Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. 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. 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. 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.

Had he been less “bloody wet”, he might not have married her and become a father of two by the age of 24. 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.Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. He is proficient equally as a biographer, novelist, historian, essayist, editor and literary journalist. But there is also a tenderness here, in his evocation of those whom he has loved, and hurt, the most.

But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. 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. A “ceramic genius” from a family of seven generations of potters, Norman was headhunted by Wedgwood and became its managing director.

The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. 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. 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.

Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. Theirs happened late and lasted till his father died; his – to the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones – was precipitate and briefer.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. Wilson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism.

To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. 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). Before he came to London, as one of the “Best of Young British” novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. 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”.His early life takes in life at boarding school and also the influence of his parents – his father, Norman Wilson was the Managing Director of Wedgwood in the 1950s.