Deducing what actually seems to have been going on in the mind of the author of the famous review trashing The Lord of the Rings: my latest Tolkien Society blog post.
I have read a great deal of Wilson over the years (I started in the late seventies, as part of my Alien Minds project, that is, trying to see through the eyes of someone I fundamentally disagree with. Evelyn Waugh was another of my projects.)
I found, at least, Wilson's most passionate work being TO THE FINLAND STATION. He was one of those idealistic communists, at least in his early years. Later, yep, he became more curmudgeonly.
He definitely had problems with women--cf his marriages, and the way he talks about his affairs in his journals. Some of it is pretty stomach turning. His fiction, on the prose level, is controlled but the whole is . . . the only word I can think of is constipated.
I don't want to say that I think he was incapable of passion--it's there in his earlier political writings--but I do think he was one of those incapable of wonder.
As I turned the pages of his 1960s diary, in which the quote about homosexuality appeared, it seemed to me to consist mostly of recountings of a brittle social life among brittle people, not very pleasant-sounding.
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calimac
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Date: 2018-01-18 03:47 pm (UTC)I found, at least, Wilson's most passionate work being TO THE FINLAND STATION. He was one of those idealistic communists, at least in his early years. Later, yep, he became more curmudgeonly.
He definitely had problems with women--cf his marriages, and the way he talks about his affairs in his journals. Some of it is pretty stomach turning. His fiction, on the prose level, is controlled but the whole is . . . the only word I can think of is constipated.
I don't want to say that I think he was incapable of passion--it's there in his earlier political writings--but I do think he was one of those incapable of wonder.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-18 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-18 09:37 pm (UTC)