Books: The Hindsight Saga

The Hindsight Saga

NO LAUGHING MATTER by Angus Wilson. 496 pages. Viking. $6.95.

Somewhere along the line in this big novel, a half-read copy of The Forsyte Saga is tossed onto a “clover-infested” English lawn. With that gesture, Angus Wilson suggests that Galsworthy’s interminable story of Soames Forsyte has perhaps been grown over by the grass of ages and that it is time to examine the social history and bourgeois values of Britain in the 20th century.

In a way, Author Wilson succeeds better than Galsworthy. He is wittier, and his reputation as satirist, which began with his acid short stories and continued through such crisp novels as Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, will be sustained by this book, his first long exercise in social, fictional history.

Wilson takes one family, the Matthews of London, from the Stone Age of pre-1914 up to the swinging, plastic present of 1967. These have been long bitter years for Britain, with one finest hour to lend its kindly light amid the encircling gloom. There are eight of the Matthews, and Wilson uses each character as a tarot card to tell the fortune of a whole people.

Eight Egocentrics. The Matthews clan conveniently epitomizes the vanished certitudes and present flux of the British middle class. Father, whom the children address by the awful nickname of “Billy Pop,” is a writer of feeble stories that barely win him sufferance in the clubby, belles-lettrist world of London. His real profession, besides “making a living out of not writing,” is sponging on family money, and his real talent is for self-pity disguised as self-mockery. Mother is a monster of snobbery, vanity and pretense, whose main pleasures are adultery and putting down her husband and children.

Little Margaret is already writing precocious romances and laying the foundations of a fortune as a popular novelist. Rupert’s good looks and narcissism give him fame as an actor in the Old Vic. Quentin, the only one old enough to have fought in World War I, transforms his bitterness against the vile old men he considers responsible for the war into a career as a left-wing scold on radio and TV. Plump, stylish Gladys does well in the antique business until she swindles a refugee to give money to her caddish lover and goes to jail. Sukie, the dim one, is all wife and mother, a remorseless gossip, deaf to the seismic rumblings of the ’30s. Marcus proves that homosexuality may not be necessary to a career in the arts, though it helps.

The great convulsions of half a century of British history are glimpsed only as they affect the fortunes of this odd family. Seen through the eyes of eight egocentrics, the tapestry of history becomes a patchwork of ironic trivia. But irritation with the Matthews-family idiosyncrasies should not obscure the novel’s virtues, which derive from Wilson’s expertise in the old-fashioned art of telling a story, crowd management, and letting characters speak in their own voice. The prevailing tone is one of bitchiness, an atmosphere more tolerable and customary in the theater than in fiction. There are scenes in the book that make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seem idyllic. The dialogue, thanks to a flair for dating and placing people, is impeccably tailored for period and person. As for a sense of class, without which no English novelist can hope to function, Wilson’s is as sound as the doorman’s at Claridge’s.

Rats in the Cordage. When Wilson writes about a woman, the malice is tangibly thick: “Her heavy amber earrings and amber necklace, her dyed black hair done in earphones so dead and scurfy that one felt that if they were lifted moths would fly out of them, her dreadful arch smile . . .” Are such caricatures intended to portray poor old Britannia? The tone is wrong for a grand historical novel; the sound is not of a foundering vessel but of rats in the stores and cordage.

What is perhaps unsatisfactory and bloodless in Wilson is not so much the usual charge that he “hates people”; if he has defects, they are of the mind rather than the heart. He lacks the philosophic gravitas that his theme calls for. Perhaps he would have summoned more compassion for his subject had he chosen a family less demonic and closer to what one hopes to be the demographic norm.