Such Darling Dodos: And Other Stories

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Towards the end of Angus Wilson’s life his short stories were entombed in a collected volume. By way of signifying the corpus was sadly complete that made sense but it didn’t do justice to the importance and quality of his work in this medium. a b c "Wilson, Sir Angus (Frank Johnstone), (11 Aug. 1913–31 May 1991), author; Professor of English Literature, University of East Anglia, 1966–78, then Emeritus". WHO'S WHO & WHO WAS WHO. 2007. doi: 10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u176296. ISBN 978-0-19-954089-1 . Retrieved 15 April 2021.

They were not intellectual, as a rule, and certainly not avant-garde. The womenfolk probably read the novels of Virginia Woolf, but the cult of sensitivity and all that is now classed under the vague name “Bloomsbury” would have seemed a little anemic to them. The men might perhaps have read a novel of D. H. Lawrence but certainly without comprehending the telling indictment of the age which we now see in his work. Experimentalism in the arts — abstract painting, the aestheticism of the Sitwells and the Russian Ballet, stream of consciousness and Joyce — all these were outside, not perhaps their knowledge, but their interest, although of course they would have disliked the philistine attitude of Punch toward such things, because they believed above all in being tolerant and broad-minded. If his homosexual tendencies alone explained this, we could recognize the cause and pass on; but it is impossible not to think that the freedom for which Butler fought was in any case a selfcentered and isolated one. In his own life he paid dearly for any emotional attachments he formed to men, and he got out of Miss Savage’s emotional attachment to him with a deserved bad conscience. The truth is, I think, that Butler’s fight against his parents was logically more than just parricide: it was a denial of the family as a unit at all. The family for Butler was the essence of the Victorian prison house. Capitulation to family life was the end of Butlerian freedom; only perhaps a marriage like Shaw’s, which brought one solid dividends, would really win Butler’s approval. Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, vol. 2, R. Reginald, Mary A. Burgess, Douglas Menville, 1979, pg 1130

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Much of this was due to Butler’s own character and circumstances. He was a weak man obsessed with the need for absolute personal freedom; he was also a man whom parental Victorianism had made abnormally suspicious of any rhetoric or embroidery in thought. Imagery, poetry, extravagance of language, all these seemed to him the evasions, the casuistry of Victorian preaching. Meanwhile, there was another problem coming to dominate considerations of Wilson's work – even the early books – which lies, ironically, in the very qualities for which, at the time of publication, they were most praised. This is the sheer efflorescence of their social detail, a determination to pin the characters down by way of supporting illustration that sometimes renders them stone dead, like a lepidopterist's butterflies pinned to a display board. So Priscilla in "Such Darling Dodos" is said to be dominated by pathos: "it had led her into Swaraj and Public Assistance Committees; into Basque relief and child psychiatry clinics … it fixed her emotionally as a child playing dolls' hospitals." One can applaud the psychology, while wondering whether, 60 years later, this torrent of minutiae doesn't require footnotes.

Stape, John Henry and Anne N. Thomas. Angus Wilson: A Bibliography 1947–1987. London & New York: Mansell Publishing, 1988. ISBN 0-7201-1872-7.The work situation was stressful and led to a nervous breakdown, for which he was treated by Rolf-Werner Kosterlitz. He returned to the Museum after the end of the War, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life. THERE is an aspect of Butler’s advice to young men who wish to be free that is even more disturbing than his realistic assessment of the powers of money and of social class: his warning against following the dictates of the heart. The danger of a young man of talent and means being entrapped into marriage with a girl of the lower classes as Ernest Pontifex was trapped into marriage with Ellen, the country girl turned prostitute, was not new to Victorian readers. Mrs. Pendennis had saved her beloved son Arthur from such a marriage, when his heart and honor were more fully engaged than the goose Ernest; Trollope had warned his hero Johnnie Eames off entanglements with barmaids and landladies’ daughters. The danger was no doubt a real one, and Butler unnecessarily weakens the case by making Ellen a drunken tart. However, if one could not be a Breton fisherman, but had unfortunately been born a middleclass young man dependent upon one’s parents, the most important thing was to have some private means. Without them one would have to obey the father’s will or, unsuited by a classical education to perform any craft, one would be forced into what we now call “the white-collar class” — to be a shop assistant or a clerk. How dreadful was the life of shop assistants Maugham shows in Philip’s most agonizing shame in the whole of Of Human Bondage. How contemptible was a clerk and his genteel aspirations Forster suggests in the character of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End. There is a strange combination of realism and snobbery about all this; for distasteful as this emphasis on dividends may be as a basis for the great truth of progress, it is a truer estimation of money power than many later progressives have allowed themselves. Angus’s sympathetic ability to inhabit female characters was impressive. Tolstoy notably succeeded with Anna Karenina – but how many other male novelists really manage it? The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) is a moving account of the life of Meg Eliot after her husband is suddenly gunned down in an Asian airport. ‘Mrs Eliot, c’est moi,’ Angus would announce to friends, as Flaubert also said of Emma Bovary. Into her he put his own strengths and weaknesses, a depressive with a strong sense of literary tradition and a sense of humour. Helmingham Hall 3". Antiques Roadshow. Series 40. Episode 22. 19 August 2018. BBC Television . Retrieved 19 August 2018.

Their main concern, however, was to conduct their lives with common sense, no nonsense, straightforward realism, and plenty of hygiene. They disliked ugliness, sordid surroundings, disease, hypocrisy, pessimism, and sentimentalism above everything; and they were conscientiously determined that their children should be brought up in a world where these things didn’t exist. It was, of course, a well-nigh impossible assignment. The First World War they had met with high hearts, but its aftermath — especially as the nineteen-thirties brought the Depression and Hitler — wore them down. Cruelty, violence of emotion, humorlessness — everything that was grubby and smutty came to invade their hygienic world. It was intended that the children should never know guilt or fear; but, of course, they did and began to turn to all sorts of improbable excesses Communism, Roman Catholicism, and what have you. Three volumes of short stories were published - The Wrong Set, Such Darling Dodos and A Bit Off the Map. Faber Finds are reissuing these original selections. Gerstner, David A. (2006). Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. p.615. ISBN 0-415-30651-5. Wilson returned to the Museum after the end of the war, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life. Years later their life together was sympathetically portrayed in the BBC2 film "Angus and Tony" (1984), directed by Jonathan Gili. It was one of the first depictions of the life of a gay couple on British television. [ citation needed] If they were muddled, however, it was not a little because their prophets had been muddled also. Anti-Victorianism had been intended as a straight from the shoulder tidy-up of a muddled, blinkered world; but if we return to its gospels — to Shaw and Wells, Forster, Douglas, and the Maugham of Of Human Bondage, to name only those who owed debts to Samuel Butler — we shall find often brute force muddled up with freedom, class prejudices accepted as honesty, optimistic generalization masking despair, and personal quirks generalized into universal dogmas. To say all this is not to deny their achievement — they were one and all brilliant demolition men, skilled parricides — where the buildings were ratinfested and had stood too long, where the fathers were corrupted and ripe for death.

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He worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk. If one of Wilson's misfortunes was that he tried to write the kind of book – effectively a try-out for the "global novel" – which was beyond his range, then another is the way in which his early work now looks to be of more interest to a social historian than a novel-reader. Significantly, David Kynaston's multivolume postwar history is crammed with approving references. On the other hand, to examine Wilson from the angle of his tornado years – the period 1949-1964, say – is to be conscious of quite how much he achieved. Evelyn Waugh once complained that Auden, Spender and Isherwood had "ganged up" and captured the 1930s to the exclusion of equally deserving talents. The same point could be made of Amis, Larkin and co 20 years later. But there was another kind of 1950s literary life, and it can be found here in Angus Wilson's clear-eyed interrogations of moral behaviour and fretful liberalism – a context in which the tedium of what came afterwards can readily be forgiven. Lccn 50035208 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA18240 Openlibrary_edition