Among my firmest certainties is that vastly too many memoirs are being written and published. Another is that the most fatuous work being done these days by otherwise serious writers concerns writers writing about the agonies of writing -- a narcissistic but apparently irresistible indulgence.
That being so, I should be either repelled by or indifferent to Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography Writing, by Michael Holroyd (Counterpoint, 336 pages, $27).
Not so. I find it to be an enchanting, provocative and richly informing collection of observations on arts and letters, a sort of gazetteer of what might be called literary civility.
Holroyd, at 67, is one of the great living biographers writing in English. His first biography, published in 1964, was of Hugh Kingsmill, himself an eminent biographer, novelist and critic. Holroyd followed that, in 1967 and 1968, with a two-volume life of Lytton Strachey, the biographer. Then came the painter Augustus John. His magisterial three-volume work on George Bernard Shaw was published in 1988, 1989 and 1991.
Holroyd's own celebrated autobiography is titled Basil Street Blues. He has been chairman of the Royal Society of Literature, the Society of Authors and the Book Trust in Britain, and president of the English PEN. He is married to the novelist Margaret Drabble.
Most of the articles in this book have been published in journals, magazines, newspapers. Dancing on the verge of burlesque, he begins with a piece that inventories "The Case Against Biography." Many a writer, and masses of other public figures, have destroyed their private papers and moved to suppress their correspondence before dying. Holroyd applauds them -- with no small amount of irony.
He cites Edith Sitwell -- who wrote biographies herself -- as complaining about a would-be biographer of W. B. Yeats who had asked her about Yeats' private life. "He says he is going to base the book on the effect this had on his poetry!!! oh, oh, oh! Is it not awful that every great man has got to be exhumed and nailed down at the crossroads with a stake in his heart?" Rudyard Kipling, Holroyd reports with glee, dismissed biography as "Higher Cannibalism."
Putting aside his playfulness as an endearing brand of modesty, Holroyd's belief in the importance of biography is powerfully presented. "By recreating the past," he writes, "we are calling on the same magic as our forebears did with stories of their ancestors round the fires under the night skies. The need to do this, to keep death in its place, lies deep in human nature, and the art of biography arises from that need. This is its justification."
In another essay -- in fact, in several -- Holroyd assails academic posturing and babble, not only in biographies but in all of literature. He writes that "the language of criticism, seldom more obfuscated with pedantry [than it is today], has retreated within the fortifications of our universities," a circumstance that Holroyd roars to abhor.
He cites Professor Antony Alpers, a biographer as well, but, in Holroyd's judgment, a stultified academic first and last: " 'Literary biography,' he has written, 'is an exercise in cutting up the artist to find out how he works.' But if that is the case, you will be presented with the bits and pieces of a dead artist, not the recreation of a living one."
Despite the book's title, the essays reach far beyond biography or the squabbles of literary figures -- though there is much of the latter. The pieces are interestingly ordered, jumping around among decades. Many are reviews of biographies or autobiographies. They are divided into five separate sections: "Biographies and Biographers," "Autobiography," "Diaries and Some Letters," "From the Life" and "Enthusiasms and Alibis." There is an "Endpiece" that he titles "Illness in England" -- a brief, sweet, sad, cheering piece about his talk with a reporter assigned to write Holroyd's obituary.
There are fascinating, painful tracings of struggles over the literary legacies of Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield and others. Mansfield's husband exploited her estate and memory unconscionably -- and profitably. Doyle's son created and sustained professional and personal battles that hurt many people and benefited none. Holroyd bemoans the disservice to the memories, and even the work, of the worthy dead.
A substantial number of the pieces are no longer than this column -- though the richest ones are perhaps five times that or longer. Many are exquisite, little jewels of the essay form --judgmental, exploratory, enlightening. Most of the subject material is firmly rooted inside the Britway -- about English or Anglo-Irish writers and writing. There are few Americans, but the women and men these essays are about are familiar to many American readers. Still, if -- at dusk with the light behind them -- you can't tell a Fabian from a Fenian, you probably don't belong here.
There is a fascinating piece, "The Making of Bernard Shaw," that recounts Holroyd's researches and his relationship -- if that is the word for a chaotic, tantrum-filled set of contacts, letters and confrontations -- with Dan Laurence, the American Shaw scholar. Acknowledged principal keeper of Shaw scholarship and editor or author of important books, Laurence found it impossible to share the subject. Holroyd's tale is a great revelation of the nature of obsession.
His piece on the Bloomsbury Group -- the early 20th century Londoners who included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Strachey and others -- is as good a concise history of that movement as I can remember seeing. Was it "a pernicious form of upper-middle-class trivialities that was articulate but never serious," as F. R. Leavis wrote in 1951? Or was it a rich and vital progressive intellectual movement of enormous humane influence? Holroyd will equip you well to make an informed judgment of your own.
Throughout, there is a forthrightness, a pervasive sense of honesty, about Holroyd's writing that makes it warm, almost loving -- even when he is writing about distasteful people, subjects or usages.
Taken as a whole, this is a fascinating, instructive window into the analytic mind of a major contemporary figure, carried along by vivid reporting and keen insight. It's a book that those who love fine writing and artful literature should not miss.