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Talking with Angus WilsonAuthor(s): Joseph KissaneSource: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 29, No. 2, Angus Wilson Issue (Summer, 1983), pp.142-150Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441092 .

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Talking with Angus Wilson

JOSEPH KISSANE

When I went to England late in December of 1982 to interview Angus Wilson, he had returned with Tony Garrett only a few weeks earlier to the cottage where they live in Suffolk, having spent the autumn term teaching in the United States at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. The week following my visit he was to go to Paris to receive an honorary degree from the Sorbonne. The day after that he flew to India to spend several weeks lecturing for the British Coun- cil. He has given lectures around the world and has been a teacher of literature and writing in both England and the United States. A friend to writers, he has been a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain and chairman of the National Book League, and a guest at interna- tional writers' conferences along with Moravia, Sartre, Mishima, and Golding. At present he is chairman of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1980, he was knighted. Sir Angus Wilson seems very much a public man. In his other life, his life as an artist, he has produced the works by which we know him: short stories, novels, travel articles, reviews, plays for the stage and for television, literary criticism and biographies of other writers. To visit with Angus Wilson is neither to feel the pressure of pending engagements nor to sense the artist's desire to be left alone. The tone of a serene and civilized life prevails in his sitting room in Suffolk, with its blazing fire and the large white Chinese characters for peace and love and luck on the red wallpaper.

An interview with Angus Wilson appears in the first series of Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, published in 1958. Since then he has been interviewed often, for he is a man who likes to talk and to whom people like to talk. Speaking of one of his characters, Meg Eliot, and in her voice, he seems to make fun of his own gregarious- ness: "I'm awfully good at parties. I mean, it's just something I have."

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Yet in Writers at Work he says, "I used to need people, but now I can be much more alone." He still says things like that and he still keeps up with a great many people. At the time of my visit, he was looking forward to a New Year's eve party and he seemed pleased to have been invited.

His pleasure in society and his pleasure in being alone ought to be more complementary than contradictory. An artist must need solitude to think over what he's seen. But the matter isn't so simple as that. In Wilson's works, there is often a conflict between public and private, the city and the country, active and passive, searching and settling. His characters' attempts to bring together the values of their personal and professional lives sometimes provide the central conflicts of the novels. In Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, for example, Gerald Middleton serves scholarship both in revealing that an archeological hoax has been perpe- trated and in taking on the presidency of the Historical Association of Medievalists. When he attempts in his own family and as its head to reveal some truths, he persuades his children of nothing except that they don't want to see him any longer.

The difficulty of living up to an active standard of values without inflicting pain on others or causing loss to oneself is a preoccupation of Wilson's and makes him wonder whether some of his characters would have been more convincing if both their private and public values had been made more explicit. Of Bernard Sands in Hemlock and After, he says:

The trouble was that there's no sign at all of his work, of his writing. Now, the trouble about David Copperfield is that he becomes a successful novelist, and there is no evidence that he's a writer. When you come to the end, he turns to Agnes and says, "Do you think I should continue to do?" and she says, "I think you do a great deal of good." And, you know, doing good is not what writing is about.

Wilson addresses the matter of the public and private in Setting the World on Fire by dividing the qualities of each between two brothers. Piers Mosson, a successful and famous play director, is contrasted with his brother, Tom, quiet, retiring, behind the scenes. In No Laughing Matter, the combined figures of Margaret Matthews, a novelist, and Marcus Matthews, art connoisseur and entrepreneur, Wilson says, rep- resent a kind of ideal.

At the end, she says, "Oh, you do nothing but fuss all the time." And he says, "And you, what you do is just sit around having inspirations." Then she goes up into the town and sees the

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crowds. "How can he talk like that. I have my inspirations in the midst of people." He goes and lies down on the beach. "She had no right to describe me as somebody who can't stop still. Look at the way I lie in the sun here and love it."

While both activity and passivity are necessary, perhaps inescapa- ble, for those who would wish to understand others, passivity is essential and must come first. Through the passive exercise of the sympathetic imagination, wondering what it is like to be someone else, one may begin to see more of the truth about another than an active judgment allows. Passive observation would seem to be Wilson's preference over imposed judgment. If he is intolerant, it is of those who judge others too quickly, on too limited a basis. He recalls Kingsley Amis's saying of the hero and heroine of Mansfield Park, "Who would wish to go to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Bertram?" The Wilso- nian reply is

Probably not I, and certainly not you, Kingsley, but the fact is that I do see what they are, and I admire them, and I don't judge characters in a book on whether I would want to go to dine with them or not.

His interest in the development of personal relationships in a more private world, away from the crowd, is evident in his stories and novels and he might, like Jane Austen, have found, as she put it, that "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on." But Wilson's continuing fear that a limited context encourages the imposing of judgments rather than the cultivation of the powers of observation is evident in what he writes about another scene in Mansfield Park. Ed- mund Bertram,

can truly, so to speak, score off Mary Crawford, because she does not know that the farmers will need their carts for harvest- ing. She is regarded from that moment as being morally defec- tive because she is ignorant of country ways. As a moral code, this is insufficient.1

I asked him how he would have written the scene. Edmund is not at all unlike some of my heroes. He's a person who's an awfully nice chap. I would have made him wonder what kind of world this was in, where people didn't know about farmers, and how could she be so attractive to him if she didn't know about the seasons. Not to do anything, really, but just to wonder.

The artist's ability to observe, to wonder, to understand and not to judge represents a view of life that Wilson seems to wish were more

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widespread. He laments that readers have a poor opinion of Inge, Gerald Middleton's wife in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

I think I've spent an enormous amount of time-foolishly, but spent it-trying to put a case for Inge, and it's meant to be there in the book, but people don't seem to see it. Inge is the character I feel for in many ways. He marries her on the rebound-there's no real love there. He brings her to Oxford, God help her, a girl from Denmark. And, yes, she turns into a self-deceiving charmer. But goodness, who wouldn't?

Sympathetic understanding is insufficient in itself if the artist is to create anything and in The Wild Garden, his book on the creative process, Wilson describes how the novelist must actively engage with his observations and understanding because

in novel writing are combined two opposite qualities that pull the writer apart. He must, as he writes, draw upon the depths of his free memory, that is to say he must be a passive vehicle allowing images, scenes, absurdities (every kind of vision and sound) to flow into him; at the same time, if his novel is to be more than a cosy 'total recall' he must be ready to interpose actively, strongly, to force the flowing material into the previously composed shape.2

The idea that an active imposition is necessary for the creation of art does not apply only to the novelist. In No Laughing Matter, for example, Wilson shows how an actor's preparation of his role includes the sympathetic understanding of the part. Rupert Matthews, observ- ing Birnbaum, the refugee writer, a man he does not much like, comes not to judgment but to understanding. From this vantage point, Rupert develops his portrayal of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, actively applying his understanding of a complicated character.

That the novelist sees in the actor's art the polarities that he also sees in his own may reflect Angus Wilson's early desire to be an actor. Certainly his love of the theatrical began at an early age. The youngest of six brothers, he likes to remember the tolerance of two much older brothers playing at dress-up with him.

They loved acting and playing things, so I can remember all of us engaged with tablecloths tied around us, and even then-I must not have been more than about four or five-I felt I wasn't getting the chief roles because either my brother David or my brother Pat was always playing Mary, Queen of Scots going to the block or Marie Antoinette going to the guillotine.

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He also says: I always seemed to be taking part in a play. My parents had this scene that they did over and over again. They'd have rows, certain points would come, and then my father would say, "For Christ's sake, I'm getting out of here, and I'm never coming back," and he would do this regularly. He had a tennis bag-he was a very good tennis player-and he'd put a pair of socks into that, and he'd say, "Christ Almighty, I'm leaving this house. Nobody'll ever see me again." And my mother-we always seemed to have a cook; this was before we went to hotels-my mother would turn and say, "Cook, I'm afraid he won't come back this time." And the cook-I can see it now; she knew it all was a play-she said, "Oh, Madam, I think he'll probably-well, you go and lie down." About an hour later my father would come back.

Not surprisingly, plays, players, and playwrights turn up fre- quently in Wilson's novels. Actors, like novelists, must first observe, then impose, judge, arrange. In No Laughing Matter, the Matthews family, one way and another, is always taking part in a play. The novel's working title was Laughing Mirrors and in it the reflections of life in art, of art in life, of art in art, convey the feeling that the novel-and life itself-is a hall of mirrors. The Matthews children play a game of imitating their parents, the art of ridicule providing some comfort as well as a way of trying out the adult world of experience. The novel covers about fifty years and at certain points Wilson mounts parodies of playwrights appropriate to the season: Maugham, Shaw, Chekhov, Rattigan, Beckett. The parodies do not call attention to themselves as parodies perhaps because there is so much play-acting in the novel. They do show the distortions of life in the mirror of drama as the plays give the characters in the novel ways of perceiving themselves-and of letting the reader perceive them-in the styles of the several periods.

The art of acting may go beyond a sympathetic ordering of a character. The actor may conceal, deceive, actively misrepresent and because acting may be evil as well as good, Wilson cannot forbear warning that those who are not cautious may be taken in. He shares, he says, Samuel Richardson's Puritan doubts about the dangers of theater as well as his intense excitement with it. Part of the danger is that the good are not protected simply by being good; the evil may have the advantage of disguise.

In Clarissa, Wilson admires Richardson's use of disreputable people who have both a bent toward criminality and a capacity for playing parts.

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So, if he wants a countess to come and make Clarissa feel it's all right, or a gentleman who's a very important man at court, he'll call in one of his disreputable characters and say, "You're going to come in as ..." And the brothel keeper appears to be a major's widow ... And I always find that fascinating because one of the frightening things about life is the uncertainty one has, or at least I have, that, are people what they appear to be?

In As If by Magic, Hamo Langmuir attempts a Richardsonian deception and impersonates a Dr. Malcolm, Secretary and Representa- tive of the London University Examination Board. Langmuir, an emi- nent rice geneticist and a homosexual with a preference for paying for the favors of young men, has the choice of impersonation or of having his intent to seduce a young servant discovered. Langmuir excels in his deception. "Then," as Wilson explains it in the Dutch Quarterly Review, Langmuir

invents another character called Roger Sudbury, and he really enjoys this. This is the first time he's let himself go and have some fun and although it's important to him because he really is doing it in order to have the kitchen boy, nevertheless he does invent these things and he begins to have fun. But what he has done is a very bad thing, because those people, even the subor- dinates and even the husband and his wife, but especially the old parents, these Singhalese people, though they are very con- ventional, though they are imitation-British and in some ways very comic, they are good and kind people, especially the old people.3

The active element, so necessary for creativity, contains within it the possibility of evil. Wilson's sensitivity to the issue of selfish and evil actions in contrast to human feeling and understanding is clear in Langmuir's putting self before concern for others, a lamentable but consistent aspect of a man whose depersonalizing scientific discoveries have outpaced his human concerns. In Setting the World on Fire, the use of art to conceal evil and to take to the limit the separation of art from human feeling is manifest in the character of Ralph Tucker, a play- wright and a gardener, who also turns out to be a political terrorist.

Because of his emphasis on appreciation and empathetic understanding of others and on striving to do the right things, I asked Angus Wilson if he also shared with Samuel Richardson the desire to portray a good man. He said:

What I have, I think, is an apprehension of striving to be good. If I have a good character, then there may be about it a certain weakness.

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Tom Mosson, for example, in Setting the World on Fire, he meant to be a good person.

But it is true that he's a very passive person. He is a supporting force for his brother's creativity, and it's possible that I see good-a nice old view if it's true-as a supportive force for those who are actually active. And I'm not sure how you can combine what I'm thinking is good with being a totally active person.

Since the active man, even if he is an artist, must be looked on with suspicion, his personal achievements possibly being the result of self- ishness or desire for gain, is there an active character in Wilson's novels who might also be described as good? Wilson very much likes his character of Meg Eliot and has said he identifies with her. I asked him why.

I think because I identify with somebody who doesn't really know what's happening in life, who goes through it as though it was a wonderful drama. What I like with her is the last thing, I think, in the book, where she says, "I got it all wrong, but I'm determined to learn. I must know about the world. Look where I've got through not knowing about it."

To have the freedom to search, to experience, to find knowledge, and still retain innocence and the desire to continue with the search, trying always to understand what the world is about is to have life at its most satisfying. Wilson has pointed out that Hemlock and After and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, as well as Mrs. Eliot, end with plane journeys. Whether these plane journeys lead from innocence to experience, through exploration to knowledge, or whether they simply allow for a change of scene, travel may bring hazards. We don't know what will happen along the way. Wilson certainly objects to novels that end with a suggestion that the search is over. The idyllic notes about life in the country with which Dickens ends Nicholas Nickleby, he sees, for example, as "pieties." "If you read the words, it's incredible-no stone was touched, not a single thing moved." He wonders too at Henry James's ending The Awkward Age with the removal of Nanda from London and Trollope's ending The Way We Live Now with the removal of his characters from "this seething, beautifully drawn, corrupt London full of bank failures and divorces and all the Victorian horrors, but still lively." Of Jane Austen's novels, he likes the end of Persuasion best because "it ends on a note of risk. At the end it says that she has married a sailor and must know alarms." That this preference may be seen in his own novels, he acknowledges: "It's certainly true that all the books say, 'Watch out. This looks like getting fixed.'"

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Getting fixed does not apply to Angus Wilson in any way and certainly not to his approach to the art of the novel. Not getting fixed is not always an asset and he says that more than one reader has re- sponded to his various experiments in fiction by saying, "There's this one book of yours I like." But, experiments aside, he describes in a 1963 interview, the essential quality of his art.

I'm immensely interested, as you know from my novels, in the shaping of the total novel, but not to reduce life to some kind of formal pattern. I think what I want to do is quite other. It is to amass various reactions to life, strong reactions, to amass various distortions and caricatures, scenes, pictures, and to bombard my readers with these things, having previously, I hope, put them into as strict a formal pattern in the sense of a designed novel as I possibly can.4

Amassing is evident in his works, in his enthusiasm for people, and in his enthusiasm for novels. He has told in interviews of his admiration for the novelists of the nineteenth century. To me, he said:

For a long time I read a great deal of novels but I didn't see them as things that I did, but certainly I was deeply obsessed by Dickens from an early time and I remain so. And this strange love-hate with Virginia Woolf, with intense enjoyment when I was young and then a great hostile period, and now back to enormous admiration-well, a pinch of admiration. Zola-you know I'd been led to think that he was a kind of photographer, and it's the passion and the extraordinary drama that I found absolutely wonderful. Then my late discovery of Kipling, which has been frightfully important to me. With all the things that are wrong, that don't work, he wrote about all the sorts of people that nobody ever thinks it worth writing about. And he had an intense vision of what he felt to be the spark of art.

Angus Wilson shows no signs of slowing down in any of his inter- ests. Still, his conversation can take a contemplative turn as he reflects on nature and the works of man.

I think I have to say that, though I enjoy being with people and I especially enjoy meeting new people, part of growing older has been finding out that I don't crave after people in the same way that I used to do. The increase in my interest has been in gardening and in wildlife and, above all, in architecture. This is partly the influence of Tony, but I have become passionately interested in architecture. And this is a replacement, which is probably to do with old age, of the mute object from the chang- ing and volatile human beings.

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At the end of our visit, he talked of his view of nature, a rather special view of distance and vastness and open sky, without distractions, not even the distractions of nature.

What really has changed my life, as far as my debt to East Anglia, is a consciousness of the sky. It is an area, above all, especially if you go out towards the coast, where you cannot believe that there's anything which is not connected to the sky. And when I go now to the Himalayas-I don't go all that often, but when I do-and when I go to the Swiss Alps, which we do quite often, I do tend, and I never used to do, to think, "Why don't they get rid of those? They're getting in the way of the sky. I can't see the sky properly." And I love the sort of marshland, vast sky, and so on. And what is that about? I don't know. It's probably like so many of the romantics, it's a sort of search for some kind of metaphysical thing, since I can't convince myself of any of the official codes.... I'm seventy this coming August, I must begin to think a little about enjoying what there is, which means looking at the sky and buildings, and also doing such things as are left that I can do.

1"Evil in the English Novel," Kenyon Review, 29 (1967), p. 172. 2 The Wild Garden (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press,

1963), p. 147. 3 "As If by Magic: Angus Wilson On his Own Novel," Dutch Quarterly Review,

6 (1976), p. 272. 4 Frank Kermode, "The House of Fiction," Partisan Review, 30 (1963), p.

69.

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