4

Self-Seeking

THE BEGINNING, A MIDDLE, AND
SOME SENSE OF AN END

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again to-day –

I wish to God he’d go away.

Anon

‘You stay hidden,’ writes Margaret Forster near the end of a letter to me. She is a novelist who has written two remarkable volumes of family memoirs. So is she right? By training I had learnt to explore others through myself but by temperament I like to explore myself through others. That is what I believed I had done in Basil Street Blues.

All good biographies are intensely personal since they are really accounts of the relationship between a writer and the subject. But biographers also hide themselves behind their subjects, inhabiting those invisible spaces between the lines of print. Had I hidden myself behind my parents and grandparents too, while trying to fix my identity through family echoes and associations?

I do appear, of course, in my book on many pages and at many places: in my grandparents’ dark house and on the margins of my schools; stumbling through the army, then starting out as a writer who gains invisibility in the belief that it is the invisible person who tells the visible world’s stories. Intermittently, in this manner, I tried to tell my story. So I suddenly appear, first as a child racing up and down my grandparents’ garden; then, an adolescent, sitting alone in the garage, an audience of one, listening to my secret concerts on the radiogram; and then again, as my own ghost, waking from a nightmare. There are other sightings of me too: obliged to arrest myself during National Service; and, back in civilian life, corresponding with myself in the guise of my mother and my stepfather.

All these, I now see, are images of loneliness. I am the point at which my family’s failures peak and end. I exult, apparently, in failure, make a set piece of it, reserve for it my most precise irony. I am not so comfortable with success, not so sure how to present it. But I have had more success, like a mirage that vanishes as I reach it, than I ever dreamt. Being someone who has two birthdays, one for each of my parents, who could not agree on a date, I have perhaps had two chances also. ‘Having two birthdays means both that you were never quite born, in the ordinary way,’ the biographer Carole Angier writes to me, ‘and that you were doubly born, the second time as a writer.’ Perhaps that is the best answer for this ambiguity.

But can I bring these two selves, the writer and the subject, together on the page? Can I write about myself not passively as a listener or reader, an echo of others? It seems to me that, whatever I write, I reveal myself, my attitudes and preferences. So why is it so difficult to use the first person singular and centre the narrative on me?

I remember, a few years ago, the uncomfortableness of having my portrait painted. A cocoon of tiredness seemed to shut off the oxygen as the artist’s concentration encircled me. When I work I lose myself by concentrating on others, and afterwards I feel revived. But, though I am doing nothing but sitting in a chair as the artist’s model, it is an oddly exhausting experience, as if the current of energy is travelling in the wrong direction. I sit up, brace myself, take notice, and generally behave like an animal seeking to please. I smile. At the end I feel no eagerness to look at myself. Then, when I do look, I recognise a peculiar rictus in the glare of life.

Now I must put together a pen portrait of myself as seen by others. But how can I do this? I look down now and see my hand still writing, but little else. And if I look up to face the mirror, there is an amalgam of my parents, and their parents, staring back. What have I added to the equation? I must find a story with a beginning, a middle and some end to answer this: a story about myself.

In 1979, at the age of forty-four, I accepted an invitation to teach a couple of courses, one undergraduate, the other postgraduate, at Pennsylvania State University. I planned to combine two days a week teaching (plus half a day of preparation, marking essays etc.) with trips to those manuscript libraries in the United States which held the papers of Bernard Shaw (whose biography I was then writing). This developed into a hectic, sixteen-week programme involving over fifty flights to and from Penn State. If there’s a blockbuster to be written round Pittsburg Airport, I’m your man.

I had never taught anything before, indeed never been a student at a university let alone a university abroad. But this seemed a good and practical way of paying for my research journeys – with the bonus of picking up some American culture.

I was to work in the curious-sounding Ihlseng Cottage, an incongruous small building on the large modern campus, named after its nineteenth-century owner Magnus Ihlseng, a white-bearded Norwegian, Dean of the School of Mines in the 1890s. By the 1970s the cottage had become an Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies whose director, the well-known indefatigable academic and versatile author Stanley Weintraub, with his wife Rodelle, a fine early-autumn rose, entertained me grandly at the university’s expense when I presented myself (I was especially impressed by the dishes of meat, fish and poultry from all of which, simultaneously, as in a boy’s dream, we were given copious helpings).

My initial nervousness was exacerbated when, on arrival, I was handed with an air of urgency some bulky medical insurance documents. Apparently my predecessor, a scientist who came from middle Europe, had fallen ill and, being improperly insured, did not qualify for proper treatment. The result had been a bad case – or, so I gathered – a bad case of death. In the circumstances I signed everything that was placed before me rather eagerly and, after a few questions about my teaching schedule, prepared to enter the classroom. Taking a formidable breath, squaring my shoulders and putting on an expression of authority, I marched in like (remembering my mixed ancestry) the very model of an English gentleman, a Swedish count, a Scottish laird, an Irish absentee landlord: something, at any rate, considerable and impressive. But what impression did I actually create?

‘He was disappointing on all counts,’ remembered one of my students. She, with most of the others, had been speculating over what this ‘mysterious professor’ from abroad would be like. It was generally assumed that, having come so far, I would carry round me a prevailing air of importance, would strike them all as indefinably fascinating, and be of course proper and precise in the best British tradition. Indeed, in my fashion, I had tried to meet these expectations. But as I entered, a cup of coffee in one hand and a bundle of books and tapes under my other arm, there was a murmur of dismay.

No bowler, no cane, no pipe, no distinguished beard even. No ‘cheerio’ or ‘chap’ . . . He slouched. As he sat down and back in his chair, he looked at us and ran his fingers through his already disordered hair. What a letdown!

I did not know then that most of my students, both in my undergraduate and postgraduate courses, had been dragooned into attending these classes as part of their literature requirements. They were not volunteers. A press release had been circulated round the Humanities Department making me out to be a very significant person. I was to deliver one or two special lectures. And this was not all. In the library stood two glass cases that had been importantly prepared with the credentials of my career: fellowships and prizes, favourable reviews and illustrated interviews, manuscript notes, and first editions (which were in truth less rare than second editions). Standing in front of it all later that day, I felt intimidated by this glittering array. Obviously it was the living embodiment of these glass cases that my students had expected to see entering their classroom.

My one immediate asset was my ‘British’ voice. ‘I may fall asleep during every session,’ wrote another student, remembering how she felt during the first class, ‘but at least I’ll nod off to a pleasant sound.’ But of course my peculiar accent was something of a cultural barrier. Was I being funny or was I serious? It was so difficult to tell. By the second week they had mostly decided that I was at least trying to be funny. It was probably British irony, that most awkward of all styles to translate. But they had been guided to their decision more by my appearance and behaviour than by what I actually said, pleasant-sounding as that might be. I was ‘the man who came rushing into the classroom every week looking a little bit like a curious mixture of Rex Harrison and Jerry Lewis’, another student wrote. In other words, a blatant comic.

What struck several of them during my carefully structured course was the informality sometimes reaching into chaos, and my air of helplessness in the middle of it all. ‘Mr Holroyd is very bad at looking stern.’ I was surprised to read this sentence since I had been practising sternness in front of the mirror until it almost cracked. But eventually I decided that here was one student’s brave stab at that sophisticated literary device, the unreliable narrator – and I annotated her essay accordingly. But I still had, they all observed, that desperate mannerism of running my fingers through my hair every few minutes (‘I wonder if his grandmother ever told him that this makes one go bald’). One student drew an impression of my constantly rearranged hair underneath her description of it. ‘His hair is rather wild,’ she observed. ‘It’s amazing the way he gets it to stand up and lay flat in such a chaotic pattern. It looks like this.’

To this she added a drawing of me sitting alert and upright in a chair after one of my long research trips – a drawing which everyone happily agreed was very accurate (though perhaps this was a form of American graphic irony, it occurred to me, and with that interpretation I present it here).

All these comments about me arose as part of (and perhaps in retaliation to) the final assignment I had set my students early on in this course. It was a literary biography and autobiography course, and as their final paper, the very essay that would carry their grades, I had asked them to write a pen portrait-in-miniature of myself. There was a gasp of genuine horror when they heard this. ‘I was no longer amused,’ wrote one of them, perhaps echoing Queen Victoria. Never had they heard anything so vainglorious. But then perhaps it was some trick, even a British ‘joke’. I was often playing tricks on ‘the poor students’. For example, among the ten or twelve books I had set for this course were a couple I disliked. Why would I choose ‘a bad book’ for them to read? The reason gradually became clear. I did not want them to second-guess what I thought. I did not want them trying to please me. I wanted to know what they thought themselves and to make any differing reactions to the texts the basis for our discussions. Should they deduce, therefore, that I did not want them to please me with this final paper too, the pen portrait of myself? How much hostile criticism would I accept without downgrading their papers? How much flattery could I swallow without being sick?

What I really wanted them to do was to use the library in a new way; to find out to what extent I was that person in the glass cases there; to connect the craft of reading with the craft of writing; to read between the lines of a text.

From a number of the essays they wrote, I found out that, during one of the coffee breaks, they had discussed whether or not I was homosexual. After all, I was unmarried. Also I had written a Life of Lytton Strachey and an introduction for the American edition of Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant. Then, too, among the autobiographies I had set them to read was a book by another homosexual author, My Father and Myself, by J. R. Ackerley. But there was conflicting evidence. One of my books had been warmly dedicated to a woman. A quick glance at my recently published Augustus John in the library revealed that he was a committed heterosexual. Perhaps it was necessary for biographers to reach beyond their instinctive interests. In the end they decided that I wasn’t a homosexual. But how could they be certain? Did anyone dare ask me – and if anyone did, would I answer truthfully? Only one student pressed her enquiries further.

And that last sentence shows you what they were up against. What exactly does it mean? The American language is stronger these days than the English language. It’s blunter, ruder, more muscular, demotic, direct. It is pitted, lavishly, with assholes, bombarded with one helluva lot of kicked butt, and does not boast the delicate, smooth bottom of British English. Of course English can be elegant, but its elegance is so often evasive, oblique, polite, ambiguous. It may be prettily enough served up, of course, but where in Christ’s name is the big meat? Here was a cultural obstacle my students had to get round to understand my game, decode my language, discover my secrets. Why had I invited them, as it were, to play detectives, only to leave them so few clues? Though claiming to be opinionated to the very edge of libel, I seemed to have no emphatic opinions at all, certainly no emphatic political opinions (it was the time of Three Mile Island about which I appeared wonderfully inscrutable – more eager to hear my students’ opinions than air my own). Where was my conviction, my ‘passionate intensity’? I sounded infuriatingly cheerful, almost aggressively mild, and had more questions than conclusions – unless, that is, a conclusion may be embedded in a question (was Three Mile Island a signal from the future? I asked). The main difficulty was that I seemed so detached, too detached maybe, detached really from myself (using ‘one’ instead of ‘I’ or ‘you’ or ‘we’ sometimes when speaking, as if I were royalty, or at least not me). It was a strange and sobering performance. How could they get around it?

One evening, when the students came over for supper, we continued our discussion between drinks and I quoted a sentence written by an autobiographer who, in order to get a divorce, had been obliged to hire a French detective to report on the activities of his wife in Paris. Though her life there was a twenty-four-hour-a-day ritual of trivialities, he found the report in precise, impersonal French so unexpectedly amusing that he concluded: ‘If I were a rich man, I would pay to have a French detective’s report on my own movements.’ My students were less amused by this aside than I was. For it reflected something of our own predicament: the distorting mirror of a different culture on the comedy of life. Besides, they said, it was taking vicariousness too far.

We sat around pouring out various odd uneven bottles, now one, then another, and I thought that this was the sort of group discussion I had missed when young, never having been at a university. Only it was focused on me because of that dreadful paper I had set. One student suggested I was wearing a self-protective mask and wondered why. Or, another student ingeniously argued, there was no mask at all, and what they were experiencing, my temperament, my voice, represented very well a country that was becoming increasingly distanced from history’s active, mainstream narrative – the hectic narrative of the United States which, in the echo-chamber of our ‘special relationship’, we merely parodied. Or whatever. They were teasing me tremendously, getting their own back, enjoying themselves. There was much laughter as their speculations spiralled into fantasy. Or whatever indeed!

I poured myself another drink.

Or perhaps, I intervened, we should jettison that word ‘or’. Our lives came to us as a series of ‘ands’ – one damn thing after another – and the skill of understanding them depended upon an ability to connect all sorts of views and events, not edit them so much as to make a pattern of them.

And, I went on remorselessly, if I was the man in the self-protective mask, then it would be reasonable to conclude that this mask did not resemble me in any way. Why else would I have chosen it? It must be an act of misrepresentation and as unlike me as possible.

Unless, I added, I had grown into it.

The food came to my rescue – I had by now drunk quite a lot. In this warm social atmosphere, my vague and enigmatic manner was beginning to acquire a flavour of poignancy. ‘Where nothing lives, nothing can die.’ Somewhere I had written or said this (written and said this, for, as my students pointed out, I quite often said what I had written). If I became too attached to life, would I not have more to fear from death? My apartment, they noticed, was bare – no flowers, no pictures, while in London they knew I had no domestic animals, not even a frog or stick-insect. So I was obviously a solitary. And yet, I appealed, from the centre of my crowded supper party, swaying slightly, I was gregarious. I actually liked people, some people; and also various animals. Even so, my students spied a dangerous fate in store for me, and from it they plucked a delightful solution to their problem. I had been keeping company with the dead, my biographical subjects, too long, and had set them the task of rescuing me from those glass cases in the library (even though, they reluctantly acknowledged, it was my glass-case career that had brought me over to them). There were several ways in which they set about this . . .

Next morning I had an awful hangover.

The students’ final papers were written in many forms: as a diary, an obituary, a letter to a publisher; as a forward-looking science-fiction pastiche, an autobiography with myself as the significant other character, and as pure literary criticism. I had tried to bring the reading of books out of the glass case, but had also perhaps converted myself into a text.

We met, the eleven of us, Constance, David, Diane, Karen, Kate, Linda, Maureen, Miki, Terese, Thomas and me, for some three hours a week over ten to twelve weeks. And it was fun. But what they handed in, they reminded me, were merely first impressions. So what I now have are the beginnings of a self-portrait.

For the next stage, I must turn to a book first published in 1936, the year after I was born. It has on its hardback jacket a silver mirror, and it makes bold on its title page to offer ‘about three million detailed individual character studies through self-analysis’. Surely this should do the trick, at least help me do it. Meet Yourself As You Really Are* was constructed by Prince Leopold Loewenstein, a political scientist and philosopher educated at the University of Vienna, who later specialised in the psychology of Nazism and Fascism; and it was composed by his friend – and later mine – the novelist William Gerhardie, who had been educated in Russia and at Worcester College, Oxford. So testing a work did it prove that these co-authors, who had long been friends, split up after writing it and never spoke to each other again. It was, I sensed, a potent book.

I worked from the paperback edition, an old yellow-covered Penguin Book, No. 382, carrying advertisements which urged me to smoke Grey’s Cigarettes, eat Fry’s chocolates, and then go to the Pelman Institute to have my worries removed (half fees for members of His Majesty’s Forces). The advice sounds bad today and the solution dubious. But I persist, tracing my psychoanalytical outlines through the complex framework of questions and instructions. I acquire a colour, yellow. Is it sunlight? Am I cowardly? Then I am given a river, the Neva which flows through St Petersburg into the Gulf of Finland (and also provides a link with the Caspian Sea). I take this as a good omen, since Gerhardie himself spent his childhood in St Petersburg. What do I find out about myself as I steer my way though these pages?

You belong to a type of character which is composed of the most contradictory features and . . . [is] very difficult to understand. People of your type resent loneliness almost as much as the company of others . . . Quite generally it can be said that your type of character produces pronounced individualists.

But the River Neva then branches wildly, and I learn that:

You are probably generous as far as property and money go, but we cannot give unrestricted praise to this generosity. It is not the expression of a happy and well-balanced disposition. You resemble, though it might seem somewhat strange to you, your very opposite type – the avaricious . . . There is something destructive in this exaggerated tendency to give.

Reading this, I am reminded of an episode from the 1970s which reveals what it was like to be on the receiving end of my help. I had been asked to write the prefaces for a reissue of William Gerhardie’s works, but soon found that he considered my praise of his books insufficiently unqualified. My avariciousness was evidently showing through my generosity and it threatened, he believed, to destroy his posthumous reputation, or at least to impair it. In exasperation, he berated me for being ‘a smilingly impenitent, pig-headed, bloody-minded, bigoted, intolerant, unyielding, unelastic, hard, inflexible, opinionated, fanatical, obsessed, pedantic, rook-ribbed, unmoved, persistent, incurable, irrepressible, intractable, impersuadable, cross-grained ruffian – no offence implied’. And none taken. Eventually I was to solve the problem by reading my prefaces to him over the telephone instead of sending them by post, raising my voice through a magnificent crescendo as I bellowed out passages of unrestricted praise, then dropping to a modest whisper when delivering the lesser sentences. This scheme of orchestration, which worked well, should probably earn me several extra epithets from the thesaurus: cunning, tricky, artful, prankish, unblushing, foxy, scheming, Machiavellian, double-tongued, unstraightforward, devious, slippery, shameless, fly . . .

A self-portrait, I see, is beginning to emerge. I go back to the book to find out if I have any more luck. The River Neva takes me in my yellow submarine to the next landing stage.

You are not the type of person whose company is sought after by others, except by those you know really well. But how does one get to know you really well? You do not make it too easy. You do not talk readily about your inner struggles and the problems that beset your mind. You are rather like a sick person who does not want others to know he is ill.

I seem to remember that when I last played this game twenty or thirty years ago, I came out rather better than this. My character is deteriorating. How far can this go?

You are at war with yourself for being at peace with the world. You find it is more than life is worth to fight the world, and you are far too frank to humbug yourself . . . your capacity for suffering is out of all proportion to the use you can make of it.

I throw the book across the room. The trouble has been that I can answer many of the guiding questions with equal accuracy one way or another. But when I attempt to follow other tributaries of my river, I fare no better. No wonder the book was never a bestseller. It does not flatter its readers.

But the process of stitching together these paragraphs to fit myself brings to mind another refitting exercise. This took place in the 1990s at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. Having misread my invitation, I arrived without a dinner jacket. Since my name was to be mentioned in a speech during the dinner, all eyes would be turned on me, the only guest inadequately clothed. This could not be. Alerted to the crisis, the departments of the university came collectively to my rescue. From the Faculty of Engineers arrived a splendid tuxedo; from ‘Life and Health’, a fine shirt; from ‘Informatics’ some dazzling cufflinks; and from the Social Sciences a terrific bow tie. But the wonder of it all was that everything fitted me perfectly. As I went through into dinner, I looked smarter, faster, more tailor-made for success than I could possibly have done in my own best clothes. My students at Penn State, and those non-speaking authors of Meet Yourself, would not have recognised me.

‘It’s over. All over. Nearly over.’ But hold on. To complete this assisted self-portrait I need an authentic end. How to convey the sense of an ending when it is ‘not the end’? Not quite. I call on absence and the blank page to see me out. ‘What Might Have Been’ is a poem I have kept since it was sent to me many years ago.

Now that you’ve really gone

And not forever bobbing

Just out of reach

Now that not streets and weeks

But months and an ocean

Lie between us

Now that I look

Into a calm grey distance

And see (as you have always done)

What might have been

As not a blue-print or a sketch

But a finished work

That couldn’t be improved upon –

Each line we’ve added since

A weakening – I am beginning

To understand at last

What you meant when you said

‘I am best at absence.’