Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love and his life in Grub Street as a prolific writer. It’s hard to know who will be interested in this memoir beyond a clutch of Oxford coevals, some geriatric theologians and six or seven Fleet Street colleagues. However, the latter set are also the people who will review this book and therein lies the problem. Confessions is exasperating less because of what it says about Wilson and more because of what it says about British intellectual culture: its glib frivolity, its fetishisation of fogeyism, its perpetually arrested development, its unwillingness to take anything very seriously at all. It claims so many of our finest minds. What is also clear is that they are not just contradictory: they are ceaselessly jostling for pre-eminence in his life, first one and then another taking control. First, there is the serious novelist. But Wilson is also a fast and fluent writer, giving him a successful career as a journalist. At one time, besides writing several books, he was writing three columns a week for the newspapers. As he says, writing a book is satisfying, “But it does not give that heady buzz which still comes upon me if a national newspaper has rung up for an article, and I see it in print the next morning.” 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, the renowned Shakespearean scholar, the late Katherine Duncan-Jones. Wilson examines his parent’s mismatched marriage in minute detail: the bluff chain-smoking, cursing father who was a managing director of the celebrated Wedgewood pottery company; and his pious agoraphobic mother who could neither abide his manners nor find a way to leave him. Still, Wilson had a relatively idyllic childhood until he enrolled in a hellish boarding school notorious for corporal punishment and sexual abuse. (Is there any more grotesque British invention than the boarding school for young boys of seven or eight?)

There are some good portraits of friends and acquaintances, but also rather a lot of uninteresting stuff. The same is true of Wilson’s experience as a university lecturer at Oxford and then as a journalist. The name-dropping is of a truly world-class standard, although I suppose those were the circles he moved in. When talking about his own intellectual activity and relationship with religion he can be fascinating and manages to stay this side of pretension most of the time – but I did mutter “Oh, for heaven’s sake” (I paraphrase) when told “I still read the New Testament in Greek every year,” for example. 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. 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.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.

It is often the case that in summary a book can sound more interesting than it really is. Confessions manages the unique feat of being both spirited and deadly dull, like reading half a century’s worth of enthusiastic parish newsletters. There are some poignant reflections, some delicate turns of phrase, as well as passages of engaging mid-century history – but there’s far too much cobwebby waffle about Wilson’s coevals (a favourite word of his, along with “slither”). A.N. Wilson hasn’t read everything — although it may sometimes seem that way. But he certainly belongs among the cadre of impossibly erudite and prolific British writers who have mastered every genre from lowbrow journalism and highbrow criticism to novels and nonfiction. Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love (sacred and profane) and his life in Grub Street – as a prolific writer. We follow his unsuccessful attempts to become an academic, his aspirations to be a Man of Letters, and his eventual encounters with the famous, including some memorable meetings with royalty.The writing life is full of potholes — long days and solitary nights followed by rewrites, rejections, and, for most, scant rewards. Upon publication of a work, critics descend from Mt. Olympus to dissect and dismember, which may explain why writers like A.N. Wilson wrap themselves in the protective carapace of grandiosity. In the first paragraph of his new memoir, Confessions, Wilson writes: “Fans and hostile critics alike have always spoken to, and of, me as one who was too fluent, who wrote with too much ease. Over fifty books published, and probably millions of words in the newspapers.” Admitting that his life has been a tangle of spiritual confusion, he recounts how, in 1989, he descended from the heights of piety to meander in the nether region of agnosticism. “I think that all churches have faults but all also have members whose lives shine with the life of Christ, and that this has been true in the C of E as it has in the other churches.” He then adds, “I still read the New Testament in Greek each year.” At every turn of this reminiscence, Wilson is baffled by his earlier self – whether 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.

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops Especially noteworthy is Wilson’s capacity to fall intensely in love — not just with people, but places, especially Oxford. Like the American intellectual the late Susan Sontag, he has a great capacity for adoration. In a cynical age, it is an endearing quality to see in someone, even if it so often leads to disillusionment, as it has done for him with both Anglicanism and the Roman Catholic Church at different periods of his life. For in him it goes with a sharp scepticism, a sense of mischief, and a delight in the comic absurdity of life, especially some of the people he has mixed with. So, not much happiness; but a life lived with great intensity and a great deal of fun. We can’t wait for the rest of the story. 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. He ends with a reverie at Tolstoy's grave, and so we also can vicariously attend that green place among the trees in which the ancient Tolstoy came we hope to peaceful rest.

The reader is dutifully and proportionally dosed with humour, the wry portraits of acolytes of church and academic grove, the mad antics of people who make up more of the world than you might think. A N Wilson writes with no self-awareness whatsoever in this book (apart from one moving section on paedophiles in public schools). Though the title suggests confessional honesty and self-scrutiny, this is a piece of crafted Mannerism. 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' As Wilson has multiple personalities, so there are many roads he did not take. His original plan was to go out to Africa to work with the Community of the Resurrection before going to art school. For a period, he was at St Stephen’s House, where everyone at the time was given a female name, about which he wrote in Unguarded Hours. He was offered a good academic position.