Alexander Larman

Alex read English at Oxford and graduated with a First. He has a monthly book review column in The Observer and writes regularly for publications including The Guardian, TLS, Spectator, The Critic and the Telegraph. His first book, Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, was published in 2014, and his second, Restoration, a social history of the year 1666, was published in 2016. His third book, Byron’s Women, also came out in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Elma Dangerfield Prize.

The Crown In Crisis is his fourth book and has been reviewed favourably by the critics. David Aaronovitch in The Times called Larman “an amiable and talented young writer” and The Observer wrote how “his scholarly rummaging has turned up fresh insights…”

Alex lives in Oxford with his wife Nancy and their daughter Rose.

Firstly, the Coronavirus stuff. How are you and how has life been in lockdown?

I am generally well. My most recent book, The Crown in Crisis, seems to have been that happy thing, a critical and commercial success, so I’m looking to the future with excitement. (For ‘future’ and ‘excitement’ read: ‘hopefully getting another book deal’, which is all any writer can try for at the moment.)

Lockdown was an interesting experience. My life beforehand generally consisted of me sitting down in a corner of my sitting room or the kitchen and trying to write articles while taking it in turns to placate our daughter. Not a lot changed, save the absence of the ameliorating pub on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday evening. I missed the pub.

Your first book, Blazing Star, was about John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. What attracted you to the man once described as "a man whom the muses were fond to inspire but ashamed to avow”? [quoting Horace Walpole] Wasn’t he all about literary fifth and poems about dildos?

Good old Horace. I became obsessed by Rochester – I mean, properly obsessed, not just ‘mildly diverted’ – when I was a student. I always felt that he was the perfect halfway point between John Donne and Philip Larkin, both of whom I revere. There’s the smut and swearing, of course, but then there’s enormous poignancy, brilliant wit and, as he approached his premature death at 33, some really very moving musings on mortality. He’s criminally underrated, but it seems unlikely that that’s going to change. It’s typical, really, that Johnny Depp played him in a film (The Libertine), and that the film was both rubbish and flopped.

I studied his poetry far beyond any normal degree of expectation and got a place to do a PhD on his work, which I never took up because I realised how much money it would have cost – plus, I felt that my approach was always an authorial rather than academic one. But I kept waiting, and waiting, for a popular, mainstream biography of him to appear. It did not, and then, through a happy series of circumstances, I managed to get commissioned to write one myself in 2012. It appeared in 2014, was generally well-reviewed (apart from a couple of hysterically bad notices) and sold decently enough, so that started things off.

And then you wrote a book about Lord Byron, Byron’s Women. Well, while he remains the connecting thread throughout, you actually examine the women in his life (history says there were plenty), so why this approach?

Unlike Rochester, who I think has been very poorly served by a biography (there isn’t a vast amount of surviving material to go on, which hasn’t helped), we know virtually everything about Lord Byron that there is to know. We’ve even more or less got his laundry bills. So this has meant that he’s been very well served – or overexposed – by biographers for decades now.

I wanted to write a kind of spiritual sequel to Blazing Star, which was intended as a revisionist book about a dashing literary aristocrat, but it became quite clear very quickly that Byron was a pretty repellent character in many regards, who treated women appallingly. So it became quite interesting to approach the subject as an ‘anti-biography’, essentially telling Byron’s story at a remove, and also giving the major female figures in his life their say.

The book didn’t sell as well as it should have, which was very frustrating. It’s good, but I now wish I’d spent longer on researching and writing it; there were almost certainly archives that I could have used that would have elevated it a few notches. I also think that if it had come out a year or so later, to coincide with the #MeToo movement, it might have chimed more closely with contemporary sensibilities.

As it was, I had the ordeal of addressing the Byron Society at their 2016 Christmas lunch, during which the present-day Lord Byron rose from the floor to castigate me for my ‘anachronistic and liberal sensibilities’. Well, that’s one form of literary criticism, I suppose. At least he bought a copy, for cash.

I remember how impressed I was when I discovered that you knew Sebastian Horsley and helped with his autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld (Sceptre). I met him briefly but you knew him well and actually visited his infamous Soho home. What was that like?

I’m very conscious, as I get older, of certain incidents in my life having acquired almost mythic proportions, perhaps because I’ve talked or written about them so much. Meeting and working with Sebastian Horsley was one of them. I was interning at his literary agency and mentioned to his agent that I was interested in decadent literature (Rochester, Byron).

Horsley’s book, then called Mein Camp, was proving problematic, not least because he’d been fired by his previous publisher after he went into an editorial meeting blasted on heroin and threatened to cut his commissioning editor’s breasts off. I met him for tea, and found him hugely charming and, of all things, lovely. So I worked on the book with him for a few months, off and on, and we divided our time between his flat on Meard Street (a fantastically odd place, where he slept in a bed deliberately too small for him and had a sitting room decorated in skulls) and Maison Bertaux, where we would take tea and cake. He was enormous fun. Underneath the quips, the outrageousness and the provocation, he was very kind, very loyal and a tremendously decent man. I was honoured to call him a friend.

After his death from a heroin overdose in 2010 – what a bloody waste – I, along with a few others, have tried to keep his memory alive. If this means writing endless articles about my friendship with him, offering up stories in interviews such as this or posting occasional recollections on social media, it’s all to the good, frankly. He was the presiding spirit of Old Soho, and now that he’s gone W1 seems a much cleaner and less interesting place.

He was known for his witticisms and one-liners, but is there one that sticks with you?

He was occasionally accused of racism and bigotry, which I think was an unfortunate side-effect of his trying to shock, but I enjoyed his outraged, tongue-in-cheek response ‘I stand for anti-racism, anti-semitism and anti-pasti.’

John Wilmot, Lord Byron and Sebastian Horsley. Are you drawn to the naughty, smutty, dirty and debauched men of history?

Oh, and the women too. In fact, the estimable Gustav Temple, editor of The Chap, and I were going to do a book about the great rakes of history called – fittingly enough – The Rake’s Progress. We had quite the rogue’s gallery lined up, including Lord Boothby, Tallulah Bankhead, Kenneth Tynan and Horsley, but the trouble was that we were attempting to do the book with the crowdfunding platform Unbound and it became miserably obvious that not enough people wanted to pledge for the project, so it hasn’t happened. It may yet, of course. But to answer your question – I’ve always been drawn to the lurid, licentious and vile. Perhaps it’s just because, like Wilde, I’ve always believed that wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

Your most recent book, Crown in Crisis has made quite the splash, attracting global attention due to your discovery of documents relating to an assassination attempt on Edward VIII. How did you stumble upon this?

Sheer luck. I was in the Balliol College archives in Oxford, looking at the papers of Edward’s adviser Walter Monckton, and by chance, I found this absolutely revelatory document ‘He Was My King’, which was written by Edward’s would-be assassin George McMahon. It’s absolutely barking and almost certainly fictional, in whole or in part, but I managed to corroborate a surprising amount of it with the official records in the National Archives. So I was in the very happy position while writing the book that I absolutely knew that it had a massive scoop in it.

The strangest thing was that I sold the serial rights to the Daily Telegraph, and expected that they’d go big on the story, but they wanted to concentrate on the Royal Family instead, so it ended up running as a massive news story elsewhere. All very exciting.

Are you likely to explore any other members (past or present) of the Royal Family?

Absolutely. I deliberately end The Crown in Crisis on a cliffhanger of sorts – Edward and Wallis going off together into darkness, with Hitler frustrated, WWII on the horizon and George VI reluctantly assuming the mantle of kingship. How can you not want to carry on telling that story as an author? And going back in time, I’ve always been fascinated by Charles II. He plays a major role in both Blazing Star and my second book Restoration, and so maybe one day, he’ll get his own book. But again, he has been written about before, so I’d need a really interesting new angle, which I don’t have at the moment. Otherwise, I have a rather irreverent book idea about our current Queen, but it is a fairly close rip-off of another major book published in the past few years, so it might have to wait for a while…

When you're not researching or writing, what do you enjoy reading?

I review a minimum of three books a month for the Observer, and then others for The Critic, The Chap and more. So a vast amount of my reading mixes business and pleasure, as it were. My own preferred titles tend to be serious and gripping historical and biographical books in non-fiction and black comedies in fiction.

At the moment, I’m reading Ben Schott’s new Jeeves and Wooster novel (I’d have thought it sacrilege to attempt to pastiche Wodehouse, but by God, I think the man’s done it for the second time), I have the new Nick Hornby to look forward to (he seems to be getting better and better) and there are the likes of Hermione Lee’s new Tom Stoppard biography, the great William Boyd’s latest novel and others to look forward to. I’m going to a literary festival in September and am relishing the thought of a long train journey with a good book to read, followed by a visit to a pub with the aforementioned book. Such things haven’t really happened for a while.

One of my favourite of your columns for The Critic was the one about famous hangovers. What was your worst ever hangover (if it's possible to recall)?

Ah, the ‘bastard behind the eyes’. Now that I am a responsible husband and father, and a respected author and journalist – with a Wikipedia page, to boot! – the days of truly dire hangovers are more or less behind me. But I remember a couple of dreadful ones from my younger days. January 1, 2003, was a bad one – I’d spent the previous two or three days holed up in my flat drinking rum with a friend and arguing about trivial things with great passion – and about five years later, I had a memorable lunch at Boisdale in Belgravia with its owner, which ended with him putting a bottle of whisky on the table and telling me that I wasn’t leaving until we’d finished the bottle. While smoking a lot of cigars. I felt thoroughly wretched after that one. Perhaps the clue is ‘avoid spirits’.

Then there's your piece on Philip Larkin, who you describe as “the greatest Poet Laureate that Britain never had.” What's your relationship with the works of Larkin?

Someone once called me ‘Alex Larkin’, and, David, I beamed. He’s by far my favourite 20th-century poet and vies with Rochester to be my all-time favourite poet, if not favourite writer. I find his work endlessly moving, hilarious and inspirational – I did my dissertation on him at university, which coincidentally I was re-reading the other day, and I thought ‘gosh, I’ve got a different relationship with his work two decades on’. And no doubt, if I’m spared, I’ll regard it similarly differently in another two decades as well. ‘Life is first boredom, then fear’. I wonder when the one ends and the other begins.

Is it true that you're currently researching the life of Peter O’Toole for your next project?

It was true. I have had an unusual literary career in that my first, second and third books were all published pretty much straight off ideas of mine and that I didn’t spend years trying and failing to get published – because that came later after Byron’s Women underperformed commercially.

Consequently, I have a huge number (well, four or five) of projects that I would have happily undertaken but never happened, for one reason or another. And a new biography of Peter O’Toole, drawing on the archive of his at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, was probably the one that went furthest – there were stories in the press about it, after all, and I thought that it would have made a great book. But there were two issues – firstly, the family are very protective indeed of his legacy (and he died more or less saying ‘no biography’, which is an enormous pity) which means that they might well withhold permission, and secondly biographies of actors, once a mainstay of bestseller lists, just don’t sell any more. So it all looks very unlikely to happen any time soon. But never say never. I wouldn’t have expected c2017 to have written a book about the abdication, for instance.

I know you as a jolly bon vivant with an interest in fine whiskies and seasonal game but I'm banishing you to a desert island and your au revoir meal is on me. What’ll it be?

I am overcome by delight and gratitude at your generosity, if a little perplexed as to why you’re sending me to a desert island. Has the interview been that traumatic?

For the starter – and it will be three courses, rather than the ludicrous tasting menus that we have been known to patronise – I would very much like Heinz Beck’s fagotelli carbonara, because they are about the most intense and delicious bursts of flavour that I can think of anywhere. The wine should be white and crisp – a really fine Riesling or Gruner Veltliner.

The main course has to be steak, and probably Hawksmoor steak at that; a really good, delectable, grass-fed one, gently mooing and with the deceptively clean flavour of a perfectly dry-aged piece of meat. Controversially I might eschew Malbec or Bordeaux for this one and go for an Amarone instead; it would be unusual but effective, I hope.

And for dessert, assuming that by this stage I’m not waddling into oblivion before the island, a really good sherry trifle would be just the ticket, complete with rhubarb and beautifully done sponge. And Chateau d’Yquem to wash it down with, naturally.

I know that I should have said truffles, oysters Rockefeller, foie gras and all sorts of luxurious items – or cited all sorts of amazing and unusual dishes – but when you’re on your way to an island, then the familiar comforts of home seem all-important, frankly.

www.alexanderlarman.com

The Crown in Crisis is available for purchase on Amazon.

InterviewDavid J Constable30 August 2020Alexander Larman, Interview, Royal Family, British History, The Crown in Crisis, Edward VIII, Blazing Star, Byron's Women, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Lord ByronComment