Works on Paper: the craft of biography and autobiography
Michael Holroyd Little, Brown, 336pp, £20
ISBN 0316856789
It is a sign of the gathering critical and commercial clout of biography that publishers now consider it worth their while to put out collections of shorter pieces by the genre's leading practitioners. In 2000, HarperCollins produced Sidetracks, a round-up of mostly published writings by Richard Holmes, and now Little, Brown has done the same with a collection of reviews, essays and articles by Michael Holroyd. Works on Paper, as the subtitle suggests, is not simply a collection of biographical and autobiographical writing, but reaches out to consider the art, craft, silliness and wonder of recreating human life in dots and dashes on a page.
If anyone still doubts that biographers are "proper" writers, rather than mere transcribers of life's rich record, then they should read this book. While Holroyd's wit, passion and grace were always in evidence in the books that made him famous - on Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw, as well the autobiographical Basil Street Blues - they are marvellously showcased in these shorter, richer pieces, which run from 1973 to the present. His essay on Quentin Crisp is a revelation. Originally written as an introduction to the American edition of The Naked Civil Servant, it manages to do all sorts of things at once, and yet reads as lightly as breath. In little more than 3,000 words, Holroyd delivers a short biography of Crisp, paints a vivid picture of his (then) present circumstances, summarises the critical reception of Civil Servant (surprisingly poor), and makes an illuminating parallel with the mocking inner world of Samuel Beckett. All this is carried along in a voice that echoes Crisp's own, yet without falling into parody or ventriloquism. No matter how many times you read it, you cannot quite see how it is done.
Even when Holroyd is being serious - and he is deadly serious about the genre that he has served so loyally for 30 years - he is enormous fun. A brand-new essay, "The Making of Bernard Shaw", tells the vexed story behind his writing of the official Shaw biography. Originally commissioned in the late Sixties, the book did not appear until 1988. The delay had nothing to do with Holroyd, but was the result of a bitter internecine war between the world's greatest Shavian scholar and the Shaw estate. Over a period of 15 years, Professor Dan H Laurence did everything he could to stop Holroyd - whom he called variously "a horse's rear end", "a spiv" and "an incorrigible fool" - getting his hands on letters and other vital documents. Keeping his sources close, Laurence was determined that he would not give away his favourite toy to a man whose education famously took place at Eton College and Maidenhead Public Library. Holroyd's account of this ghastly time, the result of two different types of biographers, and biography, crashing up against one other, is as madly funny as anything that happens in Possession, the novel by his sister-in-law A S Byatt.
Yet Holroyd still makes considered and generous points. Laurence may be a rolling-eyed obsessive (back at his flat, during a brief moment of rapprochement, he shows Holroyd a device that allows him to flash Shaw's words on to a screen, even when he is lying down), but no one can doubt his sincerity. His knowledge is vast, even if it is exceeded by his pedantry. Biography is a broad church, and needs all kinds of different voices and methodologies if it is to retain the robustness of a cross-breed. While paying tribute to Laurence's "tireless and faithful" scholarship, Holroyd questions whether it is sane, or even safe, to allow tenured academics (whose salary arrangements allow them to work at a snail's pace in the mistaken name of excellence) to hold professional biographers hostage simply because they cannot bear to share.
Holroyd has always been good at minor lives (not quite the same as obscure ones) and here he writes wonderfully on the rococo Sitwells, the vanishing Gwen John and the exquisite J R Ackerley. So, too, the ability of the robustly heterosexual Holroyd to empathise with homosexual men - as well as Ackerley and Crisp, he includes a piece on Joe Orton and E M Forster - is a timely reminder that biographers need to try harder to reach beyond their own instinctive interests. Women do not always have to write about women, or gay men about gay men. Indeed, something good and new might happen if they did not.
The only problem with Works on Paper is the publisher's refusal to indicate clearly when and where each piece originally appeared (the dates are given at the end and there is no note of the host publication). As a result, one starts each section not knowing if it is an essay or a review, or whether it is from the 1970s or 2000. Quite possibly, Little, Brown fears that this kind of information will bore or even worry general readers. Frankly, they underestimate them.
Kathryn Hughes is a biographer and critic
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