THE LIVES OF MEN

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 90, 13 October 1934, Page 16

THE LIVES OF MEN

CAN THEY BE WRITTEN ?

LITERATURE AND THE TRUTH

FACTS OF BIOGEAPHY

So Mr. H. G. Wells is to write his autobiography. After the new bodysnatching biography comes the new autobiography, where, so to speak, every writer will attend to his own corpse before it is interred, writes B. If or Evans in the "Manchester Guardian." And to what end? Is it that we hope to reach the truth or that we love anecdote 1 All of us love anecdote, of course, even those who pretend to be above it, and we English especially, with our passion for those features so incredible to foreigners, the Court, and personal columns, the "illustrateds" that specialise in pictures of hunt balls, the sober gossip columns that have intruded into even solemn journals to tell one old-school tie what is happening to more eminent old-school ties, and the less sober gossip columns from which those whom industry forces into me-chanical tasks gain some strange katharsis from contemplating the incredible extravagance of an alleged favoured and leisured few.

Yes! Certainly we love gossip, nor, after all, need we be ashamed of it, for anecdotal gossip is the raw material of all creative literature. George Moore said somewhere that an anecdote was the most difficult part of fiction, and Aristotle affirmed that the essential thing about writing was to begin with a good yarn. To pry into other people's lives is not mere morbid curiosity; it is only a desire to lessen the loneliness of human experience, which, unconsciously for the most part, we all feel unless we are very happy or in love or sharing a few of the rare, exciting, and transitory experiences of life. For the rest of our time we find an immense consolation in seeing how the eminent made fools of themselves, failed to pay their debts, had pains, petty deceits, and boredom, and shared the distempers and ailments which in our moiv depressed moments we had believed .to be a plague designed for ourselves alone. THEIR SPECIAL FUNCTION. This, indeed, was the special function of the new biography from Lytton Strachey onwards. The great, we were comfortingly assured, were not so great after all; their reputations were due largely to the fact that they were less scrupulous and more foolish than honest fellows like ourselves and that their publicity had been in competent hands. The new biography allowed us from a standpoint of omniscience and perfection to view the imperfections and inadequacies of past ages and of their great names. A very comforting sensation, though most of us, while we enjoyed the satire, retained v secret belief in greatness. So when Strachey held an all-in contest with Queen Victoria we were relieved that it was the little lady who won. Even in this unromantic age we still yearn for heroes and,heroines. .We like to. feel that human life, despite its unthinkable cruelty and waste, has thrown up men of stature and women of beauty and intelligence. We may even muse that if the-suburbs could share that grandeur and that glamour this life of ours might be fair and comely. • Biography gives us consolation, but does it give us truth? John Morley, who, like Mr. Winston Churchill, found biography a profitable subsidiary to politics, was emphatic that the truth could never out. "No!" he is reputed on one occasion to have said, "the truth can never be known. It will never overtake the legend. I have read many books dealing with events in which I took some part, and all of them are wrong. 'History' always misleads. For more depended on the conversations of half an hour and was transacted by them than ever appeared in letters or dispatches." STILL WROTE. Yet Morley was prepared to go on with biography, to enter the munimentroom at. Hawaiden, with its trunks full of- dispatches, boxes, and cases of letters, so that Gladstone's life, however untruthful, might be compiled. To an outside observer there is something that seems just a little unfair in Morley's attitude. He had the fun and the profit of exploring other lives, but he left the most solemn and dreadinspiring commandment that his own should never be written. He showed there a fear of exposure characteristic of the Victorian age. We delight in a certain exhibitionism; wo do not mind if the world knows. Mr. G. B. Shaw revises Frank Harris, and allows some of his letters to Ellen Terry to be published. He would appear to write "Open Door, All Comers Invited," over his intimate life. But the Victorians believed that there were two lives, the image that the public r.lght see and the private picture that even they themselvn: seldom gazed upon. So they entrusted their biography to their sons and daughters, who always performed the duty in two long volumes, with much left out. The literature of the nineteenth century is littered with these twin tombstones. Tennyson best illustrates the attitude as he does so much else in his age. He is alleged to have said once that if he had the only manuscript of an autobiography of Horace in his hand he woul* puMt on the fire, and everyone knows the story of how angry he was that a very old lady at Tun?jriV,re •Wells had quie a reputation because she -could remember seeing Samuel Johnson stirring his lemonade with a dirty finger. WANTED THE LEGEND. • Tennyson was content that the legend "of the Inverness cape should survive and the actuality of the rooms stale with his excessive pipe-puffing —it was not smoking—and his generous port-bibbing should be forgotten. Carlyle alone in that age would suffer to be exposed, and then only as an act .of expiation to Mrs. Carlyle. Probably he got more than he intended, a whole library of biography, and of quarrels of rival biographers. Yet the truth —is it there? Some of the recent investigators tell us that most o£ his story could be told in a sentence or two, if either he or any of those entrusted with the information had been frank enough to speak out. We are bolder than the Victorians in exposing ourselves, but does truth even now come from, biography? Even Pepys could not put down the whole ntory of his life. We often leave the Diary with the impression of one who had a hearty zest in life and a taste for shabby lecheries, but we have to turn to his friend Evelyn and to the researches of Mr. Tanner in the Navy Records to have the answering picture of the .industrious official and the great naval administrator. Perhaps the time will come when men of talent will be commanded by law to prepare full records of their existence, their letters, their bills, their dreams, with a medical report and memoranda on their private sins. Meanwhile Mr. H. Ct. "Wells is to write his aulobio-

graphy