Angus Wilson : a biography

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Library Journal Review

British novelist Drabble (Gates of Ivory, LJ 3/15/92), a friend of her subject, offers the first full-length biography of Wilson since his death in 1991. Drabble's extensively detailed work chronicles Wilson's birth (in 1913) to improvident parents, childhood in South Africa, return to England for an Oxford education, and willingness to give up the security of a position in the British Museum to pursue a literary career. Despite some attention to Wilson's fiction, Drabble focuses on her subject's long homosexual relationship with Tony Garrett; the celebrity he won with Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956); his self-exile from Thatcher's England; and his decline into poverty and ill health. Her study of Wilson is also a panorama of literary England in an era of conferences and guest lectures. For literature collections.-Charles Crawford Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Drabble's biography (her only previous one was Arnold Bennett) has the dubious virtue of being the longest life of the late novelist (1913-1991) that readers are ever likely to encounter. Almost as many names are dropped in these pages as populate the London telephone directory. Yet the chatty but encyclopedic English gossip may be as entertaining as Drabble's glib ignorance of the U.S. is appalling (flamingoes in North Carolina, typhoons in Iowa?). Few details evoking the texture of Wilson's picaresque social, literary and openly gay life are omitted, from his early years in the British Museum to his globe-trotting as literary lion. Where this works is in the camp account of the once-secret Bletchley Park cryptographic center, in which Wilson spent WWII, and where the local shrink, hooked on his patient's dream-diary, suggested he was a born novelist. The backgrounds to Wilson's writings unfold amusingly, from his satirical masterpiece, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) to money-spinning prefaces to paperbacks of Dickens. The biographer, an esteemed novelist who turns up in Sir Angus's circle as early as 1969, materializes on some pages as "Drabble" and elsewhere as "I." Whether or not she makes her case that Wilson is as significant a novelist of his generation as Graham Greene, he emerges as a colorful character. Photos. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This first biography of Angus Wilson, by acclaimed British novelist and critic Margaret Drabble, is clearly the product not only of prodigious research but also of deep admiration. Deliberately eschewing literary evaluation of Wilson's works, Drabble focuses on the life itself, describing the impressive research and notetaking for each book, the innumerable travels all over the globe, the frequent teaching, lecturing, and reviewing. The result is a groundbreaking but seriously flawed study. The sources are impressive in both number and range. But page after page is filled with the lists of names of family, friends, and acquaintances with whom Wilson and his life-long companion, Anthony Garrett, spent their time talking, eating and/or drinking, as well as with mention of events they attended. To what end? Most paragraphs have no shape or coherence. Moreover, Drabble incorporates increasingly numerous and disruptive asides, footnotes, and rhetorical questions of dubious value. Although a distinct portrait of an immensely complicated Wilson emerges, a definitive study of him remains to be written. J. E. Steiner Drew University

Booklist Review

Esteemed British novelist Drabble misses hardly a detail in her exacting and dispassionate biography of fellow countryman and fiction writer, the late Angus Wilson. It will be more her name than his that will attract American readers to this book, since few of us over here read Wilson, and what readers will encounter is an impeccably researched but a you-gotta-care kind of endless tracking of seemingly every month of Wilson's life. In a rather prosaic--stodgy, in fact--style, Drabble profiles a young man who was born into an unsettled home life, was well schooled at a fine public school and then Oxford, developed into a flamboyantly gay young man who after university tumbled into writing as a career, and later became an established writer secure in the British literary firmament. The book opens up to really engage the reader during the points when Drabble lends her critical acumen to Wilson's novels and stories. For big literature collections only. --Brad Hooper

Kirkus Book Review

As with many ploddingly obese biographies, there is a thin, sprightly work here aching to be set free. Angus Wilson was one of the last gasps of breath in the British novel's slow, asymptotic death. In novels such as Anglo- Saxon Attitudes and The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, he combined the waspishness of Evelyn Waugh with the social commentary of E.M. Forster, adding a dash of baroque Firbankian campiness for good measure. Though he was one of England's first openly gay writers, his work is more concerned with the foibles and fallibilities of English society than specifically homosexual themes. A friend of the novelist's, Drabble seems concerned with returning him to his proper place in English literature. Like many of his characters, Wilson was a colorful personality, effortlessly erudite, a great talker, but his life was usually unremarkable: He lectured and went on long holidays. And Drabble (The Gates of Ivory, 1992, etc.) feels obliged to record it all. Right to the brink of parody, list follows list as she notes seemingly every party, conference, and dinner Wilson ever attended; she even throws in the occasional menu, as well. And why not detail Wilson's slightest jaunt--from a day trip to London to a grand Indian tour? At times it's more like reading an engagement calendar than a biography. The writing tends to be bloodless, enervated, but is redeemed somewhat by her novelist's insight into Wilson's psychology. She also writes with professional understanding of Wilson's money troubles, the ceaseless Faustian necessity of teaching, lecturing, attending conferences, reviewing books, all in order to stay afloat. Such is the sad, ironic state of literature these days, that when Wilson died in 1991, much honored, even knighted, he was practically penniless, and many of his books were out of print. Perhaps this biography, in its lumbering, cumbersome way, might bring a few of these elegant, streamlined, ever inventive works back to the bookstores.