THERE IS A RUG - a large kilim possibly - in the upstairs drawing room of
Michael Holroyd's London house; it is the blue of summer sky in a hot
country, with a border of deep, dark red and I am struck by its loveliness.
“It's a wishing carpet,” he says, “Go ahead, make a wish.” He steps back,
leaving me in sole possession of its magic, so I close my eyes obediently
and utter a silent petition.
“Well done,” he says, folding his long frame into an armchair, dressed like a
schoolboy in dark grey trousers and a navy V-neck jumper. I don't ask him
what he has wished for in the past - these things are private - or if his
wishes were granted, but I'd guess they were. Because here he is on the cusp
of 73, alive and appar-
ently well, after an arduous skirmish with bowel cancer involving
chemotherapy, radiotherapy and four bouts of surgery - the most recent of
which saved his life.
The remorseless round of hospital visits punctuated work on his new book, a
whopping 600 pages, seven years in the making: “It was a way of escaping
illness, having something else to think about,” he says. A Strange and
Eventful History started out with modest ambitions as a biography of Ellen
Terry, the actress and Shakespearean heroine, as much a queen of hearts for
her adoring Victorian public as Diana, Princess of Wales, would be a century
later. But equally admired, though not so well loved, was Henry Irving, her
leading man and impresario of the Lyceum Theatre: “Henry elbowed his way
into the book,” Holroyd says. “Then their two families were all clamouring
to be let in too.”
In the end he found his canvas had stretched over 130 years, a parade of
discarded wives and husbands, lovers, mistresses and illegitimate children,
lives buffeted by passion and betrayal, triumph and tragedy, fortunes
gained, lent and squandered: as much a saga of family politics as a portrait
of the dominant theatre culture at the end of the 19th century.
Holroyd was drawn to explore the drama of family relationships, he thinks,
because of his own fractured and often bewildering childhood: “When I was
growing up there were stepmothers and stepfathers walking on to the stage,
so to speak, saying a few words and then disappearing. With this book there
must have been some need in me to pull it all together; to make a story that
adheres.”
There are striking similarities between Ellen Terry and Holroyd's mother,
Ulla: both leading precarious lives, stepping off the emotional precipice,
as it were, without looking down. “Oh yes,” he says, “If I were a novelist
I'd have to stop them.” He throws up long, elegant hands, “But as it is ...”
Twenty years have passed since Holroyd's last blockbuster biography, three
volumes of the life of George Bernard Shaw - “My reputation grew with each
year I didn't publish a new book,” is a characteristically wry observation -
but in between, as well as editing and essay writing, he produced two slim
books, part memoir, part detective story, piecing together a tragi-comic
account of the lives of his eccentric family.
His parents divorced early in his life, leaving him in a large chaotic house
in Maidenhead with his grandparents, his unmarried aunt Yolande and Old Nan,
their former nursemaid. They were fond of him but were largely preoccupied
with their own quarrels and furious disappointments. “What shall we do with
the boy?” was a frequent refrain.
The boy found solace in the company of books, haunting the public library.
Money was found to send him to Eton where a master observed, prophetically
as it turned out, that he was “a promising tortoise - not nearly at his
peak”.
He resolved to become a writer but was temporarily diverted by his father, who
gave him the task of reviving the family fortunes and articled him to a firm
of solicitors. There followed two years of National Service and a further
three in the reserves, which paid a small stipend and allowed him to
concentrate on writing.
His landmark biography of Lytton Strachey appeared in 1966 when he was 32,
followed eight years later by a life of the painter Augustus John, by which
time he was well into the 15 years it would take him to produce his
monumental study of George Bernard Shaw, a close and lifelong friend of
Ellen Terry: “All my subjects grow out of previous books.”
He has said he doesn't write for a market: “No, I start work on a book because
I'm curious. It is between me and my subject for a long time before I tell
other people about it.” This seems a very genteel way of going about things.
He smiles. “When the money runs out or I'm worried, I'll do a synopsis with
an eye to what my agent and the publisher might want. I don't lie, but I'll
pick out aspects which will have the most immediate appeal, and I do
specimen pages.”
It was different in the past, he says: “There used to be room in a publishing
house for a ‘life' - of Strachey, say, or Shaw - you didn't have to do a
synopsis of it.” (There is a slight but unmistakable curl of the lips on the
word.) “Publishing has changed,” he continues smoothly. “They think they
need to sell the book to themselves before they sell it to others.”
The biographer Kathryn Hughes noted recently that the years Holroyd spent on
his life of Strachey would be unthinkable now when young writers are harried
for 18-month deadlines. He agrees: “I've been writing biography in a most
nourishing period - from Richard Ellman's Joyce and Yeats to Hilary Spurling
on Matisse and Richard Holmes with Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. That is
finished now. The trade winds have moved behind popular history. The change
is a challenge to us: perhaps it influenced the way I wrote this last book -
spanning a period of history, not just ‘a life'.”
Will the challenge affect what he does next? “I'm aware of it,” he says
evenly, “But I don't do anything consciously to meet it.”
Still, the next book - only in the idea stage, he cautions - sounds unlike
anything he's done before: the stories of three women, each of whom
fantasises that she is really the illegitimate daughter of someone other
than the man certified as her father. “In each case,” he says, “the fantasy
is about the life they might have led. But illegitimacy is not a genetic
determiner, it may be an excuse, a sorrow, a justification, but the
important thing is how you come to terms with it.”
Women's lives in the past were more circumscribed, he says, with room for
imagining what might have been. Like his aunt Yolande who, he discovered,
inexplicably let both lover and fiancé slip through her fingers and spent
her life fiercely dog walking and washing up in an unhappy household. He, on
the other hand, was able to escape a possibly crippling upbringing by
striking out on his own. “I show all the advantages of early damage,” he
said once.
He has been married for 26 years to the novelist Margaret Drabble, was
appointed CBE for services to literature and has a watertight reputation as
one of the finest biographers and writers of his generation: might someone
do his life one day? He smiles. “Well, as you can see, my life is entirely
uninteresting, I have spent it writing about other people. (‘I watch,
therefore I am;' he has written, ‘I am what I watch ... This has been my
exit from myself.') And anyway there are the semi-autobiographical books.”
So he has pre-empted a future attempt on his life? He inclines his head:
“The nest has been fouled.”
Michael Holroyd appears at Edinburgh International Book Festival Tuesday,
August 19. (0845 3735888; www.edbookfest.co.uk
)
A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving
and Their Remarkable Familes by Michael Holroyd
Chatto & Windus, £25; 608pp Buy
the book
Edited extract
Ellen Terry's son Ted wrote: “I wish to live until the evening of my mother's
death, when I should wish nothing more enjoyable than to die before the next
day waked.” But it was the dreamer who wrote this, the dreamer who “had
great, great fear in my dreams”. He was struggling to wake up, to grow from
Ted into Edward Gordon Craig and aware “that mothers do keep little sons as
hostages, taking certain situations in life as declarations of war instead
of taking them for what they were”. The mothers of his own children, he came
to suspect, often used them to imprison him. But he had to be free. “I was
in a state when I doubted everything - marriage, theatre, friends, career,
money matters - all seem to have cheated me.” In his loneliness he “called
out to a girl I knew”, the actress Jess Dorynne, to join him. She arrived
the day after - followed a little later by an inquiry agent employed by his
wife May.
This would finally be the end of their marriage. “It must be a never ending
disgrace to you that you leave your chix & your wife after such a short
time of trial, & even now I consider you ought to put things straight
for the children within a year”, Ellen upbraided him. “The mistake you made
is in searching for Happiness - that never comes to any of us.” Behind these
words lay the ghost of Edward Godwin, Ted's father, with whom Ellen had
searched for happiness with more tenacity than her son. She had prayed he
would avoid her mistakes, his father's mistakes too. But she could never
“put things straight” for him. She had planted in him a sense of destiny -
that of fulfilling his father's unachieved ambitions.
It was Jess Dorynne who rescued him from solitude and darkness and got him
back on “the right road”. Though several men had shown an interest in her,
she never responded to them and was a virgin. She was waiting for someone to
give her what she called “a thorough, vibrating, intense Present, sound and
happy”. In Craig she believed she had found this special man.
She told him she did not expect eternal fidelity and insisted they remain
“personally independent.” But when he folded her along his body and kissed
her throat and lips, such independence was hard to maintain. So she threw
away caution and became pregnant. Then everything changed. “I was always too
sick, too ill - you were alone. I was alone ... I should have been sleeping
in your arms still.” Feeling very vulnerable it seemed to her that Craig
“mocked even my figure when, heavy with child, weighed down with grief ...
every step was an excruciatingly painful effort”. In November 1900, when
their daughter Kitty was born, they were no longer regularly seeing each
other.
The girl who had attracted Craig so strongly with her promise of no
domesticity, no children, simple freedom and collaboration, now wanted a
marriage certificate for Kitty's sake. When she appealed to him, he stayed
away, but when she wrote saying that her love for him “has been murdered ...
and now goodbye”, he decided to see her.
The birth of Kitty, and Ted's parting from Jess, made Ellen urge her son to
comfort Jess's anxious heart: “I ache to be proud of you,” she told him. “I
would rather kill you than see you grow systematically exacting &
dishonourable to women ... I am the one you make suffer most.”
