The past, after all, is not a foreign country: they do things much the same there. When my first book was published almost 50 years ago, I was sent something that might more accurately have been described as a retreat than an advance: and so it is again for many of us following the credit crisis. In 1960 I was busy writing about an unknown author who, after the appearance of my book, stubbornly remained unknown – to the extent that I can bring myself to mention his name (Hugh Kingsmill) only in parenthesis. My biography of him has recently been added to the Faber Finds – a virtual publication that changes into reality on demand. I do not like to speculate how he will he rise to this challenge.
In a fashion things have certainly changed since 1960. We have replaced blood snobbery with fame snobbery. But I find myself in a similar predicament to the 60s. I am writing about a clutch of women, all mysteriously connected, who in the early 20th century enjoyed romantic illusions of family privilege but are far from being modern celebrities today. Has anyone heard of Eve Fairfax – except perhaps on a list of Rodin's favourite sitters? Another of my subjects is Violet Trefusis, the illegitimate daughter of the man to whom Fairfax was engaged, but never married. Trefusis did have her moment of notoriety with Vita Sackville-West, but the scandal of their love affair has eclipsed her reputation as a novelist of genuine talent. The question is: can I rescue her from neglect with any more success than I rescued (Kingsmill)? He at least has a place in the new The Oxford Companion to English Literature; she has not.
Looking back it seems to me I was extremely fortunate to be writing biographies during what has been described as a golden age for the genre. It began with George Painter's Life of Proust and Richard Ellmann's James Joyce at the end of the 50s. They gained for literary biography in particular a measure of intellectual respectability, if not a secure academic status. Joyce's monstrous and much-feared "biografiend" seemed largely to retreat from view and the trade winds of fashion carried us along very agreeably. Why are the British so focused on the individual life in portraiture as well as in literature? I like to believe it is because we live on an island and, not being attached to the mainland of Europe, do not view the past so readily in collective terms.
But a dozen years or more ago things did begin to change and biography gave way to history as popular non-fiction reading. This change was partly due to television, which gives wider scope for picturesque and dramatic historical narrative. There are more group biographies these days – led by Richard Holmes. His collective biography of a generation of scientists, The Age of Wonder, making their lives relevant to their work and their work accessible to the common reader through the imaginative power of narrative, breaks new ground for him and for modern biography. First we learnt from novelists how to tell a story; now we are learning from historians how to frame it. My hope is that when the Large Hadron Collider is activated again at Cern, Holmes will be dispatched to write about it and give us understanding of its romantic mysteries.
While biography is merging with history in the general market place, in academe it is being reinvented as "life writing" and subsumed into sociology. The very word biography strikes some academics as "elitist", as does its focus in the past on single remarkable or merely fashionably well-known people. Life writing has a different agenda and concentrates principally on people who belong to and represent categories or classes of people who have been victimised in the past. It offers retrospective justice. That, at any rate, is what I understand it to be. But I shall know more next year when I attend an international auto/biographical conference at the University of Sussex.
I have been going through a bewilderingly pleasant time recently. People have been assisting me on to platforms, patting me on the back, handing me envelopes, citations and parcels. I must be careful. "Woe unto me when all men praise me". Of course it hasn't come to that. But when I began writing I was considered controversial. Perhaps I can rely on Trefusis to help me recapture that spirit of controversy.
People have often introduced me at festivals as "the award-winning writer" and I would hurry back home to find out what award I had won. It took me quite a long time to understand that this was a well-meaning phrase used by people who had never read my books and were at a loss what to say. It was as if we lived, all of us, in an Alice in Wonderland world where "all shall have prizes". But say this about someone frequently enough and it becomes true.
The most memorable prizegiving ceremony I went to this year was the James Tait Black event at the Edinburgh festival. It was held at a large tent sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland. I wasn't sure what omen this might suggest. A fierce storm preceded the ceremony, the lights suddenly went out and the microphones died. Then we went in. For 20 minutes the audience waited in the dark. Finally, to stifle the rising murmur of frustration, I was named the biography winner and summoned to give a reading with the aid of a small torch supplied by Ian Rankin. It was a heroic, not to say poignant performance. Once or twice I made a dramatic gesture at which the thin beam of torchlight left the page altogether and disappeared. I could sense my voice dying away a couple of yards from my mouth. I breathed deeply and gave it all I had. At one moment I read the words "she whispered" yelling it out at top blast and feeling that some of the subtlety was leaking away into the night. Sebastian Barry, who won the fiction prize, did rather better, dancing a precarious duet with Rankin who held the torch over his shoulder.
Among my awards over these last years is a brave assortment of fountain pens. There is a black one from the Biographers' Club and a golden one from English PEN – both with my name on them; also a silver one from Italy and a couple of Dupont ones from Paris. I keep them in their splendid cases on my desk and often look at them affectionately. But a disturbing thought has begun to creep into my mind. What are pens without ink? Are they a collective metaphor, a symbol of my future?
