“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.
He was born in Staffordshire, in one of the many houses his father Norman quickly regretted having bought (he spent his life feeling conned by estate agents). A “ceramic genius” from a family of seven generations of potters, Norman was headhunted by Wedgwood and became its managing director. He liked to pass himself off as a gentleman, “the Colonel”. In truth his background was more modest and shaped by the childhood trauma of seeing his brother die after falling from a haystack they were playing on. The episode made him an anxious parent. More importantly, it made him a ferocious atheist. When he learned that his wife Jean had arranged for baby Andrew (sick in hospital) to be baptised, he was furious.
Norman had spotted Jean in the typing pool at Wedgwood and wooed her in a Lagonda. But she’d rather have married her childhood friend Eric (if only he’d asked!) and quickly discovered how difficult Norman was to live with. It wasn’t just the atheism, volatility, lavish spending, gin consumption and 50 cigarettes a day. He made her feel inferior and unloved. Male friendships mattered more to him, that with Josiah Wedgwood (Uncle Josie to the three Wilson kids) in particular. He would avoid any conversation he didn’t fancy having with a dismissive “Tch, tch, tch”. In short “the skills required of a good husband had been left out of his store of gifts.”
Not that Jean was easy to live with either. She’d no taste in music or art, would sulk if anyone talked about a book she hadn’t read, was a rotten cook and ate little but the occasional Jacob’s cream cracker. As for joie de vivre, she had, her son reports, “a greater capacity than anyone I ever met to squeeze discontent from the happiest of circumstances”. What the couple chiefly had in common was hypochondria: though Norman lived to 82 and Jean into her 90s, “they vied with one another as to which felt iller”. After four miscarriages, a stillbirth and a botched hysterectomy, Jean had more cause. But both were insomniacs – and drove everyone mad with their bickering.
“Marital warfare was the air I learned to breathe,” Wilson says, which may explain why – after enjoyable infant years at a convent school and trickier later ones at two boarding schools – he made the most unsuitable of marriages. He was 20, Katherine 10 years older; he an Oxford undergraduate, she a distinguished Renaissance scholar; he a virgin when they slept together (and conceived a child), she in love with someone else. Had he been less “bloody wet”, he might not have married her and become a father of two by the age of 24. Thanks to a separate weekday existence in London, he stuck it out for 15 years. But resentment that “she had stolen my youth” remained. Only in her 70s, when she developed dementia and he rushed up to Oxford several times a week to check on her, did his anger soften.
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?
As for Wilson the controversialist, there’s little sign of him here, though if you’re like me you’ll dislike what he says about Salman Rushdie, LS Lowry, psychotherapists and disbelief in God being a failure of the imagination. By the end I felt knew him better. And having “never been completely sure” who AN Wilson is, he too may have a better idea.
• Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
