Late Call

by Angus Wilson

A compassionate portrait of an elderly - and frustrated - woman adjusting to new town life and finding a new purpose in living. Illness forces Sylvia Calvert to live with her son Harold, a headmaster in Carshall New Town. At first, Sylvia cannot adjust to the jungle of supermarkets, 10-pin bowling alleys and recreation areas; to the committees and purposeful entertaining involved in the creation of a new society. Above all, Sylvia can't understand Harold's odd, thrusting idealism and the strange behaviour of her grandchildren. But a chance meeting and a family crisis give her the chance to fulfil herself ...

Genres: Fiction, Family, Literary Fiction, Novels, British Literature

334 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

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

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angus Wilson is one of those twentieth-century writers, important, admired, and popular in his day, who has been almost entirely forgotten. What I liked best about this book is its focus on a type of character that is almost never at the centre of fiction--an elderly, ordinary, working-class woman. She's had to leave her job as the manager of a small hotel due to declining health, so she and her useless husband move in with their surviving recently widowed son and his family in a glossy new house in a glossy new town where their few bits of old furniture don't fit with the modern decor and the labour-saving devices intimidate her. There she sinks into depression until she figures out how to be in the world. The book is sometimes quite funny, often at the expense of the self-admiring people who inhabit this new town (though without turning them into caricatures), and it takes its central characters seriously as people. It's also surprisingly (for the early '60s) quite relaxed about the homosexuality of one of its characters.

[Daniel Polansky]

An intelligent but frustrated matron must reinvent herself when she moves to a live with her intellectual son and his family. There aren't enough books about old people, because books aren't really marketed to old people and young people generally don't like being reminded that they are growing old, which is too bad because there's a lot of territory to be mined here. Wilson's depiction of unexceptional but admirable people requires a lot of talent, and I found myself enjoying this.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another Angus Wilson novel which I read nearly 40 years or more years ago in the 1980s and even then I thought the novel ridiculously dated, not so much the old working class woman Sylvia Calvert who I thought, and still think is very finely drawn but her son, Harold. The problem with the son is the problem with the novel but really it is the problem of Angus Wilson. In 1956 he was 43, not old, but from the time of his first story collection 'The Wrong Sort' (1949) he often wrote about changing social class attitudes and nature in post WWII Britain. The problem is that so much of what he has to say, or what he observes, just seems either of date, parochial, out-of-touch, or just plain silly - it certainly did in the 1980s and I doubt if my opinion would be any different now. For example in this novel he writes about the 'new towns' created after WWII for the working class displaced by bombs or slum clearance from old inner city areas as a huge incubator for social change. Of course they were but the idea that the UK Labour government after WWII was laying the foundations for creating a 'new' classless man is just hard to take seriously. It reeks of Fabian lectures, pipe smoke, wet tweeds and earnest men and women in sandals dourly discussing the future over coco.

We now know that the 'future' was teddy boys, leather jackets, youthful rebellion, kids with money enjoying full employment listening to their own music, wearing their own clothes and creating an identity which Wilson never understood.

I am pretty sure there was at least a brief 'gay' subplot - I apologise if I am wrong - but Wilson was openly gay (I am not sure he was in 1956) but he certainly wrote many 'gay' characters in his novels as just there, as part of life without explanation or justification and was unique in doing so and that should be remembered.

There are a couple of vastly enthusiastic reviews on GR and I wouldn't want to stop anyone from exploring Wilson's oeuvre. I just don't think he has aged well. Most of his best known novels were written in the 1950s and 60s, his last two works in 1973 and 1980 and although he was a grand old man of literature he was out of fashion long before his death in 1991. But when you look at Somerset Maugham, who was already a wildly successful play-write and author in 1913 when Wilson was born, or Francis King, who was born a decade later then Wilson and published three novels before him and went on producing novels until 2009 (two years before his death) it is hard not to see Wilson's limitations. Maugham is still, rightly read, at least for his stories and will continue to be. Francis King was never as lauded as Wilson but he was a far finer writer as a comparison between this novel and, for example, King's 'Dividing Stream' of 1951 would show.

Compared to Maugham or King Wilson is an ever more curious oddity. I have given this novel three stars, as a kindness, because there are good things in it.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know anything of this novel. It was given to me following a conversation about the Old Men at the Zoo.
It is very different from that very much post 'The Entertainer'. Kitchen sink realism in suburbia of a Telford like new town.
The family characters are quite self absorbed & repellent, especially the Headmaster son, who is a sort of Champagne Socialist Nimby, years before it was a thing.
I was especially puzzled by the prologue, that reads like a cross between the Sound & The Fury & Brighton Rock. High praise indeed. The miserable lives led by middle class people is very much more Patrick Hamilton than Iris Murdoch.
It's depictions of pointless retirement are brilliant. It makes retirement seem even more scary than it does anyway.
The central arc of the novel follows Sylvia's attempts to find purpose in post retirement squatting at her Sons's house. This takes many turns as a place is hard to find for someone past their useful best.
There is redemption, but it comes at a high price, where experience is valued above youth.
The treatment of the gay characters is radical for the time but not a surprise, welcome nonetheless.
An unexpected enjoyment of a slice of early 1960s realism.
Try it you might like it!

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pedestrian play focusing on a retired woman, her gambling husband, and uppity son.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Late Call by Angus Wilson is the august, phenomenal novel included on the Ninety –Nine Novels – The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal choice of the Magister Ludi Anthony Burgess – the one that gave us the gift of the divine Clockwork Orange – Angus Wilson wrote Anglo- Saxon Attitudes, which sits on the 1,000 novels Everyone Must Read compilation http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/01/a...

10 out of 10





Reading Late Call has been such a spectacular delight, a cathartic experience that I might have to go back at The Old Men at The Zoo http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/t... and try taking it on again, the encounter with Anglo Saxon Attitudes had been sublime, but somehow the old Men at The Zoo has been less enchanting, I even had to abandon the text, but it might have been a grave mistake



Late Call also goes to prove how miraculous reading can be, how much of a magician a marvelous writer can be, for the novel centers on Sylvia Calvert, an elderly woman, and though this could be labeled as incorrect, she is not the type of personage that would attract me to a narrative, on the contrary, it takes a supreme gift to keep me attentive, focused, never mind enthused, but this is what Angus Wilson does.

Sylvia Calvert is in her sixties, she has been managing hotels and now she has to stop, the end of her career seems to be due to a combination of factors, there is her age, but the misbehavior, the blunders of her husband, Arthur, could have the essential element, for his wife had been warned before, told to keep him off the lounge, but somehow, the captain managed to get into trouble at the hotel, before that and he would in Carshall New Town, when they will move in with their son, Harold.



Arthur Calvert has had a serious addiction, playing cards and betting, when losing at these games, or when trying to guess the wining horses, he would accumulate debts, and then there has been a complaint (or a few, to be closer to the truth) and a line was drawn, the old man and his spouse had been invited by Harold Calvert, headmaster in Carshall, to join their family in the large mansion where Ray, Mark and Judy, the three children live, now that Beth has died, and the widower, Harold, is lost without her.

Harold Calvert is a very challenging, captivating character – like almost all in fact, it takes more than a few figures to make such a spectacular magnum opus, unless we are talking of course of the rara avis, a work like Waiting for Godot http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/09/w... by Samuel Beckett - he is the headmaster, and appreciated as such, but he takes on a controversial cause.



What is noble and admirable in this impressive figure – there is more than this however – is the fact that he works with children and teenagers with challenges, teaching many to read and learn, in situations where without his involvement, they would stay illiterate, and they show their gratitude and we can also feel admiration for the man.



He is the acclaimed author of manuals, they are the reason why he is wealthy, they have this splendid, modern house, decorated with the involvement of the late wife, Berth, who seems to be omnipresent, however dead, because she is always mentioned – she does not haunt the place per se, as in stories with ghosts, but metaphorically, she is one of the key players, on the A list, up there with the children Sylvia and Arthur, not to mention Harold – nonetheless, the grieving man has a breakdown…

Harold Calvert is appreciated, admired even as a headmaster, but he takes on a cause that threatens to lead to his firing, because he is opposed to a project that is desired, approved of the council, and furthermore, he loses control at one stage, proffering insults (liar, he will control you, etc.) at a large meeting and it could all end with him losing his job, albeit he is now wealthy enough, the decline from being the important headmaster to an excluded undesirable could be devastating, as it is, he suffers the loss of his wife and appears to be without meaning and this could be fatal, as we learn from a majestic book



In his quintessential Man’s Search for Meaning http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/05/m... Victor Frankl writes about his experience in the labor camp (he had been offered an exit, but since he could not take his family, he refused the offer and went to the extermination camps) and how people would be kept alive by their Search for Meaning, as long as there is a why, there is a how, those who still had a meaning, trended to survive (many, most have been massacred in the Holocaust) as in as soon as you saw somebody give his cigarettes away, you would know he is lost

Sylvia Calvert has to cope with the challenges posed by Arthur, who starts playing cards in the new setting, but alas, he accumulates debts again, and this is an embarrassing situation, which has to be hidden from Harold (as it is, he had given his father ten pounds and he thinks that is outrageous, imagine what he would do if he finds that his mother has to pay in excess of one hundred…at the time, this was serious, it would be several tens of thousands today, I think) however, the heroine saves a girl, Mandy, during a severe storm, and the grateful parents, Sheila in particular, are intensely grateful…



This relationship means a lot, because these would be new friends, those that would take her out of routine – change is essential and let me refer to The Lasagna Effect as coined by Harvard Professor Tal Ben-Shahar http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/08/h... - she had started watching too much television and could end up with habits that will atrophy her body and mind…a study involving the elderly has assigned them the simple task of watering some plants and those that benefited from this activity lived twice as much as the participants in the research that had not been given any task, in other words, if Sylvia keeps busy, she has a meaning, then we can expect her to have a longer, healthier life happy, positive humans live longer, have better lives than the negative ones, you could check the case of the nuns of the Notre Dame, to see about that or try and do this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...



I also took part in the Revolution that took down Ceausescu and here is the link to the page that I am most proud of, from the Newsweek article that told readers what had happened http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...

[Teaspoon Stories · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d always hazily assumed that Angus Wilson and AN Wilson were one and the same. Many years back in a self-improving excess of culture a friend took me to hear AN Wilson talk about his new book on Dante. My friend thought he was smiling winsomely at her while I felt certain he was smiling at me. In fact, he was acknowledging someone he knew sitting further back. At one point during the lecture he fixed us with a rhapsodic expression and demanded, “And what did Dante cry out in stanza XXVIII?” We both froze. We did not know. We’d been focused less on sonnets and more on what cake there might be afterwards. Mr Wilson’s ecstatic question turned out, blessedly, to be purely rhetorical. But it still rather put me off books by any chap called Wilson

But now I’ve discovered that AN Wilson and Angus Wilson are entirely separate people. And overcoming my trepidation, I’ve invested in a vintage copy of “Late Call” from the charity-shop bargain box, paying the princely sum of a pound for what turns out to be a (shabby) first edition.

And I’ve found the novel much more readable, and enjoyable, than I’d expected. In fact, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.

The opening chapter, the prologue, immediately delighted me. The small print, the complex sentences and the dense paragraphs create a feeling of intensity that reflects perfectly the sultry oppressiveness of that summer day in the countryside when two little girls playing becomes something ominous and worrying.

That sense of threat, of disorder under the surface, goes on to permeate subsequent chapters. The characters are mostly pretty unpleasant to each other beneath the veneer of good manners. At best, they hypocritically turn a blind eye to unpleasantness and bitch behind people’s backs, at worst, they’re beating children and tyrannising people.

Embarrassing husbands (bullies, cheats and old pervs); stressed-out wives juggling jobs and families; sulky and miserable children. Even within supposedly normal families, the abuse and dysfunction of older generations seems to live on in the form of awkwardness, casual cruelty and emotional repression.

Angus Wilson seems so close up to his characters that we feel we see them in HD. He’s so hypersensitive to what’s going on below the surface - the feelings we generally hide, even from ourselves - that it’s sometimes quite painful to read. We drift in and out of the minds of his characters, experiencing their unspoken thoughts and troubles in their own particular language and idiom:

“She tried not to look at the little woman’s scrawny, grimacing face with its silly dabs of rouge on the cheeks; and when she realised that the hard, sugary words being poured on her were intended to melt and coat her with false intimacy, she tried resolutely not to hear.” (p40)

This is Sylvia Calvert’s way of dealing with the passive-aggressive, two-faced Mrs Amherst at the Palmeira Court private hotel. Another way she copes with life’s constant battering is by imagining her struggles as part of the storyline of her favourite tv soap, “Down Our Way”. She’s particularly taken by the catch-phrase, “I don’t know, I really don’t know”, which the elderly Mrs Harker in the series repeats whenever faced with awkwardness or perplexing change in the world around her.

Life imitating art imitating life is an intriguing theme of the novel. As well as “Down Your Way” re-interpreted as a mirror of Sylvia’s own life, there are the novels of Denise Robins which she reads attentively for clues to understand better how her own relationships work. And then there’s the amateur dramatic production of “Look back in Anger” mirroring the antagonism between Sylvia’s mutinous grandchildren and their pompous, controlling headmaster father.

At one point Angus Wilson puzzles ironically over the purpose of the novel using Sylvia’s inner voice:

“Stale rows leading nowhere; intimacy that did not signify. Yet in novels, you read of family feuds that went deep enough to kill young love for ever, and that the brush of a hand roused tenderness enough to mend the fiercest quarrel. But books and life were not the same; there was no sense in expecting such a thing.” (p51)

As well as the philosophical musings, and the psychological study of a typical and/or dysfunctional family over three generations, there’s also the period interest of the scrupulously observed backdrop of Middle England in the early 1960s. I found this world fascinating:

- the ranch-style houses on fence-less new estates;

- the trendy new coffee bars in the concrete shopping precincts with their vinyl seating and arty murals;

- ambitious young men in sharp suits and slip-on pointy-toed boots;

- intense young men in duffel coats on anti-nuclear protest matches;

- spirited young men with an eye for design, calling each other “dearie” and camping it up in plain sight at a time when homosexual acts between men were still illegal;

- rebel bikers with their leathers and quiffs (the so called “ton-up boys”);

- hip women with jade eyeshadow, Alice bands and metallic frocks;

- older ladies with polyester twinsets and blue perms;

- state of the art kitchens with built-in utensils, split-level ovens and a rotisserie;

- cheese and wine evenings and showy dinner parties;

- new secondary moderns and plate-glass campus universities;

- bossy do-gooders on committees trying to improve the world and control things they don’t approve of (sigh, some things never change … )

But what I most liked about “Late Call”, and found so unexpected, was the sensitive and non-judgemental depiction of Sylvia. She’s not a typical central character for a novel. By her own description she’s old, fat, uneducated, ordinary and unloved. She’s been abused, used and put upon her entire life. She looks back dispassionately and recognises her whole life’s been pretty rubbish:

“She tried deliberately to recall, to cling to, those few happy secret times they had known together; but a desperate grief closed in upon her, grief for all the years and years that had been nothing or worse than nothing, for tenderness dried up and tenderness drained away into indifference.” (p307)

But we also know Sylvia to be resourceful, observant, brave, wise and remarkably constant in her love for the self-absorbed, high-maintenance and generally unappealing members of her family. And in the last sentences of the novel there’s the glimmer of hope that her resilience will see her through. And she might finally achieve her freedom and independence - “a place of her own”.

[Amy Carver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considered by many to be the first sustained piece of work to be set in a post-war British New Town, Wilson has hit upon a trove of themes exceptionally pertinent to the development of Britain after the war and into the 'affluence' era of the 60s. This book is deeply concerned with the nature of community, whether that be consanguineously or socially/culturally determined, and is so in a humorously satirical but always sensitive way. Sylvia is a protagonist straight out of an Elizabeth Taylor novel (likely why I enjoyed it so much), and Wilson's stylised use of space and place reminded me so much of the contrast between 'old' and 'new' life that we are shown in 1968's 'The Wedding Group'. Surely Taylor would have come across this book? The New Town principles that Harold harps on about but cannot quite articulate in any definite sense are an apt warning of style over substance when it comes to things as important as community organisation and the fostering of a deep sense of shared culture (and if those things are even compatible with what the New Towns Act aimed for/created). Such a great touch that Harold's character is a textbook-writing Head at a secondary modern, a site which such a New Town would have been modelled around. How are values constructed? How, and why, do they change? And what impact does that have on such ordinary instances of sociality? Again, a deceptively simple book that packs an important punch on the post-war British culture debate.