Irritated by what he judged the 'impacted cliches' of some review, Trapnel had once spoken his own opinions on the art of biography. 'People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The bio- grapher, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions."

And speaking of truth in biography (as I was), here's X Trapnel expounding on the subject in Hearing Secret Harmonies, the final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time:

#AnthonyPowell #XTrapnel #DTMT 📚