Such darling dodos, and other stories

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Wilson returned to the Museum after the end of the war, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life. Years later their life together was sympathetically portrayed in the BBC2 film "Angus and Tony" (1984), directed by Jonathan Gili. It was one of the first depictions of the life of a gay couple on British television. [ citation needed] He felt dreadfully lonely, so lonely that he began to cry. He told himself that this sense of solitude would pass with time, but in his heart he knew that this was not true. He might be free in little things, but in essentials she had tied him to her and now she had left him for ever. She had had the last word in the matter as usual. ‘My poor boy will be lonely,’ she had said. She was dead right. Faber Finds are reissuing these original selections. Angus Wilson made his initial reputation by his short stories, The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos being his first two published books, appearing in 1949 and 1950 respectively. When reviewing Such Darling Dodos C. P. Snow perceptively wrote, 'Part-bizarre, part-savage and part-maudlin, there is nothing much like it on the contemporary scene.

If they were muddled, however, it was not a little because their prophets had been muddled also. Anti-Victorianism had been intended as a straight from the shoulder tidy-up of a muddled, blinkered world; but if we return to its gospels — to Shaw and Wells, Forster, Douglas, and the Maugham of Of Human Bondage, to name only those who owed debts to Samuel Butler — we shall find often brute force muddled up with freedom, class prejudices accepted as honesty, optimistic generalization masking despair, and personal quirks generalized into universal dogmas. To say all this is not to deny their achievement — they were one and all brilliant demolition men, skilled parricides — where the buildings were ratinfested and had stood too long, where the fathers were corrupted and ripe for death. Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, vol. 2, R. Reginald, Mary A. Burgess, Douglas Menville, 1979, pg 1130 However, if one could not be a Breton fisherman, but had unfortunately been born a middleclass young man dependent upon one’s parents, the most important thing was to have some private means. Without them one would have to obey the father’s will or, unsuited by a classical education to perform any craft, one would be forced into what we now call “the white-collar class” — to be a shop assistant or a clerk. How dreadful was the life of shop assistants Maugham shows in Philip’s most agonizing shame in the whole of Of Human Bondage. How contemptible was a clerk and his genteel aspirations Forster suggests in the character of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End. There is a strange combination of realism and snobbery about all this; for distasteful as this emphasis on dividends may be as a basis for the great truth of progress, it is a truer estimation of money power than many later progressives have allowed themselves. Sometimes the effect is too mad to be pleasant, sometimes most moving; no one could deny Mr Wilson's gift.'As Margaret Drabble points out in her biography of Angus Wilson (to be reissued in Faber Finds) his stories were in their own way to be as iconoclastic and irreverent as John Osborne's plays were to be. Wilson worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk. [ citation needed]If his homosexual tendencies alone explained this, we could recognize the cause and pass on; but it is impossible not to think that the freedom for which Butler fought was in any case a selfcentered and isolated one. In his own life he paid dearly for any emotional attachments he formed to men, and he got out of Miss Savage’s emotional attachment to him with a deserved bad conscience. The truth is, I think, that Butler’s fight against his parents was logically more than just parricide: it was a denial of the family as a unit at all. The family for Butler was the essence of the Victorian prison house. Capitulation to family life was the end of Butlerian freedom; only perhaps a marriage like Shaw’s, which brought one solid dividends, would really win Butler’s approval. Wilson’s novels, by contrast, deal with the courage needed for the simple day-to-day task of living. He started writing after a wartime breakdown brought on by the strain of working at Bletchley Park, and his best novels concern people whose lives also collapse so that they have to re-invent themselves. This ordinary courage he exemplified himself, as a writer.

Angus’s sympathetic ability to inhabit female characters was impressive. Tolstoy notably succeeded with Anna Karenina – but how many other male novelists really manage it? The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) is a moving account of the life of Meg Eliot after her husband is suddenly gunned down in an Asian airport. ‘Mrs Eliot, c’est moi,’ Angus would announce to friends, as Flaubert also said of Emma Bovary. Into her he put his own strengths and weaknesses, a depressive with a strong sense of literary tradition and a sense of humour. Smith, Michael (2000). The Emperor's Codes: Bletchley Park and the breaking of Japan's secret ciphers. London: Bantam Press. p. 210. ISBN 0593-046412. They were not intellectual, as a rule, and certainly not avant-garde. The womenfolk probably read the novels of Virginia Woolf, but the cult of sensitivity and all that is now classed under the vague name “Bloomsbury” would have seemed a little anemic to them. The men might perhaps have read a novel of D. H. Lawrence but certainly without comprehending the telling indictment of the age which we now see in his work. Experimentalism in the arts — abstract painting, the aestheticism of the Sitwells and the Russian Ballet, stream of consciousness and Joyce — all these were outside, not perhaps their knowledge, but their interest, although of course they would have disliked the philistine attitude of Punch toward such things, because they believed above all in being tolerant and broad-minded. a b c "Wilson, Sir Angus (Frank Johnstone), (11 Aug. 1913–31 May 1991), author; Professor of English Literature, University of East Anglia, 1966–78, then Emeritus". WHO'S WHO & WHO WAS WHO. 2007. doi: 10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u176296. ISBN 978-0-19-954089-1 . Retrieved 15 April 2021.

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When reviewing Such Darling Dodos C. P. Snow perceptively wrote, 'Part-bizarre, part-savage and part-maudlin, there is nothing much like it on the contemporary scene. It is rather as though a man of acute sensibility felt left out of the human party, and was surveying it, half-enviously, half-contemptuously, from the corner of the room, determined to strip-off the comfortable pretences and show that this party is pretty horrifying after all ... Sometimes the effect is too mad to be pleasant, sometimes most moving; no one could deny Mr Wilson's gift.' Twenty-eight years ago this month, BBC's Newsnight offered its audience a bona fide literary sensation. So inimical to him had conditions in Thatcher's Britain now become, it declared, that one of our greatest living novelists had opted for self-imposed exile. There followed an extended camera-shot of Sir Angus Wilson – damson-faced, snow-haired and looking as if he had enjoyed quite a decent lunch – gravely descending the front steps of the Athenaeum to inform the waiting interviewer that he had had enough. He was insufficiently appreciated. He had always loved France, and the French had a greater respect for writers than the benighted English. He would go, in the words of his loyal biographer, Margaret Drabble, "where he was wanted". Meanwhile, there was another problem coming to dominate considerations of Wilson's work – even the early books – which lies, ironically, in the very qualities for which, at the time of publication, they were most praised. This is the sheer efflorescence of their social detail, a determination to pin the characters down by way of supporting illustration that sometimes renders them stone dead, like a lepidopterist's butterflies pinned to a display board. So Priscilla in "Such Darling Dodos" is said to be dominated by pathos: "it had led her into Swaraj and Public Assistance Committees; into Basque relief and child psychiatry clinics … it fixed her emotionally as a child playing dolls' hospitals." One can applaud the psychology, while wondering whether, 60 years later, this torrent of minutiae doesn't require footnotes. The greatest father-hater, and in his own tenacious, obsessive way the most skilled demolisher of the great Victorian Bastille, was Samuel Butler. An examination of his curious personality and of the row of uneven, brilliant, and boring books he wrote explains much of the success and insufficiency of And-Victorianism. Stape, John Henry and Anne N. Thomas. Angus Wilson: A Bibliography 1947–1987. London & New York: Mansell Publishing, 1988. ISBN 0-7201-1872-7.