Life's work

 

    

    To the book festival again, to hear Hilary Spurling and Jenny Uglow discuss the art of biography with reference to their latest books, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time and Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense.

    "Are the best biographies written by women?" asked chairman Richard Holloway. "It takes a man to point that out," said Hilary Spurling. The ladies agreed that the modern 'trend' in biography of "books you want to read" was largely started by Michael Holroyd, with similar freshness in the works of Richard Holmes*, Claire Tomalin, Victoria Glendinning, and Hermione Lee. Broadly speaking, though, men tended to concentrate on the lives of military leaders and statesmen (i.e. on power) while women inclined more to examine writers and artists. Hilary Spurling declared an extreme interest in other people, and this nosiness, as she called it, which Jenny Uglow shares, makes them adept at picking up information which someone more interested in a subject's work rather than their private life - as was the emphasis in the past - might not pick up.

    Could the ladies write about someone they didn't like? "In the same way an actor can play an unpleasant character", said Hilary Spurling, while Jenny Uglow added that loving the subject's work was the more important thing: "exploring the person who made X".

    On to specifics, and a brief overview of the books under discussion. Jenny Uglow was in the happy position of being asked by her publisher what she'd like to do next, and in feeling a personal involvement with Edward Lear was quick to claim him, as she put it. Born in 1812, the 17th of 19 children, Lear was brought up by an older sister in the manner of a Regency girl, occupied with sketching, the piano, and botany. He was an outsider, always felt his nonsense was unimportant and wanted to be known first and foremost as an artist - David Attenborough considers him the greatest natural history painter of his age and collects his work. It is the tension between the different sides of the man which fascinates, she says.

    Hilary Spurling first met Anthony Powell when she was 24, literary editor of The Spectator, and invited him to lunch. They later became close friends, and her biography of him has given her more pleasure to write than any other book. Powell's 12-part A Dance to the Music of Time "changed the novel in a way no-one else has done", and in its vision, depth and breadth puts him alongside the likes of Kafka, Balzac, and Stendhal. His dislocated youth, tyrannical father, rackety early adulthood, and wartime experiences enriched his life in biographical terms, and Jenny Uglow commented that Hilary Spurling's book conveys the "texture" of the world in which Powell and friends were living.

    Asked about the scope of their writing, per book, both ladies agreed there must be no "fenced-off areas" - "you go as deep into your subject as you can", said Hilary Spurling, "and it's the biographer, not the subject, who makes the book interesting or not." Jenny Uglow put it thus: "You delve, and ask, and open, and that's the magic of it."

    As to the impact of the digital world on future biography, "There may be deletion and obsolescence, but the past won't escape us," they said with heartening assurance.

    

*Mr. C. warmly recommends Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer.

Comments

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callmemadam writes:

I second Mr C's recommendation! It was the first book by Richard Holmes which I read. Also of course his wonderful biography of Coleridge and a curious little book called Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. He's brilliant.