by James Atlas
But there are hazards, too. When you write about someone who is still living—or someone you knew—you risk becoming embroiled in the feuds and skirmishes of the day, the gossip, the scandals, the struggle over who gets to own the narrative. “Rarely does a month pass without some new biographical ‘controversy’ making the headlines,” noted Ian Hamilton in Keepers of the Flame: “Two widows have been at each other’s throats; a family is divided; an authorised biographer has been expelled.”*1 Grief rarely brings out in people the spirit of conciliation.
This was especially true of Victorian biographers, who often knew their subjects. Mrs. Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, published two years after the novelist’s death, caused a tremendous uproar in its day. The book had been authorized, more or less—the biographer had been allowed to read the novelist’s letters—but no one in the inner circle was happy about the revelations it contained, according to Juliet Barker, one of Brontë’s more recent biographers. The novelist’s husband, Arthur Nicholls, was disturbed by the suggestion that she had been less than enthusiastic about his marriage proposal; her father denied that he had forced his daughters “to live chiefly on vegetable food,” ruining their health; and the little remembered writer Harriet Martineau, whose negative review of Brontë’s novel Villette had ended their friendship, wrote angry letters to the newspapers spinning Mrs. Gaskell’s account of their contretemps. The only one who came across as objective was William Dearden, a local schoolmaster. Trying to bring the controversy to a close, he wrote, “The passing affairs of this life—which too much occupy the attention of passing mortal man, are but dust and ashes, when compar’d with the concerns of eternity.”
How far all this commotion was from Gaskell’s actual biography, a masterpiece of sympathetic insight and scrupulous research. Herself a well-known novelist, she had been approached by Brontë’s father to write the book based on a perceived emotional sympathy with his daughter. It was a sound instinct. The two writers had spent only a few days in each other’s company; Charlotte came to Gaskell’s house in Manchester on three occasions, and Gaskell went once to Haworth. Why, then, did she refer to her subject as “my dear friend Charlotte Bronte”? If they hadn’t logged as many hours in each other’s company as Boswell and Johnson, they had nevertheless developed a strong bond, based on shared spiritual and literary affinities.
Mrs. Gaskell made no claim to biographical omniscience. “I do not pretend to be able to harmonize points of character, and account for them, and bring them all into one consistent and intelligible whole,” she wrote with a candor rare in our profession. And whenever she arrived at a place in the narrative that was resistant to authorial certainty, she let the reader know: “I now come to a part of my subject which I find great difficulty in treating, because the evidence relating to it on each side is so conflicting that it seems almost impossible to arrive at the truth.” Many biographers would have plowed ahead anyway, choosing the evidence that supported their position while pretending it was the truth.
Still, her personal acquaintance with her subject served Mrs. Gaskell well. Her use of I, infrequent and judicious, reminds you of her presence in the narrative while maintaining the biographer’s customary self-effacement. It’s with a shock that one reads her first impression of Brontë’s “reddish face; large mouth & many teeth missing” (a startling detail to the modern reader, who tends to imagine missing teeth only in some homeless crone). Then there are the eyes, often remarked upon for their singular intensity: “The usual expression was of quiet, listening intelligence; but now and then…a light would shine out, as if some spiritual lamp had been kindled, which glowed behind those expressive orbs.” Or this: “Her hands were the smallest I ever saw; when one of the former was placed in mine, it was like the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm.”
Ignoring its literary qualities, the principal and minor figures chose to focus on themselves and instantly fell upon one another. Gaskell’s Life arrived “on a tide of pathos, publicity, and near-scandal,” wrote Winifred Gérin, author of what was generally considered the definitive biography of Brontë until it was superseded*2 by Juliet Barker’s group portrait of the family. But the conflicting accounts, the concealments, the dramatis personae airbrushed out of the picture, and the outright lies continued to fester into the next generation, where the contested facts, instead of being reconciled, become even more hotly contested. Thus we learn, many years after the publication of her book, that Gaskell herself suppressed references to several manuscripts that might have offered us a less positive view of her subject, most notably The Professor, a thinly veiled portrait of the still-mysterious M. Heger, a Belgian schoolteacher with whom Brontë had been in love and who had in his possession letters to prove it. “What he knew, and the material he possessed,” writes the usually restrained Gérin in excitable (and starkly idiomatic) terms, “was gunpowder in unscrupulous hands, and could blow Charlotte Bronte’s reputation sky high.” Perhaps so, but over time the curiosity surrounding Brontë’s relationship with M. Heger has served only to intensify interest in her life. Mrs. Gaskell, the first responder, was trying to put out flames that later biographers would fan.
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James Anthony Froude also ran into heavy weather in his biography of Carlyle, one of the monuments of Victorian biography in a literary graveyard crowded with them.
Author of a twelve-volume history of England and a novel, The Nemesis of Faith, that his future subject uncharitably characterized as a “vomiting up [of] interior crudities, dubitations and spiritual, agonising bellyaches,” Froude would appear at first glance a peculiar choice as Carlyle’s biographer. But a decade later Carlyle seemed to have forgotten, or at least forgiven Froude’s poor performance:
Late one afternoon, in the middle of winter, Carlyle called on me, and said he wished to see more of me—willed me in fact to be his companion, so far as I could, in his daily rides and walks…and from that date, for twenty years, up to his own death, except when either or both of us were out of town, I never ceased to see him twice or three times a week, and to have two or three hours conversation with him.
Carlyle was ambivalent about a biography. At the beginning of their friendship, he told Froude he didn’t want one, but this reluctance soon turned to resignation: “Whether he wished it or not, a life, or perhaps various lives, of himself, would appear when he was gone.” To this end, Carlyle handed over letters, journals, manuscripts—“the accumulations of a life”—with the directive, according to Froude, “to burn freely as I might think right.” So the biographer is supposed to burn his subject’s papers? That’s a new one.
Still, he might have been tempted to consign them to the flames. Writing Carlyle’s biography would turn out to be a big job. For a man who did little but sit in his study writing, Carlyle had led a complicated life. His marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle was so famously storm-tossed that it nearly killed them both. Carlyle took up all the oxygen in the parlor of their townhouse on the Thames; the displays of harassment, arias*3 of self-absorption, efforts at talent-suppression, and neurotic bullying to which the lionized writer subjected his equally talented but stifled wife were legendary. It wouldn’t be a stretch to attribute Jane’s premature death, of a stroke while being driven around Hyde Park in her carriage, in part to Carlyle’s fulminations.
Their capacity for damaging each other was limitless: “The morning after his wedding-day [Carlyle] tore to pieces the flower-garden at Comely Bank in a fit of ungovernable fury.” They slept in separate bedrooms; they fought and screamed at each other until the neighbors complained. “For the first time,” writes Froude, describing the effect that reading Jane’s private papers had on him, “I realised what a tragedy the life in Cheyne Row [their house in Chelsea] had been—a story as stern and real as the story of Oedipus.”
The “blue marks” on her arms that Jane Carlyle described in her journal bore testimony to Carlyle’s capacity for literal, not just psychological violence. Then there wa
s the delicate issue of Carlyle’s impotence—what his beleaguered wife tactfully described as an “inability to love”—a deficit confirmed by Jane’s friend Geraldine Jewsbury*4 but known to no one else. Learning that Carlyle couldn’t get it up, instead of producing one of those aha! moments biographers live for, made Froude uneasy. “Froude was now seriously troubled,” writes Ian Hamilton in his account of the Froude/Carlyle biographical debacle: “He knew more than he wanted to know.” I doubt it—biographers can never know too much—but I see what he means. How do you handle incendiary facts that threaten to undermine your subject’s integrity of character? Treat them in a gingerly manner; be truthful, but—if you can—be generous. And if you can’t, well…you’re just the messenger.
Carlyle himself was deeply divided about how much of his private life he wanted to be made known. The note attached to the manuscript of his Reminiscences is almost comic in its ambivalence: “I still mainly mean to burn this book before my own departure; but feel that I always have a kind of grudge to do it, and an indolent excuse, ‘Not yet; wait, any day that can be done.’ ” However, in the event that he didn’t burn it, be it known that the manuscript was for “friends only.” And if he ever did consent to its publication—which would never happen—it would have to be heavily revised.
After much agonized vacillation, Carlyle chose the third option, and the Reminiscences, edited by Froude, appeared just a month after his death. He had revealed a great deal about himself, and his candor did his biographer no good. “There was outcry on all sides,” reports Hamilton:
How could Froude have allowed Carlyle’s remorse, his dark domestic secrets, to be advertized in such appalling detail; why had he not censored certain off-the-cuff acerbities (in particular those aimed at the living and the not-long-dead); why had he been in such a hurry to blacken Carlyle’s name? Froude genuinely believed that he had cut out “everything that could injure anybody,” and he knew (as the readership did not) that he had suppressed secrets much darker than the ones he had revealed.
He was just doing his job, the job he’d been commissioned to do.
The critical reception of the Reminiscences portended ill for the biography, which took Froude a decade to write and was published when he was sixty-four. “Even when it was praised,” writes Hamilton, “he did not feel that the complicated, tragic point of it had been quite grasped.” In being honest, in laying bare Carlyle’s faults—his monstrous egotism, his fits of rage, his disregard for the feelings of others, his sadistic treatment of his wife, his dyspepsia, his preoccupation with his ceaselessly churning bowels—Froude was depicting the man as he really was. And remember, Carlyle had urged his biographer to be candid: for that alone, the biographer deserved a pass. Froude wrote his sister-in-law Mrs. Charles Kingsley, herself a biographer: “Let [others] look into their own miserable souls, and ask themselves how they could bear to have their own private histories ransacked and laid bare.” Candor demanded courage.
Froude knew his book would be controversial, but he could scarcely have anticipated the loud outcry that followed fast upon its publication. Attacked in the press, denounced by Gladstone in the House of Commons, Froude believed his reputation was irretrievably damaged. He had suffered “some deep inaccessible hurt,” writes Julia Markus in her fine biography of Froude; friends noted his “vulnerability” and sensed that he was “disappointed in himself.” He wasn’t only a victim. He bore some responsibility for the debacle. He had failed to make his case. “Up close he would see Carlyle’s human feet, clay as are ours,” intones the always eloquent Markus: “But there was a part of Carlyle that was immortal, a part that was the truth teller, who if he hadn’t led mankind out of the desert of contemporary spiritual obliqueness, in the future, after democracy had its day, still would.” It was this heroic Carlyle that critics had missed in Froude’s biography, preoccupied as they were with the salacious details of his sex (or was it nonsex?) life—the great biographer, the world-historical figure whose books would survive his time. This was the book Froude had intended to write.
In My Relations with Carlyle,*5 an exculpatory manifesto published after Froude’s death, the biographer threw down a bitter challenge: “If anyone will suggest what unworthy motive I can have had, he may perhaps assist me in discovering it. I cannot discover it myself.” Not for lack of trying. Victorian England was pre-analytic—people didn’t question their ostensible motives—but Froude was unusually self-aware for that era, and his anguish rises off the page like a damp mist off a pond: “Mrs. Carlyle’s pale, drawn, suffering face haunted me in my dreams.” Had he revealed too much? Too little? Should he have mentioned the blue marks? Carlyle himself had referred to them in an unpublished memoir, with the injunction that it was “never to be destroyed.” That’s how biography was supposed to be practiced, even in that more guarded day: nothing should go unsaid. This was not just Froude’s view; it was Carlyle’s: “The lives of great men are scrutinised to the bottom. Mankind will not rest till they have learnt all that can be discovered about such men.”
The deeper problem had to do with how Froude felt toward his subject. “My admiration of him had never wavered,” he wrote, “but the contempt with which he treated everybody and everything, the anecdotes which I had heard from his wife, and his manifest forgetfulness of every other person’s interest or comfort where his own wishes were concerned, had made it difficult for me to like him in the common sense of the word.” When that requirement went unmet, trouble followed. The biographer’s feelings seeped through the facade of objectivity. The truth emerged, whether welcome or not. It always did.
Froude’s posthumous self-defense was promptly answered by Alexander Carlyle, who laid out his case in a book of his own entitled The Nemesis of Froude.*6 Rumors about the biography that had begun as “mere gaseous gossip,” he noted with fierce contempt, “have become gradually congealed and glued to [Carlyle’s] name with many offensive accretions.” That his uncle’s hated biographer, having died in the interim, could now be referred to as “the late Mr. Froude,” did nothing to moderate his wrath.
With lawyerly officiousness, Alexander made his case. The marriage, far from being a death-match between two high-strung screamers, had been happy. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, visiting from America, the great writer and his wife gave the appearance of a happy couple, sitting cozily by the fireside. “Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms,” Emerson wrote in his journal. Sure, they squabbled now and again: “They had their little differences and misunderstandings and sometimes sharp encounters. What married pair has not?” But for the most part, it was a companionable union.
As for the matter of the “blue marks,” how reliable is Geraldine Jewsbury’s allegation that Carlyle suffered from “a physical defect under which, it is alleged, he laboured, and which made his marriage no marriage”? Jane’s letters show her not to have been “amatively disappointed,” and besides, Jewsbury herself, the authors suggest, was secretly in love with Jane! A letter is quoted: “I cannot express my feelings even to you—vague undefined yearnings to be yours in some way.”
Since the existence of the blue marks can’t be denied, some other explanation must be offered. Alexander Carlyle speculates that they may have been caused by
the operations of her bête noir, the bug, if an insect may be so designated, which, in spite of her vigilance, several times invaded 5, Cheyne Row, and her hunts after which she has described with the exciting realism of one of her favourite novelists, Fenimore Cooper, and the wrist is a favourite point of attack of the Cimex Lectularius.
Of course! Why hadn’t Froude thought of that?
Froude and Alexander Carlyle disagreed about everything. The biographer assailed Craigenputtock, the Carlyle family homestead in Scotland, as “the dreariest spot in all the British dominions.” But Alexander claimed that Jane loved the place. Her letters from Craigenputtock were “as bright as the unpolluted sunshine on the mountain, breezy as the atmosphere that undulated around her; lucent an
d hopefully babbling like the streams that hurried to the valley below.”*7
As The Nemesis of Froude draws to a close after 130 pages, Alexander Carlyle ratchets up the vitriol. The Life of Carlyle is a “grisly biography,” he splutters; Froude has offered up a portrait that is “blotched and discoloured,” “literary garbage.” And why did the biographer write it? He had “pecuniary” motives.*8
What a melancholy tale, I thought as I laid this last installment atop my tottering pile of Froudeiana. You were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t. If you told the whole story, it would inflame the literary world. If you didn’t, you would be accused of suppressing the facts.
I hoped Froude had derived some consolation from a pamphlet in his defense written by his co-executor Sir James Stephen:
In order to present a true picture of him as he really was, you, well knowing what you were about, stepped into a pillory in which you were charged with treachery, violation of confidence, and every imaginable base motive, when you were in fact guilty of no other fault than that of practising Mr Carlyle’s great doctrine that men ought to tell the truth.
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Relations between subject and biographer aren’t always so acrimonious. I was comforted by the example of Dickens and John Forster, his first biographer, who merits a biography himself.*9 Born in 1812, just two months after Dickens, Forster maintained a high profile in the London literary world; a contemporary described him as “a flamboyant character with a taste for oysters and grog.” His seven-hundred-page biography of the playwright Oliver Goldsmith had made him famous. Mrs. Gaskell found him “little, and very fat and affected, yet so clever and shrewd and good-hearted and right-minded.” She undercut her already double-edged praise with a sly put-down: “His friendship was deeply valued, perhaps even slightly more than his presence.”