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Hardly surprising that historian John Lukacs believes one cannot write history accurately because what happened in the past cannot be separated from what we think happened. For historical biographers this is especially relevant. Fitzgerald, who talked about the dangers of falsifying the past, managed to circumvent those risks in his autobiographical fiction, because it is more allowable for novelists than for biographers to recreate the past. Fitzgerald felt strongly that ‘biography is the falsest of the arts’ and believed ‘there never was a good biography of a good novelist.

3. Quoted in Samuel Brittan, ‘Belgium did not invade Germany’, The Spectator, 12 October 2002. Victoria Glendinning, ‘Lies and Silences’, in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. Eric Homberger and John Charmley, p. 53, Macmillan, London, 1988. , p. 225. Michael Holroyd, ‘The Case Against Biography’, in Works on Paper, p. 8. , The Art of Literary Biography, p. 15, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, p. 10, Picador, London, 1994.

Sebald transcends all categories, but even his publishers must try to identify him – ‘Fiction/Travel/History’ they say desperately, but accurately, on most of his books. Perhaps we shouldn’t need these distinctions. But we do. indd 16 19/04/2010 16:16 Reflections 1 5. 21 The result of this awkward marriage is an awkward child. Biographers cannot add episodes to the life to add drama or bring out character, nor subtract episodes from it to avoid shocking or boring readers, hurting participants, or leaving the story in the messy shape it really had.