This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer. Richard Holmes
uncloistered and anarchic spirit. As Somerset Maugham once remarked: ‘There are three rules for writing biography, but fortunately no one knows what they are.’
In a letter of June 1680, Aubrey mischievously teased the Oxford historian Anthony à Wood with the essentially improper and extracurricular nature of his biographical researches for Brief Lives: ‘I here lay downe to you (out of the conjunct friendship between us) the Trueth, the naked and plain trueth … which is here exposed so bare, that the very pudenda are not covered.’ Wood donnishly retaliated by calling Aubrey ‘a shiftless person, roving and maggotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed’.
Yet even Aubrey regretted not being able to continue his studies at Oxford. This is one of the themes of his own perceptive, third-person entry in Brief Lives: ‘When a boy, he did ever love to converse with old men, as Living Histories.’ Here he quotes Horace on what he had missed by being forced to leave the university: ‘Atque inter sylvas Academi quarere verum/Dura sed amovere loco me tempora grato’ (And so among the groves of Academe to seek the Truth/But harsh times drove me from that pleasant spot).
So I began to ask whether the moment had come for biography formally to return to ‘that pleasant spot’, the Academy? And if so, on what terms? For me, this question took on a peculiar autobiographical twist. If I were writing my own Brief Life, I would record that for thirty-five years I worked outside academia. I had been freelance and footloose, and revelled in it. But in autumn 2000, out of the blue, I was unexpectedly invited to pioneer and teach a postgraduate university course in ‘Biographical Studies’. Should I accept the invitation?
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Frankly, for a long time I really did not know. Could my beloved biography, which I thought of as a vocation rather than a profession, really be turned into a university subject, based on an organised series of book lists, seminars, lectures, and of course a body of theory? What would be its content, what would be its aims, what would be its benefits to the student? Was I being asked to do something quite humble, like teaching the basic methods of sound biographical research – working with archives, public records, letter collections – and carefully constructing life chronologies, character portraits and social contexts? Or something more ambitious, as in the now fashionable Creative Writing courses, to launch a new generation of young biographical practitioners who were really committed to biography as a profession, as well as an ‘art of writing’?
I returned to these questions more urgently: on what grounds could one claim biography as – at least potentially – a genuine humanist discipline? It is certainly a recognisable literary genre, although that is not quite the same thing. Yet its intellectual independence was proclaimed at least as early as Plutarch, writing in Greece around AD 110, and thus at roughly the same period as the later Gospel writers (who had very different ambitions). In the opening of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch distinguished Biography convincingly from History, and gave it both an ethical and a psychological dimension:
It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write Histories, but Lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of the characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavour by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated by others.
Roger North, that subtle seventeenth-century memoir writer (not to be confused with Plutarch’s Tudor translator, Thomas North), crisply summarised the argument as follows: ‘What signifies it to us, how many battles Alexander fought. It were more to the purpose to say how often he was drunk.’ Plutarch’s chilling description of Alexander’s drunken rages, or equally of his post-battle gallantry and good humour, fully bears out this claim to peer behind the mask of public behaviour and events, into an individual ‘soul’. Who can forget the wonderfully funny and unexpected description of Alexander (after the bloody defeat of his great Persian enemy) sardonically examining the luxury fittings of Darius’s bathroom, with its ornate and ridiculous ‘waterpots, pans and ointment boxes, all of gold curiously wrought’. And then how Plutarch clinches the scene, with Alexander’s stinging jest: ‘So this, it seems, is royalty!’
John Dryden, while preparing his edition of Plutarch (1683), defined the genre similarly as ‘Biographia, or the histories of Particular Lives’. But he chose to emphasise even further its unique quality of human intimacy:
There [in works of history] you are conducted only into the Rooms of State; but here you are led into the private lodgings of the hero: you see him in his undress, and are made familiar with his most private actions and conversations. You may behold a Scipio and a Lelius gathering cockle-shells on the shore, Augustus playing at bounding-stones with boys, 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 made acquainted with his passions and his follies, and find the demy-God a man.
This touching vision of ‘the poor reasonable animal’, shorn not only of divine but even of heroic status, ushered in the first great age of English biography. Intimacy is subversive of grandeur and ceremonial, though not necessarily of greatness, or indeed goodness. This notion of a popular, even a subversive discipline, which celebrates and studies a common human nature (shared by criminals as well as kings), would seem to me crucial. It is central to the claim that the English form has become progressively greater than hagiography, formal obituary, modish gossip, or historical propaganda. It suggests a profound humanist ambition, which could indeed provide the basis for true study.
Samuel Johnson gave this theoretical weight and intense personal conviction in his remarkable Rambler No. 60, ‘On Biography’ (1750). Here, arguably, is the first deliberate statement of a biographical poetics:
No species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition … I have often thought that there has rarely passed a Life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. For, not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such an uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill, but is common to human kind … We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.
It is no coincidence that, in practice, the first short eighteenth-century masterpieces of English biography were about marginal and disreputable figures, not kings or kaisers. These were Daniel Defoe’s biographical study of the housebreaker and incorrigible escape-artist Jack Sheppard (1724), and Johnson’s own brilliant Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744), an account of the indigent poet and convicted murderer. Both works turn conventional moral judgements – and traditional social hierarchies – upside down, by insisting on the value and interest of common humanity, the universal ‘possibilities of good or ill’, wherever they are to be found. Johnson wrote: ‘Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have slumber’d away their time on the down of plenty, nor will a wise man presume to say, “Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage.”’
Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) gave this notion of common humanity the proportions of an epic – Johnson as Everyman. And the powerful idea of the marginal figure who is still representative of ‘human kind’ (in this case specifically ‘woman kind’) recurs in William Godwin’s strikingly dramatic and candid life of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798).
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