PRINCIPLE THREE: The mixed economy of meaning - the Writer as Interpreter - Getting to grips with reality
How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality.
Wallace Stevens
Having looked at the Eeyores of literature, I reckon it’s high time we examined those writers who view the plasticity of the perceived world as an opportunity rather than a threat. These are the writers who regard literature as a joint venture between their creativity and what’s already been created, and who aren’t afraid to play with reality in order to create what they feel their art demands of them. So reality becomes their starting point: they neither want to dominate it completely like those writers in Principle 1, nor are overly worried that an element of indeterminacy or invention will wreck their meaning like those in Principle 2.
And the writers who fall into Principle 3 constitute an incredibly broad church, covering genres as diverse as formal biography all the way through to Modernist poetry. But what they share is a fundamental impatience with the relationship between art and reality, usually coupled with an ambition, whether they publicly acknowledge it or not, to leave their imprint on their chosen material. For them, the key issues are either (or both) that;
Þ there’s not enough reality to satisfy their ambitions, so they have to embellish reality by “sexing it up” ;
Þ there’s too much reality for their art to cope with, in which case they have to explore new ways to represent it within the formal limitations imposed by literature;
Both groups reckon reality needs a bit of help from art to create meaning, whether that help takes the form of invention (in the first group) or technique (in the second).
We’ll get low down and dirty with this second group in Principle 4 of this section, but now let’s start by looking at the first group, who, despite their frustration with reality, keep at least one foot firmly planted in it. So we’ll quickly examine the art of writing biography.
Meaning Line, please;
Meaning-----------------------------------------------------------Significance
Accuracy Invention
I’m choosing biography, but I could equally focus on history, or indeed any discipline which is reliant on accuracy for its perceived success. So you’d think that biography belonged on the far left of our Meaning Line; if you’re writing someone’s life, it doesn’t do to make things up or you’re misrepresenting the way things actually happened (and, if your subject’s still alive, they can sue you if they don’t like the way you’re portraying them). But this is precisely, of course, what biographers do ALL THE TIME, and you’d have to be incredibly naive to believe they don’t. In fact, biography is an excellent touchstone for any study of meaning, since the aesthetic principles underlying it encompass a number of our Big Themes, including # 2, High & Low Meaning and # 1, Truth & Lies. And it all has to do with the desire to make reality more interesting than it actually is (or was).
Andre Maurois (whose biography of Shelley, as we’ve seen, was the first Penguin book to be published), put his finger on the button when he wrote;
It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: 'What is he thinking?' and he knows nothing.
If you want to keep up with Sir Robert Peel’s contributions to Parliamentary debates, read Hansard.
But you wouldn’t pick it up willingly, because it’s merely a transcript of the proceedings in the House. And that’s not sufficient to sustain most peoples’ interest. But the novelist, or indeed the creative biographer, can climb inside Peel’s head and try to inform us what he was thinking while he was making those speeches. He’s got no way of knowing for sure (was it a momentous historical thought or wondering what he was having for dinner that evening?), but, using the facts he does have, he can work out a likely explanation (which, of course, is part of Big Theme #4, Accidental vs Intentional Meaning). He can propose a solution consistent with the facts he already knows to be verifiable. And once again, we can turn to Virginia Woolf for a pithy summation of this habit;
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
“The creative fact” is a wonderful phrase Woolf uses to describe that which animates dull bits of a life. And it’s what made James Boswell’s biography of Dr Johnson published in 1791 not only revolutionary for its time, but also a candidate for one of the greatest biographies ever written.
In Johnson’s time (and let’s not forget he too was an excellent biographer), biography was an emerging genre, but was most commonly cast in the form of a moral tale for the guidance of others. Johnson’s own ‘Life of Savage’ was an account of how a talented man could be dragged down by a combination of bad luck of personal foibles. Johnson picked up this tradition and ran with it, but added touches of realism which, to some, seemed disrespectful to the dead; “If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit down in despondency, and think it impossible to imitate them in any thing,” Johnson wrote in his defence. And this rubbed off on Boswell. “I profess to write,” he said of his magnum opus, “not his panegyric, but his Life”. These guys were keeping it real two hundred years before The Fugees.
But this wasn’t all Boswell learned from his subject. In an essay for ‘The Rambler’, Johnson opined;
[Biographers] . . . rarely afford any other account than might be collected from the public papers, when they exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments; and to have so little regard for the manners or behaviour of their heroes, that more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral.
Exactly. The telling detail. But to be privy to these telling details, this body of anecdotal evidence, you not only had to be there (or know someone who was), you had to be an accurate stenographer. Which of course was one of Boswell’s most singular talents. But even Boswell’s memory sometimes let him down, or he wasn’t in a position to record a Johnsonian bon mot as it emerged lest he break the rules of propriety; after all, how would you like it if someone was following you around with a notebook jotting down everything you’d said?
And this was what damned Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ in the eyes of many of its early readers - the almost indecent intrusion into the personal life of its central figure. Boswell’s portrait was so all-encompassing that it was almost too real - there was a little too much information for the morally squeamish. It’s like being told that the Queen uses the toilet - we know she must do, but it’s somehow distasteful to record the fact.
Yet there were some who recognized the book for the ground-breaking achievement that it is; the painter and scientist James Elford was on the right lines when he wrote to Boswell that he hadn’t simply described Johnson, but “exhibited” him, and that this was a “perfectly new” way of tackling biography.
It’s only with the publication of Boswell’s letters and journals that we’ve been able to discover just how much of the Life was inferred; although notoriously scrupulous with the factual content, Boswell could gloss and extrapolate as well as any fiction writer. For the first time, it was possible to see that the book was far more than a simple record of what Johnson had done or said - it was carefully planned, structured and edited to show the incredible source material he had gathered to its best advantage.
Until this new evidence began to trickle out, editors had felt perfectly entitled to fillet, bowdlerize, abridge and generally mangle the Life; George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s lover, was one such vandal in his avowed aim to delete the “thin soup of Boswellian narrative” leaving only “the solid meat of Johnson” on the plate. But by the end of the 19th century, a radical re-assessment of Boswell’s achievement saw the Life being considered as not just a collection of observations, but a crafted work of literature. George Birkbeck Hill, himself a Johnson biographer, complained that only a “blockhead . . . could with scissors and paste-pot have mangled the biography which of all others is the delight and the boast of the English-speaking world.”
And so it finally came to be acknowledged, after a century of misunderstanding, that the facts of biography could be “creative” and still be, essentially, truthful to their subject. We weren’t quite at the point reached by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset when he noted that “Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of human life are unified”, but we were heading in the right direction: that truth is not exclusively literal. Take this passage, for instance;
Next morning, while we were at breakfast, Johnson gave a very earnest recommendation of what he himself practised with the utmost conscientiousness: I mean a strict attention to truth, even in the most minute particulars. 'Accustom your children (said he,) constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.'
BOSWELL. 'It may come to the door: and when once an account is at all varied in one circumstance, it may by degrees be varied so as to be totally different from what really happened.'
Our lively hostess [Mrs Thrale], whose fancy was impatient of the rein, fidgeted at this, and ventured to say, 'Nay, this is too much. If Mr. Johnson should forbid me to drink tea, I would comply, as I should feel the restraint only twice a day; but little variations in narrative must happen a thousand times a day, if one is not perpetually watching.'
JOHNSON. 'Well, Madam, and you OUGHT to be perpetually watching. It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.'
Boswell had no recording device or even shorthand to assist him in his recollection (in fact he’s skeptical of the accuracy of the speed-writing he developed while gathering material for the Life); yet the joy of much of the book is to be found in the short vignettes and dramatizations which bring Johnson to life, many of which are quite obviously staged. And, while crediting Boswell with extraordinary diligence over and above the call of duty, and acknowledging his almost superhuman feats of memory, we know several passages in the text were recalled many weeks after the actual conversation took place. So I’m with Mrs Thrale on this one - just try remembering what you said ten minutes ago, let alone at a remove of ten days.
Yet allowing for this necessary inaccuracy, it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) spoil our enjoyment of the book, or the value we place on Boswell’s achievement; I (and many others) would argue that we have a better sense of Johnson as a result of it, since Boswell was creating a more consistent figure that leaps more vividly from the pages, one that’s true to Johnson in its spirit if not altogether in letter. When Boswell relates the contents of a private conversation Johnson had with George III in 1767, he was taking the material (gathered from several sources) on trust. But not to have included it on the grounds of possible misrepresentation would have been a scruple too far. In fact Boswell himself skilfully manipulates the scene to place Johnson, and not the King, at its centre.
The encounter took place in the King’s Library, and although the monarch spoke to several readers on his brief visit, Boswell only mentions Johnson. Similarly, when quitting the room, Boswell implies that the King left so as not to interrupt the great man’s studies for too long; actually, he’d received a summons from the Queen. Johnson then expressed himself “highly pleased with His Majesty’s considerate and gracious behaviour”, as if it were Johnson’s role to approve of the King and not vice versa. These are small but telling deviations from the truth - but are no less enjoyable for that. Written lives would be incredibly dull if biographers took their cue from Hansard.
I also remember the occasion when I was reading the late Timothy White’s biography of Bob Marley ‘Catch a Fire’, in which the author describes in detail when the future king of reggae was put on a bus, at the age of four, for a journey from his home parish of St. Anne’s to Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. White vamps outrageously on what was passing through the child’s mind, describes Marley’s fellow passengers and how they regarded this singular young traveller - material he could not possibly corroborate if his life depended on it. The only real facts he has are Marley’s age, that he travelled on a bus, and his destination. The rest is fiction. But it’s mighty entertaining, and, perhaps even more important in a biography, plausibly entertaining.
How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality.
Wallace Stevens
Having looked at the Eeyores of literature, I reckon it’s high time we examined those writers who view the plasticity of the perceived world as an opportunity rather than a threat. These are the writers who regard literature as a joint venture between their creativity and what’s already been created, and who aren’t afraid to play with reality in order to create what they feel their art demands of them. So reality becomes their starting point: they neither want to dominate it completely like those writers in Principle 1, nor are overly worried that an element of indeterminacy or invention will wreck their meaning like those in Principle 2.
And the writers who fall into Principle 3 constitute an incredibly broad church, covering genres as diverse as formal biography all the way through to Modernist poetry. But what they share is a fundamental impatience with the relationship between art and reality, usually coupled with an ambition, whether they publicly acknowledge it or not, to leave their imprint on their chosen material. For them, the key issues are either (or both) that;
Þ there’s not enough reality to satisfy their ambitions, so they have to embellish reality by “sexing it up” ;
Þ there’s too much reality for their art to cope with, in which case they have to explore new ways to represent it within the formal limitations imposed by literature;
Both groups reckon reality needs a bit of help from art to create meaning, whether that help takes the form of invention (in the first group) or technique (in the second).
We’ll get low down and dirty with this second group in Principle 4 of this section, but now let’s start by looking at the first group, who, despite their frustration with reality, keep at least one foot firmly planted in it. So we’ll quickly examine the art of writing biography.
Meaning Line, please;
Meaning-----------------------------------------------------------Significance
Accuracy Invention
I’m choosing biography, but I could equally focus on history, or indeed any discipline which is reliant on accuracy for its perceived success. So you’d think that biography belonged on the far left of our Meaning Line; if you’re writing someone’s life, it doesn’t do to make things up or you’re misrepresenting the way things actually happened (and, if your subject’s still alive, they can sue you if they don’t like the way you’re portraying them). But this is precisely, of course, what biographers do ALL THE TIME, and you’d have to be incredibly naive to believe they don’t. In fact, biography is an excellent touchstone for any study of meaning, since the aesthetic principles underlying it encompass a number of our Big Themes, including # 2, High & Low Meaning and # 1, Truth & Lies. And it all has to do with the desire to make reality more interesting than it actually is (or was).
Andre Maurois (whose biography of Shelley, as we’ve seen, was the first Penguin book to be published), put his finger on the button when he wrote;
It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: 'What is he thinking?' and he knows nothing.
If you want to keep up with Sir Robert Peel’s contributions to Parliamentary debates, read Hansard.
But you wouldn’t pick it up willingly, because it’s merely a transcript of the proceedings in the House. And that’s not sufficient to sustain most peoples’ interest. But the novelist, or indeed the creative biographer, can climb inside Peel’s head and try to inform us what he was thinking while he was making those speeches. He’s got no way of knowing for sure (was it a momentous historical thought or wondering what he was having for dinner that evening?), but, using the facts he does have, he can work out a likely explanation (which, of course, is part of Big Theme #4, Accidental vs Intentional Meaning). He can propose a solution consistent with the facts he already knows to be verifiable. And once again, we can turn to Virginia Woolf for a pithy summation of this habit;
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
“The creative fact” is a wonderful phrase Woolf uses to describe that which animates dull bits of a life. And it’s what made James Boswell’s biography of Dr Johnson published in 1791 not only revolutionary for its time, but also a candidate for one of the greatest biographies ever written.
In Johnson’s time (and let’s not forget he too was an excellent biographer), biography was an emerging genre, but was most commonly cast in the form of a moral tale for the guidance of others. Johnson’s own ‘Life of Savage’ was an account of how a talented man could be dragged down by a combination of bad luck of personal foibles. Johnson picked up this tradition and ran with it, but added touches of realism which, to some, seemed disrespectful to the dead; “If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit down in despondency, and think it impossible to imitate them in any thing,” Johnson wrote in his defence. And this rubbed off on Boswell. “I profess to write,” he said of his magnum opus, “not his panegyric, but his Life”. These guys were keeping it real two hundred years before The Fugees.
But this wasn’t all Boswell learned from his subject. In an essay for ‘The Rambler’, Johnson opined;
[Biographers] . . . rarely afford any other account than might be collected from the public papers, when they exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments; and to have so little regard for the manners or behaviour of their heroes, that more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral.
Exactly. The telling detail. But to be privy to these telling details, this body of anecdotal evidence, you not only had to be there (or know someone who was), you had to be an accurate stenographer. Which of course was one of Boswell’s most singular talents. But even Boswell’s memory sometimes let him down, or he wasn’t in a position to record a Johnsonian bon mot as it emerged lest he break the rules of propriety; after all, how would you like it if someone was following you around with a notebook jotting down everything you’d said?
And this was what damned Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ in the eyes of many of its early readers - the almost indecent intrusion into the personal life of its central figure. Boswell’s portrait was so all-encompassing that it was almost too real - there was a little too much information for the morally squeamish. It’s like being told that the Queen uses the toilet - we know she must do, but it’s somehow distasteful to record the fact.
Yet there were some who recognized the book for the ground-breaking achievement that it is; the painter and scientist James Elford was on the right lines when he wrote to Boswell that he hadn’t simply described Johnson, but “exhibited” him, and that this was a “perfectly new” way of tackling biography.
It’s only with the publication of Boswell’s letters and journals that we’ve been able to discover just how much of the Life was inferred; although notoriously scrupulous with the factual content, Boswell could gloss and extrapolate as well as any fiction writer. For the first time, it was possible to see that the book was far more than a simple record of what Johnson had done or said - it was carefully planned, structured and edited to show the incredible source material he had gathered to its best advantage.
Until this new evidence began to trickle out, editors had felt perfectly entitled to fillet, bowdlerize, abridge and generally mangle the Life; George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s lover, was one such vandal in his avowed aim to delete the “thin soup of Boswellian narrative” leaving only “the solid meat of Johnson” on the plate. But by the end of the 19th century, a radical re-assessment of Boswell’s achievement saw the Life being considered as not just a collection of observations, but a crafted work of literature. George Birkbeck Hill, himself a Johnson biographer, complained that only a “blockhead . . . could with scissors and paste-pot have mangled the biography which of all others is the delight and the boast of the English-speaking world.”
And so it finally came to be acknowledged, after a century of misunderstanding, that the facts of biography could be “creative” and still be, essentially, truthful to their subject. We weren’t quite at the point reached by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset when he noted that “Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of human life are unified”, but we were heading in the right direction: that truth is not exclusively literal. Take this passage, for instance;
Next morning, while we were at breakfast, Johnson gave a very earnest recommendation of what he himself practised with the utmost conscientiousness: I mean a strict attention to truth, even in the most minute particulars. 'Accustom your children (said he,) constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.'
BOSWELL. 'It may come to the door: and when once an account is at all varied in one circumstance, it may by degrees be varied so as to be totally different from what really happened.'
Our lively hostess [Mrs Thrale], whose fancy was impatient of the rein, fidgeted at this, and ventured to say, 'Nay, this is too much. If Mr. Johnson should forbid me to drink tea, I would comply, as I should feel the restraint only twice a day; but little variations in narrative must happen a thousand times a day, if one is not perpetually watching.'
JOHNSON. 'Well, Madam, and you OUGHT to be perpetually watching. It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.'
Boswell had no recording device or even shorthand to assist him in his recollection (in fact he’s skeptical of the accuracy of the speed-writing he developed while gathering material for the Life); yet the joy of much of the book is to be found in the short vignettes and dramatizations which bring Johnson to life, many of which are quite obviously staged. And, while crediting Boswell with extraordinary diligence over and above the call of duty, and acknowledging his almost superhuman feats of memory, we know several passages in the text were recalled many weeks after the actual conversation took place. So I’m with Mrs Thrale on this one - just try remembering what you said ten minutes ago, let alone at a remove of ten days.
Yet allowing for this necessary inaccuracy, it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) spoil our enjoyment of the book, or the value we place on Boswell’s achievement; I (and many others) would argue that we have a better sense of Johnson as a result of it, since Boswell was creating a more consistent figure that leaps more vividly from the pages, one that’s true to Johnson in its spirit if not altogether in letter. When Boswell relates the contents of a private conversation Johnson had with George III in 1767, he was taking the material (gathered from several sources) on trust. But not to have included it on the grounds of possible misrepresentation would have been a scruple too far. In fact Boswell himself skilfully manipulates the scene to place Johnson, and not the King, at its centre.
The encounter took place in the King’s Library, and although the monarch spoke to several readers on his brief visit, Boswell only mentions Johnson. Similarly, when quitting the room, Boswell implies that the King left so as not to interrupt the great man’s studies for too long; actually, he’d received a summons from the Queen. Johnson then expressed himself “highly pleased with His Majesty’s considerate and gracious behaviour”, as if it were Johnson’s role to approve of the King and not vice versa. These are small but telling deviations from the truth - but are no less enjoyable for that. Written lives would be incredibly dull if biographers took their cue from Hansard.
I also remember the occasion when I was reading the late Timothy White’s biography of Bob Marley ‘Catch a Fire’, in which the author describes in detail when the future king of reggae was put on a bus, at the age of four, for a journey from his home parish of St. Anne’s to Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. White vamps outrageously on what was passing through the child’s mind, describes Marley’s fellow passengers and how they regarded this singular young traveller - material he could not possibly corroborate if his life depended on it. The only real facts he has are Marley’s age, that he travelled on a bus, and his destination. The rest is fiction. But it’s mighty entertaining, and, perhaps even more important in a biography, plausibly entertaining.
So impatience with reality doesn’t inevitably lead to lying; meaning that’s ‘consistent’ with reality, or that can bridge gaps and fill in holes needn’t automatically be accorded a lower status in meaning’s pecking order. After all, it’s what most writers tend to do whether they realize it or not - they begin with source material and embellish it. They often can’t help themselves. And this tendency is perhaps most evident in the school of “faction”.
