Angus Wilson also spoke, in the review already referred to, of the need for a collection of short stories to hang together, to have some sort of unity. Of the collections he was reviewing, he singled out Louis Auchincloss's The Romantic Egoists as the best in this respect. Wilson, a liberal humanist, did not approve of Auchincloss's "arrogant, neo-aristocratic" outlook, but it had had a good effect artistically, producing a book of stories with "a strict social framework and a convinced social standpoint." The coherence of Wilson's own earliest collections, both The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos, is equally recognizable, though his middle-class framework is fluid rather than strict, and his social standpoint, that of a convinced liberal with an instinct for tolerance, allows for the inspection and questioning of values rather than for their dogmatic presentation. A characteristic conformation of Wilson's stories was pointed out by Kingsley Amis in 1957: "his subject is most often the explosions and embarrassments touched off when people of different class, training or culture are made to confront one another" [Spectator, 18 October 1957]. There is also in his work a clash of generations: on the personal level, between child and adult; on the public level, brought about by the social and political changes that gradually took place as the middle-class world in which Wilson grew up emotionally was displaced by the postwar triumph—as it then seemed—of the left-wing ideas he had espoused intellectually.

The unity of Wilson's short stories lies essentially in their atmosphere and their milieu, which are characterized by personal uncertainty, social precariousness, and an emotional ambivalence that allows incidents and persons to be funny and pathetic at the same time. A further cognate element in them, commented on by Wilson himself in 1963 [in The Wild Garden], is a "pervasive raffishness," the source of which was his own experience of "reduced" gentlewoman in Kensington hotels and "old school tie" men down on their luck. (One of Wilson's brothers had had to sell vacuum cleaners door to door after World War I.). . .

"Saturnalia," set at a staff-and-residents' dance in a small hotel in South Kensington on New Year's Eve, 1931, indicates the loosening effects of drink on the prewar class structure. The social spectrum ranges from a retired Colonial governor who quotes Greek and unsuccessfully pursues a good-looking page, down to Gloria, the pretty waitress who gets fondled by Bruce Talfourd-Rich, and Tom, the handsome Irish porter who almost succeeds in "making" Bruce's "injured wife," Claire, a woman tempted by thoughts of Lady Chatterley's lover while trying to maintain "a Knightsbridge exterior with a Kensington purse." The precarious pivot of this not-very-merry social roundabout is Stella Hennessy, who has "buckled to" after the economic crash and manages the hotel in order to maintain her son at public school. The cost to her of her sacrifice and "drudgery," in terms of internal coarsening, is economically suggested by the contrast between the "dove grey tulle" she wears and the hardness of her eyes, like "boot buttons," when she snubs Tom's blarneying advances: her new position, on the edge of gentility, seems too close to his for comfort. The claustrophobia and increasing heat of the evening are well conveyed by the dense look on the page of its long paragraphs, packed with snatches of dialogue and fleeting thoughts—a technique that Wilson also employs in "Crazy Crowd" to express Peter's sexual tension, trapped among the uncongenial Cockshutts. In both stories, as in several others, there is explosive release of the built-up tension in verbal violence which gives an almost orgasmic pleasure to the reader: in "Crazy Crowd" Peter attacks his lover Jenny's self-satisfied approval of the "crazy" quality of her family by rejecting it as repellent, so furiously that she can only silence him by pulling him on top of her in a direct sexual advance. In "Saturnalia" Gloria rejects the high moral tone taken by Stella who, jealous of Gloria's greater success with Bruce, takes the opportunity of her drunkenness to dismiss her from the hotel: "You silly old cow . . . you won't send me away, you won't, not on your ruddy life. I know too much about you, my treasure, old Mother have me if you like Hennessy." At the end of "Saturnalia" a measure of order is restored when Claire dances with her husband, but the frustrations and antipathies of the crumbling social system have emerged unmistakably.

Wilson wrote "Saturnalia" in 1947, but set it in 1931 partly in order to exploit an ironic contrast between the past, when the middle classes and their protective social distinctions still had some meaning, and the present, in which they were becoming obsolete. The title story, "The Wrong Set," is placed in the gray postwar Socialist world of clothing coupons and restricted foreign travel, in which earnest young students like Norman Hackett take part in Communist demonstrations and the faded remains of the old guard, represented by the moustached and monocled sponger, Major Trevor Cawston, eke out their existence between bed-sitting rooms in Earl's Court and sleazy Soho nightclubs in which they can tell snide stories about Prime Minister Attlee.

Though not hostile to either Norman or the disreputable Major, who at least know which social "set" they belong to, Wilson reserves most of his sympathy for the confused and good-hearted Vi, the pianist at the Passion Fruit Club, who is Norman's aunt and Trevor's mistress (and provider). Vi really belongs to neither set: to her working-class relatives she appears disreputable because she is not married to Trevor, while she aspires to the propriety of "wife" and clings to outmoded middle-class notions that "class told." Vi is in fact a social victim, expendable; but even when she loses her job—just after she has treated the club's Italiancockney owner to a drink—she cannot perceive this. There is obvious irony in her telegraphed message to her sister that Norman is "in the Wrong Set," but she does not send it "to get some of her own back," as Jay L. Halio [in Angus Wilson, 1964], with uncharacteristic imperceptiveness, has written. Set adrift by the loss of her job, she may be seen as hanging on to a sense of her own identity by asserting her responsible role as aunt; she herself, in a semi-drunken mood of desperation that is both comical and moving, sees it as her "duty" as a "Conservative" to try to keep Norman out of "the hands of the Reds," and her final "Mayfair" attempts at dignity are impressive as well as pathetic.

"The Wrong Set" is a triumph of compression: its span of action covers only twenty-four hours, but its use of significant, sharply observed detail—not only at Vi's club but in Earl's Court and at Norman's lodgings in northwest London—enables Wilson to create in the space of ten pages a microcosm of changing British society. Even briefer, but also less comprehensive, is "Realpolitik," which reveals in its title and its neat, dramatic form the cold winds blowing through the postwar world. John Hobday, a newly appointed art gallery curator, confronts with careerist efficiency the old department heads who despise his manner and methods. "Hardboiled" as these scholarly idealists are, their poor committee methods are no match for Hobday's ruthless incisiveness, a quality made worse by the false geniality that accompanies it.

A more moving clash of opposites occurs in the triangular situation of "Fresh Air Fiend." Here again, as with "The Wrong Set" and "Realpolitik," a cliché of speech is taken as a title and given an ironic dimension in the story that follows. It is Elspeth Eccles, former pupil and now research assistant of Professor Searle, who wishes to open windows and let in some air; but though, unlike John Hobday, she does not inspire simple dislike, the unexpected result of her action, announced by a similar twist at the end, proves how disastrous, indeed how counterproductive, can be the attempts of the younger generation to cut through the protective facades maintained by their elders.

Professor Searle is perhaps the first example in Wilson's work of the liberal whose decent principles and instincts do not enable him to cope with family problems: Bernard Sands of Hemlock and After and Gerald Middleton of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes are more fully drawn versions of the type. Wilson's sympathy for him is conveyed partly in a private code—part of his research, shared with Elspeth, is on Shelley, who was "a much-loved hero figure" in Wilson's own "mythology"—but it is also evident in the guilt feelings that Searle expresses about his wife, Miranda, whose secret drinking is a consequence of her son's death and of the uncongenial life she has had to lead as the wife of an Oxford don. For Elspeth, the important problem is Searle's work, which he should be free to concentrate on: she hero-worships her professor and cannot bear to think of him as chained to the wreck of a former society beauty.

The tensions between Elspeth and Miranda, beautifully caught in their barbed, mutually patronizing exchanges in the garden, come to a head in the evening after dinner. Utterly drunk, Miranda interrupts her husband's tête-àtête with Elspeth, making unworthy insinuations and accusing him of being "no great cop" in bed. The provocation results in Elspeth's slapping her face, Miranda's collapsing in tears, and, as is ironically revealed at the end, in Searle's subsequent nervous breakdown. The cause of this, we are left to infer, is not simply his own embarrassment, but distress that his wife's state should have been witnessed by a third party. His feelings had not "become hardened to the routine."

One is sorry for Searle; but Wilson's most instinctive sympathies seem to lie with Miranda, whose thwarted appetite for life has been channeled into gardening, and whose outrageous shocking of the "wretched middle-class norm" of other dons' wives he reports with relish. In Elspeth's attempts to draw her out—to get her, as Miranda scornfully puts it, to "share"—there is rather too much of the condescension of a social worker. Certainly her retort to Elspeth's new-fangled psychoanalytic jargon about a "well-adjusted view of life" carries a merited old-world sting: "'Adjusted' never connects with —'life' for me, only with —Shoulder strap.'"

The Times Literary Supplement review of The Wrong Set noted "passages strongly reminiscent of Virginia Woolf [Times (London) Literary Supplement, March 26, 1949], and there is much truth in the observation. Wilson read a great deal of her work in adolescence, and though he said in 1957 [in the Millgate interview] that he was "in great reaction against" her, he also admitted that such reading could go very deep. His recurrent use of interior monologues, short or long, of the third-person and, less commonly, the first-person variety, indicates that it did. The first paragraph of "Fresh Air Fiend"—the first thing that a reader of Angus Wilson in 1947 would have encountered—is a good example, particularly in view of its telling use of the Woolfian pronoun "one." Miranda Searle, explicitly linked with Bloomsbury by being compared to Lady Ottoline Morrell, is discovered musing among her flowers: Woolfian style is used to describe a characteristic posture of the Virginia Woolf heroine.

Virginia Woolf s influence can also be felt in the long third-person interior monologues of Laura and Flo in the South African story "Union Reunion." In this story influence shades into literary parody in the first-person monologue of Minnie, which makes use of the "simple sentence" technique of The Waves in order to present a character who would be more at home in the pages of a Harlequin Romance:

"If the Kaffirs attacked 'The Maples'" thought Minnie, "I should have no man to defend me. Flo has Stanley and Laura has Harry, and Edie has her boys. I have no man. No woman was made to be petted and cared for more than me and yet I have no one. My hair is a lovely corn colour and my figure is beautiful . . . I trace figures in the sand with the tip of my cream lace parasol, but I do not look up. I am playing with him as Woman must."

Another example of Wilson's tendency to mimic, perhaps unconsciously, a writer against whom he is in conscious reaction, occurs in "Significant Experience," set in the South of France which Wilson himself had visited a number of times in the 1930s. This time the writer is Aldous Huxley, whose early heroes the "aesthetic" Jeremy somewhat resembles—though in his "very English intellectual, very Pirates of Penzance" clothes he is also a product of a strong "camp" vein in Wilson himself. Jeremy's aspirations, as he tries to disentangle himself from Prue, the sensual "older woman" with whom he has had an affair, have distinct overtones of the "sophisticated" novels that Aldous Huxley published in the 1920s and that Wilson read as a Westminster schoolboy:

His thoughts leapt forward all the time to his future, to his freedom—he would visit Aigues Mortes and Montpellier, wander up through Aries and Nimes, perhaps see the Burgundian tombs at Auxerre, he would read the new Montherlant he had bought in Paris, he might even write some poems again.

The interior monologue method associated with Virginia Woolf is used in one of Wilson's most directly personal stories, "A Story of Historical Interest," which he has described as "an almost direct relation of my father's death in which I have cast myself in the role of a daughter" [as he explained in Wild Garden]. Interior monologue is, however, used in a regular pattern of alternation with narrative. The method has affinities with that of "Mother's Sense of Fun," its thematic mirror-image: this consists of two large blocks, separated by some weeks, each of which proceeds internally by means of flashback; the story concluding, in the present, with a substantial shift of emotional perspective. But "A Story of Historical Interest" is longer and more complex, its sequence of internal flashbacks digging deeply into the personality of Lois Gorringe and her last days with her paralyzed father in a Kensington hotel, while she sits beside him in the ambulance on its bumpy way to her brother's house in Tunbridge Wells and the children's home in which he finally dies. The gradual deathward movement of Lois's father is paralleled in the public world by Neville Chamberlain's delaying tactics to prevent war—a fact which gives an ironic ring to the title, though of course this also refers to the story's biographical aspect. . . .

Emotional ambivalence, related to the need Angus Wilson himself felt to emerge from the protective yet stifling companionships of his early life, gives many of his stories what he has called "the fierceness that is their strength" [in The Wild Garden]. Many of them are concerned with a quality he refers to as "preserved innocence"—an innocence (or ignorance) properly associated with childhood, but becoming harmful when retained in adult life. The self-satisfied insularity of the Cockshutt family in "Crazy Crowd" is a satirical example of it, the "uneducated" classloyalties of Vi in "The Wrong Set" a more touching one. But the quality is most powerfully investigated in Wilson's first story, "Raspberry Jam," and with a fierceness that shocked early reviewers, one of them calling its conclusion—the torturing of a bullfinch by two drunken old ladies—"blood-curdling" [review of The Wrong Set, Times (London) Literary Supplement, March 26, 1949], another seeing it as an illustration of Wilson's "taste for brutality" [J. D. Scott, review of The Wrong Set, New Statesman and Nation, April 30, 1949].

The ending of "Raspberry Jam" is indeed unpleasant, the more so because it involves the momentary, horrified complicity of Johnnie, the boy on the verge of puberty who witnesses it; Johnnie, Wilson has said, is "drawn directly from myself as I had been at that age," and Wilson had admitted being "barbarously cruel to insects," and burning moths in a candle flame at fifteen [The Wild Garden], But such sadistic impulses, however deplorable, are hardly rare; what is more important—indeed the moral point of the story—is the incident's shock-value for Johnnie, in terminating abruptly his friendship with the two old ladies, whose congeniality as companions in imagination is now seen to be rooted in a failure to grow up, an inability to cope with an uncongenial adult world.

Both the structure and the narrative method of "Raspberry Jam" are extremely ingenious. The emotional force of the tale derives from its sticking for much of the time to Johnnie's own view of events and the three worlds in which he lives: his anthropomorphic, book-influenced games with his toy animals; his "love-starved" homelife among "unimaginative adults" who on the one hand urge him to grow up into their duller world and, on the other, like pompous, romantic Mr. Codrington, advocate retaining "the fantasies, the imaginative games of childhood, even at the expense of a little fear"; his friendship with the two colorful, upper-class old ladies, Marian and Dolly Swindale, who "were the first people he had met who liked what he liked and as he liked it." One is led to sympathize with Johnnie in his loneliness, his reluctance to grow up ("one always seemed to be getting too old for something"); and his delight in the company of the two sisters, who share his imaginative games, enlarge his horizons by their recollections, and value the "odd" and the "fantastic." Interwoven with Johnnie's impressions, however, and with his intense protectiveness toward the old ladies, whom their Sussex village neighbors think "old and useless and in the way," are recurrent suggestions from Wilson's authorial voice that their engaging dottiness is not far from insanity, that their kindness to Johnnie is a form of mental retardation, and that their enlisting of his protective instincts proceeds from persecution mania. (They have, in fact, previously been "put away.") Yet the authorial voice, though judicial, is also compassionate, revealing the sisters—the gruff, soldierly Marian, the painted, "naughty" Dolly, who makes eyes at bus conductors—as pathetic survivals of a former age: they outrage their neighbors, but can also be seen as misunderstood and rejected by them.

Wilson's structuring of the story, which inverts its time sequence, also creates a complex emotional reaction in the reader. From Johnnie's point of view, the terrible climax has already taken place; from the reader's, it has still to come. Thus Johnnie is perceived adjusting to life without his friends, and to his new vision of them as dangerous, before the reader knows why. Johnnie's memories of his pleasure in their company serve the double purpose of creating suspense and enlisting sympathy, a sympathy both widened and edged with tension as the week leading up to the fateful Thursday is described in terms of the sisters' experience: their village quarrels, their uncharacteristic mutual falling-out, and the separate drinking bouts that follow it. When, therefore, Wilson's elaborate flashback reaches Johnnie's visit, the torturing of their bullfinch "prisoner" is both understandable from their crazed point of view (to them it is a thief of the raspberries they had intended for their beloved guest and a captured "spy" from the hostile village), and horrifying from Johnnie's.

The relation of climax and flashback carries the reader in an ever-renewed circle from the "end" of the story to the beginning. Johnnie's attempt to expunge the incident from his mind by stamping the dead bullfinch into "a lump of raspberry jam" on the farmhouse floor explains his nightmares (reported by his mother soon after the story opens) and his screams when she offers him raspberry jam for tea. And his realization, in such a violent way, of the sisters' essential madness makes understandable his leaving the room when Mr. Codrington concludes his wellmeaning eulogy of them by referring to "the imaginative games of childhood," as the "true magnificence of the Springtime of life." For Johnnie, the innocence of childhood has exacted too high a price.

"Preserved innocence" is not always so sympathetic as Johnnie's rococo fantasy-world with his animals, or even as the Swindale sisters' inability to move beyond memories of their Victorian father, the General. In some cases it can become what Wilson calls "a calculated refusal of imaginative compassion," as in "A Visit in Bad Taste," which he thinks of as his best story. It is also his shortest, and in it the touch of poetic symbolism of "Raspberry Jam" is replaced by a quasi-dramatic approach: the story is like a one-scene play, covering hardly more than an hour, in which speeches are counterpointed, with unobtrusive cunning, against actions that reveal their hollowness.

Margaret and Malcolm Tarrant, two apparent liberals who have built up in their carefully furnished home a place of "taste, . . . tolerance, . . . ease of living, . . . lack of dogmatism," are faced with the presence of Margaret's brother Arthur, a former bank manager and ex-public-school man who has, at sixty, just finished a prison term for "offences against children." With his air of "military precision" and his "overpressed" suit, Arthur belongs to the type of "old sport" represented by Mr. Gorringe and Major Cawston; but though his unease with his chilly relatives reveals him in a momentarily sympathetic light, Wilson chooses to play him down as a person in order to emphasize the lack of ordinary charity in Margaret's and Malcolm's response to him as a case.

Malcolm's "Covenanting ancestry" makes it impossible for him to forgive Arthur's crime, though on his own he might treat Arthur himself kindly. The more decisive hostility to Arthur comes from Margaret, whose unwillingness to have him in the house proceeds from a kind of aesthetic snobbery: Arthur's manner is "servile," his style of speech displeases her, she cannot stand his right-wing prejudices about her servants—while herself loathing the kind of working-class people with whom his offenses have involved him. At Arthur's trial Margaret enjoyed a "Dostoevskeyan mood" of high-flown literary suffering; but now that Arthur is physically present again she wants no more of him and even suggests—in a dramatic manner now reminiscent of Hedda Gabler's exhortations to Eilert Lövborg to "do it beautifully"—that he may find suicide the best way out. Her liberalism is nothing more than a set of selfflattering gestures, a suite of mental furniture that Arthur does not "go with."

Her rejection of Arthur on grounds such as these comes over as cold and despicable. Malcolm's attitude, at least intellectually, seems to merit some respect. But the story's last phrase—"He remained vaguely uneasy the whole evening"—conveys, along with its tautological pointer to the reader, the implication that Malcolm, who feels culturally superior to his wife and thus should behave better, is at least equally to blame: his qualms will be forgotten so very quickly. His underlying unity with Margaret, despite his not-identical opinions, is suggested by Wilson's use of telling movements, as of actors on a stage. Just as Margaret, while talking, "rustled and shimmered across the room to place a log on the great open fire" and "speared a crystallised orange from its wooden box," so Malcolm "replaced his glass of port on the little table by his side" and "moved his cigar dexterously so that the long grey ash fell into the ashtray rather than onto his suit." For all their liberal "lack of dogmatism," they share an instinctive taste for gracious living which the presence of Arthur, awkward and vulgar, can only spoil. More bleakly than most of Wilson's stories, "A Visit in Bad Taste" has "a kind of immediate ethical text" [Millgate interview], and its clarity is much aided by the use of such silent gestures.

"Et Dona Ferentes," written a month after "Raspberry Jam" and printed at the end of the collection, is perhaps the richest story in The Wrong Set. It combines all the aspects of Wilson's method as a short-story writer, revealing its six characters through the barbed exchanges of dramatic dialogue as well as through detailed interior monologues, and moving the five-section narrative forward against an unusual background for early Wilson, that of external nature. It also suggests the interpersonal tensions of the basic situation—Monica Newman's jealousy and embarrassment at her husband's interest in a Swedish boy—by means of a brewing storm which bursts in lightning and subsides in rain. The story, presenting three generations of an English middle-class family and the disruptive stranger in their midst, anticipates the larger canvases of Wilson's novels.

The story's title, a reference to the famous line in Virgil's Aeneid, "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes" (I fear the Greeks, especially when they bring gifts), encapsulates Monica Newman's viewpoint: the pendant that she rejects at the end is bought for her by her homosexually inclined husband, Edwin, at the malicious instigation of their teenage Swedish visitor, Sven Sodeblom, to whom he has taken a fancy and with whom he has disappeared from the family picnic. It is the possibility that Edwin will, through Sven's presence, succumb to powerful past temptations that partly explains Monica's edginess at the beginning of the story and entirely explains her waspishness toward Sven, whom she despises for his materialism and vanity, but also fears for his physical attractiveness and animal charm. Her edginess, however, is accompanied by guilt: in recently cutting down sex with Edwin, who is depicted as extremely youthful, she "had withdrawn her sympathy at the very moment Edwin needed it most," and feels that if anything happens she will be to blame. Edwin's disappearance from the picnic is followed by the bursting of the storm, whose flashes of lightning both cause and mimic Monica's rising hysteria.

Despite her love for Edwin, and her guilt feelings, which win the reader's sympathy, Monica's inability to relax outdoors, and her view of nature as "patterns of shape and colour" to be completed and improved by man, together with her basic lack of interest in sex, make it understandable that Edwin should feel stifled in her company. A lack of direct confrontation with life is also perceived by Edwin—and by the reader—in his daughter Elizabeth, who is going through a "priggish" religious phase, and in her bookish son Richard, whose sensitive involvement with Dostoevsky's The Possessed cannot yet translate itself into easy or tactful communication with real people. Mrs. Rackham, Edwin's mother-in-law, comes over as pleasant enough, in her detached way, and at the end gives useful practical help to enable Edwin and Monica to patch up their marriage at their London flat; but she is also presented as someone who (unlike "one of those Virginia Woolf mothers") cannot fathom the emotions of others and indeed prefers to plunge into "her twenty-third reading of Emma"—a book that Wilson, generally an admirer of Jane Austen, sees as recommending self-satisfied insularity.

Edwin's attempt to communicate with Sven does not, in the event, work out. What starts as a genuine wish to make amends to Sven for Monica's and his children's inhospitality by showing him some Saxon remains, develops into a wish to "get to know" him better by means of an overnight stay in a nearby town. Edwin's romantic attraction to Sven is seen both as a sympathetic wish to "break out" and renew his youth, and as slightly ridiculous. His hinting advances are too easily "placed" by Sven's sexual sophistication, which sees in them only the opportunity to acquire a present and to get his own back for Monica's "bitchiness" by alarming her. As it happens, Sven is a rampant heterosexual, and in turning out the contents of his shallow mind Wilson shows him as incapable of much emotion beyond a repellent narcissism: thinking of his earlier female conquests Sven sees himself as "so handsome he felt that sometimes he almost wanted himself."

The wry conclusion of this skillful, involving story—a story reminiscent of E. M. Forster in its picture of various "undeveloped hearts" and even more in its sense of landscape as a challenging force and its portrayal of the disturbing Sven as like Pan—shows Edwin reunited with Monica after his sudden return from Milkford bearing placatory gifts. Whether Sven's sexual unwillingness, or Edwin's thinking better of his wild impulse, has aborted the intended night in a hotel we are not told. In a sense, Edwin is well out of it: someone like Sven will find greener pastures back home, and Monica's feelings are still important to her husband. Nevertheless, the mixture of relief and regret in the final paragraph conveys the cost to Edwin of his return to the orthodoxy of the family fold:

Safe, thought Edwin, safe, thank God! But the room seemed without air, almost stifling. He threw open one of the windows and let in a refreshing breeze that blew across from the hills.