Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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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.

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.” 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.” 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.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.

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. 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. 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. I came on this book, by my usual manner of selection, haphazard rooting about in the world of books. A snippet in a magazine here or there, a recommendation, a review and I'm off like a bloodhound - must read that! 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.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: A literary seignior, sure of his authority, this is a memoir in the manner of a Proust or a Nabokov. Now Wilson has turned his hand to a memoir covering roughly the first half of his life, from family origins to a mid-career Tolstoy biography — and, of course, mastering Russian in the process. All the Wilson virtues are here: wit and acute observation, scholarship, and brilliantly etched portraits of individuals, from troubled parents and baleful schoolmasters to wonderfully odd Oxford dons and literary compatriots. (The profile of Christopher Tolkien, son of the Lord of the Rings author, is remarkable for both its acuity and sympathy.)