The Wrong Set

by Wilson Angus

poche. 1966. Broché.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, 20th Century, Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's very of its time and class, which is great. I love the sly humour and he's very good with his characters.

Fresh Air Fiend: Fairly awful modern female academic locks horns with don's wife, an alcoholic former muse of minor poets and writers.

Union Reunion: Emigrant returns to South Africa for a family party. Everyone's fairly awful, and really awful at keeping secrets.

Saturnalia: Very Ronald Firbank. But that might just be what I'm always going to say when a gay writer has lots of characters talking at a party and I don't really know what's going on but I'm having fun.

Realpolitik: Modern chap sacks all of the fogeys at a museum.

A Story of Historical Interest: Daughter tries to do the best for her dying father. Except for the fact that the middle classes no longer ever live in hotels (except Alan partridge, perhaps?), this could be set today.

The Wrong Set: Awful common woman thinks that her nephew, studying at university, has fallen in with the wrong set. The joke is, I presume, that any number of European communists is better than her alcoholic licentious friends. Or is Wilson playing it straight?

Crazy Crowd: Serious young man goes with new girlfriend to visit her awful and self-consciously unconventional family.

A Visit in Bad Taste: Self-satisfied couple ask a sex offender to leave them and make a new life in the colonies.

Raspberry Jam: Effeminate boy has made friends with very unconventional spinster sisters. One day they go completely nuts.

Significant Experience: Boy's joy in dumping first girlfriend.

Mother's Sense of Fun: Man with difficult relationship with his mother. He doesn't want to hurt her feeling but he wants her to stop.

Et Dona Ferentes: Bored Northern European boy is tired of no one in England falling in love with him. Except for the father of the family he's visiting.

[Julian Tooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sadly, this book is out of print. I loved it. Lots of waspish dialogue between people who pretend to like each other but really don’t. Lots of sexual undercurrents and snobbery. The book feels of its time (especially in it references to the competing ideologies of Socialism & Fascism) but ahead of its time in its remarkably open references to sexual outsiders. I’ve no idea why Angus Wilson has gone so out of fashion.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, it's early Wilson, but it's still pretty great. He's kind of harsh on these stories in The Wild Garden, but I think that's just almost over-conscientious self-criticism and self-analysis.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essentially 12 characters in search of a novel – a full length book could have been written about any of them, whether it be the Oxford Don’s wife or the nightclub singer, the new Director of an old-fashioned museum or the employees and guests at South Kensington hotel. Pretty much all of the protagonists, secondary characters, and tertiary characters are awful, particularly the brittle but self-aggrandizing white colonialists in Durban in Union Reunion. If I were an Angus Wilson character, I’d say: “Angus, you cat” - probably breathlessly, or in a low contralto.

Most of the stories dabble in the societal snobbishness of the time, which is just before or just after (not during) the war, and the relations between men and women. Families are repressive, fathers are manipulative, brothers and sisters somewhat incestuous. There’s also an ongoing theme of people past their prime – society debs of the flapper age not realising that they’re old news in the post-war socialist world, but then again Mr W doesn’t seem to think much of the new moderns with their earnest honesty and unconventional sex lives.

[Nick Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does anyone read Angus Wilson anymore? Maybe they do, maybe I know the wrong people, but my sense is that he is fading away. I’ve only read one other work by him, his first novel, Hemlock and After, which I read many years ago. It was one of those novels, with things like Lucky Jim and Lord of the Flies, which announced a new generation of British writers in the years after the Second World War. I don’t remember the story or characters, I just remember that it was impressive but depressing: it portrayed a society whose post-War optimism and the promise of creating a new, fairer society, had seeped away, the usual snobby bunch being left in charge to run things for their own advantage. Of course, I might be misremembering the novel, but the stories in this volume, written in the years before Hemlock and After, are much the same. Although born in South Africa, Wilson was educated at Westminster School, attended Oxford University and then worked for the British Museum Library and the Foreign Office: Wilson writes about those he knows, the English upper middle classes (the one exception, Union Reunion, is about the white South African elite) and treats them with satiric contempt and hatred. And Wilson is no one trick pony, his characters are not all of one type, he heaps his derision on a whole range of English respectability: perhaps his most chillingly awful bunch is the family in the Crazy Crowd who pride themselves on their zaniness and nonconformity. It is all done superbly well, but there is something stifling about it, like being locked in the Huntington Conservative Club for an evening. But there is no real political critique going on, in most of these stories there is nothing positive to act as a counterweight against all the smug types. In Saturnalia, for instance, the only story whose characters go beyond the narrow social order, the staff at the hotel are as unpleasant as the paying guests. But I wonder if the stories were written in the order they are presented, because in some of the later ones we are offered a central character who is registered as a partial outsider, the man visiting his fiancé’s family in Crazy Crowd or the boy in Raspberry Jam: they tend to be observers, largely passive, and I presume they are stand-ins for Wilson: they don’t quite bring a gust of fresh air with them, but they don’t seem as mouldering as the others. Apparently Wilson later dismissed these early stories and I think they are very limited, but they show a distinctive talent...maybe I’ll re-read Hemlock and After.

[William Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty, catty, very British satire—1930s-1940s style. Wilson’s first books gives a hint of the more overt gay novels and stories to come in later work (Hemlock & After). Meanwhile his deeply realized characters, no-prisoners satirical eye, and a roving 3rd omniscient POV are already fully formed. Barely read these days—I’d never even come across his work before—Wilson deserves a rediscovery. I know that Waugh is typically lauded as the deadest-eyed of British satirists, but I’ve always found Waugh’s work flat and boring and not funny. Wilson, by contrast, made me constantly chuckle. If you like mordant wit and comically unpleasant, un-self-aware, foolish, convention-minded—yet very human—characters, then Wilson is for you.

[Grimmthorny · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third star is solely due to 'Raspberry Jam', which is now on my favourites list. The other eleven stories included in this book, in spite of some admittedly clever dialogue, are made dull by outdated attitudes and predictable endings.

[Nerina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story about 'raspberry jam' will give me nightmares!!!

[Alec]

#1
Professor Searle drained his glass of port slowly, then he said ‘I’ve been afraid that this would happen. I think you have made a mistake in asking such a question. Oh! I know you will say I am afraid of the truth, but I still think there are things that are better left unsaid. But now that you have asked me I must answer – yes, in a large degree, yes.’

#6
‘It’s impossible to be as funny about this government as they are themselves’ said Trevor. He had such a quiet sense of humour. ‘They’re a regular Fred Karno show.’ But they all begged to hear the story, so he gave it to them. ‘An empty taxi drove up to No. 10,’ he said ‘and Mr Attlee got out.’ Beautifully told it was, with his monocle taken out of his eye and polished just at the right moment.

#7
Peter opened the new book on Du Bellay and read a few pages, but somehow with Jennie sitting opposite he could not concentrate and he began to stare out of the window. Already the train was moving through the flats of Cambridgeshire: an even yellow surface of grass after the summer’s heat, cut by the crisscross of streams with their thick rushes and pollarded willows; only occasionally did the eye find a focal point – the hard black and white of some Frisians pasturing, the rusty symmetry of a Georgian mansion, the golden billowing of a copse in the September wind, and – marks of creeping urbanization – the wire fences and outhouses of the smallholdings with their shining white geese and goats.

#8
‘That’s where we differ’ said Malcolm and for a moment his handsome, high-cheekboned face with its Roman nose showed all his Covenanting ancestry ‘I could never excuse his actions. I tried to rid myself of prejudice against them, to see him as a sick man rather than as a criminal’ it was not for nothing one felt that the progressive weeklies were so neatly piled on the table beside him ‘but when he refused psychiatric treatment the whole thing became impossible.’

[Zeltzamer]

Spoiled Dostoevsky’s Demons for me.

[Jo Birkett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did enjoy some of the stories which were unexpectedly beady - the outdated language led you to believe the characters would be treated gently but definitely not. But too outdated in the end.

[achilles · Rating 5 out of 5]

raspberry jam is absolute horror oh my god

[Todayiamadaisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd never heard of Angus Wilson before, and this book of short stories isn't something I'd have picked up by myself, but I'm glad it came my way in a lucky dip bookclub, though, as it was very good. It's a collection of tales about middle-class English people being awful between the wars.

Sample dialogue: "I should not wish to give way unreservedly to what it so unattractively called the libido, it suggests a state of affairs in which beach pyjamas are worn and jitterbugging is compulsory."

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Sir) Angus seems rather neglected nowadays, many people even thinking he and A N Wilson are one and the same, but Angus is in a different class from the prolific Young Fogey who came to fashionable prominence in the Thatcher years.

This is his first early collection of his stories (1949), and is a mixed bag, but Union Reunion (no doubt based on his own South African history), Saturnalia, Realpolitik and the titular story The Wrong Set, are all gems of social observation, set in the pre-and post-war years.

My own favourite work of Angus Wilson is his last novel of social realism: Late Call (1964), which was superbly dramatised by the BBC in '75, with the late great Michael Bryant in the main part, playing opposite an equally impressive Dandy Nicholls - the latter in a serious role, for once.