Idly doing my housework, as one does, I suddenly realised that my nylon ‘feather’ duster had whisked over Kittie’s surviving suitcase without my even noticing it. I paused and by reflex put my hand on the case. Why I did this, I don’t know, but I stood there a while touching it, contemplating it, and staring out of the window.
The book is ‘over’, it is at the printer’s, it may arrive in three weeks time.
They seem so far away now, George and Kittie, a hundred years and more. Yet they are not: I still feel their presence as though I could walk into a room and talk to them. Touching the case, I felt ‘connected’. Unlike some professional biographers (that’s to say who engage with one life after another) I don’t think I am ever going to wave them goodbye. That is not, of course, to say that I won’t ‘move on’.
Have I really shown them as they were? Have I done them justice? Curiously, I feel I have with Kittie, but I have nagging doubts about George. This is because Kittie lived longer (she died on my second birthday), I knew far more people who knew her than had known George, and the fact that it transpired my great-aunt and -uncle in Ashford probably met her also drew her closer, whereas there is a lot that it is impossible to verify about George. Was he a manic depressive? Future biographers will probably conclude he was, but the evidence is tenuous; in my view, he suffered from occasional bouts of ‘blue devils’, as he called it, and knew how to fight them. Was he a secret Taoist? Possibly, but can we ever know? Martin Shaw, whom I quote on my flyleaf, refers to George’s knowledge of economics and even calls him an ‘economic propagandist’; but there are only two or three documentary crumbs to corroborate that. What was the real impact on him of witnessing the ‘Khodynka tragedy’ in Moscow as a foreign correspondent, in which 1389 people were trampled to death? He never spoke about it…
There is no better account of the neuroses of the biographer than Susie Boyt’s FT article ‘The experience of writing a biography’. I can’t add to it.
Sam2’s note: The FT article is normally behind a subscriber paywall and the above link will likely not work for non-subscribers to the FT. However, if you type ‘Susie Boyt, The Experience of Writing a Biography’ into Google and click the first link, we have found that still gives the full article without subscribing. (We tried various ingenious ways to make the link above have this magical property, but it turns out really the only surefire way is through manual googling.)
Thanks to Sam2 for instructions on how to access the Susie Boyt article, which is indeed very illuminating on the obsessions and neuroses of biographers, in particular the way in which the life of a creative artist can throw up a split in the biographer’s reaction to the (usually admired) work and the (often annoying or even downright unpleasant) person who produced it. Lucky A.N. Wilson, who’s quoted as saying he loved both Betjeman and his poetry and was in ‘floods of tears’ when he came to write about his death! Although he doesn’t say, it’s clear he found Tolstoy a much more difficult subject in this respect. I have to say that in in the end Wilson did actually do the right thing in managing to remain objective and largely avoiding personal animus in his account of Tolstoy the man. It’s of course a perennial problem. As Auden puts it: ‘what God-fearing Magistrate/ would dream of shaking hands with a financial/ crook and Anti-Semite? Yet Richard Wagner/ wrote masterpieces.’