Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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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 Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. His autobiography, The Shaping of a Soul: A life taken by surprise , is to be published by Christian Alternative Books 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. When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A. N. Wilson ... Stephen Fry A literary seignior, sure of his authority, this is a memoir in the manner of a Proust or a Nabokov.

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.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.

There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage. But these aren’t tell-all Rousseauesque confessions. He’s respectful about Katherine and about his mother, to whom he grew close in her old age and widowhood. And he’s especially warm about his exasperating father, whose forced early exit from Wedgwood was unmerited and whose death happened at the same moment as a family landscape painting crashed from the wall in the room where his son was working. After a coincidence like that, who wouldn’t believe in higher powers?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?) 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.”

The account of his friend Michael Hollings who became a priest and the host of homeless people men and women that attended his funeral in Westminster Cathedral is described by Wilson: The dynamic of marital power,” AN Wilson writes, “is one of the most fascinating of all subjects.” His memoir has many stories to tell: about Oxford, Grub Street, meetings with royals, tweed suits, Tolkien-olatry, religious muddle (as “a practising Anglican with periodic waves of Doubt or Roman fever”), travels to Israel and Russia, anorexia (his own and his mother’s), social drinking “on a positively Slavic scale”, near misses at becoming a painter or priest, and a career as a novelist, biographer and literary editor. But the main strand is the power dynamics within his and his parents’ marriages. Theirs happened late and lasted till his father died; his – to the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones – was precipitate and briefer. Neither union was happy. But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. 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.

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

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' 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. 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. 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.

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.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.” 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' 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.” Like a petulant child, Wilson retaliates with vitriol, leaving one to wonder if he was some kind of naïf who’d been shanghaied into marriage at 19 by a 32-year-old virago who bound and blindfolded him. They had two children together, and despite his many affairs (and a few of hers), remained married for 19 years, supposedly because of their religious vows. As regards the infancy of this disavowing prodigy, Child Wilson's skillful aim with his porridge bowl at one of his tormentors, at boarding school is by far by my favourite thing there, but I've a soft spot for the picture of a beaming Baby Wilson, smiling in the arms of the lovable Blakey as well.