The Arvon Book of Life Writing

Sally Cline, Carole Angier

• Publisher: A&C Black Academic and Professional
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781408122716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Creative Writing

Fascinating, wide-ranging, hugely knowledgeable - an indispensable guide and a beguiling education William Boyd
Packed with insights and advice - just the inspiration to start writing! Jenny Uglow Everyone has a story. This book shows how the best writers tell them, and offers advice on how to tell them yourself. Biographers Sally Cline and Carole Angier teach life writing - an area of creative writing that is exploding in popularity - at the world-famous Arvon Foundation. They have distilled the essence of their popular course on memoir, autobiography and biography into this wide-ranging book. The Arvon Book of Life Writing offers three fascinating ways into the genre. First, reflections on their trade by the authors, exploring its special challenges: truth, memory, ethics, evidence and interpretation. Second, personal tips and tales from 32 top British and American life writers - autobiographers and memoirists, literary, sports and celebrity biographers; plus a critic, an agent, a literary editor, two novelists, and a ghost writer.
Third, a practical guide, complete with exercises, designed for use in creative writing courses or by individual writers at home.

Part 1:

Life writing

Reflections 1

by Carole Angier

When I arrived as a hopeful writer, Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey and Richard Holmes’s Shelley had just come out, and biography was all the rage. I read them, and knew what I wanted to do. Biography was a marvellous genre – and now it even had a chance of being published.

It was the best decision I ever made. There is nothing to compare to the mystery of archives, to the thrill of the chase of an unknown story. There is nothing to compare, in the lonely business of writing, to the contact with other human beings, living and dead – despite the agonies it can also bring. Everything about life writing – both its pleasures and its pains, its special value and its special danger – comes from this direct relation to real people, which fiction writers can escape, or at least keep decently hidden.

Life writing is a wonderful life. But it is also a minefield of challenges, and these are what I want to reflect on. Iris Murdoch’s remark applies to all writing: ‘No trouble, no story’. So this is mostly an essay on the troubles of life writing. The rewards, however, will insist on shining through.

1. A note

The three sub-genres of life writing blur into each other at the edges – like living things, they wriggle out of our boxes. So group biographies blur into memoirs, quest biographies blur into autobiographies, the line between memoir and autobiography isn’t clear. The best we can say is that at one end of the range is the paradigm case of life writing, the research-based biography, at the other the short personal memoir; and somewhere in between lie autobiography and the more historical kinds of memoir. What follows applies most thoroughly to the paradigm case, biography, and most loosely to the personal memoir. But it applies to them all, for better or for worse.

2. Alarums and invasions

First of all, be prepared: life writers have never been first-class citizens in the republic of letters. Since the dawn of Romanticism, creation has been the hallmark of the artist in the West. But life writing is researched, not invented. Life writers, therefore, are accorded only a sort of immigrant status in literature: admired for their ‘investigative skills’, but only rarely noticed for the quality of their writing.

The truth is that stories are only ever noticed because of the quality of their writing; good research alone is just statistics. But this is a trade secret, and life writers are the closest of all writers to Flaubert’s ideal of the invisible artist. That is fine by us, since seeing the artist at work disturbs belief in the portrait. Nonetheless it can be irksome: eg, when reviewers retell your story as though they’ve discovered it themselves, and never mention your book at all. The biographer ‘is a craftsman, not an artist’, Virginia Woolf ruled long ago, and biography is not art, ‘but something betwixt and between’. ¹ Other life writers may be further along this range; but they too remain ‘betwixt and between’.

Being a good craftsman is already a high ambition. But there is also something more, as Woolf herself later decided. Because, of course, what life writers unearth is only the facts, not the story. That does not yet exist. It has to be understood, imagined – in fact, created. What life writers cannot invent is the facts. They must invent, or at least construct, the story.

The same is true of history and journalism too, beyond the most basic reporting; it’s true even of gossip, if it’s good (or bad) enough. Every act of giving meaning is creative. And the more elusive the evidence (and the evidence is always elusive), the more creative the life writer must be. In this way all life writers are like detectives, and the facts they unearth merely their clues. As Kate Summerscale wrote in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (which won the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize for Biography, and is as much about biography as detection): ‘Whicher’s job was not just to find things out, but to put them in order. The real business of detection was the invention of a plot’. ² The plot must fit the facts beyond reasonable doubt; but that is as close to reality as any detective, or any life writer, can get.

There is still a difference between inventing a story and constructing one. Proust’s biographer George Painter put it best: ‘The artist has creative imagination, the biographer recreative’. ³ Life writers are re-creative artists, living ‘betwixt and between’ our imaginations and reality, trying to recreate on the page the living and the dead.

This takes us to the heart of the matter – the relation to real people. It’s not just that life writers are immigrants into literature. It’s that, like immigrants over the ages, we are objects of fear and suspicion to the natives, accused of stealing their jobs and debasing their wages, and bringing disgusting new practices into their country.

The most important natives, in this case, are the subjects of biographies and their families, and those who appear in autobiographies and memoirs – ie, very often, the author’s own friends and family. Their main objection is the same as other people’s, but more violent, for obvious reasons. It is that life writing is an invasion of privacy and an exploitation. And what for? The answers one can give about fiction – to entertain readers, to expand knowledge and sympathy – won’t wash so easily with non-fiction, because real people so clearly suffer. And the answer we often give about famous people – that knowledge of the life helps to understand the work – won’t wash so easily either. It might show why someone has done what he or she did (became Prime Minister, wrote about orphans.) But it doesn’t tell us anything directly about the political career, or the writing about orphans. ‘Read what I wrote,’ the writer will say. ‘That’s all that matters; the rest is gossip.’

This is the doctrine of the autonomy of art, and by extension, of other activities. In a narrow sense it’s true: only literary analysis is required to understand a literary phenomenon, only political analysis to understand a political one. But responding to a book or a political event isn’t a narrow activity. It’s a deep and wide one, which employs all your intuitions and sympathies, and the more you know about everything to do with it, including its author, the richer your response will be.

But even suppose we agree: knowledge of the author’s life will only help to understand the author. That is still where life writers come in.

Most people want to understand authors – the famous people who have shaped or are shaping their world, for good or ill. They want to know how this person could have written this book, or done that deed, as the great French critic Ste-Beuve realised at the start of the Romantic era. They want to know about their heroes, and about the villains they fear. And they want to know, simply, what it is like to be someone else. That is not mere curiosity: it is, as Ian McEwen has said, the beginning of morality. (But it is curiosity too.)

So most people want to read about lives; our problem is not with our readers. Our main problem comes from those natives whose territory we invade, our subjects and their – or our – families. And we cannot blame them. We do invade their territory; if our books are successful, we take it over. And we do exploit them, for our books and our readers (though not for money, as they often think: money is rare in our research-intensive trades, which is another problem). If they are public figures we can argue that they are fair game, having stuck their heads over the parapet. If they are not, we have no defence. We just have to make our books as fair as possible, and hope that they are good and true enough to justify the private pain.

The worst subjects of all are the literary ones. They are the ones who accuse us of stealing their jobs and debasing their wages: our books are so much easier, they say, that people stop reading theirs, and just read the biographies instead. Germaine Greer claims this on behalf of Byron, who ‘has had more biographies than the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog. All of them sell well, to people who have never read a line Byron wrote’. ⁴

If only it were true. There may be a few literary celebrities whom people want to read about without knowing their work, but even in the case of mad bad Byron they will be pitifully few. It’s true that people will read something easier in preference to something harder; but the first books to be affected by that are serious literary biographies themselves.

The trouble with having writers attack us is that they are so good at it – like Greer herself, who calls biography ‘pre-digested carrion’. George Eliot called biographers ‘a disease of English literature’; Dr Arbuthnot, in the eighteenth century, said they ‘added a new Terror to Death’. Oscar Wilde said ‘Every great man has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography’. Betrayal and the exploitation of the dead: these are the recurring themes. They are largely unfair; but they can never be dismissed in a trade that deals in the private lives of real people.

Once again Kate Summerscale’s reflections apply. The private detective was especially feared and loathed, she reports, and plants the reason in an image: ‘The word “detect” stemmed from the Latin “de-tegere” or “unroof”, and the original figure of the detective was the lame devil Asmodeus, “the prince of demons”, who took the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside’. ⁵ Life writers are private detectives who take the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside. We too, therefore, are outcast and indecent, like devils and spies. People have felt this from the start: about Boswell, following Johnson around like an eavesdropping servant; about Froude a century later, whose biography of Carlyle was actually called ‘the unroofing of his home’ by a shocked critic. ⁶ Life writers feel it themselves: ‘What we do is morally indefensible’, Lyndall Gordon says. ⁷ Even the most brilliant biographer, the most artistic autobiographer, is tainted with the shade of Asmodeus. As Michael Holroyd says: ‘We work in an unweeded garden’. ⁸

3. Ethics and legality

Our main problem, then, is moral. What we do is dangerous. The danger is especially acute in memoirs and autobiographies, where we take the lives of our families and friends into our hands. What did you think, for example, of Iris, John Bayley’s memoir of Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimers Disease? There is no doubt that it was a beautifully written book, painfully accurate and sad. Did you think it was worth it – a work of art, about someone who could no longer be hurt by it? Or did you think it was a shameful betrayal? (I thought the first, by the way, and Sally thought the second.)

The tales of families riven by autobiographical writing are legion: ‘If you’ve got a writer in the family’, Hanif Kureishi says, ‘the family’s dead’. ⁹ Blake Morrison’s mother bore his memoir of his father, Arthur (which included Arthur’s long affair) in silence, but remarked one day, ‘I could’ve topped myself because of that bloody book’. ¹⁰ Kureishi’s trouble is his sister, Yasmin. Every time he publishes a book he asks his wife, ‘Have we had the letter from Yasmin yet?’ The safest thing for a memoir writer is to be an only child, and wait till your parents are dead: like Dominic Carman, for instance, who wrote a swingeing portrait of his father, the celebrated barrister George Carman.

When our subjects are great ones, there are multiple dangers. One is that we will reduce their greatness to mere personality, their achievements (or crimes) to their childhood traumas. Indeed life writing, like all good writing, must take care to avoid reductive explanation. But to leave our heroes and heroines unexamined means falsehood and sentimentality. And so far from offering us models of behaviour, perfect heroes and heroines will only make us give up in despair. So said Dr Johnson, who knew a lot about despair: ‘If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shewn, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in any thing’. ¹¹

Our subjects – especially when they are writers themselves – want to control what is said about them, and preferably say it all themselves. But that is not a reasonable demand. We all know that others talk about us as soon as we leave the room. Nobody likes it, but only absolute despots make it a crime. And strangely, it is only their own biographies that writers want to ban. Proust, Eliot, Auden, Henry James, the doughtiest foes of biography, all liked reading other people’s. When Byron’s papers were opened, James exclaimed, ‘Disgusting – but wonderfully significant!’ ¹²

Last but not least, our subjects fear that by revealing their humanity, we will turn their admirers away. This is ‘Shakespeare’s Second-best Bed’ syndrome – the idea that once people know how badly the Bard treated his wife, leaving her this single insulting gift in his will, they won’t want to see his plays any more. When Ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Michael Holroyd
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Life Writing
• Part 2: Tips and tales – guest contributions
• Part 3: Write on
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Address list
• Bibliography
• The Arvon Foundation
• Imprint