The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)
Page 9
The finale, quite unconvincing despite its huge predictability, brings Hamo and Ally together; they fall in love for ten minutes, then rush off to play their parts in a thematic scheme hardly less creaky than the plot. As in all but the last of Wilson’s novels, the protagonists begin the action at a moral crisis-point and end it in triumphs of varying ambiguity: Hamo is worthily destroyed by an upsurge of confused altruism; Alexandra (according to the blurb ‘ironically’ – i.e., preposterously) is enabled to work her own modest magic through the acquisition of riches, resolving ‘to betray the whole filthy system from inside’ by leasing out accommodation at fairly cheap rents. Groggy readers might do well to attend to a hippie rebuke given at some smarmy Swami gathering: ‘Oh! For God’s sake! Who knows what positive etheric waves you’re neutralizing with all that infantile defensive humour?’ Search this reviewer. One would give Wilson the benefit of these grave doubts if it weren’t for the scruffiness of much of the writing: ‘his heart beat fast with randiness’, ‘only slightly shaking from a sobbing gulped down’, Americans saying ‘Noo York’ and ‘anyways’, hippies using ‘like’ as if they were rustics, the word ‘delicious’ appearing seven times in as many pages, the whole book riddled with repetitions, unintentional rhymes, jangles, even solecisms. Naturally, one doesn’t begrudge Wilson his Uproarious Jaunt, but one hopes that in future he will make better use of his travel diaries.
In a recent statement Wilson denied that he was a social realist and avowed an increasing interest in experimentation. Nothing in As If By Magic is experimental – except for routine eng-lit coltishness and a periodic uncertainty as to what the hell is going on – yet one suspects Wilson is using the tag merely to widen his pitying smile should anyone be gauche enough to raise questions of motivation and probability. Nobody is asking him to be subservient to realist conventions but his attempts to extend these do seem to work far better when he meddles with form (as in his last two novels) rather than content (as in The Old Men at the Zoo). The twinkly, walkabout exuberance of the present book isn’t suited to Wilson’s savagely direct talents, which lie firmly in the novel-of-manners tradition; like his beloved Jane Austen, he needs only a small vista for that rheumy but unblinking eye.
New Statesman June 1973
Diversity and Depth in Fiction by Angus Wilson. Edited by Kerry McSweeney
‘I think … I suspect … I imagine … I have no doubts … I am fairly sure … I believe, as I shall suggest … I think I would like to begin by simply saying …’ And I think I would like to begin by simply saying that Angus Wilson’s pot-pourri of critical writing is delightfully personal, impressively amateurish, and thrillingly unsystematic. It prompts the thought that the gurus and yogis of structuralism have done us all a great service. As criticism coagulates into a discipline in which only the academic lab-man feels at ease, a new and neglected subject looms imposingly in the foreground: ‘It looks like literature. What a beautiful sight!’ as John Updike observed in Hugging the Shore, a book that one places alongside other recent critical collections by Nabokov, V.S. Pritchett, and Philip Larkin. These are, of course, the artist-critics, and their authority has never seemed more natural and welcome.
Sir Angus’s critical world, in particular, has a prelapsarian feel. ‘Most of [Jane Austen’s] defenders’, he writes, from the sequestered innocence of 1962, ‘belong to the upper middle class and have also gone on living in a country way.’ We now know that most of Jane Austen’s defenders belong to the academic industry and have started living in campus condominiums. David Lodge ably satirized the type in Changing Places: his hero, Morris Zapp, of Euphoria State University, has made a long career out of Miss Austen while privately admitting that he finds her ‘a pain in the ass’. ‘Eros and Agape in the later novels, wasn’t it?’ Zapp asks a baffled English student. ‘What was the problem?’ We have since moved Eros and Agape to hermeneutics and syntagmatics, to lexia and irrealia, and to other dialectical imperatives – political, sexual, and ethnic. One could attribute these fragmentations to the rise of the universities and their attempt to make the study of literature, if not as hard as philosophy or physics, then certainly a lot harder than geography. Or one could bluntly argue that the critical theorist (half high priest, half cultural janitor) fails to find literature very interesting, all by itself. It needs some gustier infusion.
Wilson has no head for theory and instinctively flouts it at every turn. It may be convenient for a critic to pretend that creative writing takes place in vacuo; but try telling a writer that. Wilson routinely commits the Biographical Fallacy, because he knows that the relationship between a writer’s life and work, while not direct or unwavering, is there on the page, detectable in imagery as much as in content: what is Dickens without his blacking factory, or Kipling without his boardinghouse? Wilson intentionally commits the Intentional Fallacy, because he knows that a work of art, if it is alive, will lead the author down diversions to unscheduled stops: hence pretension, hence incongruity, hence failure. And Wilson proudly commits the Subjective or Affective Fallacy, because he knows (with Nabokov) that the sole end of art is ‘aesthetic bliss’, and that the critic’s spinal cord is as vital as a tuning fork. Wilson also knows this from experience. Actually, we all know it. It is what we are thinking and feeling when we read.
Born in 1913, Wilson took up fiction and criticism relatively late in life. In his postwar evolution as a man of letters – a growth this book dramatizes – Wilson had two main influences to contend with and resist: on the one hand Bloomsbury, on the other F.R. Leavis. It is difficult for American readers to appreciate the power and ubiquity of Dr Leavis’s Thought Police during this period. It is difficult for English readers, too, let it be said. Provincial, lofty, and fierce, the Leavisites sought to reduce literature to a moral audit, an elaborate way of determining whether individual readers were or were not mature and wholesome human beings. ‘Literary values’ were themselves illusory, Leavis asserted, because ‘the judgements the literary critic is concerned with are judgements of life’. Thus the business of English studies was to whittle down the mass of literature into a hard core of mature and wholesome texts. As recently as 1970, you could walk into an undergraduate bedsitter and run your eye over the pitifully denuded bookcase of an aspiring Leavisite: the English poets (with Hopkins and Carew supplanting Shelley and Milton), Jane Austen (maybe), Hard Times, George Eliot, James, Conrad, Lawrence, plus one or two laughable latecomers like Ronald Bottrall and Elizabeth Myers. This was the Great Tradition – that is, the one okayed by Dr L.
It is fascinating, in the present book, to watch Wilson apparently flitting in and out of sympathy with the Leavisite doctrines. In his thrilling essay ‘Evil in the English Novel’, he uses various code words and phrases – ‘felt life’, ‘anti-life’, that ‘great tradition’ again – which seem to suggest a quiet affiliation with the cause. But one soon comes to realize that Leavis-speak was merely the prevailing literary jargon of the time. Whereas Wilson, as a liberal humanist, might have been attracted to Leavis’s grimly secular creed, he was too much of a literary hedonist, a man of the pleasure principle, to linger with it long. Soon Wilson’s apostasy is open and eloquent. It is disturbing, he writes,
that the most suggestive and sincere literary criticism of our time should have to guard its moral health so desperately that it can find no place for the heterodoxy of Dickens’s masterpieces. Perhaps the misuse of such brilliance may qualify him for the place of Lucifer – but a serious literary criticism should not be able to fall so easily into theological parody.
Literature is, among other things, a talent contest, and every reader must find his personal great tradition. Wilson’s is eclectic, sometimes alarmingly so, but it is all his own.
The countervailing influence, one to which Wilson proved more lastingly susceptible, was that of Bloomsbury and its pre-eminent (perhaps its only) talent, Virginia Woolf. The ascendancy of Leavis himself might be seen as a reaction against the Bloomsbury establishment – against
the snobbery, the leisure culture, the moneyed dilettantism of High Bohemia. A prosperous young aesthete (whose sexual tastes, incidentally, would have been deplored not only by Dr Leavis but also by the British Constitution), Wilson was naturally drawn to the ‘feminine hypersensitivity’ of Woolf rather than the ‘hedgehog prickliness’ of Leavis. To her he owes his conception of the novel, as both practitioner and pundit. The contexts, the great forms of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sagas, have been exhausted; realism and experimentation have come and gone without seeming to point to a way ahead. The contemporary writer, therefore, must combine these veins, calling on the strengths of the Victorian novel together with the alienations of post-modernism. Wilson’s debt to Woolf is frequently acknowledged, and we see its full emotional charge when he dramatically records: ‘I read in The Times of her suicide, and all the war of my intelligence work seemed as nothing. This was Hitler’s triumph … the blackest moment of the war.’
That hint of preciosity reminds us, perhaps belatedly, that Bloomsbury was a narrow world, too, and that sensibility, as a credo, has its limitations. Consider these snippets, with their Woolfian airiness:
Nancy Mitford and Angela Thirkell, who attempt to reconstruct the same scene with some of the childhood laughter that rang through the nursery in the old Hall in those far-off days …
Like Firbank, [Henry Green] transformed his desperate tight-rope walk into a wonderful ballet of dancing words.
Wafting from Cambridge and Bloomsbury, these seductive breezes blew across the England of the 1920s and early 1930s until they became the very atmosphere that the intelligentsia of the upper middle class breathed – a warm, enfolding air full of the breath of memories, sudden gaieties and strange little sadnesses.
The confidence of Bloomsbury lay in an assertion of taste – taste, with its eighteenth-century connotation of well-bred rectitude, of patrician right-thinking. Just as surely as in the Leavisite doctrine, the value judgment reflects on its espouser: on his or her background, fibre, cultural etiquette. When literary criticism began to be systematized (and thus democratized) in the Fifties, the value judgment was the first frippery to be outlawed; and the tendency shows no sign of being reversed, with the structuralists seeming equally happy filleting the minor or the major. If there ever was a middle ground – a still point somewhere between the overaesthetic, the shrilly moral, and the pseudo-scientific – Wilson never sought it. He had an artist’s certainty, and trusted to that.
So Diversity and Depth in Fiction completes a familiar and enjoyable process. In the end, we learn more about the judge than the judged. William Godwin’s prose is ‘at times unendurable’. Dostoevsky’s ideas are ‘at times almost insane’. Thackeray’s ‘awful “sweet wisdom” ’ is ‘nauseating’, Gissing is often ‘completely unreadable’, indeed ‘entirely repellent’. ‘It just does not do, I think,’ Wilson decides, having examined the dialogue in Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening. For once he supports his view with adequate quotations. But the tone? It just does not do, I think. The tone makes its appeal to a lost consensus, a unanimity that might have existed in ‘those far-off days’ but exists no longer.
Wilson’s great tradition has a nostalgic or fossilized look about it, too. Richardson’s Clarissa, Austen, the major Victorians, Meredith (‘the first great art novelist’), Huxley, Ivy Compton-Burnett (‘a great experimentalist’), and John Cowper Powys (‘he will stand with James, Lawrence, and Joyce’): there is a sense, not at all uncongenial (and analogous to what one feels about Wilson’s own fiction), that this particular ‘line’ of English literature is losing its hold on us, though perhaps it will one day revive. Similarly, when Wilson offers his hot tips for future greatness (this is 1967), he arrives at the following selection: John Berger, David Storey, Christine Brooke-Rose, Randolph Stow, Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola, and – at last – V.S. Naipaul.
Amateurism is not an unalloyed virtue, and it must be said that the hobbyist brio of Wilson’s prose is a constant distraction. He has a kind of anti-talent for the rhyme, the repetition, the tongue-twister, the ear-clouter: ‘The admirable Admiral Croft’, ‘a revolting revolutionary act’, ‘the last thing he would have been likely to do would have been to …’ Some passages are real so-and-sos: ‘It is so over-used and so often without a satisfactory content. So – this likeness between Dostoevsky and Dickens, so frequently proclaimed …’ And we would need an editor far less torpid than Mr McSweeney to cope with Wilson’s random intensifiers: at one point we get ‘very shocking’, ‘very disgusting’, ‘very possible’, ‘very difficult’, ‘very definite’, and ‘very important’, all within half a page. Wilson lassoes himself into argument as if somebody else were constantly trying to thwart and bedevil him. But he is a man in love, after all, and one cheerfully grants him his excitements, his imprecisions, and his fertile swiftness of thought.
Atlantic Monthly May 1984
Iris and Love
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
Up to page 166 of Iris Murdoch’s new novel its narrator, Bradley Pearson, seems a reliably emotionless, puritanical, Great-Book-pregnant litterateur, deliberate about everything he does CI think I’m going to faint’ – not my italics) and so fastidious that colloquialisms as raffish as ‘sexy’ and ‘housewife’ have him reaching for his inverted commas. Bradley’s civilized existence is suddenly threatened by the arrival of his (deservedly) ditched sister, the reappearance of his ex-wife and her abject, sidling queer brother, the marital crises of the Baffins (respectively a spunkier, more successful novelist and his menopausal wife), and by the importuning of their twenty-year-old daughter, Julian, who wants Bradley to teach her Shakespeare. These untidy persons have variously to be coped with: the ex-wife shooed away, the sidling queer employed to tend the noisome sister; Bradley baits the novelist with talk about integrity and has a bedroom scuffle with his wife (a scuffle only, for Bradley can’t command ‘the anti-gravitational aspiration of the male organ’ – and put like that it’s a wonder anyone can). As Bradley comes and goes from the Baffin household, Julian is to be seen doing symbolic things with love-letters and balloons.
From page 167 of The Black Prince, after a chance hard-on in a shoe-shop and one Hamlet lesson with Julian, Bradley is behaving like a mawkish schoolboy: reeling, crooning, vomiting, weeping, and in love. Since he believes that ‘there’s a dignity and a power in silence’ the reader suspects that he will be as reticent in life as he has been in art, happy to wince and gloat over all these emotions and experience them only via his usual footling pensées and aperçus. But Bradley movingly confesses his love and the impressionable Julian confesses that she reciprocates it. The couple escape to Bradley’s hideaway and, once Julian gets the idea of dressing up as Hamlet (complete with skull), Bradley’s erection problems are a thing of the past. Circumstances bring a typically melodramatic conclusion, which, whatever else it does, ensures that their relationship is nipped as it buds rather than as it wilts.
To summarize so unfeelingly is not to deride what Miss Murdoch would call the ‘causality’ of this intricate and fascinating novel. Patently, that was no ordinary Hamlet lesson: Bradley’s rhapsody to the Swan’s most elusive play is in every sense the heart of the book. The Black Prince, like Miss Murdoch’s previous two novels, is an attempt to synthesize her earlier styles, the hang-dog existential shrugs of her work before The Bell and the somewhat contrived allegorizing of the work that followed it. On a naturalistic level, Bradley’s love for Julian is no more than what Baffin sneeringly says it is: a flowery-minded man ‘sowing some rather unsavoury wild oats at sixty’. If we step back, however, we see that it is also what Bradley says Hamlet is: the means to create a ‘special rhetoric of consciousness’, a self-purging in the glare of art; Bradley’s book is Julian’s ‘deification’, and so she becomes the Hamlet he never wrote.
But while Bradley presents his love as a liberation, an escape into life, he clearly remains ‘a man who lives by words’. In the book’s early pages he
is confronted with two fat, miserable, ageing, halitosis-ridden women in need of reassurance, and his reaction to both is, simply, ‘You’re upsetting me.’ Similarly, when Bradley’s sister (who admittedly, by almost anyone’s standards, would be better off dead) commits suicide, Bradley evades responsibility, and it is this act which precipitates his losing Julian. Bradley can recognize, in pensée form, that the human condition is pathetic and laughable, fundamentally ironic in shape, but love does not enable him physically to accept the messiness that has its place in art no less than in life – and Miss Murdoch has always wished for, if not prescribed, a certain congruence between the two.
Bradley’s fastidiousness is abetted by Miss Murdoch’s. The book, which is offered by its narrator as both a ‘true story’ and a ‘work of art’, is itself presented by an ‘Editor’ who in turn supplies ‘Postscripts’ from the other characters, all of which distort the story and accuse the story of distortion. When, at last, Julian speaks, when the reader is desperate to know what happened (was it art life?), all we get is a feeble little essay on artistic theory from Julian and the ‘Editor’s’ final scotching of the rumour that he and Bradley are ‘the invention of a minor novelist’. Now you see her, now you don’t. Elaborate track-covering does not heighten artifice, it exposes it. That ‘minor’ may turn out to be false modesty, but only if Miss Murdoch will refrain from washing her hands so clean of her own creations.