I’d like to begin by stating that there isn’t a definitive answer to the question of my talk but I wanted to raise it because I would really welcome a discussion about what I hope I’ve identified as a common problem for biographers.

We live in an age when ‘truth’ in publishing seems to have become an increasingly suspect commodity if the number of recent scandals is anything to go by. In the past three months publishers have been left reeling from memoirs, travel books and histories exposed as fakes and sadly, purporting facts that might easily been checked.

In early March, Margaret B. Jones, the author of ‘Love and Consequences’ a memoir about an American girl who was taken from her family at the age of five and shuttled between foster homes before she became a gang member in South-Central LA, was exposed as a fake. Jack Begg at the New York Times, discovered that no such person as Margaret B. Jones lived in Eugene, Oregon, as she claimed. Soon her sister was on the phone, blowing Margaret’s cover completely.

The previous week Misha Defonesca, aka Monique De Wael, made a public confession that her best-selling book, Mischa: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, owed more to fiction than fact. Mischa purported to tell the story of a Jewish girl from Brussels who had walked across Europe during the Second World War. She had even lived in the forest with wolves and murdered a Nazi rapist en route. Published ten years ago despite warnings about its authenticity from scholars Deborah Dwork and Lawrence Langer, the book was made into a feature film, an opera and translated into 18 languages.

 In fact, De Wael had been orphaned after her Catholic parents -- members of the Belgian resistance -- were killed by the Gestapo. As she told a press conference, ‘the story of Misha, is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving.’

Even the relatively gentle art of travel writing has recently come under fire with Lonely Planet author Thomas Kohnstamm outing himself last week in his confessional book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? Kohnstamm admitted that he’d done a ‘mosaic job’ in researching his books, relying on the internet and a Colombian girlfriend rather than visiting the country himself. He protested that since he wasn’t paid enough and the brief was far too ambitious he had cut corners just as all travel writers do.

  Clark Hoyt, ‘The Public Editor; Fooled Again’, The New York Times, 16 March, 2008.

Blake Eskin,(2008), ‘Crying Wolf’, Slate, www.slate.com, [20/4/2008]

‘Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?’,(2008), Kirkus Review, www.kirkusreports.com [19/4/2008], ‘Lonely Planet’s bad trip’,(2008), The DailyTelegraph, www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph, [22/04/2008]

Michael Holroyd has commented in his Works on Paper on `the number of unflattering portraits of biographers in fiction'. After reading some 26 novels in which characters attempt to research and produce biographies, I have to confirm that verdict. But to judge by most of these portrayals, what racy lives you do appear to lead!

First, there is the amatory experience that seems to be consequent upon researching a biography. In Kingsley Amis's novel, The Biographer's Moustache, Gordon Scott-Thompson takes his subject's wife to his bed -- as also does Mr Moon in Tom Stoppard's Lord Malquist and Mr Moon. Raphael Alter in Celia Gittelson's novel titled Biography takes there the mistress (and possible daughter) of his dead subject, Maxwell, regarding her as `created by Maxwell out of love and madness and given me, his gift'. Mark Lamming in Penelope Lively’s According to Mark takes to bed the granddaughter of his subject. The hero of Alain de Botton's novel, Kiss and Tell, decides to write a biography of `the next person to walk into my life', duly investigates `ordinary person' Isabel, and becomes her lover as well as biographer. Phineas Nanson, in A S Byatt's novel, The Biographer's Tale, becomes lover of both Vera, his subject’s niece, and Fulla, who is assisting him in his research. Julian Ramsay in A N Wilson's A Watch in the Night makes love, in the library, to the librarian who has allowed him prohibited access to the diaries of the subject he is researching.

By contrast, the narrator of Henry James's story, desperately seeking The Aspern Papers, at first sees only one means to achieve his object, his spoils: `to make love to the niece'. But when poor Miss Tina virtually offers herself to him along with the papers, he withdraws immediately, `awkwardly, grotesquely', as he himself writes, leaving her sobbing. He explains, `I couldn't accept the proposal. I couldn't, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous, pathetic, provincial old woman' -- doubly a cad.

Or biography may lead to crime. Some fictional biographers resort to theft in their researches. Morton Jimroy in Carol Shields' novel, Mary Swann steals from a museum one of the only two photographs in existence of the dead poet, and from her daughter the pen she used. The American professor, Mortimer Cropper in A S Byatt’s Possession, even turns graverobber to obtain the contents of the box that had been buried with his dead poet subject, opening and digging into the grave to get it. On the occasion, Mortimer `swung his spade with a kind of joy. He felt he was over some border of the permissible and everything was just fine.'

The most sympathetic of these biographical villains is found in the third novel in Robertson Davies's Cornish trilogy, The Lyre of Orpheus. Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt has been commissioned to write a biography of the recently deceased Francis Cornish, an art collector. He is `determined that the book should be as good and as full as it was in his power to make it', but feels that it has a `disastrous, abysmal gap in the very heart of it'.

He finds the person who can give him the missing information; her price is some early drawings by Cornish that Darcourt himself has placed in the National Gallery of Canada. `Darcourt yearned for that information with the feverish lust of a biographer'. So, clergyman and academic as he is, he `plans his crime -- to rob first the University Library, and then the National Gallery'. Davies writes, `He now regarded himself as a biographer, and the scruples of a biographer are peculiar to the trade. Any hesitation he felt was not about how could he bring himself to steal, but how could he steal without being found out?'

Fictional biographers may even turn murderer, as in A N Wilson's sequence of five novels, The Lampitt Papers. In 1947 Raphael Hunter selects as the subject of his proposed biography belle-lettrist James Lampitt. He wrongly supposes Lampitt to be gay, as Hunter himself is, and makes a pass at him. Lampitt, furious, threatens Hunter with exposure and the ruination of his career; whereupon Hunter pushes Lampitt over the railings of his flat to his death. He then purloins Lampitt's papers and produces a biography of him with multitudinous implications of homosexual encounters with apparently all the great and good men of the age, achieving huge popularity for it. Lampitt's family see Hunter as having `filched Jimbo's papers and made out of his essentially innocuous life a scurrilous fantasy'. These implied homosexual encounters are justified in the published biography only by carefully documented, entirely spurious references to Lampitt's diaries, which Hunter renders inaccessible by tricking a millionaire collector into purchasing the Lampitt papers and secluding them in his private archive. When the colletor learns of the fraud, and may denounce Hunter, Hunter murders him likewise, and subsequently publishes a biography of him -- his second subject as well as victim.

In William Golding 's The Paper Men author William Barclay discovers Rick Tucker, a postgraduate student falsely claiming to be a Professor, rifling through his dustbin in search of his private, discarded papers. Tucker persists in his efforts to make Barclay sign authorization of him as his official biographer, pursuing him round the world, even sending his gorgeous young wife to Barclay to do all she can to obtain his consent. Barclay continues to refuse, considering `I was his special subject, his raw material, the ore in his mine, his farm. his lobster pots'. He humiliates Tucker, denouncing him on behalf of all biographers’ proposed subjects with: `Think, Rick --- all the people who get lice like you in their hair, all the people spied on, followed, lied about, all the people offered up to the great public -- we'll be revenged, Rick, I'll be revenged on the whole lot of them.' But instead, finally, the would-be biographer Tucker, maddened and enraged by Barclay's treatment of him and continual refusal to allow him to write his biography, shoots Barclay, as he is about to burn all the papers Rick has striven to get for so long.

The relationship of subject & biographer (short of taking them to bed or killing them) is usually presented in fiction as far from a happy one.

Angela Lamb, a novelist in Maggie Gee's The Flood, regards her biographer, Dr Moira Penny, as a `daft old bat', `impossible to work with' and the two come to hate each other. But this is mild stuff. Morton Jimroy in Mary Swann, described as `a thorough biographer', considers that `writing biography is the hardest work in the world and it can, just as easily as not, be an act of contempt'. For Miriam Oliver in Ruth Brandon's Tickling the dragon the attraction of writing the biography of the famous scientist who was her first lover and the father of her unacknowledged child is, `In a word, power'. Having found through her researches that `his private life was a mess, his public persona was founded upon a whole series of lies', she exults, `now I've got him in my power, pinned down like a butterfly on a board. I can make him or break him'.

On the other hand, fictional biographers may feel distinctly and deliberately manipulated by their subjects, even dead ones. In According to Mark Penelope Lively presents a detailed study of the developing relationship. Mark Lamming is writing a biography of a Victorian poet, Gilbert Strong. He feels himself `Tethered for a period of your life in this curiously intimate fashion to a man you never knew. ... in some eerie way Strong's life had extended into his own. ... Mark became daily more convinced that Strong was holding out on him. ... had been manipulating him right from the start ... I was fully persuaded that he had gone to considerable lengths to frustrate and mislead me.'

An actress in Wakefield Hall by Francesca Stanfill `plans every detail of her posthumous biography from beyond the grave', leaving a packet of papers labelled `For my biographer' and a trail of clues to her secret, so that the biographer she has nominated will realize that she is her subject's daughter. Likewise, Flora Monk in Hazel Hucker's The Real Claudia Charles, after much research, learns that she is the granddaughter of her subject, a woman writer supposed to have been childless. Another outcome of the relationship may be that the biographer inherits the mantle of, or replicates the life of, their subject. Raphael Alter in Celia Gittelson's novel, who takes to himself his deceased subject’s mistress, regards him as `my double, my strange twin -- we are inextricably bound’. Maud Bailey and Roland Michell in Possession, researching the lives of two Victorian poets who became lovers, retrace the footsteps of their subjects, and at last find romance together likewise. Polly Alter in Alison Lurie's The Truth about Lorin Jones, who researches and writes a biography of this dead artist, eventually moves to live where Lorin last did, with Lorin's last lover, and resumes her own career as a painter -- emulating Lorin.

Rival biographers may prove as antagonistic as biographer and subject. Paul Micou’s novel, The Death of David Debrizzi, consists of a series of letters written by Pierre La Valoise, one of the two mentors of Debrizzi, a young concert pianist, to the other, who has published a biography of Debrizzi. La Valoise calls this work, `Your increasingly arrogant and self-serving volume', and writes, `I have set myself the task of clearing up the errors in your Life’ -- and does so, chapter by chapter. Micou’s novel is truly a biographical counterblast.

In Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia, we find two rival biographers, of Byron. They squabble with bitter hostility, showing schadenfreude in discovering each other's errors.

The fictional biographers may feel compelled to give up the biography, not to publish their findings. There are various reasons for this. It may be because of a shocking discovery -- Raphael Alter in Celia Gittelson's novel finds that his subject had murdered and buried his second wife. The narrator in Barbara Vine's The Blood Doctor, after discovering `the monstrous pursuit carried out in the name of science' by his ancestor Doctor Henry Nanther, gives up his biography for shame: `I can't write his life. I can't face other people knowing what my great-grandfather did'.

Or the biographer's findings may be partly suppressed rather than violate privacy -- especially after reading illicit love letters. Penelope Lively’s hero, Mark, confesses to his wife, `I feel intrusive sometimes. Reading other people's letters was one of the things one was brought up never to do ... Biographers are much impeded by a genteel upbringing.’ Or third parties, anxious to preserve the secrets of the dead, may deliberately destroy all the papers in the case, as Grandma does in Jan Clausen's The Prosperine papers.

Polly in The Truth about Lorin Jones discovers incompatible versions of her subject from the varying testimony of those who knew her, and does not know which, what or whether to publish. Stoppard's Mr Moon, who trades as Boswell Inc., has been formally engaged to act as Boswell to Lord Malquist, `to record such of my pensées and general observations, travels, etc., fully and fairly', for a fee of two thousand guineas per annum. He abandons the project when the bailiffs move in on Lord Malquist.

So, as Holroyd declared, most fictional portrayals of biographers are unflattering - to say the least. None of the rest of the fictional biographers I have found is favourably presented. In Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney Queeney Thrale describes Laetitia Hawkins, planning a biography of Dr Johnson, as `remarkably persistent', making impertinent enquiries `from a wish to settle old scores'. Carol Shields' other biographer, Judith Gill in Small Ceremonies, prides herself on detecting the secrets of her dead subjects, but fails entirely to understand the motives and behaviour of her family and friends. There are evil biographers in the Harry Potter books. Eldred Worple, in Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, has written the biography of a vampire, and sees much gold to be made from a biography of Harry. Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets interviews and collects the stories of his purported subjects, then magically causes them to forget their experiences and publishes the accounts as his own autobiography, Magical Me. He makes all his students in Defence Against the Dark Arts buy the book as a set text, setting them a test on it.

The most seriously presented biographer I have found in fiction is also the saddest: Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot. He is supposedly researching the life of Flaubert, but references to Braithwaite’s wife, Ellen, keep breaking through his narration. We learn that, like Emma Bovary, Ellen Braithwaite told lies, committed adultery, and took poison. Geoffrey is painfully trying to understand why. As he says, `Ellen's is a true story; perhaps it is even the reason why I am telling you Flaubert's story instead'. ... `Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.'

Barnes himself wrote of this novel: `It's a book about the shiftingness of the past, and the uncertainty and unverifiability of fact, and Flaubert, and love and grief. Love displaced into obsession with Flaubert; a more reliable constant than love for Ellen.' This is biography as desperate sublimation.

To glance finally at fictional autobiographers -- Muriel Spark, in Loitering with intent, portrays members of the Autobiographical Association, all engaged in writing their memoirs. These, she tells us, `had a number of factors in common. One of them was nostalgia, another was paranoia, a third was a transparent craving on the part of the authors to appear likeable. I think they probably lived out their lives on the principle that what they were, and did, and wanted, should above all look pretty.' Having presented you with so many unhappy, adulterous, failing, lying or criminally inclined biographers, let me conclude with one who is both happy and apparently successful in his work (albeit following theft, recounted earlier). This is, again, Morton Jimroy in Mary Swann. Here we find him at work, alone on Christmas day:

`This is happiness, these scrawled notes, these delicate tangled footnotes, which, with a little more work, a few more weeks, will evolve into numbered poems of logic and order and illumination. These disjointed paragraphs he is writing are pushing toward that epic wholeness that is a human life, gold socketed into gold.'

Good afternoon. My name is David Sutton, and I’m a copyright person. I was born in the year 1950, and if all goes according to plan I intend to die in the year 2034. This would mean that all the words in my talk today will remain copyright-protected until 31 December 2104. So take notes of what I say by all means, but be aware that if anyone tries to publish my words – even in 90 years’ time – they will run the risk of being sued by my avenging unborn grandchildren.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of copyright.

There have always been two opposing strands running through the history of copyright. On the one hand there is the Anglo-American notion of copy-right, a property right based on control over the making of copies; and on the other hand there is the philosophical French notion of droits d’auteur, the inherent rights of the intellectual creator of a work of art, or a passage of writing, or any other original creation.

If we think back to the times of Shakespeare, we remember that the reliable “second quarto” of Hamlet was produced as a response because someone had come into the theatre and speed-copied Shakespeare’s words as the “bad quarto”. But what is striking about these activities is that Shakespeare himself was uninvolved. His play had become the property of the theatre-owner, and it was the theatre-owner’s property rights which were being defended by the second quarto.

Over the years, over the centuries, British authors from Daniel Defoe to William Wordsworth championed, in a Frenchifying way, the notion of authors’ rights, and there was some nodding in that direction in British copyright law from 1710 onwards. But the real change, the real triumph of the French approach 1, came with the international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention of 1886.

The British and the Americans were somewhat slow to accept the defeat for their traditions which Berne represented, but the British eventually implemented Berne from 1912 and the Americans from, well, from 1977.

The Berne Convention is most remembered for its introduction of a copyright period extended to a minimum of 50 years after the death of the author, but its true impact is much greater than that.

So what changed in the UK from 1912, when we adopted Berne? Well, first, we had to agree to a 50-year post mortem copyright period (which was to last from 1912 until 1996), but more fundamentally 1912 saw the end of copyright registration at Stationers Hall. From 1912 we had to come to terms with the idea of copyright as an automatic right which came into existence as soon as the pen touched the paper, or the brush the canvass, or the finger the keyboard – without any need for registration.

This no doubt appeared to be good news for authors. Rights automatically protected; no need to record one’s works in the ledgers of Stationers Hall, and so on. But what about biographers, anthologists, critics and other scholars? How would they obtain the permissions they need in order to obtain to publish their works?

No thought had been given to this problem, in truth. By the end of World War I, the old ledgers in Stationers Hall were out of date and useless, and from then on there was a huge void in the provision of reference information for scholars: there was no sure way of ascertaining the identity (let alone the address) of copyright holders for any author or artist. Biographers and others just had to do the best they could, on their own.

This lamentable position continued for about 75 years before, on the same principal as London buses, two copyright projects emerged at the same time – one based in Texas and one based in Reading. Both arose from within the community of archivists and librarians in the respective countries, and within a few months of discovering each other we decided to merge, and to hunt down copyright holders together. We became WATCH.

WATCH is now the world’s primary source of information about who holds the copyright in any individual’s creative works. It is a nice friendly acronym. Standing originally for Writers And Their Copyright Holders, it was upgraded painlessly to Writers, Artists & Their Copyright Holders some years ago at the behest of art librarians in the USA and the UK. In the mythology of the WATCH project, its acronym was dreamed up in a rooftop wine bar under the stars of Santa Fe, New Mexico in the Spring of 1994, but I can no longer remember whether there is any truth in this.

In 1996 WATCH became one of the earliest public information websites, and probably the very first to be a joint US-UK project. The web address has changed over the years, but has always been reachable by way of www.watch-file.com.

The first name-list of authors to be included was provided by a Reading-based parent project called the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters. This underlined the literary and archival nature of the original WATCH file. But very early we established a principle of never refusing to include copyright information which was notified to us, even if it was not very literary, not very archival, or not very British.

The starting-points for our research were informal (often handwritten) sources in the major research libraries. Libraries including the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of Wales, and the Henry E. Huntington Library in California made their records available to us as our research began.

The biggest file of all was in the University of Texas. They had records of the copyright holders of up to 1000 authors, mostly literary and mostly British, and by the middle of 1994 they had written permissions to include details on over 700 of these copyright holders in our database. WATCH was under way.

The British end of the project was enthusiastically supported by the Society of Authors and the British Library, and attracted funding from the Strachey Trust, the Arts Council, the Royal Literary Fund, the British Academy and a number of private charities, including the Pilgrim Trust, the Chase Charity and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation

Beginning as library-based research, our working practices came to resemble more and more the activities of private detectives. The WATCH gumshoes trawled through wills and family trees in pursuit of heirs. We importuned publishers and literary agents, universities and collecting societies, Oxbridge colleges, and even people with the same name as one of our authors. We read through poetry journals and especially obituaries. We wrote to biographers and fellow poets and friends and acquaintances. We thumbed telephone directories and electoral registers, and we made extensive use of a website which is both hugely inclusive and hugely intrusive: www.192.com. Inevitably, we have become devoted Googlers.

The WATCH file grew until most of the major names of English literature were there, together with quite a few French authors, some artists and photographers, and some politicians and public figures. It had become clear that there was no other project anywhere in the world providing this sort of service, and we were thinking about expanding our remit. By 2003, there were over 6000 individuals and their copyright contacts listed in WATCH.

In September 2003 the WATCH file was “re-launched” at an event hosted in the British Library. The occasion of the re-launch was the rebuilding of the website using Microsoft Outlook (the 1996 software had become very tired and vulnerable), but it also led us to think about where WATCH should go next. The file had been created as a service to archival and literary scholars, but it was now clear that it had become the primary source for almost all copyright holder enquiries. We felt that we should accept and welcome this, and expand fully into the areas of “popular culture”, fine art, European literature, and also “prominent people”, whose copyrights we had been including on an occasional basis.

Some of our original supporters were somewhat startled to see the copyright details of Jimi Hendrix, Britney Spears, Frankie Dettori and Damon Hill start to appear alongside those of Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden, but most users welcomed our continuing expansion.

We have been very aware of the incomplete coverage of WATCH until recently in respect of artists, sculptors and photographers. It was therefore especially pleasing to be invited in 2005 to participate in an initiative by the Museums Copyright Group to expand access to information about artists’ copyrights. The MCG had thought about creating their own website for this purpose, but after a series of meetings decided to work through WATCH.

Since that decision was taken, WATCH has been able to include many artists whose copyright details are held in the files of the National Portrait Gallery. We have also benefited from close cooperation with the Bridgeman Art Library in London and the Visual Arts & Galleries Association in New York, and have started work on artists who are represented by the Design & Artists Copyright Society in London and the Artists Rights Society in New York. Our coverage of copyright in the fine arts has really moved forward this year, and the total number of authors and artists in WATCH is now almost 12,000.

It is certainly more difficult to raise funds for a project which has been running for eleven years than for a new project. For that reason, commitments to future funding by the British Academy (which has designated WATCH an Academy Research Project) and the Strachey Trust are especially important. Our working relationship with the trustees of the Strachey Trust, in particular, has developed from that of funder and funded into a set of good friendships.

The first thing that will be achieved by these future financial commitments is an assurance of continuity and updating of the WATCH file. There will continue to be an office in Reading University Library offering copyright advice and able to help with particular copyright problems.

We have some new research ideas as well.

Publishing and literary organisations – publishing houses, literary agencies, and little magazines – which have gone out of business and disappeared from view are notoriously difficult to track. Both in Austin and in Reading, this has long been a primary area of concern. We are now preparing to start work on creating an addition to WATCH, which we have decided to call FOB (Firms Out of Business). This will be a separate file accessible from the WATCH home page, and will grow with information both researched in Reading and supplied by “friends of WATCH”. Information from members of the Biographers Club, will, of course, be welcome.

The Universities of Texas and Reading are fully committed to maintaining WATCH well into the future, and supporting both the expansion of its international role and its participation in new and related areas of research. Provided that some continuing external funding can be found, beyond the annual support of the Strachey Trust and the British Academy, there will clearly, for years to come, be plenty of work to keep WATCH ticking.

After the shock, and then the elation at being asked to address the Biographers' Club, I must confess that I felt suddenly downhearted when my mind turned to the obvious question: How do I compare with you? You choose your subjects with, at least, some care. No doubt you sometimes feel that you do not have enough time to do the job properly. You may even consider that you do not have enough space to include all you have learned. But in my case! Often I have no choice about my subject, even if I have never heard of him, or her. I am generally restricted to about a thousand words. My piece is almost always needed at once; and even when there has been warning of an approaching death, there never seems to be enough time to do any necessary revision on the day.

It is true that on the Obituaries Desk of The Daily Telegraph we call on the services of outside experts. But particularly in the early days, after the Telegraph had decided to take obituaries seriously in 1986, it was surprising how many outsiders did not appreciate what was required. I remember one piece which was dictated over the phone to our copytakers from America, shortly before deadline, which did not mention the name of the subject until the third page; and I recall frequently having to suppress a hint of irritation when commissioning obits of academics. All too often the great authority on the other end of the line would explain that, yes, no, alas he couldn't help because he didn't know the last ten years of the deceased's work. "Well, if you don't do the piece," I found myself replying one occasion, "then I will; and I had never heard of your man before lunch".

The Obits Desk relies on a variety of sources for news of a death. They include calls from our own News Desk and reports carried by the international news agencies. There are the Telegraph's own classified death notices as well as the editorial columns of our rivals at home and abroad. We also note what appears on the Internet, though anything there requires checking. And we also receive calls from families and friends. A former racing correspondent was in the habit of sending us useful letters, saying who looked peaky at Newmarket; who had failed to appear because he had just had a leg off; who had suffered a second bout of pneumonia this year.

The presiding genius of the modern obituary is, of course, Hugh Massingberd. It was he who recognised the potential for obituaries in a less respectful age after seeing Roy Dotrice's one-man show about the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey, author of the classic Brief Lives. But Hugh had to wait for the opportunity to demonstrate what an obituaries column under his guidance could offer: shrewd, authoritative, anecdotal personal sketches modelled, whenever possible, on the example of the master, P. G. Wodehouse. He made his first approach to the Telegraph when the Times had ceased production for a considerable time in the late 1970s, but was told that it would be "unshporting to kick a man when he'sh down." As so often in newspapers, what was considered beyond the pale by one Editor became the flavour of the month under his successor. Max Hastings hired Hugh. But although Hugh had wide writing experience and a vast, sometimes embarrassing knowledge of great families as a former Editor of Burke's Peerage, he had never worked for a newspaper. So Max plucked me from a very comfortable billet as assistant literary editor, saying that it would be my job to show him how the Telegraph worked.

Although I did not appreciate it, this was a good moment for me and a significant moment for Fleet Street, since the boom in obituaries was to be its last flowering before national newspapers departed for other districts of London. The Times had caused a flurry of comment by publishing some spicy items, such as an obit of Sir Robert Helpmann, which identified him as a "prosletysing homosexual". But it then settled back into stuffy rectitude, so that not long afterwards its obits editor called the new Telegraph section "a graveyard gossip column". Rather flattering! There also came the added keenness of competition when the Independent and the Guardian started their obits sections.

Hastings decided, I think rightly, that there should be no bylines in the column. Although personal assessments can be of great value, there is a tendency for those who pen signed pieces to write for widows and also to show off, so that an inordinate amount of space can be devoted to recalling the important work that the writer and the deceased did when they were both at a certain African university in the 1950s. Such considerations were of no interest to the Telegraph until Conrad Black took control. The Berry family, who owned the paper from the 1920s until the mid-1980s, were firmly of the opinion that nobody was interested in people once they were dead. Hugh Massingberd's estimable predecessor, who rejoiced in the name of Augustus Tilley, had been told when he was appointed obituary reporter by the news editor that his job was do those obits which had to be done because their subjects' death was news, but that he was to keep as much out of the paper as he decently could. "Always bring a book into the office with you," was Gus's sage advice to Hugh and myself in the few months before his retirement. I had not liked the idea of being sent to help Hugh one bit. Well, everyone knew that obituaries was a dead end job, didn't they?

It also became clear that the task was not easy. Once we had two columns to fill every day with very little information, except for what could be found in the office's yellowing cuttings files, the slog proved gruelling. The irony, for me, was that although I had taken the job reluctantly, I did it for only about a week before realising that I wanted to do nothing else for the rest of my journalistic career. I must have told somebody, because I was soon sent off to do to her jobs, such as letters editor, editor of the Peterborough column and then letters editor again for some dozen further years. But, throughout this time, I remained true to my greatest love, obituaries.

Why? Well, I'm sure that I don't need to tell you that it fulfils Pope's adage that the study of Mankind is Man. It gives one the chance to tell the story of a unique individual, drawing attention to his achievements, experiences and weaknesses, and sometimes even to produce a first draft of history. If the results can prove embarrassing on occasion, the reply to those who trot out the old saw Nil nisi bonum (say nothing unless good) is that we love our subjects for their faults.

Obituary writing certainly makes one more understanding of human frailty. For me, the most satisfying part of the job for me lies not in writing about the famous, but about those whose names mean nothing to the public. One can look back and think, if I hadn't done that person's obit he would be totally forgotten in a few years when his contemporaries had passed from the scene and his grandchildren cannot remember clearly what they were told. This particularly applies to our service obituaries. The Telegraph has always been very interested in the activities of the Armed Forces, as we particularly appreciate today, when we celebrate the sixty-first anniverary of D-Day. But the paper never considered it necessary to record information systematically. This was, as one obituarist remarked when discussing an American architect's wartime career, because "they all did that." But by the late 1980s, when he said this to me, it was clear that, while we will always need servicemen, we are unlikely to have almost two entire generations primarily devoted to fighting our enemies.

The original idea was that Hugh and I would commission reporters in the newsroom to write any obits we did not do ourselves. It soon became clear that few reporters had either the interest or the time to help; they were trained to reproduce the last four news stories in the cuttings file and were not very interested in presenting a whole life. So we began recruiting specialists, whose numbers grew as it became clear that this innovation, which had been all but despised by the news side of the paper, had become one of its strongest selling points. Today, we have an air obituarist, a naval obituarist, four army experts - two for officers, one for other ranks, one for Canadians - and also one for clandestine operations; the specialist Indian Army man, I'm sorry to say, has died, and his work is done with the senior army obituarist.

In addition, we have a political obituarist, a literary obituarist, an Anglican obituarist, another for Roman Catholic bishops, a fine man in Australia. There are also specialists in toffs, cops, climbers, sportsmen, stage actors, opera singers, composers, and many more. Some are activated once every two years, others can be busy every day of some weeks. And we have a team in the office, who write many pieces and edit the copy coming into the office, which can range from the immaculate to the verge of illiteracy.

All would agree that one of the great delights of the job is the surprises it can provide. When the silent film star Pola Negri died in 1987 we found an ancient piece of copy, written in 1931. The author was a film critic who by then had been dead for 30 years. It described how Negri had arrived at Rudolph Valentino's funeral, dressed in black, attended by a doctor and nurses all in white, and had thrown herself on the coffin because she had nothing else to live for. The piece was well done. But it had to be updated to explain how her career languished with the advent of talkies because her Polish accent was almost incomprehensible; to recount the ludicrous stories about how Hitler supposedly considered marrying her; and to record how she arrived in an unenthusiastic New York in 1941 without a visa. I mentioned a couple of poor film appearances in later life and added a snippet from the news agency report of her death, which described how two doctors stood by her bed wondering at this strange creature in her nineties, who still made up her face every day. She then rose up to declare, "I was the greatest film star of them all."

For long I told people this story of our oldest obit, but about five or six year ago, we found another old piece, written at the same time as Pola Negri's. It was about Lord Granville of Eye, a former Liberal MP who turned out to be the last survivor of 800 Australian light horesemen who captured a Turkish stronghold at Beersheba in Palestine during the First World War; he had been long been out of the news but had recently attracted attention on what he thought was his ninety-ninth birthday when the Queen sent him a telegram congratulating him on reaching one hundred.

We are always suspicious of any claim that somebody is the oldest, the youngest or the last. The number of people who were supposedly in the last cavalry charge are legion. Usually the claim is made in relation to the First World War. But the last charge was probably that of the Middlesex Yeomanry in Syria in 1941. It was against our hereditary enemy, the French. There is also the possibility that new information will emerge after an obit has appeared. I remember a nice young man, who was one of our news sub-editors, coming up to Hugh Massingberd to thank him for the nice piece on his father. "We didn't know that he was an actor," the son continued. "In fact, we didn't know that he had another family."

When we started out, Hugh and I had the idea that we should have an advance obit waiting for every important figure over the age of 55. Everybody? That's quite an order. In fact, it's an impossible one. Some of the thousands have written in advance will have to be totally recast. I am uneasily aware of a now former Canadian prime minister, whom I have described as a significant politician who never achieved that high office; I will now have to add how disappointing he turned out to be when he did.

If we don't have something ready, or have an expert on hand when a death occurs we are open to suggestions. Sometimes people send in accounts of themselves in advance; but I'm sorry to say that they don't always seem worth running when they die. Families, friends, those who have known a deceased or his field ring. Sometimes they supply us with a perfect piece, sometimes an imperfect piece because there is quite a lot they don't know about the loved one. Sometimes they send just notes or supply a list of telephone numbers.

Two things about journalism need to be remembered. One is that requirements vary according what other material is around at one time. The other is that any contribution has to be interesting. If you are a lawyer, a civil servant, a businessman, then somebody somewhere is being paid to read what you write. But nobody needs to read a journalist. Our obits have a clear formula, which consists of putting the most important points about a subject at the beginning of a piece. That done, we then double back to the beginning of a life, starting with the full set of Christian names, date of birth, schooling and perhaps any youthful peccadilloes such as causing a fatal accident on the sports field or coming up before the bench on a drink-driving charge.

The future for obituaries? Well there is no sign of them losing their popularity. And, I'm glad to say that there is no likelihood of our running out of military subjects; I only did the last survivor of the Boer War twelve years ago, when Private George Ives of the Imperial Yeomanry was 111. There are enough veterans of the Second World War to keep me busy however long I might continue to work; and there are some splendid stories attached to those who served in the Armed Forces after the Second World War. We did an obit last year of an Australian admiral who was mentioned in despatches in the first Gulf War; and there is now a young soldier in his early twenties who won a VC in Iraq.

Nevertheless, there are some clouds on the horizon for obituarists. People are undoubtedly much more litigious than they were in 1986, and the cost of pictures in the hands of professional agencies is rocketing. I would like to conclude by telling you my personal nightmare: The phone rings. The voice, belonging to somebody I know, is angry and loquacious. I listen, with gritted teeth, then finally reply: "You're supposed to be dead."

David Twiston Davies is Chief Obituary Writer of The Daily Telegraph.

I feel a bit of a poseur for being here, because I’m the author of two books which probably, by rights, shouldn’t be called biographies at all. My first was of a man whose life was largely a series of inventions by other people, most of whom thought he was something close to the devil. My second biography is of a man whose identity is still a mystery. The first book originally had no index, because not much in it seemed reputable enough to pin down, and I tended to think of it as a strange dream rather than a book. The second book always had an index, but---and I think this may possibly be a first for a biography---it didn’t include my subject, because at the end of 550 pages I still had no idea who he was.

Yet both these characters are important. In fact, they changed history, or might have changed it. My first subject, Pontius Pilate, was the man most responsible---if any one man can be held responsible---for crucifying Christ. If you take the Christian view, he’s the vital cog in the giant machine of divine redemption, and his whole life is worth writing just for that one day when he threatens, out of sheer bolshiness, to jam up the works. My second subject, the 15th century Pretender known to history as “Perkin Warbeck”---and to many contemporaries as “Richard Duke of York”, the younger of the Princes in the Tower---may have been the rightful king of England, and certainly behaved as though he was for a decade or so round the courts of Europe. He would have changed history too, if just one of his three invasions of England had succeeded. (Most obviously, there would have been no Tudors, and David Starkey would have been out of a job).

So these characters have great lives to trace; but we know almost nothing about them. We have the tiniest amount of evidence about what either of these men did, and we have no clue at all as to what was going on in their heads. A sensible biographer would conclude---indeed, all biographers up to now have concluded---that it’s not worth trying to reconstruct characters who have faded so completely. To me, perhaps because I’m not sensible, that’s a challenge.

I had to work, though, bereft of some very fundamental things. For example, names. “Pontius Pilate” seems firm enough, but it’s only the last two-thirds of a name, and to my mind the most interesting part is exactly the bit that’s disappeared: the praenomen, whether Marcus or Lucius or whatever it was. One of the very few bits of physical evidence we have for Pilate is a dedication stone that bears his name, but as bad luck would have it it’s chipped, just where that telltale initial would be; so we will probably never know the name his mother or his friends or his lovers called him by. There would be a whole new depth to his biography, if only we knew that name. But alas.

As for my fifteenth century Pretender, “Perkin Warbeck”, so called, he resisted any name I pinned on him---perhaps particularly that one---and in the end I seriously wondered whether he knew who he was himself. I had to write the book, in the end, with his name changing as supporters or enemies observed him, and being careful myself never to put a definite narrator’s label on him. And that was an interesting experience. “Perkin” and “Richard” seemed to be quite different people, moving in different ways in the world, although in fact they were not---they were one elegant, rather squeamish, princely young man, whose behaviour did not change, whatever he was called. Not much luck with names, then. What else did I really need to write the lives of these characters? Well, a face would be nice. And a date and place of birth, and some notion of upbringing, would be useful, too. I’m a firm believer in nature rather than nurture---I believe in a rather Platonic way that we come into the world with our dispositions and talents all there already, so that our childhood background and upbringing are relatively unimportant. (My experience with “Perkin” rather confirmed me in this view, that I was dealing with an unchanging, essential soul here, on which other people were loading their assumptions.) But some background indicators would be welcome, all the same. And then---well, it would be great to have a few personal documents, just a note or two, nothing extravagant. Dream on!

I don’t know which of my subjects was the more frustrating in all these respects, but I’ll start with Pilate. There’s no face for him. Or rather, there’s a multiplicity of faces, from early Christian murals to Michael Palin of Monty Python, and that in itself began to shape the way I wrote the biography. For it soon became clear that an awful lot of people sympathised with Pilate, or felt they knew him (one man said to me: “I’ve always felt he went to Radley”). In a curious way, he is not a figure fixed in history at all. He is Everyman. You can put him in a suit as well as in a toga, and his dilemma would be the same: whether to recognise God, whether to crucify a man who might be God, whether to pit his free will (assuming he had free will) against the giant hand of Fate bearing down on him. In Christian terms, God looks Pilate directly in the face, and he can’t cope. As Tony Blair once put it, “The fascinating thing about Pilate is not that he was a bad man, but that he was so nearly a good man.” And I agree.

How could I reconstruct him? I had a few verses of the New Testament (not a very reliable source), some chapters in the Jewish first-century historians, that dedicatory stone, and a handful of coins. I could learn something from all this, of course. The dedicatory stone tells me that he liked to be called “prefect” rather than “procurator”, and so saw himself as a soldier first and an administrator second; the coins, which carry images of sacred objects used in Roman sacrifices, show he couldn’t have cared less about offending the Jews. But all the same, it’s extremely slender stuff to go on. It almost made me cry to think that Pilate would have written up reports to go back to Rome every day, and not one of them has survived.

What about his background? We have a beginning, vaguely: we know that the Pontii, his tribe, were Samnites from the hills south of Rome, which means that his family had been enslaved perhaps only two generations before, and also that he would have spoken with an accent that sounded to Romans rather like Yorkshire to us. We can also be reasonably sure that he fought in the disastrous German campaign, the Roman equivalent of Vietnam. So there, right away, are two reasons for a large chip on his shoulder, which may account for some of Pilate’s brutal and bad-tempered behaviour once he was sent to Judea. It’s speculation, of course; he may have been bad-tempered just because he had raging headaches, like the excellent Pilate in Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”. But at least it’s possible to do a small amount of what biographers are meant to do, and glean some of his character from his background.

On the other hand, IS that his background? Plenty of people down the centuries have given him another one. If you visit the village of Fortingall in Scotland, you’ll find a giant yew tree under which Pilate is supposed to have played as a child, when his father was doing service on Hadrian’s wall. If you go to the museum of Forscheim near Mainz, in Germany, you’ll find the red trousers Pilate used to wear when he was growing up in the German forests. In fact, through the centuries, dozens of Pilates have been invented. Many of them are ghosts who still wander round the mountain regions of Europe. On Mount Pilatus itself, outside Lucerne, the governor strolls round the shores of a grim little lake taking note of the names of tourists, which he will then pass on to the devil. In other places he sits on a rock, endlessly washing his hands, or takes the shape of a bull or a bittern. He’s blamed for rough water, bad fishing, traumatised cattle and thunderstorms.

Since these stories are clearly rubbish, shouldn’t they just be disregarded? I didn’t think so, because it seemed to me they’ve become a part of what Pilate is. As Christ’s executioner, he was so important to the story of man’s redemption that his life could not be left alone. The yawning gap where Pilate’s childhood, youth and early career should have been had to be filled in, in order to make him a fully-fledged character by the time of his fateful meeting with Jesus. And he could be rewritten endlessly, to suit the mood of the times. His dilemma, in fact, had become his life, and it has been constantly replayed in different forms through history. So that was the way I wrote the biography, rightly or wrongly: as a collage of Pilate through the centuries, with fate, free will and God as his permanent antagonists. And though it may seem rather bizarre, out of all this interweaving one man sometimes seemed to emerge, like a rather brooding hologram.

Next let’s consider Perkin, or the Great Pretender: certainly the greatest we’ve had in England. Writing his life should have been a little easier, in principle. To begin with, I did have a face. His portrait was drawn in about 1493 or 1494, in Brabant, when he was about 20, and in the very middle of his public political career. It shows him as a real glass of fashion and mould of form; the Botticelli angel look, the hottest look there was in the 1490s. He’s draped in gold chains, and his clothes are cloth of gold and cloth of silver. He’s a prince; he even holds his head at the royal angle, benevolently and rather dreamily listening to his subjects. And, as people noticed at the time, the portrait shows he was extremely like Edward IV, his supposed father. He had the same nose, same mouth, same chin, same general shape of the face. And, in saying that, I’m obviously seeing exactly what the portrait was drawn to make me see. I’ve fallen for his argument.

I can’t tell you how many hours I spent staring at his face. I was interrogating him, almost shouting at him to come clean with me. It seemed my only sure route to understanding him. But in the end I still couldn’t read him. His eyes looked away. I couldn’t get closer to the overwhelming question about him: whether the blood coursing under that skin was really royal and Plantagenet, as he said it was, or just boatman’s blood from the banks of the Scheldt in Tournai.

In short, if I was going to solve the mystery of this character, I needed a lot more evidence about him. But there was almost none. I found this astonishing. Here we were in the 1490s, 15 centuries on from Pilate, with America almost on the map, with diplomatic despatches flying to and fro across Europe, and with the brand-new printing presses humming. People in those days felt they were drowning in information and “new media”, just as we do now. But what first-hand information do we have about this young man? Half a dozen recorded sightings; two, perhaps three, snatches of conversation; two letters and a will, all signed as Richard of course; and a few coins from a batch that were minted for him in Flanders before his first invasion of England.

Again, these things can give you little clues to the character: he had very good handwriting for a prince, perhaps too good; and he covered his coins with Yorkist symbols, possibly too many. But these are pretty slim pickings for anyone attempting to write his life. The letters, by the way, are political appeals; they contain nothing of his private thoughts, nothing to do with self or feelings, because we are too early in history for that sort of navel-gazing. Even the Pastons, in all their letters, very rarely express any interest in what we might call their inner selves. They’re unrelentingly straightforward, practical and businesslike. So my fifteenth century prince, or imposter, is there, but he’s not there. In the end he seemed to be a sort of star, a centre of fascination round which an awful lot of European politics was revolving in the 1490s, but who was himself almost invisible through the dazzle.

His background, too, remained a mystery. It is true that he agreed, after he surrendered to Henry VII in 1497, that he was just a boatman’s boy, and signed a confession that said so. But a great many things don’t hang together in this “agreement”, as it was actually called; and though plenty of historians have had no trouble swallowing the official story, I can’t digest it myself. Not least, it’s clear that neither the Pretender, nor Henry, nor much of Europe, believed what the confession said. Clarification isn’t helped by the fact that the entire archive of Tournai, where he was supposed to have grown up, was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1943. But the truth remains that we have no piece of evidence that tells us conclusively who he was. So this young man may have been born on the docks of a provincial town, as Henry VII insisted, or in a royal palace on the borders of Wales, or in neither place. But what a difference a birthplace makes! If he was the prince, his story was one of constant, tragic rejection by his own people. If he was the boatman’s boy from Tournai, he was engaged in the most wonderful adventure, which in its best moments took him to undreamt-of heights of celebrity, opulence and love. And, though the DNB may tell you differently, we still can’t say for certain which persona was true.

At one point, I decided to indulge in what Antonia Fraser calls “optical research”: visiting the places where my hero had been, and trying to summon his ghost from the landscapes and streets. It wasn’t very useful, I have to say. I took one crazy ride on the number 15 bus along the Strand, seeing if I could reproduce the public rides the Pretender made as Henry’s prisoner from the Palace of Westminster to the Tower; but of course, it’s now just office blocks and sandwich bars. I also went to the site where his parents are supposed to have lived, if he was Perkin, on the old docks at Tournai. It is now a burger bar; so I bought that great Belgian dish, frites and mayonnaise, and ate it beside the grey waters of the Scheldt, and mused under the rain. But it didn’t help, except to confirm my conviction that Tournai had played very little part in his life.

By this time I was already convinced that my biography of this young man could not be “normal”. Since nothing about this life was straightforward, but was shot through with mendacity and illusion on every side, I would have to get deep into the way people in the 1490s saw and judged the world around them. In other words, I’d have to reconstruct that whole shifting, showy, highly-coloured world, in order to judge my Pretender against it. As in Pilate, I wanted to weave a fabric out of which he could emerge. This policy made my book a bit long, as several critics have kindly pointed out. But it was engaged in a large task.

And so, after all these wild excursions, what next? There’s a strange coda to this tale. My new subject is the poet Shelley; and you might well wonder why. He’s not in the least unknown, nor, heaven help us, unwritten about. Nor do we lack evidence of his mind and thought and slightest feeling in every shape and form and stage of development, millions upon millions of words. Coming to Shelley, after Pilate and Perkin, I felt like a starving man who’s suddenly let loose in the food hall at Harrod’s.

I tried really hard not to write about him. I argued with myself for two years and, on bad days, I’m still arguing. For a while I thought I might try to restrict myself to a biography of the West Wind, but there’s a certain lack of information about the West Wind that stumped even me, in the end. I tried Hermes and Orpheus…you can see the way my mind was tending. But it was no good; I was stuck, and also well aware that the world needs another biography of Shelley like it needs a hole in the head.

On the other hand, yet again, this book isn’t really a biography in the strict sense. I don’t want to relate the daily or monthly details of a life---which in Shelley’s case, anyway, need no new relating---as much as to try to catch a soul. Never having had many “life details” to work with, I’ve always tended to float instead round the personality, real or perceived. And the human soul is a most extraordinarily elusive thing. People hide themselves, even when they appear to be laying their hearts bare. They give themselves all kinds of characters and personas which have little to do with the daily lives they appear to be leading. In the case of poets in particular, they may barely be in the world at all, in any sense that matters to them. “The poet and the man are two different natures”---and I don’t need to tell you who said that. In the case of Pilate and Perkin, I found myself building worlds round my subjects in order to bring them into view. With Shelley, I find myself excavating and prospecting, trying to get to him, in the extraordinary worlds he has built himself. And I’m sure the task of uncovering this soul is going to be as hard as any I have faced before.

In my mind there was a straight route from being a historian to becoming the publisher of the Life & Times series, which carries the presumptuous subtitle “Modern Library of Biography”. Let me try to explain why: the biography as a genre has a long history and tradition. It can well claim to be as ancient as any other written form. In German academia, however, it is considered the “Bastard der Wissenschaften” – zu populaer-wissenschaftlich fuer die Historiker, nicht literarisch genug fuer die Germanisten. For me personally, however, it is the obvious link between being a historian and a journalist, the two professions I tried my hand at before going into publishing; so when I ventured out of the Ivory Tower and became what my father condescendingly called “ein Tintenbube” it was the written interview, the portrait, the mini-biography, which not only tells something about the person interviewed, but also something about his or her background, which I liked writing the most. I never got enough room, though, in the papers I worked for, to do justice to the interviewees and it was out of this frustration that I asked for a year’s sabbatical – the term definitely borrowed from my time in the Ivory Tower and therefore completely misunderstood by my Editor-in-Chief – to write my first book “Toechter Asiens”, a collection of biographical essays on female political leaders in South Asia, who are all daughters of famous fathers. I never went back to being a gainfully-employed foreign-editor of a news magazine.

With a detour via being the publisher of Prospect and writing book number 2 (yes, you guessed correctly; another biography) I became commissioning editor at a famous publishing house, founded by two ladies in the late 40s, which had a long and distinguished tradition of translating and publishing World class literature – something very rare in the English book market. It was an honour to work for the Harvill Press, despite the fact it was struggling as so many independent publishing houses do, because of Harvill’s distinguished backlist of wonderful titles and Nobel-Prize winning authors.

Being responsible for all German and Dutch titles in translation published by Harvill – isn’t this a wonderfully idiosyncratic British combination? – it was during that time that I was working with a now very sadly missed author WG Sebald on Vertigo. Well, actually I was not so much working with him but pleading with him to let Harvill publish his next book(s). His agent had just brokered a phenomenal deal for him, which meant that after having published three books by Professor Sebald and having built his reputation in the English language market, Harvill had been outbid in an auction for the translation licence and Sebald’s next (and as it turned out final) book Austerlitz was going to be published by one of the big houses, which was able to pay much bigger advances to its authors. All Harvill could offer Professor Sebald at the time, was a lot of publishing tlc, a bi-lingual editor, who had just found him a new translator, who he was very happy with (not an easy thing to do as he was the founder of the Institute of Literary Translation). I remember that I gave up very quickly trying to persuade him to forego a six figure advance in favour of my dimples and we started talking about publishing in general and that the future of small, independent publishers depended on discovering a niche, on bringing something “new” to the ever more crowded market. Professor Sebald drew my attention to a series of short, well-researched, yet readable biographers, known as the “Rowohlt Monographien”. He was longing for a similar series to be available in English, which could become required reading for his first year comparative literature students. I tried very hard to persuade my boss to create this new series, but his mind was sadly already occupied with the fight for survival as an independent publisher, a fight which he lost afterwards when Harvill was bought by Random House.

Again I was presumptuous enough to think that I could do better myself and set out on my own. I knew (or at least I thought I did) that it would be risky, but I had a vision: to select from the vast Rowohlt Monographien series, which I knew well from my school days, those which I thought would work in the English language market and publish them myself. The first steps seemed deceptively easy and successful. I was able to secure the English language licence for Sebastian Haffner’s brilliant if short CHURCHILL biography, which had laid dormant (and undiscovered by Haffner’s English publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicholson), found a wonderful translator in John Brownjohn and a great scholar in my friend Peter Hennessy to write the introduction. The book was launched together with Professor Martin Geck’s BEETHOVEN at a concert, which Haus put on at St John’s Smith Square.

That was a little over two years ago. What have I learned in these two years? That accountants are like plumbers (calling their predecessors ‘cowboys’ and charging exorbitant amounts to ‘fix’ the mess left behind by them). That consultants should be shot on sight. That publishers need to know more about SAGE and Excel than Word or Quark. That sales reps should be paid only a commission and that I should have rented a basement office in Pimlico and started publishing from there!

Instead, the international corporate HQ of Haus Publishing Limited is in the upstairs study of my parents’ Chelsea flat and every new supplier charges Chelsea prices, i.e. puts a naught on their quote when they read the postcode. Haus Publishing consist of my editorial director (a very fine and patient friend, I brought with me from Harvill) and four computers, one of them occupied by a long line of “free lancers”, who come in when they can spare the time and I the money. My guest-room has been turned into a mini-office for my faithful Peruvian help, who took accounting classes and now runs the office and keeps the books – except for salaries, PAYE and NIC, which are calculated by a firm in Wales. This team was recently joined by a third member, who brings 20 years of experience in pr with her. The whole team is made up of multi-taskers, i.e. when the catalogue has to be mailed the publisher joins the editorial director, the public relations manager and the office manager sitting on the floor stuffing envelopes. This is possible in the UK – it would be impossible in Germany: Regulations would limit my endeavours at every step of the way. It would be impossible to run a publishing house with even three employees in Germany, because the “Lohnkosten” would be impossible to meet on the small profit margin which is left to be publisher at the end of the day (ie after trade-discounts, plant costs and royalties are paid to name just a few items in the calculation which is done for each book).

It takes about a year from commissioning a book to its publication. I am very proud that Haus now not only translates titles from the Rowohlt Monograph series, but it also commissions new titles and I am even more proud that authors (and their greedy agents) now come to me with ideas and proposals. A deadline is agreed (and rarely kept!), the manuscript has to be edited, re-edited, pictures have to be found at an affordable price, text and integrated pictures have to be typeset, proof-read, and – because I have set very high standards for the Life & Times series – an index has to be compiled.

I also created a rod, which I am now beating myself with: I invented a chronology in the image of the “Kulturfahrplan”, which sets the life of the individual and protagonist of the biography in the context of his or her time – hence the name of the series. And I adopted a layout, which is very reminiscent of a layout of a new magazine. I now have in my books what we call sidebars inserted in the text and set in a different colour (in most cases red), which take the place of footnotes, glossary terms and other additional information, which would interrupt the flow of the main text. From the beginning I knew I had to offer something new – well this is new: the Life & Times series must not only tell the story of the subject portrayed and tell that story in an accessible way (suitable for students and the general reader), but also the story should be presented in an innovative way, a layout that “catches your eye”, illustrated in colour and printed on good paper (115gms coated art paper) and sold at an affordable price. I think it is more interesting to read the story of somebody outstanding, if it is set against the background of his or her times, if you not only get the life story but also an introduction into the surroundings and atmosphere they lived in and were formed by. And then there is something else, which is different “new” about Life & Times biographies: they are short!

Disraeli said “Read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory”.

Let me tell you some of my thoughts on biography in general. There are two ways of writing a biography: the “literary” one that portrays a person by trying to read his or her mind and by being as explicit as possible about all private peccadilloes, seeing as a key object the enchantment of the subject’s reputation. This begs the trend of school biography writing influenced by the sociology of the so-called post-modern world, lacking in imaginative insights and substituting them with “pure information” – and lots of it! – scholarly monuments, to be critically acclaimed and I suspect skimmed by us lesser mortals. They are all works of art, written by modern biographers with ambition and serious (academic) credentials and are very rarely short ones. This is not meant to denigrate these biographers – please, no misunderstandings! The boom of the last 20 years has done an enormous amount for the quality of the research which goes into biographies, and there is no doubt in my mind that the best half a dozen published each year compare favourably with all but a handful published a generation ago. Both scholarship and scholarly apparatus of the contemporary biography writer have improved, source-based data are now more readily available. The publishing idea behind these books is to convince the serious intellectual as well as the ambitious or interested reader to place a biography on his/her reading list, their list of Christmas presents (where it may be even more desirable when the cover design is artful and appealing) or even on their coffee table. But will this trend continue indefinitely as our pockets get deeper and on the other hand the appetite for big, solid meticulously researched non-fiction grows? Common sense suggests this. “The reader” was always given the conservatism. As he has been reading biographies since the earliest of times, whether you look to Hittite and Chinese inscriptions as the predecessors of modern biographies or start with Plutarch, writing about the lives of heroes and villains, I think it is a fair assumption that the biography is here to stay. But in what form? Where is the trend heading?

I think, however, there is a new trend which is heading away from the Victorian “tome” and towards the sleeker version of this ever-popular genre, called biography. A good example is the publishing phenomenon, which shook the biography scene and has changed it beyond recognition: Longitude which despite its name was anything by a long biography.

Without committing publishing blasphemy I think there are only very few writers such as Roy Jenkins, Nicholas Shakespeare or Antonia Fraser, who should really be allowed to write “long”. Too many writers try to illuminate every hidden corner of their subject’s life and try to follow their patron Saint Michael Holroyd, whose intense scrutiny of George Bernard Shaw yielded four volumes and 2,000 pages from a decade’s hard labour. Which is wonderful, so long as readers of such far-from-brief lives can match his highest standards of genteel leisure and unearned income. The trouble with the boom in heavyweight biography is that it has coincided with a fragmentation of shared public knowledge; not to mention a feeling of time-famine in modern society. As the pace of change accelerates in society and education, fewer and fewer adults will know what “every school child” allegedly once did. That was what Professor Sebald meant, when he planted the idea of the Life & Times series in my head. These biographers are meant as little “Kultur Bausteine”, which placed together will build a Haus of our common culture, but are meant for an era of time-famine.

Biographies in general appeal to people who get impatient with mere fiction – perhaps it is Protestant self-improvement and voyeurism wrapped into one – as one brilliant and now sadly departed biographer, Ben Pimlott put it, but there is no doubt about it: Biography is popular.

My rant against the Victorian tome and the academic monument is not a plea for a return to the “evocative” or “atmospheric” biography, placing intuition above research, but the general reader does not need 500 endnotes or endless pages of references. He or she wants to read books, where every telling phrase and every word counts. That is why Sebastian Haffner’s CHURCHILL can withstand every comparison with much longer biographies or as the Times Literary Supplement said in the review of the first biography in the Life & Times series: ‘One of the most brilliant things of any length ever written about Churchill’. These are the kind of books I set out to publish and I have become a very strict task-master of my authors. The scope of biographical writing in skilled hands and the insight it can offer into the human condition and into the times the individual subject matter lived in, is limitless and publishing these kind of biographies is very exciting.

Biography operates within tight rules: attention to accuracy and recognition that there is no such thing as a “true” biography.

Let me quote from Ben Pimlott’s last essay: “However scrupulous the research, nobody has access to another’s soul, and the character on the page is the author’s unique creation. One aspect of creativity is the subject-in-context and it is this that makes the complaint [against biographies] about over-emphasizing the role of the individual so off-beam. Indeed, far from underplaying social factors, the good biography is flexible, making unexpected connections across periods of time and including unexpected essays on topics which but for the involvement of the subject, might never get written about at all”.

That is just what I do intend to achieve with the sidebars, giving contextual information about situation and characters referred to in the text. Or what was the reason for devising the format of our chronologies in order to inform the reader what happens simultaneously in history and culture. In other words the Life & Times series tries to live up the high standards set by the master biographer Pimlott, without inundating the general reader with too much information. The great artists amongst the biographers are selective. That selection makes their work unique and readable. That selection is like the recognizable brushstrokes of a painter and that is also what a good biography can be compared to: a good portrait. It shows a vivid likeness in his or her milieu and says something about his or her philosophy of life. It does ask questions of the viewer as well as answering them from the very personal point of view of the artist, the great biography writer.

To conclude, you might ask me, how I choose my subject matters. They should have shaped the time they lived in, made a unique contribution to history. Ann anniversary is always a good prompt for a new biography to be published. But the main prerequisite for getting onto the Life & Times list is that you have to dead. The most popular book I ever commissioned and which is now making Random House even richer was a novel by Audrey Kurkov. It is a very black, but brilliantly funny portrait of post-communist Ukraine, where a starving author accepts the offer from a newspaper to write obituaries about the new movers and shakers of the new society. The job pays well and keeps him and his pet penguin well fed. The only problem, he confesses to a new-found buddy over several vodkas they consume sitting around the kitchen table, with Micha, the penguin in attendance, the only problem is that these new movers and shakers are very much alive. Our author’s new friend asks him to identify one obit he has written and is particularly proud of, but which is gathering dust in the drawer of the new paper editor. The next morning the individual is found dead and Micha, the Penguin …..I am not going to spin the story any further. Please read it yourself.

I hope you can understand now that I prefer to publish biographies of dead people. I hope I can find more dead people, whose story will interest my readers and that I will continue to be lucky enough to find authors to write them according to my principles of the Life & Times series.

It’s at this point of a dinner, when the speaker is introduced, that I usually relax. I’ve attended a fair amount of literary lunches and dinners where our authors have been the guest speakers. I guess it’s only fair that I’ll now experience what they’re going through.

LITERARY DINNERS

Literary dinners are just one of the ways we promote books. The organisers will have invited two or three writers who are expected to give an entertaining talk after the meal. And then hope to sell lots of books afterwards. But there’s always the risk that one author will do so much better than the others – which is all right if it’s your author.

Some years ago I attended a literary dinner in Birmingham with John Suchet who had written a novel about Beethoven. Among the other guest speakers was Harry Secombe. Fortunately for John, they decided to ask Secombe to speak last. All through the dinner, Harry was scribbling notes on various bits of paper, and seemed to be rather agitated.

When he stood up to speak, he chucked the papers aside, spoke for a few minutes, and then burst into song. When he finished, everyone rose as one, and the applause almost took the roof off. The queue for Secombe’s book was definitely the longest, but I think the other authors agreed that he had deserved it.

INTRODUCTION TO PUBLICITY

This is the first occasion I have given a talk about my work in publicity, and I hope by the end you will have some idea about how we go about promoting books.

Our primary purpose is to help sell books by using the media to spread the message.

The key to a successful publicity campaign is a wonderful book with lots of angles to interest the media. Every book we publish is sent out for review. We keep in close contact with the literary editors of all the national newspapers and magazines – telling them about the books and when they are going to be published.

However, as you know we can tell them why a book should be reviewed, but we can’t force them to review it.

This means we must look to other ways of getting publicity for new books as we are not only competing with other publishers, but all sections of the entertainment industry.

We start planning our campaigns at least six months ahead of publication. As we publish approximately 30 hardbacks and paperbacks per month, the Marketing department have to be very selective about which ones to earmark for their promotion budget. Publicity is regarded as “free”, so the limits on our activities are not so constrained – but of course, nothing is entirely free.

Some books are publicised by reviews alone, but if authors are willing and able to give up their time to help us, then we can widen our media horizons.

So the first thing to establish is whether or not they are happy to help with publicity. Where possible, we will meet the author well ahead of publication and explore ideas for getting the media’s attention. We’ll discuss what we can use for publicity - perhaps the research, aspects of the book that might be topical around publication, or whether or not they’d be willing to write features.

The national press are looking for topics that will be relevant in next week’s papers – so it helps if the author has something new to say or is an expert in a particular area.

This means that publicising non-fiction books is much easier than fiction – as the focus will be on a definite subject - and therefore easier for the press to make up their minds whether or not it will appeal to their readers.

It also means they don’t have to read the book before making a decision.

Non-fiction books are also more likely to be reviewed, and biographies have a better chance than most other non-fiction subjects.

RADIO

As authors know their subjects well, and are usually pretty articulate, we approach the broadcasting media as well as the press.

Radio is particularly brilliant for books.

BBC Radio 4 buys rights for dramas and readings – and although this is outside my remit in Publicity – these have often boosted sales hugely.

The programmes on this network are excellent – You will be familiar with them - WOMAN’S HOUR, START THE WEEK, MIDWEEK, LOOSE ENDS and EXCESS BAGGAGE - all regularly have authors. And when an author is asked to be a guest on DESERT ISLAND DISCS – we know they have truly ‘arrived.’

The other BBC stations also offer opportunities. On BBC 5 Live the SIMON MAYO programme has a weekly book panel as well as running straight interviews. Radio 2’s DRIVE TIME programme with Johnnie Walker is heard in thousands of cars and kitchens every weekday evening. And on Radio 3, authors can be invited to take part in PRIVATE PASSIONS or NIGHT WAVES.

BBC programmes, particularly Radios 2, 3 and 4 have been running for years, so they have a loyal audience – and even better, their listeners are proven book buyers.

TELEVISION

Television doesn’t offer as many opportunities, but apart from the obvious celebrity books, writers with heart-rending personal stories, or are experts in lifestyle subjects can be on day time television’s RICHARD & JUDY or THIS MORNING. And recently we’ve managed to get authors onto BBC1’S BREAKFAST or GMTV SUNDAY on quite a wide range of topics. PARKINSON and JONATHAN ROSS are only interested in headline names.

BOOKSHOPS and FESTIVALS

Other opportunities to publicise books include public appearances in bookshops – signing sessions for the best-known writers, or talking at evening events. Increasingly literary festivals are attracting great audiences. All of these provide a chance for authors to meet their readers. But the experience can range from the triumphant to the disappointing. Some events are brilliantly planned, while others – and it is not always poor organisation – just don’t attract the crowds.

The major festivals get quite a lot of newspaper and broadcasting attention, and are very well attended. They include the CHELTENHAM LITERARY FESTIVAL in October, the HAY FESTIVAL in early June or the EDINBURGH BOOK FESTIVAL in August. There are about 100 other festivals to which authors could be invited running throughout the year in Britain alone.

If you were to measure success in terms of sales, then the festival circuit wouldn’t score very high – except for the biggest-selling authors. However, they are an excellent opportunity for writers to meet their public.

And there are other good reasons for going. There is the publicity that festivals create; the chance to talk to a big audiences, and if not big, then you know they are at least committed readers – And if the sales afterwards aren’t that huge, the word-of-mouth potential is strong.

IN THE BEGINNING

I have been working in Publicity for many years, and there have been quite a number of changes since I began. In the 80s, you’d set up a tour for an author, and traipse around the country visiting local radio stations, newspapers, and bookshops. My knowledge of the rail system was very good in those days.

But this meant we could be out of the office for a week or more on one tour alone.

We don’t do such tours any more. For a start the local media have become far more parochial. And we don’t have the budget required for all these train journeys and hotels. Authors still travel, but it will be in response to literary dinner or festival requests. There are exceptions though. Last year Jimmy Greaves went around England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales for a period of 3 and a half months.

BIOGRAPHIES

We spend a lot of time publicising biographies, as we publish a fair range of them. In the last year I have publicised books for:- a high-powered businesswoman, an actor, an American music mogul, an agony aunt, and an ex-boxer.

NICK LEESON

Most of our books are by people who are not very well-known. But publishing a high-profile book is exciting if anxiety-making.

I was looking after the publicity for Rogue Trader– Nick Leeson’s story of how he managed to lose huge amounts of money for Barings. He was locked up in the jail in Singapore when we published the book . His wife, Lisa was corralled into doing the publicity for her husband. It wasn’t an easy time for her. The interviewers’ questions about her husband’s behaviour was was the first time she fully realised how much he had been deceiving her as well as Barings.

NELSON MANDELA

However, we have published successful books without an author. Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom is a good example of this. We decided quite late in the autumn to have a launch party. The Reverend Trevor Huddlestone was invited, and people who would never have wanted to venture inside South Africa House before, were raising glasses to Mandela as we watched a video interview with him.

My moment to meet the great man came a couple of years ago. I was asked by his agent in London whether we would like to arrange a party at South Africa House. We even had a reason for doing so – having sold 1 and a half million copies of his book. But the only time he could spare was between 11 and 11.30am on a Saturday morning. if it had been anyone else - I don’t think that we would have got such a splendid crowd of guests.

He arrived, and at once threw the timetable out of skew, by walking into the centre of the room and shaking hands with the guests. He then gave a wholly engrossing, funny, and profound talk for 25 minutes – Virginia Bottomley was sitting rapt at my feet, and you could have heard a pin drop. Then the High Commissioner read a poem – which lasted about the same length.

When Mandela left he was at least an hour late for his next appointment, but he made time to stop and thank everyone in the kitchen who had been helping at the party.

ROY HATTERSLEY

I have worked on every book we have published by Roy Hattersley, and a number of these have been biographies. He has had great reviews for Blood and Fire – the story of William Booth, who with his wife, Catherine started the Salvation Army, and for John Wesley.

But, no matter how wonderful the reviews for these books, none of them became a best seller. It was the memoirs of his dog which made the top ten for several weeks. No one ever forgets Buster’s Diaries, and newspapers are still keen on following his exploits.

The tour around bookshops and to literary lunches were somewhat fraught for this nervous publicist, because Buster dislikes men in uniform. Roy Hattersley prefers travelling by train, so the guards passing by our seats had to move nimbly out of the way - to avoid Buster hurling himself with an alarming growl at their trouser legs - before being hauled back to his rightful place underneath the seat.

THE PRINCE OF WALES

I also did publicity for Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography of The Prince of Wales. The book was embargoed until the SUNDAY TIMES had run their serial. I had not sent out a single book or press release, so was somewhat amazed to hear RADIO 4 NEWS reporting on the revelations about the marriage which they had picked out of the SUNDAY TIMES, declare that the massive media coverage was due to the publisher’s hype!

MICHAEL WATSON

Every book is a challenge and I love working on ones which offer a variety of opportunities to approach all the media. In May this year, I handled the publicity for Michael Watson. Most people vaguely remembered his fight with Chris Eubank which had left him unconscious at the side of the ring. His story was about his recovery, his remarkable faith, and ended with his triumphant London Marathon walk last year.

Michael wasn’t always easy to understand when speaking, so it was a challenge to get him to focus on some of the best stories in his book – such as his meeting with Mohammed Ali at Bart’s Hospital, complete with a very funny imitation of him. The book got into the SUNDAY TIMES bestseller list, and this was mainly because he was committed to helping us – in spite of the physical effort it caused him.

JOHN McENROE

It’s essential we get full commitment from authors. When you publish a celebrity book it is even more important. Tennis books are notorious for not selling. But John McEnroe was so determined to top the bestseller lists, he gave us ample time for interviews and signing sessions. The result was that Serious got into the top ten in both the hardback and paperback editions.

ANNE ROBINSON

We had acquired the rights to Anne Robinson’s Memoirs of an Unfit Mother about 18 months ahead of the launch of THE WEAKEST LINK on BBC television. That was lucky. But she was exceptionally busy around publication, flying to Los Angeles every other week, and recording for the BBC. But Ms Robinson was set on giving us as much time as possible. Because her star was rising high, I was able to get all the big interviews I wanted.

CLAIRE RAYNER

Claire Rayner was also very hardworking, in spite of having two gammy knees and requiring assistance for every train and plane journey. It didn’t stop her flying up to Edinburgh or Dublin.

The result for both autobiographies was that they got into the top ten of the bestseller lists – a sure way of judging whether or not a publicity campaign has worked.

THE TIPPING POINT

Timing plays a crucial part in a campaign, and no matter how hard you try, it can all come to nought if the time is not right. Some years back, we published a book called The Tipping Point by a young American journalist called Malcolm Gladwell. We invited him to London, and I secured START THE WEEK. I was delighted. Then I got the business producer of Channel 4 NEWS interested, and BBC 5 live’s NICKY CAMPBELL.

I thought that everyone would “get” the premise of the book, which was about why trends or things become popular, and how to get them to that “tipping point”. The Channel 4 News people wanted examples, so I suggested the popularity of Pokemon , the increasing use of mobile phones and – particularly pertinent to our business - the constant bestseller status of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

However, could I get the newspapers interested in interviewing him? Or even the marketing magazines? They didn’t even want him to write features. They just didn’t see that the “tipping point” would enter the language. Although Malcolm Gladwell did quite a lot of local radio interviews, and got a fair number of newspaper reviews – I didn’t feel that the book had the impact I had hoped for.

But his time did come. By the end of the year the book had caught on. CAMPAIGN magazine voted it number 2 in their list of the ten most influential books of 2000.

WORD OF MOUTH

In the end, there are many reasons which contribute to the success of a book’s sales in addition to publishers’ publicity.

I mentioned Captain Corelli – this was probably the first book which indicated the importance of “word of mouth” as a way of encouraging people to read books. The spread of reading groups has fostered this as well.

And then last year, BBC television decided to focus on books.

THE BIG READ

They called their series THE BIG READ. It was always said that television never did anything for books, but the BBC consulted publishers, the book trade, libraries and schools before launching the series, so when it was broadcast – helped by the fact that reading groups have reached their “tipping point” - it was a huge success for all of the books voted as favourite novels.

Other television programmes have now jumped on the bandwagon. RICHARD & JUDY started a book club last spring, which was so successful they had a summer books series. They are so pleased with both, they will do another book club next spring. And there are others: BBC4 have a series called THE BOOK SHOW. There is an ITV one. And Princess Productions are planning to launch one for BBC1 next spring.

All this is very good news for books, and indicates that books are now fashionable in the media.

However, we can’t rely on television to help promote books. They are likely to tire of it and move on to something else. And there are authors enjoying success – without help from television.

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

At the moment, the star on our list is Alexander McCall Smith. People have asked me, why is he so popular? I think one of the reasons is that you can recommend his books to anyone, and know that they will probably enjoy them.

I wish we could do this for other authors – but sometimes overnight success takes years to achieve. McCall Smith had already published over 50 books before he arrived at his best-selling position today.

FINALLY

Publicity may have helped him a little along the way…but only in tandem with everyone in the publishing house – from the book cover designer to the marketing and sales departments.

Publicity alone doesn’t guarantee sales but we are a significant cog in the publishing machine, and when we work well together as a team - we can achieve success for many of the authors on our list.

Thank you Andrew for inviting us here today. I thought I'd call my bit of the discussion WHAT THE PAPERS WANT because it seems to me that authors and publishers - dare I say, even agents - don't always appreciate how different our medium is from yours. You've worked alone and hard - sometimes for many years - researching and writing your book. The subject is dear to you and you envisage your readers absorbed in the world you've created for them. Then one day, your agent or publisher calls to say that they've sold your serial serial rights to the Daily Beast for a considerable sum and, for the moment, this is a cause for general rejoicing.

Months later you open the paper and there is your beautiful book cut to shreds and pieced together like a jigsaw with all the most sensational aspects up at the top underneath a headline which has you reaching for the smelling salts and an only faintly appropriate film still with some scantily clad blonde draped over Paul Newman.

To help you understand what's going on I should explain why we buy so many books for serialisation. First, it's for exclusivity and second it's to project them in the way we know will work for us. We know our readers and we know how to present things to them. Your readers have made an informed choice, gone to a book shop and spent anything from £6.99 to £25. They intend to read your book. Our readers have parted with less than 50p and may only have bought the paper for the football results, to read their horoscope or see what's on tv. Most flick casually through the pages so we need to grab their attention by whatever means we can and that means striking 'read-me' headlines, strong-selling introductions, the most dramatic pictures we can find and plenty of snap, crackle and pop. We need to make the content immediate, exciting and accessible and that invariably means adaptation rather than simple extraction.

Many of you will be aware of John Coldstream's attack on our serialisation of his Dirk Bogarde autobiography. We couldn't be sorrier about this because the last thing we want is unhappy authors. It's for precisely this reason that we show our extracts to authors in advance - we'll always correct factual inaccuracies and we're always ready to discuss changes on nuance or emphasis.

It's particularly ironic that an experienced former newspaperman and an agent well-versed in the ways of serialisation should complain so vociferously. Of all people they might have understood that we were unlikely to be concentrating on Mr. Bogarde's kindnesses to small children when his own biographer describes him as a fantasist on a par with Laurens van der Post.

That said, I don't think nearly enough is done by the publishing industry to prepare authors for the experience of serialisation, especially where mid-market and red-top newspapers are concerned. I particularly remember a most uncomfortable conversation with Doris Lessing's agent after she objected to her serial appearing under the headline - I Left My Babies For The Wilder Shores of Love.

But, we do have happy authors, too. One of the most reluctant to appear in the Daily Mail was Claire Rayner who said she 'cringed' when she heard we'd bought the rights to her book. But in a New Statesman diary after the event she wrote: 'They treated my book extremely well, cut the text sensibly, left in as much as possible of my own style and occasional jokes. They even left in the bits that I expected them to cut - like the way I loathe Tories and am a paid-up Republican.

It's a cliche, but selling your book for serialisation is not dissimilar to selling it to a film company. You are relinquishing some control over how your book is used and the chances are you may not like the result. But there are immense benefits, too.

Newspapers rely on books. We have acres of space to fill and finite resources. Books can provide papers with all the things they're looking for - good writing, original research, big names. For newspapers first serial rights in newsworthy books bring front page splashes, headlines, even increased circulation. This alone we've serialised autobiographies of Lord Brocket, Michael Winner and Sheila Hancock as well as Tom Bower's biography of Gordon Brown. Nasser Hussein is currently running on the sports pages and there's not a section of the paper where books don't play an important role from Femail to Weekend Magazine, News to Features. Not to mention our not one, not two but three daily diaries for amusing snippets about who's writing what about whom.

And newspapers are good for books, too. They provide the means to reach massive numbers of readers. In the case of the Mail on Saturday that's some 8 million people a large proportion of whom fall into the desirable book-buying ABC1 category. Reviews come free. And we pay for serialisations. Anything from a few hundred pounds to tens - even hundreds - of thousand. A full page advertisement in the Daily Mail costs £40,068. A 20 centimetre by 2 column ad on the books pages (that's about one-sixth of a page) costs £15,900. Even in my long ago advertising days (when Babycham was an important brand) editorial space was loosely calculated at around 4 times the value of advertising space. Which means that a lead review (equivalent to roughly one-third of a page) could be said to be worth just over £64,000. Minor serialisations can be as little as one page - major ones as many as twenty. And if you factor in televsion advertising support - a rarity admittedly - then you're adding in at least another quarter of a million pounds and reaching literally millions of potential readers.

Sales figures prove that the Daily Mail really does shift books. In my early days on the paper I was amazed when Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval's Fingerprints of the Gods shifted 6,000 copies on the first day of serialisation. And looking at today's figures I see we've already sold around 1,200 copies of Sheila Hancock. The Mail also provides a wonderful opportunity for an author who would anyway be bought by broadsheet readers to extend his or her audience significantly.

It's true that not all books benefit from serialisation. I don't think Alan Samson and I will ever quite recover from the Anthea Turner experinece (a book for which we, at least - I can't speak for Alan - paid a fortune for sight unseen). We were besieged by indignant letters from our readers and sales of the book were lamentable. And only the Times walked away from the Edwina Currie experience smelling of roses. In the first case I think we at the Mail seriously underestimated Anthea's unpopularity at the time. As for Edwina, she too emerged as being pretty unpopular beyond that one sensational revelation that rocked the nation on the Saturday of theTimes's serialisation.

But by and large there's no escaping the fact that books help papers and papers help books.

 
(This is an edited version of a talk Sally Cline gave at the Biographers’ Club, London. Nov. 7th 2002. based on research for her biography “Zelda Fitzgerald : Her Voice in Paradise”)

I want to discuss firstly how myth and legend affect the lives of biographical subjects involved in the legend. Secondly I shall talk about how legends can skew the facts so that it makes it harder to achieve a balance in one’s research …which seeks to establish several faces rather than the legend’s single face. Thirdly if there is time, I want to look briefly at the treatment meted out to so-called disinterested biographers by the families, the estates or other interested parties (sometimes publishers or agents) intent on preserving the legend.

1stly: How legend affects the lives of people subjected to legendary status.

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald achieved legendary status both as a Jazz Age couple and also in different ways as individual 20th century icons. But before I even started researching this biography I had become interested in this matter of how legends work. This was partly because my personal experience in the 60s meant that I had learnt at first hand about domestic and artistic life in the land of legends. For some years I lived with a legend…unlike Zelda who lived with a literary legend, I lived with a musical legend, whose legendary status was built on the fact that he was not merely the best in his field, at his instrument, the harmonica) but was in fact the best in the world. So I started by listening to a few legendary performances. But then Reader I married him. In many ways I had a great time …(we produced a wonderful daughter who is here at the Biography Club tonight) ..but creatively I discovered that if you have a modest or even an excellent talent but live with a partner of extraordinary talent, someone who is indisputably a legend in their own time, then two things happen. The first ..if you genuinely respect your partner’s overwhelming genius (as I did and as Zelda did) , if you in fact believe the media hype that he or she is the best in their field (as I did and as Zelda did) you are likely to find a) you want to help, to be of service, to feed that talent even if it is at your own expense and or b) more dangerously to your personal identity, you might want to become a minor part of that legend, again at your own expense.

Secondly, as an artist yourself you might find creatively that you cannot breathe in the same air as the legend who shares your bed.

Here seems to be no space for your own creativity.

This is possibly because artists who are legends have, or are made to have, intense self-focus and often very large egos (as Scott and Hemingway did) either by definition or as a consequence of their mythical status. In some sense whether emotionally or physically and geogr4aphically the person living with the Legend…if they want to find artistic fulfillment…..may have to get out, find their own space, in order to create successfully.

This was one of the emotions Zelda struggled with as an artist and several times she tried for her own place, her own space, she attempted to get out. She failed for several complex reasons of which financial dependence was a strong one. I shall return to that point later in the talk.

My own experience had a certain usefulness when I began to research; although I had to throw off all personal experiences, and curtail any kind of identification with my subject , when I started writing. What I discovered was:

Other women who have lived with Legends, many of those women attached to the Fitzgerald, Hemingway circle, found a similar challenge in terms of their creativity. I shall offer you two small examples.

Picasso of course was a key part of the dazzling set on the Riviera, organized and held together, by Gerald and Sara Murphy, a circle in which the Fitzgerald’s became enmeshed in 1923. The woman who lived with Picasso for ten years from 1946 to 1953 and who bore him 2 children, the brilliant French artist, Françoise Gilot, has talked about Legends and their challenges. Today having produced more than 1500 paintings, 5000 works on paper and having written 7 books herself, is a much acclaimed artist who says confidently in all here contemporary interviews: “I was always my own self.” But years ago, after she had left Picasso, she talked about how difficult it had been, to be just that, to be your own self, when you had incredible talent of your own, but you were living with and working alongside someone like Picasso.

Martha Gellhorn, novelist and journalist, famed today as a first class war reporter, was also the 3rd wife of Scott’s hero and Zelda’s enemy, Ernest Hemingway. She was a fine writer but she lived with another fine writer who believed he was amongst the finest and more significantly contributed heavily to becoming a literary legend in his own time. After Martha Gellhorn left Hemingway, she fought the myth makers, year after year, because they automatically restricted her from being her own self by describing, any and every chance they got, as Hemingway’s 3rd wife. Because that is what legend makers do.

They were doing it in the London Times this morning when they headed an article about Posh Spice with the line “Beckham’s Wife Spooked by Book.”

I am sure that you all remember that after the split Martha Gellhorn insisted that her publicity agents made absolutely sure that in any interview she undertook for radio, television or print, she was never to be asked about her private life with Ernest. She did not want to be bracketed as an accessory to Hemingway.

LEGEND AS A TITLE

The very title of my talk: “Zelda BRACKET (and Scott) BRACKET Fitzgerald: Two Lives Beneath One Legend” bears out this theme and immediately lends itself to a comment:

I chose to put the brackets around Scott’s name because I was still after six years research all too aware that either the legend focuses on Scott and Zelda is bracketed or it focuses on a single bracketed structure called Scott-and-Zelda.
My title also opens up 2 key questions. First if a legend has become established about one of the two people in a private/public partnership, can the 2nd person, the non legend, or the lesser legend, exist independently with equal validity? Or does that person’s life automatically fall within the framework of the Legend?

The 2nd question is whether if a legend has grown up around both partners, is it possible for either one of them to transgress the boundaries of myth? Can either one easily perform autonomous or contradictory actions, that do not feed the legend, that may indeed conflict with it? Or do both parties constantly frame and reframe their behaviour and attitudes to match up to the myths, which in Zelda and Scott’s time and even more in this century are largely constructed and communicated by the media. If the participants, the biographical subjects, do behave in that legend-restricted way, then if they themselves, subsequently read about their adventures , which now fall in line with the myth, does that further reinforce and reconstruct their identities and actions?

Let us look at the case of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, born in 1900, and Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald born four years earlier in 1896.

During their chequered lives these two impossible people wore each other out with their impossible passions and impossible escapades but they rarely wore out the media. Newspapers loved them. Because with each adventure they built another brick into the legend.

When as a young bride, Zelda jumped, fully dressed, into the Washington Square fountain, or danced on tables in public restaurants, or performed cartwheels in a New York city hotel lobby, or when Scott undressed at George White’s “Scandals” (a top New York theatrical revue) it was not surprising that the press filled their pages with the Fitzgerald ‘s exploits. What could be better for headlines than a couple who did not go in for self-preservation?

So, in the 20s, journalists turned the Fitzgeralds’ bizarre behaviour into myth and that in turn encouraged Scott and Zelda to invent further extreme or extravagant antics. It also encouraged them to flourish as capricious merciless self-historians who wrote and rewrote their own and each other’s exploits.

For years they used their stormy partnership as a basis for their fiction, then that fiction became a form of private communication, which stood as a method of discourse about their marriage. Subsequently that private discourse, reworked under the guise of novels and stories , was subjected to public scrutiny, to critical appraisal, and was then rewoven into the legend.

Scott's Princeton friend , the critic Edmund Wilson said: “If ever there was a pair whose fantasies matched, it was Zelda Sayre and Scott Fitzgerald “.

But what is more significant is that these fantasies, and the way they acted them out, matched precisely those of the media, who saw Scott and Zelda ‘s celebrity, inevitably followed by crack up, or glamour followed by tawdriness, as the paradigm of the 20th century’s version of the old idea of the Wheel of Fortune.

So we have the glitter of the Roaring 20s, Scott's literary successes, their idealized marriage, the birth of baby Scottie, Zelda as High Priestess of the Jazz Age , This was swiftly followed by the wreckage of the 30s, Scott's descent into alcoholism and Hollywood hack-writing. Alongside these events ran Zelda’s possibly inaccurate diagnosis of schizophrenia, ten years inside and outside mental hospitals, their extra-marital romances, marriage breakdown, their conflict over their fiction writings.
Fortunately for the legend, under all that stress,, both these impossible people…like Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe, died impossibly young. Scott died first when he was only 44 then eight years later Zelda died when she was 48.

But in their early days before they messed up, he with alcohol, she with acute mental illness, the Legend saw the Fitzgeralds simply as Enfants Terribles, dreadful children who provoked everyone but got away with it.

One of their friends who was still alive told me: “I couldn’t get mad at them. There was a golden innocence about them and they were both so hopelessly good looking. “
We need to hang on to that word ‘golden’ as it became a key symbol of their myth. The Legend gives us the Golden couple. I noticed that almost all the headlines attached to recent reviews of my biography , contained the phrase “the golden couple” so patently it is a label that has stuck.

The legend also gives us Zelda, the “golden girl” of Scott's fiction. From the start Zelda's life story seemed to be made for fiction which had page turning qualities, even before Scott and Zelda amended it for the legend. Her tale began with dramatic thespian timing. Her birth in 1900 coincided with the start to a new century. This allowed Scott as well as Zelda to see the theatrical possibilities of a life that paralleled an era. When for instance in 1930 the year which followed the Stock Market crash, Zelda had her first terrible breakdown , Scott carefully wrote in his Ledger: “The Crash: Zelda and America!”

She was christened Zelda Sayre, because her 40 year old mother Minerva, herself named for a myth, and an avid reader of romantic novels, had during her pregnancy, come across the unusual name Zelda twice in two different novels. Both romantic heroines were so beautiful that they “drew upon themselves a hundred stares”’ just as Zelda did. Strangers constantly stared at her when she was a child . In the legend her appearance is always described poetically as rhapsodic. Legend writers comment on the long loose hair, so blonde that it was no colour at all merely a reflector of light.

Legend gives us Zelda, the spoilt blonde baby of the family, who acts like a wild child and gets away with it. Myth makers see her as a tomboy, a rebel, impetuous, strong willed. Indeed she posse4d all of those characteristics. But the legend misses the fact that she was also reflective, quiet, philosophical, a loner, who would sit brooding in the cemetery where she would write love letters or invent stories. The legend fails to inform us that she haunted her father’s excellent library, reading the classics, gobbling up encyclopaedias, always excited by the politics of the Civil War, the bravery of the white Southern men.

I wanted my biography to give us something else that was not merely golden. I tried to pare back what Michael Holroyd called “history’s cuticle of lies.”

So legendary however is Scott's status, that mystery writer Raymond Chandler pointed out that Scott “had one of the rarest qualities in all literature ,….. the word is charm ….charm as Keats would have used it….it’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite.”

Those of us who have been enthralled by “The Great Gatsby” or “Tender is the Night” would agree. The magic of Scott’s prose was echoed by the magnetism of his personality which his friends including Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Gerald and Sara Murphy described and admired. The golden image of Scott Fitzgerald’s charm and of his heroic struggle against adversity and dreadful debt, made Alice B Toklas call him “one of those great tragic American figures.”

And that sad but golden image has outlasted the catalogue of ills and frustrations, despairs and bitterness, of the last decade of his life.

But one wonders, if one is a biographer, what lay beneath the charm, the control, the magic, that Scott was exercising? What was going on under the glittery surface?

When I decided to find out, I discovered to my horror, that Raymond chandler had issued a severe warning to biographers. It went like this: “Fitzgerald is a subject no one has a right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him.”

In the past Scott's biographers took heed. Raymond Chandler was not a man to tangle with. None of the many biographers before me felt they had the right to mess up Fitzgerald, meaning of course Scott Fitzgerald. There was no similar embargo on messing up any other Fitzgerald’s life. Raymond Chandler had never instructed biographers not to play havoc with Zelda’s existence. No instructions came from anyone else. Zelda remained fair game. She was also a legend but she was not sacrosanct. Indeed NOT being sacrosanct was part of her legend.

The result has been that over the years we have heard a great deal about Scott that generally is only the nest.

That Scott was a man who wrote extraordinary prose. Which he did. And that mattered.

That Scott was a man who drank extraordinary amounts. Which he did. And that did not matter.

Well, it doesn’t matter much, to those of us today who only have to read his books. But it might have mattered , a great deal more, then to the woman who had to share the life of the man with the Keats’ charm, the man who was writing the magical prose, the man who was drinking the exquisite alcohol. The man who didn’t know when to stop.

OK. This woman. This Other Fitzgerald. Who was she?
The first time I heard anything about my primary biographical subject was in 1970 , well over 30 years ago, when I was lying in a hospital bed feeling very sorry for myself, wondering if I would ever feel sunny or sensible again. Let alone write another word.

A friend came to the hospital to cheer me up. “I have brought you just the book “ she said waving a big hardback about. “It is a riveting biography of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife. She went mad you know! Utterly bonkers. Genuinely crazy! She was MUCH worse than you! She was locked up, in and out of hospitals for ten years. “ (She paused) “It’s a great read!”

My first instinct was to show her the door. But in those days as a nice Jewish girl I was very well brought up. So instead politely I inquired; “Does she have a name, this crazy wife of the famous novelist? Did she ever get out of the asylums? Did she ever DO anything apart from being the wife of a genius.?” My friend looked doubtful. “Well the important thing in her life, obviously, was that she was lucky enough to be Scott Fitzgerald’s wife! That must have been quite something you know! She and Scott were wildly in love, couldn’t live together though, she got labeled a schizophrenic, she wrote a bit I think or possibly drew, no didn’t draw, played a musical instrument, no er maybe, yes she danced or something. She did finally get out of the asylums but when a few years later she returned to the last hospital for a brief recuperation, she got locked in to a bedroom high up on the fifth floor....they said it was an accident…..well they would say that…but a terrible fire broke out…swept through the hospital…she perished! The only way they could identify her was by a single charred slipper beneath her burnt body She was only 48. Terrible story. Ever so sad. You will just love the book!!”

“Name?” I said patiently. “Did she have a name, this woman?”

“Oh yes, she did have a name. Now what was it. Tilda? No. Imelda? No. “
She glanced down at the book she had brought me. “Sorry Sal, yes, she did have a name. She was called Zelda.”

At that moment, in 1970, in my hospital room, when my friend gave me that first biography by Nancy Milford, which I still have, I made a vow that one day I would rise up off my bed, re enter the word of print and I would find out all the things that made Zelda who she was, other than her ‘madness’, other than her marital relationship. Other than the few pieces of information which the legend has allowed us.

As a slow moving writer, but a very persevering one, it took me until 1996 to convince a publisher that commissioning me to write a biography of Zelda was the best idea they had ever had.

What was somewhat disturbing in literary terms when I began my research, 26 years after that first biography, most people with whom I talked , still held the view of my hospital visitor, that Zelda’s major achievement was being Scott’s wife. They also believed that her defining characteristic was clinically diagnosed madness.

When I began research I was very fortunate in that I was given access to all the previously restricted materials, including all the medical reports and correspondence, so I was able to sort through all the available information. I was also able to be more forthright than previous biographers both about Zelda’s condition and about her very early and very late sexual experiences and her intermittent lesbian feelings and behaviour.

I made two particularly painful discoveries. The first was an incident of sexual abuse in the school playground when Zelda was an adolescent. The second many years later when she was a patient in her final hospital where she sexually abused by her chief psychiatrist Dr Robert Carroll, an eminent doctor who was later involved in a rape case with patients in that ward.

Those facts which lay in old letters, papers, newspapers, were then confirmed for me by her very last psychiatrist Dr Irving Pine, who though an old man when I met him was highly intelligent and completely coherent. He had already mentioned these appalling facts to one previous biographer but he had never allowed her to put it on the record. He did allow me.

Dr Irving Pine also talked to me about Zelda’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. Dr Pine said that he and several other doctors had thought for many years that Zelda was suffering from what today might be termed manic depression but she had been inaccurately diagnosed as schizophrenia, then treated for many years and in their view treated wrongly that after ten years of mistreatments, she had begun to exhibit a bewildering array of symptoms, several of them similar in form or style to schizophrenia. He felt she had been consistently misdiagnosed. Although there was a genetic component towards mental illness in her own family, he believed that much of her depression came from her domestic and emotional situation and from professional artistic frustration. As those elements accelerated so did her depression.

Dr Pine like several of Zelda’s psychiatrists, (including Dr Meyer who treated Zelda in 1932) saw Scott and Zelda ‘s medical and psychological problems as a “folie a deaux”, a dual case. Their suggestion was that Scott's alcoholism had serious implications for Zelda’s breakdowns.

Dr Meyer had wanted Scott to submit to psychoanalysis but Scott had always refused on the grounds that such treatment might ruin his creativity. He said that if he gave up drinking, which Zelda and the doctors begged him to do, it would appear to justify Zelda’s family’s view that his alcoholism was a partial cause of Zelda’s mental instability. So Scott refused to take the doctor’s advice.

One interesting suggestion from Zelda’s final psychiatrist was that part of the failure of the psychiatrists in every hospital was their failure to take Zelda’s artistic talents seriously and to label them instead as obsessions.

There was one exception: Doctor Mildred Squires in Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1932 who positively encouraged Zelda to write. It was in that hospital under Mildred Squires’ encouragement that Zelda produced her first novel “Save Me the Waltz” which she dedicated to Squires.

Another fascinating area, which I discussed with her last psychiatrist, was the matter of Zelda's strange idiosyncratic speech patterns which according to legend were seen as another symptom of her insanity.

What I learnt from childhood friends and family in the Deep South was that from her childhood Zelda had always exhibited a convoluted vocabulary, her speech had from adolescence burst with high-flown metaphors, she constantly made free associations often severed linguistic clues, and would invent images sometimes using non sequiturs.

Because she lived in the Deep South (Montgomery Alabama) she was also given to sensuous Southern allegories and to Southern folk rhythms.

Those speech patterns never troubled her family, her friends, or Scott who had no difficulty in understanding her. But ultimately the way she spoke was labeled by her Northern doctors as further evidence of schizophrenia. They used her routine speech patterns to indicate disintegration of her thinking processes.

The problem with interviewees who had known Zelda, when asked many decades later, by biographers, to comment on her speech, was that by then a mental illness framework had been constructed.

Insanity had become an integral part of the Zelda legend, so the recollections by elderly friends who were interviewed many years (sometimes over 30) after the event, about the way Zelda spoke fell within or were conditioned by that mental illness framework.

In the biography I put together all the information I could find about the horrific treatment meted out to Zelda and other mental patients in that period and it is all there in heartbreaking detail both in the body of the book and in the footnotes.

Among the ‘milder’ treatments which were not mild, were the insulin shock treatments administered to Zelda for 10 years and also Metrazol convulsive treatment which produced shocks akin to epileptic seizures. These appear to have been given as much to realign the behaviour, usually of female patients, into what were considered acceptable patterns as to act as medical therapy.

There was as I said earlier a considerable albeit hidden history of mental illness in Zelda’s family so there was almost certainly some genetic inheritance.

My view however towards the end of the research was that Zelda's mental condition, like that of many patients in her situation at that time, was as much related to her medical treatment and to her constant artistic frustration as it was to certain well established genetic factors.

I want now to turn to the 2nd point.: How legends can skew the facts so that it makes it harder to achieve a balance in one’s research.

I discovered there were 3 important distortions due to legend construction. They were firstly the way in which Zelda as a product of the Deep South was treated by the myth-makers ; secondly the almost complete omission of Zelda's role as a mother ; and thirdly the way her status as an artist, in three different fields, painting, writing, and dancing, was selectively dealt with. I wanted to balance that most particularly to bring into focus Zelda as a painter.

1st. THE DEEP SOUTH

Readers knew from the legend that she was the daughter of a judge in Montgomery, Alabama. Legend told us she was a glamorous Southern Belle. But that was all it did tell us.

When I began the research I was not aware that being a Southerner was a crucial part of Zelda's identity and of her artistic expression. I found that the flowers she painted constantly were hot and Southern like those in her mother’s garden. I noticed that her fictional narratives were interlaced with the very Southern idea that youth and beauty blooms alongside death and destruction. Zelda always said that Montgomery’s controversial history strengthened her because prolonged Civil War tore the South apart and massacred an entire generation of southern men. Montgomery citizens were proud that a nation had been born there. Today they still are, Zelda had that pride in her bones.

In her girlhood , ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through the oak lined streets. She grew up in a distinctive Southern culture, often at odds with itself and the rest of America. The South was running counter to the moral beliefs of its time in perpetuating slavery just when the rest of the Western world was decisively giving it up. In Zelda's childhood there was still a gulf between black field hands and black house servants. Zelda and her white friends were wet nursed, cooked for and raised by black women. But the undercover fears of black slaves that Zelda heard show up in her writing, particularly in her 2nd novel “Caesar’s things” where she refers several times to the fear of the “black hand”. In adolescence Zelda still SAW period advertisements of lynching, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron, the methods by which black field hands and servants had been kept in check. But what she HEARD was that those shocking brutalities disturbed the peace of the white Montgomery families much less than the tragedies that had befallen their own brave white youths.

Zelda's own father , respectable Judge Sayre, even created laws that penalized Negroes. But in her childhood Zelda is never known to have questioned those laws. Only later according to her daughter did Zelda begin to reflect upon them. And to co9ntrast the situation with what was always seen as the chivalry of white Southern gentlemen.

Zelda, as a product of an old established white southern family, understood the symbolism of the south’s luxuriant blossoms which atrophied into perfumed decay.
She grew up aware that casualty and spoilage could always occur at a moment of great promise to any of the young men who courted her. So her southern heritage was the proximity of youth and beauty to death and annihilation. The legend misses that out too.

It misses out Zelda's knowledge that in the local Oakwood cemetery where lay her ancestors, where she wandered when unsettled, the bruised petals of the tissue-paper poppies, and parchment magnolias, which drifted over the headstones, were reminders of lost childhood, fallen dead and family silences.

She was taught that though the South wants to forget it never does forget. The past is never dead. It is not even past.

The legend misses out that Southern awareness also.

So that was Zelda’s setting and when I stayed there in Montgomery, I lived in the house right next door to the house that Zelda and Scott and young Scottie had lived in for a short period during their marriage, 819 Felder Ave.

I went into their house, now the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum and saw that it had changed very little. I sat in a rocking chair on their porch, I sipped mint juleps as they had done. Local people came up to me and talked about Zelda and Scott as if they had just slipped out for a few minutes. I met their elderly friends. I met Zelda's relations. They all talked about the war but they meant the Civil War . I felt I was in a time warp. The place was like a Tennessee Williams movie or a Lillian Hellman Southern play.

I watched Zelda's magnolia tree bloom in the sun. I picked one of her blossoms and took it back to England. I saw the paper white narcissi that she had planted blow in the breeze. I smelt the Confederate jasmine perfume the night air.

I went from gallery to museum, house to house, looking at the very Southern very powerful paintings she had produced.

Then I started to track her movements, and discovered that after she had relocated she became gradually dislocated when she moved from Montgomery to marry Scott, the Yankee, the man from the North.

Her daughter Scottie and Zelda’s sisters always felt that if Zelda had remained in the South she may never have become so ill.

We cannot know that.

But we do know that she found the move to the North incredibly hard. We do know that she was very homesick. We know also that like Southern writers she learnt that once you leave the South you can never go home again.

During heir romance in the Deep South, Zelda as a Southern Belle was a local celebrity dominating a struggling writer. Not any more. Scott was no longer struggling. Zelda was no longer a celebrity. When she forsook Alabama Scott had just written "This Side of Paradise " which became an instant best seller right across the States.

By the end of 1921 12 printings totaled 49,075 copies. Although Scott ‘s earnings of $6200 for 1920 did not make him wealthy, his novel was reviewed everywhere. By the end of that year it had become a conversation piece. Considered ground-breaking it captured the essence of youth and so did the author.

He became famous. Zelda became his consort. For the first time in their relationship she was merely a decorative accessory. A woman in a bracket.

According to period newspapers Zelda became part of Scott ‘s legend: a Jazz Age flapper, the American Dream Girl but above all Mrs. Fitzgerald, the wife of the more famous Scott. Zelda found first that her identity became linked to his then gradually subsumed.

. The legend preferred to offer the glamour of Zelda ‘s new Northern life with the man of the moment than to portray its effect on an uprooted Southern girl. Zelda ‘s solution for a time was to buy into the legend about them both and help make it come true.

The 2nd and 3rd ways in which the ;legend deals selectively with the Fitzgerald s’ lives are linked.

They are Zelda's role as a mother and her achievements as an artist in 3 fields: writing, painting, dancing.

Zelda became pregnant and gave birth to their only child Scottie in Scott's hometown St Paul’s, a cold harsh wet city that Zelda hated.

After the birth the Fitzgeralds' trawled New York Paris the Riviera and in all those places they continued to love and to fight passionately . They fought over Hemingway , Scott perpetually torn between Ernest and Zelda. They fought over each other’s ambivalent sexuality. Most of all they fought about Zelda ‘s desire for creative self-expression.

Zelda had an impressive array of untamed talents. She was a strange interesting writer. She was a powerful painter. A good dancer. All of which artistic skills have been consistently undervalued by the legend for a variety of reasons.

DANCE

Zelda began her apprenticeship in the Diaghilev ballet tradition very late, aged 27. yet within a mere 3 years she was invited to perform a solo role with the Italian San Carlo Opera Ballet Company. It was an invitation which brought her the chance she had been awaiting for years. However for complex emotional and domestic reasons she turned it down. Her first doctor and Scott perceived her dance career as the cause of her first breakdown in 1930 so Scott and the doctors banned her from ever dancing professionally again. Because their viewpoint, was that Zelda ‘s ballet career was an obsession not an artistic commitment, that has been the biographical viewpoint adopted subsequently.

PAINTINGS

Zelda ‘s paintings are out of step. The legend does not mention this fact. Zelda’s granddaughter Bobbie Lanahan , herself an artist, generously showed me every Zelda painting in her collection and gave me access to almost all the rest throughout the states. She pointed out to me the hallucinatory connections between Zelda ‘s verbal and visual ideas which are unsettling. She showed me ways in which she found many of the paintings disturbing. Some were flower paintings, hectic tones, blinding colours, shades that shocked. Some were cityscapes in powdery pastels each with an unearthly mysterious feel. Some were children’s fairytale illustrations . Everyone of those paintings had an Alice –in-Wonderland upside down quality. Many were figures, ballerinas, nursing mothers, historical figures transformed into curious paper dolls.

None of the paintings had any ground beneath their feet.

Although they stirred my imagination they also gave rise to a terrifying anxiety. It was as if they had been painted by someone in the form of Salvador Dali crossed with Angela carter.

Part of the reason the legend does not focus on Zelda's paintings is related to the way we rate art. In general we like artists to produce work consistently , continuously, to date it, to give us a corporate body upon which to make judgments. This is impossible with Zelda's paintings. Very little is dated. The paintings lack the traditional “artistic progress” or linear development by which one can sometimes date paintings. I had to identify paintings by subject or theme, or match up pictures with life events or ideas occupying Zelda's imagination at a particular time.

She had more exhibitions than the legend allows her but mainly in the South, so perhaps that did not count. She had several exhibitions after Scott's death which to legend manufacturers certainly did not count. She produced her greatest number of paintings after Scott's death in 1940 and before her own in 1948.

There is not in existence a complete body of work. Although she produced paintings from 1925 until the day before her death, many are lost, destroyed or burnt.

The day after Zelda died in a fire, her mother Minnie Sayre, who hated and perhaps feared Zelda’s paintings, instructed her daughter Marjorie, to take every painting stored in the garage and burn them one by one in the yard. Though Zelda left a substantial legacy, over 100 paintings, it is only a small part of her total production.
Today we are remedying the legend’s omission of her as a painter and several exhibitions of her work have been on tour,

The paintings led me to the role of Zelda as a mother, the role the legend leaves out. The first agonized painting I saw was called Nursing Mother with Red Blanket. If ever a painting flew in the face of acceptable motherhood this one did.

The mother has half her head severed while the baby sucks at what looks like the mother’s entrails. Powerful but hardly comforting.

That painting alone set me off on the hitherto untrodden trail to discover Zelda ‘s utterly overlooked relationship with her child. What kind of mother was Zelda ? How did she get on with her daughter Scottie?

Zelda loved the child deeply but once she entered a series of hospitals and once Scott took charge of young Scottie, Zelda became more and more alienated from the child. Initially her letters to her daughter are signed; “your affectionate Mama’ or with “love…or kisses” . After she entered the first hospital, after Scott had told Scottie her mother was crazy, Zelda writes less often, and in one revealing letter she appears to forget that she is Scottie’s mother and signs it sadly “Zelda “.

Later on as Scottie becomes a young woman there were some tragic moments. Scottie did not want her mother at her Graduation. Zelda went anyway but Scottie ignored her. Scottie failed to invite Zelda to her own wedding until so late that Zelda was unable to come. When Scottie wrote her memoir of her own life she talks at length about her father Scott's death but she does not mention Zelda’s death at all.

ZELDA'S WRITINGS

When the legend looks at Zelda as a writer of two novels, several short stories, a stage play, a series of articles, and hundreds of letters, it ensures that we always see Zelda's role as artistic creator as secondary to her role as the object of Scott Fitzgerald ‘s literary creations, or as Scott’s muse.

Scott did of course base most of his heroines on Zelda. He did of course utilize or plagiarise Zelda's writings, initially with her permission later without.

The high point of their conflicts came in the 30s when Scott's fame rested on HIS writing and when Zelda's ambition rested on HER writing thus they fought on the same ground.

I explored in depth the way one hospital became in 1932 the setting for one of the most contentious battles in literary history between an artistic husband and wife. From her hospital bed Zelda completed her first novel “Save Me The Waltz” in a mere 4 weeks drawing on some of the same autobiographical material which Scott was trying to plot into “Tender Is The Night” which took him 9 years to complete. Scott, incoherent with fury, that Zelda should dare to use their joint life experiences for her fiction, first insisted that the publishers cut out large sections of Zelda's novel; then a year later during a 3 way discussion with Zelda and her psychiatrist, Scott forbade Zelda to write any more fiction which drew on their shared autobiographical incidents.

He had already banned her ballet, so this new edict meant that her rights to her own material and forms of self expression were severely limited.

Scott felt he had the artistic right to silence Zelda's ‘s voice because he was the “professional” and she the “amateur”.

Previous biographers have suggested that the interests of professionalism can be used to legitimize his actions.

Zelda herself internalised the idea that those who are not professional cannot be properly talented.

Today we recognize that professionalism has a great deal to so with financial rewards, status, and the way artists could or could not define themselves by their work, as much as it has to do with talent.

But biographers and legend makers until now have been able to subsume her three arts under the greater interest of her marriage,

Another reason that Zelda’s 3 artistic talents, all of which were enigmatic, have been overlooked, is partly their labyrinthine qualities but it is also due to the fact that she had 3 gifts rather than one. Our society awards a much higher status to artists engaged fulltime on one single creative pursuit than to artists engaged on multiple forms of art. So Zelda as an artist gifted in 3 different directions has always smacked of dilettantism.

I have already pointed out that usually we credit art higher if it is produced consistently and continuously. Zelda’s writing does neither. It was not continuous. She was most productive during two periods: 1929 to 1934 when she spent long periods in hospital away from home, away from Scott, away from young Scottie. 1940 to 1948 the period immediately after Scott's death in 1940. It is perhaps not insignificant that both creative periods occurred when her husband was absent. Between those two creative literary periods she was either ill or was prevented from writing.

What is fascinating is that the years of her greatest discipline as a writer, a painter and a dancer coincided exactly with those years when she hospitalised then diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

NB When I reached the 3rd part of talk to the Biography Club, the section relating to the issue of restraints imposed on the biographer from the family and the estate, due to constraints of time, we decided I would summarise the main issues then throw the discussion on to the floor. The audience was passionately interested in discussing this and the debate went on until the evening closed.

Ever since I began working on Shakespeare and biography I’ve been having this dream. More of a nightmare really. I have committed some terrible crime, probably that sin in the Bible which is so bad that no-one can tell you what it is. Anyway, I have a huge burden of guilt and I’m sitting in the dock waiting to be judged. For some reason known only to dream logic, I have the opportunity of watching the members of the jury file in. As they take their seats, I realise that they are all Shakespeare biographers: Antony Holden, Park Honan, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Jonathan Bate, Ernst Honigmann, Richard Wilson in the front row, Marchette Chute, Antony Burgess, A. L. Rowse, Leslie Hotson in the second, even Sir Sidney Lee lurking in the background. Once I’ve recognised them all I realise that the game is up, that there is no hope, and that I might as well top myself.

One lesson I take from this dream is that the standards which operate in biography are chiefly forensic. Biographers can rarely establish with scientific certainty what they most want to know, but they can offer suggestions which are – as they say – beyond reasonable doubt. To do this, however, they need evidence and it is a notorious fact that, in Shakespeare’s case, there just isn’t any. Of course, there are christening, marriage and burial records, legal documents relating to house or land purchase, quite enough material to show that, in the often quoted and caustic words of one of Shakespeare’s 18th century editors, he: was born at Stratford upon Avon, -- married and had children there, -- went to London , where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays, -- returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.

That’s to say that there is plenty of evidence for a certain kind of life of Shakespeare, but it’s not the kind his biographers have wanted to write. What frustrates them – or should do – is that they are no eye-witness reports of any value, no records of how he looked, dressed, spoke, behaved; and more importantly, that there are no personal documents. If Shakespeare ever kept a dairy or commonplace book it has disappeared; he wasn’t given to talking about his `mountain belly’ in public as Ben Jonson was; and above all there are no surviving letters. I was going to focus in this talk on the importance of letters in biography, but in this company it’s perhaps too obvious a topic to spend time on.

Personal documents are the clue to the inner life but it could be said that if we want to know more about Shakespeare’s thoughts and feelings we have only to turn to the poems and the plays. Reading these in order to deduce from them an idea of `Shakespeare the man’ may be a legitimate exercise, but it’s not – it seems to me – biography. It would take the rest of this talk to explain why I think this, so let me just say here that a play strikes me as just about the worse possible literary form with which to play hunt the author. As for the Sonnets, I would have more confidence in their autobiographical status if, after two or three hundred years of intense scholarship, there was even a rough consensus on the identity of the addressee (Mr W.H.), or of the Dark Lady. The Sonnets seem to me at all points desperately and perhaps even wilfully enigmatic. In the absence of what I would call real evidence, Shakespeare’s biographers do of course pillage his writings ruthlessly, but there are two other major sources of material available to them and it’s those I want to say a brief word about.

The first is what the great Shakespearean scholar, E. K. Chambers, very aptly called `the Shakespeare-Mythos’: that collection of gossip, anecdote, hearsay, legend which has accumulated around his name over the years. There is the story, for example, of how he had to leave Stratford because he was caught poaching the deer of a local landowner. Several anecdotes are based on the idea that once he was established in London he became friendly with Ben Jonson and the two of them had many a `merry meeting’ in the Mermaid inn. We are told that when he travelled from Stratford to London he would always stay at a tavern kept by the Davenants. Mrs Davenant was apparently very beautiful and Shakespeare had an affair with her that resulted in Sir William Davenant, the Restoration dramatist. So that just as there were `sons of Ben’ in the mid-17th century literary world there was at least one son of Shakespeare. An initial problem with all these stories is that they only begin to circulate long after Shakespeare is dead. I thought therefore that the best one to discuss would be the one which is widely thought to have the best chance of being true, in large part because it’s contemporary.

In March 1601 John Manningham, a law student at the Middle Temple, wrote the following in his diary or commonplace book: Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a Citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III. Shakespeare’s name William. (Mr Touse.)

When Antony Holden quotes this anecdote in his biography of Shakespeare he misses out the two final phrases, but they seem to me important. We know from other entries in the diary that `Mr Touse’ indicates Manningham’s source and Touse turns out to be another member of the Middle Temple and not someone with any known links to the theatre. It’s quite clear from those other entries that the diary was not meant for publication but rather functioned as an aide-mémoire. When Manningham writes `Shakespeare’s name William’ therefore he is reminding HIMSELF of essential information he has to have in order to understand the point of the story. But that hardly suggests he was close to the scene of action. What I think biographers ought to be asking themselves with material of this kind is: what are the qualities of the witness or informant, how far was he or she in a position to provide reliable information, and also – that essential principle – where can I find corroboration?

Several people have claimed that this anecdote has been corroborated because a version of it appears in Thomas Wilkes’s General View of the Stage, published in 1759. Since this was before the Manningham diary was discovered, they suggest that what we have is that great desideratum: two independent sources for the same material. But all that Wilkes’s version seems to me to indicate is that there was a funny story, a joke, going round London in the 1600s and more than one person picked it up. That it is a joke adds, I think, to the caution with which we should approach it. Jokes play an important role in the Shakespeare-Mythos. Running through the streets of Oxford, little Willie Davenant is stopped and asked why he is in such a hurry. When he says he is rushing home to see his godfather Shakespeare, who happens to be visiting, he is told not to take the name of God in vain. This story was first recorded by Thomas Hearne in 1709 but Schoenbaum reports that it had already been included in a book called Wit and Mirth published in 1629, but applied to quite different people. The old ones are the best. The details of the Manningham anecdote are too specific to suggest that material is being recycled but when people tell jokes truth, accuracy, fairness are not the first things on their minds. There are at present a number of anecdotes circulating about the intelligence of President Bush but, if I were writing his biography, I wouldn’t want to take them seriously unless their details were confirmed in (for example) the memoirs of one of his aides.

You will have noticed that the Manningham anecdote isn’t entirely coherent, that there is a narrative gap. Burbage and the female Citizen arrange a meeting but when Shakespeare turns up instead she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. In the 18th century version, Thomas Wilkes cleared up this difficulty. He has Shakespeare overhearing Burbage and the woman agreeing that the signal for his entry to her house (or bedroom) should be three taps on the window and the words, `It is I, Richard III’. When he borrows this signal: The lady was very much surprised at Shakespeare’s presuming to act Mr Burbage’s part; but as he (who had wrote Romeo and Juliet) … did not want wit or eloquence to apologise for the intrusion , she was soon pacified, and they were mutually happy...

Katherine Duncan-Jones’s way of making more sense of Manningham’s anecdote is different from Wilkes’s. Having read lots of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays she assumes that what Manningham describes is a `bed-trick’, that because he came dressed as Richard III Shakespeare was able to substitute himself for Burbage without the woman noticing. She concludes from this that Shakespeare must have looked like Burbage -- `the substitution could not have been attempted unless the two men were of a similar height, build, colouring and, perhaps above all, voice’ – and also that he must have been an excellent actor. This is the biographical capital she makes from the anecdote and it seems to me illegitimate, an ill-gotten gain. But that’s not important compared with the way Duncan-Jones uses her interpretation of the anecdote to support her general thesis that Shakespeare had scant respect for women. Developing this view in relation to another matter, she complains: `there was no question of considering the sensitivities of the woman who fancied Burbage and ended up in bed with Shakespeare’. Here a joke has been used to define not Shakespeare’s appearance or skills but his character. You can see I hope why in my dream I am so alarmed when I realise the jury is entirely composed of Shakespeare’s biographers.

After the mythos, the second source for those who want to write a life of Shakespeare but don’t have any of the usual evidence is … history. The first sentence of Park Honan’s biography reads: `Research into the Elizabethans is of such quality today that new material about Shakespeare, his town, his parents, his schooling, his friendships, or his career comes to light continually’. The last document with any direct relevance to Shakespeare was discovered in 1909, yet it’s true that our knowledge of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans is continually on the increase, or at least that new information continues to accumulate. No-one could write a life of Shakespeare without knowing a good deal about his times but it’s a fallacy which it seems to me his biographers often adopt that the more extensively you explore those times, the more you will know about his life. The cut-off point comes early. Take the question to which Honan allludes of Shakespeare’s education. The records of Stratford grammar school for Shakespeare’s time have not survived but it’s virtually certain he went there. It is possible to deduce what he was taught from the mass of research on Elizabethan grammar school education because the educational regime of the time was relatively standard, uniform. `History’, that is, enables us to reconstruct Shakespeare’s experience at school from year to year, month to month, almost day to day. But only at a certain level. It won’t tell us, for example, whether he enjoyed the lessons or how well he got on with the other pupils. Nor whether he was a star. Of course we assume that he must have been precocious, the Mozart of the classroom, yet the man whose name has become a bye-word in our time for super-intelligence -- `So what’s your solution to this problem, Einstein’ – that man did not shine at school. However intensely we research Elizabethan grammar school education we shall never know whether Shakespeare was top of the class, nor whether he was a disruptive, unruly pupil or a passive one.

History is good at defining collective experience. Since Shakespeare must of necessity have been a church-goer, for most of his life at least, it can tell us what he had to listen to with the rest of the congregation, but it can’t give us his religious beliefs, his private thoughts as he sat there in his pew. A lot of historical effort has gone recently into trying to prove that he was secretly Catholic. The key figure here is John Cottam who became the Stratford schoolmaster in 1579. Cottam had a brother who was a Catholic priest and who came over to England with Edmund Campion in 1580 on a secret Jesuit mission. Like Campion, this brother was eventually arrested, tried for treason and executed. Sometime after his arrest, John Cottam left Stratford and went back to live on a small family property in Lancashire, that hotbed of Catholicism. One of his Catholic neighbours there was Alexander Hoghton and it is in the will Hoghton had drawn up in August 1581 that many have found not only the vital clue to Shakespeare’s Catholicism, but also to how the glover’s son from Stratford first became an actor. In an item of the will, Hoghton leaves his musical instruments and his play clothes to his brother: if he be minded & do keep players. And if he will not keep & maintain players, then it is my mind & will that Sir Thomas Hesket knight shall have the same instruments & play clothes. And I most heartily require the said Sir Thomas to be friendly unto Fulk Gillom & William Shakeshafte now dwelling with me & either to take them unto his service or else to help them to some good master...

What could be clearer? It is these words which have allowed some to speculate that, recommended by Cottam, the fervently Catholic young Shakespeare went to work for the Hoghtons, in the first instance perhaps as a tutor – Catholic families felt a special need for private tuition for their children – and that he then discovered his gift for acting before returning to Stratford in 1582 to marry Anne Hathaway and father his three children.

One of the problems of expressing scepticism about supposed episodes from Shakespeare’s life such as this one is that you are then asked, `Can you disprove it?’ But where there is so little prima facie probability the burden of proof is not on the sceptic. Attempts to disprove the `Shakespeare in Lancashire’ thesis do in any case, it seems to me, give to its arguments a respectability they don’t deserve. Everyone now knows that when two well dressed young men from Utah arrive at the door, the thing to do is explain you’re a Jew or a Catholic and not allow yourself to be seized by the demon of ratiocinative conceit. If you are tempted to display your logical powers then it’s soon made clear that rational discussion is impossible between people whose ideas of what constitutes proof vary wildly.

It could be objected that, because his father was in financial difficulties, Shakespeare had probably left Stratford grammar school by the time Cottam arrived there, but we don’t know that for certain. What it certainly seems legitimate to point out is there is a difference between the name in the Hoghton will – Shakeshafte – and Shakespeare. Those who believe he spent time in Lancashire are able to answer this objection in two mutually exclusive ways. They can remind us, as Richard Wilson does, that Campion and his colleagues took aliases when they arrived in England, in order to escape detection, and suggest that this is what Shakespeare did with `Shakeshafte’. But if that’s the case then we have an uncharacteristic moment in Shakespeare’s career when he was singularly lacking in invention. Alternatively, they can point to the notorious variation in Elizabethan names, to the fact (for example) that Shakespeare’s grandfather is sometimes referred to in local records as Richard Shakstaff and that, in one account of payment to Shakespeare’s company from Elizabeth’s Court, he himself is called Shaxberd. Quite apart from wildly variant spelling of what are demonstrably the same names, clerical error does seem to have been rife. When the clerk entered Shakespeare’s special marriage license into the Bishop’s Register in November 1582, he called Anne Hathaway Anne Whately. Given that degree of distortion as standard, almost any name in any will could conceal Shakespeare’s.

A lot of effort has been spent on showing that `Shakeshafte’ was a common name in Lancashire. Precisely the reason, responds Ernst Honigmann, why the clerk should have written Shakeshafte instead of Shakespeare. I used to think that the only reliable model for dealing with these issues had been provided by Macauley. Travelling in India, Macauley met a clergyman who said he could prove that Napoleon was the Beast of the Apocalypse. This was because if you write Napoleon Bonaparte in Arabic and leave out only two letters the numerical values of the remainder will give you 666. Macauley told the clergyman that he must be wrong because he himself had already discovered the real Beast to be the House of Commons: `There are 658 members of the House and these, with their chief officers -- the three clerks, the Sergeant and his deputy, the Chaplain, the doorkeeper, and the librarian -- make 666’. I like this because it suggests that in certain circumstances the reductio is the only legitimate response. I don’t like it because it suggest that I think the Shakespeare in Lancashire thesis is inherently absurd. But he may well have been there, or in the West Country where Burgess puts him, or anywhere. The important point is that we don’t know, but alas `don’t know’ doesn’t sell books.

In defence of recent Shakespeare biographers questions might be raised about the inaccessibility of any so-called `truth’, the `new history’ as it is sometimes termed, or even the uncertainty principle. I won’t bother with all that. Possibly more relevant would be the challenge: `Don’t all biographers speculate?’ They certainly do. Anyone who has ever been involved in writing one will know how frequently the biographer is obliged to `make things up’, particularly as regards the subject’s thoughts and feelings. Could it be then that in criticising recent lives of Shakespeare I have entered their authors for the wrong race? I think here of recent criticisms of Freud’s work and the way they have sometimes been met by the insistence that its value lies not in its theoretical coherence, its truth, or its effectiveness as a therapy, but in its eloquence and architectonic splendour. Is it not then precisely for their speculations that we ought to value Shakespeare biographies most?

I think there are a couple of answers to this challenge. The first is that all writers seem to me to be under an obligation not to give the impression of offering one thing when they are in fact offering another. Park Honan, and Katherine Duncan-Jones especially, are massively scholarly – you learn a lot from them. Duncan-Jones, for example, is very interesting on one of the early theatrical companies, the Queen’s Men, and on disputes within the College of Arms around and just after the time Shakespeare was applying, on his father’s behalf, to qualify as a gentleman. Yet there is no worthwhile evidence that Shakespeare was ever a member of the Queen’s Men and none that will tell us how he felt about acquiring a coat of arms. On the one hand his name is used to justify the inclusion of material with a minimum proven relevance to his life (Duncan-Jones writes a whole chapter on the Queen’s Men which is certainly of value to the specialist but which the general public could hardly have been persuaded to read had it not appeared in a `trade’ biography), and on the other, the scholarly character of that material imparts to her wilder speculations a bogus authority. Despite a sprinkling of `perhaps’s and `possibly’s, one is given the impression that there is a continuum between the scholarship and the speculations when in fact the two are both separate from each other and of a radically different character. Reviewing Duncan-Jones, Peter Ackroyd said that her `thorough grounding of historical knowledge supports … leaps of speculation’. In theory, the more Shakespeare’s biographers know, the more authority their conjectures ought to have. In practice, they seem to me like financial advisors who can explain in great detail the difference between various forms of investment but then put all your money on a horse in the 3.30.

The second answer is that, although all biographers speculate, some do so much more than others. There is a vital difference of degree here which I can best illustrate with a simile. Stendhal speaks in his autobiography of his past life being like a fresco, parts of which have fallen from the wall leaving a number of bare patches. With that image in mind one you say that for modern biographers writing a life can be thought of as more like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces are always missing but as the picture is built up the surrounding context allows them to fill in the gaps. They can see the shape and size of the gaps and the surrounding pieces allow then to make a fair guess as to how they should be filled. In Shakespeare’s case however there are so few pieces to begin with, that I think the only decent thing to do is to put them back in the box and direct the attention to activities which are more respectable and useful.

A writer comes for psychotherapy – let’s call her Sarah. Sarah reports feeling a certain blankness, which isn’t quite depression – but it’s not quite living either. Sarah’s parents are both powerful people who exist in a sort of mutual admiration society. Sarah grew up not just within a family but within a life that had already been mapped out for her. If she strayed beyond the parameters of that life – by showing aggression perhaps or developing her own politics or taking up with an unsuitable boyfriend - there was no criticism or reproach just ...nothing. She was ignored and when Sarah ceased to exist in her parents’ eyes, she ceased to exist at all. In a nightmare, Sarah looks in the mirror; there’s no-one there.

Only in her writing can Sarah come alive. I say to her something like, this question of who is entitled to write a person’s story – to be the author, in effect, of another’s life – has preoccupied her for a long time. Perhaps it’s related to her choice of career. I start to muse out loud about the different reasons people might have for wanting to shape and write other people’s stories.

She interrupts me to say very vehemently ‘There’s one reason...revenge!’

Sarah has split herself in two. Despite the blankness in her personal life, she is able to write, and in her writing she comes alive. Poor Virginia Woolf had to wait for her father (the eminent Victorian biographer Leslie Stephen) to die, before she could do the same. Years later, Virginia described her relief at Leslie’s death, when she was 22: ‘His life would have entirely ended mine’ wrote Virginia. ‘What would have happened? No writing, no books; inconceivable’. Virginia could not be the author of her own life while her father lived. Leslie, so to speak, held the rights. But writing is after all an immensely powerful tool. We may grow up, like Sarah and Virginia, living within our parents’ projects for ourselves. But when we write we can take the power, in our turn, to shape others’ lives according to our projects.

You may say, this might be true of novelists – but not biographers, who are bound by facts. I think this would be naive. Biographers don’t just listen and record any more than psychoanalysts do. To read different biographies of the same life back to back, as you’ll know if you’ve done it, is to be awed by the capacity of human minds to create utterly different stories from the same set of facts. It’s an eye-opener, but perhaps it’s not surprising. After all, biographers – like psychoanalysts – generally have two aims: to excavate the truth but also to shape a coherent story that will gain the interest of your readers enough to keep them reading (if you’re a biographer) or (if you’re a therapist) that will interest your patients enough to make them want to keep investing in the therapy.

It’s a knife edge: if we uncover facts but fail to make a story, we lose direction and, plodding on under a mass of shapeless boring detail, risk losing our fellow-travellers, our readers – or our patients - in the process. On the other hand, the thrill of shaping a story to our own agenda (and let’s admit, it can be quite a thrill) can make us cavalier with the truth. Seduced by our own lovely theories about what was going on in someone else’s mind, our need to believe: it was like this, we gloss over inconvenient facts. Then the creative possibilities of the dialogue are lost. Useful imaginative reconstruction slides into wild conjecture, or wild analysis. We risk losing our professional integrity; and people can get hurt.

In establishing truths, a therapy session does have some advantages. You can say hold on – you said you had a happy childhood but now you’re telling me your father was a drunken bully who beat you senseless every Friday night and your mother ran off with the milkman when you were five.....You can stop your patient and ask – why did you make that choice, what was in your mind? (not that you’ll always get an answer). In biography you can’t, usually, but you can always compare with other sources and check your facts. And stop when you like, to mull it all over.

Following on from these opening comments, I’d like to go on if I may to say something briefly about why I think fathers and daughters is such an interesting and rich topic to write about and end by saying something about ways of reading material psychoanalytically, which I find useful as a writer.

Fathers and daughters

There are historical and psychological reasons why the father-daughter relationship hasn’t in the past got the attention it deserves – a fascinating subject in itself, but beyond the ambit of this talk. In therapy too, fathers (or their absence) usually emerge as much more important than women let on initially. Partly it’s the fault of therapy which has allowed itself to become too much of a ‘mothering’ enterprise – we lose sight of how both boys and girls need fathering too, and how fathering might be different from mothering. As a society too, moving out of patriarchal ways of relating (and patriarchy, remember means the rule not of men but of fathers) we have ended up very confused about what fathering could be.

Fathers are crucial in a girl’s life – to initiate her into a world beyond mothers and mothering. While her relationship with mother draws her back to the Body, her relationship with father draws her forward to the Word. It’s interesting how many women who’ve lived by the word – as writers (Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath) or as politicians (Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Margaret Jay, Aung San Suu Kyi) have had relationships with their fathers that have been absolutely central in their lives.

From the father’s perspective, a daughter may be a sometimes unacknowledged inspiration (Darwin and Freud were both loving fathers who were led into important new areas of thought through their efforts to mourn the premature deaths of their favourite daughters); or a redemptive force (theme of the last plays of Shakespeare, also the father of daughters, and of stories from Heidi to Annie); or a threat (the fathers of Clara Schumann and Elizabeth B Browning encouraged their daughters’ outstanding early achievements but cut them off in a vindictive rage when they had the temerity to assert their independence and turn to other men. Interesting parallels here perhaps with the fathers of some of today’s great women tennis players, from Suzanne Lenglen to Monica Seles, Steffi Graf and Jennifer Capriati). Some fathers glory in their daughters’ achievements but only to the extent they see them as extensions of themselves and this (apart from anything else) has implications for their daughters’ sexual development.

My own particular interest is in how the influence of fathers both helps and hinder their daughters’ creative achievement and how this relationship changes through a life – typically, how men’s initial pride in their little princesses comes into conflict, as the girls grow up, with archaic male fear of being engulfed or surpassed by powerful women, triggered if the daughter starts getting too successful, too independent, too sexual. The sometimes, in later years, there may be a rapprochement. Obviously daughters can end up getting very mixed messages from their fathers about achievement, not to mention sexual and emotional fulfilment. Themes like this are encountered over and over - which led me to the thought: if you can write a biography of a city or a year, why not of a generic relationship?

Partly, we like reading biographies because they teach us how others think and why they make the choices they make and have the lives they do. When we immerse ourselves in someone else’s life story we make what analysts call a trial identification with them. We compare ourselves with them and perhaps we come to see the possibilities of our own lives differently. I also think father-daughter relationships have a particular significance for the times we’re living in, which is no doubt why it’s emerged as an important theme among the book buying public in recent years – Jane Smiley’s 1000 Acres, Germaine Greer’s Daddy I Hardly Knew You, Dava Sobell’s Galileo’s Daughter. Just in the last couple of years, we’ve had Annie’s Box by Randal Keynes, Clara by Janice Galloway and Penny Junor’s Home Truths, Life around my Father. The study of father-daughter relationships raises important and very topical questions for women about how much as women we feel bound by our love of men and our need of men. How much, taking that first relationship with the first man in our live as our template, have we grown up believing that what we have to say must be shaped to please male authority, to please the fathers we love but whose attention we may never have had enough of and who have, unwittingly or deliberately, censored or repressed us? Today we are aware of the extent to which a child’s need for her father as an attachment figure (and an early erotic figure) makes her tune into and become very sensitive to her father’s needs. A daughter may be willing to do or be almost anything to make her father want to stay with her, and the less his presence can be taken for granted, the harder she’ll try – one reason why girls try so much harder to please their scarce fathers than their usually more available mothers. And of course we learn to internalise our early parental relationships as ‘voices’ or programmes telling us what we can and can’t be, well into our adult lives. Today we’re also beginning to understand how some of these ways of relating are transmitted intergenerationally down families (the Royal family or the Spencers are interesting here as the generations are on record in a way they aren’t in most of our families, and from a different perspective, the families of Holocaust survivors also).

As a therapist, there are three sorts of communication I’m especially interested in: the first is sexual fantasy (which people don’t like to tell you about unless they have an ulterior motive, usually the obvious one) the second is dream (people usually don’t mind giving you at least an edited version of one) and early memory (which for some reason people are usually delighted to be asked about), and which I’ll say a bit more about.

What is your first memory?

Why do we remember one particular early memory over another? Perhaps, because it’s overlaid with particular emotional significance – perhaps it’s emblematic, in some way, of a central theme which will unfold through that person’s life. Such episodes may set the tone for the work to be done, returned to over and over as they are more deeply understood.

Princess Diana described an early memory of sitting at the bottom of some cold stone steps while her father loaded suitcases and her mother walked across gravel, got into the car and left the family home for good. We can distil from this memory: a sense of events of great significance happening close to her but out of her control; of people close to her pursuing their own agendas, apparently heedless of their effect on her; a sense of coldness, isolation, of being visible but yet not being really seen or noticed; a sense of being abandoned by maternal warmth, left surrounded by men in suits. We can see, in other words an uncanny foreshadowing of the major themes not just of her life, but of her death – when Diana herself would, of course, get into a car and drive off, leaving those who loved her forever.

The first memory of Indira Gandhi (Nehru as was) was when her wealthy family came out in opposition to the British Raj, and arranged a ceremonial bonfire of their English clothes in the grounds of their mansion. The bonfire was to be lit at night, Indira was three and her parents said she couldn’t stay up – so she appealed to her grandfather (who doted on her) and arrived triumphantly at the bonfire in his arms. Here we have Indira the politician presenting to us her credentials as a patriot, reminding us that she was there at the birth of her nation’s independence with the powerful men who brought it into being. But we might be more interested in the appeal to grandfather - inadvertently we learn not just about Indira the young patriot but Indira the little minx who manipulates her family connections to get her own way. Perhaps we might also read into the story a secret hostility to her father’s integrity and a desire to subvert it, to get one up on him? Again, we see themes of her later life foreshadowed.

Sometimes memories, as Freud said, are not remembered but repeated by being acted out. Sylvia Plath’s father died when she was seven because he had diabetes, denied his illness, had his leg amputated and died, quite unnecessarily of an embolism. In an account of the last months of Sylvia’s life, we read that after she’d left Ted that she cut her finger badly on a tin, neglected it until it became infected and told a friend she expected it would need to be amputated. In Sylvia’s last days she may have been acting out a drama in which she was abandoned one again by the powerful father, this time in the guise of Ted. But the story also suggests how powerful was her own identification with the father who neglects his health and becomes the abandoner - like her father, Sylvia left two small children behind at her death.

As a biography unfolds, as a psychotherapy unfolds, we see a person’s life unfolding, the repeat of themes, identifications, compulsions and influences acted out in many different ways. But at the same time, often we see a person stop and reinvent their life in ways that take everyone by surprise. In both psychotherapy and biography we should never take anything for granted.

I think I’d better start with a confession: I’m not quite a biographer – yet.

But I am currently writing a double biography of two personalities from the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. William Michael Rossetti, art-critic, biographer and historian, was the brother of the more famous Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. His wife was the artist Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown, mentor and father figure to the Pre-Raphaelites. You might call Lucy and William ‘The Other Rossettis’ or ‘The Secret Rossettis’.

If I’m not quite a biographer, then nor am I an autobiographer – although I read hundreds of life stories in order to edit The Folio Anthology of Autobiography – and anthologies, like any other collections, are probably autobiographies in disguise.

Coincidentally – or not? - both my biographical subjects were involved with writing lives. Lucy’s artistic career was cut short by raising a family and by her consuming tuberculosis. So she turned from paint to the less physically exhausting option of writing the Life of Mary Shelley, a romantic icon with whom Lucy felt a complex affinity. William wrote extended Memoirs of his famous brother and sister, important biographies of Shelley and Keats, and short Lives of major poets from Chaucer to Longfellow, in conscious imitation of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. In 1906 William Rossetti modestly published Some Reminiscences, a rich eyewitness testimony of appealing texture, blending memoirs, biography, autobiography, poetry, reviews, letters, opinion, and art criticism, for which he drew on a whole range of contemporary, supporting documents.

The existence of William Rossetti’s 2-volume autobiography immediately raises an intriguing issue. How much of an advantage, or indeed a disadvantage – is it for biographers if our subjects have left a pre-empting autobiography? In my own case, it has proved a positive, if complex advantage that William wrote such extensive memoirs, full of information and attitude. But the information, resuscitated in the tranquillity of his old age, has to be constantly tested as evidence against other contemporary accounts, and even against his own Diaries and Letters written on the spot and in the heat of events. Lucy’s autobiographical absence has to be sensitively weighed in the balance against William’s massive presence.

Autobiographies are ambivalent legacies for biographers. When Vladimir Nabokov wrote Speak, Memory, he so indelibly ‘fixed’ his childhood that it left little scope for his later biographer, Brian Boyd. How could Boyd possibly improve upon Nabokov’s unforgettable account of those early Russian Years? Boyd ended up quoting substantial chunks of Speak, Memory, fleshing out the historical context and exploring biographical data about Nabokov’s father. (Princeton, 1990, 2 vols.) William Rossetti’s autobiography is not a literary tour de force like Nabokov’s, so it seems easier for me to plunder it for its invaluable source material.

William Rossetti was that rare bird – a biographer who wrote autobiography. When I looked back over my database of nearly a thousand autobiographies, spanning four millennia, from cultures East and West that I considered for the Anthology, I found how few Biographers had turned their gaze inward and anatomised their own selves. Every other human occupation was richly represented – from anarchists to zoologists – with most autobiographies coming, unsurprisingly perhaps, from the pens not of politicians but of professional writers, poets, dramatists, and novelists – but not often from biographers.

In our own times, when Autobiography is rampant, this apparent shyness of biographers is remarkable. Today everyone nurtures a sneaking suspicion that if they have one book inside them, it won’t be that novel – but a bona-fide autobiography, or an autobiography tricked out as fiction. Autobiographers can play God in their own private universe. Even the Deity is not above the practice it seems, as the TLS on November 9th carried an ad for The Autobiography of God Almighty (quote) ‘Contains visits to Heaven, Hell, interviews with Christ, Satan etc’ – appropriately priced at £150. The same TLS featured an amusing exposé of the latest form of insidious autobiography, those fawning, fulsome pages of Acknowledgements that academics attach to their books, in nauseous Apologia Pro Vitae Suae.

Although Autobiography is all the rage today, both Biography and Autobiography are ancient arts, though the words for them are comparatively modern. Autobiographical texts can be traced as far back as Egyptian tomb inscriptions, 2000 years before Christ, but its star, just like Biography’s, could be said to have risen spectacularly only over the last 200 years.

Curiosity about other people’s lives is insatiable now, as always, and at some deep level is fuelled by our longing to find insights into our own. With its conventional narrative thrust, Biography today can be as consoling and satisfying as the well-made Victorian novel used to be. However experimentally presented, biography always has a satisfying final chapter on death (although nowadays the death often features as the opening chapter). This is one of its crucial differences from Autobiography, which can never provide its reader with that resolution (although one of the driving motives for writing it is a response to mortality). While Autobiography plays at intimacy, masquerading as a confidential two-way relationship between writer and reader, it is in fact a vauntingly ambitious exercise, a ‘letter to the world’, craving sympathy, understanding, and absolution, not just from the private reader but also from the infinite reaches of posterity:

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space,
To greet you. You will understand’.
(James Elroy Flecker ‘To a Poet a thousand years hence’, 1910)

Richard Holmes has claimed eloquently that Biography, too, is a ‘handshake across time’, ‘a human exchange’ that ‘confirms our need to find the self in the other, not always to be alone’. (Sidetracks, 2000, p 198) Does he mean that it’s the Biographer’s job to find the intrinsic self of the ‘other’, i.e. of the biographical subject? Or does he mean that the Biographer feeds the need we may all have, to find keys to our own selves in other people’s lives? And how dangerous and debateable is that notion?

Richard Holmes continues: ‘To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way’. (Sidetracks, Prologue). So from finding the Self, to losing the Self. Is he implying that the Biographer must suppress his/her own self in writing the Life of another? Is he unfashionably suggesting that Biography is in fact a deeply unselfish act? That literally gives a life for The Life?

Boswell is naturally the hero in the Romantic Biographer’s pantheon of heroes. For Richard Holmes, Boswell is the archetypal Biographer, the biographer’s biographer who gave his life for Johnson’s. Boswell forged a unique bond with his biographee, the great Doctor, a symbiotic relationship, a passionate commitment, a ‘marriage’, a haunting, a stalking, call it what you will. And in the process, he gave us his own Life, character and autobiography, indissolubly meshed with his subject’s. And perhaps he gave us the first Biographical triangle – Biography as a dynamic three-way process between the subject, the author and the reader, geometrically different from the linear two-way process of Autobiography.

Boswell in words did the same as portrait painters do with the brush. And just as there are as many views of a Life as there are biographers (and one autobiographer) to write it, so there are as many facets of a face, and as many versions of the ‘truth’.

Two recent novels have played with exactly these teasing notions of alternative biographical views of the self. Ian McKewen’s Atonement and Beryl Bainbridge’s According to Queeney, underline the position of biography today, now cosily cuddled up three in the bed with fiction, as well as its old paramour History. Both Atonement and Queeney show us the riot of conflicting interpretations that different characters can make of the same incidents. And add in the Narrator or the Biographer and ‘who knows what anybody is really like, or what they really think?’ as Beryl Bainbridge mused in a recent interview. (Literary Review, September 2001) ‘The biographer’, she continued, ‘ – same as a painter of portraits – cannot help but reproduce himself to some degree’.

So when Boswell gave us Johnson, he also gave us Boswell. After Boswell, throughout the 19th century, biography was almost solely the preserve of gentlemen – with one or two notable exceptions such as Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. Victorian male biographers felt it was proper to aim for detachment, objectivity and to link biography as closely as possible with the respectable methods and tone of historians. Now that we know that those old Victorians weren’t as prudish as some had always assumed, it’s no surprise to find Bohemian Swinburne urging William Rossetti to dig out the dirt for his biography of Shelley. Nevertheless, most Victorian biographers kept their own autobiographies firmly under wraps, their own selves out of the picture.

Until Edmund Gosse. Father and Son (1907) was a key text, a landmine which exploded Victorian biography even more dramatically than Lytton Strachey’s ironic new treatment toppled those Eminent Victorians (1918). Gosse set out to write the biography of his father, an eminent marine zoologist, but instead found himself in the confessional (where all autobiography is rooted). Gosse married autobiography to biography when he wrote his searing account of a damaged child, involved in a Jungian fight to the finish, to free itself from a crushing, dominant parent. But the book was a study of two temperaments, as the author always maintained. Father was a Plymouth Brother who interpreted every tenet of his religion with unbending rigour but was ultimately seen by the Son with compassion. When young, motherless Edmund was invited to tea and games at the Browns’, a local Baptist family, invitation became confrontation:

‘…my Father’s conscience was so painfully perplexed, that he desired…we might ‘lay the matter before the Lord’… My Father prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be revealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it was, or was not the Lord’s will that I should attend the Browns’ party. My Father’s attitude seemed to me to be hardly fair, since he did not scruple to remind the Deity of various objections to a life of pleasure, and of the snakes that lie hidden in the grass of evening parties. It would have been more scrupulous, I thought, to give no sort of hint of the kind of answer he desired and expected.

…As I knelt, feeling very small, by the immense bulk of my Father, there gushed through my veins like a wine the determination to rebel… My Father…asked me in a loud wheedling voice, ‘Well, and what is the answer which our Lord vouchsafes?’ I said nothing, and so my Father, more sharply, continued, ‘…We have desired Him to let you know whether it is, or is not, in accordance with His wishes that you should accept this invitation from the Browns.’ He positively beamed down at me; he had no doubts of the reply... But my answer came in the high-piping accents of despair: ‘The Lord says I may go to the Browns’. My Father gazed at me in speechless horror. He was caught in his own trap, and though he was certain that the Lord had said nothing of the kind, there was no road open for him but just sheer retreat.’ (p.171/2)

In this classic testimony Gosse, as both biographer and autobiographer, subscribes to the fallacy in which practitioners of both genres collude: - that a Life with all its fragmentary atoms of experience can be presented as a work of art with significant structure, major turning-points and recurring patterns. Both biography and autobiography seek to reveal meaningful patterns that may underlie life’s baffling and chaotic experiences, patterns that may dance, repeat, illuminate and even warn. ‘The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography’, said Nabokov in his lucent Speak, Memory (1947). Gosse uncovered these hidden patterns, limited himself to the first two decades of his life and never wrote a better book in his remaining six. He spliced the slivers of experience into an organic work of art, a model of the genre of Confessional Autobiography, which after lighting a slow fuse, has exploded over the last 20 years both in fictional and non-fictional form. I’m thinking of novels like Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only Fruit, Christy Nolan’s Under the Eye of the Clock, and auto/stroke/biographies like Andrea Ashworth’s Once in a House on Fire and Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?

The immense popularity of this Confessional genre, which blurs the conventional boundaries between biography and autobiography, is linked perhaps to the increased consumption of psychotherapy, counselling and life-coaching. It is an emotive concoction of autobiographical biography - or biographical autobiography. Confessional memoirs have piled up, at the same time as biographers have dared to use the springboard of their subjects to take a furtive look at themselves. Richard Holmes wove the story of his own brilliant vocation around the lives of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys and de Nerval in Footsteps. Margaret Forster included autobiography in her recent group biographies, Hidden Lives, about her grandmother, her mother and herself, Precious Lives, of her father, her sister-in-law and herself and Good Wives: about Mary (Livingstone), Fanny (Stevenson), Jenny Lee and Herself. Three and a half centuries ago, women had to pretend to be writing a biography (usually of a successful husband) in order to find an outlet for their own autobiographical voice, - as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle appended her True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life to her biography of William Cavendish, the Duke, her husband (1667).

It is comparatively rare for conventional biographers to make this leap of personal faith into Autobiography. It is more usual for a Biographer to turn to fiction, as Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Forster and Victoria Glendinning have done, rather than to autobiography. Very few ‘career biographers’ metamorphose into autobiographers, although a few have, such as Stefan Zweig, and Michael Holroyd who wrote Basil Street Blues. Why do biographers seem to avoid autobiography? Do they fear their own scalpels when they turn their gaze inward? Is too much scrutiny, or too much reality simply unbearable? How many biographers here today would consider writing your own lives?

If we resist conventional autobiography, how much of our own selves sidle into our studies of other people? Consciously or unconsciously, we are all autobiographers - and our own lives filter our choice of subjects. Peter Ackroyd’s passionate commitment to London influences his subjects and his biographies, of Dickens, Sir Thomas More, London itself. Experimental, risk-taking biographers may even invent autobiographies for their subjects, as Andrew Motion did for Wainewright the Poisoner. Biographers like Motion inhabit their subjects to such an extent that the life of the other becomes an obsession. Even after his comprehensive biography of Keats, Motion finds that Keats still won’t leave him alone. Or is it the other way around? The Biographer sailed in the wake of Keats’s final voyage to Italy, wrote poems, Salt Water, about the experience and is now reportedly working on a fictionalisation of Keats, because the Romantic poet is still so vivid and real to him that Motion simply can’t let him go. (subsequently published as The Invention of Dr Cake, Faber and Faber, 2003)

Which leads me to that intriguing question: - Do we choose our subjects – or do our subjects choose us? Oh, you can say airily, my publisher or my agent asked me to do the life of Byron or Elizabeth I, or Einstein or Oscar Wilde’s mother. But as biographers, are we drawn to write the life of someone, who at some deep, temperamental level is somehow ‘like’ ourselves, or with whom we believe, probably wrongly, that we can ‘empathise’? William Rossetti thought what he called the ‘sympathetic bond’ essential to writing biography. But this approach contains clear dangers for we may impose our own personality and private obsessions on to our subjects. Over-reliance on the ‘sympathetic bond’ could produce a beguiling interpretation but it could also be totally misguided. Coming from the future, as we do, to re-examine the past, we cannot re-animate dead subjects exactly as they once lived. We can only re-imagine them and present a version. Our version. A selective version.

…Like Lytton Strachey’s biographer’s bucket. In his luminous marine image, the biographer, that explorer of the past, shoots ‘a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.’ Strachey rejected any need for a ‘sympathetic bond’ between himself and his subjects. Although he called biography ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’, it is not in a biographer’s brief, he believed ‘to be complimentary: it is his business…to lay bare the facts of some cases…dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.’ Strachey thought the biographer must be a free spirit to comment on the evidence of the lives he/or she re-creates. So liberated from the ‘sympathetic bond’, biographers can deliberately choose to write the life of someone totally different from him/or herself, touring into the life of the other as into a foreign country.

Whatever the choice of subject, and whatever the line taken by the biographer, these are likely outcomes or reactions to personal experience, if only at some profound, unspeakable, inadmissible level. Eventually it may become safe to acknowledge that all writing is a form of autobiography – or that autobiography is the natural parent of all writing. W.H. Auden said that ‘Every work of art is in one sense, a self-disclosure – and too complicated ever to unravel’. He felt that autobiography was redundant for poets like him - ‘since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem’. Perhaps we had better admit that autobiography is present everywhere, in a myriad guises, in all our books, however we may struggle to resist its siren call.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I was mad to choose this subject, better suited to a PHd thesis. There are flaws in my argument, and by the end you may well say it has gone completely off the rails -- so I beg your indulgence in advance.

Now. Have you noticed, or is it just me? If you say 'a biography of Gladstone', you've merely defined a certain sort of book which could be good, bad or indifferent. If you say 'a biography of London', however, it immediately sounds rather intriguing: the 'bio' bit sounds instantly more alive, like those yogurts that are supposed to be so good for you.

But why call it that? Why not call it a history, social history, a guide book or a travel book? I think the answer lies in the fact that anything that might be described as a biography ofa place approaches things from a different angle. By putting the city centre stage, the author can examine how the people passing through it have been affected by that city, and how the city has affected them. These are the two questions at the heart of any biography of place.

So the book will be part history, part descriptive, part guide, and something more besides - for what happens, when you begin to think about the interaction of people and place, is that place begins to take on personality. It's like putting together one of those mosaic images which, on inspection, turn out to be made of millions of tiny photographs.

Peter Ackroyd's book 'The Biography of London' deserves the definite article. The very scale of his work - 700 pages - is titanic. Still, it's not the sort of book that demands consecutive reading, because the chapters are short and can be dipped into at random. This could be very bitty, but it isn't for at least three reasons. First is the author's voice, which is clear with the authority of one who not only lives and breathes London, but has read almost every book on it that was ever written. Second, the book has ( and I would say this is an essential to any biography of place) a grounded quality. He has walked every inch of the city, and knows it well enough to devote chapters to its light, its fog, its noise. There are also there arc innumerable vignettes of the individual lives of Londoners - the miniature photographs, as it were, that make up the portrait. Most interesting of all is his conviction that London carries it's past in its stones.

It's a very different approach to that of Christopher Hibbert, whose Biography of London (the first of four city biographies he was to write, incidentally) came out in 1969. In the foreword, Hibbert says that his book is 'intended as an introduction to the development of London and of the social life of its people.' So his description of the slums of St Giles, which were known as The Rookeries, is what one might expect. He describes the hideous gin-alleys, where 'the bodies of the incapably drunk could be seen lying where they ahd fallen, by day as by night, in Bethnal Green and Spittalfields.. .and particularly in St Giles.. .which Hogarth chose for the scene of his admonitory picture.' He then goes on to say that the Rookery was cleared in the 19* century, by driving New Oxford St straight through the worst of it -just as Victoria Street cut through 'acres ofslums west of the Abbey towards Victoria Station.'

Contrast this with Ackroyd on the same subject:

'The area around St Giles was, in the language of the period, a sore or abcess that might poison the whole body politic, with the unspoken assumption that it must be in some way purged or cauterised. So.. .a great thoroughfare known as New Oxford Street was run through it, leading to wholesale demolition of the worst lanes and courts with an attendant exodus of the poor inhabitants - although most of them moved only a few streets further south.. .It was a damp, dismal and 'noisome' place, to which few new residents could be attracted. And so its stands today. New Oxford Street is one of the least interesting thoroughfares in London, with no character except the dubious one of being dominated by the high rise block of Centrepoint. The building towers above the site of the old cage and gallows, and may perhaps be considered a fitting successor to them. It is an area now without character or purpose, the home of computer suppliers, an Argos superstore, some undistinguished office buildings... There are still vagrants lingering in the recesses of the area as a token of its past, but where there was once life and suffering there is now only a dismal quiet from which St Giles himself can offer no deliverance.'

That line about Centrepoint, towering above the site of the old cage and gallows: he never actually says that perhaps that's why it's such a gloomy place, but what's implicit is that the past, even when destroyed, still has a subtle ability to mould and influence the present.

Each biography ofplacc will create a relationship with the past, and each has to be created afresh in the mind of the author - because towns and landscapes, and the societies that created them, grow beyond the span of one human life.

However the writer creates that sense of the past, with it goes a sense of impermanence and flux. Everything is constantly shifting, whether it's a landscape or a village or a city, is another hallmark of biographies of place. It's deep in the bones of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise, a description of village life in the depths of Oxfordshire at the turn of the century.

'There had been a time, it appeared, when lace making was a regular industry in the hamlet. Queenie, in her childhood, had been 'brought up to

the pillow', sitting among the women at eight years old and learning to fling her bobbins with the best of them...

Now, of course, things were different. She didn't know what the world was coming to. This nasty machine-made stuff had killed the lace-making; the dealer had not been to the Fair for the last ten years... said they liked the Nottingham stuff better; it was wider and had more pattern to it! She still did a bit to keep her hand in. One or two old ladies still used it to trim their shifts, and it was handy to give as presents..but, as for living by it, those days were over.'

Flora Thompson was accutely aware that those days were over: Lark Rise described the rural world of her childhood, and by the time it was published in 1939, she was in her sixties. She was describing a world on the brink of unimaginable change and upheaval, but - as the passage I've just quoted shows - she was also recording what had already passed, liven in the passages where she describes things that have scarcely altered in centuries, you can hear Time's Wing'ed Charriot not far off.

'Next came the rectory, so buried in orchards and shrubberies that only the chimney stacks were visible from the road; then the old Tudor farmhouse, with its mullioned windows and reputed dungeon. These, with the school and about a dozen cottages, made up the village. Even these few r buildings were strung out across the roadside, so few and far between and so sunken in greenery that there seemed no village at ail.'

So far, I've lalked about some ofthe characteristics of writing biographies of place. Now, to some ofthe problems - and these are largely to do with structure. If you write the biography of a person, you have an instantly identifiable line to follow: a person is born, lives, and dies - and no matter how much the author deviates or rearranges this basic chronology, it can't be ignored.

The biography of a place gives far greater freedom. If you are writing about, Cairo, you can go anywhere in the city that interests you: the palace, the red light district, the city ofthe dead, the barracks, the slums - places you might never visit if you were there in person. So the material you collect, from hundreds of different sources, is radial rather than linear. The obvious solution to the problem of structure is that the material must be organised thcmatically, but that's not the whole answer.

To come back to the analogy ofthe image made up of photographs: If your structure was purely thematic, you wouldn't have an image just a set of patches sorted into different colours, which isn't good enough. Only a time-line or a story will give you the drive that every book needs, and even when you've found one, you still have to pull your mass of material into shape. Structure is, without a doubt, the thorniest problem for anyone attempting this sort of writing.

On the plus side, you will be able to evade the language of conventional biography, that slips so easily into old ruts: you'll never find yourself writing sentences like 'The following summer found Smith back with the Fothergills in the Lake District,' or 'The publication of Smith's memoirs in October proved the ideal opportunity for settling old scores'.

One of the curious things I've discovered in thinking about the biography of place, is how often the most successful examples of this genre have been written by novelists. I've talked about Peter Ackroyd; but think too of Elizabeth Bowen's book Bowen 's Court, about her family's house in Ireland; or Penelope Lively, who has just brought out a book called The House Unlocked, the still centre of which is her grandmother's house in Somerset. Or, one of the best biographies of place ever written, EM Forster's History and Guide to Alexandria.

This was published in Alexandria in 1922, before biography of place had been thought about, and in fact he hardly describes the modern city at all: that is merely a grid, a map, through which the reader can put himself in touch with the past. Lawrence Durrell described it as 'a small work of art, for it contains some of Forster's best prose, as well as felicities of touch such as only a novelist of major talent could command.'

 Not many biographies of place include a history of the mind that produced it; but this is what Forster does, cutting through what must be volumes of the driest theology to come up with passages like this:

'That old dilemma, that God ought at the same time to be far away and close at hand...[can only occur] to those who require God to be loving as well as powerful; and it is the weakness and the strength of Alexandria to have solved it by the conception of a link. Her weakness: because she had always to be shifting the link up and down - if she got it too near God it was too far from man, and vice versa. Her strength: because she did cling to the idea of Love; and much phiposophical absurdity, much theological arridity, must be pardoned to those who maintain that the best thing on earth is likely to be the best in heaven.'

Forster's Guide is not an easy book to get into; but, as Durrell observes, 'once the first sense of estrangement is over, the mind finds its surcease in the discovery of the dream-city of Alexandria which underpins, underlays the rather commonplace little Mediterranean seaport which it seems, to the uninitiated, to be.'

Forster's book, and the poems of Constantine Cavafy, were to become the sources for Durrell's novel, the Alexandria Quartet. This is, I think we would all agree, a novel. I hope you would also agree that it is also one of those novels in which the setting is so essntial to the action that it takes on the importance of a central character. And this book has done what novels do sometimes do - especially very successful ones that reach a wide audience and become classics: The Alexandria Quartet has grafted itself onto Alexandria, and irrevocably changed the way people think about it.

I began to realise this when 1 lived in Alexandria doing VSO in the mid-1970s. The people I met were very hospitable and enjoyed showing me round the beaches, cafes, restaurants and sports clubs which they took to be the highlights of their city. And on these jaunts one of them was bound to say 'You see, it's nothing like Durrell's books, is it?'

I soon worked out that this was a way of saying, 'it's not all sexual depravity and child brothels', but there was something else, too: a resentment that Durrell's novel had somehow pickled them all in that crumbling city he created, with its ghosts, its secrets, its suffocating history and seedy glamour. You have only to read the local guide-books, especially the French ones, to see how much sub-Durrellian prose there is still sloshing about.

This, I realise, has taken us rather a long way from the biography of place; but in so far as the biography of place is inevitably selective and subjective, novels like this do form part of the equasion. Ackroyd describes 'Bleak House' as 'a symbolic restatement of London vision', and in the same manner, that novel has shaped the way we see London - particularly that opening sequence with the fog of London hanging low over the Thames, seeping into the crannies of the Inns of Chancery, and round the great mountains of paper that make up the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.

No biography of London would be complete without several references to Dickftis in the index, nor would a biography of Alexandria be complete without mentioning LawTence Durrell.

So am I trying to say that biographies of place should be written by novelists? No, I would not dream of supporting such a heresy in this company. But I would suggest that this sort of biography requires some of the skills of a novelist. It requires a touch that is not too obsessed with accuracy, and not afraid to impose a creative imagination on the tangible and factual. As Plotinus once remarked, 'to any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen.'