A number of stories published in the 1950s and excluded from Angus Wilson's three short-story collections throw considerable light on the discovery and development of his distinctive voice and on his exploration of the genre. These early stories published in London newspapers, in periodicals specializing in short fiction, and in thematic anthologies, though they share to a certain extent the tone and themes of those collected in The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950), belong neither in those books nor in A Bit off the Map (1957), despite their common focus on displacement, self-deception, and irresponsible innocence. While they differ from the first collections partly in scale, their exclusion from A Bit off the Map can be accounted for by that collection's self-conscious attempt at mid-Fifties topicality.

Two later stories—a self-sustained fragment from an abandoned novel, "My Husband Is Right," published in 1961 in an issue of The Texas Quarterly devoted to contemporary British writing, and a Christmas story, "The Eyes of the Peacock," commissioned by the Sunday Times and published in 1975—largely serve a preparatory function, rehearsing ideas given full-scale treatment in novels. "My Husband Is Right" anticipates some of the thematic interests of No Laughing Matter (1967), and "The Eyes of the Peacock" contains in embryo the characters and principal motifs of Setting the World on Fire (1980). The early stories and the later ones demonstrate a continuity of interest and treatment, confirming Wilson's obsession with the wellsprings of his imagination in his childhood and adolescence and reiterating his fascination with certain human types.

Although the recovery of the stories published in the 1950s allows for a more complete view of Wilson's development as a writer, a reading of them does not encourage a revaluation of his contribution to the short story, nor do the stories depart radically either in method or concern from his other works of the 1950s: penetrating psychological insight abets a commitment to humane values and sharp social observation establishes and provides a context for character. And as do a number of the stories collected in The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos, these fictionalize aspects of Wilson's own life and experiences. Rodney in "Aunt Cora" and Julia in "The Men with Bowler Hats" recall the emotional tensions and economic realities of Wilson's fraught and insecure childhood as do the tensions developed in "Aunt Mathilde's Drawings" and "Her Ship Came Home." "Who for Such Dainties?" mocks the intellectual cocktail-party set that lionized Wilson after the immediate success of The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos. And while superficially more distanced from his own experience, "Unwanted Heroine" and "An Elephant Never Forgets" evoke the psychology and behavior of highly self-conscious but painfully self-deceived women—a Wilson forte—characters all in some way recalling his mother, whose egotistic self-sacrifice he presents full-length in No Laughing Matter (1967). Loneliness, alienation, and brutality, themes that dominate Wilson's early work, are forcefully developed in "Animals or Human Beings" and "Mrs. Peckover's Sky ..., " stories that share a pattern whereby fascination becomes disillusion and, ultimately, rejection.

In short, the uncollected stories of the 1950s point to positions Wilson later elaborated in The Wild Garden, the most extended exegesis of his writings: that his life, transformed, forms the basis of his art, and, indeed, in some ways gives it shape and coherence, and since life and art are for the artist inseparable, that criticism of a writer's work must take into account a writer's biography, a position elaborated in his critical works on Zola, Dickens, and Kipling. At the same time, as, in the main, a realist, Wilson attempts to convince his reader of the validity of a presented world. The dual necessity of personal revelation, however disguised or distanced, conjoined with an engagement of the "actual" world (re-created and transformed by the imagination) creates a tension that informs and animates much of Wilson's early work, giving it its "period" vividness as well as its more enduring significance as an exploration of the human—and humanist—dilemma.

Wilson's concern with self combined with its apparent contradiction—a fascination with others—is most directly evidenced in "Aunt Cora," "The Men with Bowler Hats," and "Mrs. Peckover's Sky ..., " stories patently autobiographical in inspiration. More a character sketch than a story, "Aunt Cora" (1950) presents a vivid recollection of an eccentric old woman through the sympathetic eyes of her "highly strung" young nephew. An Edwardian figure in manner and dress, and immensely rich, Aunt Cora with "her rose-decked picture hats, her hour-glass figure and her lace parasols" is an exotic visitor to the boy's "quiet Weybridge home." The figure of family legend—an invented operatic career explains her "retinue of young tenors and teachers of the tango"—in the mid-1920s she drops young men to take up spiritualism, the new but enduring interest about which the sketch's two incidents revolve. An afternoon luncheon party "on a rather hot June afternoon in 1933" concludes with a search for her valuable ruby ring spirited away by "malign influences," which, to the embarrassment of Rodney's parents, are found to be incarnated by Lady Grackle, a fellow guest in whose handbag the ring is found.

The second major incident—Rodney's visit to her flat at age fifteen, a visit that consists largely of "an exhausting afternoon of table turning, clairvoyance and every other psychic performance in which her histrionic powers could shine"—plays up her delicate sense of manners. He fails to realize that her knock upon a door as they leave the parlor for tea in the library, far from being yet another psychic exhibition, primly indicates the room where he should "wash his hands." And her legacy to him recalls his indiscretion: abroad in the forces when she dies, he inherits an Edwardian etiquette book with the chapter "How to Enter and Leave the Room" carefully marked.

Cora's is a kind of fantasy world carefully created and maintained as a means of escaping harsh and insistent reality, and while her "period" quality makes her an exotic—almost, perhaps, a grotesque—it engenders the boy's affectionate attitude to her. Rodney, however, already showing signs of a greater commitment to the actual world, feels considerably less positive about her psychic explorations, activities that, nonetheless, ally her to the theatrical and dramatic and represent an intrusion of the imagination (albeit not of the highest kind) into his everyday existence. Cora as a neurotic type symbolizes the dangers of imaginative engagement with its invitation to escapism, and Rodney's affectionate but ultimately distanced reaction to her signifies his ability to discern the imagination as a potentially devouring force. The story, then, dramatizes the artist's dual and simultaneous attraction to the inner and outer worlds, cautioning that total engagement in either negates the possibility of creating art.

As social comment, "Aunt Cora" explores the collision between the manners and morals of distinct historical moments. Cora the Edwardian survives to see her values and habits superseded by another, less delicate age, maintaining them in the face of change and even attempting their perpetuation by the symbolic legacy she leaves her nephew. In a way, the story metaphorically summarizes the situation of postwar England not yet fully convinced of the profound alteration of its social landscape, attempting to ward off the consequences of change by repeating fixed habits that had lost their force and significance (much as Wilson's own parents, living beyond their needs and means, attempted to maintain a facade of "normality" in the face of declining social status and income).

Although "Aunt Cora" lacks the polish of the best of Wilson's early work, it provides a rare and valuable glimpse of his fictional apprenticeship, allowing the sympathetic reader to observe more directly than in Wilson's mature writings the transformation of autobiography into art. The story plays an obvious role as apprentice work exorcising familial ghosts that might have hindered the development of Wilson's craft and imagination. The title character, in later guises the Miss Rickard of No Laughing Matter and Great-aunt Cara of "The Eyes of the Peacock," apparently conflates aspects of his own "very histrionic" mother with a more distant relation by marriage who as her late husband's parrot sat upon her shoulder claimed it embodied his departed spirit [Angus Wilson, The Wild Garden]. The story may also recollect the two friends who served as sources for the Misses Swindale of "Raspberry Jam," lonely women who befriended a lonely boy and in turn received his sympathetic understanding, though the boy in question was not Wilson himself but one of his brothers. However, the depiction of Rodney (the name is also used in "Necessity's Child," an acknowledged self-portrait) clearly resumes autobiographical elements, and the figure of the lonely and sensitive individual who escapes a banal environment by a fantasizing capacity recurs throughout Wilson's fiction.

The long story "An Elephant Never Forgets" (1951) focuses sharply on conflict, loneliness, egotism, and false pretenses. The friendship between Mildred Vereker, the "uncrowned queen" of a seaside resort town, and the newcomer Delice, the title's "elephant" who dabbles in clairvoyance but whose actual stock-in-trade lies in overblown emotionalism and a self-consciously created "exotic" atmosphere, is observed by Constance, an old friend of Mildred's just returned from a two-year absence abroad. Set in 1921 with a sequel in 1926, the story allows Wilson to evoke 1920s mores and fashions through the eyes of a waspish middle-aged woman, a voice he uses to great comic and ironic effect in For Whom the Cloche Tolls (1952).

The story is essentially a character study and a drama of types: the observant Constance is at times subtly undercut by her own society voice; Delice serves as a kind of dry run for the monstrous egotism and lack of self-awareness of Inge in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes; Mildred takes on the role of queen bee in provincial society; and her son Reggie, the lady's man on the make, even succumbs briefly to Delice's faded charms (though he calls her "Jumbo" behind her ample back). Detailed description abets and sometimes substitutes for characterization:

Her rather stoutly-built but erect figure swam towards me through the sea of occasional tables, grand pianos, curio cases, Japanese screens, bowls of sweet peas and pots of hydrangeas that still marked her drawing room as a backwater of the Edwardian era. She was always well dressed but, after the more modish Parisian chic, her tight-skirted cornflower blue shantung coat and skirt with its rows of large buttons at the sides and the large tongued, buckled, white linen shoes, though highly suitable for the hot weather, carried a suggestion of a war-time fashion that was now well on the way out.

The story's central interest lies in detailing Delice's decline and fall; Mildred's eyes are gradually opened, Delice becomes increasingly possessive and extravagant (there is a slight suggestion of lesbianism), Reggie and Constance fail to take to Mildred's new acquisition, and finally Delice is expelled from Seastone society. Five years later she takes her revenge as she arrives—unexpectedly and uninvited—at a pre-matinee luncheon attended by Reggie's fiancée and her parents—Sir Eric and Lady Stetson—and, of course, Constance. Delice is a triumph of vulgarity, patronizing everyone, and pretending to great intimacy with the Verekers. In short, the moral in the story's title becomes a reality.

"An Elephant Never Forgets" succeeds as a nuanced rendering of a social world but fails to connect that world with larger issues so that the story remains only a clever character sketch of its arch and observant narrator and her circle, a study of sensibilities through the eyes of a limited narrator. The story's moral comment is muted: such types call down their own condemnation, but they are, after all, the "darling dodos" that Wilson depicts with such force in the collection of that name.

The "darling dodo" theme also dominates two of Wilson's Evening Standard stories—"Aunt Mathilde's Drawings" (1952) and "Silent Pianist" (1952)—both of which focus on old women caught in harsh new realities. Aunt Mathilde, in her youth a famous French artist's model and mistress, lives now on her relatives' sufferance while her colorful past gives her a certain cachet as does the "portfolio of drawings done by the great painter" which "everyone agreed must be worth a very good deal." Living beyond their means, the Templetons, her long-suffering relations, seek a valuation only to learn that Aunt Mathilde's "engravings" prove to have been "a famous and good series in their day," but are not, in fact, worth very much. The story closes with an ironic twist as a neighbor robbed of her jewels becomes the object of Aunt Mathilde's contempt: "My dear," she said, "how stupid to have real jewels and furrs in the home. She should have lettle copies made," a comment that causes Mrs. Templeton "almost to hate her aunt."

The uncovering of deception forms the story's core as Wilson dissects familial relationships based on an absence of feeling and a lack of scruples. Again, the family is posited as a cruel and heartless social structure, a reaction, in part, against its sentimental treatment in much popular fiction. The Templetons and Aunt Mathilde are equally unsympathetic, and this minor story gives shape to an almost Balzacian vision of the predatory character of human relationships.

"Silent Pianist," like many of Wilson's stories, targets moral failure and self-deception as the out-of-date Mrs. Ramsay (a stab at Virginia Woolf, whose work Wilson then saw unsympathetically) attempts to maintain a vanished world by means of too much make-up and an overly dramatic manner. Lonely and desperate for attention, she tries first to interest the waitress in the "stuffy, beer-fumed saloon bar dining-room" where she takes her lunch and next seeks to engage in conversation Stephen, a man at the next table. Her false manner bores and slightly irritates him while she makes unoriginal observations on the food and the weather before finally proclaiming the negative effect television has had on the cinema. She herself had played the piano at the cinema before "those ugly harsh talkies" came along, she informs him, and in unself-conscious contradiction has to hurry along to an afternoon film—"It doesn't do to be late for the cinema, does it? Always such long queues."

The story has two targets: the "dodo" world Mrs. Ramsay lives in and the callous modern one that the waitress and Stephen inhabit. An early version of Rose Lorimer in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Mrs. Ramsay simultaneously invites sympathy and criticism in her preference for fantasy to reality. But the waitress and Stephen alike are victims of self-absorption, finally symbolizing its passive cruelty. Although principally the portrait of an old woman as self con-artist, the story's moral aim gives it more than simple period interest as Wilson's observant eye gleams with the satirist's intention.

The brief story "Who for Such Dainties?" (1952), also typical of Wilson's early work in its precise social observation and multilayered ironic treatment of manners, develops two characters—Harriet Mackenzie, a snob whose comeuppance provides the story's main action, and Maurice Neaves, "the greatest Shakespearean actor in England," himself a bit of a poseur. A third character, Pamela Vaughan, a "mountainous, pink blancmange-like woman, with her strident blue dress, purple hair and glittering bangles and brooches," author of a play about smuggling in eighteenth-century Truro, forms the pivot about which the minimal action and central irony turn.

The opening cocktail party, a device to establish mood and character, prepares for the principal incident—a disastrous lunch for Harriet at Pamela's flat. The final scene—a conversation between Harriet and Maurice about this luncheon—occurs "many weeks" later. The luncheon at Pamela's is characteristically detailed: the "good" sherry followed by a "good" borsch soup form the prelude to a Rumanian stew gone amiss: "Pamela's meat ration would not allow for more than lumps of fat in the stew, whilst the olives and plums had stuck to the saucepan and were burned." The dessert—stewed guavas served in treacle—irritates Harriet's teeth, which are "badly in need of stopping." The topic of conversation is, inevitably, Maurice Neaves, and Harriet, annoyed by the food and with her teeth on edge, in the end decides that "such a woman" should never be helped. In the final episode she maliciously serves up Maurice a description of that "terrible woman's" lunch, which in her version consists only of the borsch soup. And Maurice, surprised to hear of Harriet's ill-luck, for Pamela had treated him to "the most delicious of stews with all the produce of the East in it, and guavas, lovely guavas, cooked excellently in treacle," announces coolly that he is planning to produce Pamela's play, Cornish Cream, in the spring.

"Who for Such Dainties?" contains all the elements of a clever and well-told joke, but suffers from being overly concise. Wilson nonetheless manages, even in so confined a space, to depict convincingly the moral atmosphere of snide and overly self-concerned individuals. The deftly sketched characters, self-conscious surprise ending, and richly ironic title evidence the same thorough mastery of craft found in The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos. Although in either of these collections the story might appear slight, on its own it remains an amusing if barbed pleasantry. Typically, none of its characters escape criticism: Pamela, obviously on the make to advance her career, plays up both her guests; Harriet's thinly disguised social pretensions serve only to assuage a rather crude need for one-upmanship; and Maurice, the actor-manager, succumbs to Pamela's obvious flattery, a victim less of good food than of his own oversized ego. The self-deception Harriet and Maurice practice lays them open to Pamela's cynical machinations, and, although she perhaps deserves to succeed, the world in which she does is the unpleasant one delineated in Wilson's first two collections: that of a rationing Britain shaken by political and economic changes with their attendant social consequences.

Like "Who for Such Dainties?," "The Men with Bowler Hats" (1953) treats the dispossessed middle class and its compulsive need to maintain appearances, and, if possible, get ahead. The social setting, what Malcolm Bradbury has called "frayed-at-the-heels upper-middle class gentility" [Studies in Short Fiction III, No. 2, Winter, 1966], is, however, less important for its own sake than for the opportunity it provides Wilson to explore the antagonism between adult life—existence circumscribed by class, economic circumstances, and acute self-awareness—and the imaginative world, represented frequently in his fiction by children or the childlike. The story's protagonist, Julia, a girl of eight, whose contact with adult reality is fraught and only partially understood, unwittingly engineers yet another change of circumstances for herself and her affectionate but irresponsible father, Mr. Chalpers, another "Raffish Old Sport," a type patently based on Wilson's own father.

After a brief introduction of characters, the story focuses on a single dramatic situation: the new relationship between Mr. Chalpers and Mrs. Gregoby, an American widow with a nine-year-old son, Timmie. (Mrs. Gregoby, similarly a Wilson type, the "Widow Who Copes," has analogues in other stories—"Heart of Elm," "Sister Superior," "Christmas Day in the Workhouse"—as well as in The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot and Late Call; the American widow in England also appears in Hemlock and After and Setting the World on Fire, another evidence of Wilson's obsession with certain types, this possibly based on autobiographical sources.) Mr. Chalpers envisages how much this friendship will alter his economic condition, while Mrs. Gregoby, "Auntie Rosemary" to Julia, herself looks forward to an improved economic condition after marrying "Daddy." The classic misunderstanding, rendered with ironic as well as comic touches, moves forward to its logical and inevitable conclusion as the children's games reveal the truth. Timmie's dress-up imitation of "waiters and porters, and the ladies in curl-papers" turns out to be no less knowledgeable than Julia's, and when the adults discover their offspring "wearing black paper hats on their heads and pretending to drink tea out of mugs," the children's imaginative re-creation of an unpleasant reality occasions the now predictable end of the adult "friendship." On their way home Julia explains to Daddy that she and Timmie were playing "the men in bowler hats that come to people's houses" (bailiffs), adding that Timmie remembered them as having come four times to his. The whole adult fictional structure of mutual deception and self-deception collapses with her revelation, and the story ends with Mr. Chalpers informing the hotel porter that he will always be out when Mrs. Gregoby calls, an, of course, unnecessary precaution.

A transparent reworking of Wilson's own early life, like Julia's economically strained and passed in a string of London residential hotels, "The Men with Bowler Hats" is especially interesting for the unresolved conflict between pleasure and responsibility, a theme fully treated in Hemlock and After. The story's underlying structure sees adult concerns—sex, money, class—overturned by the children's "innocence." As Julia and Timmie's make-believe world forces the adults to confront their true situation, Mr. Chalpers' repeated confrontations with the bowler hat—on the one hand, the symbol of social respectability and financial success, and, on the other, of his personal failure—always result in the unmaking of his dreamworld.

The children's appropriation of this symbol is not only an accusation of failure aimed at the parental figures for their unwillingness to make a contract with the adult world, but also represents their premature adulthood. The knowing child corrupted by experience and the childlike or childish adult unable to disentangle himself from the charms of childhood are figures Wilson typically uses to focus on the commitment and responsibility necessary to a fully adult, moral life. But such maturity, he realizes, is achieved all too frequently at the expense of the imagination. (This tension, particularly acute for some artists, might be seen as coming to a head in Wilson's breakdown during the war, the result, in part, of his having to confront a situation in which his previous adaptation to life—a talent for mimicry and capacity for fantasy—proved wholly inadequate to the demands wartime realities placed on him.) As Julia and Timmie in "The Men with Bowler Hats" don adult clothing and ape adult manners, the imagination (the children's make-believe) reveals itself ironically as a means of apprehending reality (adult responsibility).

Aside from the reworking of autobiographical materials, the story's interest lies in its handling of point of view. Julia's naive language and limited apprehension, conveyed through a perfectly adapted free indirect style, expose the disharmony between the meaning of event and experience and her interpretation of them:

Once when they were living in very dingy rooms in a street near the Oval a lady came from the Ministry to ask why Julia was not at school. Daddy seemed very pleased to see her and laughed and talked a lot. When the lady went away she said she was so glad she had been able to help. But after she had gone Daddy was very angry and they had moved the next day.

The rendering of the child's limited cognitive and linguistic capacities, the means through which the narrative is filtered, heightens the reader's awareness of the gap between the storyteller's acute and full understanding of his tale and the deliberate naïveté of its telling. As in "Raspberry Jam" the story's center articulates a sympathetic and compassionate rendering of a child's vulnerability to the adult world. At the same time Wilson creates this sympathy, the comic treatment of the "misunderstanding" Mr. Chalpers and Mrs. Gregoby arrive at through their self-centeredness and cynicism—character traits that yield a limited apprehension of "the world" while nonetheless pretending to a masterful manipulation of it—modulates and perhaps even slightly undercuts it. The children's miming of a world beyond their apprehension mirrors the adults' insufficient knowledge of each other, and, ultimately, of themselves.

"Unwanted Heroine" (1954) depicts the slow coming-toawareness of the self-dramatizing Rosalind, who decides to put off marriage with James, a Cambridge history lecturer, for the sake of her stepmother, Anne. As it turns out, Anne has her own plans to marry Reggie Sinclair, who Rosalind sees as a "rich son of a rich business man . . . unbearably vulgar with his flashy good looks and sports cars." Finding her sacrifice unwanted, Rosalind does marry James, whose maturity helps her to see her selfpreoccupation, but the Joycean epiphany occurs only in the final scene as Anne's attitude and comments reveal that role-playing and egotism masquerading as concern for others have no purchase in adult life and relationships. Although the story hits on major Wilson preoccupations, the absence of distancing devices—the bittersweet humor and irony characteristic of his best work—tends to undermine its potential force. Rosalind's egotism and neurotic self-concern are depicted on too small a canvas, and the other characters, perhaps appropriately given her self-absorption, remain peripheral and sketched in. As so often with Wilson, the protagonist's moral education is worked out in the confrontation between the world of self (and selfishness) and the adult world of awareness and responsibility. The major metaphor of the story—the theater—that sustained illusion where self-gratification is essential for the actor—functions as a moral yardstick: Rosalind's heroics are not only unwanted by Anne but ought to be unwanted by Rosalind herself.

"Her Ship Came Home" (1955), another story featuring the tensions of childhood's partial awareness of adult realities, dissects a failed adult relationship. During his 1922 Christmas holidays spent with an aunt at the Osprey Court, a residential hotel "—"on the other side of the Park,'" the narrator is befriended by the Lestelles, a couple past their prime living in the hope that Mr. Lestelle's Uncle Ted in Australia will die so that they can inherit. In order to prick his wife's social pretensions and those of the Osprey Court set, Mr. Lestelle announces that their ship has come home: Uncle Ted has died. Later when Mr. Lestelle reveals that his announcement is a practical joke his wife spirits away the narrator's plasticine, making with it "a great wax doll" into whose head she sticks Mr. Lestelle's hair and through whose left side she has thrust "a long hat pin." Mr. Lestelle dies not from drink, as might be expected, but suddenly of a heart attack. By one of fate's ironies, Uncle Ted dies a week later. A mixture of naïveté and insight allows the narrator to conclude that, "In any case, Mrs. Lestelle's ship came home."

Although preoccupied with family and surrogate family relationships, the autobiographical elements of "Animals or Human Beings" (1955) are more distanced. Deliberately evoking generic conventions, the story fully realizes Wilson's argument that the modern horror story ought to abandon the practice of its nineteenth-century antecedents in placing horror in the unknown and find it instead in "the hysteria, the melancholy, the bitterness turned to malevolence that lie in our homes." Fräulein Partenkirchen, a familiar Wilson type, an outsider with a marginal existence in the great world and a tenuous hold on it—a kind of child—is sent to England by her family under the pretense of her acquiring English to obtain a secretarial post. But in reality they hope she finds herself a husband, and, in trust, they simply want "to be rid of her." Destined, then, to serve as housekeeper to a Miss Alice Ingelow living in the Welsh marshes, an animal lover quite "crazy" about the subject of vivisection, Fräulein Partenkirchen first encounters her new employer through Mrs. Gosport, a Jamesian intermediary who greets the German girl in London. Their conversation gives the story its title as Mrs. Gosport focuses on Miss Ingelow's partiality for animals in preference to "so much human material in need of help . . . ." On her arrival, the Fräulein is immediately introduced to Maria, delivered of a litter of which their father, Rufus, is "jealous." Jealousy and partiality for birds force "Auntie" to confine him to a cage, but to Fräulein Partenkirchen, who, she hopes, likes animals she praises his "beautiful coat," "fine tail," and "magnificent whiskers." Walking downstairs alone, the Fräulein leaves a note saying she does not like animals, and as she leaves the decaying house through its neglected garden hears "two loud shrieks" announcing Miss Ingelow's fate:

Upstairs, Miss Ingelow lay on the floor with her throat torn open. An enormous buck rat was hissing and scratching at the wires of a cage. It wanted to get its doe and devour the young ones. Soon it would have eaten all the raw meat that Miss Ingelow had brought with her; and as she had closed the door of the room behind her, there would be nothing then for Rufus to devour except Miss Ingelow herself. But the little bells she had put on his cage jangled merrily.

Returning home "more reserved and her skin more sallow," Fräulein Partenkirchen tells a story that, to her relatives' distress, even lessens her chances of making a match. Suggesting that "there was always the chance that she had seen ghosts," they attempt to console themselves with her "echt Deutsch quality uniting her with all the old Legenden and Märchen. But hardly if all she could see was ghost rats!"

The pattern of rejection followed by violence is common enough in Wilson's work, operating powerfully, for example, in "A Bit off the Map" and Hemlock and After, but the violence is displaced here: although the placid Fräulein takes no revenge herself upon her family for her isolation and abandonment, the story's action does so: the mother surrogate is devoured by her own obsession, a retribution for her neglect of human beings. (Indeed, the neglected garden—always a significant metaphor in Wilson—also serves to symbolize both her lack of interest in and alienation from a world outside her own.) The family complex is also embodied in the rat family with Rufus, the "jealous" father, wanting to eat his own young. At the end, the unlikelihood of the Fräulein's finding a husband may serve partly as her unstated refusal to participate in the brutalities of the family situation itself—although the penalty of refusing is that she, like Miss Ingelow, becomes an eccentric in her indifference as the older woman had by her cloying and ultimately self-destructive sentimentalism.

In common with "The Men with Bowler Hats," the story succeeds by its manipulation of a naive and not wholly aware heroine. And the management of tone, achieving emotional distance from character and event, reserves the ending's full horror for the reader alone. Even the reader's initial assumption that Rufus and Maria are cats is a narrative deception permitted because of the limitations of the Fräulein's interest in life: she chooses neither animals nor human beings, while Miss Ingelow's horrific death, obliterating the choice the title offers, forces the reader into emotional response—repulsion and disgust for the animals, and some measure of pity and sympathy, despite their irresponsible innocence, for the eccentric women. Wilson's stated aim in his early stories was to deprive both his characters and his readers of emotional response; here, without uniting brutality of action and symbol, he allows it and has diminished the story's effect.

"Mrs. Peckover's Sky . . ." (1955) also features a selfobsessed heroine. The story opens as the anonymous narrator down for a weekend with a rather boring but rich Oxford colleague is initiated into one family circle. Roy's sister Joan proves uninteresting, and Roy's father, "a very amateurish local historian," a bore, but the exquisite home pleasures his aesthetic sense and its hostess charms and fascinates him, even enlivening the other members of the Peckover family. Mrs. Peckover's is an unkind spell, however, for it rests on a thoroughgoing egotism: "everything—animal, mineral and vegetable—in that place, including her family and servants, was hers." Her possessiveness extends not only to the view but even to the sunset itself. Later, informed of rumors of war, she claims "I shouldn't allow such a messy, unpleasant thing." Visiting Bugloss Hall in 1944, the narrator sees only Mrs. Peckover—Roy is away with the forces, Mr. Peckover has been killed in a tank, Joan has married. The sunset and sky still cooperate, but Mrs. Peckover's bright manner cannot mask the fact that she is "old and miserable," and to the narrator's expression of sincere happiness at seeing her there, she brutally replies: "I'm not. I wish I was dead." Her wish comes true enough; when the narrator is in Cairo, Mrs. Peckover is "killed with a lot of other old ladies by a bomb that fell on a Knightsbridge hotel."

"Mrs. Peckover's Sky ... " contains in embryo a number of motifs Wilson develops in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: the young Gerald Middleton's fascination with Elvira Portway, the sense of surrogate family, the local historian, Elvira's attempt to ward off ugliness and death by brightness and charm. The story's link to "Aunt Cora" is also obvious. What is, however, particularly noteworthy is its displaced violence: the title character's death related in that final, brutal sentence callously dismisses it, Mrs. Peckover's saccharine-sweet vision, and the mother-surrogate relationship. Somewhat in the manner of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, disillusion lurks behind the narrator's rejection of the Peckovers, and his greater maturity and experience allow him a complete appreciation of the inadequacy of Mrs. Peckover's vision. But here insight fails to become compassion, and the narrator's rhetoric ultimately reveals only his own moral failure.

"My Husband Is Right" (1961), although it contains echoes of "Ten Minutes to Twelve," represents a marked shift in tone from most of Wilson's later stories, differing as well in its original purposes as the prologue—one of his favored devices—to an abandoned novel, Goats and Compasses, of which only it and one chapter was completed. Although it has a vignette quality, the piece possesses sufficient weight to stand alone. Set in Bruges, it focuses exclusively on a few hours in the life of an anonymous middle-aged couple who have gone abroad in an attempt to preserve the husband's sanity. Again, Wilson's own family context replete with his parents' histrionic quarrels provides part of the story's personal background, and No Laughing Matter obviously takes up some of the fragments dropped here. (Wilson's own nervous breakdown in 1944, caused partly by a disastrous love affair, contributes to the authentic note of desperation and of a relationship gone awry.) Although momentarily "unfaithful" to her husband's needs in her own selfish preoccupation, the wife affirms her commitment to him when she collects their belongings from the hotel in which he has just made a "scene": "Mon mari a raison." The statement allies her to his "correct" attitude toward the concierge and porter, but ironically underlines the entire situation's problem: her husband's "reason," his sanity, is indeed in question. The detailing of action and the precise observation of social realities, at times indulged in for their own sake in some of the early stories, is never less than purposeful here, displaying a technical maturity won through working in the more extended form of the novel.

"The Eyes of the Peacock" (1975), which Wilson has called a "children's story," recalls Wilde's excursions in the same genre, particularly "The Canterville Ghost," but aside from relying on some children's literature conventions—a fairy godmother figure incarnated here by a formidable but benevolent great-aunt (an obvious reworking of the Aunt Cora figure), a boy hero, and a ghost—the story addresses itself to an exclusively adult audience. Set "once upon a time when King George the Fifth and his gracious Queen Mary ruled in England, and a big dark man like a bullfrog called Mussolini ruled in Italy," a significant blending of fantasy and realism, the tale moves rapidly from Armistead Castle—which Stephen takes particular delight in exploring—to his Great-aunt Cara's "glorious Venice." As Cara, a former opera singer, nourishes Stephen's imagination in opposition to his practical parents, the boy comes to dream of presenting a ballet when he grows up. The tale closes with Cara's disappearance in the Venice of the black shirts. (Has she too been a ghost, like the one she and Stephen are alone privileged to see at Armistead Castle?) Thanks to a legacy from her Stephen accomplishes his childhood dream, putting on The Eyes of the Peacock, and "although it wasn't put on at Covent Garden or anywhere important, it was performed."

Crowded with incident to the bursting point, the story is primarily interesting for its parallels with Setting the World on Fire (1980), published some four years later. "The Eyes of the Peacock" anticipates the novel's characters, situations, and themes: Great-aunt Cara evolves into Lady Mosson; Stephen becomes Piers, and his parents play the role of Tom; Armistead Castle becomes Tothill House; the ballet becomes Lully's opera Phaeton. Even the novel's opposition between imagination and practicality and its political atmosphere of anarchism and terrorist activity are rehearsed here. Weighed down by its artist-parable thesis, however, the tale lacks a genuinely fictional inspiration, although, as always, Wilson adeptly conveys mood, and in Cara offers a brilliant caricature of the world of the late Twenties and early Thirties in the manner of For Whom the Cloche Tolls. Stephen, the child hero whose alienation from the actual world permits rich compensation in the world of fantasy, a figure met repeatedly (Julia in "The Men with Bowler Hats," Johnnie in "Raspberry Jam," the Matthews children in No Laughing Matter), affirms the centrality of the theme of the imagination and the child symbol in Wilson's fiction. As in other stories or in the novels, the isolated central figure accompanies his search for self-affirmation and balance, the quest to resolve the conflicting claims of "life" and "art," against a background of threat or actual brutality (here the black shirts). Although neither fully worked out nor convincingly portrayed, Stephen's uncertain status in the real world (indicated mostly by his Oedipal game leg) is balanced by the reality of his inner one, which is constellated as he achieves his dream: "it was performed."

"The Eyes of the Peacock" represents a double return to childhood in method and subject, and confirms again by its narrative displacements the sources of Wilson's art in his own early life. The legacy of these years—a dramatizing imaginative capacity—finds its embodiment in an appropriately domestic (if distinctly undomesticated) muse—Great-aunt Cara/Aunt Cora. And the portrait of artist tutored and protected by his femme inspiratrice (revealingly neither a beloved nor a wife but an aunt, a parental relation) gains strength and resonance from reference to archetypal situations. Even if the story remains largely a rehearsal for the longer work that followed, its wounded hero who conquers loneliness and fear (the black shirts) by aspiring to Art transcends Wilson's personal crises and history, speaking powerfully to the artist's condition and to his eternal battle with the twin demons of conformity and bourgeois life. Given the concerns and method of "The Eyes of the Peacock," it is hardly surprising that Wilson's next imaginative work, Setting the World on Fire, should be a full-scale retelling of myth.

These uncollected stories, though separated widely in time, nonetheless occupy a confined and delimited space. Indeed, their main value may lie in suggesting the essential fact that however wide the grasp of Wilson's imagination and the range of his social interests they possess a kind of homing instinct that finally returns them to their origins in his early life. Even in the later novels where echoes of his childhood and adolescence seem more distant, where academics and students, the aristocracy, the extremely wealthy are "done"—social situations and character types that extend his range in truly Dickensian fashion—the bedrock remains much the same. To say this, however, is not to diminish Wilson's considerable achievement either in the short story or the novel. But revealing this essential situation highlights the necessity of Wilson's turning to the more extended form, a form that his creative exuberance inevitably came to demand as, for example, the overcrowded landscape of "The Eyes of the Peacock" amply demonstrates. Moreover, this realization also serves to increase our appreciation of the tautness and concision of his early work.

A focus on the uncollected stories of the 1950s, whatever their individual interest and value, puts into relief the formal mastery and almost startling social and psychological realism of the stories collected in The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos. And by calling attention to the disjunctions between the opposed worlds of fairy tale and fascist politics, "The Eyes of the Peacock" serves to expose Wilson's fundamental optimism, which continues to insist, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that fantasy and the imagination are as real and as strong as the forces opposing them.