Title: Michael (de Courcy Fraser) Holroyd

Known As: Holroyd, Michael de Courcy Fraser; Holroyd, Michael

  British Biographer ( 1935 - )
Author(s): A. R. Jones (University of Wales)
Source: Twentieth-Century British Literary Biographers. Ed. Steven Serafin. Dictionary of Literary
Biography Vol. 155. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Biography, Critical essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1995 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Table of Contents:Biographical and Critical Essay
Hugh Kingsmill
Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography
Augustus John: A Biography
Bernard Shaw
Writings by the Author
 
 
WORKS:

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

 Hugh Kingsmill: A Critical Biography, introduction by Malcolm Muggeridge (London:

Unicorn Press, 1964; revised edition, London: Heinemann, 1971).
 Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 volumes (London: Heinemann, 1967-1968; New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968); revised edition, 1 volume (London: Heinemann,
1973; New York: Penguin, 1979).
 A Dog's Life (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969).
 Unreceived Opinions (London: Heinemann, 1973; New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1973).
 Augustus John: A Biography, 2 volumes--Volume I: The Years of Innocence; Volume II: The
Years of Experience (London: Heinemann, 1974-1975; revised, 1976; New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, 1975).
 Bernard Shaw, 6 volumes--Volume I: 1856-1898 The Search for Love [1988]; Volume II:
1898-1918 The Pursuit of Power [1989]; Volume III: 1918-1950 The Lure of Fantasy [1991];
Volume IV: 1950-1991 The Last Laugh [1992]; Volumes V & VI: The Shaw Companion
[1992] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988-1992; New York: Random House, 1988-1992).
 Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994; New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1995).

OTHER

 Lytton Strachey, Ermyntude and Esmeralda: An Entertainment, introduction by Holroyd

(London: Anthony Blond, 1969).
 Hugh Kingsmill Lunn, The Best of Hugh Kingsmill, introduction by Holroyd (London:
Gollancz, 1970).
 William Gerhardie, The Revised Definitive Edition of the Works of William Gerhardie, 10
volumes, edited, with prefaces, by Holroyd (London: Macdonald, 1970-1974).
 Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self-Portrait, edited by Holroyd (London: Heinemann, 1971;
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971).
 The Art of Augustus John, edited by Holroyd and Malcolm Easton (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1974).
 "Damn and 'BLAST!': The Friendship of Wyndham Lewis and Augustus John," in Essays by
Divers Hands, Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, new series 38
(Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1975), pp. 48-57.
 Introduction and "Women and the Body Politic," in The Genius of Shaw: A Symposium
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), pp. 9-11, 167-183.
  Strachey, The Shorter Strachey, edited by Holroyd and Paul Levy (Oxford & New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980; revised, 1989).
 Gerhardie, God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age: 1890-1981, edited by Holroyd and
Robert Skidelsky (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981; Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press,
1991).
 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being [sound recording], edited by Holroyd (London: BBC
Cassettes, 1981).
 Essays by Divers Hands, Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, new series
42, introduction by Holroyd (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1982), pp. ix-xi.
 Gwen John, 1876-1939, edited by Holroyd (London: Anthony d'Offay, 1982).
 Abuses of Literacy?, edited by Holroyd and Melvyn Bragg (London: Folio Society, 1985).
 Richard Pennington, Peterley Harvest: The Private Diary of David Peterley [1960], preface
by Holroyd (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985).
 George Bernard Shaw, Major Critical Essays, edited, with an introduction, by Holroyd
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
 "How I Fell into Biography," in The Troubled Face of Biography, edited by Eric Homberger
and John Charmley (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 94-103.

SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS--UNCOLLECTED

 "The Big Advance: Burden or Blessing," Author, 76 (Winter 1965): 11-12.

 "Involvement: Writers Reply," London Magazine, 8 (August 1968): 14-15.
 "Why Is There No Shouting?," Times (London), 16 November 1968, pp. 19, 22.
 "Authors and Their Publishers," Author, 80 (Spring 1969): 7-11.
 "The Paradox of Public Lending Right," Books, 18-19 (Spring-Summer 1975): 37-42.
 "Virginia Woolf and Her World," Horizon, 17 (Summer 1975): 49-56.
 "Bernard Shaw's Secret Childhood," Observer (26 October 1975): 25.
 "GBS: Sex and Second Childhood," Observer (2 November 1975): 25.
 "G. B. S. and Ireland," Sewanee Review, 84 (Winter 1976): 35-55.
 "Paradox of Shaw," Books and Bookmen, 21 (May 1976): 14-15.
 "The Author as Victim," New Statesman (20 August 1976): 229-230.
 "Po-Faced Shaw," Books and Bookmen, 23 (March 1977): 57-58.
 "Unreal Estate: The Wrongs of Copyright," Encounter, 49 (August 1977): 34-35.
 "My God, What Women!," Books and Bookmen, 23 (December 1977): 28-29.
 "George Bernard Shaw: Women and the Body Politic," Critical Inquiry, 6 (1979): 17-32.
 "Death, the Idol," Spectator (1 September 1979): 12-13.
 "Reviewing at the Double," Author, 90 (Autumn 1979): 103-106.
 "Devotions of a Dramatist," Times Literary Supplement (1 March 1981): 481-482.
 "About Books? A Writer's View," Bookseller (21 March 1981): 1044-1047.
 "Shaw and Biography," Times Literary Supplement (22 April 1983): 413-414.
 "William Gerhardie," Spectator (28 May 1983): 29-30.
 "Shaw and Society," Author, 95 (Summer 1984): 53-56.
 "The State versus Literature," Times Literary Supplement (8 March 1985): 257-258.
 "Yours Prodigally," Times Literary Supplement (31 May 1985): 595-596.
 "Bernard Shaw," Sunday Times Magazine (London), 28 August 1988, pp. 46-47, 49.
 "Life Studies," Listener (8 September 1988): 4-6.
 "Loneliness of the Long Distance Biographer," Times (London), 10 September 1988, p. 37.
 "Confessions of a Late Victorian Libertine," Observer (17 November 1991): 59.
 "Shaw Shot," Independent Magazine (4 April 1992): 48-51.
 "Abuse of Shaw's Literary Legacy," Times Literary Supplement (7 April 1992): 1.

 
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

Michael Holroyd is the author of three major biographies, all of which have been influential and widely
acclaimed. His two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey not only initiated a revived interest in the
Bloomsbury Group but also renewed interest in the art of biography by the way in which he combined
careful scholarship, imaginative and psychological insight, and narrative skills. His lives of Augustus
John and Bernard Shaw which followed clearly confirmed his stature as one of the leading biographers
of our time.

Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd, the only son of Basil and Ulla Holroyd, was born in London on 27
August 1935 and lived in Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, until he was three years old. His parents
had met on a North Sea ferry when Holroyd's Anglo-Irish father was returning to England having been
trying to sell Lalique glass in Sweden and his Swedish mother was coming to England to take up a post
as an au pair. After they married they could not agree about anything. His father served as a squadron
leader in the Royal Air Force during World War II, which finally disrupted the marriage, and at the end
of the war they divorced. His father married a French publisher and lived in Paris while his mother
married a Hungarian and remained in London (both parents were married three times).

Holroyd was sent to Maidenhead to be brought up by his paternal grandparents. He remembers the
house as gloomy with dark oak paneling. "Birds hopped into the dining room to share our meals. That
was the most exciting thing that happened." He felt that his life was very boring and also "extremely
insecure, frightening." "I was brought up by my grandparents," he said, "and I lived in the regime of
70- and 80-year olds when I was seven or eight. So I filled my head with book adventures in order to
have a more exciting life. What I really did, I think, was step from my own life--and there wasn't very
much going on in it--into other people's lives which seemed much more exciting. I was able to live two
lives simultaneously."

Because of the remarriages of his parents, he says that he often had to travel abroad to meet new
stepparents. "Every holiday I seemed to have a new one." He turned to books early on and became
addicted to Arthur Conan Doyle adventure stories, saying that "In books, unlike life, one could travel
without apprehension." He developed a precocious interest in "other people's lives, mainly because
there was more going on in them." "I always thought reading biography was a sign of being very grown
up, because I was aware, quite early on, that I was taking novels from the library and adult people were
taking out biographies.... I do think that in reading a novel you learn about one person. Basically you
learn about the person who's written the novel, you learn their world, whereas in reading a biography
you come across two worlds: the world of the author and of the author's subject."

In the entry he wrote for inclusion in Who's Who, Holroyd describes himself as having "read English
literature at Maidenhead Public Library," which, while it pays an appropriate tribute to the time he
spent there reading, also, perhaps, ill-conceals his regret that he did not at that point in his life read
English in the more systematic and rigorous way imposed by a university degree course. At the public
library he says he "commanded there a magnificent range of books, from ancient classics to the latest
publications, and was provided with excellent lighting, heating, the service of trained librarians, the
most up-to-date magazines."

His subsequent attitude toward universities has been consistently hostile in the sense that he tends to
divide the literary world between them and us, the academic mandarins, remote and imperious, on the
one side and the professionals--like himself--who live in the real world and do the real literary work on
the other. This often leads to a sense of being overlooked and undervalued, for instance, when he
asserts that "literary biographers have felt themselves to be outside the family of literature. The family
now lives in academe. There are departments of history but no departments of biography at our
universities; there are departments of English, but biography is not on the curriculum.... I feel myself in
some respects to be an amateur ... it does, however, avoid the arid professionalism that has little raison
d'être other than the lengthening of an academic curriculum vitae and the securing of tenure." This
opinion is expressed in a paper he read at a colloquium on biography organized by the University of
East Anglia and published in The Troubled Face of Biography (1988).

From a social point of view, Holroyd's upbringing was privileged upper middle class. He attended a
local preparatory school after which he entered Eton, where he became captain of cricket, the pinnacle
of manyschoolboys' ambition. Nonetheless, he insists that at school he succeeded in making himself
invisible, an unresolved contradiction. He did not distinguish himself academically, as his father
insisted that he specialize in science rather than in arts subjects. When he left Eton he continued to live
with his paternal grandparents and, as his father did not wish him to go to university, began work as an
articled clerk with a view to becoming a solicitor: "So, on leaving school, instead of starting my
National Service at an age when others were doing so, I was articled to a firm of solicitors at
Windsor.... As with science, it took about two years to demonstrate my unfitness for any branch of the
law, after which there was no further escape from National Service." He therefore did his National
Service in the army between 1956 and 1958 and was commissioned in the Royal Fusiliers.

However much he may have resented his time in the army, it was during his time there that he made his
most important literary contact: W. A. Gerhardie. Holroyd came across Gerhardie's books by chance
and read most of them; his mother knew Gerhardie's niece Christina. "I thought William Gerhardie
must be dead," Holroyd later remarked. "In fact I discovered he was merely buried alive." After
meeting Gerhardie, and with his encouragement, Holroyd produced the first critical biography of Hugh
Kingsmill . In 1956 W. A. Gerhardie was sixty-one years old; Holroyd was twenty-one. Looking back,
Holroyd says that he cannot really explain what made him a biographer: "I was fortunate to find
biography, because I was very much adrift in my twenties." Nonetheless, he took this step further into
other people's lives, "like an actor assuming a part."

As he was Gerhardie's protégé, Gerhardie did everything he could to ensure Holroyd's advancement.
Soon, however, it was Holroyd who was writing articles on Gerhardie and editing his works in an
attempt to revive interest in him. Gerhardie had enjoyed widespread literary and social acclaim in the
1920s and 1930s, but by 1956 he had become a reclusive and rather neglected figure. Nevertheless,
Holroyd's friendship with Gerhardie led to friendships with Gerhardie's friends. Gerhardie was thus
Holroyd's introduction into the literary world of London, though Gerhardie's corner of that world was
of an older generation and somewhat detached from the center. One of Gerhardie's closest friends for
many years had been Hugh Kingsmill , who had died in 1949. Kingsmill was a prolific author and
served as literary editor of Punch (1939-1945) and of New English Review (1945-1949). He
collaborated with both Gerhardie and Hesketh Pearson in writing books, in addition to being the main
character in Gerhardie's novel Pending Heaven (1930). His friends, Hesketh Pearson and Malcolm
Muggeridge in particular, still talked about him with love and admiration and published a series of
letters between them as a celebration of his life and their friendship with him. Muggeridge provided an
introduction for Holroyd's biography, and by the time of Pearson's death Holroyd had become trusted
enough to be appointed Pearson's literary executor. Moreover, Pearson's autobiography, Hesketh
Pearson by Himself (1965), is dedicated to "my friend Michael Holroyd." The first volume of
Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey is dedicated to the memory of Pearson and his wife, Joyce
Pearson.

Yet Holroyd had been familiar with Kingsmill's work before he met Gerhardie and his friends. The
reading of biographies written by Kingsmill is described by Holroyd as a central part of his education
at Maidenhead Public Library: "It was in this library that I had come by chance across the books of
Hugh Kingsmill . Kingsmill gave me exactly what I wanted in my late teens and early twenties. No
professor had chosen him for me: I had found him for myself. What he gave me was not part of the
schoolroom but what goes on outside it--what is enjoyed rather than endured. What was it that appealed
to me about Kingsmill? First of all, I think, he made literature real to me--that is to say, he made the
connection factually and imaginatively between what we read and how we live." Kingsmill's attraction
for Holroyd was both literary and personal, and it was, Holroyd said, under Kingsmill's influence that
"I first became a biographer."

Holroyd recalls that "The winter of 1963-4 was for me a crucial one. After two years' work, and a
further two years of waiting, I had had my first book published: a critical biography of Hugh
Kingsmill .... But only two weeks after publication [of Hugh Kingsmill ] I was being threatened with an
action for libel.... My chief witness, Hesketh Pearson , who first encouraged me to write, suddenly
died. I could muster other supporters ... Malcolm Muggeridge ... who had also attacked the Queen ...
John Davenport, the critic, who at that time had chosen to wear a prejudicial black beard ... William
Gerhardie , the distinguished novelist, who had not actually published a novel for the last quarter of a
century ... my publisher, Martin Secker, who was nearing eighty, appeared to find the predicament
invigorating."

Hugh Kingsmill: A Critical Biography (1964) was respectfully, though not widely, reviewed. The
exception was the review written by Gerhardie, to whom the book is dedicated and who reviewed the
book in the Spectator (31 January 1964) under the heading "Forgotten Immortal" with rather breathless
enthusiasm. He referred to "Mr. Holroyd's entrancing and singularly profound ... authoritative critical
biographical study" that "draws us irresistibly into the whole complex of England's intellectual battle
royal. What an amazing story, this, and how dexterously told! ... there is no true exhilaration save when
it is given to us to commune with an immortal. Hugh Kingsmill , dead at fifty-nine, was one. Michael
Holroyd, extant in his twenties, is another." Presumably, his friendship with Kingsmill and Holroyd
conferred immortality on them both. The more sober, anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary
Supplement (20 February 1964), having noticed that "some chapters are slightly disjointed as a result of
cutting required by the publisher," described it "in its total effect" as "an admirable study of an original,
complex and enigmatic personality."

In fact the biography is an interesting, straightforward account of Kingsmill, his life and his works.
There are no references, footnotes, or bibliography though Holroyd has been scrupulous in assembling
his materials. He clarifies both the eccentricities of Kingsmill's personality and the oddity of his views
without, however, inquiring too deeply into either. Yet, judging by the confidence and maturity which
he brought to his life of Strachey, Holroyd learned the craft of the biographer in writing this book.

In revising the biography for a second edition, published in 1971, Holroyd recast entirely the portrait of
Dorothy, Kingsmill's second wife, and gave a quite different impression of the marriage. In the first
edition Dorothy is described in some detail and emerges as a pretentious, domineering, and unhappy
woman who alienated Kingsmill from his friends. In the second edition Kingsmill is made responsible
for the unsatisfactory nature of the marriage, and his wife virtually disappears from the biography. In
the first edition Holroyd seems to have been directly influenced by Gerhardie, Muggeridge, Pearson,
and other friends of Kingsmill who felt that Dorothy had done her best to blight their friendship with
her husband; in the second edition he was perhaps influenced more by Dorothy and the threat of a libel
action.

Though the biography was highly regarded, it was, as he recognized, the biography of a little-known
writer by an unknown biographer. Nonetheless, it led to his writing the life of Lytton Strachey : "The
first of the sixteen publishers to whom I had submitted my Kingsmill manuscript was Heinemann.
Fortunately it had fallen into the hands of James Michie, the poet and translator of the odes of Horace."
Michie encouraged Holroyd to choose a less obscure subject for his next biography. "Kingsmill, along
with Philip Guedalla, Emil Ludwig, André Maurois , Harold Nicholson and others, had been
categorised as one of those imitators of Lytton Strachey whose literary reputation he had helped to
bring into disrepute. In order to demonstrate the injustice of this charge I had to examine Strachey's
books in some detail. To my surprise I found there was no biography of him, and no wholly
satisfactory critical study of his work. Here, it seemed to me, was the real need for a book. James
Michie agreed, and a contract was drawn up in which I undertook to make a revaluation of Strachey's
place as a serious historian. It would be about seventy thousand words long and take me, I estimated, at
least a year."

In fact Holroyd had already made rather rough and ready distinction between the art of Kingsmill and
Strachey by deciding that "On reading Kingsmill one is implicated oneself; on reading Strachey one is
part of an audience." He discussed at some length the charge that Kingsmill had followed where
Strachey led and had concluded that this was not the case. He expressed indignation that Kingsmill
should be considered an imitator of anyone.

It soon became clear to Holroyd that Strachey's friends would only cooperate with him in the writing of
a biography if he had the agreement of James Strachey, his brother and literary executor. In the preface
to the 1971 revised edition of the first volume of Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography (1967),
Holroyd describes his meeting with James Strachey and the problems he encountered in writing the
biography. However, after lunch with James and Alix Strachey he was allowed access to Lytton's
materials--"So began what, for the next five years, was to prove not simply the composition of a larger
book, but a way of life and an education."

Holroyd is explicit as to his objectives in writing the life of Strachey:

I intended to try and accomplish four things-to provide a selection of the best of
Lytton's letters; to attempt a completely original reappraisement of his work; to
 present a panorama of the social and intellectual environment of a remarkable
generation; and to write a definitive biography. These four ingredients I would
endeavour to shape into the polychromatic design of a huge conversation piece
around the figure of Lytton Strachey . "Discretion," Lytton himself had once said, "is
not the better part of biography." I should not be discreet. My purpose was to fuse an
imaginatively kindled re-creation of the inner life of my characters with the rigorous
documentation and exactitude of strict biographical method.... I was setting out to do
something entirely new in biography, to give Lytton's love-life the same prominence
in my book as it had had in his career, to trace its effect on his work, and to treat the
whole subject of homosexuality without any artificial veils of decorum-in exactly the
same way as I would have treated heterosexuality. To have done otherwise would
have been to admit tacitly a qualitative distinction, and tended to perpetuate prejudice
rather than erode it.

He was also fully aware of the irony that "the life and work of Lytton Strachey should finally be
commemorated by two fat volumes--that standard treatment of the illustrious dead that he was so
effective in stamping out."

He finished the first volume in 1964. "In return for what he [James Strachey] called 'a bribe' of five
hundred pounds, I agreed not to publish this first volume until I had finished the whole work. Both
volumes could then be brought out together.... I felt like a marathon runner who, on completing the
course, is asked whether he wouldn't mind immediately running round it all over again." James
Strachey went through the manuscript with detailed and meticulous care making objections and
suggestions at every point. In April 1967, shortly before the book was published, Strachey died
suddenly of a heart attack.

Holroyd incorporated James Strachey's comments both in the text itself and in footnotes to the text
when there was a disagreement in interpretation. James Strachey was very protective of his brother's
reputation and at one point accused Holroyd of "an unceasing desire to run Lytton down--in this case to
make people think he was impotent--which, believe me, he wasn't." On another occasion, apparently
provoked by Holroyd's suggestion that Lytton Strachey 's moustache was wispy, he attacked Holroyd
for what he considered to be his prudery in the way he dealt with Strachey's obscene verse: "I've been
positively staggered by some of your ethical judgements on the subject of sex and religion. Your
remarks about Lytton's poems astound me ... the impression you give of holding up your hands in
shocked horror at their fearful obscenity makes me wonder ... why on earth you ever set out to write
this book--and I feel inclined to want the whole thing thrown out of the window. The whole of Lytton's
life was entirely directed to stopping critical attitudes of the sort that you seem to be expressing."

Such comments tend to undermine severely Holroyd's professed ambition to treat Lytton Strachey 's
homosexuality in the same way as he would have treated heterosexual activity. Nevertheless, Frances
Partridge in her diaries, Other People: Diaries 1963-1966 (1993), makes it clear that some of those
involved with Strachey, including Duncan Grant and Roger Senhouse, were outraged by the way their
lives had been exposed to public gaze and considered taking legal action against him. Nonetheless,
Holroyd must have placated their distress between their reading the manuscript and the publication of
the book since he congratulates them in the book on their determination to see the truth of their
relationships fairly presented. Holroyd was fully aware that his intention to deal with Strachey's
homosexuality "without any artificial veils of decorum ... depended for its practicality on the
cooperation of a band of mercurial octogenarians. It was for all of us a daunting prospect. 'Shall I be
arrested?' one of them asked after reading through my typescript. And another, with deep pathos,
exclaimed: 'When this comes out, they will never again allow me into Lord's.' In particular, it says
much for the courage, candour and integrity of Duncan Grant and Roger Senhouse that, despite the
shock of its unexpectedness, they did not object to what I had written." Despite James Strachey's
defense of openness on sexual matters, when biography is dealing with those still alive or those who
have relatives still alive, tact, diplomacy, and decorum are also necessary attributes in a biographer.

Nonetheless, Patrick Cruttwell in the Hudson Review (Winter 1968/1969) criticized Holroyd for his
lack of courage in being "ridiculously reticent" and "totally inexplicit in describing this side of
Strachey's life--[especially the mechanics of his physical sexuality and his dealings with working class
boys--'if I may put it with a plainness which would upset Mr. Holroyd's old Etonian sensibilities, we
are never allowed to know what Strachey really did and with whom']--as he is also in describing the
pornographic and scatological stories and verses" of which Strachey wrote a good deal. With some
justification, he cited James Strachey's remarks as supporting evidence. However, whereas Holroyd
says that his intention was to treat homosexuality no differently than he would heterosexuality,
Cruttwell criticized him for not making homosexuality a separate issue. Noel Annan in the New York
Review of Books (6 June 1968) isolated the whole problem when he wrote that "the cult of
homosexuality at the beginning of this century was a European phenomenon whether in Berlin or
Vienna, in the Paris of Proust or Gide, in Oscar Wilde 's London, the same upper-class fashion in
homosexuality could be observed, the same predilection for choir-boys or footmen, or for the rougher
stuff of guardsmen, sailors, and low-life characters ... in England, the cult of homosexuality was
specially reinforced in the upper-classes by their education." It is this aspect of Strachey's significance
that Cruttwell criticized Holroyd for not exploring, though had he done so, it would have been a
different kind of biography entirely.

Annan, in his review, summarized what he thought to be the work's merits: "Certainly Michael
Holroyd's two-volume twelve-hundred-page biography is a remarkable achievement. He is the first to
begin to make a map of Bloomsbury and to establish the identity of the minor as well as the major
characters. Not for him the security of a university post: he worked in the most straitened
circumstances.... He has not written a literary masterpiece and his style is at times overblown.... He
needed to construct a work out of a mountain of material.... This he has done with skill and integrity....
And yet, time and again, one wishes that he had stepped back from the documents and analysed his
subject.... Holroyd calls his work a critical biography, but it is only critical in a limited sense. He does
not sufficiently criticize his sources and takes letters at their face value.... Holroyd is excellent when he
tackles the vexed question about how accurate Strachey was in the use of his sources in his historical
works.... But he does not assess the purpose and impact of Strachey's work as a whole." While Annan
was sensitive to the virtues of Holroyd's work, both he and Cruttwell were quick, nonetheless, to notice
the absence of analytical intelligence, though neither seemed to recognize that while that quality might
well be an essential prerequisite in critics such as themselves, biography calls primarily for other
virtues. Cyril Connolly 's praise was not without qualification: "I rate Mr. Holroyd very highly as a
biographer, almost in the Painter class." Nonetheless, he recognized in Holroyd "an inveterate gossip"
who "has recorded everything he has found out," thus identifying Holroyd's insatiable curiosity about
his subject, perhaps a more necessary ingredient in a biographer than intellectual analysis.

Michael Thorpe in retrospect seems to have made a more balanced assessment of Holroyd's
achievement by comparing him with Strachey as a biographer. "This is a great biography of one who
was not, in any sense great himself," he judged. "Its greatness [derives], ironically, from the many ways
in which Mr. Holroyd has excelled his subject in the art of biography: he is copious and thorough, yet
always stylish and economical, whereas Strachey was arbitrarily cursory and concise. His sympathies--
except towards Leavisiate moral critics--are broad and deep: Strachey's were straitened in the extreme--
in his writings that is. This last qualification saves Mr. Holroyd's re-created Strachey the man so that,
ultimately he wins our sympathy and regard: despite his 'ugly thoughtlessness,' his self-pity and
snobbery--the warts are all there, fully exposed--his patience and good humour in sickness, his
tolerance and generosity toward the difficult people who gravitated toward him and his tenacious
clinging to his artistic principles prove that he fought an honourable draw with weak flesh and a febrile
spirit."

Holroyd's life of Lytton Strachey was outstandingly successful and firmly established his reputation as
a biographer. It was also a great success commercially and was quickly published in paperback. He had
shown a remarkable ability to master a wealth of heterogeneous material and to deal with events in
detail without in any way losing touch with the narrative framework or with the interest of his readers.

The character of Strachey in all its contradictions and perversities emerges fully and convincingly as
the biography progresses, while the minor characters surrounding Strachey are authentic in their own
right while also authenticating the character of Strachey. At the end of the biography with the death of
the subject followed by the suicide of Carrington, Holroyd achieves a rare pathos without seeming to
manipulate either the reader's feelings or the actuality of the events. The biography carries conviction
not only because of Holroyd's mastery in marshaling the multiplicity of facts but also because the
narrative sweep of Strachey's life is brought to a satisfactory conclusion, a dignified death followed by
a coda that seems to confirm its significance. We are as moved by Strachey's humanity, that which he
shares with us all, just as strongly as we are impressed by his individual achievements.

In this respect Holroyd fully justifies his contention that biography and fiction are intimately related.
He "set out," he says, "to escape into my subjects' lives rather than identify myself with them," and as
"he pursues his research and finds out about his subject" he "makes discoveries about himself." In all
this he functions like a novelist and "learned something of narrative, structure and plot.... Though the
biographer may not invent dialogue--that is breaking the rules of the game--he may use quotations from
letters and diaries to perform a function similar to dialogue in the narrative. I structure my story." He
expresses his hope that "literary biography will increasingly be seen as a specialised branch of fiction"
though he does not hide his conviction that literary biography, at least in Britain, is commonly seen as a
branch of journalism.

Holroyd is a very self-conscious craftsman who does not "just plod through chronologically" but who
aims to give his books a "symphonic sort of structure. There are motifs and themes that are brought
back, with variation. And a long book needs to have different movements, variations of pace. At times
one must change gear and speed along. The reader may need an outdoor scene at this point or a spin in
the car." He cites as his model Samuel Johnson and his insistence that the first business of a biographer
was not necessarily to dwell on "those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness,"
but to "lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and to display the minute details of daily life."
Holroyd is particularly successful in portraying the inner lives of his characters, whatever the
performances and incidents of their public personae. His perception is both sharp and sensitive, and he
has an instinct for the telling detail, the significant phrase, and the memorable vignette. Moreover,
despite Cyril Connolly 's remarks, Holroyd's style is lucid, economical, and flexible. While his attitude
remains detached, his prose achieves that comfortable, middle style that encompasses the trivial and the
significant, the idiomatic and the formal, without strain and that moves from the amusing to the
pathetic with natural ease. Though he also has a gift for the illuminating image, he successfully
maintains that conversational tone and idiom that establish a warm and friendly relationship with his
reader. He has an easy and familiar charm and is careful never to patronize either his reader or his
subject. He aims to engage the attentions of the general reader and includes neither references nor
footnotes in order not to interrupt the narrative flow. He does, however, indicate in a short "Author's
Note" his source materials and where they are to be found.

Holroyd's only novel, A Dog's Life, was published in the United States in 1969 but has never been
published in Britain because, he said, his father threatened to sue him for libel. In 1973 Holroyd
republished a selection of assorted articles and reviews under the title Unreceived Opinions, some of
which have been heavily reworked and rewritten. Some of the reprinted articles are autobiographical,
but most have a biographical slant. Most of them are on literary figures--Gerhardie, Strachey, Charlotte
Mew , A. E. Housman , J. M. Barrie , Virginia Woolf --but there are also pieces on Bertrand Russell
and Roger Fry and, learning from his work on Augustus John, on Delacroix, William Rothenstein, and
Wilson Steer, and a description of the strange friendship between Wyndham Lewis and Augustus John.
There is also a sensitive appreciation of Dorelia John, who died in her eighties in 1969. He also
republished some of his contributions to the campaign for Public Lending Rights, in which he took an
leading role. For the most part, however, these articles and reviews are slight though urbane, elegant
and amusing, and adequately testify to the width of his reading, the liveliness of his mind, and the
quality of his journalism.

Establishing the pattern that a minor character in his previous biography becomes the subject of the
next, Holroyd followed his biography of Lytton Strachey with his biography of the artist Augustus
John. Augustus John: A Biography (1974-1975) is also a two-volume biography and was widely
criticized for its length: "The book has only one fault: it is too long," wrote Kenneth Clark in the Times
Literary Supplement (18 October 1974). "His book might have gained in quality if he had used the blue
pencil" (Denys Sutton, Apollo, December 1974)-though Diana Holman-Hunt in Connoisseur
(November 1974) expressed the sentiments of most readers when she said that she "found it too long
but could not put it down."

Yet Holroyd's mastery of his material is remarkable and his attention to detail--despite the minor errors
noted by Sutton--scrupulous. The organization of the biography is equally impressive. Clark said that
Holroyd "applies to near-contemporary life the industry of a Maurist; he tracks down every birth
certificate, discovers and transcribes every letter, reads every related memoir." Sutton praised him for
his stamina as a "patient chronicler" who "has talent for creating a mosaic of details." Moreover,
although he says in his preface that it is not an "art book," as Holman-Hunt testified, "it includes many
pages of sensitive and mature art criticism." Mainly, however, it concentrates attention on John's
extraordinary and protean personality, which is also expressed through his art. Holroyd establishes in
the first chapter of his biography the multiple character that was Augustus John: "To know Augustus
John was to know not a single man, but to know a crowd of people, all different, none of them quite
convincing ... and he did not know who he was." Holroyd undoubtedly "combines dedicated
scholarship with an absorbing story, both passionate and violent." He enjoys describing John's many
love affairs and the women with whom he was involved. But central to the whole design of John's life
are his wife Dorelia John, who is vividly presented as both beautiful and enigmatic, and his sister
Gwen, perhaps the more gifted artist, a rather remote though sad and haunting presence.

In view of his later attitude, it is interesting to notice that at one time he believed that a moderate
advance from a publisher was to be preferred to a large one. However, his literary agent, Hilary
Rubinstein, sold Holroyd's biography of George Bernard Shaw to Chatto and Windus for a record
£625,000. Rubinstein described in the Bookseller (20 November 1987) how he invited sealed bids from
nine publishers for the "finest biography of our time," and while one firm actually outbid Chatto and
Windus, the fact that Random House had already bought the rights in the United States meant that the
book would be published under the one umbrella throughout the English-speaking world. Rubinstein
pointed out that while huge advances are often paid to the authors of commercial fiction, nonfiction had
not previously commanded advances of that order: "There is often a heavy cost to be paid for the
revelation that a work of a living author has fetched a stupendous price ... while £625,000 would be an
astronomic price for a single volume, it is much less aberrant as a reward for five or five-and-a-half
books and for what will be, by the time the great work is finally finished, almost 25 years of Michael
Holroyd's working life.... The publishing community should welcome such eloquent money being
given for once to a work that all who have been privileged to read it consider a literary masterpiece....
My hope and belief is that the success--the very public success--of Michael Holroyd's Bernard Shaw
will give a similar fillip to literary nonfiction." "The advance," said Holroyd in the London Times (10
September 1988), "will be paid to me over the years, like a middle-age pension."

Clearly, in view of the commercial success of Holroyd's biographies of Strachey and John, his new
work seemed to offer publishers the opportunity of burnishing the literary image of their houses with
the surety of long-term profits. Holroyd had achieved the enviable feat of maintaining the respect and
admiration of an intellectual audience while at the same time attracting a large readership for his work.

In the early 1970s the residuary legatees of the Shaw estate--the British Museum, the National Gallery
of Ireland, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art--at the suggestion of Max Reinhardt, Shaw's
publisher, invited Holroyd to write the authorized biography. They agreed that it was time for an
assessment of Shaw for a new generation of readers and by a biographer who had not known Shaw
personally. Nonetheless, the choice of Holroyd was controversial, since, as he later admitted, he "had
no experience of politics or theatre, no academic qualifications, and no record of having worked on
Shaw." "I was thirty-four.... I was writing a life of a flamboyant heterosexual, having previously
published books about a notorious homosexual and an unknown impoverished writer who, following
the appearance of my book, stubbornly remained unknown. People usually implored me not to write
biographies of their friends and members of their family. Now I was gaining respectability, albeit
controversial respectability." Also, he was aware of the vast amount of material he would have to
master: "I had heard that Shaw wrote ten letters a day, every day, all his adult life, and that people kept
his letters. I knew that he had composed more than fifty plays, that there was a collected edition of
almost forty volumes, and many library yards of books about him, as well as huge deposits of
unpublished papers around the world. I began to suspect that ... G. B. S. could actually write in a day
more words than I could read in a day. Since he lived into his mid-nineties working vigorously to the
end, this was a daunting prospect." Holroyd said it was "a moment of great terror" when he finally
decided to accept the invitation. He realized, "It would be a long voyage and I didn't know the route,
nor did I have confidence that I would reach the end. I thought it would take 10 years, possibly more--I
didn't know then that it would take 15. I wondered whether the relationship between Shaw and myself
would work. I wasn't a Shavian. Would I be stimulated and enthusiastic enough to do not just an
inventory of his life but a worthwhile book? I was seriously worried that I might not be able to give
anything new to it."
It is interesting to see just how quickly Holroyd established a close relationship with his subject: in the
first volume of his biography, The Search for Love (1988), he demonstrates how Shaw had done his
best to doctor the public version of his loveless and neglected childhood in which he was known by the
nickname "Sonny" and that Sonny had been a vulnerable little boy with anarchic leanings--much like
Holroyd, in fact. He admits a soft spot for Sonny: "To some extent," he says, "I shared his experience. I
had a dull and rather fearful childhood." In other words he soon found himself identifying with his
subject, or at least with a seminal part of his subject's experience. "I always keep Sonny in mind," he
said, "and the subversive [effects] he had. I would like this book to give heart to those who feel they
were dealt a bad hand in life." Holroyd's characterization of Sonny continues to play a significant role
in his biography leading him, inevitably, to the conclusion that largely because of his childhood
experience Shaw became "a kind of patron saint of the lonely and the misfits, who can give such
people courage." Thus he turns his own experience to advantage, though he does so without apparently
losing his detachment or falsifying the materials of the biography. Yet it is interesting to notice that
Sonny--the unloved, vulnerable, lonely, anarchic boy--becomes something of a leitmotiv throughout
the three volumes of Holroyd's biography. Holroyd's contention that "in his relationships with women
Shaw was seeking a second childhood in which he could receive all the attention and happiness he had
been denied by his mother" is fully illustrated in the second volume of his biography, particularly in his
mariage blanc--the "sentiment of affectionate benevolence which has nothing to do with sexual
passion." "Sonny, Holroyd believes," Peter Lewis commented in the (London) Times (10 September
1988), "always remained locked up inside G. B. S., slipping out, for instance, in the short-hand diaries
which record such unSupermanlike activities as lying in bed till 11, idling at the piano instead of
working and being a hopeless duffer with his typewriter or bicycle.... He really did feel he was
unloveable, so he replaced love with attention." Richard Holmes , reviewing the first volume of the
biography in the (London) Times (15 September 1988), noticed "Shaw's frantic efforts to recreate [sic]
himself out of a bereft Dublin childhood." Because of his continuing need for the solaces of childhood,
he "shifted his desires into his literary life. Sexual excitement produced in him an ejaculation of words
from which letters were conceived, novels and plays born." Moreover, in the third volume Holroyd
quotes Shaw himself in old age harking back to Sonny--he would have preferred to be remembered "as
Sonny than as the ghastly old skeleton of a celebrity I now am." Thus Holroyd maintains an important
psychological link, however tenuous, between himself and his subject, and in classic Freudian mode
the child is seen to become father of the man.

Holroyd deliberately gave neither references nor sources but kept the footnotes for inclusion in a
separate volume, volume five. "I wanted to present," he said, "a 'pure' narrative that was neither
interrupted by sequences of numbers nor undermined by a series of footnotes." He wished to capture
the interest of the general reader by presenting Shaw as immediately as possible, and the reviews
agreed that he had succeeded: "The first volume of his biography is highly readable" but is "for the
'general reader' rather than for academics. He is detached, but not without sympathy with and insight
into his characters. The treatment of Shaw's life up to 1888 is, in the best sense, novelistic. Narrative
flow is constant; the style limpid, enlivened by a gift for the luminous generalization." Yet whatever
the reservations of "academics," the Times Literary Supplement (8-14 September 1989), in reviewing
the second volume, did not hesitate to describe the biography as "monumental." John Sutherland , the
reviewer, noticed that Holroyd "allocates this middle act of the Shavian drama twice the space per year
on the grounds, presumably, that these years are the most eventful." He admires the way that so many
strands are kept running in this volume; all the major works are described and discussed, the relations
with the Webbs, H. G. Wells , Harley Granville-Barker, and others are fleshed out--"what seems like
hundreds of other characters wander in and out of the narrative"--and all against the background of two
wars, a revolution, the Irish uprising, the rise of the Labour party, votes for women and so on. He
congratulates Holroyd for the way in which he controls Shaw and prevents his taking over the
narrative. On the publication of the third volume, reviewers were generally impressed by the sheer
scope of Holroyd's accomplishment and by his energy and powers of synopsis in mastering his
materials. "Shaw's vastness has met its match in the biographer's energy" according to Sutherland in the
Times Literary Supplement (6 September 1991), who drew attention to the way in which Holroyd had
concentrated attention on the narrative: "Holroyd is not interested in the inner lives of his supporting
cast and on occasions even seems to resent their calls on his time.... Nor does Holroyd waste words on
commentary or authorial opinion. Chapters (sections is the better term) are not thematized, even to the
extent of giving them titles.... The tale is all." Sutherland thought "the main curve of Holroyd's design
is now clear. Shaw searched for love, and never found it ... pursues power and never possesses it," and
the "lures of fantasy" similarly disappoint. The absence of commentary and authorial opinion and the
loss of clear thematic resonance demonstrate Holroyd's reliance on his structural and narrative powers
to hold the work together while at the same time fully engaging the attention of the general reader. Any
lack of analytical intelligence--with which he was charged by Cruttwell and Annan in his biography of
Lytton Strachey --is confidently compensated for by his ability to control his narrative. Rightly
Sutherland concluded that "Holroyd's biography is a masterpiece of narrative efficiency." He draws
attention to the fact that in describing the dying Shaw "Holroyd relaxes his customary austerity and
relates these last scenes with great poignancy." Nonetheless, Holroyd does not resist the chance of
lightening the pathos of Shaw's death with sardonic humor: "Death" he says "suited G. B. S. He hadn't
appeared so well for a long time." This is a novelist's rather than a biographer's intervention in the
narrative, a moment in which writer and reader share a humorous diversion from the painful memory of
Shaw's "I tell you I am in hell. I want to die and I can't." Holroyd said that he had been educated by
writing his biographies: "Strachey introduced me to Bloomsbury and the Bohemian world of personal
relations. John sharpened my visual awareness and Shaw is making me far more politically aware." But
if he has been affected by his subjects, his biographies, notwithstanding the reading and scholarship on
which they are based, are all powered by his individual vision. Having completed his biography,
Holroyd concluded that Shaw "covered up his vulnerability with dazzling panache: I have tried to
uncover it and, without losing the sparkle of this panache, show the need he had for such brilliant
covering." Holroyd's version of Shaw is a consistent and convincing re-creation, though the hidden
vulnerability that he says he has tried to uncover would seem to belong to the biographer as well as,
perhaps, to his subject. "Subject and author," said Angela Lambert, "had in common unhappy
childhoods. The funny stories Holroyd tells about his own are, on reflection, terribly sad" (Independent
Weekend, 7 September 1991). The reviewers were generally agreed that the biography is, first and
foremost, compellingly readable: "it sails along," as Richard Holmes put it in the (London) Times (15
September 1988), "with the swift, complex life of a major novel of manners.... If he does not make us
like Shaw, he makes us understand him." G. J. Watson in the Independent (6 September 1991) agreed
with him and pronounced, "This is one of the great biographies, and that Shaw now seems one of the
burnt-out meteors of the century is not Mr. Holroyd's fault."

Reviewing Robert Gittings's The Nature of Biography (1978), Holroyd endorses his saying that the last
"fifty years have been a golden age of biography" and that biography is "one of the most satisfying and
established achievements of our present age.... The man who brought back to biography what it had
lost since Boswell was, Mr. Gittings regrets, Lytton Strachey .... After Strachey, no good biographer
has dared to be less than an artist." Holroyd served his apprenticeship as a biographer with Hugh
Kingsmill before turning to Lytton Strachey and brought his artistry, fully developed, to the portrayal
of Bernard Shaw. Biography may well be as he supposes, an "illegitimate child of biography and the
novel," but Holroyd's work is an object lesson in how to achieve a seamless marriage between the
demands of fact and documentation on the one hand and the creative imagination on the other while
keeping in close touch with actual life. Holroyd reiterated his dedication to his art, perhaps a trifle
pretentiously, in the following terms: "My deepest involvement is with biography itself and its never-
ending love-affair with humanity, and my aim has been to come a little nearer a biographical ideal
described by Hugh Kingsmill as 'the complete sympathy of complete detachment.'"

In 1992 Holroyd published a fourth volume of his Shaw biography outlining Shaw's "posthumous" life.
E. S. Turner in the (London) Times Literary Supplement (8 May 1992) well described it as a "lively and
witty, if a shade emaciated, postscript to his three-volume biography. It offers an engaging run-down
on those who, in the past forty years, defied or defended the playwright's wishes, or who used him to
give lift-off or fulfilment to their careers."

The promised references for all four volumes were published in a fifth volume, entitled The Shaw
Companion (1992) (it contains source notes, acknowledgments, and cumulative index), which was
bound in with a further printing of volume four, The Last Laugh (1992). Some buyers who hoped to
have the references in a separate volume expressed their displeasure at this way of publishing them.

Holroyd followed up all his biographies by editing selections from his subjects' work. The results were
The Best of Hugh Kingsmill (1970); Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self-Portrait (1971); The Shorter
Strachey (1980), with Paul Levy; The Art of Augustus John (1974), with Malcolm Easton; and Shaw's
Major Critical Essays (1986).

In 1982 Holroyd married Margaret Drabble , who had herself written two literary biographies--of
William Wordsworth and Arnold Bennett --and some dozen novels and was at that time preparing the
revised fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature in which she gives him, though
not herself, an entry. Angela Lambert wrote: "Their domestic set-up is well known. They keep separate
establishments, meeting on social occasions and at weekends [in their country house on the Somerset
coast]. She has the house in Hampstead in which she brought up her three children (by her first
husband); he keeps the large, bachelorish, book-lined flat in Ladbroke Grove."

He and his wife have become prominent public figures. They attend and speak at literary conferences
and support writers' pressure groups. He has traveled widely in Britain and the United States and has
given a good deal of his time and energies to working on behalf of writers; he was chairman of the
National Book League from 1976 to 1978, president of P.E.N. from 1985 to 1988, and has been
chairman of the Strachey Trust since 1990. He has written television scripts for Aquarius, Arena, and
the South Bank Show and was a member of the BBC Archives Committee from 1976 to 1979. In spite
of the fact that both he and his wife are members of the informal 20 June Group of Hampstead
intellectuals founded by Harold Pinter and his wife Lady Antonia Fraser to oppose Thatcherism in all
its guises, he was awarded the Commander of the British Empire in 1989 for his services to literature
by the Thatcher government.

 
Source Citation
A. R. Jones. "Michael (de Courcy Fraser) Holroyd." Twentieth-Century British Literary Biographers.
Ed. Steven Serafin. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 155.
Literature Resource Center. Web. 11 May 2010.
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