MEMOIR: Brian Masters is the most eclectic of biographers. His subjects have ranged from dukes to murderers. He has exhibited extraordinary empathetic delicacy, fortified by commonsensical morals, while seeking to comprehend what makes them tick. Patrick Skene Catling reviews Getting Personal: A Biographer's Memoir.
Like the late Lord Longford, whose Christian forbearance he greatly admired, Masters, a non-Christian non-heterosexual, has the capacity to discern potential good even in the apparently evil - in short, to recognise the common propensities, shared in varying degrees, of all humanity.
He has investigated in depth the lives of writers from Rabelais to E.F. Benson, of English and Indian aristocrats, a gambler who founded a zoo, "Great Actors in Great Roles", two compulsive murderers and the widow of a third, and has been able to discover the redemptive benefits of all possible doubts. Yet now that he has turned to autobiography, in his 63rd year, he has been uncharacteristically severe.
"I was indeed a ridiculous child," he writes, "flabby and boring, with no immediately harnessable capacity for friendship." He extends his critical self-appraisal to adulthood: "Try as I might, all I can find is the mute, dim suspicion that I ought to have been more assertive, both as a child and as an adult, that I have never had power, that I have always been wimpish, grizzly, tearful, bludgeoned by others' indifference into an apologetic shuffle through life, not wishing to offend, not daring to draw attention."
He relents a little a few pages later and acknowledges that he is "slightly creative, slightly intellectual, bookish, fond of music, fascinated by the history and structure of language, keen on clarity of thought and expression". Only the word "slightly" seems unreasonably depreciative. His original insights into character and motivation have brilliantly illuminated his biographies, and his prose, though rarely leavened by wit and never fancifully poetic, is always substantial, lucid and eloquent.
His working-class parents had been forced to leave school when very young. There was not a single book in Brian's childhood home in south London. He remembers his mother as a hunchback with a chronic tubercular cough whose "function was to make do and get on with the tea". She "would say nothing. She had no opinion about anything". "The only conversation \ a bigoted, uninformed diatribe from my father." But, thanks to his parents, who somehow enabled him to achieve the education they had lacked, he has transcended his under-privileged upbringing.
As a teenage pupil at Wilson's Grammar School, he caught glimpses of glamour by venturing north of the river, into London's West End, to collect the autographs of celebrities of the theatre, cinema and broadcasting. In his final year at the school, he established a magazine and used it to obtain an interview with Gilbert Harding, "truly the first ever Television Personaltiy, a man celebrated for being himself". Presiding over the BBC's most popular chat-shows and game-shows, such as What's My Line?, Harding called himself "a tele-notoriety".
He was a homosexual who "drank enough to keep a battalion merry", Masters recalls. Harding became Brian's patron and tutor. The young acolyte often stayed in Harding's flat. However, their friendship was platonic. The man asked for nothing more intimate than watching the boy in his bath. Brian learned a lot about the ways of the world. His mother noticed he was beginning to "talk posh".
The Masters family moved to Barry, in Wales. Brian was able to live at home and commute to the University of Cardiff. He read French and romance philology, under the tuition of a professor whose enthusiasm, Masters found, was "intoxicating". He contributed to Broadsheet, the university magazine. From Harding, he got Bertrand Russell's telephone number in north Wales and applied for an interview. Lord Russell was not easy to get to, but he was campaigning so ardently for nuclear disarmament that he was willing to convey his message through any medium. "I quizzed the great man about epistemology as the basis for moral perception in a way which I now find embarrassing to admit," Masters writes. "But he was unfailingly obliging and answered every question as if it were important to think it through.
"The Russell interview went down well on the whole, and it might have had an influence upon fellow graduate Neil Kinnock's decision to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a commitment which in years to come would cause him some anguish. Thus are the tiny footnotes of history penned."
Masters' accounts of the successful initiatives of his formative years help to explain the great successes of his literary career, most notably Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen. While less resourceful writers relied principally on police briefings, Masters directly approached Nilsen by letters and prison visits. He gained the murderer's confidence so effectively that Nilsen awarded him the copyright in all his diaries. The resulting book is a classic study of the psychopathology of a demented yet perplexingly intelligent criminal.
All Masters's books penetrate their subjects profoundly. None is more revealing than this book about himself. He tells of the painful period when he fostered a young man with theatrical ambition. "Every subsequent domestic involvement of mine has been difficult to the point of agony," he writes, "and though I maintain against all criticism that I have never consciously sought difficulty, there must be a magnetic force which draws me to danger and drama, which ensures I shall be hurt and left wounded."
He tells of happier times when he shared houses in Surrey and France with a Spanish waiter he admired in a London restaurant. Masters also tells more than I wanted to know about the removal of his bladder.
Masters is a gregarious man who enjoys the company of aristocrats, actors, ballet dancers and members of the Garrick Club. Equally, he enjoys rural solitude for writing. He has been called a snob and a masochist. It seems unlikely anyone has ever called him dishonest.
Getting Personal: A Biographer's Memoir. By Brian Masters. Constable, 313pp. £16.99
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic