A Literary Alchemist: The Many Worlds of Michael Wilding (a Fragment from a Study of His Writings)

There was always something else, some important little piece of information they had managed to mislay. You always had to go back and ask a few more things. Ah well, Plant reflected, that was the nature of the work.

(Wilding, Little 16)

Last Days¹

Looking backward over the vast expanses of literary and literal time and space in Michael Wilding's world, the hopes and fears he foreshadowed in his early work as a literary critic, academic teacher, creative writer, and publisher seem to have come true. His warnings (predictions, fears) may have been realized as the university, publishing, creative arts, political freedoms have all disappeared or crumbled. The world that has been emerging since the end of the wildly halcyon days of the 1960s freedoms has been eroded with the advent of a hyperworld filled with the state apparatus's technologies of surveillance and internal repression through self-induced fears and doubts.

Against this postapocalypse of sorts, Wilding's work offers alternative visions that keep the beasts at bay. From his earliest stories collected in The West Midland Underground, there has been an openness or willingness to offer alternative ideas as possible choices of interpretation as much as they also embody or prefigure alternative lifestyles or sociopolitical realities. The eponymous story begins, "The West Midland Underground goes from to. Or should I have said went? Should I be saying went? Or even will go? May go. Could go" (Wilding, West 1). Again looking backward, this time from the particular vantage point of In the Valley of the Weed (2017), his latest novel to be published but not the last one written, Fullalove (one of the two aspects of Wilding's grotesquely shaped researcher-protagonists in the novel; both may have an unnamed—at least in this novel—first name of "Michael," as they are so close to the author, although Wilding states that Plant's first name is Keith, pronounced "Kif" in personal correspondence) seems to have a copy of this early work stored somewhere in his hovel or mind, as he warns or cautions his other half, the apparent (anti)hero of the novel and of the other four so-far-published novels in the series, Plant: "Answers are unimportant. It's the questions that matter" (Wilding, Valley 55).

Across the years and the spaces of many other works of fiction and nonfiction, it seems at least serendipitous that such an echo (a double voice) is possible in Wilding's oeuvre; it is as if there is an underground stream connecting these two times or works. Bringing together two or more works the connection between which may seem tenuous at first glance is how any grotesquerie, even a literary critical one such as this, is created. In this spirit, the form or methodology of this study may also surprise some readers with the texts that are put into contiguous relationships. Surprising collocations are another way of understanding the linguistics of alchemy that brings together elements or chemicals to provoke a reaction that would produce "gold" or interesting readings.

Such connections are characteristic of Wilding's worlds. He records that one of his original stimuli to write fiction was the "desolate wasteland" of the Midlands and that this desolation is compensated for by romantic visions to shore against the otherwise desolate world and make the composite world livable in. This drive or need for imaginative shaping of the environment in order to create a living space is a major ecological thematic concern of his works, as, for example, can be seen in Living Together (1974), Scenic Drive (1976), Pacific Highway (1982), and also his The Paraguayan Experiment (1985), a documentary experimental fiction of William Lane's attempt to set up a utopian space away from the failed Shearer's Strike aftermath in Queensland back in the 1890s.

By combining, as in a Llullian Ars Combinatoria technique, various aspects or parts of his life into new shapes, Wilding has been trying to generate alternative versions of what we have been told to accept, to...