Breezy Bell

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.

Autobiography inevitably involves some sense of reflection on, as well as selection from, the past; not merely a recital of factually affectless information. Australian theatrical producer, actor and company director John Bell offers a breezily easy read, rather than a notably contemplative approach to his life. His Prologue outlines his reasons for writing as being ‘part personal, part professional’, wondering ‘how do you separate the strands?’ The professional comes off best, and he articulates his notion that ‘our actors should know something of their own theatre history and maybe the theatre-going public should too’. He doesn’t altogether avoid the trap of listing titles of productions, with ‘sterling performances’, but his account of shifting theatrical tastes in the last few decades of the twentieth century is worth having.