A good biographer is known to ‘endlessly intermesh the Work with the Life,’ just like Leon Edel did in his five-volume exploration of Henry James. Claire Tomalin followed in that tradition with her superb life and work stories of Mary Wollstonecraft, passionate advocate of women’s rights, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen and the diarist Samuel Pepys. Now, she turns to look at her own life.
Tomalin says she took on this ‘self-imposed task,’ to understand herself better. Tracing her memory — How ‘reliable’ was it? — diaries and letters, she found that her ‘individual choices’ were actually not so heroic, and that she was following ‘general patterns of behaviour which I was about as powerless to resist as a migrating bird or a salmon swimming upstream.’
Born in 1933, Tomalin would go to Cambridge University, and later see herself carried away by the swinging 60s, ‘shortening’ her skirts, ‘buying boots, and dancing the Twist.’
“Writing about myself has not been easy,” she explains at the outset, not least because of the ‘triumph and tragedy’ that has followed her in equal measure, especially the grief.
While she lost two of her children — one to suicide — her husband, journalist and columnist Nicholas Tomalin, was killed on assignment to the Golan Heights.
But one of Tomalin’s ‘aims in writing was to insist on the seamlessness of life,’ because even when one is at the ‘worst moments and would like to give all your attention to grief, you still have to clean the house and pay the bills; you may even enjoy your lunch.’
In the 1970s, as Tomalin approached 40, she began work on her first historical biography, that of Wollstonecraft, after a piece for the BBC got many letters from publishers requesting her to write a book. She earned her living by working as a literary editor, with the New Statesman and the Sunday Times , and before that by being an in-house reader for publishers.
Her memoir is a literary delight, because walking through the pages are influential writers and editors, artists and musicians.
As a reader at Cape, she remembers admiring Edna O’Brien’s August is a Wicked Month , a writer who is ‘never afraid to give the bad news’; and a ‘curious editorial job’ — that of cutting John Fowles’ novel The Magus by a quarter.
She writes of her affair with Martin Amis; but not so much of her marriage at 60 to writer Michael Frayn, which brought ‘pain and difficulties’ to many. Always kind to others, but harsh on herself, Tomalin agrees with Wordsworth that the world is ‘the place where, in the end,/ We find our happiness, or not at all’ and that she has been lucky to find both happiness and tragedy.
A Life of My Own ;
Claire Tomalin,
Penguin Random House,
₹1,499.
