Books: The Lower Depths

HEMLOCK AND AFTER (248 pp.)—Angus Wilson—Viking ($3).

Modern English novelists, like Japanese farmers, often cultivate small patches of ground for maximum yields. Angus Wilson, 39, does most of his digging in mildewing sections of the British middle class. In The Wrong Set, a batch of 13 craftsmanlike stories, he unearthed a nest of hypocrites, perverts and bores. In his first novel. Hemlock and After, he lifts a rock from more human vermin.

Wilson picks up his novelist hero, Bernard Sands, at a moment of pride and triumph preceding a fall. Sands, a Grand Old Man of Letters at 57, has just wangled government support for a young writers’ colony at Vardon Hall, a country estate. This simple fact wins him many enemies. The local gentry are snobby about Vardon Hall’s comedown and sniffy about the artist types soon to take it over. The leader of the opposition is a huge “obscene parrot” of a woman named Ma Curry, who wanted to turn Vardon Hall into a hotel. As a kind of madam for a clientele whose tastes are right out of Krafit-Ebing, Ma Curry has a bit of dirt on the distinguished Bernard Sands and is waiting to smear him at the right moment.

Anarchic Humanism. Bernard Sands, it turns out, is a homosexual and almost proud of it. Though his deviation has come as a late discovery, it suits his Gide-like view of himself as an “anarchic humanist.” Living by the code that “happiness should be respected in any guise,” he has little use for conventional notions of good & evil. Yet compared with the moral termites around him, he seems a fair sort.

Not actively evil, but merely weak, his wife has retreated into a cocoon of neuroses. His brother-in-law is a shiftless drunk who pretends he can write, and his journalist daughter is a loveless prig. Sands’s first homosexual buddy, a stage designer, has left him for a theatrical producer. His second, a young bookshop manager, is in the clutch of a possessive mother. Bernard Sands feels superior to the shoddy lot until he sees a fellow homosexual dragged away by the police—and suddenly feels ready to side with the law and “join the hounds in the kill.”

This fresh insight into his own character shakes him. At the dedication of Vardon Hall he delivers a fumbling speech: “So much that has been written would have been better left unprinted.” A coterie of his friends then stage a romp that confirms the worst suspicions of the natives. Ma Curry prepares to expose Sands, but before she can make a move, Sands threatens her with counter-exposures, and then dies of a heart attack.

Cardinal Sin. With Sands gone, the life goes out of Hemlock and After. Author Wilson adds an epilogue in which a strangely recovered Mrs. Sands splices up the novel’s loose ends and packs Ma Curry and her crew off to jail.

Author Wilson seems to see his novel as a modern morality play. In its terms, vulgarity is evil, good taste is grace, “to let life bore you” is the cardinal sin, and no one is ever saved from anything. His crisp prose style and his deft aim with the acid of satire keep his novel from being pointlessly sordid. But as the parade of homosexual flirts, pimps and spivs crosses its pages, it becomes uncertain whether Author Wilson is exploring the lower depths of England or of Hell.