The Poetry of Basil Bunting

Biography and Autobiography

by David Bradshaw

English Association Bookmarks No. 15

English Association Bookmarks Number 15

Biography and Autobiography

by David Bradshaw

Scope of Topic Some distinctive features of biography and autobiography and of some of their subcategories. Some problems faced by authors who write them which may also shed light when reading them.

INTRODUCTION Have you ever kept a diary? Many young people have at some time. It may be a record of things done including family or class outings, achievements in sport or leisure activities. It may include accounts of the successes of friends which you felt you shared with them. Perhaps there are private thoughts about other people, relationships with special friends or the way the world is. Many diaries contain a blend of these though some concentrate on one area to the exclusion of others. As a diarist you may also have experienced the pleasure of conveying not just a bare factual account but something of the feeling for events. If events are funny then there is the choice to be made between say a slapstick description or detached irony. You may also have been tempted to put things down not quite as they were so as to make the story more amusing or dramatic or to leave you feeling more comfortable. If you were to ask a friend what they thought were the most significant things about you they might not agree with your own estimate. Seeing others as complete people is not always easy.

These questions of selection, tone and accuracy are all faced when writing biography (the life of someone else), or autobiography (your own).

THREE TEXTS Michael White and John Gribbin, Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (Penguin, 1992) Mary Cadogan, The Woman Behind William: A Life of Richmal Crompton (Macmillan Paperbacks, 1993) Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Virago, 1984)

NOTES

In December 1990 the rock group Status Quo (or their roadies) were in Brighton setting up for a concert. In the same complex of buildings a symposium of scientists specialising in the physics of the cosmos found it hard to concentrate on the day's papers and discussion and were much relieved when the rock preparations ended. That evening the scientists carried on with their work informally and a group of them met for a discussion at the hotel room of Stephen Hawking, one of the world's leading cosmic physicists and a man much admired for remaining at the top of his career despite severe physical incapacity. But Stephen Hawking was not there; he had gone to hear Status Quo. Even though it was a major conference in his professional field, he could find time for other interests.

Michael White and John Gribbin's Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science is the story of Stephen Hawking's upbringing and education, his research, emergence as an exceptional scientist and his career and other aspects of his life to date. At Oxford he worked much less hard than he might. Fortunately his natural ability enabled him to achieve the first class degree essential to begin the career of research at the level he had in mind. The onset of Motor Neuron disease when he was twenty and how he coped with its progress interweaves with the

English Association Bookmarks Number 15

professional story. With the encouragement and love of Jane Wilde, Stephen Hawking found the determination to develop his career. Later his success and the quest of further discoveries became additional motivations. Jane and Stephen Hawking married in 1965 and his career then developed at a great pace with election to a Cambridge college in 1965, appointment to the staff of the Institute of Theoretical Physics in 1968, a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1974 and then world-wide recognition as one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the century. There was also the huge success of his book A Brief History of Time, an account of the origin and working of the Universe.

Stephen Hawking and his discoveries are inseparable and any book about him has to make his work as a scientist the central theme. He works at the extreme edge of our understanding of how the Universe functions and his life's work is not easy to understand. The authors handle this problem by devoting several chapters entirely to our growing understanding of the cosmos and Stephen Hawking's contribution to it. It's an original approach and it works so well others may copy it. You need to concentrate hard to follow the argument, but the book has been described as the best available introduction to A Brief History of Time.

It is often difficult to write about the spouses of the famous. Most modern biographies attempt to bring them to life both as husband or wife and as distinct individuals, defining them within the life they wanted for themselves. For Jane Hawking there was the fulfilment of attaining a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese poetry, though the stresses of being identified as wife and mother led in the end to her seeking divorce and an independent life and career.

Glimpses of Stephen Hawking's world include the way the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge work and the world of publishing. There is a little space also for his relaxations, especially pop music and dancing, where he manipulates his wheel chair to the rhythm of the music.

Stephen Hawking is a contemporary and the authors have relied heavily upon tape recorded interviews with people who know him in a working or personal context. Also although his research has been of profound scientific importance it is, as yet, incomplete. It may be many decades before we can appreciate the full significance of his work in its context. So there are likely to be more biographies about him and the present book or its taped sources may come to be used as material in their writing.

Mary Cadogan's The Woman Behind William: A Life of Richmal Crompton records and celebrates the creator of William Brown, the scruffy spontaneous schoolboy with a taste for home made games, muddy streams and tangled gardens and a gift for getting into scrapes and clashes with authority. He first appeared in Newnes Home Magazine in 1919 and in book form three years later in Just William. The thirty-eighth and last book of his adventures, William the Lawless, came out in 1970. William's environment changed over these years. His house and its garden became smaller and servants became fewer and then disappeared, while the settings and plots had to take account of the war, technological innovation and evolving social custom. But William remained the same age and the same personality throughout - desperately literal and matter of fact, suspicious of adults and questioning of authority. So, too, the people around him - his three friends (the Outlaws), Violet Elizabeth, the little girl who followed them around, his parents, brother Robert and sister Ethel - all were unchanged by the passage of time. The rebellious school child is commonplace in literature today, but boys in books normally conformed to civilised stereotypes until William appeared and his gutsy resentment of adult authority and scorn of social conventions was new. If some of this impact has gone, the appeal of the books remains and all of the William titles are still in print and available in paperback.

Richmal Crompton, William's creator, was born in Bury, Lancashire, the daughter of a schoolmaster-clergyman who taught classics. Richmal was herself an accomplished scholar

English Association Bookmarks Number 15

and on one occasion while still at school wrote a postcard to her father in Latin. After degree studies at Royal Holloway College she taught Classics at her old school and at Bromley High School for Girls until she became a full-time author in 1924. Her ambition was to become known as a serious novelist for adults and some of her novels in this field are still available (and enjoyable), but they were never the literary success she hoped for them. It was the William stories, intended as 'pot boilers' to support her more serious writing, which brought her fame. The transition to full-time author was precipitated by a personal tragedy as Richmal Crompton contracted poliomyelitis in the summer of 1923 and lost the use of her right leg. The success of the William books enabled her to live in reasonable comfort and to have the help she needed in her home.

As the chronological thread of The Woman Behind William unfolds, so Richmal Crompton's family and the experiences, people and interests from which her imagination produced the works in both genres appear. Mary Cadogan takes a good deal of care to describe the locations and people whom Richmal Crompton knew and drew upon for her settings and characters. Both these and the values of the William stories are those of the middle classes during the inter-war years. The knock-about fun of William's escapades are set off by detached observation of the boy anti-hero, much of it expressed in sophisticated irony which is a perfect foil for the direct and uninhibited schoolboy argot of William and his friends. This provides an additional layer of meaning to the stories. The origin of the material used in some of the novels for adults is explored too.

The sources for The Woman Behind William are the memories of those who knew her, the postcards used extensively by her family for correspondence, journals kept while on holiday and the scraps of paper she used to make notes. There is no great archive to utilise, but Mary Cadogan nonetheless achieves a clear picture of a woman of deep intelligence, imagination, scholarship and integrity, the experiences of life which she drew upon, and great insight into people and their foibles.

Writers of autobiography have an even harder task of selection. They know far more than any biographer could; but they tell us less than they might and often less than we would like to know. But at its best this writing can convey some of the actual feeling of life as it is experienced.

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is primarily about growing up among America's poor in the 1930's and 1940's. She recalls how “It was awful to be negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense." Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis in 1928 but brought up by her grandmother in Stamps, a small town in rural Arkansas. Her childhood was one of poverty exacerbated by the depression of the 1930's and the persistent injustices of white folks. 'Momma' (her grandmother) kept the local store, which was one of the centres of the local community (the other was the church), a place to exchange gossip or comfort. For an alert child it was a place to listen, learn and think. Within the calendar of an agricultural community and the routines and special occasions of the church she tells of Momma keeping her fragile business going by trading welfare goods in kind; a whole community in terror at the Ku Klux Klan on the hunt for a victim; her race given status by Joe Louis' victories in the boxing ring and revenge for countless humiliations taken in small ways on the guilty whites. There is the universal experience of childhood too: embarrassment of being surprised in some minor misdemeanour, mortification in some obscure failure and the stresses and joys of school. Who won't empathise with the recollection of the principal's speech at a school ceremony: “It had not been my plan to listen to him but my curiosity was piqued and I gave him my attention." It is all recalled with the child's eye for what was relevant at the time and a rare gift for highlighting significant detail. But throughout there is also the dark theme of the fairminded child coming to terms with the puzzles of inequality and hate, of emotion relived in all its intensity

English Association Bookmarks Number 15

When she was eight Maya's father took her and her adored brother Bailey to live with their mother in St. Louis. Father disappeared back to California where he had lived for some time and the children had to adapt to a violent community where people made their own laws and gangs did as they pleased. To Maya it was always a foreign country to which she never adapted. But despite a lack of sympathy for the community or its ways, the pictures of life are still sharply drawn. The stay came to an abrupt end following an awful personal trauma. 'Mr. Freeman', her mother's boyfriend, first abused and then raped her. Once discovered, he was charged and convicted, let out of jail and murdered. Maya became mute and was sent home to Stamps where, with time, sympathetic care and the help of one person in particular, she eventually recovered her speech. This episode is simply told, with an understatement that is powerfully effective.

During their teens Maya and Bailey joined their mother who was by then living in California. There is not only a sharply different landscape to draw, but the changes wrought by the early years of the war, with Japanese Americans rounded up and taken away to internment camps. The personal experiences continued to be a mix of the desirable, such as a school where one teacher gave her an adult view of life, the scary (including a frightening trip to Mexico with her father) and tragedy, with an unwanted pregnancy. Along with these go a change in perceptions from the innocent observation of the quick-minded child to the emerging sophistication of the adolescent

The book achieves a satisfying balance between outer experience and inner feeling and Maya Angelou shares her impressions and emotions as she experienced them; there is very little interpretation in the light of adult knowledge. She has a particular gift for the recall of conversation - or if not that, a rare talent for reconstructing it to convey conviction; a necessary licence for autobiographers. This ensures that all the characters, even the transient ones, have reality.

FURTHER READING AND OTHER ISSUES Bernard Ingham, Kill the Messenger (Fontana, 1991) Vera Brittan, Testament of Youth (Virago Press, 1978) Adrian Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight Errant (John Murray, 1991; paperback 1993) Christabel Bielenberg, The Road Ahead (Corgi, 1993) Roland Huntsford, Scott and Amundsen (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1993) Dorothy Moriarty, Dorothy: The Memoirs of a Nurse (Corgi, 1991) Siegfried Sassoon, The Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Best value is in The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (Faber, 1972)

NOTES

Sir Bernard Ingham's Kill the Messenger is substantially about his career in journalism (Yorkshire and London) and as a political press secretary to Labour and to Conservative ministers. These are memoirs, so there is little about personal life and feelings; his working class upbringing for example is compressed into 12 pages and a few other brief mentions. As Mrs. Thatcher's Chief Press Secretary he spoke for the Prime Minister and her government and coordinated the presentation of their policies. Some alleged he helped to shape policy; he denies this and presents his evidence. The book describes Government observed from the inside, but only the passage of time and the sifting of much evidence will place it in historical perspective.

Vera Brittan's Testament of Youth includes first hand accounts of education for women at Oxford University in 1914 and just after the war, of nursing wounded servicemen in France,

English Association Bookmarks Number 15

Malta and London, and the intense emotion of separation from loved ones. It records her pain on the loss of her fiancé‚ in the trenches of France and of her brother in Italy. Historically it is valuable as Vera Brittan contributed notably to women's struggle for equality of treatment and to the cause of pacifism and the book is also a moving evocation of her surroundings and feelings.

Adrian Vaughan illustrates the growing attention to meticulous scholarship in biography in which evidence has priority over image and reputation. Based upon new sources and a reexamination of old ones, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight Errant sheds new light on a man of genius. Brunel's feats - above all in creating the Great Western Railway - make him one of Britain's greatest civil engineers. Here his standing remains. But Brunel has previously been credited with innovations that were at least in part the work of others (particularly in ship building) and as a manager he was egocentric, at times bullying and at others evasive. Previous biographers perhaps allowed admiration to blank out the weaknesses.

Biographies are about people and their times but also reflect the interests and values of the times when they are written. Christabel (English by birth and upbringing) and her German husband Peter Bielenberg lived in Germany during the war. The Road Ahead tells how they rebuilt their lives after it. With a fragile base for their family established, Christabel retook British citizenship and wrote for The Observer seeking reconciliation, exposing unfair imprisonments and helping the families of those executed after the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944. These aspects are often missed in conventional accounts. Finding neither Germany nor England congenial they settled as farmers in Ireland in 1948. This concise but flowing story of people of unusually strong character and principle is told with a lightness of touch in which humour constantly breaks through.

Roland Huntsford's Scott and Amundsen is a double biography of two men whose ambition as explorers brought them into competition with one another in their race to reach the South Pole. The earlier careers of the two men show the development of their strengths and weaknesses. This work more than any other revised our view of Scott, who disregarded information and advice which did not fit his prejudices, failed to look ahead, and was a poor organiser and leader. Amundsen studied the problems of his quest and prepared for all known eventualities. The outcome should not surprise us. A fascinating story and a gripping read.

Dorothy Bishop's Dorothy: The Memoirs of a Nurse has a long section about her upbringing in middle class comfort and with a haphazard education. Then a stay in hospital for an operation gave her the vocation to become a nurse. Training from 1914-1917 was in hospital practice before antibiotics and the National Health Service and was marked by oppressive discipline, poor instruction and every waking moment filled with ward duties, study and personal chores. A weekend off once in four weeks lasted from 6 pm on Saturday until 10 pm on Sunday. Working in Egypt in the early 1920's Dorothy met and married Oliver Moriarty and provides a brief glimpse of Anglo-Egyptian society.

Both the title (and some of the content) of Siegfried Sassoon's The Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man might deter you from trying this book. But this delightful celebration of nostalgia for life before the First World War was an immediate success when first published in 1937 and remains highly readable and entertaining. It is autobiography disguised as fiction with the hero George Sherston (Sassoon) brought up by a maiden aunt for whom Sassoon's mother thirty years on is one of the models. It concludes with Sassoon's early war experiences, a prelude to the horrors which lay behind the war poems for which he is now perhaps best remembered.

Personal response counts especially when reading autobiography so you may not be attracted to all of these. Part of the skill of reading in this genre is to place our own values alongside those of other people.

English Association Bookmarks Number 15

All books use source material. Where these include published diaries and letters you can check a biography against its sources. Often they simply make an interesting read on their own account. Choice of books is personal, so if none quoted here appeal but the genre of biography does, why not start with someone you admire? This could be someone living or dead, their story told by themselves or by someone else - a fellow admirer probably. They might be a sportsperson, musician, actor, activist or one of a dozen other things. One of the great pleasures of books is in browsing. If you go into a library or bookshop, ask for the biography section and sample a few pages here and there. You may find someone to interest you. Or you may discover browsing as a hobby (and include second hand book shops on your itineraries too; they contain many real treasures) for if you expect that something will hold your interest you are unlikely to be disappointed. Something will, and you will have found a pleasure for life.

CRITICISM

Donald J. Winslow, Life Writing: A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography and Related Forms (University Press of Hawaii, 1980).

Robert Gittings, The Nature of Biography (Heinemann, 1978)

Leon Edel, Literary Biography (Indiana University Press, 1959)

James Olney, Editor, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton University Press, 1980)

Biography and Autobiography by David Bradshaw is Number 15 in the Bookmark series, published by

The English Association University of Leicester University Road Leicester LE1 7RH UK

Tel: 0116 252 3982 Fax: 0116 252 2301 Email: [email protected]

Potential authors are invited to contact the following at the address above:

Series Editor Victor Hext

Shakespeare Bookmarks Primary Bookmarks Secondary Bookmarks Kerri Corcoran-Martin Louise Ellis-Barrett Ian Brinton