“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.
He’s less forgiving of himself. Looking back on the young AN – “so thrustingly ambitious, so full of himself, so unfaithful, not only to his wife but to his own better nature” – he’s bemused and ashamed, as if watching AN Other. His book is a mea culpa, a self-appraisal so damning (“writings not so good, deeds not so virtuous”) that it becomes almost endearing. Enough contrition, you want to tell him, you’re not so wicked a chap as you make out.
