Michael Holroyd / Features / Untitled Books

"Traditional biographers were guided by the motto 'Let us now praise famous men'. I wanted to turn this around, give an alternative history and explore private and emotional life – which interests me more than money and power."

Michael Holroyd

Michael Holroyd is one of Britain's most influential biographers. His exemplary lives of Augustus John, George Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey are as unsparing as they are wide-ranging and comprehensive. Have his recent works struck a more whimsical note? Mark Reynolds investigates.

Known internationally for his unstinting portraits of literary giants, Michael Holroyd's writing would appear to have taken a surprising turn over the last decade. With Basil Street Blues (1999), he turned the spotlight on his own upbringing for the first time, pinpointing in his early life a strong desire to immerse himself in other people's lives. The effect is that the autobiographer himself comes across as a shadowy presence, only glimpsed between the trails he furrows attempting to track down a grandfather's mistress or the soldier who reneged on marrying an aunt. When it came to writing his second memoir Mosaic (2004), he was able to draw upon an extraordinary range of responses from readers of the first, who filled in some troubling gaps, threw up new scents, and even helped locate and define both the mistress and the soldier. Then, out of the blue, Holroyd delivers surprisingly frank accounts of a tumultuous love affair with the riotously tormented Philippa Pullar, and the courtship of his wife Margaret Drabble in the 1980s that took both parties unawares. Finally he switches tone again, to ruminate on the frontiers between fiction and biography.

His latest work, A Book of Secrets, published this month, is another playful hybrid of biography and personal memoir; in which the author again examines the challenges and limitations of biography. The beginnings of the book can be traced back to Holroyd's fascination with a stunning bust of Eve Fairfax by Auguste Rodin, dated 1904-5, which he first saw while researching at the V&A in about 1970. The museum informs us that the work was commissioned by Ernest Beckett, Lord Grimthorpe, to whom Eve "was briefly engaged".

Eve was about 100 by the time Holroyd cast eyes on the work and, had he known, he could have visited her at the Quaker home for the elderly and destitute in which she wound up in her native Yorkshire. Her journey there was punctuated by adoration, affairs, an illegitimate son, bankruptcy, and a slide into eccentricity as she was bounced from pillar to post on the fringes of gentility, living as a house-guest on a succession of crumbling aristocratic estates. For the last five decades of her life she was inseparable from an unwieldy "book of memories" - containing her social calendar, autographs, poems and other snippets - that suggested the title for the present book.

An ageing playboy with financial difficulties, after dropping Eve Fairfax (and neglecting to pay Rodin), Ernest Beckett sells up his properties and art, enters and leaves politics, gives up his position at the family bank, marries an American heiress, and plans an escape to Italy to the Villa Cimbrone above the hills of Ravello overlooking the majestic Gulf of Solerno. This is the transient dreamscape that links many of the characters who populate this book, but can contain none of them.

Holroyd makes a memorable visit to the villa in the company of the indomitable Catherine Till in 2000, who on holiday there fifty years earlier made the discovery that her mother had had an affair with Beckett's son and heir Ralph. Now in her sixties, she still seeks absolute proof of her identity. The white-knuckle ride up winding mountain roads to Ravello with Catherine at the wheel offers moments of great comedy, but the trip is ultimately fruitless, and Catherine is left with only uncertainty.

Holroyd makes a second visit some years later at the invitation of translator and biographer Tiziana Masucci, who introduces him to the work of Violet Trefusis, a forgotten novelist known only for her passionate affair with Vita Sackville-West. Being "forgotten", it is now Violet of course who takes centre-stage, as the author approaches the scandalous affair through her letters to Vita, a memoir, and three fictional reworkings, including a central episode in Virginia Woolf's pseudo-biography Orlando. While Tiziana too might have a walk-on part in the hands of another writer, she and Holroyd form a close bond he studies their connections as she doggedly pursues her goal of setting Violet's life and works in context (somehow finding time to translate Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen into Italian along the way).

Fresh from devouring this engagingly discursive book last weekend, I had the opportunity to fire off a few questions to the author. He asserted that uncovering subsidiary stories was always part of his drive to explore the lives of others from every angle.

MR: You describe Tiziana Masucci's single-minded commitment to Violet Trefusis as "all-consuming". You must have undergone a similar immersion to write your lives of John, Shaw and Strachey. But in your more recent work you delight in side-stories, false trails, and the quest for truth and identity. Are these the themes that connect A Book of Secrets to your earlier memoirs, in what you collectively describe as "confessions of an elusive biographer"?

MH: I have always been tempted by beguiling sidetracks and have followed them when pursuing the minor characters in my comprehensive biographies. In my memoirs and A Book of Secrets there are no dominating characters to prevent me exploring these hidden and adventurous routes and coming across many surprises.

MR: Your principal subjects here are assorted Edwardian women of privilege who, "unlike the men, have no settled professions" and whose lives are "fluid and vulnerable". What attracted you to these marginal lives?

MH: In the past, traditional biographers were usually guided by the motto from Ecclesiasticus: "Let us now praise famous men". This book would have been a story of bankers, members of parliament and peers of the realm if I had been guided in that way - with the women lagging superfluous. I wanted to turn this around, give an alternative history and explore private and emotional life - which interests me more than money and power.

MR: Weren't certainties in the male world also crumbling? Ernest Beckett barely settles into his role as either banker or MP, and is prone to scurrying abroad or starting a new affair whenever problems arise. Also Vita and Violet's husbands are largely powerless to prevent their affair.

MH: Of course men had money and power in the late Victorian and Edwardian Days. But women generally had greater knowledge of another, more imaginative world and that is why I wanted to focus on them and show the limits of male power.

MR: To what extent is Eve Fairfax's abandonment by Ernest Beckett responsible for her subsequent rootlessness? Or does her personal tragedy lie more profoundly in her immortalisation at a young age in the busts of Rodin? (Was Eve's Book an attempt to underpin that immortality?)

MH: I think Eve Fairfax was cast adrift after Ernest Beckett's failure to marry her. She did have an emotional attachment to Rodin for some years (certainly for longer than her engagement to Beckett), and she became something of a legend through the fame of Rodin's wonderful busts of her and the extraordinary book she carried round with her, but they were to some extent compensations for the tragedy of her life. Lack of love does not necessarily ennoble us and Eve's later years, though quite brave, eccentric and stylish, were not happy.

MR: You refer to Violet's "deceptively well-camouflaged" late memoirs, in which her omissions are frequently more telling than her detached observations. Yet her love letters to Vita are filled with passion and desperate hope. Is the biographer's toughest task to define the boundaries between memory, history and fiction/fantasy? Or is his duty merely to explore them?

MH: I certainly try to explore the boundaries between memory, history, fiction and fantasy and see why at different stages of her life Violet Trefusis chose one above the other. I suggest that memory had eventually to give way to fantasy so as to prevent her life from becoming unbearably sad. The paradox was that she used her memory to recreate versions of the truth in her novels, whereas her non-fiction became a fantasy that concealed the truth.

In the end, we all need a version of truth to hold onto. But, as Holroyd shows, a life is richer if there are unexpected entertainments and diversions along the way.

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Michael Holroyd's A Book of Secrets is published by Chatto & Windus. Basil Street Blues and Mosaic are now published together in one edition by Vintage.

Mark Reynolds is Commissioning Editor of The Drawbridge.

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Thursday, 25 November, 2010