Biography, True and False

I DO not remember who it was who once remarked that every great man has his disciples, but it is always Judas who is the biographer.

Whether or not this is entirely true, there are certainly more ways than one in which a biographer can betray his subject — and not all of them spring from bad intentions. “Whatever you do, do not prettify me!” said Walt Whitman to his friend Horace Traubel, the author of With Walt Whitman in Camden. “Include all the hells and damns.” But other great men have considered that any biography can hardly fail to be a betrayal, for the very sound reason that no one really knows anything about anyone else. “The world will never know my life,” said Carlyle, “if it should write and read a hundred biographies of me. The main facts of it are known, and are likely to be known, to myself alone, of all created men.” And these words stand on the first page of the long life written by his closest friend, James Froude.

We would all agree as to which is the most satisfactory biography — most satisfactory owing to the unmistakable, unrelenting veracity of the biographer. Boswell has told us very clearly what he was aiming at: he thought that a life should be “like a flawless print struck off from the engraved plate which is bitten into our memory.” Biography, in his view, should not be a selection or a monument or a thesis, but the duplication of an image in the mind. Unfortunately, as Geoffrey Scott remarked in his penetrating preface to Boswell’s Notes and Journals, “This is an aim beyond human reach.” But Scott also shrewdly added: “The knowledge that his arrow pointed to that impossible mark, was Boswell’s source of confidence. Other biographies might forestall his book; that they could rival it, he never, in his most sombre moments, conceived. Those others did not even know that biography is impossible.”

Impossible or not, the biography written by a man’s daily companion belongs to a genre that has a perennial charm: it gratifies our wish to believe. When a biographer records — with a sharp ear and a selective eye — what a great man actually said to him, he awakens a degree of conviction that no other form of narrative or analysis can achieve. “I wonder why we hate the past so,” says Howells ruminatively to Mark Twain, and when Mark Twain replies, “It’s so damned humiliating!” we know, without a doubt, that that is precisely what the great man did say. To open such a book is like entering a room — a room, I think, in an old-fashioned English country house — greeted by a mixture of wood smoke, old books, wet dogs, and fresh roses. One enters, and one is at home.

This is, perhaps, why Dr. Johnson himself asserted: “Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eaten and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” Failing personal acquaintance, he maintained that a biographer must at least be able to talk with his subject’s friends, though he also admitted that their reports were often highly unsatisfactory, in his own youth, he related, he determined to write a life of Dryden, and applied to two men who knew him, Sweeney and Cibber. “Sweeney’s information,” he said, “was no more than this, that at Will’s coffee-house Dryden had a particular chair for himself, which was set by the fire in winter and was called his winter chair; and that it was carried out for him to the balcony in summer, and was then called his summer chair.”

WHAT, then, is the wretched biographer who is not a contemporary to do, the writer who has no plate bitten into his memory, who must juggle, two or three centuries later, bare facts and documents, and who has, at best, an occasional portrait to look at? The further back we go, the more evident our presumption becomes. From the seventeenth century onwards we have at least some private papers to help us: someone writes a love letter, someone scolds an erring daughter, someone else sets down in a diary his fear of death; but earlier, what is there? A mass of public documents, but a terrible dearth of private ones. How can we dare, from such fragmentary and formal knowledge, to reconstruct a man?

Two methods are open to the biographer: he can try, in the manner of the three-volume Victorian biography and of the exhaustive modern biographies which are again becoming popular, to set down everything he can find out; or he can attempt the selective portrait, the “work of art.” The first method, unavoidably, must be that of the official biographer, who writes at the request of the family or of the state, or sometimes, nowadays, is financed by some great foundation. He works with one great advantage — a vast supply of material — and sometimes with a corresponding disadvantage, that part of it must be suppressed. For him the only solution seems to be the one recommended by William Allen White to a young historian: “Kill the widow!” Sometimes, too, it is the subject himself who has taken a great deal of trouble to cover his own tracks. In an essay on George Sand, Henry James suggested that the artist who fears to become the subject of a biography should take an unlimited degree of trouble to destroy all his private papers, leaving only his considered creation behind him. “Then,” he wrote, “the cunning inquiry will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything we today conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, stand, without a sally, the siege of years.”

Most biographers of our own time, however, and certainly those dealing with public men, are more likely to complain of too much material than too little. Even Boswell, according to his own diary, was so overwhelmed by the amount of his material when he started to put it together that he would sit in London coffeehouses with tears pouring down his cheeks; Virginia Woolf was hardly less dismayed by the number of Roger Fry’s papers. But what must Franklin Roosevelt’s biographer have felt, surveying the forty tons of documents at his disposal?

We live in a historically minded age, and I understand that an American statesman of our time was even in the habit of having his telephone conversations recorded in large diaries. This is, surely, a formidable prospect. Moreover, in addition to the written word, it is now possible to see again our subject’s face and gestures in a hundred newsreels, to hear again the very accents of his voice in recorded broadcasts. With such a plethora of material, every biography must to some extent become a selective one. But here problems of a different nature at once arise, problems of choice: is it possible to choose without revealing a bias, to reject and not to falsify? Every biographer is familiar with the seductive tricks of the trade: the slight juggling with dates, the suppression of inconvenient letters or of remarks that are out of character or merely flat, the placing of a telling conversation or document where it is most effective, the smoothing out and the touching up. In the end a portrait is built up: slick, vivid, convincing, and false.

There are also, of course, the mistakes of sheer ignorance. I am thinking at the moment of one of my own, which was kindly pointed out to me in a letter from Rebecca West. I had mentioned, as an example of Mrs. Carlyle’s touchiness, the disastrous Christmas party at the Grange, at which Lady Ashburton presented her, from the Christmas tree, with a silk dress, after which Jane retired to her bedroom in tears. I thought she was making a good deal of unnecessary fuss, or rather that she was using this pretext to express a deeper resentment against her hostess. Rebecca West, however, pointed out my mistake. Her great-aunt Isabella Campbell, who belonged to the Carlyle period, had often spoken of the episode and thought it “a most extraordinary thing for Lady Ashburton to have done, as a silk dress was the recognized present for a housekeeper, and a friend of the family would have felt bewildered at receiving it. To wear a dress which one had not ordered from the start and had fitted according to one’s own measures was a sign of social inferiority.” Plainly, therefore, on this occasion Jane was right to be offended, and I did not know what I was talking about. I still think, however, that Mrs. Carlyle was glad of so good an excuse to express her irritation with the woman whom her husband described as having “the soul of a princess and a captainess” and whom he considered, which was worse, as witty as herself.

One way of guarding against making too many such mistakes is to write only about those times and places with which one is familiar. Another safeguard is to become acquainted with the whole surrounding scene. I remember, for instance, once reading a translation of Leopardi’s “Sabato del Villaggio” in which the fascio dell’ erba, the bundle of grass, which the girl in the poem is carrying is translated as “a truss of hay.” The image brought to mind is one of green hayfields and wagons and pitchforks and buxom country girls — an Austrian scene, or an English. But there are no hayfields near Recanati. There are only steep, dun-colored hills on which olive trees grow, with wheat beneath them and perhaps a few vines, and by the edge of the road there are sometimes tufts of grass, of which town dwellers cut an armful to feed their rabbits. This was the bundle of grass brought home by Leopardi’s donzelletta. A single misleading sentence — written not because the translator did not know Italian but because he did not know Leopardi’s birthplace — conjured up a whole nonexistent world.

THREE insidious temptations assail the biographer: to suppress, to invent, and to sit in judgment, and of these the earliest and most frequent is suppression. In the Middle Ages, indeed, it was rendered inevitable by the purpose which biography was intended to fulfill: to produce a noble example. The medieval view of history was that of a drama enacted within an established pattern — God’s pattern for mankind. The lives of the men who came nearest to conforming with this pattern were related as an example to other, lesser men, and consequently a disproportionate number of medieval biographies are concerned with the lives of saints, while others are about rulers or leaders rather larger than life size.

The first English author who admitted that a biography might also aim at what he calls “lawful delight” was Thomas Fuller, who in the introduction to his History of the Worthies of England (in 1662) places this as the fourth and last of his purposes in writing: “First, to gain some glory to God. Secondly, to preserve the manoeuvres of the Devil. Thirdly, to present examples to the Living.” And only fourthly, “to Entertain the reader with Delight.”

In this respect, the attitude of classical biography was much nearer to our own. It was by the example of Plutarch that writers justified themselves when taste began to turn, in the seventeenth century, from what Dr. Johnson later called “honeysuckle lives" to a more varied, livelier curiosity. Dryden, for instance, admired Plutarch precisely because he had dared to show his heroes in undress. “You may behold,” he said, “Scipio and Laelius gathering cockle shells on the shore, Augustus playing at bounding-stones, and Agesilaus riding on a hobbyhorse, among his children. The pageantry of life is taken away: you see the poor reasonable animal as naked as ever nature made him; are acquainted with his follies, and find the demi-god, a man.”

Here, surely, is the prelude to modern biography; but with the admission that heroes, too, should be shown as naked and fallible, the problem arose as to whether this true picture was likely to dismay or to corrupt the reader. And if this danger existed, had the biographer the right to speak the truth?

The problem was set by Boswell to Dr. Johnson. Was it right to relate that Addison, having lent a hundred pounds to Steele, recovered his loan by sending an officer to remove his friend’s furniture? Dr. Johnson charitably speculated that perhaps Addison had done this with the intention of reforming Steele, but he also declared that, whether this kind of interpretation was true or not, the facts should be told. “Of such speculations,” he said, “there is no end; we cannot see into the hearts of men, but their actions are open to observation.” And he added that another reason for telling the whole truth was that “if nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit in despondency and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything.” He believed, in short, that the whole truth should be told, for a highly characteristic reason: “It keeps mankind from despair.”

In the nineteenth century, however, the suppression of unedifying or inconvenient facts came into favor again, partly owing to Victorian reticence and prudery, and partly to the same taste which created the Albert Memorial. “Too long and too idolatrous!” was the comment of Leslie Stephen on one of the great three-volume Victorian lives, and “How delicate, exclaimed Carlyle, “how decent is English biography, bless its mealy mouth!”

THERE is, however, a still more serious temptation for the biographer than suppression, and that is sheer invention. A good instance is the one quoted by Professor Trevor-Roper in a somewhat merciless attack on Lytton Strachey: the length of Dr. Arnold’s legs. Strachey had formed a very clear image of Dr. Arnold in his mind; he saw him as a noble, pompous figure, and — to introduce just the right additional touch of absurdity, of debunking — it was necessary that his legs should have been too short. Unfortunately, however, as Strachey himself once admitted to a friend, there is absolutely no evidence to show that Dr. Arnold’s legs were shorter than any other man’s.

Now the danger of this kind of invention is that, once discovered, it shakes our capacity to believe anything that its inventor has said. “Suppose we believe one half of what he tells,” suggested Lord Mansfield to Boswell, about an acquaintance whose stories, he said, “we unhappily found to be very fabulous.” “Yes,” Dr. Johnson replied, “but we don’t know which half to believe. By his lying we lose not only our reverence for him, but all comfort in his conversation.”

In Strachey’s own opinion a biographer’s equipment consists in three points: “a capacity for absorbing facts, a capacity for stating them, and a point of view.” The definition is a good one, for without a point of view no history can be written, but there is also a danger that it may not only shape but distort the facts. The biographer who puts his wits above his subject wall end by writing about one person only — himself. My personal complaint about Eminent Victorians would be not that it is inaccurate, but that it is thin, and that its thinness springs from condescension. If you wish to see a person, you must not start by seeing through him. Another instance of this occurs in the first sentence of a very fine biography, Harold Nicholson’s Tennyson. “We smile today at our Victorians,” it begins, “not confidently, as of old, but with a shade of hesitation: a note of perplexity, a note of anger, sometimes a note of wistfulness, has come to mingle with our laughter.”

The fatal words are, of course, the first ones, “We smile today.” The biographer has started by putting up a barrier — and even if, in the next few words, he suggests that it is beginning to crumble, he is still writing from the other side. He has, in short, succumbed to yet another of the biographer’s temptations: the desire to sit in judgment. “To penetrate,” wrote the French historian Marc Bloch, “into the unknown being of a man separated from us by a long stretch of generations, one must almost cast off one’s own self. To pull him to pieces, one need only remain oneself. The effort is undeniably less strenuous.”

Every work of art, of course, implies a previous process of assessment, and it is the writer’s implicit view of life that gives style and flavor to his work. Even though the assessment and criticism of manners and morals which were once assumed by the biographer and the novelist have now largely been handed over to the psychologist, the judgment of character still remains the central problem of biography. But insofar as a biographer is also a historian, he should, I think, be very careful not to drown his subject’s voice with his own. One peculiar function of biography is to show history as it was to the participant, to observe for a moment das Gewordene als Werdendes, what has come to pass, while it is still occurring. Through the man whose life we are describing, we can see history in the course of being lived. In one sense, all organized histories are unsatisfactory, because they are written with the wisdom of the future. But in individual lives we can seize, if nothing else, a vivid sense of actuality; it is a pity to blur it.

Besides, our own judgments are surely not immune from change. We shall not, at the age of fifty, judge a man in the same way as we did at twenty-five. Ten days before his death, Dr. Johnson asserted that he was “ready now to call a man a good man, on much easier terms than formerly.” With the passing of the years, the muscles of moral indignation sometimes begin to sag and the voice becomes less sharp, and this is true even in the field of abstract thought. I remember asking George Santayana, in his old age — when he was preparing an abridged edition of the great work of his youth, The Life of Reason — whether there were many things that he would now like to change. “No,” he gently replied, “I feel I have much the same things to say — but I wish to say them in a different tone of voice.”

Recently the psychologists have invented some ingenious devices which, they claim, will provide short cuts to assessing a man’s character and state of mind. A German called Busemann advises us to count, in a man’s letters and journals, the relative number of adjectives and of active verbs, thus obtaining what he calls his A/Q or Action Quotient. A prevalence of adjectives, he says, indicates a state of emotional tension. The process has even been applied to William James’s letters, showing that between the ages of forty and fifty his letters to women were more emotional, and after sixty, those to men. Two American psychologists have invented a more complicated device. By counting, in interviews with people suffering from emotional problems, the words expressing some form of discomfort, which they call D, and those expressing relief, which they call R, they obtain what they call a DR Quotient, which, when set down on a graph, accurately reflects their clients’ states of mind at the time. They therefore suggest that the same method should be applied by biographers. We might ask ourselves, for instance, what Churchill’s Discomfort Relief Quotient was when he offered the British nation blood, sweat, and tears.

I am myself not very good at counting, but even if I were, I do not think that either A/Q or DR/Q is going to take us much further in the complicated task of assessing human personality. They will hardly take the place of those unscientific, uncertain old instruments: intelligence and intuition. Yet how often even these fail us! We can hang mirrors, as Virginia Woolf advised, at every corner; we can look at our subject’s face at every angle and in every light. We can discover strange and curious pieces of information: that Aristotle had a hot-water bottle made of leather, filled with hot oil, and that Leopardi, in the winter in Bologna, spent his days in a bag lined with feathers, from which he emerged looking like Papageno. But never, never do we see enough. Beneath the conscious personality, the purposing man, there is in each of us an underworld of discarded characters who have still some life in them. These, too, the biographer must seek. “In every fat man,” said Cyril Connolly, “there is a thin man, trying to get out.”

To Virginia Woolf the central problem of biography was how to mold “into one seamless whole” the “granite-like solidity" of truth and “the rainbow-like intangibility” of personality. It is, surely, impossible — but few writers have come closer to it than she did. The problem was one that fascinated her, not only in literature but in life. “Go on, this is enthralling,” she would say, when her friends brought her an exciting piece of gossip. “I feel as if a buried statue were being dug up, piece by piece.”

One of her friends once told me that on a cold November evening, as he was making his way to her house, he came upon Virginia Woolf standing in the fog beside an apple barrow and asking the old apple woman, in her deep, throaty, compelling voice: “Tell me, what does it feel like to stand here in the fog on a dark evening, selling apples?” I cannot vouch for the truth of this story, but certainly the question was one she often asked. “What does it feel like,” she would say to me, “to wake up in the morning on a Tuscan farm?” And once I heard her say, perhaps not wholly without malice, to a disconcerted young peer: “Tell me, what does it feel like to be a lord?”

Yet when, in later years, she came to write a life of Roger Fry, who had been one of her closest friends, the book was curiously less vivid, more conventional, than the etchings in her essays. She found, indeed, the sheer effort of putting together the material for a full biography almost unbearably tedious. “Donkey work,” she recorded in A Writer’s Diary, “sober drudgery, appalling grind.” And when at last the book was finished, there was a most revealing final note: “What a curious relation is mine with Roger at this moment — I who have given him a kind of shape after his death. Was he like that? I feel very much in his presence at the moment, as if I were intimately connected with him: as if we together had given birth to this vision of him; a child born of us. Yet he had no power to alter it. And yet for some years it will represent him.”

IS BIOGRAPHY, then, worth attempting at all? Where there are so many snares, would we do better to be silent? I think not. Many critics would deny to any biographical portrait the essential reality, the truth that is truer than truth, of the novelist’s or dramatist’s creations, but I do not think that this need be so. The biographer has, of course, a fixed pattern; he is, as Desmond MacCarthy once said, “an artist upon oath.” But the calls upon his imagination and intuition are hardly less exacting than the novelist’s. The novelist and dramatist, after all, do not create their characters in a void, but out of experience informed and illuminated by the imagination. And this is the only stuff that all art is made of.

Shakespeare himself invented hardly any of his plots, but, having accepted a ready-made pattern for the actions of his characters, was then free to give his whole attention to bringing them to life. And so surely, too, the biographer’s true function — the transmission of personality — may also be, within its own pattern, an act of creation, giving shape, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, to a man after his death and endowing him with what is, when we come to think of it, a very odd form of immortality. For of many great men of the past we know only what their biographers or portrait painters saw. Just as we know no other face for Pope Julius II than Raphael’s, no other Federico da Montefeltro than Piero della Francesca’s, so Strachey’s Queen Victoria will probably become for many the only Queen Victoria, and it is Boswell’s Johnson whom most people call Dr. Johnson. All that the biographer did not see or could not fit conveniently into his picture has faded into mist.

What, however, it is possible to wonder is whether in the near future there will be any demand for biography at all. Reading is a private pleasure, and not only is privacy disappearing from a world of ready-made designs for living, in which men are looking not so much for individuality as for protective coloring, but people’s curiosity about other people’s lives can now be satisfied in more dramatic ways than any book can offer. The radio and television now enable every man to interpret for himself, without the filter of another man’s mind, the character and actions of his contemporaries.

I do not really believe this. The story of public exploits may become, to some extent, the field of the radio and of television, but the slow development of character, the processes of thought of the writer and the artist, and above all the relation of human beings to each other — these are things that cannot be simplified and that will always have to be set down, however imperfectly, in words.

“The true history of the human race,” wrote E. M. Forster in a recent article, “is the story of human affections. In comparison with it all other histories — even economic history — are false.” He goes on to say that owing to its reticent nature it can never be written down completely, and this of course is true, yet what little we do know of this aspect of history has come to us through biography or autobiography. And as long as human beings go on feeling affection for each other, this material will be renewed — material as complicated and yet simple, intense and yet intermittent, various and yet unchanging, as the human heart. In this sense biography is, or should be, a completion of life, giving a shape and a significance to the humblest, most pedestrian existence, seeing in the routine and triviality of common experience the universal pattern which gives it harmony and meaning. Every individual life is also the story of Everyman, and while it is the biographer’s business to describe the passions, foibles, and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be very thin if these individual traits are not also seen as part of a universal drama. “A man’s life of any worth,” said Keats, “is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the Mystery.”

There is an image in Pasternak’s great novel, Doctor Zhivago, which has moved me very much — of a candle, which has melted a little patch in the icy crust on a windowpane, through which the candle’s light is seen by Yura from the dark street below. “Its light seemed to fall into the street as deliberately as a glance, as if the flame were keeping a watch on the passing carriages, and waiting for someone.” Perhaps that is the most that a biographer can ever hope to do: to clear, in the icy crust of each man’s incomprehension of other men, a little patch, through which a faint, intermittent light can shine. But at the best, it will always be a very little patch of light, in a great sea of darkness — and it is wiser not to be too solemn about what we are doing, since the life that we are describing, like our own, is brittle and shadowy, and it is surely very arrogant to try to give it a set form. All that needs to be said about this was said by Sir William Temple in his essay on poetry, in a single, perfect sentence: “Human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep — and then the care is over.”

I do not think of truth as being made of granite, but rather as resembling a note in music, a note which we instantly recognize as the right one as soon as it is struck. Proust, the great master of the art of memory, describes in a famous passage in Swann’s Way how in later life he was sometimes able to hear again certain sounds which, he wrote, “in reality had never stopped”: the sobs which had shaken him at a crucial moment of his childhood. “It is only because life is now growing silent about me,” he said, “that I hear them afresh, like convent bells which one might believe were not rung nowadays, because during the day they are drowned by the city hubbub, but which may be heard clearly enough in the stillness of the evening.”

The biographer with a similar awareness of the continuity of emotion may realize at certain moments, “when life is silent about him,” that he has suddenly become aware of something about his subject for which he could not give chapter and verse but which he now knows to be true. For all genuine emotion leaves behind it an eternal reverberation. Whether it is always possible for the biographer to hear and to reproduce it is another matter, unless indeed he has at his disposal such material as Keats’s Letters — and even then, even then . . . But certainly even the faintest echo can only be heard by temporarily casting aside one’s own self and one’s own opinions. For this reason I would say to the young biographer who has upon his desk his first, intriguing file of papers to examine them, if he can, with an almost blank mind: to let them produce their own effect. Later on, the time will come to compare, to sift, and to draw conclusions; but first he should listen without interrupting. Sometimes then, as he deciphers the faded ink, a phrase will stand out which reveals the hand that wrote it. He may see — as suddenly as, at the turn of a passage, one comes upon one’s own image in a mirror — a living face. It is then, in this fleeting moment, that he may perhaps have a faint apprehension — as near to the truth as we are ever likely to get — of what another man was like.