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 and David Bradshaw, 1994 and 2007 2 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 and David Bradshaw, 1994 and 2007 3 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.