What a Life!

Second only to the pleasure of reading a great novel is the pleasure of reading a great biography. I read Claire Tomalin's biography of Dickens over Christmas and I felt a sense of loss when I'd finished it. For over 400 pages I'd been immersed in someone else's life and though Tomalin tells us what happened to all the other characters it still wasn't enough. Like Oliver Twist I wanted more! No reflection on the writer: if there's too much detail then the narrative gets bogged down. I felt she got the balance right. Maybe it was the sense of a life cut short: he wasn't even sixty when he died.
However it isn't just the selection of detail and a compelling narrative that makes this such a good biography. Tomalin is so judicious and her moral judgements are so sound. The relationship between biographer and subject is such a close one that it can be all too easy for the biographer to let her subject off the hook. Tomalin doesn't do that. She is clear that Dickens behaved appallingly to his wife Catherine when after twenty years of marriage and ten children he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress twenty-seven years his junior. I was fascinated by her account of Dickens's secret menage and was convinced by her suggestion that Dickens had a son by Ellen and that their son died in infancy. He established Ellen in a series of out of the way locations, including Linden Grove in Peckham, which I was fascinated to realise is not far from where I used to live myself.
Poor Catherine: a married life of more or less continous child-bearing interspersed with an occasional miscarriage and then to be thrown off in such a public fashion - to be blamed even for the failure of the marriage and to have so little chance of redress. Reading this I was more than ever glad not to have been a woman in the nineteenth century. And yes, Dickens was a genius whose works have given me very great pleasure over the years, but to read about the way that he forced his children to choose between himself and his wife . . .
Ah well, it will be clear from this that Tomalin's book succeeded in doing what a biography should do: bringing the subject completely to life for the reader. I think this is as close to actually meeting Dickens as I will ever get.

The Book Stops Here?

It used to be that I felt obliged to finish a book once I had started it, but those days have long passed. I have grown fairly ruthless at cutting loose when I've had enough and this has happened quite a lot lately. I stopped in the middle of Elizabeth Goudge's THE DEAN WATCH a few weeks ago. I know she is much admired by some of my fellow bloggers so I thought I would give her a try, but something about the omniscient point of view put me off. I didn't want to be told so much about the inner life of the characters and their history (though for some reason I don't mind this when it is Trollope). I generally prefer to discover it gradually for myself. Perhaps she is one of those writers it is best to read in youth and it was just too late for me.
I've also recently stopped in the middle of a book of memoirs: I decided I didn't like this person much and didn't want to spend any more time with him. This nearly happened too with Orhan Pamuk's THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE, our latest book group choice. I got to around page forty or fifty - often a make or break point for me - and found the voice of the narrator and what he had to say so annoying that I felt I didn't want to spend 500 pages with him. A novel this long really has to have something good to offer! But after a break I went back to it and I'm glad I did. After struggling along for a while I became completely absorbed by this extraordinary tale of obsessive love and the picture of Turkey between 1975 and 2000 that came slowly into focus.

Black Like Me

On November 7 1959 John Howard Griffin, a white Texan journalist, checked into a hotel in New Orleans. He had already been taking medication to darken his skin. Now he shaved his head and applied coat after coat of dark stain. When he had finished he looked in the mirror. 'A fierce, bald, and very dark Negro glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me. The transformation was total and shocking . . . I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship.' So began the six weeks or so that Griffin lived as a black man in the segregated South, encountering not only the racism in society, but his own hitherto unconscious racism. BLACK LIKE ME contains his journal of these weeks and the story of what came after. I had never heard of this book until it was chosen by my book group. I had known of course - in theory - about the situation that he writes about, but the details of this account brought it home to me as never before. He wrote frankly, telling of his fear when he hitched a ride with a white man who told him that he had had sex with all the black women who worked for him - they couldn't refuse because they needed to eat or to feed their children - and talked of how easily the body of a black troublemaker could be tossed in the swamp and never heard of again. He experienced the posiononous atmosphere of a town where just days before a Grand Jury had failed to indict a lynch mob for the murder of a black man. He writes of 'the hate stare' that he endured from white people.
When his journal of these weeks was published, he was threatened with castration, he was hanged in effigy in his home town, and moved his family to Mexico for their own safety. He refused to be intimidated and went on to play a prominent in the civil rights movement. As a consequence a gang of white men beat him with chains and left him for dead.
An extraordinary man and an extraordinary book.

Girl in a Green Gown

A few weeks ago I went to the book launch of GIRL IN A GREEN GOWN: THE HISTORY AND MYSTERY OF THE ARNOLFINI PORTRAIT by my friend, Carola Hicks. It was an occasion both unusual and moving: unusual because the Carola could not be there. She died in June 2010 leaving her book almost, but not quite, finished. And moving because her husband, Gary, completed the book for her and saw it through the press. He told us at the launch how, sitting at her desk surrounded by her copious notes, he felt close to her, and how comforting he had found that.
I first met Carola near twenty years ago when we were both teaching in Cambridge and I enjoyed following her late-flowering career as successful writer, first IMPROPER PURSUITS: THE SCANDALOUS LIFE OF LADY DI BEAUCLERK, then her fine books on the Bayeux Tapestry and on the stained glass in King's College Chapel. I have GIRL IN A GREEN GOWN next to me and I am looking forward to reading it. I've just seen the TLS review which ends 'this beautifully written book is a splendid testament to the intelligence, attention to detail, depth of research, and down-to-earth vision of a first-rate scholar.' Yes, she was that alright, but to her family and friends she was so very much more. I miss her.

The Most Lovable of Writers

One of the books that I read while on holiday was Trollope's AUTOBIOGRAPHY. I had read it long ago, but I re-read it with fresh eyes. I first read it as an academic planning a thesis on Trollope and read it this time as a writer. It has its longeurs - discussions of writers long lost sight of - but for the most part I read it with rapt attention. Trollope had a wretched boyhood. His background of genteel poverty and his own awkwardness made his schoolday miserable and lonely. His father was an embittered failure (the bailiffs arrived at one point), a sister and a brother died of consumption. The family was kept afloat only by the efforts of his extraordinary mother, Fanny Trollope, who became a best-selling writer in her fifties. Even as she writing the novels that kept the family afloat she was nursing first her husband, then her son and then her daughter on their deathbeds.
Trollope himself looked set to be a failure too in his early working life as a disreputable debt-ridden clerk at the Post Office, and it was only when he offered to take a post in Ireland at the age of twenty-six that his fortunes changed. Professional success both as a public servant and a novelist and a happy marriage were to follow, but his painful early life was never forgotten and it helps to explain his deep understanding of human nature and his empathy and perceptiveness as a writer.
His account of those early years is touching. He has much to say too about the writing life and I'd recommend the AUTOBIOGRAPHY to any writer. One thing that especially endears him to me is his admission that he was virtually incapable of plotting his novels in advance. After hours, even days, of cudgelling his brains and driving himself almost to distraction he would abandon the attempt, and simply rush headlong into the writing.
I closed the books, feeling, as I have so often felt about Trollope, that of all the writers who have been important to me over the years, he is perhaps the most lovable.

Closing the Bedroom Door

It occurred to me the other day that you know you've reached a certain age when you write a sex scene and you're no longer worried about what your mother will think. No, now you're worrying about what your children will think.
I'm know I'm not the only writer to find it difficult to write about sex. It's not just the embarrassment factor - though there is that - it's knowing how to get the tone right. Last week I watched GRACIE! on TV. I missed this the first time round. It's the story of the singer Gracie Fields' marriage to the Italian movie director, Monty Banks, and the dilemma she faced when he was threatened with internment in the Second World War. The extraordinary Jane Horrocks pulls off such a tour-de-force as Gracie that when I heard Gracie herself on YouTube I found her curiously unconvincing. Tom Hollander was magnificent as Monty Banks and there was real chemistry between them. When he tells her he's in love with her and they kiss, they are at the door of his hotel room. He kisses her hand and draws her in. The door closes in the viewer's face. In the next scene they are having breakfast in the dining room. Yes, it's a cliché, but it works. It set me thinking about the way less sometimes really is more. In sex scenes - as in ghost stories and horror movies too - it's usually best to leave quite a bit to the imagination. For my money one of the most erotic sentences in modern fiction comes in Penelope Fitzgerald's wonderful novel, THE BEGINNING OF SPRING. It's set in Russia in the 1910s. Frank has been deserted by his wife and has fallen in love with Lisa, who's been employed to look after his children. When he declares himself they are interrupted and she slips away. Later he goes to look for her. 'Frank went up the dark stairs to the back of the house and knocked at the door of Lisa's room. He had not expected it to be locked, and it was not locked, but he waited until he heard her bare feet cross the wooden floor to open it.' There's a space and the next section begins 'In the very early morning, they left for Shirokaya.' That's all, but in the context of the novel it's electrifying.
What did Shelley write? 'Heard melodies are sweet, those unheard are sweeter.' I rather think he was right, and will you excuse me now while I go and look for my smelling salts . . .

What Were They Thinking?

On holiday recently I read Edmund de Waal's book, THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES, the fascinating story of a collection of netsuke acquired by his family in the nineteenth century. I read it with rapt attention, in particular the account of how the collection survived the second world war. The Ephrussi family were among the wealthiest in Vienna, but virtually all their assets including their art collections were appropriated by the Nazis. The netsuke were surreptiously removed from their cabinet one by one by Anna, a family servant, who was allowed to stay on in the house, and hidden in her mattress to be returned to the family after the war. It's an extraordinary story, well told. And yet as I read on, I got more and more irritated. There were illustrations, yes, but not a single one of the netsuke that are at the heart of the story, not even the eponymous hare with amber eyes. I see that the paperback does at least have the hare on the cover, but my hardback (a Christmas present) doesn't. What were the publishers (Chatto & Windus) thinking of? Yes, it would have cost a few pounds more, but still . . . I see there is now a illustrated edition in hardback, so maybe I'm not the only one to be annoyed by this.