Grub Street Irregular, page 14
After a month or so, I decided to call a halt pro tem. I would go away and do my homework before undertaking any more interviews. I wouldn’t speak to another soul until I had immersed myself in as many published diaries, letters, biographies and memoirs as I could lay my hands on, and once I had familiarised myself with the cast of characters I would trawl through Connolly’s voluminous papers in the universities of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Austin, Texas. If some of the survivors had popped off by the time I got back from the States, that was a risk worth taking; still more so since I soon realised that although I was perfectly happy to be a voyeur at one remove, riffling greedily through the most intimate letters and diaries, I was far more craven and constrained when faced with flesh and blood, feeling myself to be an uneasy cross between a Peeping Tom and a double-glazing salesman. And the fact that Connolly had enjoyed such a complicated love life made the embarrassment factor greater than it might otherwise have been.
I soon discovered that sitting in libraries is one of the more soothing aspects of the biographer’s life. It’s very like being back at university, except that one reads to more purpose, and with a greater sense of luxury; riffling through books and papers, the silence broken only by the dainty coughs of one’s fellow-researchers, the turning of pages and the soothing clack of other people’s laptops, one inhabits a limbo in which the cares of everyday life have somehow dropped away. But spending long weeks in university libraries in the Mid-West has its drawbacks: at Tulsa the campus was deserted in the evening – the students had all commuted home by car – and once the Special Collections library had closed there was little to do except swim endless lengths of the pool and spin out a lonely meal in the student canteen.
One of the ways in which otherwise obscure American universities have put themselves on the scholarly map is by buying up the papers of eminent writers, and Tulsa had done better than most thanks to the volcanic energy of Tom Staley, a cowboy-booted academic turned impresario who, by the time I got there, had left to do even greater things for the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. Connolly’s papers had joined those of Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, Rupert Hart-Davis and Paul Scott; while I was there a large wooden crate crammed with V.S. Naipaul’s paperwork arrived, and I joined the librarians in toasting its safe arrival while a graduate student wielded the crowbar. Immersing myself in the world of Eton and Balliol and then emerging into a prairie twilight was a curious sensation, as was coming across letters to Connolly from mutual friends: the Alan Ross file was crammed with his familiar postcards – the message scrawled on a London Magazine label pasted over the back of a card from someone else – and when I tipped it onto my desk they clattered out like so many roofing tiles. Every now and then I contemplated summoning up files from the André Deutsch archive, and rereading memos I had written a quarter of a century before when employed there as a junior editor, but there was never enough time.
I became so addicted to primary sources that I came to believe that one could only trust – or partly trust – letters and diaries written at the time: yet I found that they could be as unreliable as memory itself. Before I imposed my self-denying ordinance, I visited Anthony Powell, who had been at Eton and Balliol with Connolly, and had provided a shrewd if unflattering account of his old acquaintance in his memoirs. I remember the thickly striped mauve and white wallpaper in the hall of his rather gaunt country house, but I don’t think he told me anything I hadn’t read in his autobiography, nor – to my disappointment – did he serve up that disgusting-sounding combination of home-made curry washed down with claret and followed by Black Forest gâteau with which, according to proud entries in his Journals, he regaled gourmet friends like Roy Jenkins and V.S. Naipaul. Years later, in the last volume of the Journals, I found a reference to my visit. After comparing me to a friendly labrador, he got all the details of my visit wrong. None of it mattered in the least, apart from the labrador; but so much, I thought, for the reliability of the contemporaneous account. I wish, though, I’d visited Powell after I’d returned home from my long and lonely weeks in American universities, by which time I was far better equipped to interview survivors: names which meant nothing to me when I started out had become as familiar as those of my own acquaintances, and I knew enough of the small details of Connolly’s life to ask the right questions, and to know when I was being fobbed off with an evasive half-truth.
I’ve written elsewhere in this book about some of those I went to see in the course of my researches – among them Barbara Skelton, Connolly’s second wife and a celebrated femme fatale. One day, when we were eating lunch in her flat in Chelsea, an envelope was pushed under the door. We both assumed it was a circular, but it turned out to be a note from my unauthorised rival biographer, whose book had now been completed, and which was eventually published a year or so ahead of mine. Shortly afterwards, Barbara got hold of a proof. ‘It’s awfully good,’ she told me; but then she turned against it so violently that she tore the proof in half after scrawling unkind remarks all over it, and hurled it into the dustbin. I rescued it when she wasn’t looking, took it home with me, and started reading with a pounding heart.
It was well-written and full of things I’d missed or failed to notice, but the overall tone was hushed and awestruck. In his last year at Oxford, for example, Connolly spent part of his Christmas vacation in Minehead, where ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, the Dean of Balliol and a kindly bachelor don of the mother-hen variety, had organised a reading party consisting of himself, Maurice Bowra, the waggish and overbearing Dean of Wadham, and a team of hand-picked undergraduates. Bowra had fallen hopelessly in love with one of the group, Piers Synott, a good-looking Anglo-Irishman whom Connolly described as the ‘Narcissus of the Balliol baths’, and he sought to woo the object of his passion with a medley of music-hall songs; but, after picking his nose throughout the rendition, the ungrateful youth told his admirer that his feet smelt, and the Dean – by now a ‘broken man’ – had to be taken by Sligger on a restorative walk through the surrounding countryside.
The music-hall songs and the nose-picking were details of the kind that spelt magic to me, and I fell upon them eagerly when trawling through Connolly’s papers in the library at Tulsa, but my rival biographer, who had riffled through the identical papers a year or so earlier, seemed utterly unmoved by their revelations. Connolly, he tells us, ‘seems to have been engrossed in Milton, Plato, Yeats and Proust’ while in Minehead – and with that the reading party, freighted as it was with comicality and high emotion, was consigned to oblivion. The relish with which I hovered over the ignoble details of Bowra’s courtship probably indicates an incurable frivolity of mind, evidence indeed of Connolly’s claim that ‘No two biographies are alike, for in every one enters an element of autobiography which must always be different’; but my rival’s high-minded refusal to concern himself with nose-picking and the rest also suggests why so many modern biographies seem so dull. Quite apart from his other qualities, good and bad, Connolly was exceptionally funny, both in print and in person, but my rival’s biography seemed a joke-free zone. His tone was unvaryingly reverential: so much so that after a while he wearied of referring to his subject by his surname, and called him ‘the critic’ instead (‘That summer, the critic took his holiday in France …’).
What so many biographers fail to remember is that psychological insights and the accumulation of details must be accompanied by a modicum of artistry; that the biographer, like the novelist, needs to shape his material, to interlace (if possible) the funny and the poignant, the fast-moving and the slow, the quiet and the noisy. All too often biographers are so intent on hurrying their protagonist through his paces that, like a bad host, they quite forget to introduce us to the subsidiary characters, who are bustled on and off stage without a word about their backgrounds, education, looks, proclivities or mode of dress (than which nothing is more touching and revelatory). A sure and familiar sign that the biographer has failed to make the necessary introductions comes towards the end of his labours: eager to strike a valedictory, autumnal note, he tells us that old friends of his subject have died (‘That July, Jim learned that his close friend Colin had died of a heart attack’) – but since no mention has been made of Colin until now, the emotional impact is not all that it might be. Equally irritating is a failure or refusal to be specific: to say – à propos some minor character – that he went to Uppingham rather than ‘public school’ and Magdalen rather than Oxford, or joined the 14th Lancers rather than ‘a cavalry regiment’, brings everything into sharper focus, and may trigger further associations, if only among a handful of readers.
Writing a biography of someone who died well within living memory, with friends and relations still thick on the ground, is inevitably a tricky business. Deirdre Levi had proved the most exemplary literary widow, cooking delicious lunches whenever I loomed up and answering even the most impertinent questions with frankness and great good humour while Peter took Petra off to the local pub to drink enormous quantities of perry (these would be supplemented with champagne on their return, and wine with the lunch). I had become extremely fond of both her and Peter – he was one of the funniest talkers I have ever known – but even so I dreaded the moment when she reported back to me about my version of events, the brick-sized typescript of which I had posted off to her in a fever of anticipation, and was afraid that this could well mean the end of our friendship. I needn’t have worried. Far from taking umbrage, she could not have been more complimentary, but suggested that I might have been pulling my punches towards the end. Connolly’s relations with women were entertaining but deplorable – he liked to have several on the boil at once, and would bad-mouth them to each other, while declaring undying passion to them all – and late in life, when he was living in Eastbourne, he had started his last extra-marital affair. I had tiptoed daintily round it for fear of upsetting Deirdre, but she would have none of it. ‘I do think you ought to say more about Shelagh,’ she said, so in she went.
Not everyone shared her enthusiasm. Like many other writers – Auden most famously so – Dennis Enright abominated literary biographies: what mattered about a writer was his work, not his life, and lives of writers, unless written by the subjects themselves, were intrusive, trivial, irrelevant and somehow immoral. He enjoyed reading my memoirs (or ‘me-moirs’ as he called them), but although he always asked politely enough how I was getting on with Connolly, he did so between gritted teeth, and I would hurriedly change the subject in favour of cats, a shared enthusiasm, or the bad old days at Chatto & Windus. Since Dennis died at the end of 2002, I have published my biographies of Smollett and Allen Lane, and am now at work on the Greene family. I have loved every minute, and although half of me still shares Dennis’s disapproval, the other half has been utterly corrupted. I combine an uneasy sense that we biographers are, by definition, denizens of the literary second division with the hope that the detailed and sympathetic recreation of someone else’s life could be worthy to stand alongside the labours of the great novelists: it attempts, after all, the resurrection of the dead, and what could be more miraculous than that?
FIFTEEN
Footnotes
Among the people I was told I must talk to about Cyril Connolly was the Anglo-American gossip Alastair Forbes; partly because he had known Connolly extremely well, and partly because he was an influential figure in the world of upper-class bohemia, who would expect to be asked and could prove troublesome if not consulted. Ali was a familiar figure both by reputation and on account of the seemingly interminable reviews he wrote for the Spectator and the TLS, in which the names of famous people he had known were linked together by long, Jamesian sentences crammed with parentheses and short on full stops. An American educated at Winchester, he had got to know Winston Churchill during the war, almost certainly through his son Randolph, and had worked as a journalist after the war; he knew Peter Quennell and Duff and Diana Cooper, and was the sort of person who popped up in the diaries and letters of Evelyn Waugh, more often than not in the footnotes. He had gone to live in Switzerland, occasionally resurfacing in London in the bar of White’s, and might have been entirely forgotten if John Gross, when editor of the TLS, had not decided to use him as a reviewer, specialising in gossipy upper-class memoirs and allowed a good deal more space than most in which to ventilate his views. As such, he was loved by some, and mocked by others: his admirers relished his indiscretion and the sense he gave of providing an insider’s view; his detractors thought him a snob and a windbag, and a waste of much-coveted editorial space.
I knew what he looked like – or had looked like, back in the 1950s – since in volume two of her memoirs Barbara Skelton had included a photograph of him, standing in the garden of her cottage in Kent: a blond, good-looking, well-built young man of medium height, standing very upright, with a thick head of fair hair brushed back in a widow’s peak and (or so I assumed) a pinkish face and bright blue eyes. Shortly after Connolly’s death in 1974 he had written a very long and affecting piece in the TLS about his friend’s last weeks on earth, from which one might have assumed that he was one of Connolly’s closest and dearest friends, and the one person he would have hoped to have to hand during his dying days. He was very much the sort of person Connolly would have known; and yet, during all my long months of research in libraries in America and Britain, I had not come across a single reference to, or a letter from, Ali Forbes. It was very odd, but I felt sure that when and if we met, all would be made plain.
Although I was interested to meet Ali Forbes, I rather dreaded it as well: he would, I was sure, be dauntingly sophisticated and blasé, greeting my humdrum queries with condescension and weary disdain. We met eventually at Barbara Skelton’s funeral in Worcestershire. A rather dashing figure wearing a sky-blue shirt that matched his eyes, a bow tie and an expensive-looking tweed suit, he looked exactly as expected. He couldn’t have been more pleasant or more friendly: he was, he explained, heading back to Switzerland the next day, but he would love to talk to me about Connolly, and would call me next time he was in London.
As good as his word, he rang me from White’s on his next visit. I offered to jump on the train and hurry in to the West End, but he would have none of it: he had hired a car for the duration of his stay, and wanted to get his money’s worth. Did he really want to trail out to East Sheen, I asked, remembering the chimes on the doorbell and the clip-on Tudor beams, and catching sight of the balls of cat-hair rolling over the kitchen floor, the torn and fading covers on the armchairs, the water stains on the ceiling and the unswept leaves piling up in the garden beyond. He could think of nothing nicer, provided I could tell him how to get there. Petra, I explained, was out at work, so lunch might not be quite as delicious as it should be, but that was no problem: bread, cheese and pickle, washed down with beer, would suit him perfectly. After I had put the phone down I sped off to Waitrose to stock up with beer and a better class of Cheddar, hoovered the ground floor, plumped the cushions, and got out my notepad and pencil.
Shortly after one, a large white convertible drew up outside the house, and Ali Forbes stepped out. Luckily I spotted his arrival through the dining-room window – I was busy laying the table – so I was able to pre-empt the chimes by flinging open the front door before he had a chance to press the buzzer. As we sat down to lunch, he was affability incarnate. We made general conversation at first, and then turned to his friendship with Cyril Connolly; and it was now that things began to go wrong. We got on very well, but I could not get a straight reply to anything I asked. I would ask him a specific question, and he would reply by talking about something completely different. I would try to haul him in, and he would slither out of the net. I was deluged by names and anecdotes, none of which had anything to do with the subject supposedly under discussion. It was, perhaps, like reading one of his articles before it had been subjected to an editorial blue pencil: a rambling, inconsequential monologue, amiable enough but of no real interest or relevance. Worried that he might think I was paying insufficient attention, I took to doodling and scribbling in my notebook, pretending to take down what he was saying. After a couple of hours he looked at his watch and said he must be hurrying back. Baffled and worn out, I saw him to the door, and watched him speed off down the street in a cloud of autumn leaves. I had done my duty by seeing Ali Forbes, but I had learned nothing whatsoever from him.
Equally unforthcoming was the painter Derek Hill, another avid gossip who prided himself on knowing all the right people in society and the arts. Although he was not greatly admired by art critics, I rather liked his accurate and proficient portraits, many of which still line the stairs in the old John Murray offices in Albemarle Street and the walls of Oxbridge common rooms, and his less conventional landscapes, often painted at his home in Donegal. Not long before I was commissioned to write the Connolly biography, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, then running his own firm, rang me to say that he thought Derek Hill should write his autobiography, and asked me if I’d like to visit him and find out whether he warmed to the idea. When not in Ireland or his house in Hampstead, or on his travels abroad, Hill could often be found in Long Crichel, an elegant but homely red-brick eighteenth-century house in Wiltshire which had been shared over the years by a shifting cast of homosexuals, including the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Raymond Mortimer, Patrick Trevor-Roper, the eye surgeon and brother of the historian, James Lees-Milne’s close friend Eardley Knollys, and Derek Hill. Hill was alone in the house that day, apart from a housekeeper of the homely, roly-poly variety, who cooked us lunch and fussed about the place, tut-tutting and clucking under her breath.
