The Author’s Works (2): Open to Criticism?

Abstract

The context of Michael Holroyd’s remarks is a typically challenging and humorous essay towards the end of which he contrives to interpret Malcolm Bradbury’s description of him as a‘fantasist’ in terms of literary politics. Bradbury had encouraged biographers to be less concerned to embed their subjects’ novels and poems in the life-story and more willing to interpret the works per se — in other words, to be prepared to live a little and ‘fantasise’ by including some literary criticism. Holroyd teases him light heartedly for this encouragement, not because he disagrees with it, but because he sees the irony of conventional mainstream criticism, which often scorns biography, now seeking it as a potential ally — one equipped to open a second front in its battle against forces in modernist criticism that dispense with authors altogether. Not surprisingly, Holroyd sees things differently. He says that the literary biographer ‘offers his subject the opportunity of writing a posthumous work in collaboration’ — a fantasy certainly, if a different one, and a different sort of collaboration from that explored in the previous chapter. For Michael Holroyd aspires to engage the reader with all the imaginative involvement with the text that is typically experienced when reading a novel.

In literary biography there is the problem of how much literary criticism to include. Sometimes it is most skilful to include none. Since I see the life of the writer as being part of the text of his work I tend to pick out this autobiographical sub-text.

(Michael Holroyd, ‘How I Fell into Biography’, 1988)¹