Thursday, September 29, 2022

Brief lives: John Aubrey



Lytton Strachey’s essay on John Aubrey ends with a maxim about biographies that gains from coming from the pen of a man who wrote biographies small – Eminent Victorians – and large – Queen Victoria: “A biography should either be as long as Boswell’s or as short as Aubrey\s. The method of enormous and elaborate accetion which produced the Life of Johnson is excellent no doubt; but, failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us have the pure essentials – a vivid image, on a page or two, without explanations, transitions, commentaries or padding.”
Aubrey’s Brief Lives are an instance of the death of the author as, really, the-death-of-the-author. They were jotted down and left in a pile at his death; they were meant for Aubrey’s own use, but, as well, as research material for that renowned Oxford asshole, Anthony a Wood. Wood, being the grumpy and supercilious man that he was, even managed to censor some of the book by removing forty pages of material – a disappearance that is still bitterly resented by Aubrey fans. Wood, having no fans, has no defenders. Such is the judgment of posterity.
Michael Hunter, in an essay on Aubrey, notices that the fate of the entire Brief Lives has been oddly haunted by bad luck - jinxed. “There was a real Gresham's Law at work here, and things were made worse by an extraordinary episode around 1970, when a complete scholarly edition of Brief Lives, running to over 1,800 pages, was prepared by the Clarendon Press at Oxford but was never published. This was the work of an American scholar, Edward McGehee, and it got as far as page proof, its imminent publication even being announced in the Press's house journal, The Periodical, in spring 1972. In fact, however, the edition was suppressed..”
The idea that either monumental accretion or the essential anecdote can “capture” a life is, as even a biographer would have to admit, delusional. The great gaping holes in biographies are occasionally pointed to by psychoanalytically oriented biographers – there is no excremental chapter in most lives, nor alimentary, nor, for the most part, sexual chapter. How a person combs her hair, brushes her teeth, forgets, is embarrassed, angry, cold, tired – this is novelwork, not biographywork.
“The happiness a shoemaker has in drawing on a fair lady's shoe; I know a man the height of whose ambition was to be apprenticed to his mistress's shoemaker on condition he could do so.” Thus, in one sentence, Sir Thomas Badd is finished – even if, like all Aubrey’s lives, there are always more blanks for filling in. This was part of his method – leaving paper blanks in his lives, which he would then fill in later.
So much depends on an anecdote. The pure essentials are often the grossest accidents. Life is full of Freudian slips, and this is where the story comes in. Aubrey has a great eye for these stories, although perhaps it is more accurate to say that his method of vacuuming up gossip (one of his correspondents called him Mister Gossip) often results in intersections of fate and character that have that “too good” air – surely circumstance cannot be so tidy! For instance, this is Aubrey’s story of the death of Sir Francis Bacon.
“Mr Hobbes told me that the cause of his lordship's death was trying of an experiment: viz, as he was taking the air in a coach with Dr Witherborne (a Scotchman, physician to the king) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment at once. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poor woman's house at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman gut it, and then stuffed the body with snow, and my lord did help to do it himself. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his lodgings (I suppose at Gray's Inn), but went to the Earl of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan, but it was a damp bed that had not been lain-in about a year before, which gave him such a cold that in two or three days, as I remember he [Mr Hobbes] told me, he died of suffocation.”
Among the deaths of the philosophers, surely this one ranks up there with Socrates’ death by hemlock.
One of Anthony Powell’s lesser known books is his life of Aubrey “and friends”. There are a great number of anecdotes in that book, and they make faster reading than many of the dinners recorded – those endless dinners! – in Dance to the Music of Time. Powell evidently saw a kindred spirit in John Aubrey. He was one of the great seventeenth century worthies – like Sir Thomas Browne and his friend, Robert Hooke – who are, in some odd way, representatives of a very English Dao.

No comments:

The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve

In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nar...