When Graham Greene published his novel A Burnt-Out Case in 1960, an article appeared in the Daily Express predicting a great deal of "guessing in Fleet Street" about the real-life model for the lying muckraker Parkinson. It may sound an unlikely subject of national interest, but journalists are interested in other journalists, and newspapers have to be filled. What's strange is that the biographer Norman Sherry chose to revive the guessing game, half a century later, in the pages of a biography. "Could it have been Greene's old sparring partner John Gordon?" Sherry asks, before deciding that it could not have been. "Gordon was honourable", whereas Parkinson showed a "disdain for facts". He worked for the Sunday Express, a paper that would never print "anything remotely risque". Plus: wrong build.
Instead, Sherry alights on Greene's friend Ronald Matthews, a one-time journalist and the author of a book, Mon Ami Graham Greene, disliked by its subject, much as Parkinson writes articles disliked by Querry, the architect in A Burnt-Out Case. The discrepancy in physical types, used to disqualify Gordon, is here submitted as conclusive evidence, the expression "tug of guts" being, Sherry claims, "a deliberate physical exaggeration to prevent his friend from being recognised". Sherry suspects that Matthews managed to recognise himself, despite the fat-suit, but didn't say anything because Greene had paid for his son's education. "That itself to Ronald Matthews would have been worth the pain of an unfriendly and perfidious fictional portrait." By the end of the exercise, Sherry has tied himself in all kinds of knots and what have we learned? Exactly nothing.
Yet we do read biographies of novelists and memoirs by them in the hope of learning things, and not just facts. David Lodge, in one of the numerous essays on novelists in his collection Lives in Writing (other subjects include John Boorman, Simon Gray, and Princess Diana), says that we read books such as Sherry's on Greene to learn about the subject's private life, on the one hand, the source of their "inspiration", on the other. He doesn't show any sign of believing that the two might amount to the same thing, that the source of a novelist's inspiration might in some sense be located in his or her private life. When Lodge asks if there is a "danger in trying to pin down the sources of characters and events in novels too literally in the writer's own life" he is being hypothetical. The danger, fully realised by Sherry, is that the work gets short-changed, either reduced to biography – Lodge calls Sherry's connection between Parkinson and Matthews "forced and unconvincing" – or disregarded altogether, as is the case with Greene's novel Dr Fischer of Geneva, which Sherry omits to mention because, Lodge speculates, "it had no obvious source in Greene's life".
Lodge's essential objection is the reasonable one that the biographers of novelists too often reduce works of fiction to romans à clef, a transcription of real-life events with the names changed to protect the living (or the author, against libel laws). Nabokov once warned a biographically minded interviewer that the raisins in the cake of fiction are many stages removed from the original grape. In Lodge's view, Sherry's crime is to confuse the raisin for the grape, though he occasionally finds it useful to compare them. In an essay about Kingsley Amis, a man whose "personal life" had "fascinating links to his work", Lodge explains that though he didn't enjoy or understand the novel One Fat Englishman on first reading, it had become "obvious" to him that Roger Micheldene, the fat Englishman, was a kind of self-portrait. Knowledge of Amis's life has rendered it "a much more comprehensible and interesting novel". The raisin tastes sweeter, and so does the cake.
The trouble with Lodge's approach is that it recognises only one method of relating the life to the work, which can be applied either well or badly. Either we learn something from equating characters to their real-life models, or we don't. But there are other approaches. Discussing his slightly pat novel about a novelist and a biographer, The Last Word, Hanif Kureishi proposed as an "interesting" biographical question: "what sort of human would you have to be, what sort of experiences would you have to have had, to write Crime and Punishment?" It's a different order of inquiry from the one that Sherry botches, more challenging but more rewarding too.
In recent years, the most thoughtful and distinguished attempts to answer a version of this question – Peter Brooks's Henry James Goes to Paris, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens, and Rebecca Mead's The Road to Middlemarch – have paid particular attention to the point at which a promising young man or woman formally embarks on becoming a novelist. Lodge overlooks a good opportunity to discuss what goes on during this moment of transformation and evolution – and the broader theme of what makes a novelist. In an essay on the critic Frank Kermode, he says Kermode's memoir Not Entitled is in parts so vivid and funny that it makes you wonder why he "decided as a young man that his ambitions to be a creative writer were doomed". But Kermode devotes a few pages to just that subject, describing how, on his return from the war in 1945, he was put in touch with Olaf Stapledon to discuss his early attempts at fiction, and how Stapledon, having professed his dislike for a "long story" Kermode sent him, inspected his hands and exclaimed: "No digging, no carpentry, nothing manual at all!" To Kermode – a champion defeatist – this made sense. Looking back at a distance of half a century, he used the incident with Stapledon as the spur for a reflection on what kind of person makes a good novelist. Typically, his answer boils down to: people very unlike him. He recalls that in a review of William Golding's novel The Spire, he had confessed to ignorance about where Golding got the facts about masonry and received a letter from Golding saying: "I invented it by thinking what it must have been like." He similarly notes Iris Murdoch's ability, displayed in her fiction (rather than in north Oxford), to get cars out of ditches and huge bells out of lakes. In Kermode's reading, what Golding and Murdoch had and he lacked was an ability to "surmise how very complicated things are done". (Or to appear to do so: The Spire is full of errors.)
An irony that Kermode overlooked is that he gave up writing fiction at a time and an age when neither Golding nor Murdoch had got anywhere either. It is not known why Golding's first novel, Circle Under the Sea, was rejected by publishers, but his biographer John Carey points to the abundance of "nautical knowledge". With Murdoch, the process was the opposite one. Her earliest attempts at fiction-writing, one of which was rejected (without encouragement to soften the blow) by TS Eliot, were deemed by her "too personal"; she subsequently learned, her biography Peter J Conradi argues, how "to burn the confessional and subjective out of her writing". Golding found a way of putting what Kermode called his "handyman side" to the service of metaphysical inquiry, Murdoch found a way of letting in more of the world. But it took some time.
Such details support the view that the novelist is not merely someone who can mix autobiography and invention, as Lodge's impatience with Sherry suggests, but someone whose sensibility contains a balance of the intuitive and the pragmatic, the introvert and the extrovert, the better to create fiction that is not too personal. It is a realm in which fatalism is a vice, obstinacy a virtue. Shortly after finishing John Updike's novel Rabbit Is Rich, Philip Roth told his father and writer David Plante: "He knows so much, about golf, about porn, about kids, about America … His hero is a Toyota salesman. He knows everything about being a Toyota salesman. Here I live in the country and I don't even know the names of the trees. I'm going to give up writing." But Roth didn't give up – nor, crucially, did he view his lack of such knowledge in the same way that Kermode did, as an "incapacity". Instead, he did something about it. Towards the end of her recent book Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, Claudia Roth Pierpont mentions in passing that Roth "seems to know every tree" on his estate, and in a recent essay on Roth's work, Adam Mars-Jones says that for a long time "living was all the research that Roth needed to do" but a time came when he began to "find things out … and seems to have acquired a taste for it".
In considering changes and developments in Roth's writing, Pierpont makes much of his visits to Prague, his two marriages, and his experiences of psychoanalysis. But perhaps more central was the confidence Roth derived from being a worshipped child, as seen in Herman Roth's response to his son's jocular retirement speech: "Bess and I always said we were proud of Philip's writing." Claudia Roth Pierpont referred to Roth as "his scrupulously fair and loving mother's secret favourite". Updike's biographer, Adam Begley, could hardly be more insistent on the role played by mother-love in catapulting Updike to brilliance, and Mead, in The Road to Middllemarch notes that Eliot's father, Robert Evans, "encouraged his clever daughter to read".
In wondering aloud about Kermode, Lodge isn't just forgetting the passage about Stapledon and Golding. He is also failing to make a critical-biographical connection between Kermode's unhappy childhood – his lifelong sense of himself as a failure – and his very swift decision that his creative ambitions were doomed. (Updike, who threw away at least two manuscripts before publishing The Poorhouse Fair, generously though perhaps disingenuously suggested that Kermode's "inability to write a novel" should be ascribed to "a deficiency of presumption … rather than of any other qualities".) Lodge's aversion to reductive biographical readings of novels blinds him to more desirable forms of biographical insight into the writing – and non-writing – of novels.
Perhaps Lodge should have taken a cue from one of his book's subjects, Muriel Spark, a favourite he shares with Kermode, and a writer who believed in the possibility of connecting the life and the work. Spark chose to end her memoir Curriculum Vitae and her most autobiographical novel Loitering with Intent when the heroine (Muriel Camberg, Fleur Talbot) becomes a fully fledged novelist, and both books contain details about the sense of vocation – Spark uses the word "conviction" – and the novelist's capacity to surmise how things get done. (Updike, commenting on the "surprising fund of specific information" on display in The Bachelors, wondered how on earth "she gathered the fascinating material on seances in modern London".) Although Spark writes in Curriculum Vitae about some of the experiences on which she based her novels and stories, she also gives a sense of why it was she, and not any of her classmates, who was able to turn Christina Kay into Jean Brodie – not what made her talented exactly, but things that helped to form her peculiar perspective, such as her inclusion from a very young age in the family habit of laughing at guests who had just departed.
Spark's autobiographical writing hints at some of the ways in which her personality informs the tone and themes of her work, and how the personality and thus the work were affected by later experiences – in her case, travel, divorce, motherhood, religious conversion, employment, and illness. (Exile came later.) Fleur Talbot, the narrator of Loitering with Intent, says that "the story of my own life is just as much constituted of the secrets of my craft as it is of other events", but she only appears to be upholding the division between the private life and inspiration, experience and style. For Fleur and Spark, these secrets, though part of a deeply internal mechanism, are nevertheless available to description and examination in the same way as the other internal mechanisms laid bare in novels. A person's capacity for novel-writing and the kinds of thing a novelist writes are surely no more complex or mysterious than a tendency towards jealousy or a reluctance to hug one's siblings. Spark certainly didn't think so. "The process by which I created my characters was instinctive," Fleur writes, looking back at her first novel from a time when she has written many, "the sum of my whole experience of others and of my own potential self, and so it has always been."
