The Unknown Angus Wilson: Uncollected Short Stories from the Fifties and After

Abstract

A number of stories published in the 1950s and excluded from Angus Wilson's three short-story collections throw considerable light on the discovery and development of his distinctive voice and on his exploration of the genre. These early stories published in London newspapers, in periodicals specializing in short fiction, and in thematic anthologies, though they share to a certain extent the tone and themes of those collected in Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950), belong neither in those books nor in A Bit off the Map (1957), despite their common focus on displacement, self-deception, and irresponsible innocence.' While they differ from the first collections partly in scale, their exclusion from A Bit off the Map can be accounted for by that collection's self-conscious attempt at mid-Fifties topicality. Two later stories-a self-sustained fragment from an abandoned novel, My Husband Is Right, published in 1961 in an issue of Texas Quarterly devoted to contemporary British writing, and a Christmas story, The Eyes of the Peacock, commissioned by the Sunday Times and published in 1975-largely serve a preparatory function, rehearsing ideas given full-scale treatment in novels. My Husband Is Right anticipates some of the thematic interests of No Laughing Matter (1967), and The Eyes of the Peacock contains in embryo the characters and principal motifs of Setting the World on Fire (1980).2 early stories and the later ones demonstrate a continuity of interest and treatment, confirming Wilson's obsession with the