by Angus Wilson
I am also fairly sure that the character of Gerald Middleton must very broadly have played around the figure of the brilliant, very delightful yet complex character of Sir Thomas Kendrick, the Anglo-Saxon archaeologist associated with the discovery of Sutton Hoo. He was, in fact, director of the museum when I resigned in 1955 to become a full-time writer.
Neither Sutton Hoo nor Mildenhall appears in my notes at Iowa, far less the buried scandal of the Elgin marbles. But what does appear there, but not until page 59 of the 91 pages of my notes, is the Piltdown affair. In 1953, when I must have first been receiving glimmers of the novel to come, the Piltdown man, a supposed vital link in man's evolution, was revealed to have been forged by his discoverer in 1912. The affair had reached me, although I had no special knowledge of prehistory, because the staff of the British Museum Library and that of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington had interchanged a number of social receptions, and this giant fraud of prehistory was inevitably an important subject of discussion at that time. However, in 1953 I was primarily taken up with writing The Mulberry Bush, my play that ultimately in 1956 got to London, where it didn't do well although having been a big success at Bristol. Nevertheless. I am sure that I stored up the giant hoax of Piltdown for future reference. The fact that it doesn't turn up in the notes until page 59 doesn't surprise me. I was well into the construction of the novel, had left the museum, and established myself at my present cottage. I remember now that a book about Piltdown along with Bede's history served as my evening reading for many weeks when I was already writing the novel. But, then, early on I had acquired the habit of leaving the verification of factual details until late in the gestation of a novel for fear that mere fact should impede the flow of imagination.
These four events in archaeology are, then, the background for my choosing the subject of the novel. The rereading of my preliminary notes has also been a revelation to me -- and a confirmation, luckily -- of my method of work and the shape of my imagination. Here are some of the things that particularly struck me in reading those 91 pages this fall.
First, I was amazed to discover that my original idea on page one was for a novel about groups of professional forgers who were involved in an archaeological fraud and their blackmail of the guilty professor to whom each was attached by some personal tie. It could have made a successful crime stout, but I was ill equipped to write it and wise to relinquish the idea. However, I find it interesting to note that from the start the interplay of professional and private life, particularly family life, which had already marked Hemlock and After and was to continue in all my work, was there from page one of the notes for Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.
In these early stages Gerald was to be the forger himself. But this crude concept soon disappears by at least page 16. It is on that page that my biggest surprise came. I had remembered that Anglo-Saxon Attitudes had been carried only in my head until my resignation from the British Museum in April 1955 allowed me proper time to write. But here is clearly written the date 11/9/54, seven months before my leaving the B.M. It is clear to me now that a great part of the planning on paper was made by the time that, in an unfortunately wet May and in the most primitive and isolated cottage, I began to write the book. Luckily the weather soon turned to golden and encouraged me further in the way I like to write, out-of-doors with an exercise book on my knee.
On page 13 there is a list of characters and chapters -- none as they were finally to appear; but the need for detailing these two things has always remained with me, though they always change frequently before they are chosen. I see also that here and on pages 53 and 54 my short story practice is still with me, for the chapter names have that ironic and sometimes punning reference with which I had always chosen my short story titles.
The nationality of Gerald's wife, Ingeborg, then called Trudl, so essential to the title of the book, for Gerald must be and is surrounded by all the nations important to England's history (of which Norway is almost supreme) is not chosen until page 57. And two pages later I am asking myself why Gerald has chosen this moment to investigate the historic scandal and what is the hidden horror of his private life that is to balance the Melpham forgery. By page 80 both these vital links are decided-Professor Pforzheim's Heligoland discoveries make confirmation or rejection of Melpham vital, Inge had pushed her little daughter onto the fire and given her a maimed hand for life. The shape was complete.
Indeed pages 81 to 91 are of quite another kind, familiar to me in all my novel writing preparation. They are mainly concerned with a calendar for the writing of the last half of the novel, setting aside so many days for each episode and estimating the number of words needed for each. I wonder how exact my forecasts were.
