Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature (33 page)
[T]he Victorian biography was a parti-coloured, hybrid, monstrous birth. For though truth of fact was observed as scrupulously as Boswell observed it, the personality which Boswell’s genius set free was hampered and distorted … the Victorian biographer was dominated by the idea of goodness. Noble, upright, chaste, severe: it is thus that the Victorian worthies are presented to us.
48
And not only the
Victorian
worthies. Some Victorian biographers—Woolf singles out Sir Sidney Lee—contrived to write multivolume biographies, “worthy of all our respect,” books that are monumental “piles … of hard facts,” in effect noble and upright but irretrievably boring to read: “we can only explain the fact that Sir Sidney’s life of Shakespeare is dull, and that his life of Edward the Seventh is unreadable, by supposing that both are stuffed with truth, although he failed to choose those truths which transmit personality.”
49
Woolf is here teasing Sidney Lee with a phrase of his own design—“The aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality”—with which she begins her own essay, only to suggest that the two elements, truth and personality, are extremely difficult to “weld into one seamless whole,” which is why “biographers for the most part have failed” to do so.
50
Lee’s life of Shakespeare is 776 pages long; his biography of Edward VII ran to two volumes. This scrupulous heft, detail piled on detail in the service of “truth,” was increasingly typical, indeed, increasingly expected. “The conscientious biographer may not tell a fine tale with a flourish but must toil through endless labyrinths and embarrass himself with countless documents.”
51
The method, however painstaking, strikes her as exhibiting “prodigious waste” and “artistic wrongheadedness.” One of the virtues of the “new biography,” as Woolf goes on to describe it, is that it is, in contrast, relatively brief, pithy, and lively.
We might pause for a moment to reflect upon Woolf’s choice of Sidney Lee as the epitome of the achievements and problems of Victorian biography. Lee, born Solomon Lazarus Lee, was a close friend and associate of Woolf’s father and succeeded him in 1891 as the editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography
. Leslie Stephen was not only an editor
but a prolific biographer, author of books on Pope, Swift, Hobbes, Samuel Johnson, and George Eliot. He died in 1904; Lee lived until 1926; Woolf’s essay was written in 1927. In selecting Sidney Lee as the antitype of the new biography, Woolf both sidesteps and sideswipes her father’s work and his demands, upon which she reflected in her diary a year later, on his birthday (November 28): “His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.”
In writing about the “new biography” Woolf thus resolutely turns a page between the past and the present, the parental generation and her own. “With the twentieth century,” she says,
a change came over biography, as it came over fiction and poetry. The first and most visible sign of it was in the difference in size. In the first twenty years of the new century biographies must have lost half their weight. Mr. Strachey compressed four stout Victorians into one slim volume
[Eminent Victorians];
Mr. Maurois boiled the usual two volumes of a Shelley life into one little book the size of a novel. But the diminution in size was only the outward token of an inward change. The point of view had completely altered. If we open one of the new school of biographies its bareness, its emptiness makes us at once aware that the author’s relation to his subject is different. He is no longer the serious and sympathetic companion, toiling even slavishly in the footsteps of his hero. Whether friend or enemy, admiring or critical, he is an equal … He chooses; he synthesizes; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist.
52
We might think that this opens the door to the self-fictionalizing abuses of the faux memoir. But Woolf has something different in mind; she is fairly ferocious about the importance of “the substance of fact.” Where she wants the biographer to act like a novelist is in the matter of style, not in embroidery or speculation: “the biographer’s imagination is always being stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life. Yet if he carries the use
of fiction too far, so that he disregards the truth, or can only introduce it with incongruity, he loses both worlds; he has neither the freedom of fiction nor the substance of fact.” Mixing the worlds “of Bohemia and Hamlet and Macbeth” with the world “of brick and pavement; of birth, marriage, and death; of Acts of Parliament,” etc. is “abhorrent.”
53
So what is literary about biography to Virginia Woolf is the complicated freedom of the biographer in the matter of writing. Not in making things up, but in making them vivid and in establishing equality with the subject from the point of view of—point of view. Woolf herself uses an early version of unmarked notes in
Flush
, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. The dramatic (or melodramatic) last line of one chapter reads, “He was stolen.”
… suddenly, without a word of warning, in the midst of civilisation, security and friendship—he was in a shop in Vere Street with Miss Barrett and her sister; it was the morning of Tuesday the 1st of September—Flush was tumbled head over heels into darkness. The doors of a dungeon shut on him. He was stolen.
54
In Woolf’s text—unlike, alas, in mine—no superscript note is present to mar the stark drama of the moment. But the event related is verified and qualified by a deadpan unmarked note at the back of the book:
P. 82: “He was stolen.” As a matter of fact, Flush was stolen three times; but the unities seem to require that the three stealings shall be compressed into one. The total sum paid by Miss Barrett to the dog-stealers was £20.
55
What was new about the new biography, as performed by writers like Lytton Strachey (and by Woolf) was its combination of rigorous scholarship, psychological insight, and wit.
Strachey’s narrative style subsumed the scholarship into an apparently seamless narrative. Although there are no identifying notes after each character’s utterances or inner thoughts, Strachey follows his sources very closely. Consider this wryly empathetic passage from
Queen
Victoria
(1921), in which Strachey describes the situation of Prince Albert:
The husband was not so happy as the wife. In spite of the great improvement in his situation, in spite of a growing family and the adoration of Victoria, Albert was still a stranger in a strange land, and the serenity of spiritual satisfaction was denied him. It was something, no doubt, to have dominated his immediate environment; but it was not enough; and besides, in the very completeness of his success, there was a bitterness. Victoria idolized him; but it was understanding that he craved for, not idolatry; and how much did Victoria, filled to the brim though she was with him, understand him? How much does the bucket understand the well? He was lonely. He went to his organ and improvised with learned modulations until the sounds, swelling and subsiding through elaborate cadences, brought some solace to his heart. Then, with the elasticity of youth, he hurried off to play with the babies, or to design a new pigsty, or to read aloud the “Church History of Scotland” to Victoria, or to pirouette before her on one toe, like a ballet-dancer, with a fixed smile, to show her how she ought to behave when she appeared in public places.
56
The brilliance of this account lies at least in part in its artful use of free indirect discourse, in which the thoughts and even the speech of characters are communicated to the reader in a reportorial mode, so that it remains unclear whether the sentiments are those of the narrator or of the first-person subject. The term derives from the French style
indirect libre
, and one of its pioneering practitioners in France was Flaubert. The effect of this style—a style expertly employed in English by writers like Woolf and Joyce—is to produce ironic disjunction and implicit commentary at the same time that it offers an opportunity for narrative identification with fictional or historical characters. Strachey’s delicately ironic empathy with the prince consort, like Woolf’s empathy with the dog Flush, slides into and out of Albert’s consciousness while always tethering itself to verifiable details. A prefatory note, appearing opposite the dedication page (“To Virginia Woolf”), informs the reader that “Authority for every important statement of fact in the following pages
will be found in the footnotes. The full titles of the works to which reference is made are given in the Bibliography at the end of the volume.” A footnote to this passage cites three pages from the
Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttelton
.
Strachey’s descriptions and impressions are not speculations, as is often the case in twenty-first-century biography (the subject “might” have thought such-and-such, or he “could” have thought; or, cloaked in the form of a rhetorical question, “Did” he think, or “Might he have” thought …). Instead, Strachey draws his dialogue directly from letters and other written accounts. To give some sense of how he does this, I want to quote briefly from these letters. You will see both how close he is to the source, inventing no detail, and how the conversion from a third-person account to free indirect discourse brings the subject (as we so easily say) “to life.”
Here, then, is an excerpt from Lady Lyttelton’s letter to the Hon. Caroline Lyttelton, Windsor Castle, October 9, 1840:
Yesterday evening, as I was sitting here comfortably after the drive, reading M. Guizot, suddenly there arose from the rooms beneath oh such sounds! It was Prince Albert—dear Prince Albert—playing on the organ, and with such master skill as it appeared to me, modulating so learnedly, winding through every kind of bass and chord, till he wound up into the most perfect cadence and then off again, louder and softer … I ventured at dinner to ask him what I had heard. “Oh, my organ!—a new possession of mine. I am so fond of the organ! It is the first of instruments—the only for expressing one’s feelings—and it teaches to plan—for on the organ, a
mistake!
Oh, such a misery!” and he quite shuddered at the thought of the
sostenudo
discord …
57
And there is this, from a letter five years later, September 22, 1845, reporting that Lady Lyttelton had, in “a fit of courage,” spoken frankly to the queen and prince about how Victoria was perceived on a recent trip abroad:
The Prince advised her (on her saying, like a good child, “What
am
I to do another time?”) to behave like an opera-dancer after a pirouette, and always show all her teeth in a fixed smile. Of course, he accompanied the advice with an immense pirouette and prodigious grin of his own, such as few people could perform after dinner without being sick, ending on one foot and t’other in the air …
58
And finally, from a letter yet another five years later (July 22, 1850), which finds Lady Lyttelton once again musing on her reading, this time from the royal residence at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, when she is interrupted by the sound of Albert at the organ:
—Last evening
such
a sunset! I was sitting gazing at it and thinking of Lady Charlotte Proby’s verses, when from an open window below this floor began suddenly to sound the Prince’s
orgue expressif
, played by his masterly hand. Such a modulation, minor and solemn, and ever changing, and never ceasing, from a piano like Jenny Lind’s holding note, up to the fullest swell, and still the same “fine vein of melancholy”! And it came in so exactly as an accompaniment to the sunset. How strange he is! He must have been playing just while the Queen was finishing her toilette. And then he went to cut jokes and eat loads at dinner, and nobody but the organ knows what is
in him
—except, indeed, by the look of his eyes sometimes.…
59
These letters are delicious period pieces, and they show Lady Lyttelton’s continuing fondness for “dear Prince Albert.” But what is so striking is the way Strachey selects his details from this wealth of correspondence (scrupulously footnoting each) and resists distraction. Lady Lyttelton, so tempting an epistolary subject, disappears; what is retained, pared down, and made significant are the evidences of Albert’s musical solace, domestic liveliness, and private melancholy. In a passage of two hundred words, the biographer distills material gleaned from letters that span ten years of the royal marriage.
Strachey made his reputation on two biographies, both Victorian in subject matter though emphatically not in style.
Eminent Victorians
, his
brief but telling narratives of the lives of Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, Cardinal Manning, and General Gordon (the “four stout Victorians” wittily described in Woolf’s essay) was a bombshell and an instant success.
Queen Victoria
, a few years later, secured both his reputation and his income. As Woolf wrote in her essay “The Art of Biography,” “Anger and laughter mixed; and editions multiplied.”
60
Here is Strachey’s own account of Victorian biography and its discontents, from the preface to
Eminent Victorians:
… the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.
61
For Strachey, “the first duty of the biographer” is to preserve “a becoming brevity—a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,” and the second duty, “no less significant,” is “to maintain his own freedom of spirit.”
62
He considers his job “to lay bare the facts of the case,” not to extrapolate or fantasize. He appends a list of principal sources at the end of each biography in
Eminent Victorians
. His art is in the arrangement of details, and in letting the telling detail speak. Although his book has been described as ironic, he calls it dispassionate and impartial. Often the wit inheres in what he does not say.
