Books: Brilliant Gossip

A BIT OFF THE MAP (193 pp.)—Angus Wilson—Viking ($3.50).

I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face . . .

The English, as suggested in this very English verse by Sir Walter Raleigh, late professor of English literature at Oxford, live very close to their neighbors, and thus tend to have a depressingly low view of their character, morals and appearance. Angus Wilson, England’s cleverest postwar storyteller, succeeds like a gifted gossip in holding the ear of an audience which may deplore the scandalmonger but is entranced by his narrative.

A good gossip should have no shame, and Angus Wilson has little. In his current, brilliantly readable collection, Wilson has given the dreadful dossiers of about 40 odd types, ranging from pathological spivs to a loony peer. The intellectuals shuffle inside their ideas like men in borrowed dirty clothes. Most of the characters have ambiguous attitudes toward sex, money and class. The title story, A Bit Off the Map, is the personal narrative of Kennie, one of the loose-jawed, tight-jeaned set known in London as Teddy boys, who falls in with a crew of intellectuals. They are dismal London versions of Greenwich Village nihilists—a sort of intellectual Jimson weed that sprouted amid the unfilled bomb craters of postwar London. Says Reg, a novelist: “We’ll light such a blaze that all their nice little civilised fire engines won’t be able to put it out.”

Colonel & Teddy Boy. The reader may feel surprised that Kennie, the moron Teddy boy, should pal around with characters spouting Blake and Dostoevsky, until Wilson’s subtle point is clear. His fantasies of violence and his vision of life march—suede shoe by scuffed boot—the same dark path. Cleverly, Author Wilson both evokes and deplores the spirit that may find words among intellectuals and find action in the Teddy boy. To make his point, Wilson introduces a figure of the old order, one Colonel Lambourn, who carries about maps of mysterious defense zones and obscure treasure troves. He is. of course, mad. Colonel and Teddy boy meet by chance, and the madman of the old regime is struck down by the inarticulate evangel of the new. Muses Wilson’s Teddy boy in a weird finale: “See, it’s like I said when I see red I don’t know my own strength. And it’s all, all of it, a bloody cheat and I don’t know what I shall do. But if there’s questions, I’ll be all right, see, because what’s an old bloke like that want talking to me on Hampstead Heath at one o’clock in the morning. That’s what they’ll want to know.”

Wilson writes not so much with a pen as with the needle of a tattoo artist who wants to inscribe “no” on Britannia’s forehead. In After the Show, a well-illusioned young public-school type tries to be chivalrous toward a tawdry young girl, only to find that she scarcely knows what he is getting at; his illusions are shattered when she puts an Elvis Presley record on her gramophone. In More Friend Than Lodger, Wilson plots a triangle, not only of marital infidelity but of social insecurity, involving a stuffy publisher, his disarmingly bitchy wife and a handsome sort of literary confidence man—a triangle in which the woman adds up all the angles and makes the sum come out to a lot more than 180°.

Pretensions & Spitballs. Author Wilson’s view of life may sometimes seem like that of an undertaker assessing the most likely customer, but there is no denying the sneering precision of his observations. U.S. readers, without suffering the Englishman’s special anguish which comes from a feeling that he is improperly dressed, may acknowledge the deadly accuracy of some of Wilson’s catarrhy spitballs. One character sneers at his pretentious brother: “Ah, I see we have a new class now. There used to be those who had the tele [TV] and those who were above it. Now we have those who have the tele and are still above it.”