Christopher Gray looks at a fictional study of J.I.M. Stewart's Oxford college

I was saddened, and initially surprised, to see the novelist Angus Wilson described as “virtually forgotten” in a fascinating centennial tribute supplied to The Oxford Times a few weeks ago by his great-nephew Mark J. Davies. Surprise quickly changed into resigned acceptance, however, as I realised that Wilson, whom I read with great enjoyment as a young man, had become one of those many writers whose fame was destined scarcely to outlast their creative life.

Neglect by a succeeding generation of readers is a fate suffered by even the biggest names of literature. Looking back on the stars of my youth, it is shocking to consider how swiftly they have been sidelined by posterity. Who would have guessed, for instance, that writers of the stature of Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, William Golding, John Fowles, Anthony Burgess and, yes, even Muriel Spark, would fade from view so quickly?

Anthony Powell still possesses devotees, but they are a dying breed, literally. J.B. Priestley enjoyed a renaissance in reputation owing to Stephen Daldry’s National Theatre revival of his play An Inspector Calls. But who now reads The Good Companions, Angel Pavement, or (a favourite of mine) Lost Empires? A powerful Christian lobby, particularly in America, keeps C.S. Lewis in the major league, while the high profile of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien (of whom more presently) owes everything to the successful film adaptations of his books. Regular appearances before the viewing public have helped, too, in the survival of P.G. Wodehouse and his ardent admirer Evelyn Waugh.

C.P. Snow was a once mighty name in letters, though one eclipsed even during the lifetime of its bearer. The creator of the multi-faceted Strangers and Brothers series of Cambridge-based novels was pilloried as ‘C.P. Snurd’ in the columns of Private Eye. “Snow turns to slush,” observed Melvyn Bragg in another assault on his reputation.

Criticism more obliquely applied is to be found in the work of the novelist (and Christ Church English don) J.I.M. Stewart, whose Staircase on Surrey quintet was intended to do for Oxford University — in terms of showing how it really worked — what Strangers and Brothers was doing for Cambridge. I mentioned some weeks ago that I was about to re-read the books. What a pleasure this turned out to be!

Stewart acknowledges what others were bound to see as the influence of Snow’s novels in the first book of the series, The Gaudy. In it the playwright Duncan Patullo (the first-person hero of the series, closely based on Stewart himself) returns to a reunion at his old Oxford college, prompting speculation that he might stay on to supply a fictional study of it (which indeed he does).

A dining don, uttering what we might safely conclude to be Stewart’s views, tells Patullo: “There was a man who did something of the kind in Cambridge. His name escapes me, but he wrote two or three novels about the place. Rather good as stories, holding the interest well . . . but not quite putting his academics in their habit as they live.”

The lightness of touch seen in the affectation of the name forgotten is again displayed in another discourse concerning writers in the third novel in the sequence, A Memorial Service. There is first a clear allusion to the aforementioned Iris Murdoch when the don Lemprière, strolling with Patullo, remarks that Oxford seems an odd place for “lady novelists”, then is reminded “there are several at the moment”. Patullo adds: “Perhaps it’s an odd place for gentleman novelists as well.”

Patullo/Stewart continues: “A surprising number [of dons] might be found to have perpetrated a single novel in their youth or even a single novel in their riper age. Professional novelists, on the other hand, are hurrying themselves into university chairs and fellowships all over the country. They must suppose theirs is a dying industry.”

Lemprière then turns to the fictional output of his colleague J.B Timbermill and observes: “I suppose that rum book of his might be called a novel of sorts.” The ‘rum book’ is Lord of the Rings, for in Timbermill is supplied a portrait of Tolkien that will be savoured, I think, by any reader of Staircase on Surrey.

For my part, I enjoyed it for the brilliant picture it offers of the way an Oxford college such as Christ Church was (for in Surrey we see the House) in the days just before the women arrived. Very camp it was, it has to be said, at least as shown here. Though Stewart was married, and father to five children, he does harp on in the books about the beauty of young men and the frissons these stir in those around them.

His gift for comedy, as I have indicated, is a source of great enjoyment too. It would be hard, surely, to improve on this passage concerning dinner as enjoyed by Christ Church’s student body: “In hall the behaviour of the college servants had always been less of the professionally qualified waiter than of under-keepers in a zoo, concerned to get through the feeding time as expeditiously as possible and in consequence putting a good deal of raw vigour into thrusting the gobbets through the bar.”

Clearly, many years of experience were behind the framing of another elegant sentence: “He was a very new tutor, and I judged him to be in the process of working out a technique for more or less simultaneously insulting, amusing and flattering the young.”

The prose, if often flamboyantly mandarin, is always scrupulous in respecting the laws governing good English. In this connection, I was interested to see, more than once, his use of an expression often considered by fuddy-duddies (hands up in my corner!) to be an unacceptable modern coinage. I refer to ‘for free’, whose ‘for’ is said by pedants to be redundant. It was a surprise, too, to find him using the word ‘shite’. I thought this to be of much more recent vintage.

On which unseemly note, I shall sign off, wishing all my readers a very prosperous 2014.