Talking with Angus Wilson

Abstract

When I went to England late in December of 1982 to interview Angus Wilson, he had returned with Tony Garrett only a few weeks earlier to the cottage where they live in Suffolk, having spent the autumn term teaching in the United States at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. The week following my visit he was to go to Paris to receive an honorary degree from the Sorbonne. The day after that he flew to India to spend several weeks lecturing for the British Council. He has given lectures around the world and has been a teacher of literature and writing in both England and the United States. A friend to writers, he has been a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain and chairman of the National Book League, and a guest at international writers' conferences along with Moravia, Sartre, Mishima, and Golding. At present he is chairman of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1980, he was knighted. Sir Angus Wilson seems very much a public man. In his other life, his life as an artist, he has produced the works by which we know him: short stories, novels, travel articles, reviews, plays for the stage and for television, literary criticism and biographies of other writers. To visit with Angus Wilson is neither to feel the pressure of pending engagements nor to sense the artist's desire to be left alone. The tone of a serene and civilized life prevails in his sitting room in Suffolk, with its blazing fire and the large white Chinese characters for peace and love and luck on the red wallpaper. An interview with Angus Wilson appears in the first series of Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, published in 1958. Since then he has been interviewed often, for he is a man who likes to talk and to whom people like to talk. Speaking of one of his characters, Meg Eliot, and in her voice, he seems to make fun of his own gregariousness: I'm awfully good at parties. I mean, it's just something I have.