HEMLOCK AND AFTER

P. N. Furbank called Wilson ‘the casuist of humanism’ (D. 481). Liberal humanism, a disparate bundle of belief and unbelief, was momentarily forced into illusory coherence after the last war. The space it defended was anti-Marxist, post-Christian, anti-capitalist, socially progressive. It proposed a political alternative to Cold War extremes, and, in the teeth of the experience of Hitler, tested belief in goodness and progress. ‘Test’ is the operative word here. Even the liberal humanist Forster, with whose cosiness Wilson was to quarrel, has been well described as ‘deeply at odds with the liberal mind … at war with the liberal imagination’.

In Hemlock and After, Communism is represented by the ‘psychopathic politics’ of Louie Randall – and capitalism is defended by the mercenary, selfish world of Sands's son James and his wife Sonia. Liberal humanism, in the median position, is critical of the Establishment even if arguably also parasitic on it, and uneasily angled towards authority. Above all, humanism resists any ideas of religious transcendence as false consolation. Yet it has its own myths. Hemlock and After invents half-casually – the actual writing of the novel took only four weeks – a potent humanist mythology of breakdown which is to serve Wilson for his first five novels. It seems no accident that a later Wilson, while agnostic about ‘transcendence’, declared interest in the workings of ‘grace’ (H. 56).

Bernard Sands is a 57-year-old ex-schoolmaster and successful novelist, and appears a ‘respectable’ father of two. He is situated within a ‘stuck’ society, its coteries referred to as ‘petrified’ (p. 210). Hemlock and After is vibrant with energy, and puts this energy, à la Gogol or Thackeray, into brilliantly evoking different kinds of dead worlds. Sands speaks of ‘stagnant pools’ (p. 108). Set towards the collapse in 1951 of the Labour government which had created the Welfare State, England here is tired from the war and subsequent rationing. Bernard's sister Isobel is a professor of English literature who no longer responds to what she teaches. His daughter Elizabeth is imprisoned within a brightly strained magazine-world persona, and her brittle chatter – ‘Jolly D’, she keeps repeating – hides from herself and reveals to us her deep boredom with life. For Wilson the limits of our diction are the precise limits of our moral world. How we express ourselves defines us.