by Angus Wilson
Conclusion of Professor Clun's review of Dr Lorimer's 'The Passing of a Faith' (1950)
There are, nevertheless, masterly touches in the book which declare to us - if indeed we need any reminder - that, when the author can forget her central obsession, she remains the most learned and perceptive historian of early Anglo-Saxon history alive in England today. These moments of glorious lucidity occur, as may be anticipated, when neither the Celtic Church nor Anglo-Saxon paganism, those twin monster King Charles's heads of Dr Lorimer's later work, are in question. In The Christian Debt to the Copts and the Irish these brilliant passages were many; in The Passing of a Faith they have sunk to a scattered few. Nevertheless, even in the present book her analysis of the marriage policies of the reigning houses of the Heptarchy, her summary of the evidences for trade between the Celtic and Saxon areas of these islands, her description of the Anglo-Saxon pilgrimages to Rome before 800, her extraordinary grasp of Merovingian history - all these will remain models to later historians despite their fantastic setting. For fantasy, it must finally be said, her apology for Celtic Christianity, her 'case' against Rome, and her ubiquitous pagan survivals are; her book, in the last resort, is more a fit subject for the critic of historical fiction than for the historian proper. It is the great regret indeed of the present reviewer that he cannot leave his task to some critic of fiction, but Dr Lorimer's reputation is a high one, her detailed monographs published over many years command deserved respect, the price of such a high reputation is itself inevitably high. We cannot pass over frivolous or sentimental indulgence in a great scholar as we would in some Ph.D. student or some historical journalist. Dr Lorimer in the course of her apologia for Celtic Christianity impugns the honesty of many historians; the present reviewer is neither a Roman Catholic nor indeed a Christian of any denomination, but the reputation of historical scholarship must be dear to all who profess it. The truth must be written and it is that Dr Lorimer's own scholarship when she touches upon the subjects dear to her sympathies is not without the exaggerations, the omissions, and the distortions, which she so freely attributes to other scholars. Some of these I have mentioned in my article; to detail all of them would be tedious. There is one practice, however, against which I should wish to protest and to protest strongly: this is the attribution of views to scholars now dead on the basis of personal conversation. In her preface, Dr Lorimer declares that Stokesay, despite the very cautious attitude he took in his own written book, changed his views about the burial of Eorpwald and took up the view that Dr Lorimer herself adopts - namely, that the apostasy of Eorpwald gives reason for general criticism of the Roman mission of Theodore. The authority for this statement is given as her own conversations with Stokesay in his last years. There may legitimately be more than one view about the value of Stokesay's later work, but this must be firmly said - he was not a man who would fear to put into print a view, however controversial, if he accepted it. To imply, as Dr Lorimer does, that he was prevented from publishing his changed views by pressure of public business is to do ill justice to his lifelong devotion to the service of history.
The publishers of Dr Lorimer's new book have not done her good service. The proof-reading is a model of what should not have been passed. The historian of the Saxon invasions appears twice disguised as 'Neumus', the ascriptions of the two plates facing page eight should be reversed, Deira appears on page fifty-four as Deria and on page one hundred and eighty as Diera. ...
Extract from 'The Times' of January 1955
A pamphlet entitled 'The Melpham Burial', published today by the Historical Association of Medievalists, gives a concise account of the present view of scholars upon this much disputed Anglo-Saxon antiquity. It now seems clear beyond doubt that the heathen idol found in the coffin of Bishop Eorpwald in 1912 was placed there as a practical joke by Gilbert Stokesay, who assisted his father in the excavations. The full story of this lamentable affair will probably never be known. It is clear, however, that both Lionel Stokesay and Reginald Portway became aware of the fraud during the nineteen-twenties. Devotion to his son's memory appears to have blinded Stokesay to his duty as a scholar; the reason for Portway's acquiescence in this deplorable silence remains obscure. A note of personal sadness marks Professor Middleton's narrative when he deals with the conduct of these two eminent historians. It is a sadness which all who honour Clio must inevitably share. The wretched fraud should not make us forget that the idol itself may well be a unique example of a heathen god unearthed from English soil. Eorpwald, however, whose faith has been so sadly impugned all these years, is now vindicated from all charges of backsliding. By a curious coincidence the exposure of the fraud comes at a time when pagan relics being associated with Christian burial has been once again brought into consideration by the present excavation of Aldwine's grave in Heligoland. Final verdict on this important archaeological discovery must await the definitive report of Professor Pforzheim, the eminent archaeologist in charge of the excavation.
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'Angus Wilson's brilliant and ambitious novel is about the conscience as it worries two generations of a middle-class family ... And here lies the great originality of Mr Wilson as, a novelist and the richness of the book. Its moral seriousness is matched by the comic explosions of our tradition' — V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman
'No other English novelist of his generation has offered as complete and detailed a portrait of English society ... His ears missed nothing, not a single nuance. They captured, time and time again, the sound of the way we live now' - Paul Bailey in the Observer
'One of the five great novels of the century' - Anthony Burgess
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ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES
Angus Wilson was born in the south of England in 1913. A part of his childhood was spent in South Africa, and he was then educated at his brother's school in Sussex, Westminster School and Oxford. He joined the staff of the British Museum Library in 1937. When the War came he helped towards the safe storage of the British Museum treasures before serving the rest of the War in Naval Intelligence. It was while trying to emerge from a period of depression and near-breakdown that he began to write short stories in 1946, a collection of which, The Wrong Set, was published in 1949. This met with immense critical acclaim, and was followed a year later by a second collection, Such Darling Dodos. In 1952 his short critical study Emile Zola was published and was followed in 1953 by Hemlock and After, his first novel and one of his best known works. In 1955 he resigned from the Museum in order to devote his time to writing, and in 1963 became a part-time lecturer at the new University of East Anglia in Norwich, subsequently becoming Professor and Public Orator. He was made a CBE in 1968 and knighted in 1980.
His other novels are The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958), The Old Men at the Zoo (1961), Late Call (1964), No Laughing Matter (1967), As If By Magic (1973) and Setting the World on Fire (1980). His third volume of short stories, A Bit Off the Map, was published in 1957 and a critical autobiographical study, The Wild Garden, appeared in 1963. Many of his books, including his Collected Stories, are published by Penguin.
Angus Wilson died in 1991. Among the many people who paid tribute to him on his death were Malcolm Bradbury: 'He was brilliant in the real sense of the word. He shone and he was very theatrical. Lectures were packed'; Paul Bailey: 'He was the kindest of men. I am not the only younger writer who is indebted to him'; and Rose Tremain: 'Angus Wilson was a great novelist and a profoundly lovable man'.
The Genesis of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
ANGUS WILSON
From Books at Iowa 34 (April 1981)
Copyright: The University of Iowa
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes has been, broadly speaking, the most popular of the eight novels I have published since I began in early middle age to write fiction. For this reason, perhaps, it has tended to be little in
my mind, as a successful and dependable daughter or son tends to be left to herself or himself. In addition, my novels have become increasingly unorthodox in form and I have found it aggravating that the usual response of literate strangers to meeting me has been praise for Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, my most conventional, traditional creation. So Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, so far as its author is concerned, has tended to be left to look after itself, which, I must say, it has done very well.
In the last ten years, however, I have accepted a number of teaching posts in the United States which have involved, besides the teaching of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, seminars in creative writing. My first experience of this was at The University of Iowa in 1971 and I like doing it more and more. My instruction, which is always subordinate to reception of the creations I am offered, is based not upon any general rule, but upon my own writing experience, and I have written a book and a lecture on the subject.
Two things about my creative process that have seemed most marked is the long period that I spend upon bringing the book to life and the mass of notes that I write in the process. My novels are written in longhand, in ink, in school exercise books, and,. broadly speaking, it would be true, I think, to say that at least a quarter or over of these books contain preliminary notes, in which the novel as it finally emerges may be seen coming to life. Characters, interaction, basic plot, outline narrative, sample dialogues, above all, genealogy, chronology, and other aspects of the interrelation of characters, subplots, and disclosure of mystery-all these are set out in these preliminary notes. The novel is "there," so to speak, before I start to write it. Yet my memory tells me that seldom have I referred to these notes once I have begun the process of writing the novel itself. The whole thing has been worked out on paper in argument with myself, I have been convinced by the results of the argument, and I have no longer need to refer to it. This is the reason, perhaps, why I have seldom made changes to my novels when they were completed. And editors have, happily, not demanded major changes. Indeed, in recent years, I have wondered whether I should not amend more the final versions of my novels. And, for the first time, with my latest novel, Setting the World on Fire, I rejected a whole section that I had written in Sri Lanka.
This fall, when teaching at the University of Delaware, I decided that I should discuss with my creative writing students the genesis of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. I chose the novel for three reasons: it is the most easily available in the U.S.A. in paperback (unlike England, where all my books are in paperback); it is the novel which marked my first months of commitment to the life of a professional writer; I felt that I had unduly neglected my most successful child. To make this study possible I asked for (and was most courteously granted) a photostat of the preliminary notes for the novel which, with many of my other manuscripts, belong to The University of Iowa. These notes comprise in all 91 pages.
The result was a revelation to me. I had to my pleasure remembered a great deal of the creative process that had taken place in the making of the novel; but I had also, to my chagrin, forgotten a good deal. It may be of interest to those concerned with fiction writers and their imagination to set out here what I have remembered of the genesis of the novel besides what the notebooks reveal of how it came to being. I am also adding an account of the attendant circumstances of the writing of the book as I remember them, although I am somewhat chastened by the discovery among my notes of things I had not remembered, or, happily, only very rarely, remembered wrongly.
The remote genesis of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which of course is not included in the manuscript notes, lies back in my early years of work on the staff of the British Museum. I was engaged there on coming down from Oxford as a temporary assistant cataloger in 1936. The decision had been made to recatalog the vast B.M. library. The treasury agreed to the library's hiring of 20 extra young men and women from Oxford and Cambridge for this purpose. In part because of the intervention of the war and, in part, I suppose, because of postwar economic conditions in the U.K., the scheme came to an end in the fifties at an early stage of its proposed course. This was, in fact, shortly after I had left to become a full-time writer. Many others of the 20 had also gone off to other more satisfactory jobs, although the temporary status had been converted to permanent staff after the war. The truth was the cataloging work was not very engrossing-indeed when I returned there after the war, I was gratified to be employed in other library fields. But the late thirties were economically as hard a time for graduates as the early eighties appear likely to be, and I was glad of the job. It was enormously exciting to work in so famous an institution and, among the colleagues of my own age, I found many fascinating and delightful people who have remained friends. In addition, I quickly got to know scholars from the other museum departments-antiquarians, archaeologists, ethnographers, and art historians. We met in a common canteen. It was the gossip of that canteen that, I feel sure, sowed the seeds from which Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was born, although it was over 15 years before the creation began to flower.
It was from this general museum talk that came the novel's story of archaeological fraud and its effect upon the morale and the creative powers of the hero, an eminent historian, Gerald Middleton who; in his youth, had sensed forgery in the air. I must note here that of the events in the archaeological field which I believe influenced me in imagining the novel, none is mentioned in the preliminary notes for the book. I have only, therefore, my memory to rely on for the conviction that they played the part I shall now suggest. My memory and, I must say, my conviction.
First in time, but very important in overall effect, was the rumor that the Elgin marbles had been overcleaned. Most of this incident remains wholly obscure to me, but I do dearly remember that a well-known newspaper columnist showed great interest in the rumor but that the events of the Munich crisis swallowed it all up. A number of my senior colleagues gossiped to me about it. I had no memory of it all, I am sure, when I was writing Anglo-Saxon Attitudes 17 years later or composing it 16 years later. Nor, of course, was there any falsification of history involved. But the general air of academic scandal must, I think, have sunk into my imagination.
Quite different are the two following events. In the late spring of 1939 the Anglo-Saxon burial ship was discovered at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia (a part of England I had not then visited, but where, by chance, I wrote my novel and have lived for the last 25 years ). Although the extreme importance of this discovery was fully grasped at the time, the evermore certain approach of war meant that it was clear that no serious excavation could go on until the war was ended. As I had studied medieval history at Oxford -- indeed had specialized in the Anglo-Saxon field -- I was peculiarly interested in this event and listened avidly to all that I could hear about it. And I do remember that I was struck by how strongly the prestige, learning, experience, and historical integrity of the principal archaeologists involved counted in the assessment of any theories put forward.
The work at Sutton Hoo, of course, was resumed after the war, and although, after 1947, I was deeply taken up in my spare time with writing my two books of short stories which led me into absorption with my own past life, I did often lend a very interested ear to the conversations about Sutton Hoo. By this time the great Anglo-Saxon discovery had been joined by the wonder of the Mildenhall treasure, discovered in 1942, also in East Anglia: a great silver hoard buried by a Romano-British landlord after the Anglo-Saxon invasion. This has historically less interest for me, but its aesthetic beauty, when it appeared on show, entranced me. Neither of these two great finds appears in my preliminary notes for the novel. But I remember, extremely clearly, that after I had published Hemlock and After (1952), I did spend some time (I imagine it was in late 1953 or early 1954 ) questioning some archaeological colleagues about the two finds, especially Sutton Hoo. And I also know that I had a novel in mind when I did so, indeed, that I told one eminent archaeologist of my idea for such a novel and that he was interested, for my reputation as a fiction writer
had by then become established.
