There was always an extra buzz of excitement at the Biographers’ Club Christmas party when one of the club’s grandest lady biographers brought her husband along. He was a man widely seen at the time as Britain’s greatest living playwright, the closest thing you would find to a ‘household name’ in the cultural world.
Moving, as one does at these sorts of parties, from one conversational group to another, I found myself next to the grand lady biographer after the wine had been flowing for a while. She made the usual polite enquiry as to what I did for a living (coincidentally her equally splendid mother and father had been two of the literary grandees who had made similar polite enquiries at the first Foyles Literary Lunch I attended nearly 40 years before. Then I would have told them I was a novelist or perhaps a journalist).
When I explained that I ghosted books and that many of them were memoirs she loudly summoned her husband to join us from another nearby group.
‘You need to talk to this man,’ she instructed him. ‘He’s a ghostwriter. You’ve been saying for years that you are going to write about your wartime evacuee experiences and you’re never going to get round to it. Why don’t you just let him do it?’
For just a moment it looked as if the greatest living playwright was actually weighing up the benefits of having someone else lift the burden of authorship from his shoulders, but the moment passed and the polite conversations rolled on. He died a year or two later and I suspect he never got round to writing down those memories, although his wife wrote a moving, and bestselling, account of their relationship.