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Foot 8

"What bed is he in?” Michael asked pointing at me. “Not the same as mine?” “That’s what happens when you have a biographer,” I told Michael. “Same bed.” With our sleeping arrangements, sorted out Michael and I went off to our respective rooms."

I said to Michael: "You know the last time I was here I spoke with Tony Benn. I told him I was dealing with all aspects of Jill’s life and I was describing to him the kind of biography I was writing. He said he really wasn’t in favour of saying that much about the private lives of public figures, that he didn’t like gossip in biography. I told him I thought it all had its place—the whole story. People really wanted to know what that person was like and Jill in her own book had said she wished she knew more about the personalities of some of the women she was writing about. He said, “No, I don’t believe you need to know all that much” and he was quite adamant. So then I was reading these obituaries of Barbara Castle and he wrote one ... He mentions you and at the end of the obituary he just throws in a sentence about how you and Barbara were lovers. I was stunned. I was astonished because it seemed gratuitous. I couldn’t see why he had put that in after he had given me this lecture. How can you just throw it into an obituary? “First time I’ve heard of it, actually,” Michael said. “I’ll send you a copy,” I said. Benn had coupled a comment about how Michael had not supported Barbara on a particular issue with the fact that they had been lovers. Michael simply would not engage in a discussion of Benn on this point.

At breakfast, Michael told me about “a rather anguished letter,” he had recently received. He had written an obituary of Barbara Castle in which he referred to an affair she had with William Mellor, Tribune’s first editor. “My first job was also with him and so that’s when we’d known each other.” Michael described the Castle/ Mellor liaison as lasting a decade, until he died in 1943. One of Mellor’s sons had written to Michael to say, “We’re rather surprised because we thought the affair was less lengthy.” Apparently the son saw Michael’s view of it as an insult to his mother. To me, Michael’s comment only illustrated how impossible it is to write any sort of honest biography without offending someone. Michael’s response was merely to reply to the chap that they must meet sometime and talk about it.

We then had one of our periodic discussions about the nature of biography. I had been reading Montaigne. I told him how struck I was by this passage: “I have a singular curiosity to pry into the souls and the natural and true opinions of the authors with whom I converse.” Montaigne, I added, would much rather learn about what Brutus said in his tent the night before a battle than about the speech the hero delivered the next day for public consumption. Montaigne enjoyed reading about the private lives, the failings, the little quirks of great men. This relish for intimacy appealed to me, I said, because “contemporary critics of biography are so often suggesting that when you write about what seem to be trivial or minor incidents there is no point to that, when in fact they often do reveal personality. Montaigne understood that much better than critics do today.” “Yes, you bet,” Michael agreed, “You’d have to knock out a lot of Montaigne if he couldn’t do that. Perfectly true, Carl. People say you mustn’t put any of this stuff [the “minute particulars” Johnson insisted on]. You must use your own judgment.”

I did not tape the last face-to-face meeting about the biography. Going in I knew how fraught it would be and somehow I thought the tape recorder would add to the tension. Instead, as soon as I arrived at Philadelphia airport, I asked my wife, Lisa Paddock, to drive home so that I could recount into my tape recorder how I had seen Michael unravel. This was vital since so much of the account I had established had been formed of testimonials, that failing to add my own of this pivotal moment would have served as an injustice to the uncensored portrayal of the private man I had been striving to present.

DMU Timestamp: January 22, 2016 23:23





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