A Life of Failed Promises
A. N. Wilson
Bloomsbury Continuum, 2022
A (Andrew) N. Wilson is always worth reading or listening to. In May 2021 I attended the 150th anniversary of St Augustine’s Church, Kilburn where he was a guest speaker. He said that when he arrived, he saw a huge queue of people next to the church and his heart soared as he thought that the glory days of St Augustine’s as the hub of community life had returned. When he drew nearer, he discovered that the crowds were queuing to get into the car boot sale next door! Times had changed.
A. N. Wilson writes so well that I assumed that his autobiography of the first part of his life would be a guaranteed good read. The book cover has quotes from Stephen Fry and Antonia Fraser, boasting about Wilson’s “readability”. I was therefore disappointed to have so much trouble reading it. For example in pages 34-37 we have: “matutinal”; “like the expensive delicate ship in Auden’s poem”; “as capo di tutti capi”; then on page 225 “Wyrd bith ful araed”. I don’t know what “matitudinal” means, I haven’t read Auden’s poem and I don’t know other languages. Stephen Fry and Antonia Fraser being more intelligent than me find all this very readable, but it gave me unnecessary trouble. The book is often not in chronological order, which makes it hard to place where you are in his life. Only when I got halfway did the book really start to grip me and make me want to go on reading.
I found one inaccuracy. On page 29 he refers to Bishop David Jenkins: “Easter was dismissed as a ‘conjuring trick with bones’”. What Jenkins had actually said was that the resurrection was a spiritual event, “more than just a conjuring trick with bones” and the Press at the time mischievously misquoted him.
The book subtitle “a life of failed promises” I thought would be Wilson recounting how people had let him down. I was impressed that it was actually his confessions of how he had let others down. One of his failed promises was from his wedding day when he had promised to remain faithful to his wife. Though, when he married, his wife was at the time in love with someone else.
A. N. Wilson’s father, Norman, was an atheist with a contradiction:
“Hatred of the God in whom he did not believe was part of the atmosphere in which I grew up.” (Page 44).
He had a difficult relationship with his father, but developed sympathy for him, when after retirement Norman had become an isolated figure, stuck in a circle of recounting memories of his time at work, which had been his life.
Norman had good qualities for work, but not for marriage:
“The skills displayed in factory management – efficiency, ability to command, brisk insistence on cheerful diligence – were welcome… The skills required of a husband had been left out of his store of gifts. The capacity to make a woman feel loved… the capacity to curb impatience and smother irritability – he never showed any awareness that these were desirable qualities. (Pages 68-69).
His parents’ marriage was full of arguments, yet they had an unbreakable bond:
“early acrimony and squabbles becoming an ingrained habit, but the perpetual bickering, which made their joint company unendurable to one another, accompanied by mutual dependency. At last, when the bickering stopped, he would lie in a Welsh churchyard, and she would wait twenty lonely years before being placed in the same grave.” (Page 59).
A. N. Wilson had an excellent example in one of his teachers at school, Sister Mary Mark:
“You never met anyone who knew her whose face doesn’t change at the mention of her name. All of us whose lives she touched saw that there is a higher way of living, that human nature is capable of transformation if one is humble enough, simple enough, to submit to the Gospel of Christ. (I’ve never quite done it, much as I have hoped or aspired, in pious moments to try.) (Page 102).”
He then had the worst possible example when he moved to a boarding school where he and other boys were sexually abused by the headmaster. One of the boys later told him:
“that he had been anally raped by Rudolph Barbour-Simpson. The injuries were severe and identified by his family doctor.
Naturally, the family removed him at once from the school, and asked the doctor to be a witness in criminal proceedings. The doctor replied that he was willing to do this but that they must understand the consequences of such a course of action. Barbour-Simpson would almost certainly deny the charges. (He was a much-respected member of the educational establishment in Malvern, a Justice of the Peace, etc., etc.) There would be a trial. The child victim would be compelled to relive his ordeal in court. A senior barrister would be engaged by the defendant, and he (it would certainly be a man) would belittle the child in court. And pour doubt on his story. This mental torture in the witness box could last for days. Of course, the family brought no charges.” (Pages 129-130).
Today things are better, with special measures for vulnerable witnesses, such as the ability to give pre-recorded evidence etc, though you can never make any court procedure stress free.
A. N. Wilson also writes about the irrational shame that a victim feels:
“What abusers know, and what is so difficult to understand who has never been abused, is the shame felt by the victim. This is evidently multiplied a thousandfold in the case of rape victims, but even in the case of ordinary bullying … You felt – in my case still feel – shame.” (Page 132).
We learn of the tensions in his life. Married to a woman who didn’t love him. Having an affair but feeling guilty about it. Being a successful writer but getting sucked into a journalist’s drinking culture:
“In the midst of the carnally obsessed love affair…many hours were also spent sitting or kneeling at the back of churches, painfully aware that in this vale of soul-making, the addition to writing more and more journalism, the marital failure and infidelities, the booze was destroying, not making, a soul.”
His faith has had ups and downs. A high point was as a young man visiting the Holy Land:
“The conversations with the Portuguese friar made a great impression. He took me to Nazareth and showed me the excavations beneath the large modern basilica which suggested a church had been there since the first century. …The cult which had grown up in Christ’s lifetime, and its continuation after the Resurrection (first generation) and came to be written down (second generation), were not about some imagined figures from storybooks.” (Page 204).
“the Gospel is an uncompromising call, for the death of self, for the transformation of every soul into God’s likeness, for the bringing to pass of His Kingdom on earth. You can’t get anything more revolutionary than that.” (Page 220).
He flirts with ideas of moving to the Roman Catholic Church but remains in the Church of England. When he was a theological student on a church placement, he saw the C of E at its best, when the vicar, Canon John Lucas, conducted a funeral for an unknown woman:
“In St Thomas’s, where there were many rough sleepers in the parish, the police found the corpse of a youngish woman in the gutter. No one ever identified her, as far as I am aware, and when the coroner’s permission had been granted, John conducted her funeral. There were requiem candles. A catafalque. The coffin was draped with a splendid purple and black pall. And when he had said a requiem for the soul of ‘this our sister’, we went to the crematorium where he read the Book of Common Prayer funeral service. We were the only two people present, but all had been conducted with the solemnity and seriousness of a state funeral.” (Page 248).
Today, civil celebrants have taken more market share of funerals than clergy. I doubt many civil celebrants would take so much trouble over a funeral where the only one listening is God.
Adrian Vincent
December 2023