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PARTISA REVIEW
devouring, most archaic, most unleashed form, maternal passion in its
full spectrum of grandeur and terror.
Joanna S. Rose :
Our next speaker, Hilary Spurling, is a writer, critic, lit–
erary editor of
The Spectator,
book reviewer, and biograpber of Ivy
Compton-Burnett and Paul Scott. Her most recent books are
The
Unknown Matisse,
volume
I
of the first ever biography of Henri
Matisse, and
La Grande Therese: The Greatest Scandal of the Century.
She has been described as a biographer with the abil iti es of a detective
and the narrative skills of a novelist. The title of her talk is "On tbe
Smoking Ruins of Structura lism."
Hilary Spurling :
One of the surprises of this cosmopolitan and transat–
lantic gathering has been, for me, its emphas is on the metaphysical
rather than ethica l aspects of biography. 1 hadn't fully realized before
that all the sim il ar occasions 1 have ever attended in Britain or France
have invariably revolved around ethics. The two countries take oppos–
ing positions on tbis as on so many fronts and, as a British biographer
working for the past ten years on a French sub ject, 1shall begin my brief
dispatch from London and Paris with a horticultural metaphor.
It
was, as you might have guessed, a henchman who characterized
biography as a weed on the smoking ruins of structura li sm. But it might
just as easily bave been the founding father of contemporary biography
in Britain, Michael Holroyd, who recently became so exasperated by his
colleagues' interminable defensive ethica l debates that he delivered a
swinging speech for the prosecution. Holroyd himself, incidentally,
demolished his own case shortly a fterwa rds by pu bl ishing h is memoirs,
Basil Street Blues,
a hilarious and sometimes harrowing account of the
Holroyd family and how they turned him into a biographer. At its core
is a passionate defense, cast not in the shape of a philosophical or foren–
sic argument but on an intensely moving human level. Holroyd epito–
mizes the power of biography to restore and re-enter other lives and the
worlds that shaped them, to give life
to
the past from which we come.
Like many radical reformers, he is at his most subtle when he is simplest.
Here he is looking out a window at people on the street outside, and fol–
lowing them in his imagination:
" I
never tire of watchin g. 1watch, there–
fore I am;
J
am what 1 watch; and
what I watch entrances me."
That is the nub, the essentia l philosophical base on which any defense
of the British approach to biography-as opposed to the French or
Cartesian school-mus t rest. Holroyd divides biography into three cat–
egories: popular, academic, and literary. He dismisses the first group as
