His own best subject
Rupert Christiansen
WORKS ON PAPER: THE CRAFT OF BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Michael Holroyd Little, Brown, £20, pp. 319, ISBN 03168567898 Michael Holroyd's life of Lytton Strachey:, published in 1967-8, is often said to mark the starting-point for the modern explosion of interest in biography. There's no doubt that his sympathetic, unprurient exploration of the thickets of Bloomsbury sexuality has been enormously influential, and, yes, it probably does constitute the most significant advance in candour about the recently dead since Froucle's life of Thomas Carlyle shocked the Victorians some 80 years previously. But Holroyd doesn't, I think, otherwise rank as an outstanding innovator in the field: as his treatment of Shaw and Augustus John also witnesses, he is by nature a pretty conservative, cradle-to-grave, door-stopper sort of biographer, who has run shy of the frothy experimental brews of fact and fiction concocted earlier in the last century by Strachey himself, A. J. A. Symons and Hesketh Pearson, and in our own time Richard Holmes and W. G. Sebald, This is not to detract from Holroyd's achievement. Rather the opposite: his effortless gravitas makes the factionalists look merely whimsical. He is peerless in his powers of psychological penetration, graced with an easy, lucid and buoyant style (I have never caught him involved in a dull or prolix sentence) and exceptionally rich in the two greatest of all biographer's virtues — the knack of telling a human story, and an inexhaustible curiosity about people and the existential gap between what they do and who they are.
Not everything in this collection of occasional pieces composed over the last 25 years shows Holroyd at his best. He needs more space than the dimensions of our newspapers and literary journals allow, and some of the reviews gathered here are just too slight to merit republication, Nor does the book live up to its subtitle: Holroyd is not an ideologue or academic, and the essays devoted to the history and development of biographical form are somewhat frustrating — plenty of gentle and often intriguing reflections, but nothing in the way of cogent theory.
Where Holroyd excels is in his understanding of the culture behind the Edwardian twilight and our imperial decline. His attention is most compelled by the rebels, eccentrics and poseurs which these historical phenomena threw tip: the Sitwells, Shaw's dotty stalker Erica Cotterill, 'the Queen of Queer Street' Quentin Crisp, whose The Naked Civil Servant he rightly rates as 'a classic of autobiography'. He gets straight to the heart of E. M. Forster, whom Keynes described as 'the elusive colt of a dark horse', and boldly stares out the 'bloody rude' Rebecca West. There is a poignant essay on Gwen John, a good case for Patrick Hamilton, and some fascinating investigation of two intriguing literary frauds, The Whispering Gallery and Peterley Harvest.
The best of this book, however, comes towards the end, when Holroyd brings himself to the fore. Fans of his autobiographical exercise Basil Street Blues will not be surprised at the essentially modest but unintimidated persona which emerges from the shadow of his interest in other people; he writes about himself with a cool, dry wit and gentle self-deprecation that can't fail to charm. There's also something quite painful about the honesty with which he relates his troubled dealings with Dan H. Laurence, a scholar of impossible integrity whose dogged control over Shaw's correspondence hampered the progress of Holroyd's biography: the scene in which Laurence beards him in a sound-proofed room of the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas makes one's blood run cold.
Holroyd's ability to paint such small dramas of the literary life in all their ironic colours is further illustrated in the sorry tale of his battles with obtuse Whitehall mandarins over Public Lending Right. I suppose his refusal to be bamboozled in such quarters has done him out of the knighthood he richly deserves for dogged service to the cause of his profession, enacted in several committee rooms with great energy and passion. But it seems a shame.
The bonne bouche of the collection is entitled 'Among the Americans'. It dates from 1978, and presents an acute and hilarious sketch of his encounter with transatlantic habits and customs:
The adults of America are the machines. They are very fine. If you want anything done, ask a machine. Machines buy and sell, produce, convey, communicate. They keep you alive, or don't. No wonder human beings are almost redundant. To make a secret of their decline has become a national preoccupation. A popular method is for Americans to resemble their machines in much the same way as Englishmen are said to resemble their dogs. It is astonishing what willpower can achieve. Sometimes you can hardly tell them apart.
Bill Bryson, Mark Twain, GBS even, could hardly have put it better.
Previous page
