Paganism and Piety
OESTERREICHER, ARTHUR
Paganism and Piety Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. By Angus Wilson. Viking. 410 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Arthur Oesterreicher This very serious yet very funny novel must, despite its imperfections, be...
...and as Gerald Middleton becomes absorbed into their worlds and their problems in his search for the truth about Eorpwald, he must rediscover the 20th century as well as the 7th...
...Wilson's endeavor...
...The organization is loose and at times a trifle rambling...
...Here and there, in the first 100 pages, the scaffolding creaks—the dialogue, though smooth and urbane, is contrived in order to inform the reader of what has already taken place...
...In his demonstration of this truth, Mr...
...Kay is a cripple...
...It is a novel of society on the grand scale—a society which Mr...
...They are problem children, all three...
...As the novel opens, Middleton is 60, estranged from his family and his colleagues, lonely and disappointed with himself...
...The book is slow in getting started...
...yet at its heart there lies an important parable of paganism and piousness...
...This major theme is sounded at the very beginning: In the tomb of a 7th-century bishop named Eorp-wald, Professor Stokesay...
...Its unearthing stirs and confounds the scholarly world...
...Gerald Middleton...
...Kay, the youngest of the trio, has made a dour marriage to a brilliant but cantankerous young intellectual of a distinctly reactionary cast, whose temper has spoiled his chance for a good academic post...
...But the saintly Eorpwald cannot be divorced from the barbarous pagan idol...
...Over 30 characters of major importance, many of them interrelated on several levels, people Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and the time span covered is one of 40 years...
...Reviewed by Arthur Oesterreicher This very serious yet very funny novel must, despite its imperfections, be ranked as one of the considerable literary achievements of recent years...
...a prominent medievalist, finds in 1912 a crude and unmistakably heathen idol...
...The latter is a socially-conscious litterateur, formerly a Laborite MP, who has turned into a journalistic Tribune of the People and a homosexual...
...When the Historical Association of Medievalists offers him the editorship of the new Medieval History series, he is faced with a difficult decision...
...His overriding concern is with honesty, an ideal which leads some of his characters down many strange and unsavory paths...
...Robin, the eldest child, has taken over the hereditary Middleton industrial interests, acquired a culture-starved French Catholic wife and is in the throes of an affair with a brashly Bohemian young thing who is the secretary of his brother, John...
...Wilson has much to say and he knows how to say things cleverly and well...
...Can he accept the post despite his unvoiced apprehensions about the Melpham find—a blot of dishonesty on his scholar's escutcheon...
...The surface texture of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is a bright and glittering comedy of English manners...
...One of Stokesay's most brilliant pupils...
...Such a summary can evoke only inadequately the vastness of Mr...
...Despite the unfailingly deft characterizations and Mr...
...it is a novel in an earlier tradition, slow and leisurely in its beginning, but the pace of which quickens visibly as the action develops, until, at the end, when all the plots and sub-plots are unsnarled at last, it generates a real sense of intellectual excitement and satisfaction...
...her hand was deformed in a childhood accident for which Inge deeply blames herself—a blame which Gerald fed until it caused the destruction of their marriage...
...At the end the threads of paganism and piousness remain as intertwined and indissoluble as ever...
...they are the twin polarities of the Anglo-Saxon attitude...
...is at Melpham, the site of the discovery, when the momentous find takes place...
...Not long afterward he is given good reason to doubt its authenticity, but for the next forty years Middleton sits on bis uncertainty and achieves a good deal of fame for valuable, if uninspired, medieval research...
...His search leads him into moral tangles as confused as the Melpham enigma—into the world of his own youth as well as the lives of his children, into the realms of libertinism and perversion as well as of passion, into deceit as well as honesty...
...Wilson examines with surgical precision but which he does not presume to judge...
...Wilson's gift for quiet and penetrating wit, his book is not as slick as, say, Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point...
...The Middleton clan and the diverse social circles in which its members move provide the setting for Gerald's search, It is headed by Inge, his estranged wife, a middle-aged...
...His re-examination of the case of Eorpwald projects him back into the world of human relations, toward his family from which he had for many years severed himself...
...but Middleton undergoes a moral revi-talization and recaptures the urge to live and to achieve...
...blonde Scandinavian goddess whose conversation consists chiefly of a platitudinous gospel of nature-mysticism brought up to date by Have-lock Ellis...
...Wilson has scored a major artistic and moral triumph...
...Wilson has a good piece of work cut out for himself putting all his people on stage and setting them into motion...
Vol. 39 • November 1956 • No. 46
