ANGELA THIRLWELL TALK (22nd November 2001)
I think I’d better start with a confession: I’m not quite a biographer – yet.
But I am currently writing a double biography of two personalities from the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. William Michael Rossetti, art-critic, biographer and historian, was the brother of the more famous Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. His wife was the artist Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown, mentor and father figure to the Pre-Raphaelites. You might call Lucy and William ‘The Other Rossettis’ or ‘The Secret Rossettis’.
If I’m not quite a biographer, then nor am I an autobiographer – although I read hundreds of life stories in order to edit The Folio Anthology of Autobiography – and anthologies, like any other collections, are probably autobiographies in disguise.
Coincidentally – or not? - both my biographical subjects were involved with writing lives. Lucy’s artistic career was cut short by raising a family and by her consuming tuberculosis. So she turned from paint to the less physically exhausting option of writing the Life of Mary Shelley, a romantic icon with whom Lucy felt a complex affinity. William wrote extended Memoirs of his famous brother and sister, important biographies of Shelley and Keats, and short Lives of major poets from Chaucer to Longfellow, in conscious imitation of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. In 1906 William Rossetti modestly published Some Reminiscences, a rich eyewitness testimony of appealing texture, blending memoirs, biography, autobiography, poetry, reviews, letters, opinion, and art criticism, for which he drew on a whole range of contemporary, supporting documents.
The existence of William Rossetti’s 2-volume autobiography immediately raises an intriguing issue. How much of an advantage, or indeed a disadvantage – is it for biographers if our subjects have left a pre-empting autobiography? In my own case, it has proved a positive, if complex advantage that William wrote such extensive memoirs, full of information and attitude. But the information, resuscitated in the tranquillity of his old age, has to be constantly tested as evidence against other contemporary accounts, and even against his own Diaries and Letters written on the spot and in the heat of events. Lucy’s autobiographical absence has to be sensitively weighed in the balance against William’s massive presence.
Autobiographies are ambivalent legacies for biographers. When Vladimir Nabokov wrote Speak, Memory, he so indelibly ‘fixed’ his childhood that it left little scope for his later biographer, Brian Boyd. How could Boyd possibly improve upon Nabokov’s unforgettable account of those early Russian Years? Boyd ended up quoting substantial chunks of Speak, Memory, fleshing out the historical context and exploring biographical data about Nabokov’s father. (Princeton, 1990, 2 vols.) William Rossetti’s autobiography is not a literary tour de force like Nabokov’s, so it seems easier for me to plunder it for its invaluable source material.
William Rossetti was that rare bird – a biographer who wrote autobiography. When I looked back over my database of nearly a thousand autobiographies, spanning four millennia, from cultures East and West that I considered for the Anthology, I found how few Biographers had turned their gaze inward and anatomised their own selves. Every other human occupation was richly represented – from anarchists to zoologists – with most autobiographies coming, unsurprisingly perhaps, from the pens not of politicians but of professional writers, poets, dramatists, and novelists – but not often from biographers.
In our own times, when Autobiography is rampant, this apparent shyness of biographers is remarkable. Today everyone nurtures a sneaking suspicion that if they have one book inside them, it won’t be that novel – but a bona-fide autobiography, or an autobiography tricked out as fiction. Autobiographers can play God in their own private universe. Even the Deity is not above the practice it seems, as the TLS on November 9th carried an ad for The Autobiography of God Almighty (quote) ‘Contains visits to Heaven, Hell, interviews with Christ, Satan etc’ – appropriately priced at £150. The same TLS featured an amusing exposé of the latest form of insidious autobiography, those fawning, fulsome pages of Acknowledgements that academics attach to their books, in nauseous Apologia Pro Vitae Suae.
Although Autobiography is all the rage today, both Biography and Autobiography are ancient arts, though the words for them are comparatively modern. Autobiographical texts can be traced as far back as Egyptian tomb inscriptions, 2000 years before Christ, but its star, just like Biography’s, could be said to have risen spectacularly only over the last 200 years.
Curiosity about other people’s lives is insatiable now, as always, and at some deep level is fuelled by our longing to find insights into our own. With its conventional narrative thrust, Biography today can be as consoling and satisfying as the well-made Victorian novel used to be. However experimentally presented, biography always has a satisfying final chapter on death (although nowadays the death often features as the opening chapter). This is one of its crucial differences from Autobiography, which can never provide its reader with that resolution (although one of the driving motives for writing it is a response to mortality). While Autobiography plays at intimacy, masquerading as a confidential two-way relationship between writer and reader, it is in fact a vauntingly ambitious exercise, a ‘letter to the world’, craving sympathy, understanding, and absolution, not just from the private reader but also from the infinite reaches of posterity:
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space,
To greet you. You will understand’.
(James Elroy Flecker ‘To a Poet a thousand years hence’, 1910)
Richard Holmes has claimed eloquently that Biography, too, is a ‘handshake across time’, ‘a human exchange’ that ‘confirms our need to find the self in the other, not always to be alone’. (Sidetracks, 2000, p 198) Does he mean that it’s the Biographer’s job to find the intrinsic self of the ‘other’, i.e. of the biographical subject? Or does he mean that the Biographer feeds the need we may all have, to find keys to our own selves in other people’s lives? And how dangerous and debateable is that notion?
Richard Holmes continues: ‘To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way’. (Sidetracks, Prologue). So from finding the Self, to losing the Self. Is he implying that the Biographer must suppress his/her own self in writing the Life of another? Is he unfashionably suggesting that Biography is in fact a deeply unselfish act? That literally gives a life for The Life?
Boswell is naturally the hero in the Romantic Biographer’s pantheon of heroes. For Richard Holmes, Boswell is the archetypal Biographer, the biographer’s biographer who gave his life for Johnson’s. Boswell forged a unique bond with his biographee, the great Doctor, a symbiotic relationship, a passionate commitment, a ‘marriage’, a haunting, a stalking, call it what you will. And in the process, he gave us his own Life, character and autobiography, indissolubly meshed with his subject’s. And perhaps he gave us the first Biographical triangle – Biography as a dynamic three-way process between the subject, the author and the reader, geometrically different from the linear two-way process of Autobiography.
Boswell in words did the same as portrait painters do with the brush. And just as there are as many views of a Life as there are biographers (and one autobiographer) to write it, so there are as many facets of a face, and as many versions of the ‘truth’.
Two recent novels have played with exactly these teasing notions of alternative biographical views of the self. Ian McKewen’s Atonement and Beryl Bainbridge’s According to Queeney, underline the position of biography today, now cosily cuddled up three in the bed with fiction, as well as its old paramour History. Both Atonement and Queeney show us the riot of conflicting interpretations that different characters can make of the same incidents. And add in the Narrator or the Biographer and ‘who knows what anybody is really like, or what they really think?’ as Beryl Bainbridge mused in a recent interview. (Literary Review, September 2001) ‘The biographer’, she continued, ‘ – same as a painter of portraits – cannot help but reproduce himself to some degree’.
So when Boswell gave us Johnson, he also gave us Boswell. After Boswell, throughout the 19th century, biography was almost solely the preserve of gentlemen – with one or two notable exceptions such as Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. Victorian male biographers felt it was proper to aim for detachment, objectivity and to link biography as closely as possible with the respectable methods and tone of historians. Now that we know that those old Victorians weren’t as prudish as some had always assumed, it’s no surprise to find Bohemian Swinburne urging William Rossetti to dig out the dirt for his biography of Shelley. Nevertheless, most Victorian biographers kept their own autobiographies firmly under wraps, their own selves out of the picture.
Until Edmund Gosse. Father and Son (1907) was a key text, a landmine which exploded Victorian biography even more dramatically than Lytton Strachey’s ironic new treatment toppled those Eminent Victorians (1918). Gosse set out to write the biography of his father, an eminent marine zoologist, but instead found himself in the confessional (where all autobiography is rooted). Gosse married autobiography to biography when he wrote his searing account of a damaged child, involved in a Jungian fight to the finish, to free itself from a crushing, dominant parent. But the book was a study of two temperaments, as the author always maintained. Father was a Plymouth Brother who interpreted every tenet of his religion with unbending rigour but was ultimately seen by the Son with compassion. When young, motherless Edmund was invited to tea and games at the Browns’, a local Baptist family, invitation became confrontation:
‘…my Father’s conscience was so painfully perplexed, that he desired…we might ‘lay the matter before the Lord’… My Father prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be revealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it was, or was not the Lord’s will that I should attend the Browns’ party. My Father’s attitude seemed to me to be hardly fair, since he did not scruple to remind the Deity of various objections to a life of pleasure, and of the snakes that lie hidden in the grass of evening parties. It would have been more scrupulous, I thought, to give no sort of hint of the kind of answer he desired and expected.
…As I knelt, feeling very small, by the immense bulk of my Father, there gushed through my veins like a wine the determination to rebel… My Father…asked me in a loud wheedling voice, ‘Well, and what is the answer which our Lord vouchsafes?’ I said nothing, and so my Father, more sharply, continued, ‘…We have desired Him to let you know whether it is, or is not, in accordance with His wishes that you should accept this invitation from the Browns.’ He positively beamed down at me; he had no doubts of the reply... But my answer came in the high-piping accents of despair: ‘The Lord says I may go to the Browns’. My Father gazed at me in speechless horror. He was caught in his own trap, and though he was certain that the Lord had said nothing of the kind, there was no road open for him but just sheer retreat.’ (p.171/2)
In this classic testimony Gosse, as both biographer and autobiographer, subscribes to the fallacy in which practitioners of both genres collude: - that a Life with all its fragmentary atoms of experience can be presented as a work of art with significant structure, major turning-points and recurring patterns. Both biography and autobiography seek to reveal meaningful patterns that may underlie life’s baffling and chaotic experiences, patterns that may dance, repeat, illuminate and even warn. ‘The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography’, said Nabokov in his lucent Speak, Memory (1947). Gosse uncovered these hidden patterns, limited himself to the first two decades of his life and never wrote a better book in his remaining six. He spliced the slivers of experience into an organic work of art, a model of the genre of Confessional Autobiography, which after lighting a slow fuse, has exploded over the last 20 years both in fictional and non-fictional form. I’m thinking of novels like Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only Fruit, Christy Nolan’s Under the Eye of the Clock, and auto/stroke/biographies like Andrea Ashworth’s Once in a House on Fire and Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?
The immense popularity of this Confessional genre, which blurs the conventional boundaries between biography and autobiography, is linked perhaps to the increased consumption of psychotherapy, counselling and life-coaching. It is an emotive concoction of autobiographical biography - or biographical autobiography. Confessional memoirs have piled up, at the same time as biographers have dared to use the springboard of their subjects to take a furtive look at themselves. Richard Holmes wove the story of his own brilliant vocation around the lives of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys and de Nerval in Footsteps. Margaret Forster included autobiography in her recent group biographies, Hidden Lives, about her grandmother, her mother and herself, Precious Lives, of her father, her sister-in-law and herself and Good Wives: about Mary (Livingstone), Fanny (Stevenson), Jenny Lee and Herself. Three and a half centuries ago, women had to pretend to be writing a biography (usually of a successful husband) in order to find an outlet for their own autobiographical voice, - as Margaret Duchess of Newcastle appended her True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life to her biography of William Cavendish, the Duke, her husband (1667).
It is comparatively rare for conventional biographers to make this leap of personal faith into Autobiography. It is more usual for a Biographer to turn to fiction, as Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Forster and Victoria Glendinning have done, rather than to autobiography. Very few ‘career biographers’ metamorphose into autobiographers, although a few have, such as Stefan Zweig, and Michael Holroyd who wrote Basil Street Blues. Why do biographers seem to avoid autobiography? Do they fear their own scalpels when they turn their gaze inward? Is too much scrutiny, or too much reality simply unbearable? How many biographers here today would consider writing your own lives?
If we resist conventional autobiography, how much of our own selves sidle into our studies of other people? Consciously or unconsciously, we are all autobiographers - and our own lives filter our choice of subjects. Peter Ackroyd’s passionate commitment to London influences his subjects and his biographies, of Dickens, Sir Thomas More, London itself. Experimental, risk-taking biographers may even invent autobiographies for their subjects, as Andrew Motion did for Wainewright the Poisoner. Biographers like Motion inhabit their subjects to such an extent that the life of the other becomes an obsession. Even after his comprehensive biography of Keats, Motion finds that Keats still won’t leave him alone. Or is it the other way around? The Biographer sailed in the wake of Keats’s final voyage to Italy, wrote poems, Salt Water, about the experience and is now reportedly working on a fictionalisation of Keats, because the Romantic poet is still so vivid and real to him that Motion simply can’t let him go. (subsequently published as The Invention of Dr Cake, Faber and Faber, 2003)
Which leads me to that intriguing question: - Do we choose our subjects – or do our subjects choose us? Oh, you can say airily, my publisher or my agent asked me to do the life of Byron or Elizabeth I, or Einstein or Oscar Wilde’s mother. But as biographers, are we drawn to write the life of someone, who at some deep, temperamental level is somehow ‘like’ ourselves, or with whom we believe, probably wrongly, that we can ‘empathise’? William Rossetti thought what he called the ‘sympathetic bond’ essential to writing biography. But this approach contains clear dangers for we may impose our own personality and private obsessions on to our subjects. Over-reliance on the ‘sympathetic bond’ could produce a beguiling interpretation but it could also be totally misguided. Coming from the future, as we do, to re-examine the past, we cannot re-animate dead subjects exactly as they once lived. We can only re-imagine them and present a version. Our version. A selective version.
…Like Lytton Strachey’s biographer’s bucket. In his luminous marine image, the biographer, that explorer of the past, shoots ‘a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.’ Strachey rejected any need for a ‘sympathetic bond’ between himself and his subjects. Although he called biography ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’, it is not in a biographer’s brief, he believed ‘to be complimentary: it is his business…to lay bare the facts of some cases…dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.’ Strachey thought the biographer must be a free spirit to comment on the evidence of the lives he/or she re-creates. So liberated from the ‘sympathetic bond’, biographers can deliberately choose to write the life of someone totally different from him/or herself, touring into the life of the other as into a foreign country.
Whatever the choice of subject, and whatever the line taken by the biographer, these are likely outcomes or reactions to personal experience, if only at some profound, unspeakable, inadmissible level. Eventually it may become safe to acknowledge that all writing is a form of autobiography – or that autobiography is the natural parent of all writing. W.H. Auden said that ‘Every work of art is in one sense, a self-disclosure – and too complicated ever to unravel’. He felt that autobiography was redundant for poets like him - ‘since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem’. Perhaps we had better admit that autobiography is present everywhere, in a myriad guises, in all our books, however we may struggle to resist its siren call.
