Efforts at Truth: An Autobiography
by Nicholas Mosley
(Secker and Warburg, £20)
This book is not what it seems. Its bluff title and honest conversational style suggest simplicity, but Mosley is the author of such ambitious novels as Hopeful Monsters (Whitbread Book of the Year, 1991) and Accident, and the obvious is not for him. Nor is it an autobiography in any conventional sense. Efforts at Truth is a pilgrimage, a journey of the spirit, both Holy and otherwise, for faith and God make unembarrassed appearances in the effort to understand.
There are few dates and little chronological drive, but in discussion, often with himself, the writing and the life are reflected on each other in the hope that these partial beams will merge into a fuller truth. Above all, Mosley is concerned with learning from pain, with finding the patterns between opposites, with knowing.
The facts of his life are glanced over: eldest son of Oswald, who was 'like some lighthouse visible for miles' deprived by death of a mother war in Italy marriage and children, affairs success as a writer and screenwriter second marriage and some calming down in approaching old age. For a writer, his life has more incidents than most.
But it is his intellectual curiosity, his humour and (selective) candour which makes this book so rewarding. There is a cool detachment as Mosley explores his ideas of free will and the patterns between light and shadow, good and bad: people around him fall apart while he watches, the brilliant forensic observer. But then he quotes letters from wives, friends, lovers - and his step-mother Diana - and the emotions aroused scorch the page.
His own turmoil is glimpsed between the cracks: here is a passionate man who 'like the hero in his favourite book, Faulkner's Wild Palms' prefers grief to nothing. But he can see also the irony in his stance faced with physical suffering after an apocalyptic car crash, he realises he would relinquish everything to be relieved of his pain.
'A human being is only bearable, only makes patterns that are bearable, perhaps, if he sees himself (and lets others see him) as not only a hero and a victim but also as both ' which is a clown.' This book's insights into the large archetypal themes are leavened with an oblique wackiness. One of his lovers moved in and out of his Hampstead house regularly, always accompanied by her grand piano - and the necessary crane. (As the crane driver remarked, 'This piano goes up and down like a yo-yo'.) He is touched by his father's bizarre defence in a libel action against a novel: 'the character who is like my son Nicholas ... is portrayed as being not only a bugger but impotent, whereas in fact he had a fine war record and won the 440 yards at Eton'.
This is an exhilarating book. So intent is Mosley on himself learning from experience and reflection that he becomes an inspiring teacher. It is important for him to pass something of this on to his children before he dies ' and with this book his readers are included in this blessing of revelation and self-discovery.
