Organisation was left to his lover, secretary, driver and cook, Tony Garrett.All these activities mean that Drabble is faced with a cast of hundreds, but she never lets one slip. He succeeded, not as a born organiser but as someone who was interested in other human beings, a brilliant, malicious man who was still, at heart, a sweet-natured busybody, prodigal with time and effort. For the next 25 years, as literature entered what Drabble calls "the Age of Conferences", Angus emerged, with only Stephen Spender as a serious rival, as the Indispensable Man. In 1963 he became first lecturer, then Professor, at the new University of East Anglia as it rose from Norfolk's flat fields.
He was on the committee of the Royal Literary Fund and the Arts Council, Chairman of the National Book League and the Society of Authors, eventually a Companion of Literature and a knight. As a distinguished visiting lecturer he patrolled Europe and America, hugely welcomed as a sort of white-haired totem by the world's students. Ceaseless travelling is pretty sure to mean comic mishaps, and Drabble doesn't miss these, but at the same time she skilfully keeps us in mind of the heroism with which Angus (perhaps literally) worked himself to death. Angus liked to say that he had thought of this story, almost that it had thought of him, on a single afternoon. Drabble, however, has found four earlier drafts in the notebooks. You almost regret her thoroughness. Hemlock and After (1951) and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), his first two novels, were generous in scope, but just as deliciously, or frighteningly, acid in flavour. Their success and that of the much calmer Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) led to an unpredictable result; his commitments expanded enormously and so, in spite of the nervous strain, did his happiness.
The child's eye view, he came to believe, was crucial to the writer, (although one of his schoolfriends thought Angus had never had a real childhood at all). When at the age of 36 he published his first volume of short stories, The Wrong Set, it included the very earliest, "Raspberry Jam": a small boy looks on while two odd village ladies, who don't wish to be spied upon, put out their pet-bullfinch's eyes with a pin. Angus came from a confusing, shabby-genteel family and a half-world of expatriates and private hotels where he was the precocious, blue-eyed youngest, an eavesdropper on the world. This skilful and sympathetic book, then, is in the first place a matter of rehabilitation, or picking up the pieces, which may not be the very best basis for a biography, but is still an extremely good one Throughout she calls him, affectionately, "Angus" She is "Drabble". He never managed it, and by 1991, when he died, his standing as a novelist had suffered and he had begun to feel like an old trouper or an old queen whose show was no longer wanted.
"You've better things to do with your time, dear girl," Angus Wilson told Margaret Drabble when, after 24 years' friendship, she suggested writing something about him No, he would do that himself - Angus Wilson on Angus Wilson. As she imagines Le Guin's jolly girls knocking back the Veuve Cliquot on their ice-floes, surrounded by those comical little headwaiter birds of Antarctica, she notices the book's full title. Is anything to be trusted any more? Can this huge hardback really be a Penguin?. Meanwhile, back in the outer universe, colonising Americans have turned the indigenous triple-breasted lesbian inhabitants of a newly conquered planet into suburban replicas of Doris Day.
