Monday, Mar. 30, 1959
The Widow Britannia
THE MIDDLE AGE OF MRS. ELIOT (439 pp.)--Angus Wilson--Viking ($4.95).
More than half a century ago Rudyard Kipling advised the world to walk wide of the Widow at Windsor (for '"alf o' creation she owns"). Now British Satirist Angus Wilson offers a look at the other side of the Victorian coin--a blowsy Widow Britannia, landed tails down on the wet asphalt of the Welfare State.
Author Wilson's heroine is a smart, smug, vastly muddled and grimly girdled figure of middle-class bafflement. Meg Eliot is widowed in a fit of absentmindedness : her husband, a prosperous lawyer, is shot by a confused Asian student, who is really gunning for the Minister of Education of an Indonesian state. "If that had happened when we were young, there would have been a war about it," one character remarks. But there is no war, not even compensation for the widow. Instead, Meg faces only a set of sad second choices--social work, the society of Angry Young Men, bohemian sex. While Author Wilson unfolds a kind of serial on the theme of "Which Weeds Will the Widow Wear?" he also presents a series of sharp, lantern-slide portraits of modern England.
Meg takes dingy rooms in Kensington, enrolls in a secretarial school. She tangles with her brother, a brilliant, sexually confused war wreck, who has turned from the complexities of civilized life to the simplicities of horticulture. Author Wilson puts his widow in the temporary toils of an Angry Young Man, the pointy-bearded but pointless son of her best friend. In a savage little vignette Wilson makes clear that the fellow is angry not because he is young, but because he is not really a man.
Meg is forever taking high-minded positions, forever tumbling into ludicrous misunderstandings. She suffers from tonsilitis, a nervous breakdown and the unwelcome attentions of matchmakers. Finally she sets out on a trip to Britain s surviving Crown Colony of Hong Kong, as secretary to a British woman M.P. (the lady may or may not be intended to resemble that noted Socialist amazon. Dr. Edith Summerskill, who took a trip to explore the wonders of Mao's China).
Author Wilson keeps nudging the reader into the conviction that there has been a death somewhere in the British family; Wilson is obviously still trying to identify the corpse and sort out the suspects. Despite this essentially sad preoccupation, he is pure comedian with a mimic's malice, a gent's outfitter's eye for the socially off-base, and an eavesdropper's avidity for the give-away phrase. Wilson is a first-rate caricaturist whose stature increases as he diminishes others.
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