THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

As his novels of the 1950s suggest, Angus Wilson (1913-91) seems to have been intent on restoring Victorian
narrative styles to English fiction in opposition to what he saw as the errant experimentalism of the Modernists. In
contrast to the slim, even anorexic, shapes accepted by his contemporaries, he steadily swelled the physical shape of
the novel back to something approaching its nineteenth-century proportions. As a means of emphasizing where his
artistic loyalties lay, he published a fine, but decidedly untheoretical, study of Émile Zola in 1952 (thoroughly revised
in 1965); in 1970 he added an observant, semi-biographical, critical introduction to Dickens and in 1977 an essay on
Kipling. Wilson recognized in Dickens a writer who combined ‘art and entertainment’ and whose works made up a
‘complete whole — the World of Charles Dickens’. In 1961 he also proclaimed his continuing confidence in the
‘God’s eye view’, the omniscient narrative stance of many of the Victorian novelists that he admired. Although some
critics have attempted to draw parallels between Wilson’s own work and that of Zola, Dickens, and even George Eliot,
the parallels cannot really be sustained. He was, it is true, a convinced realist who occasionally indulged in
grotesquerie and fantasy and a finely tuned comic writer who habitually allowed for the intrusions of tragedy and
cruelty, but the world of his own novels is idiosyncratic and decidedly that of the mid-twentieth century. Wilson, who
began his literary career with two volumes of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950),
had a talent more developed for creating scenes, set pieces, and characters than for the spruce and ordered fictional
shapes that defined themselves against what Henry James had dismissed as ‘loose baggy monsters’. Wilson's novels,
from
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his first, Hemlock and After (1952) to his last, Setting the World on Fire (1980), are essentially comedies of manners
in which the comedy winces, sometimes gratuitously, with pain. As an observer and mimic, Wilson also had an
exceptionally sharp ear and eye for the whims, voices, vogues, pretensions, and pomposities of his time. He had a
particularly fastidious distaste for the kind of social gatherings which represent what he called in his essay The Wild
Garden, or Speaking of Writing (1963) ‘the hell of the human failure to communicate’, where the damned are ‘the
social climbers, those wanting to be loved, the unloved women who push people around, the organization men who
fall to pieces when they are alone’. His two most ‘traditional’ novels, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and The Middle
Age of Mrs Eliot (1958), are also probably his surest comments on the cultural, social, and sexual tensions of a period
struggling to come to terms with the conflicting claims of tradition and novelty. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is especially
adept in its panoramic movement from scene to scene and in its gradual establishment of connections between a
disparate number of characters. Wilson beds his novel in an archaeological fraud (perpetrated in 1912 before the
narrative begins) whose ramifications return to darken the present of Gerald Middleton, an ageing historian. Late
Call (1964) also introduces the idea of historical determination (its opening ‘Prologue’ is set in 1911) but it narrows
the scope of its plot to an account of the alienation of the retired Sylvia Calvert amid the affected liberalism and the
engineered environment of one of the ‘New Towns’ (social experiments much promoted by government planners in
the late 1950s). The latter part of Wilson’s career was marked by an increasing experimentalism, not all of it
successful. Late Call is notable for its deliberate use of pastiche and its undercutting of cliché; Old Men at the Zoo
(1961, but set in an ‘utterly improbable’ 1970-3) for its juxtapositions of men and beasts against a background of
‘wars, domestic and foreign’; No Laughing Matter (1967) for its long time-span (1912-67), for its parodies, and for its
introduction of scenes presented as if they were written for the stage. Neither the capricious As If By Magic (1973) nor
the yet wilder Setting the World on Fire (1980), however, exhibit quite the vivacious panache of Wilson’s earlier
work.
Irish Murdoch (born in Dublin in 1919) was, in the early part of her career, to remain equally faithful to
traditional fictional shapes. Unlike Wilson, however, she underpinned her novels with arguments derived from a
scrupulous investigation of the problems posed by moral philosophy. This underpinning has been consistently
enhanced by a series of independent philosophical studies, notably Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), The
Sovereignty of Good (1970), and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). If Murdoch was amongst the earliest
readers to respond positively to Beckett’s fiction (she read Murphy as an undergraduate at Oxford and paid homage to
it in her own first published novel, Under the Net, in 1954), her only work of fiction which can be said to draw
directly from Beckett’s example is Bruno’s Dream (1969), a study of the atrophying consciousness of an old man.
Murdoch sketched the nature of her own
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philosophical and literary standpoint in an article entitled ‘Against Dryness’ in 1961. ‘We live in a scientific and antimetaphysical
age’, she argued, an age in which ‘we have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human
personality’ and in which the connection between art and the moral life had languished ‘because we are losing our
sense of form and structure in the moral world itself’. The problem with much modern writing, as she saw it, lay in