Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. Rory Knight Bruce, The Field * All these accounts are fascinating, rendered with both melancholy and self-deprecating humor. 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. Theirs happened late and lasted till his father died; his – to the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones – was precipitate and briefer. 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).

We meet the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school and then the dons of Oxford, one of whom he marries when he is just twenty years old. His own marriage lasts 15 years and he was a father of two by the age of 24 but Wilson resents that his youth has disappeared to fatherhood and a failed marriage. 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. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy.an arresting, honest, memorable book, never naive or sloppy , tender and forgiving towards those who have hurt Wilson, contemptuous and merciless about his own cowardice, vanity and failings. Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling children's author * Deliciously delicate barbs are scattered throughout the pages. 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. Had he been less “bloody wet”, he might not have married her and become a father of two by the age of 24.

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”. When he learned that his wife Jean had arranged for baby Andrew (sick in hospital) to be baptised, he was furious. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson's early comic fiction.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”. His book is a mea culpa, a self-appraisal so damning (“writings not so good, deeds not so virtuous”) that it becomes almost endearing.

There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage. 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. 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. But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. 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.

We follow his varying careers or attempted careers, from dabbling with academia and becoming engrossed in Grub Street to fancying himself as a painter and a priest. Before he came to London, as one of the “Best of Young British” novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A.