“I’ve had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer”: Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of his credentials and an implicit call to further inquiry. What constitutes a life, and what can it mean to write about it? Can you write about your own from inside it?

Before his bestselling and highly praised account of his father’s life and death, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was published in 1993, Morrison had a life as a poet, a critic and a literary editor. And perhaps his interest in penetrating the mysteries of another’s interior world was already in evidence: a few years earlier, he had written The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, in which he had attempted to capture what newspaper reports had missed of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (“So cops they lobbed im questions / Through breakfast, dinner, tea, / Till e said: ‘All right, you’ve cracked it. / Ripper, aye, it’s me.’”).

The poem features in On Memoir, as an example of how form can be used against the grain of expectations to talk about traumatic collective experiences; Morrison also points to As If, his exploration of the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the 10-year-olds who had killed the two-year-old James Bulger. Life writing, then, doesn’t always mean your own life, and almost never only yours. So how do you do it?

Morrison’s response is a deceptively breezy alphabetically ordered guide, with Flashbacks, Food and Footnotes giving way to Persona, Photos and Plagiarism, and so forth. There’s plenty of cheerfully nuts-and-bolts advice for the would-be memoirist, culled from the author’s years teaching the form at Goldsmiths, University of London: the most pedestrian example might be not to keep repeating everyone’s names, and perhaps the most surprising not to write off self-publishing if you really want to get your story out there. The book also functions as a terrific reading list, encompassing titles from Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, through Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and the work of Annie Ernaux to, more recently, Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings, a memoir of growing up that also found itself compelled by Peter Sutcliffe’s crimes.

But the most insistent questions seep between the entries, recurring throughout and never quite resolving. Chief among them is: does it have to be true? Memory, after all, is a slippery customer, and although the contemporary exhortation to “speak one’s truth” might appear simply to encourage openness and reject shame, it also draws attention to the fact that others have their truth too. When accounts of events and their associated emotions and conclusions are contested, things can get messy quickly.

Should a committed life writer worry about what other people think? Morrison hedges his bets a touch: one should be as truthful as possible, and certainly not fabricate entire histories in order to deceive and manipulate (see Binjamin Wilkomirski’s invented experiences of the Holocaust). But neither can writers allow themselves to be self-seduced by the desire to be likable, or to quail from excavating experiences that are painful or embarrassing. You can’t mind too much, either, if your old school friend is cheesed off because you inaccurately remembered seeing his brother on a train (as happened to Morrison), although you should practice human decency when you’re revealing your father’s love affairs (also Morrison).

One of the most intriguing consequences of his A-Z approach is that you start to add your own entries. Between Likability and Loss, I wondered, wasn’t there a place for Loneliness? Not simply as a way to understand why people might want to write about their own histories, but to grasp why so many of us read them? Poring over the minute details of another’s life isn’t the same as befriending them, but can it make one feel – to use another telling contemporary term – “seen”? Maybe that should be under N for Nosiness.

In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in the least expect you to read it,” he wrote. “It is a highly problematical and ‘German’ work, and of such monstrous dimensions that I know perfectly well it won’t do for the rest of Europe.”

Morten Høi Jensen’s approachable and informative study of The Magic Mountain positions Mann as a writer who was contradictory to his core: an artist who dressed and behaved like a businessman; a homosexual in a conventional marriage with six children; an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption. Very much the kind of man who would send someone a book and tell them not to read it.

Despite the doubts Mann expressed to Gide, The Magic Mountain – a very strange, very long novel – was embraced throughout Europe, and three years later in America, too. Its publisher there ignored the strangeness and proclaimed its “use value … for the practical life of modern man”. While that makes it sound like Jordan Peterson-style cod philosophy, in fact it stands alongside In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities and To the Lighthouse as one of the summits (apologies) of literary modernism.

The novel describes its youthful protagonist, Hans Castorp, visiting a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos where his cousin is a patient. Intending to stay a few days, he doesn’t escape for seven years. The novel’s plot mirrored its composition: it was first conceived as a novella, a lighthearted counterpart to the gloomy Death in Venice. But Mann began writing in 1913 and didn’t finish for more than a decade. Between those two points, the first world war radically changed the book’s size, scope and temper because it radically changed the political and moral outlook of its author.

Mann began the war a staunch conservative. Yet by the early 1920s he was making speeches in defence of the maligned Weimar Republic. (In time, and in exile, Mann became the most prominent German opponent of the Third Reich.)

This tumult fed into The Magic Mountain, notably in the characters of Lodovico Settembrini (humanist) and Leo Naphta (rightwing radical), who vie for Castorp’s soul. Their arguments are dazzling – far more so than the political toing and froing Mann engaged in while writing the novel. It isn’t Jensen’s intention, but his dogged account of Mann’s shifting political views supports the theory that a novel can know more than its creator.

Jensen falters occasionally when attempting to correct the record. He says the “oft-repeated claim” that Mann “was an indifferent or cruel parent seems inaccurate”. Yet all he offers in support is a single quote from the autobiography of Thomas’s son Klaus, who was deeply troubled for much of his relatively short life. There is voluminous evidence to the contrary.

Jensen also takes issue with the “callousness” of Ronald Hayman’s assertion, in his 1995 biography, that Mann “liked and admired” his wife but wasn’t in love with her. Hayman supports his claim by quoting from a letter Thomas wrote to his brother on the matter. It’s permissible to takeissue with Hayman’s conclusion, but Jensen’s protest – “How could he possibly know?” – seems disingenuous coming from a writer engaged in the same process of interpretative analysis. Especially in the case of a judgment about Mann (“gay most of the time”, in Colm Tóibín’s description) that is so uncontroversial.

Whatever the truth may be, it doesn’t make The Magic Mountain any less captivating an exploration of the human condition, or less of a literary achievement. Jensen doesn’t penetrate deeply into the mysteries of the book, but he doesn’t aim to do so. Rather, he gives a brisk, confident overview of an extremely dense work of art – no small achievement – and contextualises the era in which it was forged. In his foreword to the novel Mann wrote that “only thoroughness can be truly entertaining”, but summary has its pleasures too.

Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself – puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch. But there is also ascetic Thomas More, hiding his cruel streak behind fine bones, and sly yet thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those shifty eyes and the beginnings of a double chin. “Hans the Painter” did the wives too – an appropriately sketchy drawing of Anne Boleyn, a saintly portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry’s heir, and a pin-up version of Anne of Cleves.

It was this last portrait that caused an international incident in 1539 when Holbein was sent by Henry to the Low Countries to check whether Anne was pretty enough to be his next wife. Based on Holbein’s portrait, Henry committed to the marriage in absentia, only to be horrified when the actual Anne arrived on the Kentish coast, looking “nothing so fair as she hath been reported”. The union lasted six months.

In this magnificent book, the first scholarly biography of Holbein in more than 100 years, art historian Elizabeth Goldring characterises the Cleves affair as a “debacle” but also points out that it was a rare misstep for Holbein, whose portraits generally struck contemporaries as uncannily lifelike. And even though today we have no way of judging their verisimilitude, there is no mistaking their essential vitality: you would swear Holbein’s people are blinking and breathing before you, ready to reach out and shake your hand.

Consider his early pictures of the Dutch humanist Erasmus, commissioned in 1523 when both men were living in Basel. The middle-aged scholar’s deeply etched face manages to convey both generic qualities of intellectual rigour and benign humanism while remaining utterly individual, with a wide, curving mouth and deep-set eyes. And there is a certain cheeky humour in evidence, too. In the background of the portrait now hanging in the National Gallery is a Latin tag, presumably by Erasmus (Holbein had only a rudimentary education), which calls attention to the artist’s juvenile cockiness: “I am Johannes Holbein, whom it is easier to denigrate than to emulate.”

It was Erasmus who was responsible for getting Holbein to Britain in 1526, when he wrote a letter recommending the young man to his friend Thomas More. More, who was on his way to becoming lord chancellor, quickly commissioned a series of portraits. Holbein presciently rendered the saintly More as saturnine, with the beginnings of cruelty about his mouth. Here was a man who was simultaneously devoted to God while busily installing a set of stocks at his Chelsea home with which to torture heretics. The fact that More famously opposed Henry’s attempts to obtain a divorce and marry Anne Boleyn may explain why the portrait that now hangs in the Frick Collection in New York has two large, centuries-old vertical splits. Boleyn was reputedly so angry with her nemesis that she dragged Holbein’s painting – the next best thing to More himself – from the wall and flung it on the ground.

All that lay in the future, though. After the portraits, Holbein busied himself with painting the large More clan as the epitome of a happy Christian household. Well-dressed women dominate this canvas, with More’s clever daughters and female wards consulting their prayer books while Alice, his second wife, wears an ostentatious crucifix. This mood of prosperous devotion is in startling contrast to a picture Holbein did on his return to Basel the following year. Portrait of the Artist’s Family shows a red-eyed, bone-tired Elsbeth Holbein looking like a soiled Madonna with her two peaky children. Having been left behind to function as a single mother and workshop supervisor while her husband was getting famous in England, Frau Holbein can hardly be blamed for not bothering to disguise her exhaustion and resentment.

The chronology of Holbein’s life is complicated and opaque, but Goldring does a good job of keeping things on track without pretending to absolute certainty. It appears that Holbein didn’t stay in Basel very long once the city had become a religious war zone, with Protestant activists creating a bonfire out of Catholic vanities. Instead, he returned to the Henrician court, this time permanently, leaving Elsbeth to fend for herself. To add insult to injury, he seems to have taken up with a woman in London, fathering another two children.

Returning to England was, however, no guarantee of political safety. Thomas More would soon be executed for refusing to recognise Henry as the supreme head of the new Church of England, and it says a great deal for Holbein’s survival skills that he did not go down with his erstwhile patron. Instead, on this second and final trip, he shrewdly pivoted towards the new man Thomas Cromwell and the new queen, Anne Boleyn.

For Anne’s coronation in 1533 Holbein built an extraordinary triumphal arch out of papier-mache painted to look like marble. (Goldring reminds us that, like all Renaissance artists, “Maister Hans” could turn his hand to anything.). It would take another five years, though, before he finally got what he had been angling for – a place on the royal payroll and the title of “King’s Painter”. What sealed the deal was a series of huge murals undertaken for the Palace of Whitehall. It was here that Holbein’s iconic rendering of Henry first appeared, the one that is recognised around the world today.

Barrel-chested and bulked out with padded shoulders and an enormous codpiece, Holbein’s Henry stands glittering and thuggish, ready to take on all-comers. According to a slightly later source, to be in the presence of this Whitehall Henry was to feel annihilated, which was exactly the intended effect – since the real flesh-and-blood Henry was in a far more parlous state. A recent jousting accident had left him with ferocious headaches and a leg so putrid that you could smell him coming. It was hard not to feel pity.

All of which is ironic, given that there was no artist better than Holbein at confronting the brute realities of ailing flesh. Fifteen years earlier, he had painted The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, a grotesque rendering of Jesus’s decomposing corpse. In this lifesize image, the mouth and eyes hang open, the skin is already going green and the fingers have begun to stiffen with rigor mortis. More than 400 years later, Fyodor Dostoevsky would find the painting so disturbing that his wife insisted on dragging him away, terrified that it would trigger an epileptic seizure. Nonetheless, Holbein’s visceral painting made its way – almost as a character in its own right – into The Idiot (1869).

In her introduction, Goldring seems wary of characterising her extraordinary book as a biography. This is doubtless because of a long-held scholarly suspicion of treating works of art as if they are mere anecdotes culled from an artist’s life, rather than autonomous creative objects. But in the case of Hans Holbein it is impossible to see how one could do otherwise than plunge into a world of rich and vital lived experience. His great achievement was to bring before us the living, breathing men and women who plotted, suffered, contrived and triumphed through the most terrifying decades of English history. And it is Goldring’s achievement to show us the process by which this magic happened.

Alice Munro, short story master and Nobel Laureate, dies at 92

May 14 2024

Canadian author Alice Munro died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, on May 13. She was 92.
Munro, who is best known for her many short story collections depicting the lives of those living in small town Ontario, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, when she was recognized by the Swedish Academy as a “master of the contemporary short story.” At the time of her award, Peter Englund, then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, praised Munro as “a fantastic portrayer of human beings,” noting that her consistent depiction of the rural Canadian landscape proved that she “has everything she needs in this small patch of earth.”

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