The Early Years of Angus Wilson

Abstract

Angus Wilson is unusual among twentieth-century British writers in at least two ways. He seems, in the first place, never to have served a literary apprenticeship or to have experienced any difficulty in getting his first work published. He speaks of having contributed pieces to the school magazine of his preparatory school, and one short story to The Elizabethan, the school magazine of his public school, Westminster,' but, apart from these juvenilia, Angus Wilson wrote nothing until the age of thirty-three, when in a single Sunday in November 1946 he produced his short story, Raspberry Jam. Together with eleven other stories written in rapid succession on subsequent weekends, this was published in 1949 in his first collection, The Wrong Set. Only three of these stories had previously appeared in print, but these came out in excellent magazines: Realpolitik in The Listener, Mother's Sense of Fun and Crazy Crowd in Cyril Connolly's Horizon. Such prestigious first appearances, coupled with the willingness of an important firm, Secker and Warburg, to bring out as part of a collection nine stories not previously published, is impressive testimony to the power of Wilson's late-flowering talent, and to the authority with which he was able to handle material drawn from the experiences, opinions and emotions of his earlier life. Since 1949 and his emergence fully-armed on the literary scene as a writer of short stories, Angus Wilson has become one of Britain's most important post-war novelists. In his entry in Who's Who Angus Wilson lists his recreations as gardening, travel, so revealing in the simplest form the sense of contrast on which his view of the world is based. The cultivation of a garden implies rootedness, or at least usually involves being settled in a particular place, and since the mid-1950s Wilson has lived in a small village in Suffolk, near Bury St. Edmunds. But he has also traveled