Angus Wilson (1913-1991) is one of those writers you hardly ever see mentioned these days without some sort of apologetic qualifier like "under-appreciated" or "unfairly overlooked". Meaning that the author of the piece approves of him in theory but hasn't actually got around to reading all his novels yet, I suppose. In the early fifties, Wilson was unquestionably one of the leading British novelists. Everyone was talking about Hemlock and after (1952) and Anglo-Saxon attitudes (1956), and you can still find a few copies those books in Penguin on the shelves of just about any secondhand bookshop in the British isles (probably also in North America). But the chance of coming across any of the six other novels he wrote up to 1980 is much smaller. The coming of the Angry Young Men in the late fifties, the feminists in the sixties, and the postmodernists in the seventies and eighties made his kind of intellectually and morally demanding well-made bourgeois novel a tough sell, despite a few successful TV adaptations. And of course he came across as male, white and patrician - none of them qualities that were particularly saleable in those days.

On the other hand, Wilson always had a very high reputation in his own lifetime for his engagement for the profession: he gave innumerable lectures, taught at least one term a year (often more) at UEA from its foundation until his retirement, was heavily involved in setting up UEA's pioneering Creative Writing programme (famous for its first graduate, Ian McEwan), spent at least a term every year teaching in the US, was active in the Dickens, Kipling, and John Cowper Powys Societies, and worked at various times for the Arts Council, the RSL, PEN, and all the rest, as well as being a leading campaigner for the introduction of a Public Lending Right scheme. He seems to have been enormously generous with his time in helping young writers - former students or complete strangers - and you often see his name in the acknowledgements of books by the most unlikely people.

And of course he was also a fairly determined campaigner for gay rights - Vice-President of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, giving evidence to the Wolfenden Committee, protesting outside BHS about discrimination against gay employees, and so on. One of his last political acts was an open letter of support for the famous London bookshop Gay's the Word when it was raided by Customs & Excise in 1984. In the good old days of the Open Secret, Angus Wilson and Tony Garrett (together from 1950 until Angus's death) were probably the most visible gay couple in Britain after Britten and Pears - they even let the BBC film a profile of them for its series on Couples.

Drabble investigates, as a biographer should, the threads in Wilson's background and upbringing that made him what he was, whilst with her novelist's instinct, she is fascinated by the story of Angus as a human being - and as her friend for 20 years. So we get more than we really need of the depressing, but beautifully told, account of his decline into sickness and old age, and Drabble evidently has a hard time resisting getting sucked down too many of the rabbit holes of fascinatingly eccentric characters who appear in his life-story. (Still, at 650 pages this is a much more manageable proposition than her husband's four volumes on George Bernard Shaw...!)

What soon becomes clear in her account of Wilson is that there was never any danger of him turning out boringly respectable. His remote Scottish ancestors the Johnstones were notoriously reckless cattle-raiding and woman-stealing Border landowners; the Edwardian Johnstone-Wilson family into which he was born had long since used up any land and money that remained on racecourses and actresses. His father, Willie, had been sent off to the colonies when he landed in the soup back home (like a character from an early P.G. Wodehouse story) and had come back with a South African wife whose money he soon got through as well. Angus was "an afterthought", by far the youngest of six brothers - you often hear from youngest children that their big sisters played with them as though they were dolls (cf. Abdellah Taïa, >52), but in Angus's case it was his ultra-camp teenage brothers Pat and Colin who got out the make-up and fancy clothes for him.

Drabble introduces an unnecessary confusing note here - we are presented with quite a bit of evidence about Angus's childhood that is said to come from Colin's novels. But stop: surely Colin Wilson the novelist was (a) a young writer Angus mentored and (b) not related...? It turns out that whilst some of the brothers stuck to "Johnstone-Wilson" all their lives and Angus dropped the "Johnstone" bit as soon as he started to publish, Pat and Colin went the other way and dropped the "Wilson". Moreover brother Colin was often known as "David Johnstone" in later life, and his unpublished novels were only found in a trunk long after his death. But this isn't clarified until about 500 pages further on in the biography.

By a mixture of astonishing good luck and knowing the right people, Wilson avoided the painful process of being forced into social norms that most unconventional young people go through - he went to a prep school on the South coast run by one of his brothers and to Westminster School, probably the one major public school of the day where it was more acceptable to be clever than to be athletic. After that, Oxford (Merton) was no problem, and the British Museum, where he started to work as a cataloguer in 1937, was hardly a hotbed of macho conventionality either, nor was Bletchley Park, where he did his war service. (It's notable that when she was researching this book in the early nineties, much of what went on at Bletchley was still officially secret, and Drabble had a hard time getting either GCHQ or his former colleagues to say anything about Wilson's time there - if she'd been writing a decade or so later she'd probably have heard rather more from those witnesses who were still around to talk about it.)

Wilson went back to the Museum after the war, eventually becoming deputy superintendent of the Reading Room, a familiar figure to all the writers and academics (and dotty eccentrics) who did research there. He stayed until 1955, when he left to write his second novel. After a few false starts he and Tony moved to a cottage in Suffolk, which turned out to be conveniently located for the future UEA when he was headhunted to join its staff in 1962. Tony had a career as a parole officer, but was forced to give that up in 1960 when gossip reached his bosses that he was living with another man - then as now, people who worked in the criminal justice system were expected not to break the law themselves, and before 1967 anything two men might choose to do in bed in private was (technically at least) a crime. This seems to have been the only time that overt discrimination on the grounds of sexuality interfered seriously with their life together.

The second half of Drabble's account of Wilson's life, from the sixties on, turns into a bewildering succession of foreign trips, conferences, books, lectures, dinners and receptions, with famous names showering down from all sides. Drabble herself first comes directly into the story in the late sixties, joining Wilson on what seems to have been a memorable Arts Council writers' tour of North Wales. In an unusual lapse of self-confidence, she never quite seems to be able to make her mind up whether to talk about herself in the first or the third person, which is a little disorientating as she cycles apparently arbitrarily through "Drabble", "Maggie", "MD" and "I".

Apart from a couple of very minor reservations, this is an extremely readable biography, and would probably be enjoyable even if you hadn't ever read any of Angus Wilson's books. Although 650 pages is quite an investment of time... ( )

Wilson's star has waned since his death in 1991. The biography illuminates the odd relationships of his family and how these came to bear upon his precocious and prescient observations of people's behaviour.
He was temperamental, too wiling to please others, vain, and too ready to act out the role of "great Twentieth Century British Novelist".
As he got older his novels became over-plotted and the characters took on the role of types rather than assets to the telling of a story. It's sobering to observe the plummeting reputations of writers like Wilson and Burgess since the 1990's. They were lionised and feted with public appearances, lecture tours, university postings; they were among the people you turned to when "the novel" was up for debate on television.
What is truly sad are his penurious last years in France where failing memory, immobility and Alzheimer's saw him much reduced.
The biography is an enjoyable and informative piece of work, perhaps only spoiled by litanies of personages, who were Wilson's friends, cropping up in lists of party-goers or visitors to his country cottage in Suffolk.