ANTIPODAL FICTION
357
evance has Mr. Wilson imposed a restraining discipline upon his work as
to make his immeCliate predecessors and contemporaries seem self-in–
dulgent by comparison. As if they were in danger of clotting together
and becoming indistinguishable from one another, people are separated
in these painstal<ing studies until they are sufficiently individualized to
react upon each other in a sharp climax that at once illuminates them
clearly and dramatizes them forcibly.
The title story is a fair sample of how much Wilson can effectively
establish within a brief compass. Tony, an aging, ardently Catholic, Tory
homosexual, is visiting a female cousin and her husband, who, despite
his self-adjudged superiority, have always made him feel inferior, made
him aware "of a curious, ridiculous sensation of having missed the es–
sentials of life." The couple, besides having children, are extreme cases
of thirties liberalism and humanitarianism, and have, to Tony's envy,
always been looked up to by undergraduates sharing similar ideas. But
times have changed. A young couple pays a visit in which it becomes
obvious that they are on Tony's side and Tony, strolling out triumphant–
ly with them, describes his relatives as extinct, dodos in fact, but "such
darling dodos."
The
phra~
contains an irony tha t moves in so many directions at
once as to cease to be irony, serving simply instead as a kind of sudden
flare that lights up all that has gone before. The irony turns against
the speaker who is himself convicted of being a dodo, if only by his
use of the phrase and the petrified sophistication it reveals. The liberal
couple are dodos, too, but scarcely darling ones and, in fact, the
tax–
onomy fits nearly all Mr. Wilson's characters. Functioning in a society
become fantastically parasitic on itself, they borrow and cling to some
attitude or affectation with a kind of palsied egotism and grow obsolete
in grotesque poses as their postures interfere with the satisfaction of
urgent, elementary, human needs. Where attitudes have become in–
fections and sympathies and antipathies themselves contagious grimaces,
Mr. Wilson wisely rather than coldly refrains from inflicting his pre–
dilections, if any, on his readers. As a result, these stories have a
puzzling, non-moral, masklike mode of presentation which conveys, if
I read it rightly, the notion that life enforces its own harsh morality
without the help of fiction writers and also a humorous, tough, last–
ditch respect for almost any genuine manifestations of human need or
feeling, even mean and ignoble ones. The stories in
Such Darling Dodos
seem to me easily on a par with any contemporary fiction and a kind
of ultimate in freedom from even intangible cant and humbug.
William S. Poster
