ANN WROE TALK (23rd May 2005)
I feel a bit of a poseur for being here, because I’m the author of two books which probably, by rights, shouldn’t be called biographies at all. My first was of a man whose life was largely a series of inventions by other people, most of whom thought he was something close to the devil. My second biography is of a man whose identity is still a mystery. The first book originally had no index, because not much in it seemed reputable enough to pin down, and I tended to think of it as a strange dream rather than a book. The second book always had an index, but---and I think this may possibly be a first for a biography---it didn’t include my subject, because at the end of 550 pages I still had no idea who he was.
Yet both these characters are important. In fact, they changed history, or might have changed it. My first subject, Pontius Pilate, was the man most responsible---if any one man can be held responsible---for crucifying Christ. If you take the Christian view, he’s the vital cog in the giant machine of divine redemption, and his whole life is worth writing just for that one day when he threatens, out of sheer bolshiness, to jam up the works. My second subject, the 15th century Pretender known to history as “Perkin Warbeck”---and to many contemporaries as “Richard Duke of York”, the younger of the Princes in the Tower---may have been the rightful king of England, and certainly behaved as though he was for a decade or so round the courts of Europe. He would have changed history too, if just one of his three invasions of England had succeeded. (Most obviously, there would have been no Tudors, and David Starkey would have been out of a job).
So these characters have great lives to trace; but we know almost nothing about them. We have the tiniest amount of evidence about what either of these men did, and we have no clue at all as to what was going on in their heads. A sensible biographer would conclude---indeed, all biographers up to now have concluded---that it’s not worth trying to reconstruct characters who have faded so completely. To me, perhaps because I’m not sensible, that’s a challenge.
I had to work, though, bereft of some very fundamental things. For example, names. “Pontius Pilate” seems firm enough, but it’s only the last two-thirds of a name, and to my mind the most interesting part is exactly the bit that’s disappeared: the praenomen, whether Marcus or Lucius or whatever it was. One of the very few bits of physical evidence we have for Pilate is a dedication stone that bears his name, but as bad luck would have it it’s chipped, just where that telltale initial would be; so we will probably never know the name his mother or his friends or his lovers called him by. There would be a whole new depth to his biography, if only we knew that name. But alas.
As for my fifteenth century Pretender, “Perkin Warbeck”, so called, he resisted any name I pinned on him---perhaps particularly that one---and in the end I seriously wondered whether he knew who he was himself. I had to write the book, in the end, with his name changing as supporters or enemies observed him, and being careful myself never to put a definite narrator’s label on him. And that was an interesting experience. “Perkin” and “Richard” seemed to be quite different people, moving in different ways in the world, although in fact they were not---they were one elegant, rather squeamish, princely young man, whose behaviour did not change, whatever he was called.
Not much luck with names, then. What else did I really need to write the lives of these characters? Well, a face would be nice. And a date and place of birth, and some notion of upbringing, would be useful, too. I’m a firm believer in nature rather than nurture---I believe in a rather Platonic way that we come into the world with our dispositions and talents all there already, so that our childhood background and upbringing are relatively unimportant. (My experience with “Perkin” rather confirmed me in this view, that I was dealing with an unchanging, essential soul here, on which other people were loading their assumptions.) But some background indicators would be welcome, all the same. And then---well, it would be great to have a few personal documents, just a note or two, nothing extravagant. Dream on!
I don’t know which of my subjects was the more frustrating in all these respects, but I’ll start with Pilate. There’s no face for him. Or rather, there’s a multiplicity of faces, from early Christian murals to Michael Palin of Monty Python, and that in itself began to shape the way I wrote the biography. For it soon became clear that an awful lot of people sympathised with Pilate, or felt they knew him (one man said to me: “I’ve always felt he went to Radley”). In a curious way, he is not a figure fixed in history at all. He is Everyman. You can put him in a suit as well as in a toga, and his dilemma would be the same: whether to recognise God, whether to crucify a man who might be God, whether to pit his free will (assuming he had free will) against the giant hand of Fate bearing down on him. In Christian terms, God looks Pilate directly in the face, and he can’t cope. As Tony Blair once put it, “The fascinating thing about Pilate is not that he was a bad man, but that he was so nearly a good man.” And I agree.
How could I reconstruct him? I had a few verses of the New Testament (not a very reliable source), some chapters in the Jewish first-century historians, that dedicatory stone, and a handful of coins. I could learn something from all this, of course. The dedicatory stone tells me that he liked to be called “prefect” rather than “procurator”, and so saw himself as a soldier first and an administrator second; the coins, which carry images of sacred objects used in Roman sacrifices, show he couldn’t have cared less about offending the Jews. But all the same, it’s extremely slender stuff to go on. It almost made me cry to think that Pilate would have written up reports to go back to Rome every day, and not one of them has survived.
What about his background? We have a beginning, vaguely: we know that the Pontii, his tribe, were Samnites from the hills south of Rome, which means that his family had been enslaved perhaps only two generations before, and also that he would have spoken with an accent that sounded to Romans rather like Yorkshire to us. We can also be reasonably sure that he fought in the disastrous German campaign, the Roman equivalent of Vietnam. So there, right away, are two reasons for a large chip on his shoulder, which may account for some of Pilate’s brutal and bad-tempered behaviour once he was sent to Judea. It’s speculation, of course; he may have been bad-tempered just because he had raging headaches, like the excellent Pilate in Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”. But at least it’s possible to do a small amount of what biographers are meant to do, and glean some of his character from his background.
On the other hand, IS that his background? Plenty of people down the centuries have given him another one. If you visit the village of Fortingall in Scotland, you’ll find a giant yew tree under which Pilate is supposed to have played as a child, when his father was doing service on Hadrian’s wall. If you go to the museum of Forscheim near Mainz, in Germany, you’ll find the red trousers Pilate used to wear when he was growing up in the German forests. In fact, through the centuries, dozens of Pilates have been invented. Many of them are ghosts who still wander round the mountain regions of Europe. On Mount Pilatus itself, outside Lucerne, the governor strolls round the shores of a grim little lake taking note of the names of tourists, which he will then pass on to the devil. In other places he sits on a rock, endlessly washing his hands, or takes the shape of a bull or a bittern. He’s blamed for rough water, bad fishing, traumatised cattle and thunderstorms.
Since these stories are clearly rubbish, shouldn’t they just be disregarded? I didn’t think so, because it seemed to me they’ve become a part of what Pilate is. As Christ’s executioner, he was so important to the story of man’s redemption that his life could not be left alone. The yawning gap where Pilate’s childhood, youth and early career should have been had to be filled in, in order to make him a fully-fledged character by the time of his fateful meeting with Jesus. And he could be rewritten endlessly, to suit the mood of the times. His dilemma, in fact, had become his life, and it has been constantly replayed in different forms through history. So that was the way I wrote the biography, rightly or wrongly: as a collage of Pilate through the centuries, with fate, free will and God as his permanent antagonists. And though it may seem rather bizarre, out of all this interweaving one man sometimes seemed to emerge, like a rather brooding hologram.
Next let’s consider Perkin, or the Great Pretender: certainly the greatest we’ve had in England. Writing his life should have been a little easier, in principle. To begin with, I did have a face. His portrait was drawn in about 1493 or 1494, in Brabant, when he was about 20, and in the very middle of his public political career. It shows him as a real glass of fashion and mould of form; the Botticelli angel look, the hottest look there was in the 1490s. He’s draped in gold chains, and his clothes are cloth of gold and cloth of silver. He’s a prince; he even holds his head at the royal angle, benevolently and rather dreamily listening to his subjects. And, as people noticed at the time, the portrait shows he was extremely like Edward IV, his supposed father. He had the same nose, same mouth, same chin, same general shape of the face. And, in saying that, I’m obviously seeing exactly what the portrait was drawn to make me see. I’ve fallen for his argument.
I can’t tell you how many hours I spent staring at his face. I was interrogating him, almost shouting at him to come clean with me. It seemed my only sure route to understanding him. But in the end I still couldn’t read him. His eyes looked away. I couldn’t get closer to the overwhelming question about him: whether the blood coursing under that skin was really royal and Plantagenet, as he said it was, or just boatman’s blood from the banks of the Scheldt in Tournai.
In short, if I was going to solve the mystery of this character, I needed a lot more evidence about him. But there was almost none. I found this astonishing. Here we were in the 1490s, 15 centuries on from Pilate, with America almost on the map, with diplomatic despatches flying to and fro across Europe, and with the brand-new printing presses humming. People in those days felt they were drowning in information and “new media”, just as we do now. But what first-hand information do we have about this young man? Half a dozen recorded sightings; two, perhaps three, snatches of conversation; two letters and a will, all signed as Richard of course; and a few coins from a batch that were minted for him in Flanders before his first invasion of England.
Again, these things can give you little clues to the character: he had very good handwriting for a prince, perhaps too good; and he covered his coins with Yorkist symbols, possibly too many. But these are pretty slim pickings for anyone attempting to write his life. The letters, by the way, are political appeals; they contain nothing of his private thoughts, nothing to do with self or feelings, because we are too early in history for that sort of navel-gazing. Even the Pastons, in all their letters, very rarely express any interest in what we might call their inner selves. They’re unrelentingly straightforward, practical and businesslike. So my fifteenth century prince, or imposter, is there, but he’s not there. In the end he seemed to be a sort of star, a centre of fascination round which an awful lot of European politics was revolving in the 1490s, but who was himself almost invisible through the dazzle.
His background, too, remained a mystery. It is true that he agreed, after he surrendered to Henry VII in 1497, that he was just a boatman’s boy, and signed a confession that said so. But a great many things don’t hang together in this “agreement”, as it was actually called; and though plenty of historians have had no trouble swallowing the official story, I can’t digest it myself. Not least, it’s clear that neither the Pretender, nor Henry, nor much of Europe, believed what the confession said. Clarification isn’t helped by the fact that the entire archive of Tournai, where he was supposed to have grown up, was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1943. But the truth remains that we have no piece of evidence that tells us conclusively who he was. So this young man may have been born on the docks of a provincial town, as Henry VII insisted, or in a royal palace on the borders of Wales, or in neither place. But what a difference a birthplace makes! If he was the prince, his story was one of constant, tragic rejection by his own people. If he was the boatman’s boy from Tournai, he was engaged in the most wonderful adventure, which in its best moments took him to undreamt-of heights of celebrity, opulence and love. And, though the DNB may tell you differently, we still can’t say for certain which persona was true.
At one point, I decided to indulge in what Antonia Fraser calls “optical research”: visiting the places where my hero had been, and trying to summon his ghost from the landscapes and streets. It wasn’t very useful, I have to say. I took one crazy ride on the number 15 bus along the Strand, seeing if I could reproduce the public rides the Pretender made as Henry’s prisoner from the Palace of Westminster to the Tower; but of course, it’s now just office blocks and sandwich bars. I also went to the site where his parents are supposed to have lived, if he was Perkin, on the old docks at Tournai. It is now a burger bar; so I bought that great Belgian dish, frites and mayonnaise, and ate it beside the grey waters of the Scheldt, and mused under the rain. But it didn’t help, except to confirm my conviction that Tournai had played very little part in his life.
By this time I was already convinced that my biography of this young man could not be “normal”. Since nothing about this life was straightforward, but was shot through with mendacity and illusion on every side, I would have to get deep into the way people in the 1490s saw and judged the world around them. In other words, I’d have to reconstruct that whole shifting, showy, highly-coloured world, in order to judge my Pretender against it. As in Pilate, I wanted to weave a fabric out of which he could emerge. This policy made my book a bit long, as several critics have kindly pointed out. But it was engaged in a large task.
And so, after all these wild excursions, what next? There’s a strange coda to this tale. My new subject is the poet Shelley; and you might well wonder why. He’s not in the least unknown, nor, heaven help us, unwritten about. Nor do we lack evidence of his mind and thought and slightest feeling in every shape and form and stage of development, millions upon millions of words. Coming to Shelley, after Pilate and Perkin, I felt like a starving man who’s suddenly let loose in the food hall at Harrod’s.
I tried really hard not to write about him. I argued with myself for two years and, on bad days, I’m still arguing. For a while I thought I might try to restrict myself to a biography of the West Wind, but there’s a certain lack of information about the West Wind that stumped even me, in the end. I tried Hermes and Orpheus…you can see the way my mind was tending. But it was no good; I was stuck, and also well aware that the world needs another biography of Shelley like it needs a hole in the head.
On the other hand, yet again, this book isn’t really a biography in the strict sense. I don’t want to relate the daily or monthly details of a life---which in Shelley’s case, anyway, need no new relating---as much as to try to catch a soul. Never having had many “life details” to work with, I’ve always tended to float instead round the personality, real or perceived. And the human soul is a most extraordinarily elusive thing. People hide themselves, even when they appear to be laying their hearts bare. They give themselves all kinds of characters and personas which have little to do with the daily lives they appear to be leading. In the case of poets in particular, they may barely be in the world at all, in any sense that matters to them. “The poet and the man are two different natures”---and I don’t need to tell you who said that.
In the case of Pilate and Perkin, I found myself building worlds round my subjects in order to bring them into view. With Shelley, I find myself excavating and prospecting, trying to get to him, in the extraordinary worlds he has built himself. And I’m sure the task of uncovering this soul is going to be as hard as any I have faced before.
