PETER ACKROYD & CATHOLIC ENGLAND : At present, living in the past.

I prefer the city in darkness; it reveals its true nature to me then, by which I suppose I mean its true history. During the day it is taken over by its temporary inhabitants, and at those times I feel as if I might be dispersed and lost among them. So I keep my distance. I imagine them in the clothes of another century, for example, although I realize that this is very fanciful. But there are occasions when a certain look, or gesture, plunges me back into another time; it is as if there had been some genetic surplus, because I know that I am observing a medieval or a sixteenth-century face. When the body of a neolithic traveller was recovered from an Alpine glacier, sprawled face down in the posture of death, it was considered to be an extraordinary act of historical retrieval. But the past is restored around us all the time, in the bodies we inhabit or the words we speak. And there are certain scenes or situations which, once glimpsed, seem to continue for eternity.

PETER ACKROYD
The House of Doctor Dee

British novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd is not widely known in the United States, at least not to the general reading public. His acclaimed 1998 biography The Life of Thomas More brought him to the attention of an American Catholic audience, but his ten novels, though they have earned a loyal readership both here and in England, have not pushed him visibly into the front ranks of contemporary fiction writers. That's too bad, because Ackroyd is a fascinating writer with a singular voice. His novels as well as his superb biographies (he has written five) are all passionately engaged in attempting to imagine what the past might have been like. Though his methods are extremely bookish, he extends himself imaginatively to call up in rich detail lives radically different from our own. He is insistently interested in continuities over time, but fixes on the oddest items--the location of a left-wing bookshop in a neighborhood where seventeenth-century religious radicals used to hang out, for example--to reconnect us to our never-quite-dead past. The quirkiness of his vision is seductive, and makes him seem sincere where so many postmodern writers interested in history are insincere as an article of unfaith.

Some time in the last few years, after several decades of dogged labor, ineffectually disguised by a playful public persona, Ackroyd became a man of letters. In both the novels and biographies (which include lives of T. S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Blake, as well as More) he has produced a unique sequence of literary pictures of London through the centuries. A forthcoming "biography" of London will offer readers the yield of Ackroyd's lifelong obsession--a comprehensive study of his hometown. The city has served as more than a backdrop in many of his novels; it is a central locale for the celebration of a native English tradition of spectacle, ritual observances, and festive burlesque. Ackroyd knows London by heart--knows it as Dickens, or Blake, or Thomas More would have known it. He represents it with antiquarian zeal, but unlike many of the heritage-fixated, he does not despise the present. Readers can anticipate that the London biography will appreciate the living city while serving up a combination of historical conjuring and visionary leaps through time.

These preoccupations can be traced in Ackroyd's earlier works, but such thematic handles are the slightest of helps in getting a grip on this prolific writer. Reading him conveys a sense of a restless imagination disciplined by unvarying work habits and a desire for a steady income. A self-acknowledged workaholic, Ackroyd is a bookworm's bookworm, whose imaginary worlds radiate out from the British Library. Though he talks freely about his life and opinions in interviews, this is no confessional author. His homosexuality, a recent heart attack, the loss of his long-time companion to aids, his drinking problem--are no secret. But Ackroyd resists the current fad for autobiographical writing, submerging himself instead in the task of imagining the look, feel, smell, and above all the language of characters and times that can be reached only by exercising the imagination.

Nor does Ackroyd fit in among the better known now-middle-aged British writers such as Julian Barnes and Martin Amis. He describes the difference in quasi-religious terms--the rest are secular writers, but he is steeped in sacred forms and rituals. In his fiction, time is cyclical and tradition is tenaciously rooted to place. The present contains the traces of the past in human and verbal forms. In the essay "Some Old Haunts," he writes that "it is possible to walk down a street and glimpse a face, or gesture, which seems to have sprung from some past time. These same gestures and movements, even the very words themselves, have been repeated and revived over many generations in that precise place. I have seen medieval faces, Elizabethan faces, eighteenth-century faces, and in that recognition I realized that in London it is possible to understand everything within the eye of eternity."

Ackroyd has built his career by steeping himself in the work of a historical period, by mimicking its lingo, quoting its popular songs, and navigating its byways. Addressing aspiring novelists, he defies conventional wisdom and advises, "Write what you don't know." He revisits the past without cleaning it up (in fact he often lingers on old vices), and without rendering the historical encounter as especially redemptive for his present-day characters. In Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), English Music (1992), and The House of Doctor Dee (1993), a structure of gothic horror undergirds the stories. Deja vu blends with the frisson of horror, while the present becomes the meeting place of all our pasts. We marvel that our ancestors could have lived through those dark, unpoliced, dangerous, and nasty times.

In Hawksmoor, for instance, modern-day London is reconnected with its late-seventeenth-century past, when architects worked to rebuild after the Great Fire. The title suggests the architect Hawksmoor (1661-1736), whose churches, with Wren's, are among the city's most distinguished edifices. Yet Ackroyd's Hawksmoor is a hard-boiled detective at work on a serial murder case which can only be solved by time travel. The fantastic and gothic erupt into the historical, with the architect of Hawksmoor's churches being reimagined as an orphan of the black plague, a victim of abuse, and a Satanic practitioner who builds churches on sacrifice-stained foundations to etch a pentagram on the very surface of London.

The sacred forms and rituals in which Ackroyd is steeped are recognizably Catholic, although he suggests that his religious sensibility has now taken the form of unhappiness with modern materialism. Still, he sometimes describes himself as a Catholic--an unorthodox one--whose writing is a form of prayer, and the Catholicism he was exposed to as a child shows up in partial disguises in his work. Moreover, he insists that the English tradition is a Catholic one still. "The Catholic sensibility of the English is innately strong," he told the literary critic Susana Onega. "Hence the interest in spectacle, hence the interest in pantomime, in display and vaudeville...the theatrical use of language, the interest in ritual, all these things stem from a Catholic sense of life."

Yet few of his subjects have been explicitly Catholic, and that makes Ackroyd's biographical treatment of More of particular interest. The Life of Thomas More contains a sympathetic depiction of late-medieval English piety, one that could be read as a useful supplement to Eamon Duffy's superb history of the period, The Stripping of the Altars (1992). In describing the consequences of More's conscientious objection to the policies of Henry VIII, Ackroyd invokes and laments the loss of a world of ritual, hierarchy, order, and tradition. Formal gestures of filial piety, rituals of official power, and the deference commanded by authority--in short, the last days of Catholic England--are presented respectfully. The crisis undergone by a power elite and establishment founded on medieval principles of hierarchy and cosmic order lies at the heart of the book.

Much of Ackroyd's imaginative life has been spent retracing and uncovering older versions of London still visible for benighted present-day readers. However, that keen historical sense doesn't stop him from playing fast and loose with the "facts" in his fiction. Historical distance makes melodramatic plots seem less incredible, Ackroyd has argued, and a juxtaposition of the present day with earlier periods helps reveal the unknowability of the present. Uninterested in multiculturalism and postcolonial writing, mistrustful of union with Europe, and actively hostile to the influence of American literature, he asserts that he is doing nothing new, and denounces originality and individuality as fetishes of Protestantism and post-Romantic modernity. Still, his playful opportunistic use of the past has led some critics to describe his novels as "historiographic metafictions" that are indebted to American experimental fiction, to Latin American magical realism, and to other postmodernist styles. Ackroyd stoutly denies this lineage. Of his seemingly postmodernist craft, Ackroyd told Onega, "No, it's English....This combination of high and low, farce and tragedy, is something which is innate in the English tradition....just part of the inheritance that goes back as far as a thousand years." He points to the romances of Philip Sidney (1554-86) and Edmund Spenser (1552-99) as primary influences.

Consequently, the critic who offers an autobiographical explanation of Ackroyd's work is on shifty ground, for here is a gay man who does not want to be known as a gay writer, an author who disavows the cultivation of an authentic "voice," preferring to ventriloquize others. While much of Ackroyd's finest work is dedicated to the description of writers' and artists' lives, his fiction reveals relatively little of himself, or little undisguised. Still, it seems pertinent that Ackroyd's maternal grandfather was a van driver for Harrods and an active trade unionist who believed that a true Christian must be a socialist. His affection for London radicals and Cockney visionaries may spring from a source close to home. We might also note that the novels often feature fatherless boys (Chatterton, Hawksmoor), or boys with feckless dads (Chatterton, The House of Doctor Dee, English Music).

Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. He was raised a Catholic by his mother, Audrey Whiteside Ackroyd, in East Acton, a working-class housing project. His father, Graham Ackroyd, left when Peter was six months old. (Though he corresponds with his father, Ackroyd has never cared to meet him.) He likes to note that he grew up in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs prison, which adds a Dickensian flavor to an unexceptional childhood. To be sure, in the 1950s it was less common to be raised by a single parent, but Ackroyd was not deprived. Both mother and grandmother worked to support the family, and they managed to provide vacations to the continent for the young boy. Scholarships enabled him to attend Saint Benedict's (a Catholic day school in Ealing), Cambridge University, and Yale. Encouraged by his mother and the monks at Saint Benedict's, he steeped himself in books, the Latin Mass, and scholarship. At Cambridge he took a First in English; at Yale on fellowship he did the work for a precocious book of criticism, Notes for a New Culture (1976).

Returning to London from America in 1973 he became, at twenty-three, the literary editor and film critic for the Spectator; from 1978 to 1981 he was the magazine's joint managing editor. His early books were respectfully reviewed, but with Hawksmoor and Chatterton (1987, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) he caught the attention of academics. Critical accolades, big literary prizes, enormous advances, and long-term contracts for multiple books followed. Book-length studies of Ackroyd's oeuvre (by Onega, Laura Giovannelli, and Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys) have begun to appear. Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his voluminous papers for an undisclosed sum (Ackroyd sought [pound]50,000).

The most recent novel, The Plato Papers (2000), offers a distillation of Ackroyd's views about time and history. Set in a future-world London, a.d. 3700, the novel is a fragmented fictive archive of orations, dialogues, dream-visions, and the working papers of its protagonist. Like his creator, Plato is fascinated by what can be gleaned from scattered bits of evidence, and he does not hesitate to fill in what he does not find. Ackroyd has often asserted that he does not distinguish between fiction and nonfiction. Novelists are biographers without imagination, Ackroyd quips; in biography you can make things up, whereas in fiction you have to tell the truth.

Plato studies the earlier periods of human life, including our Mouldwarp Era (a.d. 1500-2300), about which so much vital information has been lost. His "expert" teachings reveal the insufficiency of historical evidence, the likelihood of error in interpretations of the past, and the tenacity of the visionary imagination. One of the novel's cleverest features is Plato's glossary of ancient terms: "ideology: the process of making ideas. The work was generally performed in silence and solitude, since great care was needed in their manufacture. Certain artisans were chosen for this occupation at an early age and were trained in mental workhouses or asylums. They were known as idealists, and were expected to provide a fixed number of ideas to be exhibited or dramatized for the benefit of the public"; "see red: to see into the fire at the heart of all things"; "telepathy: the suffering caused by television." Charles Dickens is celebrated as the author of the great novel The Origin of Species (his only surviving work), Freud as the great comic genius of his age.

Thus Ackroyd demonstrates that a story will be made of the past, whether the facts survive to support it or not. At its best The Plato Papers gives us estranging glimpses, in the style of Craig Raine's poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," of our own time: "Who can properly depict," Plato wonders, "the despair engendered by the cult of webs and nets which spread among the people in these final years? They seem to have worn these dismal garments as a form of enslavement as well as worship, as if their own darkness might thereby be covered and concealed." But as an exercise in future worldmaking, The Plato Papers is rather thin, and does not compare well either to Russell Hoban's linguistically inventive post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker (1980), or to Keith Roberts's lyrical depiction of a Catholic England, four centuries after the Spanish won the Armada, in Pavane (1968). Instead, the book offers a displaced ars poetica from a novelist steeped in the past and an apologia from a biographer whose Dickens (1993) envisioned the great novelist at play with his fictional characters.

Ackroyd has often suggested in interviews that his unwillingness to mine personal experience is purely practical--his own life is too boring to dwell upon. It is a writer's life, full of reading and hours of labor that are best encountered by reading the work. Surprisingly for a writer who later became so dedicated to an exclusively English tradition, he wrote a thesis on James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. At college he became a poet, writing verse in the style of John Ashbery and Ashbery's English precursor J. H. Prynne. During his years at the Spectator he published more poetry, a book about transvestism and drag (Dressing Up, 1979), and his first biography (Ezra Pound and His World, 1980). Having embarked upon novel writing with The Great Fire of London (1982), he resigned his post at the Spectator in 1981, to become a full-time, self-supporting writer. While he worked on the critically acclaimed Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1984, winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize) and his breakthrough biography, the prize-winning life of T. S. Eliot, Ackroyd kept producing book, film, and television reviews to pay the rent. He has conducted his career as a full-time writer with businesslike consistency. His work diaries (deposited at Yale's Beinecke Library) show a tireless and disciplined laborer.

Ackroyd is also a prodigious drinker, but this has not interfered with his productivity, though there were some bad times when his companion Brian Kuhn was dying. While at Yale in the early 1970s, Ackroyd met Kuhn, who would be his research assistant for the next two decades. Kuhn died of aids in 1994, after an illness of three years. Though Ackroyd is discreet about the relationship, he asserted in interviews after Kuhn's death that he wasn't worried about becoming ill himself, as their relationship had been companionate rather than sexual for fifteen years. The two had made two homes together, one in Notting Hill and the other a historic property in Devon; both were sold after Kuhn's death. There is further evidence of a long, loving union. Kuhn's letters to Ackroyd from the early days of their relationship can be found in the Beinecke papers. Some of these sheets have the texture of fine cloth, softened by handling. Ackroyd's biography of William Blake, dedicated to Kuhn, warmly portrays the visionary poet's wife Katherine as the helpmate who made Blake's work possible. Kuhn had cared for Ackroyd through a nervous breakdown in 1988; Ackroyd in turn fought the dreary battles for insurance coverage and humane treatment, and quietly nursed Kuhn until his death.

In recent work, Ackroyd has moved away from the horror and remorse of Hawksmoor. As the allegorical visions toward the end of The House of Doctor Dee make plain, love is the goal of existence. Light is its medium. Thus the older Ackroyd handily reverses the suggestions of Hawksmoor, deploying gothic elements to celebrate felt connections across time, the formation of true families of soul mates, and the healing of fractured relationships. In this romantic invented religion, the past has a restorative nature, capable of bringing on what Wordsworth described in "Tintern Abbey" as "that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery, / In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened" (II. 37-41).

Arguably, Ackroyd needs something to help him escape the weary weight imposed by his grueling work routine. In the first interview granted after his heart attack, he told Francis Gilbert of the New Statesman that writing his biography of London very nearly killed him. The heart attack occurred on the day he finished the book. Ackroyd mused, "London has made my career--my most successful books all have the capital as their main theme--but it has exacted a very high price. Perhaps the city, which I regard as an organic being in its biography, wanted my death as a payment. Luckily it didn't cash the cheque. In a strange way, I think that the very last word of the biography helped to resurrect me. It's the Latin word Resurgam, which is what Christopher Wren made the centrepiece of Saint Paul's: I will arise again."

Though the deliberately blasphemous bantering might conceal it, this is a writer with a liturgical imagination that owes a great deal to his faith. Ackroyd may have jettisoned traditional Catholicism, but in his work humans are spiritual beings with souls that survive death and time. He speaks about writing and the imagination with a religious sensibility, adopting a priestly language of vocation. "I had begun in nature, where like an orphan I had looked for signs of a divine home among the dark material of the world, but now I had found my end in eternity," says Matthew Palmer, the narrator in the House of Doctor Dee. "This is no lost city under ground. The veil had been torn aside, and though the blazing stars had gone for ever, the light of the imagination filled every corner and every quarter, every street and every house, of this place from which I had come and to which I had returned. The imagination is the spiritual body, and it exists eternally."

If professional researchers like his character Matthew Palmer feel "at odds with the rest of the world," they are also "travelling backwards" on behalf of the rest of us, who are stuck moving forward. A lifetime of reading becomes a kind of sacrifice of and to time. Asking "What is the past, after all?" Ackroyd hopefully votes for the combination of discovery and invention that comes out of the act of writing, "discovering it within myself, so that it bears both the authenticity of surviving evidence and the immediacy of present intuition." Ackroyd labors among his books to enliven connections to the past that shares space with the present. Like the Renaissance mage Doctor Dee, he strives to distill his reading and synthesize knowledge through the alchemy of authorship.

Suzanne Keen, a frequent contributor, is associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The author wishes to thank the curators of the Beinecke Library for their assistance in consulting the Peter Ackroyd Papers and to express her gratitude for their award of a John D. and Rose H. Jackson Fellowship, which made her work in the Ackroyd Papers possible.