For my taste, this book is the most innovative biography since Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life (see 15 October 2016). Although reviewed positively when it appeared last year, it is so original that I defy anyone to get their head quite round it. But equally, I defy anyone not to be grabbed by it:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
A further complication in my case is that when I read it I discovered that I have known four of the real-life characters who appear in it, one pretty well. It has taken some effort to block out the interference from that, but I think I have. I must try and concentrate on the the essentials. I will attempt to make this a low wall of words.
Like Masters’s previous two ‘lives’, Stuart: A Life Backwards and Simon: The Genius in my Basement, this is the biography of an ‘unknown person’, as Masters calls them, but the subject here is even more unknown. 148 diaries were found in a Cambridge skip. They started in 1952 and ended in 2001, but there are about 800 missing covering periods between 1965 and 1999. They were written at a rate of approximately 2000 words a day. Masters calculates this means they totalled forty million words.
Reviewers expressed frustration that it was difficult to describe the narrative of A Life Discarded because that would be to ‘give the ending away’ (although there are several endings, in fact). But I think it is necessary to commit this spoiler in order to get a grip on what Masters is doing. So: three quarters of the way through, he discovers that the writer of the diaries is still alive, aged 73, and living on an estate in Cambridge.
However, he has hitherto fought against finding this out. He begins by thinking the writer is dead and is convinced it was a man. He resists for as long as he can putting the diaries in chronological order. All the bleeding described at one point is not from a knife fight: the diarist is a woman. She makes much reference to ‘Whiters’ and Masters imagines a complete persona for this butler-like figure. It turns out that ‘Whiters’ is a grand house outside Cambridge. Masters visits the site, but the house has been burned down. He makes no attempt to investigate its past through Kelly’s Directory, say, and he absolutely refuses to look at electoral rolls. He prefers to consult a graphologist and private detective (there are beautifully told chapters on each). The graphologist points out the diarist’s date of birth in a diary, which Masters has missed. Someone in another diary blurts out the writer’s name: Laura. The dominating and belittling male with whom Laura has an unconsummated affair between the ages of fourteen and forty, turns out to be a woman pianist fifty years older than her… And so on.
What is clear is that Masters enjoys imagining who the diarist is and what is going on in her diaries infinitely more than he would enjoy the prospect of factually researching them. Every biographer will recognise this: the elated extrapolation…the delayed forensic gratification…creative fantasy…the excitement of the pursuit of the unknown…the pleasure of spinning a fiction…the temptation to believe that you know the truth about your subject better than any facts could. And this process, in Masters’s hands, is suspenseful, absorbing, hugely entertaining. You are driven along by the desire (his desire) to find out who the diarist is and yet not arrive there.
The life of Laura, the failed librarian, failed great writer, failed great pianist, failed great painter, failed great Shakespeare scholar and failed housekeeper, who buys cauliflowers in sevens because that is practically all she eats, then reheats the stalks, and who was almost psychologically destroyed by a schoolgirl crush that lasted twenty-six years, is utterly mundane and utterly weird. Apart from her diary, she has achieved nothing; in her almost complete solipsism, she has succeeded in skipping life. Like Masters himself, you may well sob, roar with laughter, rant and despair over this woman, but you will keep turning the pages. He wanted to ‘keep reading Laura’s diary entries, even when they are agonisingly tedious’, and realises it’s ‘because they are true. […] She has absolutely no awareness of your presence. Her drama is that she is not fiction’.
She is not fiction… ‘Everything that this woman locked up in her bedroom late in the evening writes, and by writing makes interesting, could be replaced by a single, endlessly repeated sentence: I am alive. I am alive. I am alive.’
The pressures to consult the online electoral register eventually become too great. The first three-quarters of the book, entitled ‘Mystery’, end, and factuality breaks in for the rest (‘Crisis’). He discovers her full name: Laura Francis. ‘Ten minutes later I was looking into her living room on Google Earth.’ They meet and she approves the publication of his book. For many readers, I imagine, this last quarter will be an anticlimax. But Masters now produces a series of slim, elegant prose pieces that in my view avoid that: we have two parodic academics ‘interpreting’ for him what he has done in this book, we have the climax of the sub-plot (the death and funeral of his literary collaborator for twenty-five years), a transcription of the recording of his first meeting with Laura Francis, a formal four-page ‘Biography’ of her, a very short ‘PS’ with a further twist in it, and four pages of ‘Acknowledgements’ in a smaller font that are practically a story in themselves.
And literally at that moment, it occurs to you that ‘Laura Francis’, for a host of reasons, cannot be the diarist’s real name. It is fictitious. A Life Discarded is the biography of a fictitious person. The whole Shandy-esque narrative is enclosed in a fictitious identity. Masters has written, then, what he always really wanted to write: fiction…
A Life Discarded seems to have sold well, but it evokes a wide fan of responses from readers. If you have read it, I would be very interested to hear from you through the Comments column.
As soon as I read this entry your descriptions rang alarm bells that the book itself was fiction, presented as fact. A fashionable modern technique – or, perhaps, always a fashionable literary technique? (Is that, then, “fashionable”?)
But…the way you clarify the fictionality of the book at the end of this entry still leaves some uncertainty in my mind. It is fiction? Isn’t? Surely, it must be?
Does Masters ever clarify, himself, in the book at some point after meeting “Laura”, as to the reason the diaries were in a skip in the first place? For me this is such a killer McGuffin that it gives away the conceit. Then again, some things have to be true because if they were made up then no-one would believe them.
I suppose I will have to read the book for myself!
Thank you for such a pithy Comment. I confess that it’s a relief to hear that readers today can still be alarmed by the presentation of fictions as facts.
When you say ‘some things have to be true because if they were made up then no-one would believe them’, I assume you are being heavily ironic. Where writing is concerned, I would say that if it is verisimilitudinous then people will believe it even though it’s made up. But then that is the trouble: it may ‘have the sound of truth’, or we may be persuaded by the rhetorical skills of the writer that it sounds true, when it is not factually true. (This applies as much to fiction as non-fiction, e.g. characters may think/behave in ways that strain the credibility based on our own experience of life.)
Most of Alexander Masters’s A Life Discarded is, I find, verisimilitudinous. An exception, for example, would be his calculation that there are 800 diaries missing and the total word-count of the diaries is 40 million — neither he nor ‘Laura’ satisfactorily explains what happened to those 800 and although he is a mathematician by training my confidence in that area is dented by his calculations that the diarist is 7.6 m tall. Yes, when he meets ‘Laura’ he is able to clarify how the diaries ended up in the skip and this does have the ring of truth.
But again, if the protagonist’s name has been changed and numerous small facts throughout, how much can we believe at all? The underlying question is: does biography have to be true to the documented facts, otherwise it isn’t biography? Well, I would say it has to be factually true of people who are dead, or it’s a slander. What use would a ‘creative’ biography of Shakespeare be, which included an array of made-up events and details? It would actually be a biographical novel, of sorts. But it doesn’t seem so vital with someone whose identity is ‘unknown’, as in this diarist’s case, because so much has to be extrapolated or imagined anyway. Interestingly, the slim section entitled ‘Biography’ at the end of A Life Discarded is written in a limpid, factual,’historical’ style, but still fails to convince as ‘the truth’ because you know some names (at least) have been changed.
Masters’s book largely, I feel, has the persuasiveness of fiction rather than non-fiction. But this blurring, as you imply, is so common or fashionable these days in modern biographies and especially autobiographies. Moreover, modern biographies are often as much about their authors as their ‘biographical’ subjects, which is almost overwhelmingly the case here.
The whole subject is complicated by the fact that any piece of writing is a personal creation and therefore in a sense a fiction. But I would say that biography is still a fiction that has to fit the facts. Travel-writing in my view is the same. Thus I have worked out that George changed at least half a dozen significant names in Tahiti, and in a note he said he had ‘disguised the personality’ of people in the book of whom ‘personal details’ are told, ‘so that no-one should recognise them’. This might make you suspect the book’s veracity, its realism as non-fiction, but George insists ‘Everything set down in this book is true’!
We live in a trans-genre age, it seems. Call it innovation, call it ineptitude, call it post-truth, call it truth.
May I alert everyone who is following Patrick’s ongoing exploration of the interface between history and fiction to Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures, broadcast this week on BBC Radio 4? I have just listened to her first – ‘The Day is for the Living’ – and (I’m afraid only a cliché will do here) it was a fantastic tour de force.
“As soon as we die, we enter into fiction…”
“You become a novelist to tell the truth…”
I don’t think she actually used the ‘B word’… but it was so good I am going to listen to it twice.
Thank you very indeed much for this recommendation, Clare. I have heard some snippets and entirely agree. And I daresay that, as author of the first play about Thomas Cromwell, George would too…