The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
11 January 2004
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A
conversation with ... Piers Paul Read, biographer of Sir Alec Guinness
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The day Br Nicholas dropped the pin
a conversation with ... Piers Paul Read, biographer of Sir Alec Guinness
BIOGRAPHY: A ‘leap in the dark’ for novelist Piers Paul Read
Awesome task – the life of a stage colossus
By Greg Watts
Piers Paul Read’s recently-published authorised biography of the
late Sir Alec Guinness has been garnering a fair amount of publicity.
But he is disappointed that the media have, largely, ignored the importance
of Catholicism in Sir Alec’s life. He tells me this as he makes
coffee in the kitchen of his house in Holland Park, London, where he
has lived for more than 20 years.
It has been Sir Alec’s occasional irascibility and questions about
his sexuality that have caught reviewers’ interest in Alec Guinness:
The Authorised Biography, not his Catholicism.
Sir Alec, who died in 2000, was one of the most celebrated British actors
of his generation.
Apart from tackling many of the major roles in theatre – Hamlet,
Macbeth and Richard III – he also appeared in such films as The
Lavender Hill Mob, Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge Over the River Kwai and
Star Wars, and in a number of TV series, including Smiley’s People.
I had expected Piers, “a friend of Sir Alec”, to be an aloof figure for some reason (maybe it was something to do with his literary credentials and rather grand sounding name). Instead, he turns out to be friendly and more open than I had expected. His thin lips and grey hair brushed sideways give him a sort of patriarchal look. Dressed in brown corduroys and a sweater, he could easily pass for a teacher.
His red socks are an unusual touch. Coffee made, he leads me into the basement, where we sit down in a simply furnished room whose main features are a bed at the far end, with a framed poster of New York above it, the shelves of books and a painting presented to his father, the art critic Herbert Read. Several bottles of spirits sit on a table.
This was Piers’ first biography. He is better known as a novelist (13, so far) and author of a history of the Knights Templar and the international best-seller Alive, which told the story of the aftermath of a plane crash in the Andes.
“
It was a slight leap in the dark for me, as I’d never written a
biography before. Merula, Alec’s wife, suggested it when she was
dying, and I didn’t want to disappoint her,” he tells me
in his measured voice, adding after a pause: “She felt I was the
kind of person who would understand what Alec was about, as a human being,
not an actor. And understand his Catholicism.
“
I was a little worried that I might find some skeletons in the cupboard.
And it’s quite a responsibility writing a biography of someone
who was so greatly loved by so many people. You feel his posthumous reputation
is in your hands.”
His task of condensing Sir Alec’s glittering life on stage and screen into just over 600 pages was made easier by the existence of his diaries and the letters he wrote.
Piers read through around 800 letters Sir Alec wrote to Dame Felicitas Corrigan at Stanbrook Abbey.
“ I was very lucky. The sisters at Stanbrook photocopied these extraordinary letters, which spanned 40 years. The correspondence became a sort of diary. Alec would write to her and ask for her prayers and he would discuss his spiritual life, to some extent.
“ And then there were the letters Alec wrote to Merula. About 500. It was a joy to read his letters and diaries. He was a very good writer. Alec wrote in beautiful script and very legibly. He modelled his writing on Fr Patrick Barry, who had been my house master at Ampleforth. And he also dated all his letters.”
He adds that he wouldn’t be surprised if another cache of letters turns up one day. He then tells me that Sir Alec called in a number of letters he had written to friends so that he could destroy them because he didn’t want some of the unkind things he had written about people to be included in a future biography.
Piers suggests that the exact nature of Sir Alec’s sexuality is not clear, although the book includes a number of references to homosexuality.
“ It did not occur to many of Alec’s closest friends that he might have homosexual inclinations until the question was raised after his death,” he says.
“
To have become a fully- paid up member of what WH Auden called ‘Homintern’,
though it might have been true to his sexual nature, would have put at
risk the marriage and family life which, after his rootless
childhood, he valued so highly.”
The media’s lack of interest in Sir Alec’s faith is particularly puzzling to Piers, given that Sir Alec had at one time considered becoming a Church of England vicar before he was received into the Catholic Church.
Like many others of his time, Sir Alec struggled with the changes brought about by Vatican II, not least in the liturgy.
He found the revised Mass lacked the mystery and depth of the old Mass.
Despite this, he put up with it and continued to worship in his parish church of St Lawrence in Petersfield, Hampshire, where his funeral was held.
“ He was very good in the parish. He used to read at Mass and had a sort of class teaching people how to read in church. And he gave money to people anonymously. He did lots of individual acts of charity. He wasn’t keen on global do-goodery,” Piers says.
So how did Piers find writing a biography compare with writing fiction? “Fiction is more fulfilling, if it goes well. It’s more exciting when characters take on a life of their own. It’s creative in a way that non-fiction isn’t. You feel you are an artist, rather than a historian or a journalist.”
Piers was born in 1941. He spent his early years in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His family moved to North Yorkshire when he was eight.
“ My father was well-known in his day and was called the apostle of modernism,” he says. “I was going to be a farmer until I was 14 when I decided I wanted to be a publisher.”
Following his education at Ampleforth, where a certain
Fr Basil Hume was on the staff, he went off to read
history at St John’s College, Cambridge. Afterwards, he went to
Germany to train as a publisher. But he got bitten by the writing bug.
His first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, was published
in 1966. By the time he was 30, he had
published a further three, picking up two literary prizes
along the way. Several of his books have been adapted for
TV and
film, including
Alive
and Monk Dawson.
Apart from a year on The Times Literary Supplement, he has been freelance all his working life: “I’m quite self-disciplined. I used to work outside the house, in an office, but I now work at the top of the house because three of my four children have left home.”
A former master of The Keys (the Catholic Writers Guild) between 1992-97, he follows in a long tradition of novelists whose Catholicism has shaped their work. You only have to think of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Morris West, Brian Moore, Bernard MacLaverty and David Lodge, to name a few.
“ I think all my novels have a kind of Catholic moral view behind them even if there are no Catholics in them,” he says thoughtfully. “Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh books had miracles in them and they were best sellers. But I don’t think you could do that now. I try to show the working of grace, but not in a miraculous sense.”
He attended the launch of At Your Word Lord, Westminster Archdiocese’s parish renewal program at Wembley Arena, but admits he had misgivings about it.
“ I think it was successful for what it set out to be. A bit of it was tacky. But I’m not comfortable about mixing entertainment and the Mass.”
Having criticised the event, he then acknowledges that young people are often attracted to this kind of liturgy. But he adds, “quoting Ronald Knox”, that while it can be easy to whip up people’s enthusiasm, it can be difficult to sustain it. Nevertheless, he has joined an At Your Word group in his local parish.
His children’s Catholic education was more watered down than his at Ampleforth, he goes on.
“ I’m not a Latin Mass or anti-Vatican II type. I met someone yesterday who said that he was so fed up with hearing social work preached from the pulpit. I feel that the Church has lost the plot a bit.”
As to the media, he says with a wry smile: “I’m quite encouraged by the antipathy of the media towards the Catholic Church. Christ said that it would be a sign of contradiction.”
Reprinted courtesy of The Catholic Times