If a man or woman came up to me with a gun (it’s more likely to be a man, I suppose) and shouted YOU ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO READ ONE GENRE FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE AND YOU MUST CHOOSE NOW, THIS SECOND, AND IF YOU DEVIATE FROM YOUR CHOSEN PATH - EVEN FOR AN AFTERNOON, BY A SWIMMING POOL, ON HOLIDAY - I WILL KILL YOUR WHOLE FAMILY, then I would probably have to go for… biographies. No, fiction. No, biographies. Final answer.
I don’t know if this lunatic will haggle - it doesn’t sound like it - but obviously I’d try to include memoirs in there. And of course I’d regret my choice, and have many, many second thoughts. Someone will write the greatest novel of the 21st century, and I won’t be able to read it, but guns are guns, family is family. Off the top of my head: Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman Peter Guralnick’s two massive Elvis books, Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin, James Shapiro’s 1599, ( DON’T SHOOT - it’s about Shakespeare), the oral biography of Edie Sedgwick by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Mikal Gilmore’s Shot In The Heart, Todd Purdum’s Something Wonderful, about Rogers and Hammerstein, Philip Glass’s autobiography, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Edmund Gosse’s Father And Son… These are among my very favourite books ever. And I haven’t read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker nor any of his LBJ books, and I intend to get through the lot, so those will probably take me the rest of my life anyway. I want to know about art, writing, sport, music, the movies, politics, and I could not bear the thought that I could only learn about these things through the eyes of a novelist. I have those eyes. You can’t trust them. Before anyone tells me off: I love fiction. I write fiction. Fiction is very important to me. I’m glad I read David Copperfield before the guy with the gun turned up. But the he wanted an answer, and I’m increasingly confident that I have made the right choice.
One of the most loveable and unexpectedly gripping biographies you may have missed is ‘Dear Dodie’, Valerie Grove’s 1996 life of Dodie Smith. You will probably know the name because of ‘The One Hundred And One Dalmations’, and many of you will have read ‘I Capture The Castle’. But in the 1930s Smith was a very successful playwright. The last of these 1930s plays, ‘Dear Octopus’, is occasionally revived, but the rest of them - Autumn Crocus, Service, Touch Wood, Call it a Day (the most successful) and Bonnet Over The Windmill - are now forgotten. All of them were adapted for film.
What I love about the book is that, because Smith is not a major literary figure, Grove has to make a case for the life - you don’t have to do that for any of the heavyweights. Matisse was Matisse, Ellington was Ellington. Of course you’re interested. That’s why you’re reading it. And Smith’s life is both a particular story of the twentieth century (she was born in 1896 and died in 1990) and a cautionary tale about writing. Smith was born in Bury, and moved to London. She tried to make it as an actress, and entertained troops during WWI. She wrote plays and screenplays, but nothing worked, so she took a job in Heal and Son’s, the trendiest furniture store in London, and had an affair with Ambrose Heal. Then came the decade of success, which was interrupted when she and her husband moved to the US during WWII - Alec Beesley was a conscientious objector. They hung out with Isherwood in California.
And her popular touch deserted her. She no longer understood her own Blitz-battered country, which in turn no longer seemed interested in her brand of drawing-room comedy. This was an idea that was new to me: live abroad at your peril, if you want to write about your own country. You may think you know it well, but it changes all the time, and unless you are experiencing those changes on a daily basis, there is a lot you can miss. Dodie Smith’s answer was to go back to the 1930s for her first novel, I Capture The Castle, and then tried her hand at children’s fiction. So she wrote two immortal novels, having been the most successful playwright of her generation. We’d all settle for that. Valerie Grove has written a number of excellent biographies, but this one has a kind of sympathetic magic to it. If you have the misfortune to be threatened violently bu a genre-bully, you could do a lot worse.
In the better late than never category, I nominate The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne. Another wonderful British writer rendered beautifully by Byrne.
I'm terribly late to the party on this one, but I so adore Dodie Smith and ‘I Capture The Castle’. It is the one book I give to every writing student who is trying to find her voice. I love how it opens with Cassandra in the sink of this freezing old pile just trying to have a bath--never mind the beautiful stable boy Stephen's ill-conceived, but well-intentioned plagiarizing of poems to win her heart. And then there's the ultimate scheme of getting old man Mortmain to write again by locking him in the tower! It's exactly what my girls and I would have done to my ex-husband to get him to work 😂 But all this time, I hadn't a clue about Ms. Smith's plays... Cannot wait to read Grove's bio and dig up all I've missed. Thanks ever so for this!