Lives and Letters

No one asked me to be a biographer. Quite the opposite. My grandfather hoped I might set off for India and make a career at the tea plantations there. He had been presented with some shares in one of the Assam tea companies by his father. He used these shares as if they were tickets that took him on a summer holiday which he called ‘following the business’. What he really wanted was to go abroad without his family from time to time. I saw a photo of him in India once: he was smiling in a way I had never seen him smile at home. And he was encircled by rather bemused-looking planters.

Back at home he taught me the skills of making a proper cup of tea. It was not easy: how to hold the cup correctly; how to boil the water to an exact temperature – and then how to engage the small spoons of tea with water at the right moment. Then there was the difficulty of preparing the milk and adding it. Sugar was never tolerated. Writing a biography was far easier than preparing a correct cup of tea – or so it seemed to me. In the end I wrote a small biography of my grandfather and placed it in my autobiography. Most people do not encourage members of their family to become biographers. There is no telling what trouble they will get into. If you write fiction any member of your family who appears on the pages of your book can be hidden by a different name that prevents them being recognized. But biographers are always invading other people’s families uninvited, writing about the dead who cannot answer them and presenting what they have written to their subjects’ families and friends. It’s no surprise we are not welcome. I was fortunate in never being at a university, going instead to the public library for my education. In the library I found hundreds of possible subjects lined up in alphabetical order and waiting to be chosen. There they all were: Dickens, Samuel Johnson, Hugh Kingsmill, Shakespeare. Which one would you have chosen? I chose Hugh Kingsmill. He seemed to have something the others didn’t have: an absence of biographies about him (though he wrote some biographies himself – all of them safely out of print). He was, I thought, an obvious choice. I finished my biography of him within two years – keeping alive by doing odd jobs and writing reviews of other people’s biographies. Over the next two years I sent my typescript to sixteen publishers who sent it back to me with a polite letter. They thanked me for sending it to them and implied that they would have very much liked to publish it: but unfortunately couldn’t. They were sorry – and so was I. Sorrow filled the air. But eventually it was taken by someone who had recently given up publishing: Martin Secker. He was, someone told me by way of explanation, almost blind. Mine was the last book he published in his life and he did so with a colleague. It was brought out in 1964 by the Unicorn Press and I was given a generous advance of £25. This came in useful when Kingsmill’s second wife objected to a couple of pages in which she appeared and I paid for the rewriting. This rare first edition revealed that it was ‘the strange and mysterious quality of her silences which exerted so compelling a power’. I wish she had been more silent with me. I was gradually learning the complexities of biography which was almost as difficult as my grandfather’s tea-making. My father, if asked, would say that I was a historian, which sounded more respectable. He could not see how I would make a career from writing and wished I had become a scientist. If I had a proper career I could, he said, write people’s Lives on Sundays – and, if absolutely necessary, on Saturdays too. What more could I need? As it was, one of the publishers who had amiably turned down my Kingsmill suggested I should try someone else – preferably someone not unknown but not yet written about. Such subjects are hard to find, I discovered, but eventually I came up with Lytton Strachey. He was a biographer without a biography. What could be better? Indeed he was so good a choice that I was given twice the £25 advance for my first biography. But since it took me seven years to complete the book I had to renegotiate this part of my contract as many times as Britain negotiated joining ‒ and then leaving ‒ Europe. In one of his essays the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell had written after Strachey’s death in 1932 that it would be impossible to write his biography for a long time. It certainly took me a long time to write his Life – though that was not what Bell had in mind. In the early 1960s homosexuality was still illegal. It was brave of some of Strachey’s friends to talk to me about this. ‘Shall I be put in jail?’ one of them asked. ‘Will I be allowed to watch cricket any more at Lord’s?’ asked another. It seems ridiculous now, and it was fortunate that the law changed shortly before my biography was published in 1967. Some of the most charming readers of the book were men who invited me to dinner – but were disappointed. What involved me most deeply was Strachey’s extraordinary relationship with Dora Carrington. Though my biographies usually have a man’s name on the title page, women take over many chapters. This was inevitably true with my next subject, the artist Augustus John. Walking along the streets of Chelsea in London he sometimes patted the heads of children in case, he explained, ‘they are some of mine’. Sometimes I’m asked how I choose the people whose biographies I write. And I have no idea ‒ no memory of choosing any of them. The fact is, as it were, they choose me, or to put it another way, a minor character in one book gets my attention and becomes my next subject. When I began writing about Ellen Terry (having got to know her when working on my Life of Bernard Shaw), I had no intention of writing about her fellow-actor on the stage Henry Irving – but it was impossible to leave him out. And not leaving him out opened the door to both his and her children. So what had begun as a single short pen-portrait of one person expanded into a group biography covering two generations over a period of a century. No one was more surprised than me. Am I writing a biography now? Certainly not! Or rather I don’t think so. But of course anything may happen on the next page.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 56 © Michael Holroyd 2017