The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
When giant characters were given room to breathe
Biographers rejected the reductionism of cancel culture to embrace everyone from Orwell to Maxwell in all their complicated glory
If this was meant to be the great year of cancellation, nobody told the biographers. While students were boycotting thought crimes and museums were frenziedly airing their historic dirty linen, on the page it was the opposite. Calmly, wisely, with all the nuance a book affords over a tweet, the year’s best biographies asked us to see caricatured figures in the round: the villains not so villainous, the pin-ups not so perfect, and every human life, with its twists and turns, having something of value to tell us about our own.
Take George III (Allen Lane, £35), damned by Thomas Paine as “the Royal Brute of Britain”, and cancelled (in 90 characters) by the clerihew: “George the Third/ Ought never to have occurred./ One can only wonder/ At so grotesque a blunder.” Andrew Roberts’s mighty Life, drawing on masses of unseen papers locked up in Windsor Castle, turns on its head the lazy idea of George III as a tyrant halfwit; in fact, he was probably our most cultured monarch. Every page (despite the occasional irritating typo) is entertaining, with some vignettes of pure horror – George as a young boy, for instance, having to smell the decomposing corpse of his own father, bowels in a nearby box, because his grandfather hated him too much to bury him.
George III’s great-great-grandson also found a superb biographer in Jane Ridley, author of George V (Chatto & Windus, £30). “He was dull, beyond dispute,” sniffed his courtier “Tommy” Lascelles, but Ridley disagrees, exposing the eccentricity of this man – dynastically sandwiched between a priapic father and a louche son – who actively chose to be Mr Pooter, living for 33 years in a laureloppressed Norfolk villa, the small, dark rooms of which he filled with reproduction paintings and furniture from “a fashionable emporium on Tottenham Court Road”. (As his eldest son later put it, “Until you have seen York Cottage you will never understand my father.”)
Thirteen European monarchies fell in his reign, but the irascible, chainsmoking, stamp-collecting George V – who on Thomas Hardy’s 70th birthday accidentally sent royal congratulations to his fishing-rod maker, Hardy’s of Alnwick, instead – left the British monarchy stronger than ever, precisely because, says Ridley, he was so like his subjects.
No one thought Robert Maxwell was ordinary. John Preston’s addictive Fall (Penguin, £9.99) maps the mogul’s progress from rabbinical scholar in the shtetl to decorated British soldier to self-made publishing billionaire to eventual full-on cartoon madman, with blackened flesh hanging over his shoes, shuffling cash around his businesses (“accounting is an art, not a science”) in ever more desperate schemes to stop the British Establishment laughing at him. Monstrous, yes, but Preston also shows how emotionally complicated and genuinely impressive “Bob the Max” was, having perceived in 1945 that information would become “the gold dust of the 20th century”. As Maxwell’s long-suffering wife once put it: “No waves are static and I would much rather swim and have swum with you than vegetated with small, unintelligent and uninteresting beings.”
In Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me (W&N, £20), John Sutherland sticks up for the poet’s mistress – crushingly sidelined by him (“I’m not a person to you. I’m a situation”) and maligned by Kingsley Amis as a “grim old bag” – by showing us “the Monica I knew”: a lifechangingly brilliant lecturer, a wit, a sexy, snappy dresser, who made Sutherland her protégé. But in unsealing Monica’s unseen letters to Larkin, Sutherland is confronted with an anti-Semitism that outstrips even the poet’s – the Monica he didn’t know. He gets a little lost in the hall of mirrors that is the different personae a writer puts on for different correspondents – how can he know that Monica’s “raw honesty” drew “the least inauthentic Larkin”? – but this is an interesting, witty, heartbreaking book.
Frances Wilson’s magnificent Burning Man (Bloomsbury, £25) sets out to rescue DHLawrence, that most unfashionable author, from our (at worst) contempt and (at best) indifference, by embracing his fiendish contradictions: “a modernist with aching nostalgia... a sexually repressed Priest of Love, a passionately religious non-believer, a critic of genius who invested in his own worst writing”. There’s a bit too much Dante, but Wilson serves up such a delectable feast of snippets of little-read Lawrence that any reader will be convinced.
After such a strong crop of “don’t be beastly” books, it was nice to mint some new villains. Paula Byrne’s The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym (William Collins, £25) shocked us by revealing the novelist not as a meek, Christian spinster like the protagonists of her comedies but a bohemian who flirted with dashing rogues – and Nazism: “She was so upset and distracted […] that she lost her precious swastika brooch on the Banbury Road and burst into tears.” The late Terence Conran, meanwhile, tried to ban Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity’s biography Terence (Constable, £25), which delights in the designer’s nasty side: he worked out it cost him 54p every time someone used the lift, and yelled at his accountant: “If you’re so f---ing clever, why aren’t you as rich as me?”
Conran “wanted the world to have a better salad bowl”, but Josiah Wedgwood, as Tristram Hunt shows in The Radical Potter (Allen Lane, £25), wanted us to have a better world, full stop. The optimism of
Georgian Britain is brought brilliantly to life as one-legged Wedgwood hobbles around indefatigably, lobbying for abolition while inventing everything from new glazes to a fashionable, sleek sort of showroom (like the modern Apple store).
In The Duchess Countess (Simon & Schuster, £25), Catherine Ostler takes us behind the fluttering fans of Wedgwood’s shoppers to tell the eye-popping story of Elizabeth Chudleigh, inspiration for Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, the racy society beauty who in 1776 was convicted of bigamy, and ended up running a vodka distillery in Estonia.
Less novelistic, more calmly furious is Antonia Fraser’s The Case of the Married Woman (W&N, £25), which hinges on another sensational trial, exactly 60 years later: that of the novelist Caroline Norton, accused of adultery with the prime minister, who then lost custody of her children – even though her husband was abusive. It led to a change in the law – Norton called herself one of “the little hinges on which the great doors of justice are made to turn”. Among many details I was pleased to learn was that the Whig aristocracy had a specific accent: pronouncing Rome as “Rawm”.
Albert and the Whale by Philip Hoare (Fourth Estate, £16.99) was one of many biographies to cut down a big subject by yoking it to another. Hoare zones in on Albrecht Dürer’s quest to capture nature, scurrying all over Europe in his hunt to see a whale ( “Leviathan”), but there is too much of Hoare’s musings – now rather a hackneyed trick. Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows by Ruth Scurr (Chatto & Windus, £30) is similarly flawed – always pleasant to read, but conceptually fluffy: there’s an awful lot about gardens but not Napoleon, and an awful lot about Napoleon but not gardens.
Rebecca Solnit’s superb Orwell’s Roses (Granta, £16.99), on the other hand, while it spins out even further, keeps its grip on Orwell tighter. Solnit makes us rethink “Orwellian” to mean not just what he was against, but what he was for: mainly, nature. When he was attacked by socialists for such sentimentality, he wrote: “Is it politically reprehensible to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October [?] If a man cannot enjoy the return of Spring, why should he be happy in a laboursaving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?”
Josh Ireland’s Churchill & Son (John Murray, £20) cuts a brilliant cross-section out of an even-morewritten-about life. Like a Russian novel, it traces the psychological burden passed from father to son: the coldness of Lord Randolph Churchill (who, when cornered by a bore, rang a bell to say “Waiter – please listen to the end of Colonel B’s story”), how it made his son Winston desperate for his posthumous approval, then spoil his own son, Randolph, as a consequence. The dialogue is a delight: “Stop interrupting me while I’m interrupting you!” shouts Winston.
For bons mots, however, nothing can beat Henry “Chips” Channon: The Diaries, volumes one and two (both Hutchinson, £35). He reports Lord Curzon saying to his much younger third wife: “I don’t mind the laughter of YOUR young men in YOUR boudoir; it is the little silences that worry me.” Later, “Fruity” Metcalfe consoles the widowed Lady Curzon: “They call him the Butcher’s Dog, because he sleeps with the meat but cannot have it,” writes Chips. A social mountaineer, Chips is a little monstrous, but redeemingly self-aware. These are the uncensored, unvarnished thoughts of one of the 20th century’s greatest diarists. By contrast, it is as a diarist that I like David Sedaris least: in A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 (Little, Brown, £20), the great humorist is at his most misanthropic. And he’s a ray of sunlight compared to the 1,000 pages of bile that is Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, ed Anna von Planta
As a boy, George III was made to smell his father’s rotting corpse, bowels in a nearby box
(W&N, £30), which should be available on prescription as a downer.
The value of diaries is that they are written without hindsight. Endof-life memoirs do the opposite. “We all carry upon our backs, like a curled-up roll of film... the legacy of our whole lives. My experience has been that, as I entered my eighties, I began to review that long exposure with new interest,” wrote the late Jan Morris, in her delightful posthumous Allegorizings (Faber, £14.99). Her joie de vivre is a sharp contrast to the other great writer who spoke to us from beyond the
grave: David Storey, in A Stinging Delight (Faber, £20), exorcised a lifetime of private anguish. It’s well written, but feels like something he had to get off his chest, not something we need to read.
Better, but not for the squeamish, is W-3 by Bette Howland (Picador, £14.99), a cool, brief memoir of her stay on a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt in the early 1970s. Madness has rarely been described so sanely. She comes to in intensive care, and starts “clicking my teeth, wanting to snap [the irritating tubes] in two”. Life Support by Jim
Down (Penguin, £9.99) is the ICU doctor’s side of the question, a gripping, pacy account of being hit by the first wave of Covid. The Madness of Grief by the Rev Richard Coles (W&N, £16.99) is from a third perspective, that of the (pre-Covid) bedside mourner as a partner slips away – and how it feels to pick up the pieces while inside you have “just detonated” and are “in super slow motion... disintegrating”.
Inner turmoil is played for laughs in My
Mess Is a Bit of a Life by Georgia Pritchett (Faber, £12.99), the Succession screenwriter’s memoir of how it feels to battle on in life despite anxiety and depression (less Churchillian “black dog”, more “Dark Overlord Beaver”). The shards of observation are excruciatingly modest: “Having decided I was a writer, my first job involved writing precisely one word. My name. On a sticker. I got a job at Catford Broadway Theatre as an usher for an Irish jig competition.”
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The texture of a writer’s life is also the subject of Real Estate by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, £10.99), the third volume in the novelist’s “living autobiography”, this time about crumbling flats, new starts and empty nests. There’s a sense of diminishing returns, but when Levy’s on a roll, it’s very funny – and there’s a golden piece of advice, borrowed from Jane Birkin’s mother, which I’d commend to readers of any sex: “When you’ve got nothing left, get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.”