“I’ve always believed that there’s no such thing as a definitive biography and, particularly if you write about writers, that you are offering your subject the opportunity to write one more book, posthumously, of course, and in collaboration with you. Even if you and I were writing about the same subject, and even if our research were identical, we would produce different books. The dates and so on would be the same, but some themes would seem important to you and insignificant to me.
INTERVIEWER
You have written that you have “traded somewhat in invisibility as a biographer.”
HOLROYD
I believe that we are there between the lines, but most readers are not particularly aware of us.
INTERVIEWER
Are there subjects you considered but didn’t pursue?
HOLROYD
I thought a long time ago that Katherine Mansfield was a good subject. And I was asked to do one or two other books—Pamela Hansford Johnson, Stephen Spender—but I was always in the middle of something else. I was also asked to do a life of Jacqueline du Pré, whom I met, but I wasn’t competent to do it.
INTERVIEWER
Because you felt you didn’t know enough about music?
HOLROYD
Yes. It would have been interesting—in a way my subjects have been the tutors I never had, because I didn’t go to university. So I would have learned a lot. But it was difficult, too, because she was alive, and she suggested how I should do it, and I thought, This won’t work. I think it’s important to keep a distance from the person you’re trying to get close to.”
An interview with Michael Holroyd
Published
How my heart sings 