Bad blood is a dashing title for an autobiography, somewhere between apology and swank. Lorna Sage, at the end of this year, has much to swank about. Look at any newspaper's "Books of the Year" and there she is, turning up, again and again, like the bad penny she pretends to be.
Lorna Sage has my vote, too. But Bad Blood has been praised for some rum reasons. Doris Lessing says it would be "the saddest book you have ever read," were it not for Sage's vitality. But Bad Blood isn't in the running for a "most unhappy childhood" award. If it had been a novel, there might have been a temptation to go to melancholy extremes, to make Lorna's parents odious and the boy who got her pregnant at 16 a village idiot. It would also have been natural to assume that the baby would put an end to her education. But life was kinder. Lorna, as befits the granddaughter of a philandering vicar, sees good everywhere-and plenty of sin, too. Her picture of her parents is sympathetic (they loved each other, stayed married and did not oppose her ambitions) and she was encouraged by a liberal, unshockable teacher to go to university. Although the portrait of the boy who brought about her downfall begins as heartless comedy ("He was Victor Sage, his mother's pride but no one else's"), he later emerges as intelligent and decent. Lorna and Victor separated in 1974, but they are still "friends and colleagues."
Bad Blood gripped me like a thriller, which is extraordinary, because it is about boredom. Sage describes with gusto the fearful tedium of Hanmer, the Welsh village in which she grew up. And when she first dips into her grandfather's compromising diaries, she describes them as a "great shock" because the expected sinner-"the eccentric, predatory rook in a black cassock" that she has already evoked-turns out to be leading a "Pooterish" and "farcically domesticated life." She admits: "I nearly censored January to June 1937 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to; the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless." And so she treats us to a gripping disquisition on the subject of Grandpa's pipes, worthy of Laurence Sterne.
A few years ago, an autobiography by Andrea Ashworth attracted similar attention. Once in a House on Fire was a candidate for a "most unhappy childhood" award-with two violent stepfathers and a bashed mother in the cast. When Ashworth got into Oxford, her mother waved her off in a taxi, saying: "You're my hope." Ashworth's title was a statement of her intent: she turned her life into a dark, inverted fairy tale. When I first read the book, I was discomfited by the lyrical distance between style and content but recognised, too, that there was heroism in it. Ashworth was making good out of bad, rescuing herself through words.
I remember once hearing an editor grumble that people seemed to feel that having an unhappy childhood automatically qualified them to write a publishable autobiography. But unhappiness is easier to write about than happiness. It is often easier to read about, too. What do we get out of reading books about unhappy childhoods? Schadenfreude, partly. We're glad we are not unhappy children. And it is encouraging to read about people who triumph over their beginnings. Ashworth, like Sage, was an avid reader. (She used to read upside down-as if she knew that her life would respond and turn itself around.) They escaped from their childhood through books; then they wrote books about their childhood into which others could escape. A circle completed.
Auden once said that the problem of writing about one's own life was that it was using up "capital" as opposed to the limitless currency of imagination. That's why the best confessional writers tend not to be big spenders. If anything, they are bankers. Martin Amis's Experience, partly a memoir of his father, is lopsidedly structured, with more time spent at the dentist's than at home. He leaves out any account, for example, of his first marriage. Lorna Sage's book stops at her graduation at Durham University. There is a feeling that it ought to be a first volume, but the manner in which she concludes makes it plain that it is not. She and Amis still have their "savings," their secrets, their capital. It is often implied that autobiography, rather like travel writing, is an inferior art, as if it could be written on autopilot. But it is dicey. No one experiences a single moment in the same way as anyone else. Once writers start to describe other living people and shared experiences, they may offend or find their version challenged. Even so, there is a sense of control in writing autobiography that may be missing in life itself. For autobiographers are the authors of their own lives.
