ARTEMIS COOPER TALK (26th September 2001)

THE BIOGRAPHY OF PLACE

 
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.'