Feature: Talks - Michael Holroyd at Burgh House on Thursday April 28
Published: 21 April, 2011
by PIERS PLOWRIGHT
MICHAEL Holroyd says he has written his last book. I hope it’s not true but, if it is,
A Book of Secrets is not a bad way to go.
It’s a kind of literary thriller, a chase through corridors, across borders, in and out of bedrooms and salons, and up an Italian hill to a romantic palazzo above the gulf of Salerno.
Virginia Woolf comes into it, Vita Sackville-West, Henry James (elliptically, as usual), Rodin the sculptor, and Winston Churchill’s dad. And, of course, the author himself.
Chance encounters, romantic associations, accidents and serendipities abound.
It’s all very typical Holroyd, the man who changed the way biographies were written in Britain and who wrote, in a recent autobiographical book, Basil Street Blues: “This is what has always attracted me to biography: the idea of an intimacy between strangers, a closeness growing up during the acts of writing and reading between an author, the reader and their subject, all unknown to one another before the book began coming into existence”.
And you do succumb to that growing intimacy in all his books. His discoveries become yours. Whether it’s sharing his excitement as he begins to plough through the chaotic piles of Lytton Strachey’s manuscripts or delighting in the asides – one of Bernard Shaw’s uncles trying to commit suicide with a carpet bag and dying of laughter before he can asphyxiate himself.
Then there are the quotations – Bram Stoker’s about the great actress, Ellen Terry, moving through the world of the theatre “like embodied sunshine”.
And there are jokes: Basil Street Blues and Mosaic are laugh-aloud funny. They’re difficult to categorise too. Basil Street Blues was put in the jazz section of bookshops and Mosaic in the art department.
He confidently expects A Book of Secrets to go straight onto the espionage shelves. A man who began his literary career in a place called Maidenhead Thicket and managed to hang the Union Jack upside down during his National Service is always going to see the funny side of things.
“I am not methodical”, Holroyd writes in Mosaic, “I work by instinct. Certainly I have ends in view. But I do not know how to reach them… Until I can find a design that makes sense of everything, including what is not found, my discoveries are no more than moments of light which briefly illuminate the outlines of dark shadows.”
The splendid thing about Holroyd’s instincts is that they always seem to lead him to those crucial connections which ends in a narrative, scrupulously researched but as thrilling as fiction.
Long before the fashion for writing biographical novels, Michael Holroyd had shown that biographies are novels.
Come and hear him talking about his life and work in Happy Hampstead at the end of this month.
• Michael Holroyd talks to Piers Plowright in the Lifelines series at Burgh House, New End Square, NW3, at 7pm for 7.30 pm on Thursday April 28. Tickets £12 (Friends of Burgh House £10, Buffet supper afterwards £18). 0207 431 0144