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 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 Callis 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 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