Books: A Carnival of Humbug

ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES (410 pp.)-Angus Wilson-Viking ($4.50).

Angus Wilson is a social satirist with an itchy trigger finger. The novel is his shooting gallery, and the characters he sets up as targets not only have clay feet but clay minds and clay hearts as well. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is his longest, cleverest and most annihilating display of literary marksmanship to date, and after it is all over, what hangs in the air is the acrid odor of an unrelenting misanthropy.

A Joke on Tame Cats. The theme of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is fraud leavened with a little Freud. In particular, it is the kind of fraud practiced by the English, who cling to the belief that if something awkward is ignored, it will go away. Gerald Middleton, handsome, sixtyish and a kind of historian emeritus among English medievalists, has long repressed a suspicion that the 1912 discovery of the Melpham Tomb was a grandiose hoax on a par with Piltdown Man. The remains of a 7th century Christian bishop named Eorpwald had been found in the tomb. But in the coffin rested a shockingly priapic fertility idol. Ever since, disconcerted historians had been trying to adjust their theories to this evidence that the good bishop had relapsed into paganism. But Middleton knows something his fellow medievalists do not. Soon after the un earthing, the discoverer’s son, Gilbert Stokesay, boasted in a moment of drunken glee that he had planted the pagan relic himself as a huge practical joke on “our deadly tame-cat ways and our cheap little suburban civilization.”

Through the years Gerald has kept silent, and the secret has paralyzed his career and poisoned his family life. Author Wilson takes his hero on a kind of infernal journey through the circles of deceit in the world-infidelity, envy, avarice, false pride, false piety, malice-before Gerald can face up to the truth about Melpham and himself. The journey is complicated, since Anglo-Saxon Attitudes has as many characters and flashbacks as a deck has cards, and Author Wilson shuffles, reshuffles and deals them in endlessly changing combinations.

Spivs & Mistresses. Since Author Wilson’s implicit tenet is that to know people is to loathe them, the people closest to Gerald are farthest from him. His Danish wife is an octupal mom rich in bloodcurdling whimsy who speaks Teutonically fractured English. Their best years together have been the long ones they have spent apart. Gerald’s only daughter has married a slack-spirited intellectual snob. His younger son is a BBC television personality whose public pitch is heart-tugging interviews with the wronged; privately, he is enamored of a blackmailing, homosexual spiv. Gerald’s elder son is a humorless business tycoon who keeps two sets of emotional books: in one, a grim and proper wife; in the other, a toothsome, pseudo-bohemian mistress. This illicit affair is almost a parody of

Gerald’s own, a long-ago, long-drawn-out liaison with the alcoholic widow of that same irreverent Stokesay who tampered with the tomb at Melpham.

Other vices lead to other dooms. Gerald’s professional colleagues brain each other in peevish academic pillow fights. His onetime charwoman, a raffish comic delight of a character, is picked up for petty shoplifting. Through his younger son’s perverted pals, Gerald is introduced to a nether world of catty infighting governed by the rule of cadge-as-cadge-can.

Broody Hobgoblins. By novel’s end Gerald’s liverish conscience finally forces him to pin down the Melpham hoax and expose it. But the moral of the book seems to cancel itself out, i.e., a life without truth is not to be borne, but a life with truth is unbearable.

Author Wilson wears his rue with wit, literacy and a hostly urge to keep the epigrammatic small talk flowing. But in this carnival of humbug, the prevailing tone is strangely irascible. It is more than an irritation with fraud; it is an irritation with life as it is. Only once does an image of reconciliation with the order of things shine through, as Gerald muses: “I was wondering if it was only when we were really happy that we knew what was true.” For that isolated moment the broody hobgoblins of the Anglo-Saxon mind scurry away, and the novel is laved in sunlit Mediterranean serenity.