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A RECENT READING OF Hugh Kingsmill’s Frank Harris: A Biography, followed by a re-acquaintance with Harris’s very untrustworthy My Life and Loves, suggests how deeply fictional one’s own life can be, and in fact invariably is. Some of us could barely get through a day if we had to live the actual reality of the life we’ve been given instead of the life we daydream or otherwise invent. Only the vituperative biographer, as Kingsmill is, however winningly, is interested in the facts of a life. The truth of a life is generally far more interesting, often because it flies in the face of known facts and delivers to us a man (or woman, of course) a reader would like to believe in.

By JEROME BOYD MAUNSELL [Times Literary Supplement] – The biographical novel is “honest” in this regard: it makes no pretence to authority in matters of fact. It also neatly – perhaps too neatly – sidesteps the vexed ethical concerns over privacy, propriety and intrusion with which literary biography is enmeshed.

There are, however, many ways of writing such books, especially in terms of how close to the factual record one keeps. In his disclaimers to his campus novels Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), [David] Lodge was keen to stress the imagined element of his fiction. In Author, Author – and in A Man of Parts, his second biographical novel, about the life of H. G. Wells – he emphasizes the extent to which he has been faithful to the facts. “Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources”, he tells us, “‘based on’ in the elastic sense that includes ‘inferable from’ and ‘consistent with’.”He wants us to feel that what we are reading really happened. Thoughts, feelings and talk, he assures us, have merely been lightly embroidered over the factual scaffolding; imagination here is closely aligned with empathy and intuition, rather than outright invention. And by staying so close to the facts Lodge does secure a certain amount of blind faith from the reader. He is determined not to forfeit “the great advantage of writing a novel about a real person, namely, the reader’s trusting involvement in the story”, as he puts it in The Year of Henry James; yet at times he also seems anxious that he has not distanced his work from conventional literary biography.

As in Author, Author, the story of a writer’s life is given a framing account, at the beginning and end of the book, of his last days. Where Author, Author began with the First World War taking place in the background as James approached his death, A Man of Parts opens and closes with Wells at home in Hanover Terrace near Regent’s Park, being fussed over by his extended family as the Second World War comes to an end.

Continued at The Times Literary Supplement | More Chronicle & Notices.

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