becomes almost a sort of self-parody of the older, forgotten, thin-skinned writer. The thing that I can't understand, various people have tried to republish him and it's never quite stuck. John, you were talking about the 60s. I think the short stories of this era and Hemlock and after have so many things that we associate with the literature

that was to follow 10, 15 years later. But Wilson is the wrong class and sexuality by the early 1960s to fit in with that gang it's room at the top it's very working class and hetero it's very it's very male very quite macho and finding wilson now and reading and he's not a woman so he doesn't get the virago bonus yeah yeah true dick and i again thank you for choosing the book because for me this really feels like an important book to try and put in front of people again there are problems with it i think it is to use wilson's which is congested there's too much trying to get out of quite a short book but at the same time it has so many things and certainly we've concentrated on it in this episode for a good reason, but certainly the depiction of the very brave, accurate and funny depictions of different types of gay life in these stories and in these novels need to be revisited, in my opinion.

Comic set pieces and a wonderful ending, a Dickensian ending, as he said, where he sorts all the pieces on the board out. And Dickon, why do you think we need to read Angus Wilson now? He is the missing piece in the story of gay lives in Britain, which was focused on a couple of years ago with the anniversary of decriminalisation, 2017, 1967. If you read Lucky Jim or any other 1950s novel and you think, well, where are the gay people? Here they are, hemlock and after.

And if you want to go and see, want to just pay your respects, go to the British Library today in Humanities 1 in the reading room. You don't even have to have a pass. Just opposite the security desk, there's a painting of Angus Wilson. Hundreds of people walk past all the time.

I wonder if they know who he is. read read read angus wilson i feel as passionate as i did 30 years ago when tim waterstone first gave me late call but that's all we've got time for huge thanks to dickon to our super smart producer nicky birch and to our civilized distingue even sponsor unbound you can download all 84 Backlisted episodes, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading on our website, backlisted.fm. And of course, you can still contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. And if you feel so moved, don't be shy.

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