Since I didn't have a novel to hand after completing A Man of Parts I opted to read Ursula Vaughan Williams's biography of her husband as my on-going good story, and I'm very glad I did. (I think I was influenced by a sudden moment of recall that RVW had Wells's Tono-Bungay in mind at the end of the London Symphony which somehow made it feel natural to move on from reading about the novelist to doing similar with regard to the composer.) It's not at all an academic biog, being more in the way of an anecdotally gossipy sort of memoir. The musical life of RVW is firmly at its centre but in a very practical, grounded day-by-day manner: his work as a teacher, the on-going involvement in all sorts of festivals, the correspondence from friendships with other composers: that sort of thing.
The funny thing is that, as well as enjoying the relaxed looseness of it all, I'm finding myself developing a very clear sense of the great man. And I really mean 'great'. The relentless artistic development which sort of starts late and slowly and then just keeps going and going is almost without parallel and surely a model for us to not go gently into that good night. I've just reached the point at which he's composed the 4th Symphony and taken everyone by surprise with its glorious discords. He's clearly regarded as a senior in his field making grand final statements and no one knows he's not yet half way through the symphonies (nor through his wives, not having met his biographer-to-be yet.)
What a guy!
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