John Bell

When Arnold wrote his famous sonnet, he could have been anticipating John Bell’s book, which repeatedly asks provocative questions about the man and the work that have been his life’s inspiration – and arrives at much the same conclusion as Arnold. We don’t go to Shakespeare for mere knowledge, but for insight, challenge, and enrichment, and perhaps to help us know ourselves and others better. Further, as Bell says: ‘There is no worldwide conspiracy to keep Shakespeare alive. He survives because actors want to go on performing him and audiences want to listen.’ These sentences come from his second-last page, and the rest of the book helps us to understand why.

As it happens, this is the sixth autobiographical work I’ve read in the last couple of months, and I’m led to reflect on the mode. If you do it in the form of publishing your diaries, as playwright Peter Nichols does in Diaries 1969–77, and are honest about it, then the absence of a time lag means you are perhaps more likely to render accurately the flavour of the experiences. If, like Henry James in A Small Boy and Others, you wait until you are seventy, the blurrings of time and the obfuscating convolutions of your late style may so distance the actualities that all the reader is left with is a meditation on the processes of memory. Nick Hornby, on the other hand, in Fever Pitch, combines meditation with sharply sensuous verbal snapshots of days spent on the ‘terraces’ cheering on the hapless Arsenal, and a life emerges – while he is still young enough to re-create the minutiae with vivid immediacy.