The Biographers' Library by Jane Ridley

A surprising number of biographers have held important posts at The London Library, which reflects the significance of the collection of volumes on the subject, as Jane Ridley observes.

Proust’s biographer George Painter once described The London Library as a tower, starting from the underground inferno of topography and history, rising through Middle Earth’s obscure wood of all sciences and all literature in all languages to ‘the mount of Purgatory of biography, where souls relive their sins and are pardoned’ , and then on up to the heavenly floors of philosophy and theology. To biographers, however, the Biography floors are not purgatory but paradise: home to what Lytton Strachey described as ‘those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead’ and much else besides – diaries, memoirs, scholarly editions of letters. Readers use these floors a lot, but no one thinks much about them.

The Biography collection comprises 1.69 miles of books – that is how they measure books here, in miles – and it represents roughly 10 per cent of the Library’s 17 miles of open stacks. To find out more I visited Gill Turner, Head of Acquisitions. We met in a small room next to her office, an eyrie high up in the Library opposite the Members’ Room on the sixth floor. Gill explained that exactly how many books there are in Biog. isn’t known, as online cataloguing is not yet completed. The staff estimate that there is a total of 100,000 volumes, probably more. The figures refer to volumes as opposed to titles, as many biographies are multi-volume works – an extreme example is Martin Gilbert’s Churchill biography, which consists of eight volumes and seventeen Companion Volumes of Churchill documents, published between 1967 and 2014.

Charles Hagberg Wright, Librarian 1893–1940.

Biography is the third biggest openstack collection in the Library after History and Literature, both of which come in at over two-and-a-half miles of open shelves. History and Literature, however, are divided according to topic, country or period. Biography, by contrast, forms one single section arranged simply by alphabetical order of subject.

Leslie Stephen, President 1892–1904

There are a few idiosyncrasies. Ruling monarchs are shelved in History, not Biography. You will find The Queen in H. England, Kings &c. Lives of The Prince of Wales and other royals are shelved in Biography. One of the lesser-known changes that will attend the next reign is the removal from Biography of the books shelved under Charles, Prince of Wales, which will then be reshelved in History. As consort The Duchess of Cornwall will come too, but the rest of the royal family will remain behind in Biography.

Arranging over one-and-a-half miles of books in the simplest way possible – alphabetically by subject – is a stroke of brilliance. It means that the Biography shelves are uniquely available for browsing. The man responsible for making the Library as we know it today was Charles Hagberg Wright, who was Librarian from 1893 until his death in 1940. He commissioned the present steel-framed building, and also created the Library’s famous subject catalogue. It is thanks to him that the Library is a super-resource for biographers.

Noel Annan, President of the Library from 1980 to 1996 and the biographer of Leslie Stephen (who was also a Library President as well as a biographer), described how ‘every time I mount the stairs, past the likenesses of those formidable Victorians who were past presidents of the Library, past the photographs of T.S. Eliot and Harold Nicolson, until I reach Eng. Lit. and turn the corner for Biog., my heart leaps up’ . Annan recalled sitting in the stacks, reading books which had nothing to do with what he was supposed to be working on: ‘People forget how important it is to be lazy in libraries. Not of course idle: idleness means daydreaming. Laziness means reading the books one ought not to be reading, and becoming so absorbed in them and following the trails along which they lead you so that at the end of the day you still have most of the reading to do that you had before that morning. Creative laziness broadens the mind. ’

One master of creative laziness was Isaiah Berlin, a Vice-President of the Library. While browsing the Russian Literature section he picked up the memoirs of Alexander Herzen (in Russian, of course), about whom he knew almost nothing. ‘I vaguely began reading it, leaning against a

shelf, and the first five pages appeared to me so fascinating that I took the volume out. ’ This was the start of a lifetime’s study of Russian political thought. ‘I think that I can truthfully say that my membership of The London Library eventually determined the direction of my interest – indeed in some sense it can be said to have formed me. ’

You don’t need to be Berlin to benefit from browsing. The Biography section is heavily used – more so, no doubt, as public libraries disappear. According to figures collected by the Library, 95 per cent of the biographies bought in the last five years have been taken out. No one knows more about borrowing patterns than members of the Library staff, who take their turn at reshelving the trolley-loads of volumes returned by readers. Top of the list are the diaries of James Lees-Milne – himself a lifelong Library member who helped in the rescue operation after the building was bombed in 1944, reportedly holding the novelist Rose Macaulay out of the building by her ankles so that she could retrieve books. I picked up Ancestral Voices: Diaries 1942–3 (1975) and Caves of Ice: Diaries 1946–7 (1983), which are both rebound in green cloth. Each book has 8 pages of issue stamps glued into the first page, which works out at roughly 160 loans.

Library cataloguer Natasha West looked through the section of the Biography stacks from F to M, and made a list for me of the most borrowed subjects (not authors). Here it is: F.S. Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, S. Freud, Gandhi, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, Edward Heath, Ernest Hemingway, Nicholas Henderson, Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler, Michael Holroyd, A.E. Housman, David Hume, Christopher Isherwood, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, William Joyce, John Keats, John Maynard Keynes, Rudyard Kipling, Lord Kitchener, Osbert Lancaster, D.H. Lawrence, Laurie Lee, James Lees-Milne, John Lehmann, Primo Levi, C.S. Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, David Lloyd George, R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Thomas Macaulay, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Macmillan, Katherine Mansfield, the Marlboroughs, Somerset Maugham, the Mitfords, Nicholas Mosley, Oswald Mosley, the Mountbattens, Iris Murdoch, Benito Mussolini.

To judge from this eclectic assortment, publishers are premature in pronouncing that literary biography is dead; it seems by far the most popular genre. Nazis and fascists are still in demand, and so are twentieth-century politicians, but not Victorians – no Gladstone. Most striking is the small number of women. The only ones here are members of the Mitford family, Katherine Mansfield and Iris Murdoch. Some of the Library’s readers, it seems, still agree with E.C. Bentley that ‘Geography is about maps/ But Biography is about chaps’ .

The strength of the Biography section of the Library lies in British public life. There are over 150 volumes on Churchill and nearly 100 books shelved under Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of. They are well ahead of the writers, who come in next, with 60 volumes on Virginia Woolf, over 50 on Charles Dickens and over 60 on T.S. Eliot (though of course there is more to be found on writers in Literature).

hotographs on the staircase of, from left to right, John Grigg, Chairman 1985–90, and Noel Annan, President 1980–96.

Biographers feature disproportionately among the Library’s past office holders, and fittingly perhaps the latter include some of the greatest chroniclers of public lives. For much of the second half of the twentieth century biographers acted as chairmen of the Library Committee. The role of chairman was created in 1952; before that the President of the Library was also the Chairman of the Committee.

Of the six Chairmen who served between 1952 and 1990, four were biographers: Harold Nicolson, Rupert Hart-Davis, Philip Ziegler and John Grigg.

Harold Nicolson was elected to the Committee in 1931; he considered it to be the most intelligent and formative of the many on which he sat. In 1927 he published Some People, a brilliant collection of biographical sketches, irreverent and witty (to be found shelved under Fiction; I would have expected to look for it in Biog. Colls., but still). The story about Lord Curzon told through his valet Arketall is a comic masterpiece. In 1952, however, when Nicolson was appointed Chairman of the Library Committee, he was hard at work on the life of King George V. This was an authorised biography, and Nicolson was writing to a brief – he was given full access to George V’s papers, but in exchange he was expected to leave out anything that was discreditable. The result was a stately royal biography which was more an official history of the reign than a personal life of the monarch.

Philip Ziegler, who chaired the Committee from 1979 to 1985, is the author of 12 biographies (as well as many other books) and is still writing. Before 1979 he published lives mainly of early nineteenth-century figures – Melbourne, Addington and King William IV. During his time as Chairman, he was commissioned to write the life of Lord Mountbatten. This confronted him with a dilemma – how to sympathetically record, as official biographer, the life of one of the most self-aggrandising figures of the age – and he resolved it by quoting both the criticism and the praise about his subject and writing a wonderfully readable narrative. Mountbatten (1985) was the first of Ziegler’s important lives of twentieth-century public figures. He followed it with a major royal biography of Edward VIII (1990), which was far franker than Nicolson’s book, and lives of Harold Wilson (1993) and Edward Heath (2010).

John Grigg, who succeeded Ziegler as Chairman (1985–90), was also the authorised biographer of a major twentieth-century public figure: Lloyd George. By the time he sat in the chairman’s seat he had just published the third of four projected volumes of the biography. Grigg admired his subject, and felt no conflict in his role as official biographer, but he was defeated by the sheer vastness of the material, and his sparkling biography remained unfinished.

Rupert Hart-Davis, Chairman from 1958 to 1969, was a publisher by trade, but also a biographer. He wrote a wellreceived biography of Hugh Walpole, published in 1952, but is best known for the witty, gossipy letters that he exchanged with his old Eton master George Lyttelton between 1955 and 1962, which he edited and published in six volumes between 1978 and 1974 (shelved in Biography under Lyttelton). As well as being a vital source for writing about literary society, these letters chronicle the history of the Library.

Hart-Davis contributed to Biography in another way, too. In 1960, as part of a fund-raising campaign to save the Library – which, as usual, was having money troubles – he organised a sale by Christie’s of literary treasures given by members. The highest prices were commanded by manuscripts. Lytton Strachey’s MSS of Queen Victoria fetched £1,800. The two stars of the sale were E.M. Forster’s manuscript of A Passage to India, which went for £6,500, then the highest price ever paid for a twentieth-century literary manuscript, and a copy of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, the Library’s President, which made £2,800. All three of these manuscripts were bought by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and they can be read in that superb collection today, a treasure trove for literary biographers – the Library could hardly have hoped to find a more appropriate buyer.

After beginning page one of his book on George V, Nicolson wrote in his diary: ‘I gaze at the sentence in wonder, realising what a long journey I have to go before I reach his death. It is like starting in a taxi on the way to Vladivostok. ’ If anywhere can ease the loneliness of the longdistance biographer, it is the Biography floors of The London Library.

Isaiah Berlin, a Vice-President 1968–97, in 1978. Image Geoff A. Howard/ Alamy Stock Photo.