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.
4