ANGUS WILSON’S PROTAGONISTS
Dr. K. K. SINHA
In Lionel Trilling’s
novel The Middle of Journey, John Laskell, a
patient of scarlet fever, represents the liberal humanist tradition. He, in his
sickness, is fascinated by a rose and contemplates it for hours. His friend, Nacy Croom, compares him to
Ferdinand, the young bull who loved flowers. Laskel
recalls with some embarrassment the story of how, when Ferdinand was sent to Madrid, instead of
fighting, he sat down in the middle of the bull-ring and enjoyed the flower in
the hair of the ladies. As a result the bull was disgraced but safe, and sent
back to the ranch. He is startled by the application of the story to himself, and uses it to define his own liberalism. Although
people praise the bull, they really feel scorn, their
attitude typifies a strange ambivalence in Laskell’s
own attitudes. His belief in individual liberty makes him afraid to impose his
will on others; and so he considers whether his ideas withdraw him from the
real struggles of life: “I wonder if we don’t rather like the idea of safety by
loss of bullhood.”
Laskell represents a type of character to be seen in many
novels of the last hundred years. Obvious examples are Ralph Touchett in James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Fielding
in Forster’s A Passage to India and Bernard Sand in Wilson’s Hemlock and After.
The educated liberals of our time lack vitality. Either instinctively or
deliberately, writers have often associated the liberal tradition with
sickness. Laskell’s very name suggests lassitude; he
thoroughly enjoys his illness. His pleasure in illness is caused by an
instinctive reaction to the violence of life; his delight in the rose is a kind
of sophisticated aestheticism into which the defeated man of culture is tempted
to retire. In the course of the story, he overcomes his love of death and
reasserts the value of liberalism. In common with many other liberals, Trilling
recognizes that his own ideals can lead to a form of weakness, a lack of
contact with real life. He tries to demonstrate how this can be overcome, and
liberalism given a new health. Exactly the same purpose underlies much of Angus
Wilson.
Wilson’s protagonists are but a slight variation on Trilling’s Laskell-type
character. They are all confronted with the problems of the liberal humanists
of our time. Today, liberals in England
find that their values are impotent yet a large number of people, particularly
among the educated classes, still find liberal values very relevant to their
private lives. Henry James, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf
and Angus Willson are concerned with the moral
problems of these people, with the ways in which they can develop a mature
sense of values. Wilson’s
protagonists, such as Laskell, demonstrate the
weakness of modern humanists and the attempt on their part to overcome them:
“Simple naive people I am impatient of, because
they haven’t faced up to the main responsibility of civilized man” – that of
facing up to what he is and to the Freudian motivations of his actions. Most of
my characters have a calvinist
conscience, and this is something which in itself makes action difficult. The
heroism of my people, again, is in their success in making a relationship with
other human beings, in a humanistic way, and their willingness to accept some
sort of pleasure principle in life as against the gnawings
of calvinist conscience and
the awareness of Freudian motivations. These people are fully self-conscious”.1
Wilson’s heroes and heroines are put to the test
of awareness. They must rediscover the lost past in order to confront the
unfound future. Consequently, their movements ahead (their actions) are halting
and confused, their return upon the past (their reflections) at once sweeping
and meticulous.
The dilemma of Wilson’s characters are always connected
with their relation to other people. The hero of Hemlock and After, the
novelist Bernard Sands, is a humanist whose inner complacency is shattered. The
development of his homosexual tendencies in middle age, and his observation
that he feels a sadistic pleasure on seeing a male homosexual arrested in Leicester Square.
It is not his “salvation”. He is worried (like the heroes of Sartre and Camus) about the fact that his relation to
society is not what he thought it was the discovery of his relation to it gives
him a sense of guilt that leads him to death.
Wilson is concerned with his hero as an illustration of
the inevitability of decline if life is denied. The hero of Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes is a historian whose personal life has been highly unsatisfactory
owing to his moral cowardice.
Simon Carter, the hero of The Old Men at the Zoo
is also a kind of humanist. But he is unable to cope with the savage
violence, on a collecting expedition with Falcon in Uganda he suffers an attack of
dysentery, and is forced to retire from active work in tropics. As with Laskell in The Middle of the Journey, his sickness
is a sign of inability to accept the conditions of real life. He never becomes
aware of his delusions and self-deceptions. “In unfolding of the events,” says
J. Halio, “he steadily changes, like Gulliver, from
the instrument of satire to its object”.2 This
explains why he is not a serious comic hero like Gerald Middleton or Meg
Eliot.
Wilson’s protagonists are usually humanists. They
struggle against the anti-humanist forces of society including their own
illusions and lusts. Marcus in No Laughing Matter changes from a weak
homosexual to an active force and achieves “optimism of will and pessimism of
intellect.” The heroine of Late
Call is quite a different kind of character. In Sylvia
Calvert Wilson chooses for the first time a protagonist who cannot articulate
or even understand her own condition. No doubt, he succeeds in evoking,
through meticulous characterization and powerful imagery, the texture of her
consciousness. But he is thrall to his own success, as though the creature must
sustain its creator. For whenever he fails to project the consciousness of
Sylvia Calvert upon the on-going business of the novel, there is so sharp a
falling up as to leave the reader entirely unconcerned.
Angus Wilson’s memorable characters, all, have a
family likeness. Most of them, indeed, can be grouped into a few simple
categories. There is, first of all, Bernard Sands, Gerald Middleton, Meg Eliot
and other humanists – Wilson’s
type of good men who are the stoical and also emotional cripple. These
characters, like the heroes of Sillitoe and Iris
Murdoch, find the virtue of simple perception very rewarding. Their words are
more difficult, their facts harder to understand and arrange. They, being
existentialists, are caught between their vast possibilities and their enormous
limitations. “The new hero is too self-divided...he has to learn to heal his
self-division.” says Colin Wilson, “the final hero will be the man who has
healed self-division, and is again prepared to fling himself back to struggle”.3
Wilson’s protagonists are self-divided at first but in course of their lives
they become integrated personalities and return to life. They are the “final
hero” in Colin Wilson’s term.
REFERENCES
1 Malcolm Cowley, ed. Writers at work. First
series (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958), p. 234
2 J.L. Halio,
Angus Wilson. (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1964), p. 91
3 Colin Wilson, The Age
of Defeat, (London: Vector Gollanez, 1959), p.88
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