The young wife in Bartok's opera is tough, fearless, energetic and implacably determined to let in light and air on the murky past. When I started out as a biographer in my twenties, I was like that too. Each of my books since then has unearthed and exposed secrets that had been kept dark — in the words of my first subject, Ivy Compton-Burnett — through long lives and on deathbeds. That was the proud aim of all biographers. We pursued our calling in what the romantic Richard Holmes called the courts of Truth and Justice. Discretion was another word for cant, hypocrisy and evasion.
My generation had been liberated at the end of the 1960s by the publication of Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey, a book that not only radically rehabilitated its subject but revolutionised the nature, goals and intellectual status of the form itself. Biographically speaking, Holroyd's Strachey initiated a golden age that lasted 30 years, and is generally agreed to be pretty much over now.
Various explanations have been suggested. Some say the game was up as soon as biography began to be taught in universities. Others argue that the stock of prime subjects has been exhausted. Still others claim the form has grown so top-heavy it was bound to collapse under its own weight. But I think it just as likely that biography as we know it — a mighty tome (or sometimes two) that sets out to explore a single human life together with the world that shaped it, and was in turn reshaped by it — no longer meets the needs of either its subjects or its readers.
I doubt if writers can take it much further either. When I started work on a life of Compton-Burnett in 1969, I hadn't the faintest notion that I was picking not so much a career as, in Holroyd's definition, an education and a way of life. Holroyd himself was deeply shocked by
his first sight of the Strachey archive, a dusty, shapeless, more or less unsorted mass of 10 or perhaps 20,000 letters, not counting diaries and papers, that confronted him with an immediate decision. Was his almost-forgotten subject worth the commitment entailed for a potential biographer in terms of isolation, obsession, psychic infiltration, "several years of uninterrupted labour and a coverage of about half a million words"
Most biographers carry similar moral and financial burdens — hostile or dubious executors, wary families, in Holroyd's case a publisher reluctant to offer more than an initial advance of £50. A decade later my own advance was £500, and my problem the opposite of his. Compton-Burnett said nothing about her past, corresponded on postcards, kept no journals and destroyed all her papers except for a few random notes in a half-empty shoebox. Writing her life in two volumes took me 10 years (with a gap of five in the middle when I had three children). The family of my next subject, Paul Scott, had sent his papers to an American university. I read them all (12,000 neatly docketed items) and realised that the entire correspondence was a kind of smokescreen, designed to divert attention from the one missing piece of evidence without which I could make no sense of his existence.
Non-biographers, and even some practitioners, often talk as though writing someone's life was a simple matter of adjusting your earnings on the one hand, and securing access to an unpublished archive on the other. So much funding equals so many phone calls, so many interviews, so many books read and documents consulted. But documents can lie. Their importance may consist in what they don't tell you as much as in what they do. The same is true of interviews, where you often learn most by listening to undertones, paying attention to gaps and silences, disentangling meanings sometimes very different from what people think they've told you.
In my experience, uncovering the reality of the past is more like exploring Bluebeard's castle than conducting an office audit. Truth lies unspoken, inarticulate, buried consciously or not beneath layers of conventional preconceptions and accretions. It takes time and effort to drag it slowly towards the light. The two novelists and a painter who have been my subjects all wrote about or painted this underlying reality. "All artists are marked by the times they live in," said Matisse, "but the great artists are those who bear the deepest imprint."
Matisse is perhaps the last significant 20th-century figure who has had no biography until now. His work, much of it incomprehensible — sometimes almost literally invisible — to his contemporaries, helped shape the way the world looks to us now. My book attempts to show how the mysterious power of his painting grew directly from the strange, unsuspected, secret places of his life.
That is the only possible justification for a type of biography that has become, from every other point of view, a preposterous proposition. The economics are ludicrous, the funding nonexistent, the time spans involved for both writer and reader frankly absurd. Even the potent lure of revelation — the lakes of tears, the bars and fetters, the blood seeping under the doors of Bluebeard's castle — already belong to a previous age. Our own society has comprehensively dismantled the taboos and prohibitions erected to protect the beliefs and institutions of the last century and the one before. Our lives are saturated by the kind of information that was once so hard to come by, let alone to publish.
The problem for today's biographer is not frankness but perception. "Everything exists, nothing has value," E M Forster wrote prophetically nearly 100 years ago. What we need now is a shorter, tighter, more sharply focused form, that concentrates on inner meaning rather than its outer chronological and documentary casing. After the 15 years' hard labour that produced my two stout volumes on Matisse, I have finally ended up where I should have liked to start from in the first place — in a position to paint the small, clear, startling portrait in words that was what I wanted all along.
Hilary Spurling will talk about writing her biography of Matisse, at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Wednesday, April 13, at 3pm
