As if By Magic by Wilson, Angus

by Angus Wilson

The adventures of Hamo Langmuir, grower of 'magic' rice and traveller throughout Asia, and his god-daughter Alexandra Grant. This is a novel of sexual intrigue and the search for life's meaning. It explores the growth of interest in the Irrational during the 1960s, and the deep but conflicting relationship between East and West.

Genres: Fiction, Literature

Unknown Binding

First published March 30, 1978

About the author

Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson, KBE (11 August 1913 – 31 May 1991) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood for his services to literature.

Wilson was born in Bexhill, Sussex, England, to an English father and South African mother. He was educated at Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford, and in 1937 became a librarian in the British Museum's Department of Printed Books, working on the new General Catalogue. During World War II, he worked in the Naval section Hut 8 at the code-breaking establishment, Bletchley Park, translating Italian Naval codes.

The work situation was stressful and led to a nervous breakdown, for which he was treated by Rolf-Werner Kosterlitz. He returned to the Museum after the end of the War, and it was there that he met Tony Garrett (born 1929), who was to be his companion for the rest of his life.

Wilson's first publication was a collection of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949), followed quickly by the daring novel Hemlock and After, which was a great success, prompting invitations to lecture in Europe.

He worked as a reviewer, and in 1955 he resigned from the British Museum to write full-time (although his financial situation did not justify doing so) and moved to Suffolk.

From 1957 he gave lectures further afield, in Japan, Switzerland, Australia, and the USA. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1968, and received many literary honours in succeeding years. He was knighted in 1980, and was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 1983 to 1988. His remaining years were affected by ill health, and he died of a stroke at a nursing home in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on 31 May 1991, aged 77.

His writing, which has a strongly satirical vein, expresses his concern with preserving a liberal humanistic outlook in the face of fashionable doctrinaire temptations. Several of his works were adapted for television. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 1978, and jointly helped to establish their creative writing course at masters level in 1970, which was then a groundbreaking initiative in the United Kingdom.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I first read this novel back in the early 1980s or maybe even the late 1970s, I also read quite a few of his other novels 'No Laughing Matter', 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes', 'Late Call' and his short story collection 'The Wrong Set', and when I read that Angus Wilson's reputation as a writer had more-or-less evaporated I determined to reread this novel, and others, and write a defense of an unjustly forgotten author.

Well that is not what this review will be, but to understand why it is necessary to remind everyone who isn't my age (66 as of February 2024) who Angus Wilson was (as a general introduction I recommend a splendid assessment from The Guardian newspaper by DJ Taylor from August 23, 2013 titled 'From Darling to Dodo 'https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...). It is extraordinary to remember, not say embarrassing, that for a huge chunk of the mid twentieth century there were many in England who ranked Wilson with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and John Updike. Wilson became the 'grand old man' of English letters, showered with all the baubles and important positions that a recognised establishment figure could desire. Unfortunately what they didn't grant to Wilson was one of those figures that used to accompany Roman emperors at their triumphs whispering into their ears about the evanescence of worldly triumphs. Not that he needed one. By the time he received his knighthood in 1980 he knew he was on his way to joining Hugh Walpole in that black hole of, not forgotten authors, but of authors we look back on with incredulity that they were ever taken seriously.

I think it is significant that the novel of his which was most often mentioned when I was growing up in the 1970s 'The Old Men at the Zoo' was not even mentioned in Wilson's obituaries in 1991.

What about 'As If by Magic'? it is one of Wilson's late novels but I found in it the same flaws I remember in his earlier novels 'Late Call' 1964) and 'The Middle Age of Mrs. Elliot' (1958) dated in their concerns and details and boy do we get a lot of details in 'As If by Magic'. I was bored to tears before the 'hero' Hugo Langmuir had even packed his bags as we learnt way to much about his ivory backed hair brushes, silver shoe horn, shoe trees and the pigskin travel case with silver fittings. This sort of information is piled on throughout this and other Wilson novels but to what point? It is the sort of set dressing that the 'Merchant-Ivory' films like 'A Room with a View' were filled with, like the cocktail shakers in adaptations of Scott Fitzgerald, but none of this is mentioned or described in the novels. You won't find it in the works of writers like Evelyn Waugh or Somerset Maugham each of whom wrote about times and people when pigskin luggage and other such frills were commonplace.

What killed my ability to continue reading 'As If by Magic' and will keep me from revisiting Wilson's other novels is my sense that Wilson thought he was saying something profound about the times he lived in and through. These weren't just novels but 'state of the nation' novels. The problem is that Jane Austen said so much about her time without writing 'about her time'. She was writing about people, as were all great writers such as Dickens, Balzac or even Somerset Maugham. Wilson writes about 'issues' through his characters and thus fails to live on outside of his era. There are times I was reminded of reading journalism written half a century ago about issues we don't care about anymore.

I have to emphasise that I read Wilson with great pleasure when I was young and that he wrote so many open homosexual characters (I can't call them gay because it is anachronistic) was part of it. Back in my youth to find an establishment writer who created homosexual characters as just 'there' in his novels of the 1950s and 60s was important. He also gives the lie to EM Forster's insistence that he couldn't publish 'Maurice' in his lifetime.

I can't help contrasting Angus Wilson (1913-1991) with Francis King (1923-2011). King never enjoyed the reputation that Wilson had. Nobody compared him to Marquez, Calvino or Updike but he died with his reputation intact - in fact he was a writer everyone insisted was consistently under appreciated. I have recently read his 1951 'Dividing Stream' set in post war Florence and despite the social, economic and political milieu that supports the novel's action now being as 'one with Nineveh and Tyre' the people he writes about are utterly compelling and the 'allusive homoerotic' tone of this and so many of his early novels is both poetic and sexy. King is woefully unappreciated today, but nobody has to apologise for thinking him great.

Although I shelve As If by Magic as unable-to-rate but I give it one star just so I know I have reviewed it.

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really one of my favourites of his, on revisiting it.