Michael Holyroyd – Works On Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography

It is NOT FAIR to write at the beginning of your book that you are in hospital and this is the beginning of the end. Because then only a TOTAL BITCH would be able to judge it with any degree of detachment, or emotion other than empathy.

But.

I don’t know whether many non-Brits will have heard of Michael Holyroyd? He had the outstanding fortune to write the perfect book at the perfect time: a biography of Lytton Strachey in the 1960′s. The law had recently been changed so that homosexuality was no longer a crime – and so this was the first biography which wrote about Strachey’s affairs openly, without judgement or prejudice or leaving gaping holes where the facts should be. We take this all for granted now, so it is hard to imagine how revolutionary this was. But Lytton Strachey caught the mood of the times and changed the way biographies are written: ie, you were allowed to tell the truth.

Anyway, Holyroyd therefore became Prince of the Bloomsbury Revival, and eventually the King of English Literaryness. He’s the President of the Royal Society of Literature now.

One of the advantages of this lovely perch at the top of the literary pyramid is that people will publish anything you write. And then idiots like me will read it. Even when it’s a mish-mash of disparate randomness. 1970′s reviews of books no-one will care about now. Rambling accounts of his attempts to change library legislation. The first section had some interesting reflections on the nature of biography; why some people love it and some people hate it – and there was a thought-provoking discussion of Bloomsbury which I’m saving for another post. But otherwise. Meh.