Читать книгу This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer - Richard Holmes - Страница 12

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As he set out to wreak havoc on his four Eminent Victorians in 1918, Lytton Strachey tenderly suggested that English biography might eventually rediscover its true calling as ‘the most delicate and most humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. Some three generations later, the form has certainly expanded out of all recognition, gained a broad new readership, and achieved considerable (though not unchallenged) intellectual authority. At its best, I think, biography can indeed now call itself a true ‘art of writing’, and also perhaps a humanist discipline. It is ‘the proper study of mankind’ – and womankind too. But is it an art and a discipline that can also be taught? Is it a proper subject for an academic course?

It has always seemed to me that the essential spirit of biography – of English biography at least – has been a maverick and unacademic one. (The French, German and American traditions are different, for interesting historical and institutional reasons.) For some three hundred years, from John Aubrey and James Boswell onwards, much of its most exciting and innovative work – among which I would now include certain books by Michael Holroyd, Claire Tomalin, Peter Ackroyd, Hilary Spurling, Frances Wilson and Alexander Masters – has been done outside the established institutes of learning, and beyond the groves of academe. It has retained an 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).

By the early nineteenth century, the cultural significance of biography’s growing popularity was broadly recognised, and was already receiving some study, though not necessarily favourable. Coleridge wrote about it in his journal The Friend (1810), calling it the product of ‘emphatically an Age of Personality’; and Wordsworth attacked the use of ungentlemanly revelations in a contemporary Life of Burns (1828). But in fact Romanticism embraced the ideas of both ‘personality’ and of personal ‘revelations’. In 1813 Robert Southey clinched his appointment as Poet Laureate by writing a short and wonderfully vivid biography of Nelson, which eventually became by far the most successful work he ever published. It enshrined the dead wartime naval commander as a new kind of national hero, a people’s hero with the common touch, flawed of course (Emma Hamilton), but open-hearted and irresistibly courageous, and above all familiar: ‘The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend.’

Similarly, in 1818 Mary Shelley chose to educate Frankenstein’s monster in the complex ways of human civilisation by making him read biography (‘a volume of Plutarch’s Lives’) as well as Goethe’s fashionable novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and Milton’s Paradise Lost. While fiction seems to emphasise the creature’s isolation and sense of exclusion, biography consoles him. Hidden in his woodshed, the monster reflects: ‘I learned from Werther’s imaginations despondency and gloom: but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me beyond the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages.’

One cannot help wondering which exemplary biography Mary Shelley would have chosen to give the monster for uplift and study today. Currently some 3,500 new titles are published in Britain a year. (However, this figure includes autobiography, ghosted books, and many pictorial show-business biographies which are surely closer to the older forms of hagiography or demonology.) Virtually all bookshops have a Biography section which is larger than any other non-fiction genre, and is still quite separate from History. This seems to emphasise the continuing notion of a popular pantheon, a kind of intimate collective memory of ‘common human kind’, which offers ever-expanding possibilities for serious study.

Yet commercially the genre of biography is still regarded as ephemeral and utilitarian, rather than a permanent art form. It is strongly content-orientated, and it is shelved alphabetically by subject, not by author. Even Boswell is shelved under ‘J’, for Johnson. This seems to imply that most biographies are defined crucially by their subject-matter, and don’t really have a significant authorial status for the reading public. Essentially, biographies are understood to write themselves, self-generated (like methane clouds) by their dead subjects. This popular misconception still affects much contemporary newspaper reviewing of new biography, which tends to consist of a lively critical précis of the whole life, with perhaps one brief mention of the actual author of the book, tucked away somewhere in the penultimate paragraph.

Yet, if biography is to provide a genuine academic course, it must surely concern itself primarily with the outstanding biographers, as literary artists, and their place in the changing history of the form. This would imply an agreed canon of classic works, and of classic biographical authors, as it does in the novel. But has such a canon ever been put forward or generally accepted? Does biography have a widely acknowledged Great Tradition, in the same way that the novel does?

There has been a considerable growth in modern biographical theory, especially since Leon Edel’s Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (1984). But surprisingly little has been written about the specific question of a canon, between Harold Nicolson’s The Development of English Biography of 1927 and Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography of 1999. Indeed, Backscheider concludes that the need to establish and teach a canon is a paramount requirement for the future evolution of the genre as a whole: ‘If biography is to come closer to reaching its potential either as an art or a cultural force, then readers must demand art, collect the books, think in terms of canons and schools, and biographers must have the daring to accept the calling.’

But what about the daring to propose a canon? Leaving aside classical and Renaissance precursors, and concentrating on the early modern English tradition only, there are perhaps fewer than half a dozen names which would immediately spring to mind. These might be Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Johnson, Mrs Gaskell’s Charlotte Brontë, and Strachey’s Eminent Victorians – though technical objections can be made to all of them as ‘impure’ biography. Johnson, it could be argued, was writing critical essays; Boswell a dramatised memoir; Mrs Gaskell a romantic novel; and Strachey a social satire.

However, let me propose for argument’s sake a possible canon of twenty-seven classic English works written between 1670 and 1970, which might form the basis for postgraduate study. I give abbreviated working titles, though the full original versions are often revealing, as when Godwin omits to mention his wife’s name but describes her only as ‘the Author’ of her most controversial book.

Izaak Walton, Lives of John Donne and George Herbert (1640, revised 1670)

John Aubrey, Brief Lives (1670–88, first published selection 1813)

John Dryden, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (translations edited 1683–86)

Daniel Defoe, The History of John Sheppard (attributed, 1724)

Samuel Johnson, The Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744)

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791)

William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)

Robert Southey, Life of Nelson (1813)

William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (pen portraits, 1825)

Thomas Moore, Life and Letters of Lord Byron (1830)

John Gibson Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837–38)

Thomas Carlyle, Life of John Sterling (1851)

Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)

G.H. Lewes, Life of Goethe (1855, revised 1863)

Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1863)

John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74)

David Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1855, revised 1880)

J.A. Froude, Life of Thomas Carlyle (1882–84)

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)

Geoffrey Scott, Portrait of Zélide (1925)

A.J.A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo (1934)

Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (1950)

Leon Edel, Henry James (1953–72)

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959, revised 1982)

George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (1959, 1965)

Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (1967–68, revised 1994)

All these books could be justified on grounds of literary quality, the historic pictures they achieve of their subjects, and their significance within the development of the form. Yet one is immediately aware of several objections to their place in a canon for study. First, there is the simple problem of length, upon which Virginia Woolf expatiated with such eloquent irony in Orlando (1928): ‘documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads’.

This is particularly evident in the nineteenth-century convention of inflating a chronological narrative with enormous excerpts from original letters and diaries, which by modern scholarly convention would now be published separately. For example, Froude’s Carlyle (though one of the greatest studies of Victorian marriage) is in four volumes; Lockhart’s Scott is in seven. How are these dinosaurs to be recovered? Perhaps by editing?

Next, there are certain obvious biases within the selection. There are few American, Irish or Australian lives. There is the large predominance of literary biography over scientific, political or military. Equally, there is the overwhelming predominance of men over women, either as biographers or as subjects. This seems historically unavoidable. Aubrey included only three women in his Brief Lives, though one was the remarkable Countess of Pembroke; Johnson wrote nothing about his large circle of brilliant bluestocking friends; Hazlitt included no women in The Spirit of the Age. It was only with the late recognition of the mid-Victorian heroine – Caroline Herschel, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Mary Somerville – that the biography of women began to emerge, and only with modern feminism that it began to have serious impact on the form after 1970, with work by Claire Tomalin, Hilary Spurling, Nancy Milford, Judith Thurman, Stacy Schiff and others.

But there is a wholly different level of objection. How can the term ‘classic’ (in the sense of unique and enduring) be applied to even the greatest of these biographies, when their facts and interpretations will always be altered by later research? This crucial question of the superannuating of any biography raises several issues. At the simplest level, it is a matter of factual accuracy. This is an obvious problem in the case of Thomas Moore, who altered and spliced so many of Byron’s letters and journal entries; or Boswell, who could not fully come to terms with Johnson’s early, unsettled years in London; or Mrs Gaskell, who suppressed much of Charlotte Brontë’s amorous life and correspondence with her Belgian mentor Monsieur Héger. (These letters, largely unsent, were published after Brontë’s death, though they had been partly used in her novel Villette.)

This leads on to a larger, almost philosophical question about the apparently ephemeral nature of biographical knowledge itself. If no biography is ever ‘definitive’, if every life story can be endlessly retold and reinterpreted (there are now more than ten lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, thirty lives of Johnson, two hundred lives of Byron, four hundred lives of Hitler, and literally countless lives of Napoleon), how can any one Life ever hope to avoid the relentless process of being superseded, outmoded, and eventually forgotten – a form of auto-destruction which has no equivalent in the novel.

This would also seem to imply that as ‘factual content’ grows out of date, the artistic structure is fatally weakened from within. When we learn of the young actress Ellen Ternan and her place in Dickens’s life, from the modern biographies by Peter Ackroyd (1990) and then Claire Tomalin (1991), doesn’t this fatally superannuate John Forster’s Life? (Forster mentioned Ellen Ternan only once – in an Appendix with reference to Dickens’s will.) Or when we discover from Richard Westfall’s magisterial Never at Rest (1980, abridged as The Life of Isaac Newton, 1993) the real extent of Newton’s alchemical and astrological interests, and their impact on his concept of universal gravity, doesn’t this weaken the authority of Sir David Brewster’s great two-volume Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855)?

In fact, one might suggest that precisely here lies one of the greatest arguments in favour of the disciplined, rigorous academic study of biography as a developing form. It is exactly in these shifts and differences – factual, formal, stylistic, ideological, aesthetic – between early and later biographies that students could find an endless source of interest and historical information. They would discover how reputations developed, how fashions changed, how social and moral attitudes moved, how standards of judgement altered, as each generation, one after another, continuously reconsidered and idealised or condemned its forebears in the writing and rewriting of biography.

Here one is considering virtually a new discipline, which might be called comparative biography. It is based on the premise that every biography is one particular interpretation of a life, and that many different interpretations or reassessments are always possible. (If there can be innumerable different interpretations of a fictional character – Hamlet, Moll Flanders, Mr Pickwick, Tess – then surely there can be as many of a historical one.) So, in comparative biography the student examines the handling of one subject by a number of different biographers, and over several different historical periods. In the case of Shelley, for example, one might compare the biographies by his contemporaries Hogg and Peacock (1858) with the late-Victorian one by Professor Edward Dowden (1886), the jazz-age one by André Maurois (1924), and the American New Deal biography by Newman Ivey White (1940). The ‘Shelley’ that we have inherited has grown out of all these versions, and he in turn reflects back a particular picture of each generation which has, alternately, been inspired or bored or scandalised by him.

Some comparative work has already begun. Sylva Norman has written about the strange shifts in Shelley’s posthumous reputation in The Flight of the Skylark (1954); Ian Hamilton about the cumulative influence of literary executors in Keepers of the Flame (1992); and Lucasta Miller in her study of the increasingly exotic literary cult of Haworth parsonage in The Brontë Myth (2001).

The notion of comparative biography also raises the question of the perceived limits of the traditional form. Ever since Edmund Gosse wrote a second, child’s-eye, version of his father’s biography (1890) as Father and Son (1907), and Virginia Woolf transformed a biography of Vita Sackville-West into the historical romance Orlando (1928), the boundaries between fact and fiction have become controversial and perilous. These experimental novel-biographies also form part of the tradition that might be usefully taught and studied. No critical account of modern ideas about biographical narrative could ignore Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990).

The subtle question of the nature of non-fiction narrative, and how it differs from fiction, offers one of the most fascinating and fruitful of all possible fields for students. It is different from the conventional discipline of historiography. All good biographers struggle with a particular tension between the scholarly drive to assemble facts as dispassionately as possible and the novelistic urge to find shape and meaning within the apparently random circumstances of a life. Both instincts are vital, and a biography is dead without either of them. We make sense of life by establishing ‘significant’ facts, and by telling ‘revealing’ stories with them.

But the two processes are rarely in perfect balance or harmony. Indeed, with some post-modern biography the two primal identities of the biographer – the scholar and the storyteller – may seem to split completely apart, and fragment into two or more voices. This happens at unexpected, diverting moments in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990), or in a rich, continuous, polyphonic way with Ann Wroe’s Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man (1999), or in a deliberately sinister, insidious, disconcerting manner with Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner (2000). Yet this too is part of an older tradition already explored in Woolf’s Flush (1933), the playful biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog (with its genuine scholarly notes). Indeed, I believe it goes back through certain texts as far as the eighteenth century, and I have tried to investigate the roots of these bipolar forces (which may also be described as ‘judging versus loving’) in Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993). It is, of course, tricky terrain, the impossible meeting of what Woolf herself called ‘granite and rainbow’. But for that very reason, and because it requires a growing degree of critical self-knowledge, it could be rewarding for students to explore further.

Equally, the close textual study of biography could throw much more light on the unsuspected role of rhetorical devices such as ‘suspense’, ‘premonition’, ‘anecdote’ and ‘ventriloquism’ in the apparently transparent narrative forms of life-writing. And this in turn could reflect on the way that we are all, continuously, reinterpreting our own lives with story-based notions such as ‘success’, ‘failure’, ‘chance’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘achievement’. So biography could have a moral role, though not exactly the naïve exemplary one assigned to it by the Victorians. It may never teach us how to behave, how to self-help, how to find role models. But it might teach us simply how to understand other people better. And hence, through ‘the other’, ourselves. This, too, is part of the potential humanist discipline.

So, finally, I returned to the fundamental question: what would students be studying biography for? To discover and appreciate a great literary tradition: certainly. To learn both the values and the limitations of accuracy and historical understanding: without doubt. To grasp something of the complications of human truth-telling, and to write well about them: yes, with any luck. But above all, to exercise empathy, to enter imaginatively into another place, another time, another life. And whether that could be taught, I still had no idea at all.

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So it was, in the spirit of enquiry more than anything else, that in 2001 I signed a contract to design and then teach a new Masters degree in biography as part of the celebrated Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. My theories now required strictly practical and immediate application. This was my first and only academic appointment, and I took it on with proper trepidation. But I decided to be ambitious, and to design a course that would begin with the Greeks and run to the twenty-first century. I spent most of the summer of 2001 reading Plutarch in an olive grove on the tiny island of Paxos, where an ancient legend said a voice was once heard at dusk, calling from the sea: ‘The great god Pan is dead.’

For the next five years I was responsible for about sixteen new postgraduate biography students every autumn. The first thing that delighted and astonished me was the evident appeal of the course to a hugely disparate group of people, whose ages ranged from twenty-two to sixty-seven, and whose backgrounds, life experiences and professions differed wildly. My notebooks record an Irish poet, an American Mormon, a general practitioner from Oxford, a Pakistani air force pilot, a Japanese businesswoman, a TV researcher, the ex-headmistress of an English girls’ school (not Greta Hall), a human rights barrister from London, a Vassar literature graduate, a Canadian TV executive, a financial journalist from the City, a Norfolk asparagus farmer, a Birmingham social worker, and a mother of three from Sussex whose sailor husband (I eventually discovered) was dying of cancer.

The central discipline of the MA was indeed my idea of ‘comparative biography’. In practice this established itself in two ways. First, we would look at how the form had developed historically – classical, medieval, Renaissance, Augustine, Romantic, Victorian, modernist, post-modern. We would compare the different ideas of evidence, narrative, sources and appropriate subject, which were assumed. At the same time, we would take particular biographical subjects, and compare the various versions of their Lives which had been written over time. Of course, some ran into literally hundreds – Napoleon, Byron, Lincoln, Queen Victoria. This also gave rise to interesting reflections on the shifting fashions in biographical popularity. But most of all it called into question the whole idea of one, definitive Life.

A particularly effective example was that of the early Anglo-Irish writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Her first biography was written by her husband, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, in 1798 – a work so shockingly frank that it was said to have destroyed her reputation for the next hundred years. But many others followed in the twentieth century, among the best being those written by Emily Sunstein, Claire Tomalin, Janet Todd, William St Clair (a group biography over two generations), Lyndall Gordon and Diane Jacobs.

Each was outstanding in its own way, yet each made very varied assessments of Wollstonecraft’s character, her achievement and the nature of her feminism. They also gave strikingly different accounts of many key episodes: her stormy relations with her brutal and abusive father; her passionate and possibly lesbian friendship with Fanny Blood; her disastrous love affair with the American Gilbert Imlay; her illegitimate child; her two suicide attempts; and finally her tragic death in giving birth to her second child, the little girl who would become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

According to her biographers, Mary Wollstonecraft’s historical standing had fluctuated wildly between that of a tragic heroine, a feminist martyr, a dauntless travel writer (Ireland, Scandinavia, France), a visionary educationalist, ‘a female Werther’, or ‘a hyena in petticoats’. What emerged from these comparisons was the very complex notion of human and historical truth, the importance of social context, and the unexpectedly controlling force of the narrator’s point of view, or bias.

One scene in particular seemed to entrance my seminars. This was the surprising way William Godwin introduced his first encounter with Mary in Chapter 6 of his classic 1798 biography. He met her at a literary dinner given by the radical publisher Joseph Johnson in November 1791, in honour of Thomas Paine. Paine was about to take up his seat in the revolutionary Convention in Paris, and Godwin was agog to meet him. He knew very little about ‘Mrs Wollstonecraft’. Of course my students expected a proper moment of sentimental revelation, even perhaps love at first sight. But this is the biographical scene that Godwin actually wrote:

My chief object was to see the author of The Rights of Man, with whom I had never before conversed. The evening was not fortunate. Mary and myself parted, mutually displeased with each other. I had not read her Rights of Woman, I had barely looked into her Answer to Burke, and was displeased, as literary men are apt to be, with a few offenses against grammar … I had therefore little curiosity to see Mrs Wollstonecraft, and a very great curiosity to see Thomas Paine. Paine, in his general habits, is no great talker, and though he threw in occasionally some shrewd and striking remarks, the conversation lay principally between me and Mary. I, of consequence, heard her very frequently, when I wished to hear Paine … We made a very small degree of progress towards a cordial acquaintance.

This is a wonderful, paradoxical moment in Godwin’s unfolding of his narrative, especially as he will later take such care in describing how they each, slowly but inevitably, fall deeply in love. Not only do we see with a shock Mary’s forthright style, and her refusal of polite conventions; but Godwin subtly implies his own tetchiness and male intellectual snobbery. As we see by the end of the biography, Mary will transform all these attitudes of his, in a way that was wholly characteristic of her genius.

A good deal of time was spent examining such narrative techniques, and the different styles of experiment, especially in twentieth-century biography. In a sense this was the traditional classical discipline of ‘rhetoric’. One revealing exercise was simply to look at the opening sentences of several major modern biographies, and see how immediately they suggested a particular line of biographical approach. My notebook records many examples.

For instance, there is the headlong way in which Robert Caro launches his magnificent Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (1982):

On the day he was born, he would say, his white-haired grandfather leaped on his big black stallion and thundered across the Texas Hill Country, reining in at every farm to shout: ‘A United States Senator was born this morning!’ Nobody in the Hill Country remembers that ride or that shout, but they do remember the baby’s relatives saying something else about him, something which to them was more significant …

Here is the announcement of a mighty action epic (the biography will eventually run to five volumes), a wide-screen panoramic opening in cowboy country, and yet immediately and carefully undercut by subtle reservations – ‘he would say … nobody remembers … something more significant’ – which give a first clue to the fantastic thoroughness and diligence of Caro’s scholarly research.

Another memorable example is Alexander Masters’s opening to his strikingly original biography of a dysfunctional homeless Cambridge man, Stuart Shorter, in his witty, tender, outspoken Stuart: A Life Backwards (2006):

Stuart does not like the manuscript.

Through the pale Tesco stripes of his supermarket bag I can see the wedge of my papers. Two years’ worth of interviews and literary effort.

‘What’s the matter with it?’

‘It’s bollocks boring.’

This shock opening immediately announces a new kind of personal confrontation between biographer and subject. It will be fraught, informal, no holds barred, but with extraordinary possibilities of good humour and even, eventually, mutual understanding. The development of this strange duet, between Masters the clever young Cambridge academic and Stuart the streetwise but deeply damaged down-and-out, is at once established as the central narrative drive of the whole biography. Even so, there are traditional parallels for the student to recognise and ponder: not so much with Boswell’s Johnson, but more with Johnson’s own eighteenth-century down-and-out story, The Life of Mr. Richard Savage.

A third equally challenging, but utterly different, narrative voice takes immediate control in the thoughtful and provocative first paragraph of Hermione Lee’s superb biography of Virginia Woolf (1996):

‘My God, how does one write a Biography?’ Virginia Woolf’s question haunts her own biographers. How do they begin? ‘Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen.’ ‘Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child: she was an incest-survivor.’ ‘Was Virginia Woolf “insane”?’… Or: ‘Yet another book about Bloomsbury.’

Here is a different kind of surprise, a post-modern daring in which the biographer immediately breaks the narrative convention of biographical objectivity. Is the form possible at all, she asks. Even her subject – especially when her subject is Woolf – seemed to doubt it. So Lee instantly takes the reader into her confidence, shows herself at work, apparently vulnerable and self-questioning, and acknowledges the great body of previous Woolf biography she has to contend with. By this very gesture of transparency, Lee skilfully captures her reader and establishes new intellectual intimacy with her formidable subject. From the admission of doubt comes a new authority. Now both are on equal terms: a new sort of biographical dialogue can begin, and will be continued triumphantly for eight hundred pages.

Parallel with the study of ‘texts’ (a term I still find oddly alienating) ran the practicalities of the students researching and writing their own work. One topic we frequently considered was the impact of the internet on biographical source-hunting. On the one hand it made original archives astonishingly more accessible; on the other hand it threatened to drown the researcher in a raging sea of second-hand, unchecked materials (as with a Wikipedia entry). But above all it demonstrated the need for the biographer to create his or her own, clear narrative structures – to check the evidence and take command of the story.

We discussed the difference between ‘inventing’ a fictional character and ‘entering’ into a biographical one. From this arose the question of whether the biographer’s self, the biographical ‘I’, could be introduced into the narrative. Should autobiography be allowed to impinge on biography (as, for example, Boswell had done with such signal success)? Should the pronoun ‘I’ be allowed to slip into the text? Or remain abstemiously in the footnotes? Or merely lurk in the Introduction?

But always we returned to discussing the value of an individual human life, and how it should be assessed. What constituted success or failure? Was this the same in a man’s or a woman’s life? Was this the same in all societies? Where did biography melt into social history? Much discussion ranged round Virginia Woolf’s mischievous remark (in Orlando) that ‘The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.’

In a properly ecological manner, we even considered the span of human life in comparison with other life forms on earth. This produced an interesting document which became known as the ‘Lifespan Litany’, and was pinned up on many study walls, as an act of biographical humility:

The Lifespan Litany

1 American redwood tree – 500 years

2 Galapagos tortoise – 190 years

3 African elephant – 90 years

4 European Homo sapiens – 75 years (20 years asleep)

5 Canadian grizzly bear – 25 years

6 German shepherd dog – 12 years

7 Cloudy yellow butterfly – 1 year

8 Worker bee – 5 weeks

9 Adult mayfly (ephemera) – 1 day

As the MA course became established, I found myself asking a different and more practical kind of question. What did these particular students each expect to gain from studying biography? My original concept of a ‘humane discipline’ seemed increasingly abstract. What was really important to them? Obviously, many wanted to write biographies themselves, and already had specific individual projects. These ranged from personal heroes drawn from history (Martin Luther King, Janis Joplin, Charlotte Brontë, Yuri Gagarin) to the recovery of intimate family tales, lost relatives and mysterious traditions. The title ‘What My Grandmother Did During the War’ became iconic.

Others wanted to catch up on post-university education, after a lapse of a decade or more, and regarded biography – with its mixture of history, psychology, sociology, literary criticism, archival research, and what we called ‘fieldwork’ – as an ideal mode of re-entry into the world of scholarship. It also took them sideways, into related documentary areas in the visual arts – portraiture, photography, film, video, and of course the whole world of YouTube and the internet.

But behind these two broad motives I often discerned a third, which only became clear over the course of the year, and usually among the older students. It was what I can only call a need for personal ‘reorientation’. They had reached a point in their lives, often marked by some sort of crisis – a loss of employment, the departure of children from the family home, illness or death, divorce, even a crisis of faith – which required a new kind of taking stock of their lives, a standing back to consider the ground, to consider the shape of their own story so far.

The remarkable thing was that biography, by taking them out of their own lives into someone else’s, allowed them to do just that. It gave them a different kind of overview. I rewrote in my notebook: ‘Another person, another time, another place.’ Not as an act of therapy, but as a deliberate discipline. I remember one student saying she had reached ‘a new landing-point’ in her life. She had climbed the stairs, and ‘biography was the banister helping me up’. This was the woman whose husband was dying of cancer. She wrote a brilliant biographical essay on the marriage of the beautiful Venetia Stanley and the daring seventeenth-century sailor and adventurer Sir Kenelm Digby. It was one of the best things written during my entire time teaching the MA. It gave me new respect for Strachey’s claim about biography: ‘the most delicate and most humane of all the branches of the art of writing’.

4

Clearly, such neo-Romantic aspirations for teaching biography require an ironic postscript. So here are my Ten Commandments for any other practising biographers who are already bravely teaching in the postgraduate seminar rooms of life-writing (or of Life).

1 Thou shalt honour Biography as living, experimental, and multifarious in all its Forms.

2 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s Novel, for there are as many rooms in the Mansion of Non-Fiction as there are in the House of Fiction.

3 Thou shalt recognise that Biography is always at best a Celebration of Human Nature, and all its glorious Contradictions.

4 Thou shalt demand that it be greater than Gossip, because it is concerned with Historical Justice and Human Understanding.

5 Thou shalt require that it chronicles an outward story (the Facts) only to reveal an inward life (a Comprehensive Truth).

6 Thou shalt see that this Truth can be told, and re-examined, again and again unto each Generation.

7 Thou shalt greet it as a Life-giving form, as it is concerned with Human Struggle and the Creative Spirit, which we all share.

8 Thou shalt relish it as a Holiday for the Human Imagination – for it takes us away to another place, another time, and another Identity – where we can begin quietly to reflect on our own Lives and come back refreshed.

9 Thou shalt be immodestly Proud of it, as it is something that the English have given to the World, like cricket, and parliament, and the Full Cooked Breakfast.

10 And, lastly, thou shalt be Humble about it, for it demonstrates that we can never know, or write, the Last Word about the Human Heart.