‘My life has had tragedy, but also luck’
Biographer Claire Tomalin tells Elizabeth Day that writing the story of her own life proved the most painful effort of all
When she was 12, writer Claire Tomalin wanted to be the first female prime minister, but Margaret Thatcher got there first. “Now I feel rather feeble,” she smiles. Tomalin is speaking from the house she shares with her husband Michael Frayn, the novelist and playwright, in south west London, and is sitting in a black leather chair that looks as if it has been plucked from the set of Mastermind.
Instead of pursuing a political career: “I settled for the oldfashioned path of literature, which women can combine with marriage and children.”
She is being modest. As her new memoir, A Life of My Own, makes clear, it really wasn’t “settling” at all. Tomalin read English at Newnham College, Cambridge, a few years before Sylvia Plath. Later, she was the literary editor of the New Statesman (a young Martin Amis was her deputy) and the Sunday Times, before turning her hand to the art of biography.
Her first book was about Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century protofeminist, and today, aged 84, she is an award-winning biographer, her subjects including Charles Dickens, Samuel Pepys and Jane Austen. In her memoir, Tomalin writes that “working on a biography means you are obsessed with one person for several years”. She details long hours spent in libraries and universities, scavenging through papers that might, or might not, reveal some essential truth. Did she apply a similar approach to writing her own life?
“I think I did,” she says. “It was wonderful, particularly with Pepys, that he saw his life as a whole – it was all there, public and private life were absolutely joined. I tried, in my life, to do the same thing.”
It is true that public and private collide with some force in Tomalin’s memoir, and she does not shy away from chronicling the darker side. Her third child, Daniel, died weeks after being born in March 1960. Her first marriage to the journalist Nick Tomalin was troubled: beset by his affairs and a short temper that occasionally turned physical. Her second daughter, Susanna, an Oxford undergraduate, killed herself in 1980. Tom, the youngest, was born with spina bifida and required extra care.
I wonder what she says when people ask her how many children she has. “That’s a very shrewd question,” she says quietly. “I’ve got used to saying I have three now.”
Nick was killed in Israel by a Syrian missile in 1973, while reporting on the Yom Kippur War, leaving Tomalin with four young children. She went to work, and somehow kept the family afloat. She remembers cycling home and taking her bicycle straight into the kitchen to start preparing supper.
During the Seventies and Eighties, Tomalin was something of a pioneer: an early proponent of the notion that women could “have it all”. Yet she never considered herself in these terms. When I asked if she ever experienced sexism in the workplace, she says no, before adding: “At the Sunday Times, I did discover I was being paid half of what the male heads of department were being paid.”
That sounds like sexism to me, I say. “Yes. I went to the union and they said ‘Oh, we can’t do anything about that.’ I don’t think the conversation advanced much further.”
A lesser woman might have crumbled. Tomalin survived, and there is not a shred of self-pity in either her manner or writing. In her memoir, she mentions how her elderly father once said: “You have had a hard life.” Tomalin’s reaction was to be “surprised, since he so rarely said anything personal”. But she must acknowledge that she’s endured more than her fair share of tragedy?
“Well,” she says, “I’ve had a life with tragedies in it. Many people have tragedies, but I’ve also had extraordinary good luck, happiness and blessings. I don’t think I’ve had a hard life; I’ve had a mixed life.”
Tomalin is so used to analysing the shape of other people’s lives that she can’t help but apply the same meticulous standards to herself. When there is blame to apportion, she shoulders it.
The disintegration of her first marriage was, she says, her fault, “because I knew I didn’t have the right feelings for him”. She feels terrible guilt over Susanna: “I was responsible for her and I failed.”
Tom is now 47 and lives nearby. He organises his own care and takes himself off in his wheelchair on long train journeys through Europe. Tomalin worries about him constantly, and then worries that she’s worrying too much.
You’re remarkably self-critical, I say. “Well, I hope so,” she laughs. “I think one has to be.”
With all this to tackle, it’s no surprise that writing her own story was challenging. “I had so much material – hundreds of letters, documents from when Nick was killed, when Susanna died, all of Tom’s documents – so going through it all and reliving some of the worst moments…” She trails off.
“I did get really depressed. It’s the most difficult bit of writing I’ve ever done. I think if I’d known how painful it would be, I wouldn’t have done it. But,” she says, briskly smoothing down her dress, “if you take on something, you do it don’t you? You can’t stop halfway though.”
There were happier memories, too. A Life of My Own details a brief affair with Amis (“He was delightful, very funny actually and terribly sweet with my family”) and her run-ins with Andrew Neil, her editor at the Sunday Times. In the end she resigned, writing him a corker of a letter describing his failings.
Tomalin is terribly nice about almost everyone, and the only person she refers to by surname alone is Neil. “Really?” she says. As if she hadn’t noticed.
Having faced down the ghosts of her past, Tomalin insists her next project is “tidying the study”. There are no concrete plans for another book.
She is six years shy of her 90th birthday, even though she looks decades younger, and has started “feeling old… I’ve got high blood pressure and have to take pills. One feels one is approaching the end. In [Chekhov’s play] Uncle Vanya they say ‘We shall rest, we shall rest’ and I think, yes! We shall rest! It’s not an entirely unattractive prospect.”
Tomalin once said that she would never write her own life story because “I don’t know who I am.” She chuckles when I quote this back to her: she’d forgotten. Does she know herself now?
“I think the difficult thing is to be very honest about one’s faults.” There is a pause, as she looks down at her hands. “I think I know myself a bit better. I do.”