The once and future biographer

By MICHAEL CAINES

In the spring of 1963, Sylvia Townsend Warner received a copy of some privately printed poems "inscribed with immodesty", as she put it: "from an unknown worshipper". Yet these were poems that she liked, as she frankly noted, because they were "of my own way of writing".

The poet duly received a letter of thanks (and Warner could be a wonderfully charming letter-writer of note), but, unfortunately, was to die barely a year later. Warner immediately lamented him as a "friend I never managed to have": he was T. H. White, like her, a novelist as well a poet, and a person she was soon to get to know all too well, not as a friend, but as a biographical subject.

This was a somewhat surprising situation. . . .

. . . and there's a fascinating essay about it, The Cat in the Hamper (now online), by Morine Krissdóttir (the biographer of John Cowper Powys). Dr Krissdóttir raises more general questions about the difficulties of life-writing, which happen to be on my mind at the moment (albeit in relation to a much older and more venerable figure, more of which at some later date, maybe).

Warner had never written a biography before she wrote White's, and she was feeling the age she appears to be in the photo above. Writing was becoming more and more of a struggle. Old friends (including her beloved cat Niou) were dying; she despondently describes herself in her diary around this time as "dead-alive as usual".

As far as I recall, however, in T. H. White: A biography she produced an engrossing, vigorous book, in large measure because Warner soon discovered the sympathetic similarities between her and her subject as well as the significant differences – for her feline Niou, for instance, he had the canine Brownie, whose death had also left him bereft ("Brownie, I am free of you", one poem begins, "Who ruled my heart for 14 years!") – although, as "The Cat in the Hamper" suggests, there may be more and less to it than simple sympathy. Leafing through the book now, I think it does exactly what Warner intended it should do, in that it lets White speak for himself a great deal, whether that means making a minor confession ("I am partially in love with a quite perfect barmaid") or a judgement on Shakespeare ("Pericles is perfectly cinematic, if only Hollywood knew it . . . Titus Andronicus stinks of Marlowe").

White's publisher had approached Warner, out of the proverbial blue, to write a Life of White – a fellow author whose commercial appeal had recently increased dramatically, with the publication of The Once and Future King in 1958, the success of the musical Camelot and the Disney film of The Sword in the Stone, adapted from the first volume of White's Arthurian tetralogy).

Over the next couple of years, she immersed herself in his books, his letters and his diaries (including his red-inked dream diary), visited his house on the island of Alderney, consulted with his friends and his loyal publisher, discovering the self-tormented man permanently traumatized by the "thwacking regime" of his schooling at Cheltenham College, perennially lonely and driven to work as a means of fending off the demons of alcohol and pent-up sadism. Reading the later diaries, Warner told her friend and New Yorker editor William Maxwell, was "like feeling at home in hell".

Some of this potentially controversial information called for the advice of mutual friends, such as David Garnett, and there was clearly plenty of wrangling and revision during the production process. The possibility of being sued for libel could not be ruled out. The unknown worshipper had become a rather dangerous kind of muse.

"Presumably", Krissdóttir remarks, "Cape wanted a biography that would increase White's readership not repel it." I'm reminded of the dodgy dossier about Swinburne, another writer with a taste for drink and flagellation, that Edmund Gosse circulated among a small circle of his peers, seeking their advice on what to do with it; as a result, the Gosse biography has its charms but the whole truth it is not. By contrast, here's Garnett's radical suggestion to Warner, which might make interesting reading for anybody wondering about the shaping of a literary biography and the gradual evolution of a reputation over the years:

"You must write your book without thinking about anyone's feelings. Then when you have completed your masterpiece, you can bowdlerise the 1966 edition, knowing that the whole thing will appear in 1996 and that there will be long reviews saying that you were not only a poet, not only a master of the short story, but the most brilliant and perceptive biographer of the era . . . ."

Flattering stuff. (And it makes me wonder, although Warner went her own way in the end, which, if any, I wonder, of the literary Lives of the 2000s will appear in thirty years' time with the long-dead scandals restored?)

In the end, Warner found it extremely difficult to let go. "Sometimes as I handle these mss, note-books, letters, the sense of his existence – that he handled them, knew the look of them – almost overwhelms me", she wrote in her diary in 1966. "I think, I shall die when these are withdrawn: they are mine, he bequeathed them to me." A biographer possessed and possessing – is that the way it always is?