Times Literary Supplement, 1999
An Unforgettable Voice
Angus Wilson: A Biography, by Margaret Drabble
‘You’ve better things to do with your time, dear girl,’ Angus Wilson told Margaret Drabble when, after twenty-four years’ friendship, she suggested writing something about him. No, he would do that himself—Angus Wilson on Angus Wilson. He never managed it, and by 1991, when he died, his standing as a novelist had suffered and he had begun to feel like an old trouper or an old queen whose show was no longer wanted. This skilful and sympathetic book, then, is in the first place a matter of rehabilitation, or picking up the pieces, which may not be the very best basis for a biography, but is still an extremely good one.
Throughout she calls him, affectionately, ‘Angus.’ She is ‘Drabble.’ Angus came from a confusing, shabby-genteel family and a half-world of expatriates and private hotels where he was the precocious, blue-eyed youngest, an eavesdropper on the world. The child’s eye view, he came to believe, was crucial to the writer (although one of his school-friends thought Angus had never had a real childhood at all). When at the age of thirty-six he published his first volume of short stories, The Wrong Set, it included the very earliest, ‘Raspberry Jam’: a small boy looks on while two odd village ladies, who don’t wish to be spied upon, put out their pet bullfinch’s eyes with a pin. Angus liked to say that he had thought of this story, almost that it had thought of him, on a single afternoon. Drabble, however, has found four earlier drafts in the notebooks. You almost regret her thoroughness.
Hemlock and After (1951) and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), his first two novels, were generous in scope but just as deliciously, or frighteningly, acid in flavour. Their success and that of the much calmer Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) led to an unpredictable result; his commitments expanded enormously and so, in spite of the nervous strain, did his happiness. For the next twenty-five years, as literature entered what Drabble calls ‘The Age of Conferences,’ Angus emerged, with only Stephen Spender as a serious rival, as the Indispensable Man. In 1963 he became first lecturer, then Professor, at the new University of East Anglia as it rose from Norfolk’s flat fields. He was on the committee of the Royal Literary Fund and the Arts Council, Chairman of the National Book League and the Society of Authors, eventually a Companion of Literature and a knight. As a distinguished visiting lecturer he patrolled Europe and America, hugely welcomed as a sort of white-haired totem by the world’s students. Ceaseless travelling is pretty sure to mean comic mishaps, and Drabble doesn’t miss these, but at the same time she skilfully keeps us in mind of the heroism with which Angus (perhaps literally) worked himself to death. He succeeded, not as a born organizer but as someone who was interested in other human beings, a brilliant, malicious man who was still, at heart, a sweet-natured busybody, prodigal with time and effort. Organization was left to his lover, secretary, driver, and cook, Tony Garrett.
All these activities mean that Drabble is faced with a cast of hundreds, but she never lets one slip. Some are famous; others, although their names are listed, are totally obscure; some have their own anecdotes: ‘Juliet Corke married a Frenchman and Angus spoke at the wedding in fluent French, recalling the little tabby cat she had once given him,’ Gerard van het Reve ‘would ask for a plate and some mustard, if conversation at table grew dull; he would then spread the plate with mustard, and lay his penis temptingly upon the plate.’ Drabble vividly describes the places Angus went to, and even, on occasion, places he might have gone to, but didn’t. Drabble assesses the reviews of each book and suggests the originals of the characters (four are given for Rose Lorimer, the sublimely ridiculous lecturer in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes). She knows the names of Angus’s roses, and makes us interested in his meals. Her sense of period, down to the very year, is, as always, matchless, and you can feel time pass inside and outside the cottage at Felsham Woodside. There is, on the other hand, not much evidence from accountants and it’s not quite clear why the money ran out just before Angus and Tony (now acting as a nurse) left England for St Remy. Readers of The Independent will remember the dignified appeal for funds in May 1990 by Rose Tremain, who had been one of his pupils. The end, as Drabble says, was not a happy one. But Dr Patrick Woodcock, who looked after Angus and many of his friends, once told me that the best provision against old age was ‘to make sure of your little treats’ and these Angus had, in the visitors who brought him his last luxury, gossip.
‘He made no secret of the fact that he was a homosexual,’ Drabble says, ‘and this volume is in part a history of what we now call gay liberation, and the decreasing need for discretion.’ Francis King suggested in his memoirs Yesterday Came Suddenly that at first Angus Wilson hated his own sexuality, but this does not appear from the biography. He seems to have been admitted to dressing-up games, and perhaps seduced, by his elder brothers. However, although in Hemlock and After he wrote, for 1952, quite openly about the subject (Rupert Hart-Davis’s Hugh Walpole, published in the same year, never mentions it), he still felt obliged in his early novels to restrict himself. Getting rid of the restraints didn’t improve him as a writer—when does it ever? Meanwhile in his official capacity as a smiling public man, he felt, although he never denied or compromised, that it was better to proceed with caution. I should add that anyone anxious to read about the details of his personal sex life has come to the wrong counter. Drabble has been guided, as she explains in her preface, by Tony Garrett, to whom the book is dedicated, and who told her that he was prepared to talk about the relationship but not about ‘actual sexual activity…firstly because I cannot ask Angus for his permission.’
The truth about his sexual adventures, Angus always insisted, was in his fiction. Everyone is at liberty to look for it there. His real subject, as he explained in his Northcliffe lectures and his self-analytical The Wild Garden, was evil, as distinct from right and wrong and their traditional playground of comedy. Margaret Drabble accepts this and says: ‘He demonstrated that it was still possible to write a great novel.’ This implies direct competition with the great Victorian classics, and Angus in fact wrote distinctive studies of Dickens and Kipling, but Drabble goes off course, I think, in trying to show that what attracted him to them was that his life-story was like theirs. It wasn’t. Their attraction for him, surely, was the lavish, unaccountable nature of their genius—Kipling’s daemon, or Dickens’s ‘I thought of Mr Pickwick.’ Faced by what seemed almost the duty of greatness, and uncertain of his own daemon, insecurity threatened, and to banish insecurity Angus took to avoiding silence. Nobody who ever knew it could forget his voice—heard from outside in the street, growing louder on the stairs, non-stop into the rooms rising into plaintive arabesques, pausing only for a painfully brilliant imitation. You can hear it, so to speak, through the chinks of this admirable biography, a solid tribute of scholarship and affection.
Independent, 1995
Joy and Fear
Roald Dahl: A Biography, by Jeremy Treglown
Truth is more important than modesty, Roald Dahl said, but glorious exaggeration seemed to suit him better than either. For example: ‘It happens to be a fact that nearly every fiction writer in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope, and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.’ This is the writer as hero, talking to his young readers in their millions in Boy —not an autobiography, he tells them, as that would be full of boring things, but a record only of what ‘made a tremendous impression on me.’
What had impressed him most since he was born in 1916 to Norwegian parents were the family’s rugged holidays in the fjords, spiffing practical jokes—such as frightening an ugly old sweetshop woman with a dead mouse—savage beatings at school, a confident beginning as a trainee oil salesman in East Africa. In 1939 he trained as a fighter pilot ‘and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames…but that is another story.’
Invalided out of the RAF, he
was sent on intelligence work to wartime Washington. At this time he was a handsome young man, with something a little dangerous about him, who was friendly with the rich and famous, and married to the actress Patricia Neal. He also had a ferocious imagination, which he set to work for him. He was fairly well established with The New Yorker and Playboy long before he began, perhaps more successfully than anyone else in the world, to tell stories to children.
It might be felt that fate had allowed him a good deal, but Dahl knew he deserved more. He felt entitled to dispense with income-tax collectors and quarrel with publishers and, if he was bored, to be exceptionally rude. He was convinced he should have a knighthood, since that was what great writers were given. On the other hand, he was often kind and generous, and met life’s worst blows with courage. His favourite daughter, Olivia, died at the age of seven. Dahl nearly went out of his mind, but he said afterwards that he had lost all fear of dying. ‘If Olivia can do it, I can.’
Dahl was colourful, noisy, dominating, possibly a genius, certainly an expert in self-publicity. Jeremy Treglown, his biographer, is calm, judicial, accurate, quietly brilliant. The ice man cometh. Treglown is humane, but we would like to know the truth. Was Dahl really shot down, or did he make an ignominious forced landing? Can he be trusted on the subject of his flogging headmasters? How much help did he get from publishers’ editors, who patiently toned down the bloody-mindedness of his plots? Treglown never proceeds without evidence, some from documents and from the books themselves, a lot of it from firsthand witnesses. Then he gives his assessment, trying to separate ‘the detached, scientific, sometimes cruel-seeming Dahl from the kindly magician.’ This, however, as he must have noticed, means distinguishing one unreality from another.
Roald Dahl’s books for children are much less primitive than his stories for adults, which depend on shock endings, Saki-like schemes for revenge, and hateful practical jokes. The much-loved ‘juveniles’ are just as ruthless, but they are life-loving. The eight-year-old Roald was galvanized by the idea of coasting downhill on his bike, no hands. ‘It made me tremble just to think of it.’ Joy and fear are indistinguishable here, just as they are when the juice-laden Giant Peach is spiked on the Empire State Building, or the BFG endeavours to please the Queen by farting his loudest. Jeremy Treglown’s fine psychological study is the key to these fantasies, which still earn £2 million a year for the Dahl estate. Most writers would tremble just to think of it.
Evening Standard, 1994
‘Really, One Should Burn Everything’
Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940—1985, edited by Anthony Thwaite
There is no direct train from London to Hull, in Yorkshire. You have to change at Doncaster. Philip Larkin used to claim that he went on working there because literary curiosity-seekers (not to speak of ‘Jake Balokowsky, my biographer’) would be daunted when they discovered that the journey took three to four hours, and might decide on another poet instead.
Certainly Hull seemed like seclusion, almost retreat, with correspondence as a lifeline. ‘Postmen like doctors go from house to house’—although Anthony Thwaite is perhaps too optimistic in saying that Larkin thought of both of them as healers. Postmen and doctors make mistakes, and the relief they bring is often only temporary.
Larkin decided early on against marriage, risking loneliness in exchange. He valued jazz, cricket, drink, women (some women), books (some books), poetry, and friendship. ‘“Friend” can mean three things,’ he wrote somewhat sourly in 1941, ‘acquaintance, comrade, or antagonist.’ Of his three joint literary executors, all were unquestionably his comrades and two are poets—Andrew Motion, whose biography of Larkin comes out this year, and Anthony Thwaite, who edited the Collected Poems (criticized for putting in too much) in 1988 and these Selected Letters (criticized for leaving out too much) in 1992. The third executor, Monica Jones, a university lecturer, was by far the closest of Larkin’s women friends.
The correspondence will only be completely comprehensible when the biography appears. Meanwhile, faced by several thousand letters, Thwaite has had to save space and at the same time do what he could about some awkward gaps. Only a dozen or so letters to Monica Jones have been made available (although Thwaite discreetly says that ‘apparent losses may later be recovered’), and it seems that those to Bruce Montgomery (the detective writer Edmund Crispin) can’t be inspected until 2035. George Hartley, the publisher of Larkin’s first important collection, The Less Deceived (1955), reserved his letters because he wanted to sell them unexcerpted. And the important correspondence with Kingsley Amis, who first met Larkin when they were students together at Oxford, and to whom the very last letter in this book, dictated just before the final operation, is addressed—this correspondence, too, is rather ragged.
Thwaite’s job, or one of them, has been to show the ‘stages of life’ which Larkin himself so dreaded—the inescapable I-told-you-so of mortality. First there’s the adolescent, trying out romantic ideas and dirty language. Here the chief correspondent is Jim Sutton, who knew Larkin as an eight-year-old schoolboy at King Henry VIII School, Coventry. Sutton never became a celebrity. He was an unsuccessful painter, an Army driver in the war, later a chemist’s dispenser, and evidently a choice spirit. To him Larkin confided not only his early disappointments with publishers and with sex but his concept of poetry itself. ‘A poem is just a thought of the imagination—not really logical at all. In fact I should like to make it quite clear to my generation and all subsequent generations that I have no ideas about poetry at all. For me, a poem is the crossroads of my thoughts, my feelings, my imaginings, my wishes, and my verbal sense: normally these run parallel…often two or more cross…but only when all cross at one point does one get a poem.’ At this time he was ‘humanly although perhaps not excusably tired of not getting any money or reviews or any sort of reputation.’ The only ‘adventurous’ thing in his life, he told the agent Alan Pringle, was to apply and be selected for the public librarianship at Wellington, Shropshire, replacing a man of seventy-six, and ‘handing out antiquated tripe to the lower levels of the general public’ for £175 a year. And yet by the time he was twenty-five he had published two novels and a volume of poetry. The poems had only one reviewer, but that reviewer was D. J. Enright.
From the 1950s his life quite rapidly, if warily, expands. The toad, work, always keeps a precious jewel in its head of self-doubt, misanthropy, and irony. But the nervous beginner becomes what he has to admit is a well-known poet, and the young writer who signed his first book contract for £30 turns out to be an excellent businessman. To Patsy Strang (whom he met after moving from Shropshire to Belfast) there is his first series of love letters, or something very like them. ‘You are the sort of person one can’t help feeling (in a carping kind of way) ought to come one’s way once in one’s life.’ When she decamps to Paris, he tells her she is like ‘a rocket, leaving a shower of sparks to fall on the old coal shed as you whoosh upwards.’ In 1959 he was appointed to the University Library of Hull. In 1961 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. It was not until the end of the Seventies that he began to feel the wretched approach of dryness, although even then he ‘would sooner write no poems than bad poems.’ Thwaite believes that this drying-up or desertion was partly, at least, the result of the unsettling experience of his last move. In 1973 the University of Hull decided to sell off its ‘worst properties,’ including the one where he lived, and he became, for the first time, a homeowner, faced with endless practical difficulties, and feeling ‘like a tortoise that has been taken out of one shell and put in another.’ But even this experience never stopped him from writing letters.
Two omissions seem strange. There are no letters to Larkin’s family, not even to his mother, to whom he wrote regularly until her death at the age of ninety-one. And there are almost none to do with his official career at Hull, and yet the building of the Library Extension, of which he had been in charge since his arrival, was, as he put it, ‘the daysman of my thoug
ht, and hope, and doing’. At the same time, he was secretary of the university’s publishing committee. Very likely these letters might be considered dull, but dullness is a necessary part of most existences, and certainly of Philip Larkin’s.
What was he like, exactly? Having decided, by its usual mysterious processes, that Larkin was one of the very few living poets that anyone (apart from students and teachers) wanted to buy and read, the British public accepted his persona from the poems they knew, and grew attached to it. He was modest and humorous, lived out of tins in rented rooms, was ‘unchilded and unwifed,’ worked decently hard without becoming rich, visited churches as a wistful sightseer, had missed the sexual revolution of the Sixties by being born too early, was ‘nudged from comfort’ by the sight of ships and aircraft departing and of the old people’s ward. He refused to bother about what didn’t interest him. He was the writer who, when asked by the interviewer about the influence of Borges, said: ‘Who’s Borges?’ New music, a new generation’s language, was not what he wanted. ‘My mind has stopped at 1945, like some cheap wartime clock,’ he told Kingsley Amis. In defiance of realism’s bad reputation, he continued to write about the recognizable human condition. ‘I’m not interested in things that aren’t true.’ But with this marvellous talent for the clearest possible everydayness he combined the torment of the romantic conscience and, however embarrassing it might be, the romantic vision. In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ he is forced to admit—though not until the train is nearly into London—that the absurd honeymoon couples, and not himself, are the source of fertility and future change. The ‘success or failure of the poem [when read aloud] depends on whether it gets off the ground on the last two lines,’ he explains to Anthony Thwaite in 1959.
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