by Iris Origo
Iris and Antonio leave Villa Medici on their wedding day
1 This festa is called Lo Scoppio del Carro. If the fireworks go off well, it is considered an omen for a good harvest.
8
Writing
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
DR. JOHNSON
Why does one write at all? After some sixty years spent in this pursuit, I still scarcely know. The first of my writings to be printed was, at the age of ten, a prize-winning essay in Little Folks. For this I received ten shillings and sixpence, a copy of The Christmas Carol, and a moment of as pure and unalloyed pleasure as has ever come to me out of an envelope. But the essay itself was imitative and flat, like all my other childish works. ‘A sedulous ape’, I covered a great deal of paper between the ages of ten and seventeen, producing several long romances, many attempts at verse, some translations of Sappho, Leopardi and Pascoli, and a biographical study of the Medici children. These works show much industry, some versatility, and not much talent—a fact which I fully realised myself—and, indeed, I have scarcely more facility now. Some people, it appears, set well-turned, elegant phrases on paper at once, which only require a little subsequent polishing. “I think,” said my step-father, Percy Lubbock, when I once commented on the exquisitely neat and decorative pages of his manuscript, “I think, before I write.” I do not, alas, resemble him. I have seldom written a sentence which did not have to be altered and trimmed and often entirely recast. Nor have I ever written a book about which I did not ask myself, at some stage, how it was conceivable that anyone should wish to read it. I write because, exacting as it may be to do so, it is still more difficult to refrain, and because—however conscious of one’s limitations one may be—there is always at the back of one’s mind an irrational hope that this next book will be different: it will be the rounded achievement, the complete fulfilment. It never has been: yet I am still writing. From the age of twenty-one, however, the year of my engagement, to that of thirty-five, I never wrote at all. Those were the first years of my marriage, of my son’s childhood, and of my attempts to lead, at La Foce, an entirely new kind of life; to identify myself with the work of our farm and with my husband’s interests, and to become, if I could, a rather different kind of person. Then, in 1933, after Gianni’s death, in an effort to find some impersonal work which would absorb at least a part of my thoughts—I turned back to writing again. It was then that one aspect of my training in youth stood me in good stead.
When I was working with Professor Monti, at the time of the first War, I went to Florence daily on the Fiesole tram, which then took an hour to reach the town. The old trams were falling to pieces, the roof leaked and it was often difficult to get a seat, but since it was the only time in which I could do my homework, I learned my Greek verbs or Latin verses all the same, acquiring a habit which has been of use to me all my life. Far from having a padded room, like Carlyle, I have written in trains and planes, during illnesses, in an air-raid shelter, in a nursery, and among all the ordinary interruptions of domestic life—not always, I admit, without irritation, but at least getting on with the book. And I do not really believe that this has ever done me or my writing any harm.
Iris in 1936
When I began to write again, I thought that I had better start by trying my hand at biography. I knew that I had neither the creative imagination nor the sharp ear for dialogue which produces good novels; I had long ago given up the hope of becoming a poet. I lacked the historian’s training which I might have obtained if—as I had wished at eighteen—my mother had allowed me to go to Oxford, instead of ‘coming out’. But for many years I had preferred memoirs and letters to any other form of reading, and I hoped that I might perhaps have a certain aptitude for observing and assembling the different parts of a character and a life until they came together into a pattern, giving a man what Virginia Woolf called ‘a kind of shape after his death’.
My first subject I found made to my hand: a life of Leopardi, about whom at that time no study existed in English, except an interesting essay by James Thomson and the scholarly Introduction to the translation of his works by G. L. Bickersteth. Leopardi—apart from being one of the greatest Italian poets—was an almost ideal subject for a biography in the thirties, especially for a generation whose taste had been formed by Strachey and Maurois, by Harold Nicolson and Virginia Woolf. He was young, deformed, lonely, ambitious and embittered; he lived in an old-fashioned, pious family of the noblesse de province in a little town of the Marches, and violently rebelled both against the rule of his parents and the restrictions of his environment; he was extremely articulate, setting down his loneliness, his grief, his contempt for his fellow citizens, his longings for friendship and love and his literary aspirations, in what eventually turned into five volumes of letters, as well as in the seven volumes of his daybook, Lo Zibaldone. ‘In depicting his despair and total disenchantment’—the phrase is his own—‘he drew the colours from his own heart.’
Moreover he belonged to a closed society into which English travellers have seldom penetrated (his contemporary, Byron, was perhaps the first to do so, but that was through his mistress) and about which they have consequently felt very curious. ‘You must have wondered’, wrote Basil de Selincourt in one of the first reviews of my book, ‘what went on in the huge rooms of the seemingly unoccupied palazzi … Here is a book that will put the key of the mystery into your hands.’
It is to these circumstances that I attribute the considerable success—perhaps greater than it deserved—of my first book. Its chief merit, it now seems to me, was the fullness with which I quoted from my subject’s letters and notebooks. For while I read those letters myself—sometimes long-winded and self-pitying, but often unendurably poignant—a man had indeed taken shape for me, whom I came to know better than most of my friends and to whom I wished to offer the only tribute that a biographer can pay to his subject—to tell (in so far as is possible) the truth about him.
This has always been one of the cardinal problems of biography: to what extent can or should one tell the truth—and what, indeed, is the truth about any of us? The second question is the more difficult one to answer. ‘The world will never know my life’, said Carlyle (and the words stand on the first page of his Life by his closest friend, Froude) ‘even if it should write and read a hundred biographies of me. The main facts of it are known, and are likely to be known, to myself alone, of all created men.’ Not only are there facts that we do not tell, but some that we ourselves do not know; at best, some small facet of the truth occasionally catches the light, and it is that which the biographer must try to seize. ‘For there is’, as Virginia Woolf remarked, ‘a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.’1
Johnson himself maintained that ‘in order to write a man’s life’ one must at least ‘have eaten and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him’. But did even Boswell see Johnson’s real life? Would the great Doctor himself have thought that he perceived it? A few days ago I received a letter from Archibald MacLeish in which he was turning over precisely this question in his mind. ‘We can set down’, he wrote, ‘a record of happenings which seem to have a shape or meaning: expectation, achievement, defeat, death; a drama with a beginning, a middle and an end; a drama often interesting, fascinating, moving; but is that a life or only a Life?’
Perhaps the biographer should be less ambitious; indeed, if he has not had Boswell’s inestimable advantages, but is writing about a dead man, or one whom he only knew slightly, he will have to be. He will have to be satisfied if he can catch an occasional glimpse of a face or sound of a voice. And even to do this, he will have to accumulate a vast amount of material and then, if his biography is to be a work of art, to prune and select … But is it possible to choose without bias, to reject without falsifying?
There is a revealing paragraph in A Writer’s Diary, in which Virginia Woolf�
��who was both an artist and a very honest woman—hints at this process; after six pages of meticulously exact description of a visit of hers to Mr. and Mrs. Hardy, factual, detailed, convincing, reproducing scraps of conversation, she proceeds, the next day, before turning all this into an article, to ruminate on the nature of art and thought. ‘If art is based on thought, what is the transmuting process? I was telling myself the story of our visit to the Hardys, and I began to compose it; that is to say, to dwell on Mrs. Hardy leaning on the table, looking out, apathetically, vaguely; and so would soon bring everything into harmony with that as the dominant theme. But the actual event was different.’
Is ‘the actual event’ invariably different? I think it is. We can hang mirrors, as Virginia Woolf advised, at every corner—we can look at our subject’s face at every angle and in every light. We can discover strange and curious pieces of information: that Dr. Johnson liked to carry an orange-peel in his pocket, that Aristotle had a hot-water bottle made of leather, filled with hot oil, and that Leopardi, during the cold winters in Bologna, spent his day in a bag lined with feathers, from which he emerged looking like Papageno. But never, never, can we see enough. Here is Howell’s description of Mark Twain in his old age: ‘He was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a remote sort of absence: you were all there for him, but he was not all there for you.’
For when indeed—except perhaps for a few brief moments between lovers—is the whole of another human being ever there for us? To Virginia Woolf the central problem of biography was how to weld ‘into one seamless whole’ the ‘granite-like solidity’ of truth and the ‘rainbow-like intangibility’ of personality. The problem was one that fascinated her, not only in literature but in life. “Go on, this is enthralling,” she would say, when a friend had brought her an exciting piece of gossip. “I feel as if a buried statue were being dug up, piece by piece.” One of her friends once said, that on a cold November evening he came upon her standing in the fog beside an apple-barrow, asking the woman in her deep, quiet, compelling voice: “Tell me, what does it feel like to stand in the fog on a dark evening, selling apples?” I cannot vouch for the truth of this story, but certainly it was a question that she liked to ask. I vividly recollect the day on which, not without some misgivings, I took the typescript of my Allegra—which had just been accepted by the Hogarth Press—to Tavistock Square. The office was downstairs, but as I was leaving it, Virginia’s voice came floating down the stairs: “Bring her up, Leonard, bring her up.” And a minute later, we were sitting at a round tea-table, with my hostess pouring out from a large brown tea-pot and asking: “Now do tell me—what does it feel like to wake up in the morning on a Tuscan farm?” I am afraid I only gaped at her, quite unable to make an intelligent reply.
Iris by Augustus John, 1936
But she was right. It is only by discovering what life ‘felt like’, to our subject—at least in fleeting moments—that we can become aware of him as a person at all. And this implies an attempt to see him in every attitude: not merely riding in triumph at the head of his victorious troops, or unveiling a monument in a frock-coat and top hat, but (in so far as possible) in his private, unguarded moments. In this respect, indeed, the aim of classical biography was much nearer to our own than the mediaeval one, which aimed at producing Lives of great men chiefly for edification, about subjects who conformed to God’s pattern for mankind, while the taste of the seventeenth century again veered back towards the classical attitude. Dryden, in particular, admired Plutarch precisely because he had dared to show his heroes in undress. ‘You may behold’, he wrote, ‘Scipio and Laelius gathering cockleshells on the shore, Augustus playing at bounding-stones, and Agesilaus riding on a hobby-horse among his children. The pageantry of life is taken away: you see the poor reasonable animal as naked as ever nature made him, are acquainted with his passions and his follies, and find the demigod, a man.’
Here, surely, is the prelude to modern biography. But with the admission that heroes, too, might be shown as naked and fallible, the problem arose as to whether this picture was likely to dismay or corrupt the reader—and if this danger existed, had the biographer the right to speak?
Pascal maintained that the real danger of describing a hero’s vices as well as his virtues was that it would always be the former that would be imitated. ‘The example’, he said, ‘of Alexander’s chastity has produced fewer continent men, than those whom his drunkenness has rendered intemperate.’ Dr. Johnson, however, when asked if it was right to reveal Addison’s miserliness towards his friend Steele, was of precisely the opposite opinion: whatever the interpretation, he said, the facts should be told, for ‘if nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything.’ He believed, in short, in presenting the unadorned facts for a very characteristic reason: ‘It keeps mankind from despair.’ But in the nineteenth century the suppression of unedifying or inconvenient facts came into favour again. ‘Too long and too idolatrous!’ was the comment of Leslie Stephen on one of the three-volume Victorian Lives, and ‘How delicate’, exclaimed Carlyle, ‘how decent is English biography, bless its mealy mouth!’
There is, however, one temptation even more insidious than suppression, and that is sheer invention. An excellent instance is the one by Professor Trevor Roper in a somewhat merciless attack on Lytton Strachey: the length of Dr. Arnold’s legs. Strachey had formed a very clear picture in his mind of Dr. Arnold: he saw him as a noble, pompous figure, and to introduce just the right additional touch of absurdity, of debunking, it was necessary that his legs should have been too short. Unfortunately, however, as Strachey once admitted to a friend, there is absolutely no evidence to show that Dr. Arnold’s legs were shorter in proportion to his body than those of any other man. Now the danger of this kind of invention is that, once discovered, it shakes our capacity to believe anything the narrator has said. ‘A story’, said Dr. Johnson, ‘is a picture, either of an individual, or of life in general; if it be false, it is a picture of nothing.’ Even a touch of fantasy may be disproportionately destructive. ‘Suppose we believe one half of what he tells’, suggested Lord Mansfield to Dr. Johnson, about a common acquaintance whose stories, he said, ‘we unhappily found to be very fabulous’. ‘Yes’, Dr. Johnson replied, ‘but we don’t know which half to believe. By his lying we lose not only all reverence for him, but all comfort in his conversation.’
Strachey himself said that a biographer’s equipment consists of three qualities: ‘a capacity for absorbing facts, a capacity for stating them, and a point of view’. The definition is a good one, for without a point of view no history can be written, but there is a danger that it may not only shape, but distort the facts. The biographer who puts his wit above his subject will end by writing about one person only—himself. My personal complaint about Eminent Victorians, on re-reading it after over thirty years, would not be that it is inaccurate, but that it is thin, and that its thinness springs from condescension. If you wish to see a person you must not start by seeing through him.
Moreover, while it is certainly the biographer’s business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be very meagre if these individual traits are not also seen as part of a universal drama—for each man’s life is also the story of Everyman. The biographer has, of course, a fixed pattern: he is, as Desmond MacCarthy said, ‘an artist upon oath’. But the calls upon his imagination and intuition are hardly less exacting than those of the novelist or dramatist. They too, after all, do not compose their characters out of a void, but out of experience or intuition. Shakespeare himself invented hardly any of his plots, but having accepted a ready-made pattern for his characters’ actions was then free to give his whole attention to bring them to life. And so, surely, too, the biographer’s true function—the transmission of personality—may also be, within its own pattern, an act of creation.
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br /> But there is yet one more snag to guard against: the snares of sheer ignorance, of insufficient acquaintance with the background of one’s subject. Behind each biography there should always be a rich treasury of unformulated knowledge, a tapestry that has not been unrolled. (That is, to take only two instances, why David Cecil’s Lord M and Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln are such good books.) We should know more, a great deal more, than what we tell.
I remember only too vividly an occasion on which I gave myself away as lacking precisely this sort of knowledge. It was kindly pointed out to me in a letter by Rebecca West. I had mentioned, as an example of Mrs. Carlyle’s touchiness, the disastrous Christmas party at The Grange at which Lady Ashburton presented her, from the Christmas tree, with a silk dress, after which Jane returned to her bedroom in a huff. I thought that she had made a great deal of unnecessary fuss. Rebecca West, however, pointed out my mistake. Her great-aunt, Isabella Campbell, who belonged to the Carlyle circle, had often spoken of the episode, and had considered it ‘a most extraordinary thing for Lady Ashburton to have done’, as a silk dress was the recognised present for a housekeeper and a friend of the family would have felt bewildered at receiving it. To wear a dress which one had not ordered from the start and had fitted according to one’s own measurements was a sign of social inferiority. Plainly, therefore, on this occasion Jane was right to be offended, and I did not know what I was talking about.
In my first book, I tried very hard to avoid mistakes of this kind. I had lived in Italy since the age of seven, and through both books and people had tried to make myself familiar with the kind of provincial society into which the poet was born, and of which vestiges still remained in some small country towns. I took the advice of Italian friends and scholars. I steeped myself in Leopardi’s works. I thought about little else. And, of course, I repeatedly visited Recanati, since I am convinced that, when it is not possible to follow Dr. Johnson’s precept, one can at least make it one’s business to visit the home of the man one wishes to describe. Nothing that can be learned from papers and books (even from one’s subject’s own words) can take the place of a direct visual image, of the sensation of having lived (even if only for a few hours or days) in the same physical environment. I never knew what Leopardi’s hours of study were like until I had actually stood in the icy rooms of his father’s great library on a winter’s day, beside the desk at which he wrote and the closed bookshelf in which, among the writings proscribed by the Church, his sister Paolina one day sadly locked his own Operette Morali, and felt the thinness of the woollen rugs which, as he worked on through the night by candlelight, he placed over his shivering knees and shoulders. I did not fully realise the extent of his sensation, as a boy, ‘of subjection and dependence, and of not being his own master, indeed of not being a whole person, but only a part and member of someone else’2 until I saw his bedroom, to which, like his brothers, he only had access through his mother’s own bedroom. I walked about the streets of Recanati, peering into the courtyards of the shuttered palaces, and felt the biting blast of the tramontana which would sweep the poet’s black cloak off his hunched shoulders, while the street boys jeered, “Ecco il gobbetto!”3 I went into the parish church where he made his First Communion and saw the bench still inscribed, Gentis Leopardae. I went back to Recanati in the summer and walked about the surrounding countryside, seeing ‘le vie dorate e gli orti’4 and the grassy banks beside the roads from which his donzelletta cut her bundle of grass. I saw the church steps on which some old crones still sat at dusk, gossiping about the days of their own youth, and looked across the square towards the window at which he saw Silvia singing at her loom. I climbed the hill from which he gazed at the far horizons of L’infinito, and heard, as he had, the wind sighing among the branches. I saw the moon rise above his hills, on a still summer night: