Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  The White Bull was written when Voltaire was seventy-nine, and has the feeling of a will and testament. As in many of the later stories, it conjures a fantastic world where bigots rule, innocents travel, and animals speak the truth. In this case the beautiful Princess Amasida (who has read Locke’s On Understanding) has fallen tenderly in love with a large white bull (who is really the young King Nebuchadnezzar). She is trying to save both him and herself from execution by the religious authorities, who fanatically disapprove. Amasida succeeds, and the last chapter is entitled, ‘How the Princess Married her Ox’.

  The story is unusual in that it contains a mocking self-portrait of Voltaire as the Princess’s faithful companion, the philosopher Mambres, ‘a former magus and eunuch to the Pharaohs’, who is ‘about thirteen hundred years old’. Mambres gives exquisite dinners (‘carp’s tongue tart, liver of turbot and pike, chicken with pistachios’) and dispenses wisdom. In his ironic, absent-minded fashion, Mambres succeeds in averting various catastrophes for the Princess and her Bull, and finally sees that the monstrous creature gets changed back into the handsome young king. ‘This latest metamorphosis astonished everybody, apart from the meditative Mambres … who returned to his Palace to think things over.’ To his great satisfaction he hears the people shouting, ‘Long live our great King, who is no longer dumb!’

  It would be too much to expect Voltaire to die quietly and meditatively at Ferney. Instead, he decided on one last assault on Paris. He succeeded in taking his native city by storm, not once, but twice. Once, while he was dying; the second time when he was dead. In 1778, in the spring of his eighty-fourth year, he attended a performance of his last tragedy, Irène, at the Comédie Française, and satin on a session of the Académie. Both occasions were a personal triumph. Over three hundred distinguished visitors called on him, where he was staying at the Marquise de Villette’s hôtel, now 27 quai Voltaire (on the corner of the rue de Beaune, with the restaurant Voltaire serving ‘Candide cocktails’ on the ground floor).

  But amid this public glory, Voltaire was exhausted, and in the privacy of his bedroom spitting blood. He died in much pain on May 30, 1778. He had received a Jesuit priest in his dying hours, whom he seems to have teased, as in the old days: on being urged to renounce the devil, Voltaire gently replied, ‘This is no time for making new enemies.’ But to the relief of Enlightenment Europe, he refused to renounce any of his works. His body was smuggled out to a secret burying place in the Champagne region.

  Thirteen years later, in July 1791, Voltaire came storming back posthumously. He was reburied as a hero of the Revolution in the crypt of the Paris Pantheon: and there (unlike many of his temporary cohabitants) his monument has always remained. The modern inscription – probably written by André Malraux – describes him as one of ‘the spiritual fathers’ of France, and as ‘the immortal symbol of the Age of Enlightenment’. His marble statue, with a quill in one hand, and a sword beneath his foot, grins at that too.

  Far above him, in the nave of the Pantheon, a curious law of physics is at work. The stonework of the great eighteenth-century vault has become unstable, and chunks of masonry are imploding on to the hallowed floors beneath. Safety nets have been set up, and the public are warned to keep clear. The authorities announce that they are making investigations. But they do not yet know the cause of this disturbance in the great structure. Perhaps it is a conte philosophique.

  VII

  Homage to the Godfather

  INTRODUCTION

  FELIX QUI POTUIT rerum cognoscere causas. These words from Lucretius were inscribed above the gateway of my College in Cambridge. ‘Happy the man who knows the causes (the origins) of things.’ It was the motto for a scientific community – Churchill College was a modern foundation, which contained by statute a minimum of 70 per cent science undergraduates, and its culture was open-minded, democratic, iconoclastic to a degree. As one of its few arts undergraduates, vigorously defended by the nuclear energy of Professor George Steiner, I breathed in a pioneering atmosphere of excitement and questioning.

  Here I first looked at the blue mountains of the moon through an enormous reflector telescope, saw molecules of human body tissue on the glowing screen of an electron microscope, and heard the passionate arguments about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. All life could be seen as exploration, an endless search for cause, shape and meaning. And I now think that Lucretius’s motto would do very well for biographers, who are dedicated to the search for the human causas after their own fashion. But that, of course, is an incorrigibly Romantic view.

  I often wish I had met James Boswell in a tutorial, as you will see in my last piece. Any attempt to explain the origins and workings of English biography must eventually lead back to him. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. is our foundation text, our Principia or Old Testament; and he is our prophet. His great book is in fact astonishingly unorthodox: a mighty chronicle which is also an intimate conversation in a back parlour, an eighteenth-century Grand Tour of the Johnsonian landscape which is simultaneously a profound Romantic study in friendship. There are few experimental techniques that Boswell has not already tried. His subtle layerings of autobiography upon biography, dramatized dialogues upon sober documentation, reverence upon mockery, are still an instruction and exhilaration to behold. Perhaps it is only the youthful Johnson, the uncertain young man in the dark city, long before Boswell had encountered him as the bear-like sage in Davies’ bookshop in Covent Garden, that somehow slips through his capacious net. It was this shadowy time that I tried to recapture myself in Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, a further investigation of the strange byways of biography and friendship.

  But to do Boswell himself justice was another matter. What proper form could be found to salute the master? I have tried many times, and here at the last I offer just three versions, each in its own way provisional and unsatisfactory. The first is a formal celebration of the bicentenary of his great Life, which attempts to trace the immediate impact of his work, and then follow something of its repercussions down to our own day. It is also a modest defence of biography itself, a claim that the genre Boswell founded, the multifarious family that he godfathered is – despite all doubts and objections – more than ever alive and kicking.

  The second, ‘Boswell Among the Tulips’ might be described as a floral tribute. Here is a glimpse of Boswell in his salad days, romping through the flatlands of Holland, solitary and yet gregarious, melancholy and yet madcap, learning his métier. His discovery of biography is also a discovery of his own heart, and if he does not quite fall in love with the clever, contradictory Zélide, she teaches him something of self-knowledge without which there can be no human understanding, no true empathy, at all. His tall cathedral tower still stands in Utrecht, and looking down you can still see the roads and tracks and canals stretching far away into the mist, as if they might go on for ever in every direction, busy with life and movement, glinting and then gone.

  And what shall I say of ‘Dr Johnson’s First Cat’? Nothing, except that it was written for the radio, when I was asked if a biographer had ever been known to tell the truth.

  BOSWELL’S BICENTENARY

  FIOGRAPHY, LIKE LOVE, begins in passionate curiosity. Where it ends – or should end – has become a matter of some dispute, in the current bookshop boom of sales and advances. In fact the British, with their bristling sense of privacy, have long been a nation of biographers; and if there really is a boom in the form, it began exactly 200 years ago with the publication of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D on 16 May 1791. The two enormous quarto volumes sold out in eighteen months, and earned its author spectacular profits of £1,555 18s 2d, bringing praise and condemnation with equal extravagance.

  Boswell is the godfather of English biography, in both the literary and the mafia sense. He championed the art, and he launched the business. No one before him had reconstructed another life on such an epic scale (modern editions run to 1,500 pages), or with such relentless, brilliant inti
macy. He spent nearly twenty years on the research (unveiling his project to Johnson by degrees in 1782), and six years in the writing up of materials after Johnson’s death in 1784. He persisted obsessively through periods of extreme depression, alcoholism (and worse, teetotalism), and the death of his beloved wife Margaret. He wrote up thousands of pages of conversations recorded in his private Journals; collected hundreds of letters; interviewed bishops, actresses, philosophers, booksellers, blue-stockings, childhood friends and household servants. (Johnson’s black servant Francis Barber was sent a detailed Questionnaire; while Johnson’s confidante Mrs Desmoulins was carefully cross-questioned about cuddling-sessions in Hampstead.) Boswell deftly explored Johnson’s lifelong melancholia, delving deep in his private Diaries, Prayers and Annals. He minutely observed the Great Cham’s nervous tics and religious terrors, his Rabelaisian eating habits, his fondness for cats.

  Finally he wrote proudly in his Preface: ‘I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived. And he will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life.’ This, in effect, was the manifesto of modern biography.

  In one of his moments of manic optimism, Boswell even considered applying for a royal endorsement, ‘By Appointment to His Majesty, Biographer of Samuel Johnson’, for the 2nd edition title-page, as if his work was a pot of successful marmalade on the breakfast tables of le tout monde.

  In fact reactions to his labours were divided in a way now familiar to modern biographers. Dr Charles Burney, the distinguished musicologist, considered he had achieved a noble work of memorial art, as Xenophon had done for Socrates. While Mrs Barbauld, the novelist, reckoned he had produced a fascinating but cheap piece of popular gossip: ‘It is like going to Ranelagh pleasure-gardens; you meet all your acquaintance: but it is a base and mean thing to bring thus every idle word into judgement.’

  Modern doubts about biography – particularly raised by the peculiar form of anti-hagiography, as in recent ‘celebrity lives’ of Picasso, John Lennon and Nancy Reagan (polemics as unreliable as panegyricks) – run much along these lines. The biographer is seen as a type of predator, grave-snatcher, or gossip driven by commercial instincts; the stock-in-trade is betrayal, invasion of privacy and superficial scandal; the biographical method is shallow, and can say little about the deep springs of character, or the profoundly inward process of the creation of a work of art; and biography, so flourishing in Britain, is at best a productive part of the heritage industry, a pungent but malodorous mushroom of the nostalgia culture. In short, the ‘boom’ is a hollow, passing drum, beaten by industrious clowns.

  Well, maybe some of it is. But the bicentenary of Boswell’s masterpiece – which has remained one of the most widely read and reprinted books in the English language – should give us pause for reflection. Why is biography so popular? Why does it, at best, seem to fulfil Dr Johnson’s own epitome of fine literature, that balances entertainment with instruction, and helps us the better to enjoy life or to endure it? And indeed why did Johnson himself, no literary lightweight, consistently say that biography was the part of literature that he ‘loved best’?

  Boswell seems to me to have bequeathed to us not a technique of exploitation, but an idea – even an ideal – of truth-telling. Conceived within a calm, noble culture of Augustan Enlightenment – ‘the proper study of mankind, is man’ – it has burnt ever more brightly in the dark sturm und drang that has followed. In our own age of scepticism, discredited ideologies and disabling self-doubt, the possibility and the desirability of knowing our fellow man and woman – how we ‘really are’ (beyond the masks of fame, ‘success’, obscurity, or even ordinariness), the worst and the best – has remained extraordinarily constant. And biography has gradually become a prime instrument, a major artistic form, of that essentially humane, courageous and curiously cheering epistemology.

  It has certainly been a gradual arrival. Boswell did not, with rare exceptions, convert the Victorians, even though his book was almost canonized by Macaulay and Carlyle in famous essays. Instead, the protectionism of the ‘authorized’ biographer, like Dickens’s friend John Forster or Arnold’s one-time pupil A. P. Stanley, drew a cloak of respectability and family pieties around the eminent subject. It hardened, as Edmund Gosse (significantly, an inspired autobiographer) observed, into the marbled monuments of multi-volumed ‘Life and Letters’, massive, shapeless, stainless and sepulchrally concealing. Forster, for example, only once mentions in his thousand pages the name of Ellen Ternan, Dickens’s intimate companion for over a decade, now herself the subject of a wonderfully revealing, tender biography by Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman. Indeed, Victorian biography, in the hands of Sir Leslie Stephen, ended by erecting a Great Wall of China, the DNB, around the outposts of public truth-telling: thus far and no further may civil knowledge go.

  Of course there were exceptions – notably Mrs Gaskell’s vividly empathetic Life of Charlotte Brontë (one novelist upon another); or Froude’s grimly honest exposé of – ironically – Carlyle’s own marriage. And Victorian biography is at last beginning to receive study, in the work of A. O. J. Cockshut, or the recent Clark Lectures of Christopher Ricks. One can now see how its very restrictions have, paradoxically, given modern biographers something to work against; in William St Clair’s striking analogy, like huge archaeological sites to be patiently re-dug and redefined, down through layer upon layer of silted deceptions.

  But perhaps Boswell’s first true heir was Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians (1918) – four short lives of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold and General Gordon, each elegantly pierced and mocked – breached the Great Wall of respectability for ever. It was the end of Empire in several ways. Strachey was perhaps less of a truth-teller, than a destroyer of illusions and a liberator of forms. What he released was a generation of brilliant experimenters in biographical narrative, who at last began to ask how can lives be genuinely reconstructed: what is memory, what is time, what is character, what is ‘evidence’ in a human story?

  Thus Virginia Woolf (daughter of Stephen, or ‘rebellious daughter of DNB’, as Julia Briggs called her) wondered how to describe the twenty or so personalities a single life may contain. She produced a fictional biography of her friend Vita Sackville-West, covering several centuries and a change of sex, in Orlando; and presented the Browning household through the biography of Elizabeth Barrett’s dog, Flush.

  A. J. A. Symons made the biographical chase itself the subject of his eccentric, dandified The Quest for Corvo. Harold Nicolson described his early intimates – from an infuriated governess to an unflappable Lord Curzon – in the manner of Chekhovian short stories, in Some People; he demystified the lordly Poet Laureate in Tennyson; and wrote one of the pioneering studies of the whole form in The Development of English Biography, in which Boswell is praised as a cinematographer. Maurice Baring invented ‘lost’ letters and diaries in his Unreliable Histories, and suggested intriguing versions of ‘alternative lives’, including Shelley retiring as Tory MP for Horsham, and Coleridge completing his ‘epic Kubla Khan’ in fifteen volumes at the age of eighty.

  Many other writers, such as the ex-actor Hesketh Pearson, contributed to this flexing and exercising of Boswell’s grand ideal. What it meant was that the monumental form lost its rigidity, and was recognized at last as a subtle, responsive art, as various as the lives it contained.

  Our own generation has seen literary biography especially, freed of Victorian inhibitions, rise to power as a virtually new genre. Its early landmarks are now clear: Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey, Robert Gittings’ John Keats, George Painter’s Proust, Hilary Spurling’s Ivy Compton Burnett, among others. They are the work of scholar-artists, totally committed to both painstaking research and polished story-telling, often over many years.

  One enters these great biographies, as into entire worlds of historical r
e-creation, having the human density of large novels peopled by many characters, and yet focused upon the single, minutely documented experience of an actual life. They contain extraordinary richness and conviction; they shimmer with innumerable points of living light. At their heart often lie mysterious, contradictory tragi-comedies – perhaps of all modes, the most modern, the most immediate, the most true to our perceptions of how things are. And in this range, touch and tonality, they most clearly and directly rival Boswell, the first master.

  The appeal of such a genre, to a wide public, has also become more evident than perhaps it was to Boswell’s startled contemporaries. The partial collapse of the large, naturalistic novel – precisely the form invented by Boswell’s peers like Fielding and Richardson, and continued from Dickens to Lawrence – has left an immense hunger for the large, naturalistic biography, with its solid, architectural colonnade of beginning, middle, end. (Peter Ackroyd has remarked that his highly successful Dickens was originally conceived in the exact form of such a Victorian novel.) A similar collapse of academic literary criticism into the dry ruins of deconstructionism, has left the old, humane Arnoldian form of commentary at the disposal of biographers and their readers. Jon Stallworthy, both academic and biographer, superbly deployed this critical tradition in his Wilfred Owen, a matchless account of the war poet; and recently observed that the finest critical work on Joyce remains Ellmann’s Life.

  At another level, much modern biography has something of the inescapable tension, and steady unfolding, of the classical detective story: with the psychological promise of some sort of ‘revelation’ (not of a crime solved, but of a human mystery – at least partially – resolved). The resolution often appears not in narrative, but in figurative form, which a skilled biographer can sometimes give with almost poetic force. Boswell had already divined this art, and central to his revelation of Johnson’s innermost struggles, is not a conversational exchange, but an embattled image.