Of Lives and Letters : With His Final Volume on G. B. Shaw Completed, Michael Holroyd’s Star Is Burning Brighter

Three large busts of distinguished men of arts and letters are arranged in an almost conversational grouping at one end of a long, light living room in a ground floor flat on a leafy West London avenue.

In this mustard-colored room--the walls replete with original Bloomsbury paintings--the atmosphere of a more meditative era reigns. No computer screen beckons, no printer beeps and there is no evidence of a secretary’s efficiency in a study where sheaves of paper are piled on every surface and the impression is one of the dust and deceptive chaos of a construction site.

It is here that Michael Holroyd works. The busts are of the subjects of his three acclaimed biographies.

Probably the brightest star in a glittering group of British biographers in the midst of what is widely acknowledged as a Golden Age for their craft, Holroyd, 57, most recently finished the third and last volume of his life of George Bernard Shaw. “Bernard Shaw: The Lure of Fantasy” was published last week, following “The Search for Love” (1988) and “The Pursuit of Power” (1989).

Within the echo chamber of literary London, Holroyd is one of the two or three names on everyone’s lips, as he was in the 1960s when his ground-breaking biography of Bloomsbury group writer Lytton Strachey was published. The Shaw biography is symbolic of something else: the amount of money Holroyd will receive for it--625,000, just over $1 million, paid over several years, the largest sum ever earned for a biography in the United Kingdom. (By contrast, American biographer Kitty Kelley reaped a $3.5-million advance for her recent biography of Nancy Reagan.)

Possibly because of this and the increased visibility he gained when he married the British novelist and literary lioness Margaret Drabble nine years ago, Holroyd has assumed the status of a colossus in the world of letters.

Shaw has not been easy to live with, Holroyd says. A Titanic figure whose pen produced more than 50 plays including “Pygmalion,” “St. Joan” and “Man and Superman,” Shaw amounted to considerably more than the sum of his parts. Shaw was a phenomenon--a symbol and spokesman in a life that seemed to last forever (from the mid-19th Century until the middle of our own); a critic, a wit, a character, a sage and one of the first great manipulators of public opinion at the dawn of the Media Age. He was the originator and chief player in a universe of ideas which became common currency during his era, the name for which he himself devised: Shavian.

Holroyd--though he now confesses to fatigue--has managed to endure the pressure of the almost palpable presence of Shaw’s ego and has done so alone over the small eternity it has taken to get him right: a decade and a half.

Unassisted by a researcher, a computer or a secretary, he scrambled, searched, interviewed, dug, and imagined until the work in all its bulk (1,500 pages, a quarter of a million words) and complexity took shape and the huge, heavy presence of Shaw--rather like the bemused bust of him in Holroyd’s study--almost regained life and began to speak.

“I certainly felt 10 years into (Shaw), am I building a sort of fool’s palace, something that people will feel was a complete folly that no one is going to live in, that no one has commissioned?” he says. “But I became stubborn in pursuing it.”

Very stubborn. For two years, Holroyd lived in Ireland to absorb the atmosphere that had nurtured Shaw in his youth. He visited the places Shaw had known and--half-Irish himself--renewed an intuitive grasp of the essential Irishness that formed the foundation and bulwark of Shaw’s character. In the course of his work on the biography, Holroyd also has attended performances of every one of Shaw’s plays. He visited every Shaw collection worldwide, which included libraries in Moscow, New Zealand and Texas.

(Holroyd did not visit Hollywood, although Shaw did, bringing the movie crowd its own Shavian moment in the early 1930s. Shaw stopped there for a couple of hours before continuing a world tour. Actress Marion Davies prepared a “splendid” luncheon for the visiting writer; unfortunately the only part of it the vegetarian Shaw could eat was a sprig of parsley. He evidently got even, because after he left, having earned the general dislike of everyone who met him, Davies decried his “caustic Irish wit which is quite detestable.”)

Executors of the Shaw estate initially proposed the book in the early 1970s, when Holroyd was in the middle of writing his life of painter Augustus John. They gave Holroyd access to what amounted to reams of new material.

“No biographer has seen the material that I’ve seen,” he says. “A lot of it is on the early life--letters and so forth--but the diaries, for example, that Hesketh Pearson or Archibald Henderson (early Shaw biographers) didn’t see--that really cover Shaw’s early years in London 1876-1890s--those were the most interesting.

“I certainly believe that a biographer who is able to handle the actual pieces of paper, the letters, the diaries does get in contact--almost literally so. And if the biographical magic works and (he or she) does get in some sort of spiritual or emotional contact with the subject, that is very useful in trying to resurrect the subject,” he says.

But, he warns, one must never get carried away, and the capacity for objectivity is essential. Access to virgin material, painstaking research into the history and spirit of Shaw’s time and a good deal of unrelenting thought produced the new theories for which the three volumes--in addition to the style and quality of the writing--will be remembered.

Holroyd’s major new theory on Shaw’s personality is that Shaw had significant doubts about whether he was the legitimate son of his dreary, alcoholic father or the illegitimate son of the more spectacular, self-constructed personality, Vandaleur Lee, a musician of dubious though magnetic character who insinuated himself into the Shaw household.

“His possible illegitimacy and his attitude and doubt about it is the thing that subverts the public figure of GBS with all his certainty and assertion. It doesn’t matter whether he was legitimate or not--and I can tell you that I think he was legitimate--but it’s a more subtle point: his own doubt about ‘Who am I?’ ”

Holroyd sees this “profound uncertainty” as what caused the young Shaw--whom Holroyd refers to by his childhood nickname “Sonny”--eventually to build around himself a spectacular construct of a personality Holroyd has denominated throughout his book with the capitalized initials GBS. “I’ve tried to plot these two selves, deriving really from the two fathers inside him.”

Vegetarianism, teetotaling, feminism, and Fabianism were some of the causes Shaw embraced and promulgated. His style of dressing (a wool Jaeger suit), his wit and his whole manner of being in its public manifestation were embraced by an adoring public. But this image was born after years of poverty-stricken struggle in London during which Shaw tried to forge his name as a writer and, with variable success, as a ladies’ man.

Holroyd says: “What I want to do is give a multifaceted portrait, which does have something particular conjured out of the relationship between myself and Shaw--something felt--and in a way the writing of the books partly changed my life--and therefore I suppose I would like it to have that power for some readers. I would like it to affect people.”

It is in giving readers the whole truth about a great man (or woman) that Holroyd believes the meaning of biography is to be found. “What modern biographies are really showing is that our heroes and heroines are of all kinds and that although they achieved extraordinary work, they may have this shortcoming, that fault . . . they are not heroes in that sense and they really tell us that the narrative of life is a tremendously broad stream. There are no freaks; no people outside it.”

In the Strachey biography, Holroyd revealed the details not only of Strachey’s homosexual life but also the homosexuality of the capitalist economist John Maynard Keynes. In the process of writing the book, the style and content of which are considered landmarks, Holroyd founded what has become known as the Bloomsbury Industry, the flood of writing on that group of intellectuals and artists centered around Virginia Woolf in London in the 1930s. “I have been accused of that,” he observes dryly.

If Holroyd opened the door to Bloomsbury, he also helped establish a new school of biography. About his contribution to this he is modest and quick to give credit to those (Richard Holmes, Peter Ackroyd, Victoria Glendinning and Hilary Spurling, among others) who have, in the last 40 or so years, written in a similar vein, collectively producing a string of biographies noted for their literary sophistication.

“We’ve gained an enormous amount from novelists over how to tell a nonfiction story,” says Holroyd. “We have produced books equivalent to the late Victorian novel--they’re sometimes two to three volumes. They detail the subject’s adventures through life rather like a Fielding novel.

“It all sort of came from Ellman’s Joyce (Richard Ellman’s biography of James Joyce) in the 1950s and (George) Painter’s (life of Marcel) Proust. This was the beginning of a new age of literary biography. There are real writers writing literary biography, rather than editors putting together a compilation of the life and letters. I suddenly see biography as becoming mature. And I have a love affair with (it) as I do with human nature.”