Lessons for life

All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well as public lives.

All modern biographies, one could say, are books of secrets; certainly all biographers during the past four decades have felt entitled to ferret around in their subject’s private as well as public lives. This development is routinely ascribed to the new frankness with which Michael Holroyd re-invented the genre in the late 1960s with his biography of Lytton Strachey, who had himself revitalised it 50 years earlier with his subversive portraits of Eminent Victorians.

It seems appropriate, then, that Holroyd’s latest (and, he maintains, his last) book signals yet another change of direction, albeit one that has been becoming increasingly clear over the past few years. Recently, murmurings of disenchantment with substantial cradle-to-grave biographies have become louder. Such books, we hear, are out. Other more selective, more personal forms are in. Advances are down, writers are worried.

But has anything really changed, or is it just a passing shift of emphasis, a nervous publishing industry’s attempt to identify and exploit a trend? We have been here before; after all, it was Virginia Woolf who wrote ‘I want to revolutionise biography in a night’ as she embarked on Orlando, still the most personal and experimental biography of all and published in 1928.

Certainly, Holroyd’s new book is strikingly unlike any of its predecessors. A sequence of loosely linked biographical episodes and reflections, it is also the final volume of his ‘confessions of an elusive biographer’, which started with Basil Street Blues and continued with Mosaic. It is as if, having mastered the genre with his long, scrupulously researched, annotated, narrative biographies of Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw, and his more recent portrait of the Irving and Terry theatrical dynasty, he has sighed with relief, torn up the blueprint he did so much to formulate and set himself free.