[An English man of letters, Bradbury is best known as the author of such satiric novels as Eating People Is Wrong (1959) and Stepping Westward (1965). He has also, as a literary critic, written extensively on English and American literature, especially the works of E. M. Forster. In this analysis, he discusses Wilson 's unusual mix of moral realism and absurd, grotesque characters.]

Many of the critics who have commented on Angus Wilson's fiction appear to have seen him as a direct inheritor of a central tradition in English fiction—the socio-moral tradition, which concerns itself with the moral analysis of life in society. Seen in this light, Wilson is a writer who carries on the habitual concerns of storytellers from Jane Austen to Forster into the world of post-Second World War uncertainty. He is a writer of intense moral concern, a moral realist devoted to the analysis of man in his social context. He is a writer of liberal humanist sympathies, seeking honest conduct and exploring the dilemmas of modern humanism under conditions of extreme strain and tension. He is a novelist of manners, his social world that of the English upper middle classes and their associated intelligentsia, a world with elaborated social forms and distinct social types, a world the standards of which the welfare state and Suez, the new town and the end of Empire have nonetheless challenged. This social world, set at some distance by Wilson's characteristic irony, yet relished for its manners and styles, is judged in terms of its capacities for personal relationships, and for its capacities to face present history. Because Wilson exercises his irony generously, and because he is particularly attentive to extreme states of mind, critics who see him in this way would admit to finding it hard, often, to pin down his exact moral perspective; but they tend to see it as essentially a liberal-radical one, speaking for tolerance and social decency—its ideal achievement personal sanity, honest conduct in human relationships, and emotional fulfillment within the available conditions of history. And so by this view Wilson emerges as a moral realist, exacting in his judgment on his characters, expert at presenting their states of self-delusion, devastating in his analysis of the terms of the liberal dilemma.

But at the same time critics have recognized that there is another strain in his work, and one that does not sit easily with the first. This is the strain indicated by the fact that Wilson himself has confessed a debt not only to Austen and Forster but also to Dickens. Dickens, too, is of course a social novelist, but one who works with rather different assumptions both about what society is and how it may be rendered from those of novelists like Jane Austen or George Eliot or Forster or the other central figures of Leavis' Great Tradition (though Leavis includes Dickens, somewhat guardedly, in it). Dickens tends to see society as an elaborated complex of persons and institutions in which individual control and moral mastery are rare and improbable. Society is a prison or a fog, a pattern of interconnections by family and class and profession whose meaning is difficult to shape and whose impact on the individual is often confining. There is, in Dickens, social range but also social simplification. The engagement of the individual with any role or style tends to be heightened toward the absurd; and in Dickens' concern with the grotesque and with caricature, we sense a shrillness of tone, which is also a sense of absurdity, of the odd distortion given to men by their daily life. Dickens' comedy is not ironic, not comedy of manners so much as comedy of human observation. And Wilson himself has pointed out how anarchic Dickens' social world is, how he deals repeatedly with plots of pursuit and flight, how he sees home as prison and makes his mode of picaresque a mode of psychological search for existence. The gothic instinct of Dickens, his sense of haunting wrongs, family secrets, depredations on innocence, runs deep in his work and has much to do both with his human judgment and his comic dimensions. The debt to Dickens that Wilson himself calls attention to is in fact reasonably evident; the way in which Wilson plans his novels over a broad scope, with large casts of characters, with the same sense of the tension and the hopelessness of family life, the same sense that society is a maze, the same sense of human motivation deriving from guilts and tensions, the same patterns of pursuit and flight, the same sense of comedy, must throw into some question the account of him as the novelist of manners, the rigorous analyst of delusion and folly.

In fact, of course, both of the debts co-exist; and they consort oddly in Wilson's work, giving it a distinct kind of strangeness that seems to have proved troubling to a considerable number of his critics. For Wilson does have the dimension of a moralist, along with all the running inventiveness he has acquired from the more gothic tradition. Essentially a comic writer, he has various moods of comic procedure. Thus we often find ourselves encountering a mode of moral analysis we are familiar with in Austen and Forster, while at the same time becoming aware that Wilson's characters are of a different order, are potential grotesques—so that they evade the insistences of moral judgment by their tincture of unreality, by their touch of the absurd. We are invited, indeed, to put the test of moral realism to personages whose moral reality Wilson's mode of creation throws into doubt. We think we observe in one of his personages the features of snobbery or social cruelty; and then we find, as we proceed, that the cruelty is better than the progressive rationalism that would challenge it. Or we see the familiar ties of parents to children, of husbands to wives, of relative to relative, exposed as exploitation; we think we know how to judge that, but then exploitation comes to seem in this world the only possible relationship, seems part of Wilson's essential perception of what relationships are. Or again, Wilson the liberal seems persistently to offer hopes of social betterment: finer relations between man and man, happier orders of society, greater tolerance. But history, so active a force in his writing, is never so regenerative as the promise seems to suggest; and we come to find that the prevailing world is one of degeneration, of new convolutions of cruelty, new possibilities in self-deception, new kinds of strain.

The difficulty is evident enough in his novels; and it is present, too, in the stories, though the stories do have to some extent their own modes and styles. Nonetheless they are an important and central part of Wilson's endeavor; in fact he is one of the few postwar English writers who have made much of their reputation in the form. Wilson's satirical and comic talents are fully exercised in them; and so are some of his most persistent themes. In this form he touches on both of the modes mentioned, and encourages the same kind of critical uncertainty. For example, many of the stories turn on a moment of moral realism, a moment of truth—a moment when, often, he reveals the grotesque as the grotesque. In "Fresh Air Fiend"—the first story in Wilson's first collection, The Wrong Set—time and history have turned Mrs. Searle, the wife of an Oxford professor, into a "grotesque"; and Wilson takes a characteristic delight in rendering her manners and style, while at the same time introducing an agent, Miss Eccles, a research student of Professor Searle's, who sees through her. But when the girl tries to "let a breath of fresh air into a very fetid atmosphere," her act is only destructive; it produces a breakdown in Professor Searle, whom she has been trying to help. The moment of truth, then, does not sustain the need for reality; rather it discloses the danger. And the satirical victim of the story is not the grotesque Mrs. Searle, or her husband, but the fresh air fiend herself. The grotesque is not in fact a comic mode that Wilson necessarily used for satirical assault on the character. Indeed, it is often an achieved condition of life, a form of human balance the more appreciated because of its essential style.

The style is not, of course, spared acute analysis, but the comedy that creates it is often appreciative of it. We relish by invitation Mrs. Searle's triumphs over the girl's inhuman simplicity, her inability to appreciate the finely balanced tensions of the marital relationship—Searle is impotent, guilty about his marriage, attracted by the girl but more committed than she can see to his wife, an incubus on her as well as she on him. And the same is true of the two mad old ladies in "Raspberry Jam" (The Wrong Set), whom the young boy in the story relishes:

In a totally unselfconscious way, half crazy as they were and half crazy even though the child sensed them to be, the Misses Swindale possessed just those qualities of which Johnnie felt most in need. To begin with they were odd and fantastic and highly coloured, and more important still, they believed that such peculiarities were nothing to be ashamed of, indeed were often a matter for pride.

At times, of course, the grotesquerie, the craziness, does indeed become discreditable—as it does in "Crazy Crowd" or "The Wrong Set" (both in The Wrong Set). It becomes the voice of extreme snobbery, of spoiled personality, of Fascism; it advances into the terrifying, the aggressive, and the possessive; and Wilson sketches alternatives against it—Peter's innocent openness in "Crazy Crowd," and more firmly Mrs. Thursby's left-wing, pacifist household in "The Wrong Set." But though the grotesquerie is identified, as quite often it is, with the sensibility of social arrogance exacerbated into oddity by the democratic pressures of the new England, though it is in fact a social grotesquerie, Wilson can be involved as much with it as against it; and we may not simply identify him as a democratic satirist who is exposing the unreality of a disinherited class. Some critics have tried to locate him in this way, and it is true that from time to time he appeals to the procedure. But that Wilson is, like Dickens, too much involved in the unrealities, is, in fact, too psychologically curious, seems so evident as to make this an incomplete way of characterizing the essential quality of his work.

Of course it is perfectly evident that Wilson is concerned very precisely with the social process, and with the deprivation from central social experience that social change can bring about. The very titles of his three volumes of stories—The Wrong Set, Such Darling Dodos, and A Bit Off the Map—carry the implication. One can see that the volumes if taken together draw upon the social developments in England from the 1930's to the 1950's; the pressure toward democracy in the 1930's, the tense democracy of the war, the austerity of the Labor Government in the immediate postwar period, the rise of the Welfare State and a more planned and bureaucratized social order with levelling implications in the period thereafter, the rise of youth culture and the tension of Suez. Wilson gives a good deal of attention to these developments; he often defines the characters in their politics; their crises coincide with radical political changes—thus "A Story of Historical Interest" (The Wrong Set) is of historical interest, being located just on the outbreak of war; and the financial and social consequences of such changes are part of the data of most of the tales. And Wilson does, repeatedly, deal with the socially dispossessed; his characteristic milieu is that of frayed-at-the-heels upper-middle class gentility, and it would seem true to say that nowhere in recent English letters has the cry of dispossession and impoverishment been so shrilly sounded. And indeed the extravagance and the oddity of so many of Wilson's characters, their patterns of stylishness and selfishness, of snobbery and arrogance, their class and sexual jealousies, direct us specifically to social sources—to the way in which the life-style of a class can become exaggerated and even menacing when the conditions that served the style are threatened. We can indeed take Wilson's stories as a kind of elaborated portfolio of the decline of the English upper middle class, of a whole order pinned and placed—except that Wilson's relationship to his material is neither totally detached nor totally involved, but a complicated mixture of the two responses.

For at times Wilson presents this social world with a comic detachment resembling Waugh's; morally uninterested, socially curious, the writer renders the world as a total impression. The comedy derives from a sense of the social world as an unreal one, a "lurid nightmare," as Paul Pennyfeather sees it in Decline and Fall, in which justice and order break down, and the bounder and cad prevail. But, as Jay Halio points out [in Angus Wilson, 1964], there is a difference between Waugh and Wilson in their handling of this sort of comedy, for Wilson, repeatedly, is engaged with the emotion of pathos. His characters have much of the outrageousness of Waugh's, but they exist in a much more probable context; they have more direct appeal to authenticity than do Waugh's, and we are engaged with them in terms of reasonably recognizable experience: they call up our sense of the "frightful"—the frightful, bad weekend in the country, the frightful, impecunious relative. They are not beyond our experience; and our experience is heightened in recognizable ways. For if Wilson is, like Waugh, essentially a sophisticated observer, his sophistication is a kind of metropolitan urbanity about our situation. Families are really hell; his characters readily break affectionate relationships; the springs of relationship are tension and guilt and sexuality; behind gentility lies vulgarity. The degree to which Wilson appeals to our sense of the rather frightful and the very vulgar is consonant with the degree to which he appeals to our sense of the essential pathos of most human roles and relationships. In fact, then, his sense of social unreality—which one is tempted to read politically—is part of the conditioning material of a larger assumption: that disintegration, social and psychological, is the fundamental condition; that to be socially insecure and financially unsafe and in the power of the tough hotel manageress is within the order of normal experience; that sexuality burns long and love is short-lived; and that, therefore, the inadequate posturings that are on the one hand feasible objects of satire are also the assertion of some grit or energy by means of which life continues possible.

For Wilson's "dodos" are in fact rarely the weak but usually the strenuous: aging hostesses, fading Edwardian roués, professional spongers, well-trained survivors of old struggles. Their past has never been secure; there is no comfortable, conservative idyll behind them; they are the long-term products of an hotel civilization. Their sexual sophistication and resource are vast, and they are old hands at shoring the fragments against their ruins. As Halio points out, there are repeated types among them to which Wilson seems to have a special literary attachment: the Raffish Old Sport, the Widow Who Copes, the Fresh Air Fiend, the Social Oxbridge Academic, the New Bureaucrat—often types both frightful and with strong capacities for endurance and domination. Wilson is attentive to their individual styles, to their modes of conversation and intercourse; and he often presents them with a kind of joyful creativity independent of moral implications. He has himself spoken of the state of creative "possession" involved in the act of writing, where the writer becomes engaged with his material to the point of debilitating any rigorous moral perspective upon it; and we can see that the process must often work for him. There are instances—as in the story "Such Darling Dodos"—where the moral and indeed the political judgment seem plain, but more often that is not the effect. Rather there is a blurring of the moral implication in the interest of sensations and judgments of different kinds. Thus in most of the early stories at least he works by providing large numbers of personages within the story, and a constant variation of point of view, which detaches us from a direct involvement. In one of the novellas of A Bit Off the Map, "More Friend Than Lodger," Wilson tells a story through a single character, the story emerging as a superb piece of self-exposure—a self-exposure that is also self-awareness on the part of the first-person narrator. But usually such awareness as we have about a character's weaknesses and how they should be judged derives from the use of inner monologue counterpointed with external observation and the manipulation of other points of view, to produce what is finally an ambiguous effect. In the case of the more strenuous and grotesque characters, this seems often to derive from the novelist's attraction to the view of the universe from which they derive, his attraction for recognizing that the world is a collocation of exploitative relationships, that humanism is simply another mode of self-deception, that the cool, cruel wrongs perpetrated by one character upon another provide the only viable assertion of selfhood he may possess. Thus Wilson's urbanity, despite an often devastating satire, seems designed to create in us a regard for his extreme grotesques, especially when they are efficient manipulators of a debased environment.

Many of Wilson's characters seem in fact to be in the grip of a kind of depraved romanticism—the only mode of romanticism available to them. And it would seem that Wilson is in some sense a "romantic" writer in that he is concerned with a psychological mode of notation; and his intricate dramas of personal relationships are contests in the pursuit of freedom. The impression of his work is that to have lived and formed relationships is to have entered a world of imprisonment, a world from which the individual can escape only by the repossession of some longdeprived romantic joy. But the joy, so often hinted at—in the unachieved homosexual relationship of "Et Dona Ferentes," in the release from the mother in "Mother's Sense of Fun," in the attraction of the tartish Sylvia in "After the Show"—is itself likely to be deceptive; Wilson's romanticism rarely goes so far as to propose success. (In this respect, his stories show some similarities to those of Forster, which, too, have strong romantic overtones, but a surer attitude toward the positive worth of freedom, of escape from convention and lovelessness and smugness.) For Wilson, the sought freedom has an air of unreality, and he exploits not the possibilities of it but the irony of the pursuit. For Wilson's characters are usually caught in the psychoanalytic trap; the dream of freedom is an irony. They live out their social roles, as representatives of a family function or a class, while thirsting for more; they are, so often, part of an architectured social structure of disappointment. At times, Wilson enforces his point by a directly "gothic" rendering of the situation. "Totentanz" is a dance of death in a world in which the sinister is of the atmosphere. The ominous names of the characters—Todhunter, Professor Cadaver—the gruesome memorial in the living room, the final dance of death of the guests, drives home with an unusually surrealistic indulgence a kind of perception implied in many of the other stories, in which funereal domination generally plays a singularly large part. "A Little Companion" exploits a more familiar "gothic" mode—it is a psychological ghost story; and so, too, is "Mummy to the Rescue," with its recourse to madness. Wilson's modern supernatural is never very far from the scene, in fact; and his sensibility unites—as Dickens' does—the comic, the grotesque and the pathetic, taking the comic as a main mode of modern experience.

Wilson's essential capacity as a writer of fiction is, I think, to disquiet us by distinguishing the resources of selfishness, cruelty, violence, and unfulfilled ambition that lie within our family experience; and in the service of this approach he uses, I suggest, modes other than those of familiar social comedy. A writer who draws heavily on the identifiable social world, on contemporary history, on recognizable tones of voice and on the familiar objects of present-day England, he nonetheless manages to create a surrealistic landscape and a surrealistic society, a special kind of fantasy which is his distinctive world. It is, I think, limiting and unsatisfactory to describe him—as many critics do—simply as a social satirist, since the mode of comic procedure is extremely complex, having a less direct relation with "familiar reality" than we are often encouraged to think. Wilson is in fact an inventive and indeed sometimes an indulgent writer, yet one who guides his effects, though broad, by what is very much a "gothic" sensibility. His comedy, though socially observant, is not, I think, adequately defined for us unless we recognize in it the elements of exaggeration that this kind of sensibility invites; nor is it defined unless we say that it involves us in ironic ambiguities that contain distinctive kinds of hope and despair. It is comedy not just of social surface but of psychological conflict, in which he reveals passionate urgencies in every heart, and in which he presents the spectacle of decadence or misery with a brilliance that makes it both amusingly absurd and engagingly pathetic. Wilson's writing never engages him with the alternatives sufficiently for us to feel the pathos too deeply to enjoy the comedy. He is never fully involved in urging the view of freedom, rarely suggesting that his characters are trapped in a situation from which they might escape. Consequently, though it is possible to regard him as a "hard" or "cruel" writer, he is not concerned to offer to us a sense that there is a better world beyond our own decadent sensibilities. A writer substantially fed by the culture in which he lives, and attentive to the forces at work in it, he is nonetheless much less the meliorative social satirist than the collector of grotesqueries which, because they are culturally and psychologically grounded, come to us with ominous recognition.