This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

No one who has laboured for any time in what the Victorian novelist George Gissing used to call “the valley of the shadow of books” can have failed to be amused by A.N. Wilson’s recently published memoir. You suspect that the amusement will have been two-fold — provoked naturally by the book itself, but also by its reception down on the Grub Street front line. 

As for the contents of Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises (Bloomsbury £20), “Ann”, as Craig Brown once christened him in his “Wallace Arnold” days, is as waspish at 72 as he was at 30. He is also, as experienced Wilson-watchers have noted, surprisingly vague about some of the chronological details of his own life. The media coverage, meanwhile, has rolled in from an astonishing series of viewpoints.

John Walsh, in the Sunday Times, contrasting his memories of the fogeyish exterior that Mr Wilson offered to the world back in the 1980s with the subject’s retrospective enthusiasm for the ladies, remarked that he’d never known our man was such a “badass”. 

From other quarters came praise for the “devastating honesty” mingled with a faint suspicion (see Johanna Thomas-Corr in the New Statesman) that, back in the day, this distinguished literary man was a bit of an upper-class twit, able to profit from the workings of a literary-cum-political clique not-so stealthily at work to make the world safe for tweedy reactionaries and their oeuvres.

Is this true? And does it matter if it is? The Secret Author is rather younger than the biographer of Prince Albert and Tolstoy, but he is just old enough to remember the great days of the mid-1980s Spectator, when the television column was written by the self-confessed TV sceptic Richard Ingrams, the film column by Peter Ackroyd (who took it as a compliment that in all his years of criticism he had never been quoted in an advertisement) and the magazine’s weekly lunch was regularly enlivened by the sound of an enraged chef — this was Jennifer Paterson, later to find fame as one of the Two Fat Ladies — hurling plates out of the window.

It was all very jolly and all very exclusive, with agreeable berths waiting at the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs for anyone who showed promise, and helpful publishers on hand to assist those keen on ascending from journalism to the world of books. It was cliquish, certainly, and irredeemably right-wing, but also passingly bohemian and accessible to people with talent in a way that its left-wing equivalents were not. 

There is no genuine pluralism left in the contemporary literary scene

For purposes of comparison, the literary editors of the New Statesman and the Observer at this time were still filling their pages with chaps they’d sauntered round Cambridge college courtyards with at the time of the Suez Crisis.

Fast forward thirty-five years or so and how do book-world cliques work in 2022? To be sure, new players have emerged and one or two ancient redoubts of pomp and privilege have spectacularly collapsed. But many of the old separations endure. The Spectator/Telegraph/Oldie clique is still going strong, and so is the Guardian/Observer/London Review of Books nexus. 

There are occasional, dazzling examples of writers who by dint of amiability and talent are able to transcend these divides — a prime example might be Ferdinand Mount, once employed by Rupert Murdoch (and indeed Mrs Thatcher) but still, somehow, welcome at tables otherwise populated by sniffy left-wing academics — and also a whole heap of cordons sanitaire bent on keeping non-toers of the party line out of business. 

To print cliques can be added institutional groupings with modish agendas to pursue — the Society of Authors, for example, which now seems far more of a fount for newspaper controversies about alleged wokery than the writers’ trade union ideal on which it was originally based.

There is, of course, nothing very startling about this. Book-world cliques are as old as literature, and the caballing and wire-pulling that distinguishes New Grub Street (1891, Gissing’s savage conspectus of the late-Victorian literary scene) make anything that happened at the Spectator’s Doughty Street premises a third of a century ago seem the merest bagatelle. On the other hand, should you happen to be one of those promising young talents we hear so much about these days, what are you supposed to do?

The answer, alas, is that you should find your clique and stick to it. There is no genuine pluralism left in the contemporary literary scene — if indeed there ever was any to begin with. In choosing which path to follow, you are usually better off sticking with those on the right. 

At a very early stage in his career, the Secret Author discovered that for all his need to convince readers of the Guardian of his attachment to all the good brave causes, it was far more fun writing for right-wing newspapers and magazines. 

They paid on time, they didn’t muck you about, and by and large their editors were more hospitable. Not much has changed.