by James Atlas
Yes, it’s true: Aubrey was a flop at most of the things he tried, but he did write the incomparable Lives. (Anthony Powell called him “England’s first serious biographer.”) Some of the portraits are clearly based on third-hand gossip or the impaired memories of someone who woke up on many mornings with a hangover: it’s hard to believe that Isaac Selfe, “a cloathier of Milsham,” when he died at the age of ninety-two, left behind eighty-three children, some of whom were born without various limbs or even heads; or that a “Fellow from North-Wales,” having been killed by a fallen tree limb, rose out of his coffin, still alive. Imagine that!
Dubious, even absurd as these fugitive portraits are, there is something haunting about them. They testify to the power of the impulse that motivates all biographers:
to raise the dead, so that the retriving of these forgotten Things from Oblivion in some sort resembles the Art of a Conjuror, who makes those appeare that hae layen in their graves many hundreds of years: and to represent as it were to the eie, the places, Customs and Fashions, that were of old Times.
If we peer behind the veil of orthological and grammatical oddities that obscures Aubrey’s curious dialect, we can make out one of the most eloquent manifestos ever written about the purpose of biography.
That the brevity of life should become a dominant theme in the seventeenth century makes sense. It was a death-haunted period. Life was short, mortality real, the grave close by. Izaak Walton, remembered as the author of The Compleat Angler, wrote far darker books. I cherished his biography of the poet and clergyman John Donne for its brooding account of the death of Donne’s wife:
In this retiredness, which was often from the sight of his dearest friends, he became crucified to the world, and all those vanities, those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage; and they were as perfectly crucified to him. Nor is it hard to think—being, passions may be both changed and heightened by accidents—but that that abundant affection which once was betwixt him and her, who had long been the delight of his eyes and the companion of his youth; her, with whom he had divided so many pleasant sorrows and contented fears, as common people are not capable of;—not hard but to think that she being now removed by death, a commensurable grief took as full a possession of him as joy had done; and so indeed it did, for now his very soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now grief took so full a possession of his heart, as to leave no place for joy: if it did, it was a joy to be alone, where, like a pelican in the wilderness, he might bemoan himself without witness or restraint, and pour forth his passions like Job in the days of his affliction: “Oh that I might have the desire of my heart! Oh that God would grant the thing that I long for! For then, as the grave is become her house, so I would hasten to make it mine also; that we two might there make our beds together in the dark.”
The writing has such incantatory power that it overwhelms our natural hunger for the truth. Walton writes in the conditional: “might bemoan,” “not hard to think,” “would hasten.” However vivid the prose, you couldn’t be sure if the scene it described was a hallucination.
Not that it mattered. Maintaining the pretext of accuracy had yet to become an important part of the biographer’s job. Even James Boswell, the most scrupulous of biographers, admitted to the occasional fabrication—as did his impeccably moral subject. “When the information was not directly available it had to be supplied by guesswork,” Macaulay admitted in the preface to his brief biography of Dr. Johnson, still the best apart from Boswell’s: “The unscrupulous biographers added invention to their ingredients.” Invention was frowned upon but tolerated.*6
At the end of Dr. Johnson’s biography of the Delmorean poet and vagabond Richard Savage, he put forward the possibility that Savage, on his deathbed in debtors’ prison, was on the verge of confessing to his jailer that he was an imposter, then forgot what he was about to say (“ ’Tis gone!”). Did this scene happen the way Johnson reported it? How could anyone know what Savage had been on the verge of saying, since he didn’t say it? As Boswell noted: “The world must vibrate in uncertainty as to what was the truth.”
The assumption that a biography would be accurate didn’t establish itself until the Victorian era. As I made my ponderous way through the triple- and quadruple-volumed biographies of people I’d never heard of written by biographers I’d also never heard of, like Samuel Smiles, author of The Lives of the Engineers; Wilfrid Ward, the biographer of Cardinal Newman; and Viscount Morley of Blackburn, author of a then-definitive biography of Gladstone, I noted how formal and reserved they were—the biographers of a rationalist age.
Here is the deathbed scene in Lockhart’s biography of Sir Walter Scott:
About half-past one P.M. on the 21st of September, Sir Walter breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. It was a beautiful day—so warm, that every window was wide open—and so perfectly still, that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.
It’s crisply told, without any of the eccentricity that lurks in the testaments of Walton on Donne or Johnson on Savage; the facts (“half-past one P.M. on the 21st of September”) are laid out with a reassuring specificity; the scene is recounted with placid eloquence. What it lacks is the dark atmosphere of Aubrey and Walton, the levity of Boswell and Johnson; we have arrived at the age of normalization, when biography is domesticated, death has lost much of its terror, and what we read could well be true.
—
Afflicted with a serious case of book collector’s zeal, I had acquired one of the stubby volumes in Morley’s English Men of Letters series—brief biographies packaged in threes by writers who were then distinguished and are now forgotten.*7 My trio consisted of James Anthony Froude (most famous for his controversial biography of Carlyle) on John Bunyan, now known*8 only for his quaint and strange religious parable The Pilgrim’s Progress; R. W. Church, whom I’d never heard of, on Francis Bacon; and Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf, on Johnson and His Friends.
Stephen’s book was a revelation. I knew hardly anything about Dr. Johnson at that time—not even why he was called “Dr.”—but Stephen brought him instantly to life, offering a vigorous sketch of his subject’s physical oddities: he was pockmarked; he had a compulsion to touch every lamppost when he walked down a street; he was so agitated that he once twisted off the shoe of a woman sitting beside him. He was afflicted with a variety of tics: “Once he collected a laughing mob in Twickenham meadows by his antics; his hands imitating the motion of a jockey riding at full speed and his feet twisting in and out to make heels touch alternately.” He had uncouth table manners: his friend Tom Davies the bookseller said that he ate like a wolf, “savagely, silently, and with undiscriminating fury.”*9 He was of strange appearance: he wore a “shriveled” wig and worn slippers; his breeches hung loose about his knees. But he was powerful, too; he could box and wrestle: “Once he is said to have taken up a chair at the theatre upon which a man had seated himself during his temporary absence, and to have tossed it and its occupant bodily into the pit.”
This was my introduction to anecdotes I would encounter over and over in the years to come, as I proceeded through the substantial shelf of Johnson biographies (finally figuring out that it was Boswell I wanted to read about). Thus it was that I heard for the first time about Johnson as a young man refusing to help out his father in his bookstall and returning years later to stand bareheaded in the rain as atonement for that ancient dereliction; being outraged by the anonymous loan of a pair of shoes when he was an undergraduate at Oxford; his importuning letter to Edward Cave, publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine, asking for work; the eloquent kiss-off epistle to Lord Chesterfield, who had turned him away when he came, hat in hand, to plead for Chesterfield’s support; the Club (the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, the actor David Garrick, and the playwright Oliver Goldsmith were its mos
t prominent members) that met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street once a week at seven o’clock; the motley tenants in the house on Gough Square (his Jamaican servant, Francis Barber; the taciturn apothecary Mr. Levet; his boarder Mrs. Williams); the hoary proverbs (“No man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money”) and the famous ripostes, so familiar that it was hard to imagine Johnson ever actually said them, as when Boswell reported that he had heard a Quaker woman preach and Johnson replied: “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
Such anecdotes would become part of what academics called Johnsoniana—the accretion of folkloric stories that made up the mythic, as opposed to the real, Dr. Johnson, who would appear in his full majesty in the greatest biography in the English language, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by that drunken, depressive, philandering, whoring, obsequious, comic, effusive, and compulsively indiscreet genius James Boswell.*10
There were also many interesting facts in Stephen’s brief biography, such as how much money writers of that era made: the philosopher David Hume got 700 pounds for each volume of his History of England; Laurence Sterne got 650 pounds for Tristram Shandy. What did such pecuniary details have to do with the books these writers produced? They filled out the sociological picture, gave us an idea of how much literature was valued, in the literal sense, during the eighteenth century.
And the work? Wasn’t this supposed to be all about the work? Yet it’s not until after the deathbed scene that Stephen gets around to the books the man wrote, in a chapter—the last chapter—entitled “Johnson’s Writings.” (“It remains to speak of Johnson’s position in literature.”) Acknowledging “the inferiority of Johnson’s written to his spoken utterances,” he trots through the monumental Dictionary, impressive but a stunt; the translations of Juvenal; the essays published in The Rambler; Irene,*11 a play about some Turkish sultan “which can be read by men in whom a sense of duty has been abnormally developed” (funny!); and Lives of the Poets, his still enchanting collection of brief biographies. Stephen’s biography wasn’t about his work—What did he even write besides the Lives?—but about his character: It was written as all great literature is written: with style, wit, elegance, and verve. Who wouldn’t prefer it to the pedantic essays in The Idler.
One of Dwight Macdonald’s favorite biographies was Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. It consists of four brief portraits of Victorian figures significant in their own day—and, as is so often the case, forgotten in ours. What did I care about Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon? But as Virginia Woolf, herself a shrewd commentator on biography, noted: “There are some people who without being themselves famous seem to sum up the qualities of an age and to represent it at its best.” This had clearly been Strachey’s criterion in choosing his subjects, and I marveled at his capacity for expanding the particular trait into the general rule. He wasn’t interested in doing original research or even pretending to do it; he ransacked others’ biographies and generalized from his borrowings.
Strachey lost me sometimes in the thickets of Victorian culture. It was hard to follow the religious disputes of Cardinal Manning, and I could never remember what the Oxford Movement was or who the Tractarians were. But half of the chapter about Manning, it seemed, was about Cardinal Newman and his dramatic apostasy from the Church of England, which he renounced for the Roman Catholic Church. What seized my imagination was less this spiritual agonizing than the problems of Newman as a writer wrestling with the limitations of his mind and the ravages of time: “Newman was now an old man—he was sixty-three years of age.*12 What had he to look forward to? A few last years of insignificance and silence. What had he to look back upon? A long chronicle of wasted efforts, disappointed hopes, unappreciated powers.” (How powerfully I could identify, even in my twenties, with this compressed summation of another man’s life.)
A year later Newman writes his Apologia pro vita sua, still one of the great autobiographies in the English language; “and he does it in seven weeks,” writes Strachey,
sometimes working twenty-two hours at a stretch, constantly in tears, and constantly crying out with distress. The success of the book, with its transparent candor, its controversial brilliance, the sweep and passion of its rhetoric, the depth of its personal feeling, was immediate and overwhelming; it was recognised at once as a classic, not only by Catholics, but by the whole English world.
This is Newman at the height of his career, the great work done; but it’s not long before, life being life, he is brought low and becomes again an ordinary, anonymous man:
At about this time, the Curate of Littlemore had a singular experience. As he was passing by the Church he noticed an old man, very poorly dressed in an old grey coat with the collar turned up, leaning over the lych gate, in floods of tears. He was apparently in great trouble, and his hat was pulled down over his eyes as if he wished to hide his features. For a moment, however, he turned towards the Curate, who was suddenly struck by something familiar in the face. Could it be?
The question is written in the biographer’s voice, rather than as a quote. But it dramatizes the scene without violating the facts. The unstated answer to “Could it be?” is “It was.”
That exchange, so portentous with omission, liberated Strachey from the most oppressive stricture of biography: he could make it up without making it up. A biographer isn’t a novelist, Leon Edel was always reminding us: “Novelists have omniscience. Biographers never do. The personages exist; the documents exist; they are the ‘givens’ to a writer of lives.” Okay, so we don’t have omniscience; what I’d learned from Lytton Strachey was that we have permission to write as if we did—not to invent but to imagine.
*1 I spent half an hour on the Internet trying to figure out how much this would be if you went to Cook’s and tried to exchange sesterces for dollars, but all I got were contradictory answers; let’s just say it was a huge amount, well into the millions.
*2 Another contemporary biographer of Charlemagne, the memorably named Notker the Stammerer, was almost defiantly insouciant about his editorial methods: “Since the occasion has offered itself, although they have nothing to do with my subject matter, it does not seem to be a bad idea to add these two stories to my official narrative, together with a few more which happened at the same time and are worthy of being recorded.” Note to Notker: Don’t try this at The New Yorker.
*3 The biographer Giannozzo Manetti, writing a century later, also referred to this trait in Dante, noting that he was “often sad and absorbed in his thoughts.”
*4 It’s not. See world literature.
*5 His two-page portrait of Shakespeare didn’t add much to the record, though it was strange to think of Aubrey interviewing Shakespeare’s contemporaries, like Sir William Davenant, who testified that the playwright had “a most prodigious Witt.”
*6 The academic world has little tolerance for this kind of guesswork: it should come as no surprise that the exact number of days Boswell spent in Johnson’s company remains the subject of much lively dispute. The distinguished scholar Donald Greene argues for 327, while Professor A. W. Collins, taking into account undated entries, comes up with 425—a significant discrepancy. “This must pose a problem for those scholars who extol the ‘artistry’ of Boswell’s composition,” Greene notes with scorn. There is no artistry, in his view; the shape of the Life was dictated by when the biographer was on the scene. When he was there, it expanded; when he wasn’t, it shrank. Greene, a Johnson partisan, wants to keep the number down in order to reduce Boswell’s importance. (We might call this “day-suppression.”)
*7 The scholarly rigor of these volumes varied widely. Anthony Trollope’s on Thackeray is one of the more egregious; hedged about with “probablys,” it hustles through the facts, few of which seem to be known—at least to the biographer—and devotes a stingy paragraph to his subject’s family, alluding to “a skelet
on in his cupboard” that he declines to explain. But if you want to know what it feels like to try to become a writer, read this book. In three eloquent pages, Trollope enumerates the perils that lie in wait for the literary aspirant. No one can teach you how to write; no one cares if you do it or not; nor can you support yourself. “It is an idea that comes to very many men and women, old as well as young—to many thousands who at last are crushed by it, of whom the world knows nothing.” (This from the author of forty-seven novels.) I wish someone had told me that.
*8 If known at all. Let’s be honest about the radical shrinkage of what was once thought of as the core curriculum, which required at least a cursory knowledge of the corpus of English literature. No one—except perhaps a few Ph.D. candidates in the field, and in many cases, I suspect, not even those—is expected any longer to have read systematically in the literature of our own language, much less others. But why complain about it? The world changes. Few tweet about Bunyan.
*9 Boswell: “When at table, he was totally absorbed in the business of the moment; his looks seemed rivetted to his plate; nor would he, when unless in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.”
*10 Had it not been for a series of serendipitous events, we would possess only a skimpy selection of the letters and journals—in effect, we would have almost no Boswell at all. Ian Hamilton recounts this story in his neglected book, Keepers of the Flame: The Making and Unmaking of Literary Reputations from John Donne to Sylvia Plath. I’ve decided to quote from it at inordinate length: why struggle over some lame paraphrase with a writer as good as Hamilton?