The cardinal problems of biography: to what extent can or should one tell the truth

When I began to write again, I thought that I had better start by trying my hand at biography. I knew that I had neither the creative imagination nor the sharp ear for dialogue which produces good novels; I had long ago given up the hope of becoming a poet. I lacked the historian’s training which I might have obtained if—as I had wished at eighteen—my mother had allowed me to go to Oxford, instead of ‘coming out’. But for many years I had preferred memoirs and letters to any other form of reading, and I hoped that I might perhaps have a certain aptitude for observing and assembling the different parts of a character and a life until they came together into a pattern, giving a man what Virginia Woolf called ‘a kind of shape after his death’.

My first subject I found made to my hand: a life of Leopardi, about whom at that time no study existed in English, except an interesting essay by James Thomson and the scholarly Introduction to the translation of his works by G. L. Bickersteth. Leopardi— apart from being one of the greatest Italian poets—was an almost ideal subject for a biography in the thirties, especially for a generation whose taste had been formed by Strachey and Maurois, by Harold Nicolson and Virginia Woolf. He was young, deformed, lonely, ambitious and embittered; he lived in an old-fashioned, pious family of the noblesse de province in a little town of the Marches, and violently rebelled both against the rule of his parents and the restrictions of his environment; he was extremely articulate, setting down his loneliness, his grief, his contempt for his fellow citizens, his longings for friendship and love and his literary aspirations, in what eventually turned into five volumes of letters, as well as in the seven volumes of his daybook, Lo Zibaldone. ‘In depicting his despair and total disenchantment’—the phrase is his own—‘he drew the colours from his own heart.’

Moreover he belonged to a closed society into which English travellers have seldom penetrated (his contemporary, Byron, was perhaps the first to do so, but that was through his mistress) and about which they have consequently felt very curious. ‘You must have wondered’, wrote Basil de Selincourt in one of the first reviews of my book, ‘what went on in the huge rooms of the seemingly unoccupied palazzi . . . Here is a book that will put the key of the mystery into your hands.’

It is to these circumstances that I attribute the considerable success—perhaps greater than it deserved—of my first book. Its chief merit, it now seems to me, was the fullness with which I quoted from my subject’s letters and notebooks. For while I read those letters myself—sometimes long-winded and self-pitying, but often unendurably poignant—a man had indeed taken shape for me, whom I came to know better than most of my friends and to whom I wished to offer the only tribute that a biographer can pay to his subject—to tell (in so far as is possible) the truth about him.

This has always been one of the cardinal problems of biography: to what extent can or should one tell the truth—and what, indeed, is the truth about any of us? The second question is the more difficult one to answer. ‘The world will never know my life’, said Carlyle (and the words stand on the first page of his Life by his closest friend, Froude) ‘even if it should write and read a hundred biographies of me. The main facts of it are known, and are likely to be known, to myself alone, of all created men.’ Not only are there facts that we do not tell, but some that we ourselves do not know; at best, some small facet of the truth occasionally catches the light, and it is that which the biographer must try to seize. ‘For there is’, as Virginia Woolf remarked, ‘a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.’1

1.Granite and Rainbow, p. 149: ‘The New Biography’.

Iris Origo
Images and Shadows

On Orwell:

Some years earlier he had made an unfortunate and unwelcome pass at another woman. This episode is documented by the editor with embarrassing precision—at which point readers might remember Orwell’s hostility to the very concept of biography (“every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats too humiliating and disgraceful to contemplate”). Do biographers, however serious and scrupulous, really need or have the right to explore and disclose such intimate details? Yet we still read them. Is it right for us to do so? These questions are not rhetorical: I honestly do not know the answer.

Simon Leys