Novels

For almost 300 years, the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world — the device by which we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves. Something new came into art during the transition out of the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Reformation, and into the modern age. We might call it the turn to the interior — an increasing agreement that domestic life and drama are real, not merely minor activities necessary to keep body and soul together while we play out our real lives on the world’s stage. Think how rare domestic drama was before the novel.

My first novel, A Dog’s Life, was largely autobiographical. It described my grandparents’ life, my parents’ marital exploits, and my own limping attempts to become a writer. But since I seemed unable to harness these first two subjects to the advancement of the third. Then I suddenly saw how I might carve out the first quarter of this spacious family saga and make it a self-contained novella covering 24 hours of family life. Heinemann offered me an advance on royalties of £500, which was ten times what they had given me for my biography of Lytton Strachey. Roland Gant did not wish to publish A Dog’s Life until the two Strachey volumes were out of the way.