the one with whom we are concerned

Nothing much, but I've been reading the Virginia Woolf biography written by her nephew Quentin Bell and this anecdote seemed worth passing on:

M de l'Etang entered and died in the service of the Nawab of Oudh; he left three daughters. Adeline, the one with whom we are concerned, married a James Pattle who was, we are told, a quite extravagantly wicked man. He was known as the greatest liar in India; he drank himself to death; he was packed off home in a cask of spirits, which cask, exploding, ejected his unbottled corpse before his widow's eyes, drove her out of her wits, set the ship on fire and left it stranded in the Hooghly.

Bell adds,

The story has been told many times. Some parts of it may be true.

Bell's tone, which is simultaneously open, cheerful, sympathetic, and firm, glad to tell an amusing anecdote but also willing to check sources (the reader can see this in the footnotes and in occasional qualifications - as above), gives this biography its charm. Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead's biographer, said that a friend of hers went through her manuscript helping her to cross things out, tighten it, make it shorter, more exciting, but a rapid pace is not the solution, I think, to the problem of making a biography interesting. (I mean, aside from its subject matter. But this is not always enough. I was once bored by a biography of Edward Lear, a thing that should have been impossible. The subject was not boring; the voice was flat.)

Pace helps, but the biographer's voice is even more helpful, and this voice, if it's off, can't be fixed in the way that the length can be fixed, by trimming or reshaping: if it's wrong, it's wrong, and the only thing the biographer can do is get reborn as a different person and try to write the book again. One of the things that tickled me about Graham Robb's biography of Victor Hugo, was his ongoing grumble about the insufficient researches of past Victor Hugo biographers. He was dirty on them. How dare they laze around! This is Victor Hugo (Robb all but thundered). Important Victor Hugo! This was a biographer with character; he was also, obviously, in love with his subject. I liked Robb. I like Bell. I like Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens, which, in its manic accumulation of facts, reminds me strangely of the Anatomy of Melancholy. I'm looking forward to the Jenny Uglow biography of Elizabeth Gaskell, discovered at St. Vinnies for a dollar on Thursday, thick enough that when it fell off a shelf two evenings ago there was a thud that echoed through the house. "Long, exhilarating, and written with a recklessness that springs from affection for her subject," claims Fiona McCarthy of the Guardian, quoted on the back cover.

At the opposite extreme you have Sir John Hawkins, who must have thought he was going to go down in history as the first man to publish a substantial biography of Samuel Johnson but who instead became the ogre Boswell complained about in the introduction to his biography of Johnson, which is the one everybody knows.

Sir John Hawkins's ponderous labours, I must acknowledge, exhibit a farrago, of which a considerable portion is not devoid of entertainment to the lovers of literary gossiping; but besides its being swelled out with long unnecessary extracts from various works … what is still worse, there is throughout the whole of it a dark uncharitable cast, by which the most unfavourable construction is put upon almost every circumstance in the character and conduct of my illustrious friend; who, I trust, will, by a true and fair delineation, be vindicated … from the injurious misrepresentations of this authour

When the Hawkins biography was republished recently a review by Henry Power in the Times agreed.

Hawkins’s style is awkward, and the biography often reads as though it is being delivered from the Bench … He is sometimes insanely digressive, always “glad to escape to scenes more congenial to his disposition”, as the Critical Review put it. To give one example, an account of Johnson’s love of tea prompts Hawkins to wonder “what were the viands of a morning meal for people of condition, for which tea with its concomitants is now the substitute”. He is happily able to resolve the matter instantly, by reproducing the menu of a sixteenthcentury breakfast …

Which might not be so bad if not for this:

Hawkins … conveys an air of disapproval.

The kiss of death for a biography.

a considerable effort of resolution

On Wednesday, after months of guilty neglect, I wrote to M.'s mother. On Thursday, opening Boswell's Life of Johnson, which I'm reading now for the first time, I, almost immediately, came across this letter from the older man to the younger one:

Dear Sir,

You are not to think yourself forgotten, or criminally neglected, that you have had yet no letter from me. I love to see my friends, to hear from them, to talk to them, and to talk of them; but it is not without a considerable effort of resolution that I prevail upon myself to write. I would not, however, gratify my own indolence by the omission of any important duty, or any office of real kindness.

A little later (Boswell reports) Johnson is fretting in his private notes to himself, worried that he is not doing enough, that he is lazy. On Thursday, when I read this, I was doing the same thing, I was saying to myself, "You have this free time, you were going to do such-and-such, you were going to finish so-and-so, but here you are, reading a book, and sometimes wandering off to spray the mould on the grouting in the shower with vinegar and water. Is this the work you told yourself you were going to do? It is not."

Then, on Saturday, after coming to the end of Lisa's post about Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You By Chance, a book about a Nigerian man tempted by the email scam business, I opened Johnson and found myself looking at this:

The ferocity of our ancestors, as of all other nations, produced not fraud, but rapine. They had not yet learned to cheat, and attempted only to rob. As manners grow more polished, with the knowledge of good, men attain, likewise, dexterity in evil. Open rapine becomes less frequent, and violence gives way to cunning. Those who before invaded pastures and stormed houses, now begin to enrich themselves by unequal contracts and fraudulent intromissions.

It is not against the violence of ferocity, but the circumventions of deceit, that this law was framed; and, I am afraid, the increase of commerce, and the incessant struggle for riches, which commerce excites, give us no prospect of an end speedily to be expected of artifice and fraud.

The theme of spookiness has being doing the rounds of the blogs recently, thanks to the Stateside enthusiasm for Hallowe'en, but none of these coincidences seemed spooky, they were surprising but comforting, or not comforting exactly, but they gave me the impression that I was being spoken to, and being heard. At the same time I knew that I was not, and that I was only noticing these passages because ideas like them were running through my mind. If I'd read them at a different time they would have looked like nothing special. This is not Boswell or Johnson talking to me, this is me talking to myself, through the book, and recognising myself, reframed. Of course it's me. Who else is here? No one. And yet this recognition of solitude, which might have left me melancholy, left me pleased.

Proust once wrote:

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity …