Winnie and Wolf
by AN Wilson
361pp, Hutchinson, £17.99
The Poor Man and the Lady, the title of Thomas Hardy’s first (rejected) novel, is a well-worn literary theme. Ever since Henry Fielding’s chaste footman Joseph Andrews rebuffed the advances of the lecherous Lady Booby, there have been numerous fictional liaisons between high-class women who go in for a spot of sexual slumming, and working-class men who like a bit of posh.
Strindberg’s ‘Miss Julie’ enjoys being mentally tortured by her sadistic servant. DH Lawrence presents us with the ‘Lady and the Gamekeeper’, as well as The Virgin and the Gypsy. John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter works out his red-brick resentments on the infuriatingly cool daughter of an army officer.
It is not, of course, a subject confined to fiction. That apostle of equality, Karl Marx, was foolishly proud of his wife’s genteel social background. The upper-class Unity Mitford fell morbidly in love with Adolf Hitler, and shot herself in despair at his downfall. In AN Wilson’s new novel, it is Winifred Williams, Richard Wagner’s Welsh daughter-in-law, who falls for the charms of the Führer, and has a child with him. Fascism won support from patrician types who wouldn’t have allowed its squalid henchmen into their drawing rooms; but this Hitler is a habitue of the Wagners’ palatial home.
To give a fictional portrait of Hitler, or ‘Wolf’ as he is known here, is a famously risky business. Realism has a habit of humanising the unspeakable. It is even riskier when the Führer is shown, as he is here, partly as an abused child, partly as a clown, and partly as a genial, opera-loving, cuddly old uncle to the Wagner children.
A ‘human’ monster!
Yet Hitler was monstrous precisely because he was human. And Wilson rightly rejects the view that to explain is to exculpate. There is a convincing portrayal of the young Adolf as an unemployed ex-soldier, smouldering with some justifiable social grouses. But that is not to say they justified genocide. There is also a marvellous encounter in Vienna between the down-and-out Hitler and his ex-schoolmate, the posh little Ludwig Wittgenstein.
When it comes to the Wagners, however, Wilson’s imaginative sympathy begins to sail dangerously close to whitewash. He is foolishly smitten with the ‘breathtakingly beautiful’ Winnie, who, so he insists, saw Hitler as a gentle, geekish opera lover. Yet he has already told us that she knew all about the death camps.
The portrait of Richard Wagner is one of the finest things in the book, yet one gleans little sense of just what a repulsive old egoist he was. Like most conservatives, Wilson is against mixing art and politics— by which he means other people’s politics. This particular work of art is laced with anti-leftist jibes and tirades against politics, not to speak of a blimpish stereotyping of Celts in general and the Welsh in particular.
The composer of the Ring must therefore be rescued from the charge of being a reactionary. Or, if he was indeed a reactionary, he was so, “like any man getting on in years”. Noam Chomsky? Tony Benn? He was no more political than any great artist, the novel insists, even though it has already described him as a poisonous, anti-semite.
For Wilson, however, anti-semitism is somehow not political. “Whatever ghastly views he might sometimes have expressed about Jews, revolution, Germany etc etc”, Wilson says the author of Siegfried was fundamentally, “a free, creative spirit”. Would he concede the same of leftwing artists like Brecht and Neruda? Wagner’s anti-semitic outbursts, he adds, were simply “aberrations from the purer side of his nature”. Anti-semitism for Wagner was about as much of an aberration as wit was for Wilde.
When it can keep politics out of art, however, there is much to admire in Winnie and Wolf. There is a superbly feline cameo of the malevolent old Cosima Wagner, the composer’s widow, and a moving scene in which Jews and non-Jews link arms to protect a synagogue against Nazi louts.
Wilson proves something of a duffer at ideas. Almost every reference he makes to German philosophy involves a howler. But one does not expect the AN Wilsons of this world to be earnest, steel-spectacled intellectuals.
Like much of his fiction, Winnie and Wolf is skillful, agreeable, conventional and a little depthless. Wilson is not Thomas Mann. And though this is far from that mighty melange of Third Reich art and politics, Mann's Doctor Faustus, it is in its own way a bold, ambitious piece of fiction.
The Guardian