diary d j taylor
The first literary biography I ever read, back in 1977, was Christopher Sykes’s life of Evelyn Waugh. Even at the age of sixteen, I seem to remember, I had my doubts, impressed, on the one hand, by what the book clearly gained f rom the author’s f riendship with his subject, yet puzzled, on the other, by the emollience of the tone and the reluctance to conf ront one or two of the, shall we say, more challenging aspects of Waugh’s personality. Subsequently, and by degrees, the path led to Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster’s Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure (1968) and David Newsome’s wonderful biography of A C Benson, On the Edge of Paradise (1980).
Both these books turned out to be very different f rom each other and also f rom Sykes’s. The Howard biography is a work by many hands in which those reminiscing sketch out the (non-) career of a legendary interwar-era scamp whose countless schemes for literary advancement perished on the vine of inanition. The Benson biography, alternatively, is an extraordinarily subtle life of a minor literary figure whose greatest achievement was his diary, the sharpness and astringency of which altogether redeem the dullness of his published work. Both books seemed to convey some important truths about the biographer’s art. The first was that there is no set approach or file of desiderata. Another was that biography is, of its nature, provisional and open-ended – a snapshot of a particular life at a particular moment, taken by an observer whose own personality and animating spirit may need as much interrogation as the biographee. After all, the real subject of all those gossipy anti-biographies of the Kitty Kelley school is not so much the poor saps they happen to be about – Frank Sinatra or Nancy Reagan or whoever – as the psychological quirks of the people who write them.
The fascination of Sykes’s Evelyn Waugh: A Biography was that, however tangentially, it offered one or two glances at the history of life writing. The most flagrant came at the point where Sykes quoted a substantial chunk of Waugh’s first book, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published in 1928. Here Waugh remarks, with maximal sarcasm, that the modern biographer has found a jollier way of honouring our dead. The corpse has become a marionette. With bells on its fingers and wires on its toes it is jigged about to a ‘period dance’ of our own piping; and who is not amused? Unfortunately, there is singularly little fun to be got out of Rossetti. As Sykes points out, Waugh is specifically mocking Lytton Strachey, but his wider target is the shift in biographical style that kicked in around the 1920s. By and large, the Victorians took the great statesmen and artists whom they admired out into the drawing rooms of their imagination and embalmed them, often in several volumes. One of my favourite exercises in this line is the mammoth treatment by the husband-and-wife team Robert A Watson and Elizabeth S Watson of the life of the Scottish literary divine the Reverend George Gilfillan, published in 1892. By contemporary standards, it is scarcely a biography at all, but simply a compilation of the subject ’s letters
Many Walks of Life and journals and the recollections of his f riends. Even so, the authors make Gilfillan’s zeal and also some of his absurdities – among other accomplishments he was a cham-
pion of the ‘Spasmodic’ school, part of the mid-century poetic nouvelle vague – shine off the page in a way that many a modern biographer would struggle to emulate.
If the multivolume Victorian monument, with Strachey’s bomb quietly ticking away beneath its foundations, eventually gave way to the smaller-scale feline disparagement, the triumph was comparatively short-lived. The caustic young men were onto Strachey by the 1930s. Gordon Comstock in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is keen to denounce ‘smart pseudoStrachey predigested biographies’ – a sentiment that we can be confident was shared by his creator. Predictably enough, the next revolution came in the field of sexual f rankness, one of the first beneficiaries being Strachey himself, by way of Michael Holroyd’s two-part life, published in 1967–8 and serialised in the Sunday Times, which described his Ham Spray House as ‘the abode of love’. Not, of course, that an astute practitioner f rom the pre-Wolfenden era couldn’t conjure up something of their subject ’s sexuality if they tried. Any reader of Rupert Hart-Davis’s 1952 life of Hugh Walpole who came across a sentence such as ‘Turkish baths provided opportunities for informal social contacts’ would have known exactly what Hart-Davis was on about.
As for modern biography, like the modern novel no dominat- ing pattern or aesthetic prevails. There have been ‘experi- mental’ biographies, usually of obscure and sparsely documented figures, in which, once the facts dry up, the biographer crashes on regardless. The group biography is back in fashion, if indeed it ever went away, providing a means of reanimating bygone artistic and social movements. And then there is the biography that disdains conventional approaches for a kind of circular tour that in the end brings you back to the no doubt highly arrest- ing personality of the biographer, a case not so much of ‘X as I knew them’ as of ‘X as they knew me’.
A glance at the Waterstones display table is enough to confirm how remorselessly this last, hybridising tendency has taken hold. One of the books I most enjoyed reading in 2022 was Lara Feigel’s Look! We Have Come Through!, a lockdown-era engagement with D H Lawrence by a writer who never hesitates to bring herself in when necessary, is sometimes exasperated by her subject and on other occasions seems to regard him as a kind of Star of Bethlehem bent on pointing her towards a better life. To wonder whether Feigel’s book is, strictly speaking, a biography is beside the point; that it makes you think hard about Lawrence (and also about Feigel, and what she thinks about Lawrence) is surely enough.
If the hybridisers are deedily at work, then so are the professionalisers, the academic zealots and the urgent completists. The next time anyone writes a biography of Orwell, I have no doubt it will be in three volumes by an American academic with a bumper research grant and a team of graduate interns to do his bidding.
july 2023 | Literary Review 1
