“I think this is what a biography is
meant to be: a folding-in of all the ingredients, the living, the loving, the
writing, to make a rich pudding. Oh dear.’
So writes Sarah LeFanu in her
biographer’s journal Dreaming of Rose, which chronicles her researches, writing
and rewriting of her book on Rose Macaulay’s life, which involved travels to the
Macaulay homes in Wales, Cambridgeshire and the Ligurian coast as well as foot-stepping
Rose to Herrick’s Devon village for They Were Defeated and her trip to the
Black Sea for The Towers of Trebizond. She
also goes to Ireland, where Rose’s long-term secret lover had been a popular priest
before leaving the church for marriage and fatherhood.
There’s something of Macaulay’s own clear-eyed
rejection of romance and glamour in LeFanu’s wry observational style, as well
as a touch of her subject’s abjection, as when both authors deprecate their own
books or (silently) envy others’ success. Above all it’s a beguiling mix of literary
pudding, detective scholarship mingling with daily life and paid work, current
reading and personal memories such as when she and a friend sneaked from
Cheltenham Ladies College to Brian Jones’s funeral, hiding their
uniforms in a hedge behind the public lavatories.
There’s local tragedy too, in the suicides
of a neighbour and his son, and snatches of friendship with other writers,
intermingled with radio broadcasting and creative writing for visually-impaired
students. The narrative thread, almost
invisibly woven in, covers long hours in libraries, copying ancient letters and
microfilmed newspapers, obtaining inter-library loans and talking or failing to
talk to those who knew Rose Macaulay. Oh,
and dreams, of course – of Ivy Compton
Burnett, ‘hair sculpted as ever like an over-turned chamber pot … a silent but
powerful presence’; and of being handed a book by RM in bookshop with a title
like Veruca of which Sarah had never
heard, its pages stuffed with edibles like olives, so that even wearing gloves as
she turned the pages her fingers were smeary with oil.
I expect most biographers are familiar
with these vivid dreams invaded by one’s subject in incomprehensible guises. I also
often used to dream of writing the perfect
paragraph that conveyed exactly what
I wished to convey, and even repeating
it in the dream so it would be remembered…. I began a similar journal when
writing about Christina Rossetti, only to find life and research so uncannily
full of coincidence and correspondence that I desisted for fear of what might
happen.
LeFanu writes wittily and economically of
writing as wrestling; of searching for a non-chronological opening only to
eventually settle on ‘Emilie Rose Macaulay was born on…’; of the ethics of
telling other people’s stories irrespective of what they wished to conceal; and
of completion, when finishing a book is more like divorce than like sending a
child on its first day at school, least of all like giving birth. Endless niggling
details backward and forwards, letters of supplication over quotations and
illustrations – ‘a hundred tiny ties to the book I want to cast off’.
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