Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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Before he came to London, as one of the “Best of Young British” novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator , we meet another A. N. Wilson. We meet his father, the Managing Director of Wedgwood, the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school, and the dons of Oxford – one of whom, at the age of just 20, he married, Katherine Duncan-Jones, the renowned Shakespearean scholar. This appear the book of a writer, to whom a work is entrusted to speak of a milieu and its people, the definite strips of eccentrics, and remote intellectual endeavours of some Oxford heads, the bullish males , the pretty women, the big drinking. His account of being a Booker Prize judge is witty and cynical, as is his description of how his close friend the novelist Beryl Bainbridge failed for the fifth time to get beyond the Booker shortlist and finally win. The bridesmaid who never became the bride.

Wilson might have ended up as an obscure Oxfordian academic, specializing in Old Norse or medieval Latin, if not for the enticements of popular writing and the eventual offer of a job as literary editor of The Spectator magazine. At this point, the book shifts into a welcome higher gear of anecdotes and gossip about the always lively and often incestuous world of literary Britain, where bright young writers soar with critical praise, yet too often crash into sodden alcoholic lumps. It does make for highly entertaining reading, however.

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Andrew survived and grew up in Stone, Staffordshire, cared for by a fleshy nanny named Blakie. Aside from his parents’ marital warfare (“the air I learned to breathe”), it was an idyllic childhood. The young Andrew was treated like a “Crown Prince” and became a “spoiled brat”, until he was sent to Hillstone, a boarding prep school in Great Malvern run by his parents’ friends: the paedophile headmaster Rudolf Barbour Simpson and his sadistic wife, Barbara. The former masturbated while he caned the boys; the latter stroked their genitals in the bath. Years later, Wilson heard explicit stories of rape, and boys who developed drug addictions and took their own lives as a result. These people stay with you, they have not gone unsung, we take away memorable and amusing stories of them. We'd never have known how the Vicar and his wife, puzzled that in so wanting a baby and having done they felt everything to make it happen, finally succeeded- a talk to the wife by a doctor , telling her the relevant thing to make it happen, and lo! the longed for babe. Here we are reminded by Wilson of the big, the perennial questions of Tolstoy's endless searching: ' are the gospels morally true? Can we respond to their radical demands? Questions ' that never go away'

At least up to the time of his father’s death, and the publication of his biography of Tolstoy, which is where this book ends, Wilson’s life was painful. His parents, sometimes crammed together in a small house, were totally estranged. His mother had an “unrivalled capacity to extract unhappiness from any situation however neutral or cheerful”. His father, a militant atheist, lost his job and spent decades endlessly repeating stories about the Wedgewood family, for whom he had worked. At the end of the service, when the coffin was lifted onto the shoulders of the bearers, this army of homeless men and women surge forward. They seem like the holy ragamuffin pilgrims of old Russia or the followers of a medieval pilgrimage, these shaggy rough sleepers , fixing their tearful intent gaze on the coffin. These were Michael's people. Jesus's people' But then he fell in love with the woman who would become his second wife, until that marriage also ended in divorce. Before either of those wives came along, Wilson admits to having had “one fully fledged love affair” at his all-boys boarding school “that lasted nearly three years.” Before he came to London, as one of the "Best of Young British" novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. N. Wilson. We meet his father, the Managing Director of Wedgwood, the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school, and the dons of Oxford - one of whom, at the age of just 20, he married, Katherine Duncan-Jones, the renowned Shakespearean scholar. At every turn of this reminiscence, Wilson is baffled by his earlier self - whether he is flirting with unsuitable lovers or with the idea of the priesthood. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book.

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Quite a record for a British writer not born in Stratford-upon-Avon. And not to puff up an already overstuffed ego, but Andrew Norman Wilson can write — fluidly, gracefully, and with immense literary flourish. So, one might wonder about his memoir’s subtitle, A Life of Failed Promises. The disconnect, according to Wilson, is found in his self-assessment of a man who has squandered his potential.