In the world of biographers, Alexander Masters is an extreme sportsman, a base-jumper, a free-faller. He doesn’t find his subjects neatly shelved in libraries, he trips over them in doorways, discovers them in his basement, or, in the case of this book, encounters them at the bottom of a skip.
His first biography, Stuart: a Life Backwards (2005), was a perception-shifting portrait of his charismatic but catastrophically damaged homeless friend Stuart Shorter, who died on railway tracks aged 33. His next book, Simon: The Genius in My Basement (2011), dealt with his live-in landlord, astronomically gifted mathematician Simon Norton, who fell to earth in a shower of bus timetables and tinned fish. These are intimate, close-quarters books, detailing smears of food, ways of sitting, facial hair.
There’s no such physical contact in A Life Discarded, however. Masters’s new book isn’t just about somebody unknown to the public, he doesn’t know them, either. In 2001, his friend Richard Grove came across a skip in a professorial suburb of Cambridge. Inside, he saw something exciting, and unable to reach it himself, called his more agile colleague, Dr Dido Davies, to remove the treasure: 148 notebooks of different shapes, sizes and stages of decay, crammed from front to back with writing.
Davies opened one, splitting its spine. It was, like all the others, a diary. Soon after, “two terrible things” happened: Grove suffered life-changing injuries in a car accident, while Davies, Masters’s friend and collaborator, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Masters was charged with returning the notebooks to their rightful heir, yet slowly became seduced by writing about this nameless subject.
He might not be able to smell them, or capture their speaking voice, but Masters immediately sees this word-hoard as a kind of body. One box is “caved in, the top half shut up like a punched eye”. Another is “approximately the length of a thigh”. Mummified inside this paper is a person, and Masters wants to reanimate them.
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As a result, this wonderful, mercurial book demands more spoiler alerts than any Game of Thrones episode. Unlike most biographers, Masters can’t set himself up as an expert on his subject — he is as clueless as anyone. There’s no name, no address, no obvious identification in his source material.
One of the joys of the book is the way new information suddenly, exhilaratingly, slams the narrative onto an entirely different track, demanding a complete reassessment. Masters pieces together fragments of self-description (“tremendously thick” hair, “an artist’s chin”) and compiles a comic but increasingly nightmarish portrait. He works all night devising an equation to measure the diarist’s height based on the curve of their writing. At dawn, he has an answer: “7m 60cm, or just under 25ft tall.” He consults a graphologist who recoils from the scrawl — “Nameless person, whoever you are, I don’t want to be in the same room as you” — and later a real detective, Vince, not to find out more but to stop him finding out too much and spoiling the magic. “The faceless person next-door” is more interesting than any celebrity.
It feels transgressive, looking through a stranger’s diary, but Masters is rarely troubled. “I was not a decent human being,” he reprimands himself, before finding a particularly intimate passage: “Thrilled, I lit a fire...and kept reading.”
The diarist might not be famous, but as the graphologist’s response shows, he or she is not ordinary either. The first words that Masters reads are “hope my diaries aren’t blown up before people can read them. They have immortal value” — one hell of a tagline. Running incompletely from 1952 to shortly before their arrival in the skip, the diaries record their writer’s development from hormonal teen to middle-aged cauliflower obsessive.
At first, cut loose from any context, everything appears freakishly distorted. There are scenes of gothic horror, the narrator tormented by a terrible man called Peter, who creeps into the room and burns things. One notebook raises the possibility that the diarist is a Henry Darger-like outsider artist, filling pages with uncanny drawings of a figure Masters calls Flatface, disturbingly reproduced.
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Yet as these mysteries are unpicked, the initial lurid flare fades, leaving something more explicable but still compelling. Here is someone artistic, passionate, prone to rage, phobias and grandiose claims about their work: “I may — perhaps — have colossal powers in me.” One painting is Van Gogh-like; their novel is slightly less good than Dr Zhivago.
Our diarist attends art school, works in a library, has an unhealthy relationship with the equally mysterious E. Slowly, grimly, youthful passion and potential gives way to watching TV: the later diaries are, says Masters, “like listening to a tomb breathe”. He tracks birthdays and has fun with an entry concerning radishes.
If Masters’s investigations feel like a Paul Auster detective story, there are also traces of Alan Bennett and Barbara Pym seeping through the Cambridge hedges. Yet despite the mundanity, it remains fascinating. Masters believes it is because this compulsive outpouring of words is unmediated, and therefore a “true thing”, as close as you can get to another brain without a chisel. Yet there is a terrible moment, when he finally orders the notebooks chronologically, and realises that these 148 diaries represent only a fraction of the output. Adding up the gaps, there should be nearly 1,000. He knows almost nothing.
In one passage, the diarist writes of going to see a performance of Iolanthe, during which “there came in a flash to my mind a universal truth…a fairly obvious & simple explanation of the purpose of life”. Masters exhilarated, looks up, savours the moment, and returns for the revelation: “But the momentary metaphysical insight passed & was gone.” This is the backdrop of A Life Discarded: the promise of epiphany, constantly thwarted. It’s not life-affirming — Masters isn’t slick or pompous enough for that — but life-probing, pushing at the boundaries of empathy and understanding.
Read the first chapter on the Sunday Times website
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Fourth Estate £12.99 pp258
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A frantic pace
As he looks for clues about the identity of the diary writer, Masters calculates that some volumes contain as much as 150,000 words covering two months of entries — “or 2,500 words a day”. Given that the “typical English human can write 30 words per minute”, and assuming no pauses, this means that the average entry would have taken nearly an hour and a half to write. “One rare occasions it [would have been] as much as three hours.” All, Masters points out, without crossings-out or hesitation.