Angus Wilson (Magill Book Reviews)

The product of five years of meticulous and exhaustive research, novelist Margaret Drabble’s biography may help restore the once-high reputation of Angus Wilson. This volume is in part a history of gay liberation. Wilson made no secret of his homosexuality. Yet Drabble can write: “Coming out was not easy [for him].” By demonstrating this truth, Drabble has conveyed the courage of one who dared from the start to challenge the sexual taboos of his native England. Wilson discovered, as Somerset Maugham had before him, that writing about disturbing matters enables the writer to deal with them.

Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson was born in August, 1913, in Sussex. His parents were in early middle age when he was born, the youngest of six brothers. His mother, a “sad-eyed, embittered, courageous but snobbish woman,” typical of those displaced home colonials his fiction would bring to life, died during Angus’ third year at Westminster. It was an inheritance from her that enabled Angus to attend Oxford, the first of his family to go to university. Oxford widened his social framework and developed his sympathy for ordinary people which would surface thirty years later in his fifth novel, LATE CALL (1964), in which his sixty-four-year-old heroine would relive in flashback the traumas of Angus’ own wartime crackups. The notion of a creative breakdown is at the core of his writings. “Beneath the satire, the wit, the brilliant parodies and social observation lies a sense of the self in search of the self.”

Angus was forty years old when his controversial first novel, HEMLOCK AND AFTER (1952) was published. Written fifteen years before British law decriminalized homosexual relations between consenting adults, the book was one of the first to treat candidly sexual matters that were beyond the law. Once Angus retired from the British Museum in 1955, he was able to devote himself wholly to fiction. ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES (1956) and THE MIDDLE AGE OF MRS. ELIOT (1958) made him famous—and notorious. In his fifties, Angus Wilson became a flourishing academic industry on both sides of the Atlantic. He was one of the few English literary visitors who genuinely liked America and Americans. He made friends everywhere but the only one that really counted was his fifty-year companionship with Anthony (Tony) Garrett which made the living of his life possible.

Sources for Further Study

Contemporary Review. CCLXVII, August, 1995, p. 108.

The Economist. CCCXXXV, June 17, 1995, p. 86.

London Review of Books. XVII, June 8, 1995, p. 3.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. June 9, 1996, p. 3.

New Statesman and Society. VIII, May 26, 1995, p. 24.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, August 11, 1996, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, March 4, 1996, p. 42.

The Spectator. CCLXXIV, May 27, 1995, p. 38.

The Times Literary Supplement. June 9, 1995, p. 24.

The Wall Street Journal. May 14, 1996, p. A18.