AN Wilson’s Confessions is subtitled “A Life of Failed Promises”, which is a little harsh for one of the most consistently lively and entertaining writers and one of the kindest of men. I have known AN since he was literary editor of the Evening Standard, which followed his time as literary editor of the Spectator. He was, and is, a natural journalist. Trouble is, Wilson (like so many of us) values himself differently than others do. I found him to be a columnist of genius, a world-class gossip and a very good friend. As is clear in this book, he’s aware of his reputation as being just too productive, whereas other less fortunate souls vacillate endlessly. But he maintains, surprisingly, that he has to struggle to find the right words.
He is also a brilliant biographer – his life of Hilaire Belloc is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read, extraordinarily perceptive about the age as well as the man. His account of Victoria and the Victorians could not have been written by anyone else. What’s more, for a time, AN summed up something of the spirit of the age himself in the 1980s, when he was the living embodiment of that engaging and distinctive type, the Young Fogeys. They were men of a conservative persuasion – in religion more than politics – whose views and outlook on life were some decades older than their years. Indeed, the picture on the front of the book, of AN in his three-piece suit, wheeling a bicycle, conjures up the YFs instantly.
Wilson sees himself chiefly as a novelist, possibly because his father, as we learn here, declared that little Andrew would turn into another Arnold Bennett. But I think it’s not in novels that the best of AN is to be found. As ever he is insightful about the contemporary novel: he thinks there is no one in this generation to match the greats, including himself, though on the bright side, we are in a golden age of crime writing, a genre about which he is exceptionally knowledgeable. The failed promises, however, aren’t really to do with his novels, or his academic career, where his gifts would have been, frankly, wasted.
Rather, it is to do with his first marriage, which he entered into when he was 20 to a brilliant Oxford academic, Katherine Duncan-Jones, who was ten years older. His relationship with her began, characteristically, during a weekend meeting of the Tennyson Society and it was then that their elder daughter, Emily, was conceived. AN was effectively forced into marriage, and when his poor parents protested, Katherine, we learn, turned on them savagely. Yet we also learn that a few months into the union, she told her young husband that she was in love with someone else, with whom she had been having an affair concurrently; later still we learn that it was her mother who forced her into marriage.
AN is a romantic, forever susceptible to the charms of clever and pretty girls, and this marriage, entered into under these circumstances, meant that his later passions would always have the aspect of infidelity. He frankly admits that he would come away from his later meetings with his first wife – for a second wife would follow, entailing a desertion of Katherine and their two daughters – filled with rage that she should have forced him into marriage so young.
Any half-decent canon lawyer would tell him that he was not really a free agent when he married, and that therefore the marriage was null. Yet he is furiously angry when one Catholic priest tells him just that, and offers him a discreet annulment. Both his marriages, he says emphatically, are valid. Hmm. Not sure, myself. But great good came of the unhappy union in his two brilliant daughters; Emily, the baby conceived at a Tennyson Society gathering, became a famous translator of Homer. Providence works in curious ways.
The book begins with his visits to his first wife, her brilliant mind gradually succumbing to dementia just as his friend Iris Murdoch’s did. And he has been faithful to her, Cynara, in his fashion, in those sad visits to a woman who gradually ceased even to recognise him. The greater part of the book is about the family from which he came: Norman, a brilliant ceramicist, whose passion was the famous Wedgwood pottery in Staffordshire for which he worked, and from which he was let go when the firm was restructured and bought by private investors, who promptly dismantled it.
I can identify with all this, with Norman and his love of ceramics, and AN, furious at the way 200 years of skill in the Potteries was squandered for the benefit of asset-strippers. My own father was a ceramics designer, a mould maker, who was trained in Stoke-on-Trent and worked for a pottery in Ireland that was eviscerated by Japanese investors in a similar fashion. Wilson observes, “I am not naturally vindictive but it would be satisfying to know that somewhere in the Inferno’s less comfortable circles, Little Bryan [Arthur Bryan, the author of the takeover] was fixed, while some Dantean demons mouthing appalling insults in the Stokey dialect, were perpetually cramming wet clay into his greedy chops, while some others, with even riper crueller language, were shoving red-hot pokers up his arse.” Saeva indignatio, and good for him.
This being AN, much of the book is given over to religion. We learn that he is in fact a Catholic, having been baptised when he was a sickly baby by a Catholic nurse in hospital. He also fell under the spell of the Dominican sister who was the head of the school he attended, Sr Mary Mark Bullough (sister of the theologian Fr Sebastian Bullough) whose convent he describes “in liturgical terms, as a place of light, refreshment and peace”.
Later, in Florence, he was received into the Church formally, though his marriage meant (for Katherine was unwilling to accept any of the conditions on a non-Catholic marrying a Catholic) that he could not receive the sacraments. Yet his mother was a devout Anglican and his father a religious sceptic, as was Wilson for about 15 years.
During his first marriage, he decided to train for the Anglican priesthood at “the St Trinian’s of theological seminaries, St Stephen’s House” – “Staggers”, as it is known. He is very funny about it. “There were probably forty-five of us, no more than half-a-dozen of whom were perverts. The perverts of course were those, like myself, who lived with a woman… The other Bags [students at Staggers] were unlikely ever to perpetrate what was called the sin of matrimony.” Yet, while some of these men were saints, others were dangerously unsuited for ordination. Fortunately, he never made it into Anglican orders – he is too honest to be other than a believing priest. Now he writes that “of the three contradictory mental conditions – Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and agnosticism – I find as I grow older that agnosticism is for the most part predominant.” But not wholly, so let’s see. God may have other plans.
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