The half is better than the whole
Francis King
INCLINE OUR HEARTS by A. N. Wilson
Hamish Hamilton, .£11.95, pp.250
Anyone who buys A. N. Wilson's new book will, in a sense, be getting a novel and a half for the price of one. At a time when one all too often gets only half a novel for the price of two, this is in itself no bad thing. Primarily, here is a Dundee cake of a Bildungsroman, fruity with hectic incidents and nutty with idiosyncratic characters, in the manner of Compton Mackenzie's Sinis- ter Street or Somerset Maugham's Of Hu- man Bondage. Like Maugham's Philip Carey, Wilson's Julian Ramsay is orphaned at an early age (a wartime bomb from a Heinkel falls on the hotel in which his parents are staying) and then placed in the care of a clergyman uncle and his wife. Unlike Philip Carey's guardians, a childless couple hypocritical in the chilliness of their rectitude, Julian's guardians, parents of a sullen, lumpish girl destined to become a successful philosopher at Oxford and con- scientious to a fault in their determination to do their unwelcome duty by their nephew, hardly seem to deserve either his contemptuous indifference or the epithet 'starchy' bestowed on them in the blurb.
The book follows Julian through a lonely but — despite screaming fits at night — not unhappy childhood, and so on to private school, public school and National Service in the ranks. Since he is a bit of a prig and a bit of a muff, with an intelligence and a tongue sharper than those possessed by most of the adults with whom he comes into contact, it is not surprising not merely that others find it hard to like him but that he should so often find it hard to like himself. Looking back not so much in anger as in queasy irony, he shows the virtue of being at least as much aware of his own shortcomings as of the shortcomings of both his victims and his persecutors.
At his private school, the headmaster, known as 'the Binker', alternately whacks and gropes his charges — who, in the manner of the young, accept these unwel- come attentions as things as unavoidable as cold baths or compulsory games. One of Julian's closest friends is the school rebel, who, on Parents' Day, arranges for a cartload of manure to be dumped outside the entrance of the marquee in which the Binker, parents and pupils are taking part in a religious service. There is a young, gossipy assistant matron, Vanessa, her waist narrow and her hips broad, who kisses the boys goodnight when making her dormitory rounds. There is a hardly older art mistress, Miss Beach, with tiny features and flashing eyes, with whom Julian falls in love — for the first time in his life. In the manner of the youthful hero of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between, Julian witnes- ses Miss Beach and the man said to be her fiance in an intimate embrace; but, more robust than Hartley's molly-coddle, the prepubescent boy is not marked for life by the incident. Subsequently, taken out from school by his grandmother on a visiting day, he sees the same young man faithless- ly holding hands with Vanessa in a tea- shop.
Moving on from private school, Julian encounters the sort of commanding, soph- isticated, name-dropping master of which even the most minor of public schools always has at least one example to exert a lasting influence on his pupils. Sent to study French in Brittany for a month, he loses his virginity to the daughter of his landlady. In National Service his closest friend (here strenuous characterisation de- generates into effortful caricature) is a dark, sharp-featured and slight-figured homosexual who regales him with lurid confidences.
Little of all this territory is virgin; indeed, most of it has already been tramped over by a host of writers ranging from E. F. Benson to Hugh Walpole and from Evelyn Waugh to Robert Liddell. But Wilson has now staked it out for his own with vigour and aplomb. He is a writer who, in both his novels and his biog- raphies, has not merely an eye and an ear but also a heart for eccentricity, and eccentrics, at once amusing and touching in their singularity, abound in these pages. Chief of them is Julian's uncle and guar- dian, who habitually dresses in Oxford bags, high collar and white bow tie, and who is obsessed with his neighbours the Lampitts. Like stinginess, snobbery tends to be selective, and it is on to this family, recently ennobled and only mildly disting- uished in public life, that Uncle Roy's snobbery has mysteriously battened, to the exclusion of folk more worthy of it.
A member of this family is a purveyor of Edwardian-style belles lettres, James Pet- worth Lampitt, whose death, in compara- tive obscurity when Julian is still a teen- ager, provides the half novel which any purchaser of this book will get in addition to the whole one. This half, incomplete and tentative, is in fact potentially far more interesting than what is complete and assured. James Petworth attracts the atten- tion of a biographer, Raphael Hunter, first seen by Julian as the young man in intimate contact with his own beloved Miss Beach. Raphael, sinister and elusive, worms his way into the confidence of the Lampitt who is Uncle Roy's particular friend, and so acquires the James Petworth papers, from which he constructs a biography scandalous in a host of sexual revelations which — like the claim that James Pet- worth once gave a blow-job to Lloyd George in the House of Commons Library — may or may not be true. In his depiction of this 'publishing scoundrel', a man of infinite charm and absolutely no conscien- ce, Wilson, himself a distinguished biog- rapher, demonstrates his distrust both of biographers and of biographies. How can one claim to know a man from an accu- mulation of his letters, diary entries and bills, and from the reminiscences of those who probably knew him far less well than they pretend? It is hard enough for a man to know his own self.
If Wilson had concentrated on this theme — with the life of Raphael Hunter eerily now running parallel and now inter- twining with Julian's — one suspects that he might have produced a novel less rich and entertaining but more original both in the questions which it asks and in the answers which it gives.
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