Literary Lives

Biography and the Search for Understanding

David Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136057946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book meditates on the nature of biography and the way biographers habitually explain their subjects' loves by reference to psychology, ancestry, childhood experience, social relations, the body, or illness.

1
Lives without Theory

Rise early and regularly and read for three hours . . . Read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

(Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, Pt 1, chap. 3)

The popularity of biography shows no sign of abating. In the Times Literary Supplement more space is occupied by reviews of new biographies than of new fiction; if large numbers of celebrated figures could be resurrected, they would be dumbfounded by the frequency with which their lives have been described; and few of us can now imagine how difficult it would be to buy a Christmas present for a relative, of whose taste we were unsure, without that generous provision of biographies on the bookshop shelves in Decembenr.

The phenomenon is not without its implications for cultural life. In some cases only a literary biography can send readers back to the subject's writings with renewed interest and curiosity even if, in others, it can also make them feel that, knowing so much about the life, they are dispensed from further or indeed any acquaintance with the work. Our times are cynical yet biographies can sometimes offer an inspiring example of how life ought to be lived. More often, they appear to provide their readers with the comfort of believing that those who have achieved distinction in a certain field are not merely as humanly fallible as they are, but much more so.

At a time when the triumph of 'Theory' in the universities has widened the gap between the academic world and the rest of society, biographies represent one of the few remaining points of interaction. Such is the popularity of the form that bulky and highly detailed lives, composed over a long period, with the Academy principally in mind, can be shorn of their more obviously scholarly appurtenances, published in a 'trade' form, and left to compete with the work of professional writers. When the public appetite is so great, there would be no surprise if the careers of those writers were partly influenced by it. Only a handful of serious novelists receive advances which allow them to live comfortably, but lucrative commissions for biographies are by comparison relatively easy to secure. Although the transformation of Peter Ackroyd from well-known novelist into excellent biographer may have been entirely a matter of free will, there is a good chance that it also had some connections with the free market. Successful though he is, it is doubtful whether Julian Barnes would now be so well known without Flaubert's Parrot, that ingenious enquiry into biographical research which, while it wittily mocked academic pretentions to knowledge of the past, simultaneously entertained its readers with a fascinating array of genuine historical information about Flaubert, arranged in an unusual and stimulating way.

Prominently associated with 'the rise of the novel' in England was Daniel Defoe who judged it best to send many of his works into the world thinly disguised as life histories. After his time, the English novel rose so far and so quickly that its status took away any need for protective colouring. Accompanying its success have been countless investigations into the conventions, narrative structures and characteristic features of the novel form. Popular though biography has become, there has as yet been no comparable interest in how it 'works': for its readers it has indeed been a rare case of (as the father of Disraeli's hero puts it) 'life without theory'. Of recent well-known practitioners only Leon Edel has attempted a Principia Biographica. From Richard Ellmann onwards the tendency has been rather to write books that, when they do not consist of unfinished business, initiate the reader into the behind-the-scenes secrets of the craft of biography without attempting a sustained analysis of any element which might be described as fundamental.

Very few monographs on biography - which are not historical surveys - have appeared, and none of them are particularly satisfactory. Otherwise the field is occupied by collections of essays. These are often the product of conferences and have the associated strengths and weaknesses. Full of incidental observations of great interest, it is rare to find in these collections any one theme steadily pursued. A good many of their contributors, invited to the conference because they have published successful lives, have neither the temperament nor the interest to reflect on how they did what they did; and for others, however intelligent and well-informed, it is just another conference, not especially central to their concerns.

When the academic body sweats publications at every pore and, in Britain at least, the financial well-being of all institutions of higher education depends more and more on their charge sheets (the number of publications for which they can claim responsibility), the comparative dearth of analytic enquiry into biography is surprising. One possible explanation lies in the announcement, many years ago now, of the 'death of the author'. Even though that news proved on closer examination to have been much exaggerated, and both Barthes and Foucault were themselves later to indulge in biographical enquiry, the notion that authors were mere intersection points for a number of psychological, linguistic or socio-economic systems was hardly an encouragement to study the details of their lives, especially in their more private aspects. Yet the intellectual disapproval this view encouraged, and the consequent lowly status of biography as a genre, have perhaps less to do with the lack of analytic attention it has received than its bewildering diversity: its inevitably heterogeneous nature. If one were attempting to establish some outer, defining limits then one useful rule of thumb might be that the subject of a biography ought no longer to be living. Call no man happy until he is dead, say the Greeks and, although their literature does not always give that impression, they would presumably have agreed that, while a man was still alive, one ought not to call him unhappy either. This means that what offers itself as the 'biography' of a living subject could only ever be an interim report. But removing to one side in this convenient way all those many books which set out to satisfy public curiosity about living figures, the field is still vast. What makes it so diverse is the huge variety of possible subjects: generals and businessmen as well as writers and artists, bishops as well as politicians, wives and sisters of the famous as well as famous women themselves, obscure individuals who never left their native regions or princesses who travelled the world. Both the intrinsic interest of these people, and the kind of evidence which makes it possible to write their lives, are in each case so different that their biographies can seem at first to have very little in common. Yet even within a narrow band (of literary biography, for example) the treatment may differ enormously. The heavily researched, 'groaning door-stopper' may be made to look much like the book from an author practised in producing 'lives' every couple of years, but it has probably been written according to very different criteria. There are so many different kinds of biography that it would be foolish to imagine that any enquiry could cover them all without degenerating into a catalogue or list. The real challenge, therefore, is to try to say something about one particular category within the genre which will then have at least some relevance for most, if not all of the others.

The paucity of the secondary literature on biography might well be construed in some quarters as a blessing. If there are certain rules or conventions in writing lives which most biographers follow more or less instinctively, how would it help if they were led to reflect more about what they were doing? 'Grand practisers have not the leisure to be analytiques', Aubrey claimed and Beckett has his Molloy say, 'When I try and think riding I lose my balance and fall'.¹ The generally acknowledged predominance of the 'Anglo-Saxon' world in life-writing appears to suggest that there are traditional procedures which have served well in the past, and that there would be no point in even attempting to codify what has flourished so luxuriantly in a world of case law. How biographies work, the habits of enquiry and explanation which so largely determine their form, can seem irrelevant when the publication figures over so many decades (and centuries) demonstrate so resoundingly that they do.

Any general history of biography will tend to mention Plutarch, Suetonius, and various authors of lives of the Saints but, although references are often made to Walton and Aubrey, the two figures most commonly regarded as the 'fathers' of the form in England are Johnson and Boswell. It casts some doubt on how safe it might be for a contemporary biographer to rely on traditional procedures that neither of these writers is a biographer in the modern sense. Johnson's pre-eminence would be widely accepted. It manifests itself in the life of Swift when he is pondering why Queen Anne and her chief minister Harley did not respond with more resolution to loud cries for action from a group of Tories known as the October club:

The Queen was probably slow because she was afraid, and Harley was slow because he was doubtful: he was a Tory only by necessity, or for convenience; and, when he had power in his hands, had no settled purpose for which he should employ it; forced to gratify to a certain degree the Tories who supported him, but unwilling to make his reconcilement to the Whigs utterly desperate, he corresponded at once with the two expectants of the Crown and kept, as has been observed, the succession undetermined. Not knowing what to do, he did nothing; and, with the fate of a double dealer, at last lost his power, but kept his enemies.
Swift seems to have concurred in opinion with the October Club, but it was not in his power to quicken the tardiness of Harley, whom he stimulated as much as he could, but with little effect. He that knows not whither to go is in no haste to move. Harley, who was perhaps not quick by nature, became yet more slow by irresolution; and was content to hear that dilatoriness lamented as natural, which he applauded in himself as politic.²

As so often in Johnson, the impression here of understanding penetrating insight into the motives of another human being - is remarkable; yet, in this respect, his would be a hard act to follow. On more mundane matters, where imitation appears more feasible, he is hardly the ideal model. Except where he has personal knowledge of his subject, the Lives of the Poets are for the most part brief commentaries on the better known secondary sources. A modern biographer is supposed to 'research' the subject energetically, and work with original documents or sources; but one of Johnson's attitudes to endeavour of that kind emerges after Boswell had arranged a meeting for him with Lord Marchmont, who had information about Pope. Boswell describes Johnson as declaring that he had no intention of keeping the appointment and reports him as saying, 'If it rained knowledge, I'd hold out my hand; but I would not give myself the trouble of going in quest of it'.³ The context of this remark suggests that it may have been partly prompted by Boswell's officiousness, and it is a fact that Johnson did later arrange to see Lord Marchmont;⁴ yet at the beginning of the life of Swift he displays an indifference to the conventionally accepted duties of writing lives which a modern biographer can only envy. Swift, he points out, 'according to an account said to be written by himself', was born in Dublin. 'According to his own report, as delivered by Pope to Spence', he was born in Leicester so that 'he was contented to be called an Irishman by the Irish; but would occasionally call himself an Englishman'. 'The question', Johnson magisterially concludes, 'may, without much regret, be left in the obscurity in which he delighted to involve it'.⁵

In contradistinction to his great object of study, Boswell boasts of a passion for accuracy in what must be one of its purest forms:

Were I to detail the books which I have consulted, and the enquiries which I have found it necessary to make by various channels, I should probably be thought ridiculously ostentatious. Let me only observe, as a specimen of my trouble, that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly; which, when I had accomplished, I well knew would obtain me no praise, though a failure would have been to my discredit.⁶

This is how biographers often like to think of themselves: quietly but doggedly industrious, conscientious, unappreciated. Assuming that, as a researcher, Boswell was as exemplary as he here claims, there are nevertheless ways in which his Life of Johnson is even less like a modern biography than the Lives of the Poets. Although it covers the whole of Johnson's life, its form alters dramatically from the moment of Boswell's own meeting with him. At the beginning, the narrative of his subject's birth in Lichfield, his time at Oxford and the years of labouring away at the Dictionary in relative obscurity, is conducted in a familiar way; but once Boswell can rely more exclusively on his records of daily conversations, the onward momentum slows to a virtual stop, we seem to be in a kind of historic present, and the nature of our interest changes completely. From following Johnson's progress from year to year we become involved in listening to what he had to say from day to day. In general the all-inclusiveness triumphantly justifies itself, giving readers the feel of what it was like to be in Johnson's company and demonstrating, by the very bulk and heterogeneity of the opinions recorded, how complex he was. Yet although he was hardly averse to passing judgement, Boswell nonetheless presents so much material whose place in the biographical narrative is self-evidently unclear to him, that the chief impression left by his book can be of a miscellaneous mass through which readers have to make their own way. Whatever the obviously significant degree of dramatic and literary art in the presentation of particular episodes in Boswell's Life, it is hard to agree with those critics who have praised its coherence. At many of its most memorable moments, it is more a memoir than a biography and for modern-day writers of lives quite as much a complicated example to follow as the Lives of the Poets. For more reasons than the two I have chosen to emphasise, there is in neither Boswell nor Johnson the beginnings of a tradition so clear that all subsequent biographers have ever had to do is follow in their footsteps.

Very unlike Boswell are the summarising, well digested and, above all, even-paced chronological narratives which eventually came to dominate after his death. As Christopher Ricks has demonstrated,⁶ these have often been undervalued and there are many among them that would be the more genuine forerunners of today's biographies, representing a tradition within which the modern practitioner could indeed unselfconsciously operate, if the attitude to the private life they illustrate were not so different from our own. It is their tone more than their shape or method which chiefly distinguishes them, as if their authors had adopted as their unavowed epigraph Wordsworth's thoughts in his essay on epitaphs:

The character of a deceased friend or beloved kinsman is not seen, no - nor ought to be seen, otherwise than as a tree through a tender haze or a luminous mist, that spiritualises and beautifies it; . . . Shall we say, then, that this is not truth, not a faithful image; and that, accordingly, the purposes of commemoration cannot be answered? - It is truth, . . . hallowed by love - the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of the living!⁸

The occasional consequences of this approach were once vividly, if perhaps not very fairly, described by D. H. Lawrence, after he had re-read Lockhart's Life of Burns (a poet for whom his own social origins gave him a special affinity). 'Those damned middle-class Lockharts', he complained, 'grew lilies of the valley up their arses to hear them talk.'⁹

Lockhart's Burns is pre-Victorian and partly for that reason less prudish than Lawrence's outburst might suggest; but it is also uncharacteristic of biographies in the nineteenth century because it is short. The new and modern form of biography which Lytton Strachey could be said to have inaugurated at the beginning of the twentieth century is a reaction against the excessive length of his predecessors' works, as well as what he judged to be their excessively reverent tone. Strachey took a lower, although not necessarily more complex view of human nature than they had, and he was less inclined to accept that there were certain areas which should never be exposed to public view. More importantly for my purposes, he was also less inclined to believe the subject's own testimony, particularly when it related to the self. In his essay on biographical writing in The Idler, Johnson had suggested that 'those relations are ... commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story'. This was because,

The writer of his own life has at least the first qualification of an historian, the knowledge of truth; and though it may be plausibly objected that his temptations to disguise it are equal to his opportunities of knowing it, yet I cannot but think that impartiality may be expected with equal confidence from him that relates the passages of his own life, as from him that delivers the transactions of another.¹⁰

No contemporary biographer could afford to be as cavalier about information as Johnson was; and, since Strachey, very few of them would not have felt discomfort in subscribing to sentiments as confident as these are about the authority of the subject.

One of the difficulties of thinking clearly about biography is that it is often assumed to follow the same procedures and methods as autobiography. There are in fact crucial differences between the two forms and, as Johnson implies, their relationship is often antagonistic. Writing the lives of people who have already written their own is a tricky business. In the case of literary figures, although it may be impossible to do better (who is it, after all, who writes the better English?), there is for the modern biographer, less trusting than Johnson, a challenge to at least do differently. At the beginning of his life of Yeats, for example, Roy Foster calls the autobiography which his subject published in 1914, and which deals with the same years he is about to cover, a 'disingenuous masterpiece'. He notes Yeats's tendency to think of his past in terms of 'strictly defined epiphanies', and the way in which his account of the period between 1887 and 1891 was 'constructed to end with the death of Parnell, seen in retrospect as a watershed'. But, Foster comments, 'at the time Parnell figured little in WBY's universe: his idea of a heroic leader was William Morris'. The climax of those four years, he goes on, was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Lives without Theory
• Chapter 2: Biography and Explanation
• Chapter 3: Ancestors
• Chapter 4: Primal Scenes
• Chapter 5: Body Matters
• Chapter 6: The Sociological Imagination
• Chapter 7: History, Chance and Self-determination
• Chapter 8: Compatibility, Sartre and Long Biographies
• Chapter 9: 'Dignity and Uses of Biography'
• Notes
• Index