His So-Called Life : EFFORTS AT TRUTH: An Autobiography, <i> By Nicholas Mosley (Dalkey Archive Press: $22.95; 339 pp.)</i>

This book met with the unanimous acclaim of intellectual critics when it was first published in England in 1994. One of them called it “clever, anecdotal, suspenseful and funny,” another considered it “a heroic striving after truth,” and such epithets as “exhilarating” and “fascinating” were liberally scattered through the reviews.

All this was deserved, but the reader must not be misled into thinking that this is an easy book. It isn’t. Sometimes one wishes for a few more bricks and a little less straw. Nicholas Mosley is himself an intellectual of a high order, and his autobiography is less a step-by-step account of his life than exploration of his states of mind as illustrated in his successive novels (including “Hopeful Monsters” and “Impossible Object”) and other books. He makes a point that fiction is often truer than fact. We can know more about Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Heathcliff than we will ever know about a living person. So he parallels the actual events of his life with those of his characters. The similarities are close because his novels deal in the main with domestic crises involving infidelities and consequent remorse, as in his own experience. An analyst once said to him, “You like mysteries: All your life you have liked tying yourself into knots.” He was moody and confesses it.

Take, for example, his marital experience. He was twice married. Not outwardly an attractive man, for his figure was gangling, his bright eyes permanently shielded by spectacles and his speech impeded by a stammer, he was loved by many women for he was vivacious, passionate and invariably stimulating and amusing. I know, because very many years ago he and I shared a girlfriend, and while I adored her, she adored Nicholas. He left her to marry his first wife Rosemary, to whom he was quite soon unfaithful.

The two other women who entered his life, “Mary” and “Natalie” (the mistresses are given pseudonyms, the wives their true names), were worked into his contemporary novels, from which we are given plot summaries and long quotations. He is extremely candid about this side of his life. When he is not veiling his women in the decency of his fiction, he is quoting from their letters, never concealing his self-doubt and often his self-reproach.

At the same period he was deeply reappraising his religious beliefs--more “knots” to unravel and his novels became more and more introspective. His literary models at the time were William Faulkner and Henry James, but much of his writing resembled Virginia Woolf’s at her most intricate.

Mosley’s life, however, was far from solitary or tepid. As a soldier in World War II he saw dramatic action in the Italian campaign; later he was an intrepid traveler, a vivacious socializer and writer of film scripts. He succeeded his aunt as a peer and is now officially Lord Ravensdale, but writes under his original name.

An editor once advised him to change it, because Mosley was a name that still made British flesh creep. He refused. He was not ashamed of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, while profoundly disagreeing with his politics. Much of this book deals with their relationship. Both were interested in the subtler motives of human conduct, and Nicholas found it strange that so sophisticated a man could lower himself to the level of demagogy, street brawls and barely concealed racism, earning himself, unfairly, the reputation of an anti-Semitic thug.

Father and son talked and corresponded with unusual profundity, but from time to time Nicholas would be driven to despair, once accusing him of being a “lousy father,” a sentiment that he soon withdrew because there was something in Sir Oswald’s performance that compelled admiration. “He had aimed very high,” his son writes, “he had gambled, and had failed. But could it not be said of him, as of Faust, that the very exaggeratedness of his effort gave some redemption?”

That is a frank and generous conclusion, as indeed is Nicholas Mosley’s whole attitude to life. It seems that he has written this autobiography for his children, “our means of seeing our failures and mistakes” to explain but not excuse them.