posted on 07 Apr 2018

A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin

I have only ever read one of Claire Tomalin’s acclaimed biographies – 2002’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self – but I thought it was marvellous and amply confirmed the claim some critics have made that she is one of the greatest biographers of our age.

When I began to see reviews of her own memoir A Life of My Own, I felt it would be essential reading. One of the things that astonished me about her book on Pepys was the ability she had to capture something she says she first saw in Pepys himself – “the texture of the days as he lived them, work and play mixed together, never pretending that he felt as he should, or behaved better than he did”. In short, Pepys’ extraordinary and disarming frankness, the past reaching out to us to offer a real impression of living, breathing life in all its complexity, its triumphs and its sometimes shaming admissions.

In a short introductory note Tomalin explains that this is what she hoped to bring to her own life, realising that this would require navigating both the trivial and the tragic. “I set out to describe,” she says, “how it was for a European girl growing up in mid-twentieth-century England, how I got my education, how I made friends and related to different families who were good to me, how I was carried along by conflicting desires to have children and a worthwhile working life…” And perhaps especially, how long it took her to find her vocation – researching and writing historical biographies – and to create the circumstances in which that vocation would be possible.

Let me first say that the photograph on the cover of this book is perfectly chosen. It seems to capture the vulnerability, the unhappiness and the toughness that one feels Tomalin must undoubtedly combine. For it must be said that she has had more than her fair share of tragedy: a son dying at just a couple of months old; a teenage daughter lost to depression and suicide; a second son born with Spina bifida (but growing to cheerful, hard-won independence); her first husband – the debonair, charming and philandering journalist Nicholas Tomalin – killed while covering the Six-Day War in 1973. Add to this the disastrous marriage of her parents and their acrimonious and bitter separation when Tomalin was young, and one would think that any chance of professional and artistic success would be at best minimal.

And this – at least to this reader – is the central problem. Don’t get me wrong – the book is magnificent, written with a steely regard for truth (but also a nod to discretion and a regard for privacy when this is appropriate or required), in prose of great simplicity, elegance and clarity. Precisely the qualities she brings to her biographies. But what I really wanted to know was how a person overcomes these tragedies, what reserves are required – of emotion, intellect, of courage, determination, resilience – to keep going, to build the life one envisages and to succeed on the terms one has chosen.

And I don’t think the book quite explains this – or, to put it another way, explains this in terms that I was able to identify with. Because what comes across, I think, is precisely what I most didn’t want to hear: that class and background and social connections still count for an immeasurable amount.

For the fact is that even from her earliest days, Tomalin seems almost impossibly well-connected and leads a life of upper-middle-class assurance (I hesitate to say privilege because I think this has become an over-used weasel-word, although Tomalin does in fact say this of herself). For example, at a time when she desperately needs some part-time paid work – editorial jobs, publisher’s reader, the kind of thing that can be done from home and fitted around an almost impossibly demanding family life after she is widowed – Cecil Day-Lewis puts a word in for her and work is forthcoming. She rises over the following decades to the literary editorships of first The New Statesman and then The Sunday Times, despite the fact that in the latter case this was not the job she had applied for, but Harold Evans more or less insisted that she take it.

I’m aware that this sounds carping and unfair, and I don’t mean it to and I wish it didn’t, because it’s a marvellous book and my admiration for Tomalin is undiminished. But I can’t help a feeling of – what? – disappointment? Of finding that at times, despite the repeated hammer blows of personal tragedy, despite the lucidity and the rigorous regard for truth (and make no mistake: Tomalin is far tougher on herself and her own failings than she is on others), it does sometimes read like one of those dreadful round-robin Christmas circulars posh families used to send to their friends, and which during the late-90s Simon Hoggart would sometimes lampoon in his Guardian column.

I suppose what I’m saying – all I am saying, really – is that what A Life of My Own makes clear is that class and social background do in fact count for an awful lot. And I’m not stupid: I do know this. But I hadn’t expected to find this sad and generally self-evident truth so clearly confirmed in this particular book or in this particular life. And doing so, I closed its covers with mixed feelings, because – dare I say this? – what I read seemed to make this courageous and hugely accomplished woman less rather than more remarkable.

Alun Severn

April 2018