Holroyd on biography

Whenever I re-read my typescript, I check the sources for a few facts or assertions chosen at random. The last time I was re-reading, one of the assertions that struck me as needing checking was that Augustus John had been ‘downright anti-Semitic’ in his attitude to the painter William Rothenstein, who was one of George’s closest post-university friends. The general point I was making was that at this time (1909) Edwardian England itself was pretty anti-Semitic, but with their cosmopolitan backgrounds Rothenstein’s friends George Calderon and Joseph Conrad knew and understood Jews.

The source for the assertion about Augustus John was a letter from him to Ottoline Morrell and it was quoted in Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John: The New Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1996). So I went to my notes and photocopies from this book and checked it. It is on page 171.

However, the first thing that caught my eye when I got out my 2011 notes on Holroyd’s biography was this, which I had written out from his Preface:

For me the virtue of biography is the humanizing effect it can bring to history. To see people as being ‘worth’ a Life on account of their greatness and goodness is a nineteenth-century concept. […] Biography is no longer simply an instrument of information retrieval, though historical and cultural information that is retrieved from these expeditions is a bonus. The biographer’s prime purpose is to recreate a world into which readers may enter, and where, interpreting messages from the past, they may experience feelings and thoughts that remain with them after the book is closed.

I’d forgotten reading this. It’s very good and I agree with every word of it.

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