Engaging Compilation Celebrates the Craft of Biography

WORKS ON PAPER

The Craft of Biography and Autobiography

By Michael Holroyd

Counterpoint

320 pages, $27

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“The moon is a dead body, having nothing but reflected light: but it can blot out the sun,” writes Michael Holroyd, explaining why people often fear becoming the subject of biographies. “Whenever a writer, artist, musician, any man or woman of imagination, is made the subject of a biography, his or her light may be extinguished.”

This is an interesting position for one of England’s most preeminent biographers to take: Holroyd has written the lives of Augustus John, Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw. Holroyd uses his devil’s advocate position to combat objections to biography (“those who fear biography so much are the very people who have made it additionally fearful by putting in the way obstacles which impoverish the quality of the Life without preventing its publication”) and to bring respect to the often maligned job of the biographer. “By recreating the past 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.”

“Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography” is Holroyd’s celebration of biographical writing, an oddly arranged, at times esoteric but engaging compilation that looks into the craft of writing lives from an erudite (rather than “how to”) point of view. In 39 disparate essays dating from the 1970s, Holroyd discusses the strengths and weaknesses, purpose and ethics of writing biography and autobiography and introduces readers to many British artists and writers.

His discussion of biographical subjects focuses primarily on 20th century British writers and painters, many of whom may be familiar to readers--Evelyn Waugh, J.R. Ackerley, Osbert and Edith Sitwell, Katherine Mansfield, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Quentin Crisp--while others may seem more obscure--J.L. Carr, John Stewart Collis, Harley Granville Barker.

The highlight of the book is “The Making of Bernard Shaw,” Holroyd’s fascinating account of taking the commission to write the official biography of Shaw in the late 1960s and the battles that delayed the work until it was finally published in 1988. A bitter and at times ridiculous war raged between Holroyd and a lifelong expert in Shavian scholarship who was miffed at not having been chosen for the commission himself. The rival tried to stop Holroyd’s efforts, determined not to allow him to succeed with his work; he considered Holroyd “an incorrigible fool,” who, despite years of research, knew “bloody nothing about Shaw.” In one eerie scene, Holroyd visits the scholar’s apartment and finds a setup whereby he could, at the switch of a button, flash Shaw’s words onto a screen. The rival “was pleased with this device, which, if he chose, he could operate while lying down. But to me it presented a frightful warning. I began to see the lengths to which a lonely obsession could, in the pursuit of excellence, lead any of us.”

In some ways “Works on Paper” reads as the literary equivalent of a “Best Of” album--a collection culled from works previously published in which the essays, prefaces and introductions lack cohesiveness. And though the book includes a section about the writing of autobiography, there’s nothing from Holroyd’s point of view about his own experience as an autobiographer. This is surprising, since, as the author of the well-received “Basil Street Blues,” he would certainly have something to offer on this subject. Even the book’s ostensible subject matter is not large enough to hold Holroyd’s manifold subjects. The last grouping, “Enthusiasms and Alibis” is a catch-all for essays that don’t fully fit. “Among the Americans,” for instance, is a quite dated 1978 piece about living in New York and “A Dark Adapted Eye” tells of Holroyd’s love-hate relationship with television. In “The Battle for the Public Lending Right,” Holroyd writes captivatingly of his efforts to bring about the British practice of paying authors for the use of their books in libraries--an essay that makes one wish we had a similar situation in the U.S. but which has little to do with the crafting of biography.

As a whole, the book provides a profile of many great 20th century British authors and artists, and a glimpse into the slippery terrain of crafting another’s life. Well written, at times wryly funny, “Works on Paper” is not light reading but offers entry into Holroyd’s biographical obsessions.