Angus Wilson

My recent article The ‘Jeweled Style’ focused on the literary device of that name “in which authors created jewel-like effects by the ordering and juxtaposition of individual elements”.¹ And I noted how Lord Alfred Douglas and the poet Charles Kains Jackson had found the stylistic practice present in Oscar Wilde’s writing.

To those two observers I can now add the novelist and short story writer Angus Wilson: a kindred soul who used the same expression about Wilde’s prose over 60 years later, when he wrote:

“It is in his jewelled phrases, his poetic prose that Wilde leaves logic and abstraction behind…”

Angus Wilson was an interesting character and not a little ornate himself.

In Context

In the mid 1950s there was a confluence of events that brought the plight of homosexuals to the foreground of British culture, including the fallout from the landmark Montagu case, the suicide of Alan Turing, and Parliamentary debate leading to the ground-breaking Wolfenden Report.

Oscar Wilde was never far from this discourse: overtly in Vyvyan Holland’s touching memoir Son of Oscar Wilde (1954), and covertly in many places such as Compton Mackenzie’s novel Thin Ice (1956).

Another writer who helped to assuage Wilde’s reputation during this period was Angus Wilson, who wrote an insightful piece on Wilde for “The London Magazine” in 1955.

Wilson was eligibly qualified for such an appraisal. Had he not been the man most in sympathy with Wilde at Bletchley Park during the war (which would be saying something) he was certainly the most conspicuous:

Dorothy Robertson, a student of Wilson’s at Bletchley. recalled him as:

a brilliant young homosexual… He used to mince into the room wearing, in those days, outrageous clothes in all colours; he chain-smoked; his nails were bitten down to the quick and he had a rather hysterical laugh.²

In his article for “The London Magazine” Wilson interprets Wilde as a victim of his own charm. He paints Wilde as so naïve in his worldview that he was unprepared for the forcefulness of his relationship with Douglas. Wilson’s prescient thesis is that Wilde was not a martyr to his sexuality, per se, but rather a martyr on a grand scale to fatalism: in short Wilde allowed his art to triumph over his life.

The article is well worth a read and I have placed a link to the full magazine below.

© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnote:

1. The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, Oxford University Press, 2018. See also: Roberts, Michael, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity, Cornell University Press (1989). ↩︎
2. Smith, Michael (2000). The Emperor’s Codes: Bletchley Park and the breaking of Japan’s secret ciphers. London: Bantam Press. p. 210. ISBN 0593-046412. ↩︎

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Related:

The Guardian: Angus Wilson: From darling to dodo

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