'Everyone He Knew Something About'

A reader who enjoys the novels of Sinclair Lewis tells me she is put off by the length and dullness of Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography of the Nobel laureate. I haven’t read Lewis since high school and have never read Schorer’s 867-page behemoth but I sympathize. I remember reading Joseph Blotner’s two-volume, 2,115-page life of Faulkner when it was published in 1974. I was still smitten by Faulkner’s verbiage and endured both corpulent volumes. It was my first encounter with the vacuum cleaner school of biography, the indiscriminate sucking up of every available fact. 

There are alternatives. Publishers have often issued “brief lives.” I’ve read titles in the Yale University Press “Jewish Lives” series, for instance – King David, Irving Berlin, Alfred Dreyfus, Marcel Proust. Such efforts have a precursor: John Aubrey (1626-97), the English polymath, antiquarian, gossip and author of Brief Lives. Some of his lives are a single sentence long. Thomas Hobbes’ goes on for twenty pages. Aubrey’s mini-biographies are sketchy by modern standards, the opposite of Blotner & Co., but many are rich with human detail, seventeenth-century trivia that is often fascinating. Here in Andrew Marvell:

 

“He was of a middling stature, pretty strong sett, roundish faced, cherry cheek’t, hazell eie, browne haire. He was in his conversation very modest, and of very few words: and though he loved wine he would never drinke in company, and was wont to say that, ‘he would not play the good-fellow in any man’s company in whose hands he would not trust his life.’”

 

The membrane between biography, gossip and even fiction is highly permeable. Without gossip there would be no Duc de Saint-Simon, no Henry James, no Proust. Gossip is the opium of the masses, not religion. It’s as human as duplicity and usually a lot more fun. It can even be literature. Here is Aubrey on Sir John Denham, the Dublin-born poet and courtier:

 

“He was much rooked by gamesters, and fell acquainted with that unsanctified crew, to his ruine. His father had some suspition of it, and chid him severely, wherupon his son John (only child) wrot a little essay in 8vo, printed . . .  Against gameing and to shew the vanities and inconveniences of it, which he presented to his father, to let him know his detestation of it. But shortly after his father's death (who left £2,000 or 1,500 in ready money, 2 houses well furnished, and much plate) the money was played away first, and next the plate was sold.”

 

Even when we suspect Aubrey is enhancing the truth, we appreciate the effort: “Mr. William Shakespear was borne at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but when he kill’d a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech.”

 

Among Aubrey’s modern admirers is Elias Canetti. He modeled Earwitness: Fifth Characters (trans. Joachim Neugroschel, 1979) on Aubrey and Characters by Theophrastus, the fourth-century B.C. Greek who was a student of Aristotle. Here is Canetti writing in The Human Province (trans. Neugroschel, 1985), his collection of notebook jottings written between 1942 and 1972:

 

“John Aubrey, who, in the seventeenth century, saw people the way the most cunning writer does today. He recorded them in terse sentences, omitting nothing, adding nothing. He recorded everyone he knew something about. He did not take it upon himself to find them good or bad, he didn’t much care for preachers anyway.”