The fiction of Angus Wilson provides evidence for the great changes that have taken place in the thinking of liberal humanists during the last hundred years. In fact George Eliot would have found him a very odd humanist indeed. Particularly in the early short stories, his attitude towards human life appears to be one of disgust. There is a revulsion from the body in all his writing, and this saps his work of full vitality. For example, in "Union Reunion" he dwells upon the fat, bloated flesh of the whites in South Africa. The women are like "so many brightly painted barrels," and their eating dinner is "a deliberate locust-like advance that finally left the table a battlefield of picked bones, broken shells, dry skins and seeds." Minnie's once attractive small hands and feet now only look absurd on her mountainous body, and her attempts at foot-play under the table with her old admirer, Harry, make her an object of contempt. This kind of physical nausea occurs repeatedly. Trevor squeezing blackheads from his nose in "The Wrong Set," the young technician spitting fragments of potato as he talks to his girl friend in "Christmas Day in the Workhouse," or Tom Pirie spitting on Meg's arm as they chat together in The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, are all typical examples. The frequency with which such details occur suggests a squeamish refinement in Wilson. It is significant that in his stories there are many women, such as Mrs. Carrington in "Mother's Sense of Fun," who find the physical side of marriage repulsive.

This disgust is not only hardly suitable for a humanist, but also seriously affects Wilson's values. A. O. J. Cockshut has argued in a most intelligent essay [in Essays in Criticism, Vol. IX, 1959] that Wilson's "fiercest moral condemnations are mingled with aesthetic and intellectual distaste; we cannot tell where one begins and another ends." Cockshut uses Celia Craddock in Hemlock and After as an example, blamed in the same way for being a half-baked intellectual as she is for being selfish. And in the depiction of Minnie in "Union Reunion" the physically and the morally repellent are curiously muddled together. In his early work Wilson is fighting against an emotional conviction that human beings, with a few rare exceptions, are in every way contemptible, and moral action useless. Rage at human inadequacy pervades his early writing, and his values are confused by the passionate intensity of this feeling. At times he is very close to complete despair.

Living in the post-1945 world, Wilson has lost much of Forster's assurance, and this appears most clearly in his irony. Where Forster is evasive, Wilson is savage and uncompromising. His short stories are peopled by lonely hypocrites, who try desperately to hide from themselves their own futility. He is particularly successful in caricaturing middle-class affectation, and in his treatment of this expresses fundamental attitudes to character which are hard to square with his humanism. He repeatedly depicts personality as a mask, a cover for either deep-seated insecurity or egotism. His novels parade before us the self-righteous, the smugly conventional, the followers of cliques, in a great tableau of debased humanity.

Language itself among the middle classes has become a means of evading reality. With delightful irony, Wilson captures the exact intonations of that middle-class drawl which places other people at a distance and leaves the speaker in a superior, detached position. In "Raspberry Jam" Grace recounts the sins of the Miss Swindales, but does nothing to remove her child from their influence: "You've heard the squalid story about young Tony Calkett, haven't you? My dear, he went round there to fix the lights and apparently Dolly invited him up to her bedroom to have a cherry brandy of all things and made the most unfortunate proposals."

This type of speech makes the experience of others a curiosity for drawing-room gossip; it is a game played by the middle classes to avoid recognition of the real pain and evil that surrounds them. And this evasive use of words is also brilliantly caught in the conversation of Dr. Early, in "Learning's Little Tribute," who speaks of his daughters as "his girlies," and "always in so arch a manner that one might have fancied him master of a seraglio."

More important, Wilson suggests that a large part of human personality is built upon this false assumption of rôles. Many of his characters are mere ragbags of pretence and affectation; they have no unique individuality but have become merely a series of poses. This frightening sense that personality is fashioned entirely by pretence is shown vividly in a story such as "What Do Hippos Eat?" Greta is a typical Wilson figure, whose real identity has become lost in a series of social gestures. Wilson describes ironically her "virtues as a real good pal; her Dead End Kid appeal that went through the heart." She has created this shadowy conventional figure in order to get on with other people. Her reward is the attention of Maurice, a broken-down gentleman who only wants her money and nearly murders her as they watch the hippos at the zoo. The scene is treated in a mood of farce, and the actions of such humans appear suited only to this medium.

Wilson's irony is at its most severe in condemning these false substitutes for real living. In "A Flat Country Christmas" Carola likes the thought that she is her husband's "funny little mouse." And at the Christmas gathering in this story, each character can be merry only when he assumes his "party" face. Eric tries to bridge the underlying conflicts by being "at the top of his Max Miller form." And this false gaiety is typical of all the ghastly parties to which Wilson's characters submit themselves. In "Saturnalia," "Christmas Day in the Workhouse," or "Totentanz," the party atmosphere shows in extreme form all that is meaningless in the day-to-day lives of the participants. The party masks and games are not the exceptions, but in their fantasies an expression of the poses typical of human relations.

Evasion is seen again among the Cockshuts in "Crazy Crowd," whose eccentric manners are a great game by which they hide from themselves their own egotism; and in "A Visit in Bad Taste" a pair of humanists, intelligent and cultured, cannot stretch their tolerance sufficiently far to accept into their home the homosexual relation just out of prison. It is interesting that the sin most talked about in these stories is self-pity. This blurs the honest acceptance of reality which is Wilson's own ideal.

This unmasking process is expressed by the prevailing ironic tone. In common with many other post-war novelists, Wilson often writes in a flat, banal manner which contrasts sharply with the forced gaiety or supposedly deep emotions of the characters being described. A good example is the account of the New Year's dance in "Saturnalia": "The pretty waitress Gloria had gone very gay. Take it away' she cried to the band. Her shoulder strap was slipping and a bit of hair kept flopping in her eyes. It was difficult to snap your fingers when your head was going round. She and young Tom the porter were dancing real palais de danse and 'Send me, darling, send me' she cried." Here the simple sentences act as a means of deflation. This is a style deliberately made bare of all emotional overtones. Its casual ordinariness works in opposition to the jargon of Gloria, forcing home the triviality of her feelings. There is no emphasis, for nothing is worthy of emphasis here. This passage makes an interesting comparison with E. M. Forster's portrayal of Kingcroft in Where Angels Fear to Tread. Forster still delights in the absurdity of his comic creations; he is still in sympathy with the English comic tradition which can laugh at fools because they are the exception from the norm, and he is not altogether aware of the new notes of uncertainty that are creeping into his style. Angus Wilson does not suffer his fools gladly. He is depressed by their futility and feels only the pathos of their condition.

In the short stories in The Wrong Set (1949) the deliberately unpretentious style often debases all action to a meaningless animal-like series of gestures: "Then he sat in his pants, suspenders, and socks squeezing blackheads from his nose in front of a mirror. All this time they kept on rowing. At last Vi cried out 'All right, all right, Trevor Cawston, but I'm still going.' 'O.K.' said Trevor, 'how's about a nice little loving?' So then they broke into the old routine." And "Significant Experience" is a sort of parable to illustrate what so-called "significant" experiences are made up of in reality. The pompous Loveridge talks romantically about the value for a young man of an affair with a mature woman. Jeremy remembers the actuality of his summer affair with Prue—her neuroses, her temper, her sexual promiscuity, his own inadequacy. And Wilson's style deflates the oldest source of romantic joy. Even when Jeremy and Prue are happy together, the style makes their love appear a pretence: "Their fingers entwined more closely. It was such a happy evening." There are times when for Wilson all happiness is illusion; depression is the natural state for the humanist of our times.

It would be wrong to say that Wilson's attitude is wholly contemptuous, for there is compassion in his treatment of these lost people. Also, he feels that loneliness, and its compensatory illusions, are in part a necessary result of modern conditions. His people are always a prey to anxiety, psychological breakdown, even lunacy. The reasons for this are often obvious. In the aftermath of war his stories are full of girls and widows whose men have been killed, of refugees and people who can never completely suppress their fear of a nuclear cataclysm. . . .

For Wilson, pessimism is realistic and self-confidence a delusion. The power of evil now invades every corner of the humanist world, and Wilson's imagination is obsessed by breakdown and violence. The burden of modern conditions makes his characters easily irritated and a prey to moods. Their feelings shift rapidly from anger to affection, as with people who live under stress. The violence that threatens in the outside world is reflected in the characters themselves. There are constant outbreaks—the drunken scene at the end of "Fresh Air Fiend," for example, or Kennie striking the mad Colonel Lambourn in "A Bit Off the Map." Much of the writing conveys a feeling that civilized conduct is an uneasy pose above a threatening abyss. In "What Do Hippos Eat?" the animals are part of the destructive element that human beings try to forget. The hippopotamus pool is slimy and smells abominably: "Every now and again the huge black forms would roll over, displacing ripples of brown, foam-flecked water, and malevolent eyes on the end of stalks would appear above the surface for a moment." This horror is ever present in the stories, a vision of meaningless evil that haunts the imagination of the sensitive characters and at times imposes itself as the only possible view of reality on this planet.

In the short story, "The Wrong Set," and in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, there are hints that an honest vitality still exists among the working classes, but no effort is made to study such people in detail. Wilson's imagination is taken up by the dead lives of the middle classes. On the one hand there are characters such as Vi in "The Wrong Set" who, amidst night-club squalor, still believes she is carrying on a genteel tradition; on the other, there are characters in "A Flat Country Christmas" who have deliberately emancipated themselves from their conventional backgrounds. Carola, Ray, and Sheila have left behind them various set types of upbringing—in a Baptist family, the working classes, and rich Guildford business society respectively; but they are left without any way of life at all in the wilderness of a new housing estate. The liberal ideal of freedom, examined so relentlessly by Henry James, brings these characters to complete emptiness. On their way to the party Carola and Ray can see the by-pass, "its white concrete line of shops shining in the dying light—the snack bar, the Barclay's bank, the utility furniture shop, Madame Yvonne's beauty parlour"; the bareness of this scene is a comment on their romantic illusions. Similarly in "Higher Standards," Elsie, the school-teacher, has been educated out of her class. She is unmarried, longing for the days before her scholarship to the "County" cut her off from the village community. Her escape from the dull village routine has brought her only isolation and neurosis. Wilson is more conscious of the psychological problems arising out of the education of the working classes than of the benefits in a widening of cultural horizons. Progress through education, the ideal held so fervently by many Victorian humanists, for Wilson has problems of its own and offers no final solutions.

These violent changes in class structure, the breakdown of traditional beliefs, and the threat of war have brought other writers to complete abandonment of humanist beliefs. Wilson courageously fights against his own despair and tries to rebuild the broken fragments of optimistic humanism. As he develops, he becomes more compassionate towards his misfits and failures. But he insists that humanists must take into account the facts of modern life, the suffering, the power of evil, and the failure of most human aspirations. He tries to be completely honest and he rejects the illusions which seduced Forster. He believes that human beings must accept their essential loneliness. No personal relationship, not even marriage, can overcome separateness. The whole of middle-class convention is a structure built to avoid these facts; and for Wilson Christian idealism is a form of sentimental evasion.

In many stories Wilson insists that human life does not permit any perfect solutions, and he often satirizes misguided enthusiasts who try to sort out a tangled human situation. In "Fresh Air Fiend" Miss Eccles visits the Searles in the hope of straightening out their broken marriage and of infusing Professor Searle with the energy needed to start his long-delayed study of Mary Shelley. She believes in absolute sincerity, and by honest outspokenness hopes to let fresh air into the poisoned atmosphere. But the result is a complete breakdown in Professor Searle. We must live with the muddle of our private miseries and accept inadequacy as the common lot. This explains an apparent ambiguity in Wilson's treatment of the possessive mother. He often writes of lonely children, dominated by a mother, as with the Middletons in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes', but in "Mother's Sense of Fun" and "A Sad Fall" he brings out the irony of the situation. To love is to make demands on another person, to possess, and often it is better to accept such servitude than to be free. So after the death of his mother, which he welcomes with relief, Donald in "Mother's Sense of Fun" is suddenly overwhelmed by loneliness. And in "A Sad Fall" Mrs. Tanner wants to love without "holding," but knows this is almost impossible. Freedom, travelling light, is no easy solution for Wilson as it is for Forster.

These ironies and ambiguities are most clearly seen in the controversial story "Raspberry Jam." The two old women, Dolly and Marian, are the only ones who care for the boy, Johnnie, entering into his fantasy world and trying to give him the affection denied to him by his parents. Also they are repeatedly concerning themselves with lost causes, defending the broken and the worn-out with true kindness. But both are mad, Dolly obsessed by sex and Marian by the reputation of her father. The implication, repeated in so many stories, is that to live, to feel deeply and realistically about the human condition, is to face the danger of breakdown and perhaps lunacy. And so the two old ladies have taken to drink, and Wilson makes no concessions to sentimentality. They have invited Johnnie to tea but have been drunk for so many days that the raspberries have been eaten by the birds: "The awful malignity of this chance event took some time to pierce through the fuddled brains of the two ladies, as they stood there grotesque and obscene in their staring pink and clashing red, with their heavy pouchy faces and bloodshot eyes showing up in the hard, clear light of the sun." With insane delight in revenge, they let Johnnie watch them as they put out the eyes of a bird. This ending is not just a sensational trick. The most sympathetic of the adults in this story have been driven by their neuroses into the most horrible act of cruelty. Wilson deliberately shocks the reader to force home the danger of the sentimental, idealistic view of human goodness. The humanist must act in this type of muddled situation, and he can never escape into a world of clear-cut decisions and moral absolutes.

Although Wilson uses all his intelligence to find new ways of satisfying conduct for the humanist, he often suggests that true humanism is dying, its representatives growing old and being replaced by a younger generation whose values he deplores. In "Realpolitik" Sir Harold, the "last of the humanists," has been replaced at the Art Gallery by John Hobday, the ruthless careerist; and a comparable change is the theme of one of the most successful satires, "Such Darling Dodos." Priscilla and Robin are typical left-wing intellectuals who have been involved in all the political campaigns of the 'thirties. Wilson laughs at their naïve idealism, at the ugly fashions of Priscilla, and their curiously typical behaviour; but these two did care for people, and their pathetic idealism contrasts with the dead conservatism of the modern generation. Michael, the undergraduate, does not find chapel a bore; Harriet believes responsibility is what matters in India, not freedom, and that the abolition of the death penalty is an easy luxury in the face of social duty. Priscilla's cousin Tony, who is conservative, Roman Catholic, and reactionary, feels for the first time very much at home with young people. This arraignment of the new post-war generation is repeated in the portrayal of Miss Eccles in "Fresh Air Fiend," of Maurice in "After the Show," and of John Appleby in "A Sad Fall." Appleby takes a statistical view of people; for him it does not matter if Roger dies after his fall from the roof, for there are millions more like him. Wilson still cares above all for the individual case, and in "Ten Minutes to Twelve" he sums up this feeling that a new authoritarianism is perverting modern youth. The old man, Lord Peacehaven, has lived in the Victorian tradition of individual enterprise, a great man whose energetic selfconfidence hid an essential fear and anxiety and whose career ended in madness: ". . . their certainty was so limited. . . . There was only a bottomless pit beneath their strength of will." But the young man, Geoff, is like his grandfather. "Why shouldn't people be ordered about he says, "if they get in the way and don't pull their weight. What's the good of being in charge if you don't give orders." With a few exceptions, the younger generation are like James and Sonia in Hemlock and After, with no sense of the danger of their own assertive wills. The humanists in the novels—Bernard Sands, Gerald Middleton, Meg Eliot, and David Parker—are all older people, fighting to keep alive their values in a society increasingly unsympathetic. Whether Wilson is right to think that humanist values are in decline in England can only be a matter for conjecture and the comparison of personal impressions; but it is worthy of note that his depression appears to be characteristic of those artists whose early manhood was spent in the atmosphere of the last war. Such writers usually find difficulty in understanding those whose memories are not crammed with scenes of violence and killing.