Believers in the lives to come

Roy Jenkins

THE TROUBLED FACE OF BIOGRAPHY edited by Eric Homberger and John Charmley

Macmillan Press, £27.50, £8.95, pp. 140

Iwas recently involved in the discussion of a plan for an Anglo-American biog- raphers' weekend conference. There is inevitably something faintly ludicrous ab- out compiling a list for such a gathering. 'Schlesinger', one says, 'can speak for Roosevelt (and Kennedy), Grigg for Lloyd George, Rose for Curzon and King George, etc', as though one were summon- ing a congress of plenipotentiaries on some great Cloth of Gold in the sky. However, I thought it might be worthwhile, provided the participants could be made to talk about the problems and techniques of biography in general and not just present potted lives of their own chosen subjects.

After reading this book, which stems from another biographers' conference, this one held in the University of East Anglia in 1985, I am not so sure. By this I do not mean that I have turned against the Anglo- American project or that I have found this quite different symposium (of which I was unaware) disappointing. It is rather that the authors here assembled are much more vivid and interesting when they are either describing their subjects or giving us de- tailed, even humdrum, descriptions of their own methods of work than when they are trying to construct biographical theories or epigrams. Ann Thwaite and Hilary Spurling on how they wrote respec- tively about Gosse and Compton Burnett, Kenneth 0. Morgan on why (but not how) he wrote about Keir Hardie and Lloyd George, and Robert Blake on both why and how he wrote about Disraeli, with some side glances at Bonar Law, all seem to me to say things of interest and novelty.

Lord Blake, incidentally, is devastating about his subjects. His Disraeli was far from hagiographic but it did not tell us quite the extent to which every uncovering of the truth stripped away a part of the Beaconsfield legend, so that at the end practically nothing was left, while Law had saved his biographer from the immanent temptation to overquote by the fact that 'his many virtues did not include the slightest flicker of literary grace'.

The more schematic essays seem to me to be less happy, although Robert Skidelsky, despite his not very illuminating title of 'Only Connect: Biography and Truth', provides an exception. He has the appropriate gift for a biographer of Keynes of knowing how to construct a general theory. His main axiom, I suppose, is that biography changed dramatically with Lyt- ton Strachey and has never been the same again, even though it underwent a second sharp sea-change with the swing back towards hero-worship and non-selectivity after 1945.

Strachey broke with the past, not by being prurient but by being iconoclastic, not by portraying his subjects as perverts or libertines but by challenging their mo- tives. Certainly he made no attempt to conciliate the tradition. 'Those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead', he wrote in the preface to Eminent Victorians (although it is unquoted by Professor Skidelsky or anyone else in this volume) — 'who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material,their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their la- mentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism'.

There is no doubt that Strachey was different, but there is much more room for hesitation about whether he was seminal. Who were the biographers who tried to follow his methods? Skidelsky at one mo- ment couples Harold Nicolson with him as an equally 'exquisite miniaturist'. But Nicolson was not a debunker. His gift of delicate irony was kept under considerable control with real people and only allowed full rein when the semi-anonymous charac- ters of Some People were involved.

Nor has Strachey's brevity proved much of an example. The Twenties and Thirties produced plenty of 'two-deckers', and some more recent British writers have shown too much of a tendency to follow the American trend towards measuring the value of biographies by weight. Andrew Sinclair in one of these essay points to the paradox that 'modern biographers are both drowned by their material and stranded without it'.

Half of the essayists (Ann Thwaite, Victoria Glendinning, Michael Holroyd, Hilary Spurling, Malcolm Bradbury) are essentially concerned with literary rather than political biography, and several of the others, rather like criminal barristers with a yearning for the refinements and rewards of the civil courts, give me the impression that they wish they were on the more cultural side of the barrier. Only Lord Blake and Kenneth Morgan sound unques- tionably reconciled to the rough Old Bailey-like life of the political biographer.

In several of the other essays there are self-deprecating references to the low pre- stige of all biography as a writing art-form. Perhaps, however, there are really two ranks within this proletariat: the respect- able working class, who deal with such figures as Eliot and Gosse and the Sitwells; and the lumpen element who get casual employment dealing with Oswald Mosley or Christopher Addison or President War- ren Gamaliel Harding. Quite rightly the artisan group mostly gets higher rewards, (so at least the size of Michael Holroyd's contract suggests). But there is one still more significant difference of status. I would guess that the political contributors have all read the main literary biographies, but I would be very doubtful about the likelihood of the literary biographers hav- ing read Morgan's Hardie, or Blake's Bonar Law, or even Skidelsky's Keynes.

So their essays teach us about literary pecking-order and a certain amount about how to write a biography, or at least how certain people say they do it. But I remain sceptical about too many rules, and am glad that Lord Blake cited the old bit of doggerel about the centipede whose ability to walk was lost through ratiocination about the order in which to move its feet. And perhaps also, pace 'deconstruction' and pace feminism, there is still something in Bentley's clerihew that

The art of Biography Is different from Geography.

Geography is about maps And Biography is about chaps.

As emerges clearly from the list of contributors, however, biography is by no means written exclusively by 'chaps'. And a very good thing, too, if we are to judge by the quality of the female contributions here presented. The best of the lot is Ruth Dudley Williams's not over-modest account of how she destroyed the legend of Padraig Pearse, with whose death 'a terri- ble beauty was born', by exposing his religiosity and morbidity to the iodising air of a 1970s Dublin literary season.