Where Did It All Go Right?
A Alvarez
Richard Cohen Books, 244pp, £20
Buy it at BOL
Basil Street Blues
Michael Holroyd
Little,Brown, 306pp, £17.50
Buy it at BOL
A Time To Be In Earnest
PD James
Faber, 304pp, £16.99
Buy it at BOL
The Sorcerer's Apprentice by John Richardson 320pp, Cape, £20
Buy it at BOL
Good autobiography has much in common with good poetry. It has an inner, magnifying sense of the significance of individual perception, of attitude. It understands that a voice shouldn't speak unless it has the weight of need behind it. And it has its own secrecy and wisdom.
Talking of poetry may sound wrong-headed because the poetry we find and admire in the best autobiography isn't primarily a poetry of language but of content, of convincingly transmuted personal experience. Since, on one level, it's self-evident what autobiography is - the story of a life told by the person who actually lived it, and not necessarily anything more - it's easy to forget that the best examples work on quite another.
The finest autobiographies - the ones that we read again and again - are written, at some fundamental level, without selfishness or egotism, and with a kind of hard, stoic, open-eyed, didactic generosity. The best of them - Primo Levi's If This Is A Man or Ralph Glasser's Growing Up In The Gorbals, or C S Lewis's Surprised by Joy or Robert Graves's Goodbye To All That - are driven by a need to render the world more intelligible, to bestow upon us a renewed and magnanimous sense of what we value in living, and to instruct us how to alter the future by showing us the havoc and damage wreaked by the past.
Great autobiography involves us in hard-won spiritual journeys, whose endings, though often only tentatively achieved, imply freedom, or at least a kind of dismissal, a release of the spirit into grace. We find them compelling for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because they seem tense with secret but communicated meaning. At the end of If This Is A Man, Primo Levi admits, half reluctantly, "I write what I would never dare tell anyone".
Literary critic Al Alvarez's famous autobiographical book, The Savage God, was a study of suicide, written after the author's own attempt to kill himself in 1960. It was widely admired because, in it, Alvarez did what Levi said: he wrote what the politeness and prevarications of speech might have defeated. Its subject was psychic pain, the wounds an individual sustains in trying to continue the experiment of living. The book, which reads like an essay but is raw with emotional violence, brought the autobiographical form back to first principles, rooting all the wide-ranging cultural references in a near-annihilating intensity of personal experience.
Now, at 70, Alvarez has published a traditional autobiography, Where Did It All Go Right?, which is ostensibly a completion, a rounding out, of what The Savage God began. In fact, by being so much more conventionally conceived and structured - it begins, like a 19th-century novel, with his birth and family background and takes us more or less chronologically through the events of his life - the new book proves what those of us who admire Alvarez's work have probably always felt: that he is an intellectual, an essayist, more than a narrative or a descriptive writer.
He gives us all the expected, familiar autobiographical scenes - cameos of his kind, good-hearted but wretchedly incompatible middle-class English-Jewish parents; serious, potentially crippling childhood ailments; the sports-mad public school, Oundle, where he reinvented himself as an athlete; Oxford, with its pretentiousness and snobbery, and which offered an academic career on which he turned his back; literary London, then America, in the 1950s and '60s, with its poetry and parties and totemic famous names - Berryman, Hughes, Plath, Lowell, Pound, Auden.
The prose is meticulous, and very precise, and it's hard not to admire its sheer unaffected clarity, but it lacks sensuality. Often, the elegant sentences strike the ear as echoes of other, more suavely fictional, literary writing. As here: "I remember waking up when my leg was giving me trouble and seeing the night nursery we shared at the top of the house infused with the orange glow of the gas fire and Nanny beside it in her rocking chair, reading and knitting in a pool of lamplight." It could all be the background to some long, unwritten John Le Carré novel, about the perennial displaced middle-class outsider, about what it's like to grow up in England and try to do the expected things and yet never quite belong.
It is only when Alvarez starts to write about poetry and poets - about the beauty and demonism he finds in the form - that the book comes to life, becomes plainly and beautifully about something. It's in passages like this, on Ted Hughes who was a close friend - "In the domain of Hughes's unforgiving imagination, beauty exists but always perilously, as an act of will, and the forces ranged against it are terrible. Wild creatures, for him, were like dreams, they were his way through to hidden parts of his mind" - that his prose quickens and becomes fascinating to read.
Where Did It All Go Right? is always absorbing, but it lacks an answer to the question put by the title - not literally, since Alvarez is quite clear about the moment at which he felt his fortunes turn - but spiritually. As the story unfolds, we miss the moment-to-moment, interfusing extremes of bleakness and joy in the texture of the writing itself, that poet's sense of a mind growing, altering, as it perceives.
The emotional world of Michael Holroyd's Basil Street Blues appears, at first, remarkably similar - an impression reinforced by the book's misleadingly trivial, musical-comedy title, and the blue-tinted picture on the jacket of the author, at prep school age, with cap, cricket bat and pads. One by one, the familiar John Le Carré-ish autobiographical vignettes come up: the unreliable father; the pretty, impractical mother - Swedish this time, a flirt out of early Ingmar Bergman - the public schooldays at Eton; the comic, misconceived attempts to get a "proper" job before - inevitably - a kind of literary success arrives, in the nick of time.
Yet, beneath all this Holroyd has something to say about human nature, and the diminishing, self-destructive patterns into which most of us are compelled to watch our lives being shaped by events, which is finally very moving. Perhaps this is because - as his Eton housemaster once presciently suggested - he's a fatalist at heart and believes in the inevitability of failure, or at least the failure of most of our grander hopes and pretensions.
He depicts his noisy, disordered, life-loving, quarrelsome, self-absorbed family with a historian's calm and detachment. As his father's life collapses into financial incompetence and chronic ill-health - the father who had sought, in Holroyd's youth, to play the paternal role with an absurd mix of gravitas and swagger - he writes his son pitiful, touching letters which are tacit admissions of defeat. "I am finding life very tricky. It's like trying to walk on a tightrope and I have no doubt I'll come crashing down one day."
The lesson of Basil Street Blues is that, in the end, we all come crashing down. As Holroyd understands, all that's left to meet the indignities of age, time and physical impoverishment is a kind of hard-headed, unsentimental kindness - the ability to see our families clearly, and to appreciate them for what they are, and not what they wanted or pretended to be. There is little verbal poetry in the book - Holroyd's disciplined style is too clean-limbed and self-effacing for that - but it has unusual warmth, and real psychological generosity and distinction.
One of the weaknesses of autobiography is that it is too loose, too unambitious a form - a scrapbook of a literary genre, which can be adapted to contain virtually anything the author wishes to glue into it. I rapidly lost patience with PD James's Time To Be In Earnest, which, although it claims to be "a fragment of an autobiography," is little more than last year's revamped engagements book larded with scraps of memory and reflection.
It's written in superior, diarist's English, but remains opaque and self-concealing, talking of essentially private things - childhood, parental relationships, her husband Connor who returned mentally ill from overseas service, day-to-day inner reflections - in a language that is essentially official, approved, bloodless. Of the inner, hidden, private impulses which drew James to the ordered but violent form of the murder mystery, there's infuriatingly little.
Temperamentally, art critic and Picasso biographer John Richardson's The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the opposite. It has the giddy effervescence of a Fellini film. Although it is largely a portrait of his lover and mentor, the monstrous and brilliant Douglas Cooper, it is also, like the Picasso masterpieces he has brooded on for so long, a celebration of movement and sensuality: of light and colour, physical vitality and sexual freedom.
Richardson writes to catch the lightness, the comic triviality of things: his epigrammatic put-down of Lolita as "the greatest of American travel books" or his three-page account of the painting of Graham Sutherland's portrait of Churchill can make one laugh out loud. There is also a sane and admirable sense that you can't and shouldn't make life too abstract: that we are put on this earth to eat, drink, talk and make love. What the book isn't, frustratingly, is anything much more than an entertainment.
Gore Vidal once said that. whereas memoir is a mere impression of a life, autobiography is an attempt to recreate it - a nice distinction but one which reality always blurs. The greatest long poem in our history, Wordsworth's "The Prelude", is also our first genuinely great autobiography - the first to have, as it were, the courage of its own egomania, and treat personal reflection and self-scrutiny with the sort of sublime high seriousness previously only applied to the conflicts of epic heroes or the destinies of nations.
Wordsworth demonstrated that autobiography is written for us to discover what we have done with our lives, and if it fails to go deep, it's nothing, just a protracted ramble of gossip or reminiscence. To work, it needs what's most often lacking here, a poet's sense of a private importance, an intelligibility in the smallest, most trivial events.
In Growing Up In The Gorbals, Ralph Glasser recalled his childish wonder at the scale of the night sky and wrote: "In dreams I wrestled with the question of how to encompass the mystery of the heavens and how to draw them into a pattern; that, and so much more. What pattern? That I did not know. Why a pattern at all? Some search for order in a world where my infant mind could observe none, but longed for it, must have driven me. Perhaps the stars and the heavens stood for other things." Exactly.
