The fact that Osborne was making an analogy between the declining fortunes of a second-rate vaudevillian and the British Empire — something which was pretty obvious, even to the most cloth-eared member of the audience — was apparently lost on Wilson.
His view of Kingsley Amis isn’t much more charitable. He says he was unable to read more than 50 pages of Lucky Jim and claims that ‘the bed-burning episode made me feel uncomfortable’ — a slightly odd reaction to one of the funniest scenes in what many people regard as the best comic novel of the 20th century.
How much of this is due to sour grapes? After Amis gave The Outsider a bad review in The Spectator, Wilson fired off a stiff letter to the miscreant. ‘I have a lot of things I want to establish — vital things for the course of modern history — and knocking you and other misplaced figures off their pedestals will be the first step,’ he wrote. Reading The Angry Years, it’s impossible to dismiss the feeling that he’s still trying to do just that.
I don’t want to be too unkind to Wilson. It’s a mistake to respond to your critics as soon as they publish their reviews — but to still be responding long after they’re dead is weirdly impressive.
He clearly believes that his dismissal by the literary establishment 50 years ago was some kind of ghastly mistake and if only he keeps plugging away, churning out book after book, he’ll be re-admitted into the fold. It will never happen, of course, but you have to admire his refusal to give up the fight.
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