Kathryn Hughes

What does it feel like to invite an extremely distinguished, highly strung stranger into your home, into your head, for a few years? Would anyone in their right mind do it? Biographers do. But what happens to the rest of your life when a troubled genius lurks, waiting in the study in the morning and ambushing dreams at night?

For many biographers the duration of the writing is, necessarily, one of obsession resisted or indulged. There are periods of intense closeness where the levels of intimacy are almost more than either party can bear. The subject calls to you continually – and you want to speak of nothing else – but you know you can’t. Biographers live in two worlds because a great deal of the time they must seem to ignore the person in whom they are most interested. As a lover of puns, I am limited to only 10 plays on words each day in my house, just to save everyone’s nerves. Do similar restrictions apply in biographers’ households?

Of course, it’s not just the hero or heroine who comes to stay with the biographer; it’s often all their relatives too, their lovers, psychoanalysts, pets, and long-suffering children. Then there is their luggage. There may be reams of correspondence to contend with, a glut of photographs, manuscripts, publicity material, gossip column coverage, and that’s before their personal effects start to arrive: candle snuffers, lipsticks, leather jackets, mandolins, so the subject not only commandeers your imaginative space but your physical space also.

Spending the working day with one of your favourite people in the world ought to be the definition of pleasure. But once biographers actually have their hero or villain in their clutches, on the premises, do they automatically know what to do with them, day in day out?

George Eliot

Kathryn Hughes, professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and author of George Eliot: The Last Victorian (1998) and The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (2005), says: “At the beginning, you’re not that fussed about your subject. Then, gradually, they get under your skin and you start to think they’re the most significant, interesting person you’ve ever met. Then, a couple of years in, you begin to notice their annoying habits. In the case of George Eliot, it’s that prissiness, the ghastly self-righteousness. Then, before you know it, your subject is dead and you wish you’d been a bit nicer. You never got to tell them how much you loved them.”

Biographers’ attachments to their subjects can, of course, vary wildly. Jenny Uglow, who is currently working on Charles II and has previously written biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth and wood engraver Thomas Bewick, tries to take a more detached approach. “I’m so conscious that it’s dangerous to think of your subject as a friend or to over-identify. It would be completely bonkers to think you could actually get close to them.

“Liking is dangerous, loving is dangerous because, of course, it will change the way you see things. I hate the idea of things being soppy.”

Jenny Uglow

Writing a memoir that was also in part a biography of my heroine Judy Garland, I too knew it would be disastrous to be soppy in any way. But I often wondered what the correct kind of distance ought to be. Though I occasionally felt like Garland’s reluctant psychoanalyst, I knew I wasn’t required to keep those kinds of steely professional boundaries. I admired her enormously but wanted my hero worship to be disciplined and rigorous if such a thing is possible.

Other writers favour friendship over love affair. As biographer and critic Miranda Seymour says of the 1930s film star Virginia Cherrill, subject of her latest book Chaplin’s Girl: “I wish I could have known this sexy, unpretentious, funny woman but writing her life has been the next best thing to it. I never get tired of watching Cherrill’s beautiful face in City Lights, or of listening to stories of the friends she made, the hearts she broke, the splendour she gave up, all for love.”

The notion of friendship, real or imaginary, is also touched on by AN Wilson, the novelist and biographer who has written lives of Milton, Tolstoy and God, among others. “You do miss people,” he says. “I wrote a book about Betjeman [Betjeman: A Life (2006)] and I did become extremely possessive of him, fond of him and all his works. I wrote about his death in floods and floods and floods of tears. In my fantasy, I still think he’s my best friend and I’m his best friend, so that’s rather nice.”

CS Lewis

For a biographer, the gradual awareness of strong loyalties to your subject can be a powerful thing. “If you like the person,” says Wilson, “you find yourself defending the indefensible, as if he were your brother or your father. The other, rather disconcerting thing is if you do start to dislike them, you start disliking everything about them, even things that are quite admirable.”

He recalls how, while writing CS Lewis: A Biography (1990), a life of the novelist and critic, “I would visualise his voice and his big, red, polished butcher’s face, his clothes, the reeking tobacco smoke, and I would wake up in the morning with a feeling of dread thinking, ‘I’ve got to spend the day with this person.’”

Wilson felt a duty not to betray his feelings on the page. He hopes those who bought his book weren’t able to glimpse his negative feelings for Lewis. He did not wish his readers to share his dislike nor the enormous sense of relief he felt when he realised how very ill Lewis was becoming, because it meant the end was in sight.

. . .

Miranda Seymour

When you are mildly obsessed with something, the world seems to reflect your obsession at every turn. Recently, I watched the Newsnight Budget special and was astonished to hear 13 references to “Over the Rainbow”, which had been introduced as a metaphor for “pie-in-the-sky” economics. The same night, I flipped channels and saw a contestant in The Apprentice dismissed because he was said to resemble the Wizard of Oz; all boomy voice and mystery with no real powers.

Kathryn Hughes is familiar with this surreal feeling. “When I’m in the midst of writing a biography I become convinced that my subject is trying to help me write the book. I keep on discovering weird coincidences. For example, George Eliot’s best friend lived in the Hackney square in which I live. Also, Eliot used to lodge at a house in the Strand, which was owned for years by my then boyfriend’s family.”

Virginia Cherrill

A sense of fellow feeling between author and subject seems normal but does it go further? Are writers drawn, even subliminally, to those whose sensibilities echo their own? Is all portraiture a form of self portraiture? Hughes says: “When I showed the manuscript of George Eliot to my brother he said, ‘Well, it’s fine but, of course, it’s basically a description of you.’ I find that a bit odd because I’m not a novelist from the Midlands but I assume he meant that I’d written about someone whose childhood had been full of feelings of alienation and inadequacy combined with a compensating arrogance. I also think that I started to talk a bit like her, in long, measured sentences in which I weighed the folly of humankind with a kind of rueful smile.”

In my experience, this is not unusual behaviour. When I was “living” with Judy Garland, I would, to amuse myself, sometimes utter her well-known phrases. For example, if the weather was even the slightest bit overcast, I might say to the postman: “Do you ... do you like a foggy day? I do!”, which is how Garland asked her audience at Carnegie Hall in 1961 whether they wished to hear Gershwin’s famous tune. It was, I think, harmless.

Hilaire Belloc

AN Wilson says: “The one who really got to me was Belloc [Hilaire Belloc: A Biography (1984)]. I am as absolutely unlike him as it’s possible to be and yet while I was writing about him I started putting on his voice, doing his French Rs. As soon as I’d had three glasses of wine I turned into him. It started as a sort of joke and then it stuck.”

These anecdotes suggest something I’ve long thought was true: there is something innately embarrassing about writing someone’s life. It is by its very nature possessive, obsessive, ardent, jealous work. As Hughes says: “It is a bit like having a secret lover. Every time someone else mentions your subject’s name in public you feel outraged that they should presume to comment on ‘your’ person. Towards the end of writing my book on Mrs Beeton I went to an academic conference where someone was giving a paper on her, and I couldn’t bear it. I tried to cultivate a serene smile although, secretly, I wanted to stamp on her head.”

Even when it is all over, the complications carry on. The question of how to unhand a subject at the end is a particularly difficult one. “Is she out of your system at last?” friends ask at your book launch, with a bluff, tactless swagger that stuns. The trouble is you feel so sad!

“You do have a real feeling of closeness afterwards,” says Uglow, “like with cousins you might not see often but you’ve always known them and you’ll know them all your life.”

AN Wilson

Of course, part of you feels that nothing has really changed. Your interest in your subject was never a problem that needed to be solved. You thought a great deal about your subject before the book and will continue to do so.

But you do extricate yourself slightly. You put the 60 books pertaining to your subject elsewhere. You set to one side some of the photographs of your heroine and her offspring so that images of your family and friends are once again visible. Remember me? They seem to chide.

As with successful mourning, in time the absent, loved object becomes not the only thing in one’s life, merely one of the most important. You let go a little as new interests flourish and bloom. There is disappointment in this but, as with most forms of disappointment, there is also a measure of relief.

Susie Boyt is the author of ‘My Judy Garland Life’ (Virago)

Her column returns next week

...........................................................................

‘Living’ with the Nazis by Andrew Roberts

After four years of writing about the second world war, I’ve finally handed in the last set of corrected proofs. The sense of release is cathartic, mainly because I can bid farewell to a bunch of people with whom I’ve had to spend an inordinate amount of time but who are utterly deadening to the soul.

In my last book, Masters and Commanders, Hitler and the senior Nazis played important off-scene roles, and their glowering presence was always tangible. Yet in my present book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, they have been centre-stage.

How I’ve envied those biographers who can form an empathy with their subjects. I’ve known authors who construct imaginary conversations with their subjects, have their pictures and busts by their desks, and plenty of writers have actually fallen in love with their subjects. Leonie Frieda, author of Catherine de Medici, has for years been passionately in love with one of her biographical subjects, Edward Horner, the only problem in their relationship being that he died at the battle of Cambrai in 1917. Needless to say I haven’t been able to enjoy such rapture with Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and the rest of that foul crew. They just leave one feeling utterly depressed at the sheer waste of 50m lives between 1939 and 1945.

Writing the chapter that covered the Holocaust made me profoundly sad, angry and depressed for a month. It wasn’t pity, or shame over what the Holocaust tells us about the human condition, but sheer impotent fury that a bunch of gangsters and human filth could have wreaked such terrible damage to innocent people, and for so long. Yet re-reading the chapter this week, I realised that I have allowed none of that anger to spill out into my account, which is as objective and calm as all historical writing should be. The facts and the contemporary accounts speak far more eloquently than I ever could.

For now, I feel purged of the Nazis. No longer do I have to wade through hundreds of pages of stenographers’ reports of Fuhrer-conferences held in Hitler’s East Prussian HQ, or listen to any more of his endless, banal rants about Lebensraum, the master Race and all that bilge. For me, the war is over.

Andrew Roberts’ ‘The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War’ is published by Penguin on August 6