How does one shape a scene? Do life-writers and writers of fiction do it in the same sort of way? In the following discussion I place side by side readings of almost identical scenes as narrated by a biographer or memoirist and a novelist, and see what critical and creative lessons can be derived from the comparison. I also propose a few practical tasks for those who wish to apply the lessons further in their very own writing.
Dramatization, after all, is a vital frequent element in fiction, and in life-writing as well. The problem is that there are different kinds of dramatization, and in each one of them several elements operate, frequently in combination. This is as true of literature in the ancient world as in the modern, and in both instances it contributes powerfully to readerly interest. So, whether we are discussing the phenomenon from the point of view of the practising or potential writer, or from the standpoint of readers of varied dispositions – and here I am addressing both groups – we need to take a close and practical look at the spectrum of possible uses.
A Scene in the Bus
Let us begin with a scene from a recent book that announces itself as a “memoir” and contains strands of both biography and autobiography, together with a fair dash of fictionalisation as well. The year is 1945. The author’s mother, an awestruck twenty-two-year-old Italian woman called Ilia who has grown up in Bari on the Amalfi Coast and has never before left her native land, is making her way on a crowded bus through war-ravaged South Kensington in order to meet, for the very first time, the parents of her English husband. He is away fighting in the Far East but has supplied her with the address of the mansion flat where his father, a former captain of the English cricket team, lives with his wife and one female servant. Ilia is uncertain where to alight, so she approaches the genial bus conductor for directions and advice:
The man with his wooden board where tickets were trapped like mice, was asking her all kinds of things she couldn’t answer except with a smile.
‘Sir Pelham – ah, I see, “Plum Warner. Cricket’s Grand Man. He’s expecting you, is he pet?’
‘He is my father,’ said Ilia.
‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba.’ Passengers behind him tittered. The conductor went on, with bright eyes, ‘Your father! Well, love, that’s a thing.’ Then he winked.
She caught herself and remembered. ‘No, my father-in-law.’
Passengers were taking a keen interest, now
‘Can we come too,’ said one, laughing, ‘and have a cup of tea with his nibs?’
It was awkward, not being able to grasp the mood through the unfamiliar words, but she smiled back and after thinking carefully, asked ‘How long until we come?’
‘I’ll let you know, pet, don’t you fret.’[1]
The envisaged conversation takes place twelve months before the author Marina Warner’s birth. The year of publication is 2021. The buildings of West London have long since recovered from their war-time devastation and now stand tall and straight, and there have not been such people as London bus conductors for some thirty years. There is no possibility the writer could have heard this conversation, which she has compiled partly from broken accounts by her mother in later life, and partly from a diffused sense of the immediate post-war period. Yet she quotes the conversation verbatim, providing the suspiciously helpful bus conductor with the Geordie accent that her mother with her rudimentary English could hardly have discerned: he is from Newcastle or Sunderland and calls his eager passenger “pet”. His sustained attitude is one of patronizing concern and slightly jolly sarcasm, strongly redolent of social life at a time when the rough-and-ready egalitarianism of the war years was just beginning to break down. The passengers behind him refer to Sir Pelham as “his nibs”, a now dated expression, deriving, as Eric Partridge notes in the 1937 edition of his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English from a ‘thinned’ version of ‘nob’, meaning a self-consciously superior person. Thus “his nibs” could imply the honorific ‘His Lordship’ insolently applied to anyone[2]. In the pre-war years it was the sort of expression to be heard in the mouth of an overworked and resentful female servant of the Downton Abbey sort when conveying her employer’s (“his nibs’s”) orders for dinner to the domestic cook. So it perfectly captures the facetious deference of working-class Londoners travelling by bus in the immediate post-war period when class distinctions of this kind had recently been brought into question. The expression, then, is one aspect of the willed period feel of the piece. And the whole passage, it might be said, echoes the feel of black-and-white movies of the time, straining – perhaps a little too hard – for authentic effect. This author is shaping a scene.
Warner’s Inventory of a Life Mislaid, later re-entitled Esmond and Ilia, presents itself as an “unreliable memoir”. As its revised title implies, it is essentially a portrait of the author’s parents’ difficult marriage as it begins slowly to unravel during the period of her infancy and early childhood. Warner is a novelist as well as a critic and memoirist and, seventy years after the events described, she chooses vicariously to imagine them, to recreate them self-consciously in prose. The result is half way to fiction, and yet it is (auto-) biography as well.
EXERCISE ONE:
Re-write the scene in the bus in the first person in the voice of one of the following:
a. Ilia;
b. The bus conductor;
c. One of the other passengers.
A Short History of Reconstructed Speech
On the surface of it, such departure from literal record-keeping might seem a bit daring and experimental. In fact, the re-creation of imagined speech after its exact trace has been lost is a practice with a very long pedigree. In the Pali biographies of the Buddha, his Ādittapariyāya Sutta or Fire Sermon is quoted word for word, though none of the select batch of novice monks who were privy to its delivery is likely to have taken it down. In the dialogues of Plato we get the Socrates discussing matters of philosophical concern with his students: the resulting scenes are highly dramatic and engaging, though Plato was almost certainly relying as much on his literary skill as on inspired recall. In The Apology, one of the middle-period dialogues, we eavesdrop on Socrates’s passionate self-defence at his trial, though an exact transcript is most unlikely to have survived. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek historian Thucydides puts a whole magnificent oration into the mouth of the Athenian statesman Pericles in praise of the recent patriotic dead.[3] “When the time arrived, he came forward from the grave on to a high platform which had been erected so that he should be as clearly audible as possible to the crowd, and he spoke these lines…” In the first-century religious biographies known as the Christian gospels, Christ’s words are quoted precisely in Koine Greek, though Christ was long dead and he may have been preaching in Aramaic any way; in his seventeenth chapter Saint John even treats us to a conversation Jesus is supposed to have been having with God. Another of the evangelists, Saint Luke, continues his story in a sequel we call The Acts of the Apostles, which amounts to a potted biography of Saint Paul. In the seventeenth chapter he recreates a pointed address delivered by Paul to the Areopagite council near the Acropolis, beginning “Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.”[4] Later Luke devotes one whole chapter to Paul’s prolix self-defence before Herod Agrippa, quoted verbatim, though Luke was certainly not in Caesarea where the encounter took place.[5] During the following century the Greek biographer Lucius Flavius Philostratus transports us to a courtroom where, a century before, the philosophical sage Apollonius of Tyana had been on trial for seditious heresy. The judge has been appointed by the irascible emperor Domitian, and is determined to produce a damning verdict and sentence. As the accused prepares to enters the court, we hear the rustle of legal documents and the excited murmur of the crowd. The guard then asks him to remove his outer clothing. “Is this a bath,” inquires Apollonius, “or a trial?”[6]
The spread of these titles suggests that, in the ancient world, generic divides, insofar as they existed, were exceedingly fluid. In her book Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man of 1983, for example, Patricia Cox allocates Philostratus’s Life of Tyana to a sub-genre that she calls “aretalogy”[7], whilst in 1994, in a book entitled suggestively Greek Fiction, Ewen Bowie is equally insistent that Philostratus was a “writer of fiction” and that his book is effect a novel[8]. Confusion on this score persists nowadays in the minds of those whose professional business it is to classify literature for certain bureaucratic purposes, as witness the artificiality of much academic, library and bookshop categorization. While the Buddha’s sermon will be shelved under “Religion (Eastern)”, the works of Saint Luke under “Theology”, Plato’s dialogues under “Philosophy”, and Thucydides under “Classics”, you can be very sure that none of them will be filed under “Fiction”. And yet all of them draw on fictional techniques, not least in their use of dialogue, dramatic scene-building and characterisation.
To clear this matter up, and to illustrate the use of dramatic techniques in works habitually classified as either “fiction” or “non-fiction”, including life-writing, it may prove instructive a take a close, comparative look at identical scenes as handled by a biographer and a novelist. I shall take my examples fairly freely across literary history. Although Max Saunders in an influential study has maintained that the invasion of fictive techniques into biography and autobiography is one facet of Modernity, or rather of “Modernism”, giving rise to such hybridities as “autobiografiction” (a neologism that Saunders dates to 1906), it is very clear that such blending has been implicit in all of these varieties of writing from the very beginning[9]. What is more, it remains a fruitful resource for practitioners. I shall start with an example of a scene depicted in an ancient biographer and then realised by a novelist within the modern period (that is, well within Saunders’s proposed span.)
Suetonius Meets Graves
It is the year 41. On the morning of 24 January, the twenty-nine-year-old Emperor Gaius, generally known as “Caligula”, has been enjoying a morning’s blood-soaked entertainment in the Amphitheatre, during which he had been liberally splashed with actors’ blood:
On 24 January then, just past midday, Gaius, seated in the Theatre, could not make up his mind whether to adjourn for lunch; he still felt a little queasy after too heavy a banquet on the previous night. However, his friends persuaded him to come out with them, along a covered walk; and there he found some boys of noble family who had been summoned from Asia, rehearsing the Trojan war-dance. He stopped to watch and encourage them, and would have taken them back to the Theatre and held the performance at once, had their principal not complained of the cold. Two different versions of what followed are current. Some said that Chaerea came up behind and gave him a deep sword-wound in the neck, whereupon Cornelius Sabinus, the other colonel, stabbed him in the breast. The other version makes Sabinus tell certain centurions implicated in the plot to clear away the crowd and then asked Gaius for the day’s watch-word. He is said to have replied ‘Jupiter’, whereupon Chaerea, from his rear, yelled: ‘So be it!’ and split his jawbone as he turned his head. Gaius lay writhing on the ground. “I am still alive!’ he shouted; but the word went round: ‘Strike again!’ and he succumbed to thirty further wounds, including sword-thrusts through the genitals. His bearers rushed to help him, using their litter-poles; and soon his German bodyguard appeared, killing several of the assassins and a few innocent senators into the bargain.[10]
This dramatic incident is drawn from a collective biography of the first twelve emperors written by the Roman historian Suetonius in around 119 A.D. The translation offered is that by the poet and historical novelist Robert Graves, as revised by the Cambridge-trained classicist Michael Grant in 1957. Twenty-three years previous to its publication, Graves had drawn on this passage for the climax of his historical novel I, Claudius (1934), which leads up to Caligula’s assassination and his uncle Claudius’s unwilling assumption of the imperial throne. Here is Graves’s fictional account:
What had happened was this. Caligula had come out of the theatre. A sedan was waiting to take him the long way round to the New Palace between double ranks of Guards. But Vinicius said: ‘Let’s go by the short cut. The Greek boys are waiting there at the entrance, I believe.’ ‘All right, then, come along,’ said Caligula. The people tried to follow him out but Asprenas dropped behind and forced them back. ‘The Emperor doesn’t want to be bothered with you,’ he said. ‘Get back!’ He told the gate-keepers to close the gates again. Caligula went towards the covered passage. Cassius stepped forward and saluted. ‘The watchword, Caesar?’ Caligula said, ‘Eh? Oh, yes, the watchword, Cassius. I’ll give you a nice one to-day – “Old Man’s Petticoat”.’ The Tiger called from behind Caligula, ‘Shall I?’ It was the agreed signal. ‘Do so!’ bellowed Cassius, drawing his sword, and striking at Caligula with all his strength. He had intended to split his skull to the chin, but in his rage he missed his aim and struck him between the neck and the shoulders. The upper breastbone took the chief force of the blow. Caligula was staggered with pain and astonishment. He looked wildly around him, turned, and ran. As he turned Cassius struck at him again, severing his jaw. The Tiger then felled him with a badly-aimed blow on the side of his head. He slowly rose to his knees. ‘Strike again!’ Cassius shouted. Caligula looked up to Heaven with a face of agony. ‘O Jove,’ he prayed. ‘Granted,’ shouted The Tiger, and hacked off one of his hands. A captain called Auila gave the finishing stroke, a deep thrust in the groin, but ten more swords were plunged into his breast and belly afterwards, just to make sure of him. A captain called Bubo dipped his hand in a wound in Caligula’s side and then licked his fingers, shrieking, ‘I swore to drink his blood!’[11]
The example is somewhat unusual in that a novelist is serving here as the translator of his own principal source. A comparison between the two passages, however, has a lot to tell us in general terms about the relative strengths and limitations of two literary genres. Suetonius, you notice, is far from indifferent to the dramatic potential of the murder, which in his version almost reads like an extension of the gory entertainment exhibited in the theatre the young emperor has just left. Among the most sensational of Roman biographers, he exploits to the full the incident’s capacity for surprise as the assassins leap onto their hapless victim. There is an effective rhythm at work in the passage, leading from the decorous progress along the covered way at the beginning to the “Trojan dance” performed in the passage way to the violence of the assault and the sadistic flurry of the aftermath.
Throughout, however, this kinetic pace is offset by something else: the judicious posture of an historian well aware of variations between the witness accounts available to him and unwilling to disguise such inconsistences for the sake of cheap effect. “Duplex dehinc fama est”, he insists: “Two different versions of what followed are current”. This hesitation and weighing of possibilities allows the reader temporarily to withdraw from the affray and entertain theories as what actually occurred that afternoon. Very few novelists would allow themselves this degree of objective impartiality, unless they were pretending to be biographers or historians. As a translator, Graves is true to this equivocation, but he also meets the reader half-way by rendering the exchanges between the assassins in demotic twentieth-century English. So Chaerea’s “Hoc age!” becomes “Take this!”; “Accipe ratum!” becomes “So be it!” and “Repete!” becomes “Strike again!”.
As a novelist, Graves permits himself drastic further freedoms. To enhance the rhythmic fluctuation implicit in his source he has the servants indulge in several minutes of inconsequential banter before the party sets out, once more set out in casual modern English. This informality serves as a restful respite before the main action of the scene begins. Then, setting aside the difference of opinion as recounted by Suetonius, he jolts the episode into action by bringing forward the business of the watch-word, which he changes from “Jupiter!” to “Old Man’s Petticoat” for incongruous comic effect. Then the first blow falls. As the incident unfolds we realize that has happened: Graves the novelist has condensed Suetonius’s scholarly variants into one so that both versions of what happened occur consecutively as a sequence of phased staccato action. As a novelist he cannot afford to hang about or distract the reader’s attention with conjectural alternatives. “The Tiger”, in this account is Suetonius’s Sabinus. And “Jupiter!” has changed from the day’s watchword to an impulsive prayer-like exclamation uttered by the victim as he lies writhing on the ground. Bubo’s lugubrious licking of the death emperor’s blood is one final macabre touch.
The more fundamental change, however, involves the narrative focus. Suetonius was a “grammaticus” or scribe employed by the imperial administration in the reign of Hadrian about seventy years after the assassination that he is describing. So he is writing as a court official who was not present at the time of the murder but needs to place these events on record as part of his semi-official account of the reigns of twelve successive Caesars. Graves, on other hand, is writing almost two millennia afterwards. He has no vested interest in these events, but has a strong professional investment in turning out readable fiction. As a novelist he has a strong interest in creating character, so all of the personalities involves are vividly etched.
There is one more essential shift. In chapter five, we invoked Wayne Booth’s distinction, set out in The Rhetoric of Fiction, between the flesh-and-blood author of narrative prose and the “implied narrator” whose voice we hear telling the tale. In the case of Suetonius, these are one and the same: it is the voice of the historical Suetonius Tranqillus (69-c. 122 AD) that we hear in all of its pedantic diffidence. Graves, on the other hand, hides. Throughout, his novel sequence is couched in the voice of Claudius, Caligula’s apparently bumbling uncle who, as a result of the nephew’s unforeseen demise, is about to be raised to the imperial throne, very much against his inclination (his reign is recounted in the sequel novel Claudius the God). It is Claudius, therefore, who in the implied narrator, even if Graves is the actual author. One result of this is to give the story an extra edge. Uncle and nephew are chalk and cheese; Caligula has treated Claudius with barely concealed contempt, while Claudius had always regarded his nephew’s increasingly aberrant behaviour with fastidious exasperation. In fact, he would have been quite relieved at Gaius’s bloody execution, were it not for the fact that it has obliged him to mount the throne in his place.
Given this background, Graves has reworked Suetonius’s material and in the process converted it from a highly charged, would-be objective historic narrative, into dark comedy. The assassins have been converted into genial buffoons; Caligula is to them both a tyrant to be feared and a threat to be removed, and their reaction to him is a mixture of derision and playful sadism. The casual way in which Bubo strolls up to the corpse and licks the blood from his fingers – pure invention this – is part of the willed pantomime of the passage. Chronicle, in Graves’s novelistic hands, has turned into something close to entertainment.
EXERCISE TWO:
1. Based on the facts at your disposal, write an account of Caligula’s murder from the point of view of one of the following:
a. Chaerea (“The Tiger”);
b. Cornelius Sabinus;
c. Bubo;
d. Caligula (Roman emperors were sometimes deified after their deaths, and made the object of prayer and supplication, so there is a strong case for an afterlife of sorts);
e. One of the Greek boy dancers;
f. A Roman citizen with strong republican sympathies;
g. A Roman citizen with strong imperialist sympathies;
h. A domestic slave;
i. One of Caligula’s sisters, or his wife.
2. Update Caligula’s assassination either to the present day, or to another period in history. The present day account may take the form of a report by a journalist present at the scene, of an eye witness testimony by an updated version of one of the original characters, or of someone taking the stand in court as one or all of the assassins is tried for murder. This will probably involve changing names and the locations. The accounts may be either evidently biased, or apparently unbiased.
Mantel Meets MacCulloch
The year is 1500. Walter Cromwell, a Putney brewer, has just struck his fourteen-year-old son to the ground. “Get up!” he shouts, “Now get up!” The boy’s face is gashed, a welter of wounds. One eye will not open, and he fears it never will. His father is relentless and roars again:
“So now get up!” Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and moves forward, on his belly, trying to do it without exposing his hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. “What are you, an eel?” His parent asks. He trots backwards, gathers pace, and aims another kick.[12]
The scene is the opening one of Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall, first of a trilogy covering the life, rise to eminence and fall from grace of Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), Chancellor of the Exchequer for the last seven years of his life, right-hand man to Henry VIII, mastermind behind the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and – according to the historian Geoffrey Elton and his followers – the main genius behind the transformation of the English nation from feudal economy to a modern, bureaucratic state. Cromwell is a pivotal figure in the development of English governance; he has attracted the attention of historians in their droves, of a clutch of biographers and, somewhat late in the day, of a major novelist.
What have these various witnesses made of him? It had been Elton’s opinion that Cromwell was “unbiographicable”. Despite this judgement, in 2018 Elton’s student Diarmaid MacCulloch produced his Thomas Cromwell: A Life. What light does MacCulloch shed on this early episode? That almost nothing is known of Walter Cromwell, apart from the fact that was of possible Irish birth, once owned a water mill, and occasionally watered his beer. That in 1520 his son Thomas left London and spent several years on the continent where he made various contacts useful to him in later life, and acquired fluent Italian[13].
Of the boy’s reason for quitting London in the first place, as MacCulloch reveals, nothing is known. The only, and very slight clue is provided in a novella by the Matteo Bandallo (1480-1562), sometime Bishop of Agen and the ultimate source for several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing. Basing his version on hearsay, in 1547 Bandallo published an embellished fable about Cromwell’s life that had the young Thomas picking up his heels and making for Italy “che fuggendo da mio padre” (“running away from my father”), a phrase picked up in 1570 by the Protestant hagiographer John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs and rendered somewhat neutrally as “I am strayed from my country”. Bandallo himself, one notes, was forever running away. Not much to go on this. So, one asks, why the paternal violence at the outset of Mantel’s book?
It is baseless, and yet it is sound. Until his execution in 1540 Cromwell enjoyed a meteoric rise to power for which, as the disadvantaged and sparsely educated scion of the yeoman class, very little in his early life seems to have prepared him. Ambition seems to have been his lodestar from the beginning; he had wiliness, he had political nous; above all, he possessed drive. His career makes little sense in social or in psychological terms unless you can provide him with a motive, something that spurred him on. As MacCulloch points out, very little of his correspondence with others survives, and so it is hard to hear his authentic voice. We cannot enter the confessional after him, but we can make sense of the known facts if we construct a need for compensation founded possibly, but entirely credibly, on some early humiliation, perhaps at his father’s hands, a need to prove himself. The biographer and historian’s hiatus is the novelist’s opportunity. She must, however, convince us and, it has to be said, she does.
MacCulloch is a great fan of Mantel’s work, and she was latterly an admirer of his. A comparison between the two has much to tell us about the traditional parameters dividing the novelist’s work from the biographer’s. Conventionally, it is the biographer’s responsibility constantly to indicate the presence of the load-bearing joints that support his or her work. These are documents of various kinds – letters where they exist, journals where they exist and, for later periods, vocal testimony of various kinds. It is also his or her responsibility to point out where and when these supports are lacking. The novelist labours under no such obligation. Instead, she must carry us with her: through consistency of character and idiom, and parity of narrative stance.
Both biographer and novelist are driven by questions, but the questions are different in kind. The questions that the biographer puts to him or herself are “what actually happened?” and “how do we know what happened?” Moreover, “what is it that we do not know, and how does our ignorance modify the picture?” (These, it will be noted, are precisely the questions which, in the second century AD, Suetonius seems to have put to himself). It is at this point that the novelist takes over. Her medium is neither knowledge not ignorance; nor is it strictly speaking, conjecture or speculation. Instead it is imaginative projection based on empathy and understanding. Mantel’s Cromwell is not the Cromwell of history, but he is very convincing on his own terms. What she delivers is not so much a testimony as to what occurred, as a journey into motivation that digs beneath what we know. In other words, it is Truth more than it is Fact.
In no respect is this clearer than in the elements of narrative style and in quoted, direct speech. Mantel narrates her story in the historic present tense, from beginning to end. The desired effect is one of immediacy, as if these events are happening before our very eyes. Like Warner, she is making a scene, so there is a strong element of theatre is what she does. She also constantly shifts focus, from the enraged father to the intimidated son, then back again. The one person to whom she never refers directly is herself as the narrator, and yet that presence is constantly implied as an eye observing the scene from outside. MacCulloch, on the other hand, always employs the past tense when referring to the events which he is observing (though “considering” might be the better word): there is no pretence of immediacy, because scholarly distance is his very purpose. He also constantly makes his presence felt as one who is sifting the evidence and striking a balance between what, and what is not, known. He never ventriloquizes the words of his subjects unless and until he can quote passages of written self-expression in letters and other documents. There are several instances of this later in his book, and there he sticks religiously to the record, retaining as a matter of principle its spelling, diction and style.
Mantel is striving for transparency, which is one reason that she never talks about herself. As a narrator she aims for invisibility, as if her mind were some sort of translucent screen. She wants her readers to experience this brutal episode as if it was (or is) happening now. One result of this is that the spoken idiom used throughout is a compromise between early sixteenth century speech and modern day usage. (Very like Graves’s practice, this.) “Now get up!” is the sort of insulting jibe you might overhear in a twenty-first century roadside brawl, or else in a highly charged scene in a soap opera on TV. One might even use it oneself. Reading it, one is reminded of such contexts, even as one registers the historicity of the scene. For readers schooled in antique speech there may be a slight feeling of anachronism, since in 1520 these common words are unlikely to have been combined in this exact order to create this particular colloquialism (“Get ye up!” might have been nearer the mark). But the anachronism is not so extreme as to disturb the impression of two periods of time carefully superimposed. Thus the reader’s mind is enabled to work on two levels: we are both in Putney (then a small and quite insignificant riverside town) and wherever we happen to be enjoying the book at the present time. This surely is an almost definitive condition of the imagination. These events are imagined as well as being imaginary in the sense of existing without archival support.
In the case of MacCulloch, the equation between past and present is quite different. In one sense we never quit the present day as we remain in a mental present even as we contemplate the exhibited evidence of the past as it is set before us, like a visitor to a museum surveying the artefacts of some distant age through the glass fronting of a display case. At the same time, he never adulterates his account with present-day experience; the past remains past, even as we perceive it in the present. That is the aim in any case, though as a professional historian he is well aware that present day preoccupations may well pollute the pseudo-objectivity of his stance, and our reception of it. MacCulloch is a Protestant scholar, and an ordained deacon of the Anglican church; it would be unrealistic to expect his account of the Godfather of the English Reformation to remain unaffected by these facts. A Roman Catholic historian might interpret these events quite differently. Distance has its advantages, since it creates an impression of impartiality. But it also has its dangers, since it enables a writer to air his or her prejudices whilst disguising them behind a façade or judicious non-involvement.
To sum up, Mantel the novelist and MacCulloch the historian concentrate on the same subject matter but view it, or him, through very different eyes. To some extent, though both recent writers, they each occupy a classic positon with regard to the biographical/ fictional divide. McCulloch never shifts from his ground as a biographical scholar, and Mantel never budges from hers as an historical novelist. They respect one another’s differences and remain on opposite sides of that recognizable divide. But it is not quite as simple as that. I spoke of MacCulloch’s partiality as a compromising element in his objectifying gaze. Yet Mantel too has her prejudices, as a former Catholic and one-time Convent pupil benefiting from the fresh air of modern secular doubt. And I also spoke of the relative freedom of Mantel’s treatment and her emancipation from the rigours of literal scholarship. Yet her work if also based on painstaking research and an immersion in validated sources, even if for her this is an overture to an imaginative excurse.
EXERCISE THREE:
3. Re-cast the assault in Putney from the point of view of:
a. Walter Cromwell;
b. Another member of the family;
c. The mature Thomas Cromwell, looking back at his youth.
4. Take a traumatic incident from the life of someone subsequently well-known, and realise it as one of the following:
a. As an episode in their biography (that is, as written by somebody else);
b. As an element in their autobiography or memoir (that is, as written by themselves);
c. As a fictional episode in either the past or the present tense, couched in the third person.
d. As an analytic piece discussing the effect of this incident on their later conduct.
Wulf Meets Fitzgerald
In the above instance we see a novelist working in the interstices of history, deploying her imagination where evidence is lacking. The case is quite otherwise where relevant documentary or other kinds of source material exist, which to a limited extent is true for Graves. Yet, as the case of Graves also illustrates, all evidence, however abundant in quality, is likely to be partial. The biographer and the novelist must both adopt strategies to deal with these sorts of bias. The following example may shed light on different ways in which each of them is able to cope.
On Wednesday June 8, 1796 a fourteen-year-old girl called Sophie von Kuhn was operated on in a rented room in the Thuringian university town of Jena for an abscess on her hip and liquid that had accumulated on her liver. The operation was performed without anaesthetic by a local doctor, Johann Christian Sark. Also present were Stark’s assistant Jacob Dietmahler, Sophie’s older sister, her middle-aged French governess Jeanette Danscour, and a couple of medical students.
In 2022 the German writer Andrea Wulf described the episode in a group biography, Magnificent Rebels, set in Jena at the period[14]. In1995 the eighty-year-old British writer Penelope Fitzgerald, who had already published three biographies and eight novels, brought out her last book. The Blue Flower is an account of the love affair between Sophie and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hardenberg, a twenty-four-year-old man of aristocratic lineage training as a manager of salt mines, later to achieve eminence as the poet and philosopher Novalis. Sophie’s operation in Jena in 1796, the first of three, forms a turning point in that story.[15]
Wulf approaches the task with some of the standard equipment expected of an expert biographer, drawing on the only available eye witness account - a letter written that evening by Dascour - eked out with sympathetic and informed speculation. She begins with the exact date, followed by some information as to the doctor’s usual approach to similar cases, gleaned from a textbook Stark was to publish in 1799, including one essential detail: namely that, to spare their nerves, he never gave his patient and the family more than a few hours’ notice of his arrival. After one brisk linking sentence – “better far to surprise them” – she switches tense to adopt a common fall-back position for biographers faced with a real scene about which available information is sketchy. She adopts what is technically known as the “modal past tense”, though a better term might be the conjectural past tense: Dr Stark and his team, she says “would have covered the bed with sheets” and then carefully have laid out their instruments. After some background information on Sophie’s case history, phrased in a combination of the pluperfect (“Sophie had been ill for the past year”) and the continuous imperfect – “Dr Stark also recommended” - we are back with informed conjecture: “the young girl must have been terrified”; “she would have been fully clothed with her skirts hitched up”. Then the operation is described in terms derived from Danscour’s letter, but carefully re-distributed so as constantly to shift perspective from the doctor - “Dr Stark had to work fast” – to the supine patient – “Sophie experienced the most excruciating pain” – to the distraught observers, amazed at the “unimaginable” amount of puss released by the incision. The key word here, I think, is “unimaginable”, since writer, reader and those present in the room are all being forced vicariously to share agony of a kind few of them can ever have experienced, and imagine it as suffered by a fragile but courageous woman in early adolescence.
Fitzgerald recounts the course of the operation in full, but from a vantage point instructively different from Wulf’s. It is essential to her account that Novalis himself is not present, partly because he is pre-occupied with his professional training and partly because he cannot bear to observe his beloved’s suffering at too close quarters; hence the need for Danscour’s letter posted to him at his parental home that evening.
Like Wulf, Fitzgerald devotes one whole chapter to the operation. Instead of the date, however, she starts with an altercation between Sophie’s elder sister and Stark’s assistant, who has been entrusted with the task of liaising with the family to make sure arrangements are made appropriately. This requires dialogue, and hence a lot of direct speech. Both of them are on their dignity, the assistant because of his professional status, the sister because of her anxiety on Sophie’s behalf, and her temporary position as head of the family. “I do not wish us to be antagonists”, the assistant concludes, offering a shake of the hand, which she reluctantly accepts. The focus then shifts to the landlady Frau Winkler who is worried that her neighbours will overhear Sophie’s screams, and attribute them to someone being murdered in her house. “A lodger perhaps, strangling the landlady,” the sister pointedly remarks; she is none too fond of Frau Winkler. Then Sophie arrives after a morning drive with the local pastor’s wife. She is strangely chirpy for someone who is about to endure a terrible ordeal, and has obviously got only the foggiest idea as to what it involves, remarking blithely “I wish George was here”. George is her older half-brother back at the family home, and we are supposed to note, I think, that she regrets his absence rather than that of Novalis. Soon the assistant arrives again with a message that Dr Stark will have to postpone the operation by three hours. “Just to remind us that he is a great man,” retorts the sister tartly. “That is unjust,” is the assistant’s sharp retort.
When Stark reaches the house, Frau Winkler is kept out of the way at the foot of the stairs, where she has difficulty restraining her nosy-parker inquisitiveness. Meanwhile the operation proceeds with due Teutonic formality. A cordial of wine and laudanum is prepared in line with the recommendations of Stark’s medical guru, John Brown (1735-1788), an Edinburgh physician of controversial views whose teaching Stark religiously follows. Sophie is helped onto a pile of blankets and asked whether she wishes her face to be covered so that she cannot see what is being done to her. “I see something glittering,” she says with jejune enthusiasm. “Perhaps,” adds the author, reverting to the free indirect style, “it was a game after all.”
As the surgeon and his assistant take their places, a piece of customary medical etiquette is observed. The surgeon asks whether he may begin, and how many incisions he should make.
“Two, Herr Professor,”
“So?” “So”
And then the room fades out, much as Sophie may have done, and we are taken to the foot of the stairs, where Frau Winkler is straining her ears for eagerly anticipated screams. “Frau Winkler,” we are told, “waiting below on the bottom stair, had been able to hear nothing, but now her patience was rewarded.” It is the most chilling line in the entire book.
Fitzgerald prefaces her book with an epigraph taken from Novalis: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” Or, in this case perhaps, the shortcomings of biography. Are we entitled to respond that biography arises out of the shortcomings of novels? It is surely only right that novelists should be suspicious of biographers and vice versa, since both possess their weaknesses and their strengths. If, like Fitzgerald, they ply both trades, it is only right that they mistrust their other half. Fitzgerald’s own biographer Hermione Lee observes that, at the time of writing The Blue Flower, Fitzgerald was not sure in which genre she intended to work[16]. And yet, superficially at any rate, the rules and dividing lines are quite clear. There is no direct speech in any of Fitzgerald’s biographies, so presumably, in supplying it in in her novel, she was quite clear in her own mind that she was passing from one way of writing to another. Yet this is the very boundary that Warner has decided to cross in that scene set in a bus from her 2022 memoir. The validity of that exercise surely depends less on a set of declared or implicit property laws than on the relative success with which, in breaking with conventions of genre, she carries her readers with her. Which, as we have seen, she almost does, but not quite.
EXERCISE FOUR:
5. Describe the operation in Jena from the first-person perspective of one of the following:
a. The patient, Sophie von Kuhn;
b. The surgeon, Dr Johann Christian Stark;
c. Stark’s assistant, Jacob Dietmahler;
d. The landlady, Frau Winkler;
e. Sophie’s sister;
f. A twenty-first century medical historian intent on illustrating the inadequacies of eighteenth-century surgical practice and the advances that have been made since.
Luhan Meets Cusk Meets Lawrence
Wulf and Fitzgerald both couch their respective accounts in the third person, and both to some extent, but with a very different emphasis, dramatize their scenes from the outside. The distinction between the skills of life-writer and novelist are subtler and therefore in a sense more revealing when, as in our next example, both are phrased in the first person, as when the biographical account is drawn from an autobiography or personal memoir.
It is September, 1924. The British novelist, D. H. Lawrence has been invited with his German wife Frieda to an artistic commune situated in Taos in New Mexico, where they are to spend several turbulent months. Their host is to be the affluent American patron of art and literature, Mabel Dodge Luhan, who is in her fourth marriage, to the taciturn Navaho jack-of-all-trades, Tony Lujan. Luhan has given them the use of a small property several yards from her own, which they are to share with Dorothy Brett, a forty-year-old half-deaf English painter devoted to Lawrence and his views, whom they have brought with them, complete with her ear trumpet. Before they move in, they decide to decorate the interior, with consequences vividly described by Luhan in her memoir Lorenzo in Taos, published in 1932, two years after Lawrence’s death from TB.
Ninety years later, the English novelist Rachel Cusk draws on Luhan’s account as the basis for her novel The Second Place. Like the memoir, this takes the form on a long letter in Luhan’s own voice, to the poet Robinson Jeffers, another habitué of the commune, absent during Lawrence’s stay, and thus needing to be informed as to the result of this experiment in mutual dependency and attempted toleration. Cusk moves the action to a misty marsh in Norfolk, and she cuts Frieda out of the story. The other personalities, however, are very recognizable, and, as in the memoir, the scene of the house painting is climactic and decisive in its effects.
In Luhan’s version the scene begins in a mood of adventurous co-operation: they are all to join in the painting, though, conscious of the superior skills of Lawrence and the subservient Brett, the hostess restricts herself to window sills and the edges of walls. But, out of the corner of her eye, she cannot help noticing that elsewhere something far more alarming is unfolding:
‘Now on this little round door,” said Lorenzo, “I’m going to put the Phoenix rising from this nest of flame.” I knew what he meant. I had heard him talk often enough about the Phoenix. He identified himself with it. It was himself he wanted to place there – his sign manual on that house. Well, he put that blithely on the upper part of the door, and Brett was carving out some figures for the lower part. They put their heads together and created a Garden of Eden, an apple tree with red apples on it, a huge serpent, and a brown Adam and Eve on either side of the tree. They both liked doing things with their hands and I hated it – so that was that. I was just swishing paint round on window-frames and places where I could go fast and furious and where it didn’t matter, and I was getting mad. I felt out of it. The others kept up a running comment, Lorenzo giggling and Brett excited.
“Here, put a smile on the serpent,” he said, chipping at it and nailing it to the door.
“Here’s Eve – the bitch,” Brett said, viciously, “cause of all the trouble. Here, let’s give her a good, fat tummy.”
And Lorenzo answered, responsively: “Yes, the dirty little bitch with her sly, wistful tricks.”
Now, maybe this needn’t have made me mad, but it did. I was Eve. I got up and solemnly walked out on them. I was covered with paint, so I went home and washed it off myself and put on a clean dress. When they came over for supper, I was cold and digne.[17]
So that’s the event as told in Luhan’s voice, and from her point of view, with her persecution feelings loud and clear, for anyone to see. As far as the facts are concerned, her narrative agrees very much with Brett’s account of the same incident in a memoir published in 1933[18]. It also agrees with what David Ellis writes in 1998 in the third and final volume of the official Cambridge life of Lawrence, unsurprisingly since Luhan and Brett at this point are his principal sources[19]. The difference, of course, is that she indulges pretty freely in direct speech, from fragments of conversation that she remembers, branded on her inflamed soul. In that respect she is close to Warner’s technique, except that she is in the scene herself, seething silently. As with Warner, the event as told by Luhan is half novelised or fictionalised.
When Cusk reworks the scene, she repositions the actors. She gives Brett her hearing back, and converts her from a neurotic and easily lead woman in fragile middle age into a self-assured and glamorous girl in her twenties. Since Frieda is eliminated from the scene, Brett also becomes the principal source of female rivalry to Luhan, whom she counters not simply with ideological impertinence, but with the threat of youth and beauty as well. In this version of events, moreover, Luhan takes no part in the interior decoration. She goes to the house because Lawrence, who in the novel is a full-time artist rather than a writer, has invited her across so that he can paint her portrait, thus adding pertinence and relevance to his depiction of Eve, who appears as a deliberate representation of Luhan, rather than merely being suspected of being so. And Tony tries to prevent her turning up, yelling from an upstairs window as she leaves “COME BACK HERE!” Nonetheless she goes, and when she arrives sees the artwork taking shape through the window:
I saw the forms of trees and plants and flowers, the trees with great twisting intestinal roots, the flowers fleshy and obscene, with pink stamens like phalluses, and strange animals, birds and beasts of unearthly shapes and colours; and in the middle of it all two figures, a woman and a man, standing beside the tree bearing violent and red fruits like countless open mouths, with a great fat snake wound all around its trunk. It was the Garden of Eden, Jeffers, except a hellish one…They were working on the Eve figure, and I heard L. say:
“Let’s give her a moustache, the castrating bitch!” while Brett shrieked with laughter. “Cause of all the trouble,” he said, blotting the figure’s upper lip with thick, black strokes.
“And let’s give her a nice fat little belly,” Brett cried, “a barren belly like a middle-aged lady’s! She’s skinny all over, but that belly gives her away, the bitch.”
“A big hairy moustache so that we know who’s in charge, don’t we? Don’t we?”.
And the two of them howled, while I stood in my wedding dress beyond the window in the glade where night was falling and trembled, trembled to the soles of my feet. It was me that they were talking about, we that they were painting – I was Eve.”[20]
Stung to the quick she flees into the dusk, just in time to spot the tail lights of Tony’s car as he drives away in disgust. Tony’s attempted intervention, and his abrupt departure, are both transposed from an earlier scene in Luhan’s text. Cusk has also used and extended Luhan’s dialogue so as to exacerbate the insult, deliberately aimed here rather than casually and pessimistically interpreted.
The main thrust of Luhan’s testimony is the battle of wills – Lawrence’s own phrase – between her and her irascible guest. It is the kind of pitched battle which only one of them can win, and Cusk pulls out all of the stops to evoke it. Thematically then, the two versions have much in common. Luhan, however, was present the scene and so she lets the facts as she experienced them guide and restrain her. Cusk is not hemmed in by any such consideration. Borrowing Luhan’s voice, and her suppressed anger, she permits her narrator to express her bewilderment and frustration uninhibited by the demands of memory.
Cusk also, as is her novelistic right, re-arranges the details of the scene so as to justify Luhan’s feelings. She eliminates Lawrence’s wife Frieda, who is irrelevant to the conflict. And she allows Luhan to come across the scene and observe it from outside the house, where she can indulge in her feeling of betrayal unhindered by Lawrence and Brett’s awareness of her presence. The one fact that she adds, namely that Lawrence has invited her across to the house to have her portrait painted, is transformative, since there can be no doubt in her mind that the effigy of Eve is intended to represent her. Her flight into the night, and Tony’s abrupt departure, round off the scene, which is deliberately shaped so as to make this dénouement natural and appropriate. Through Luhan’s howling rage, Cusk has made room for her a shared feminist protest to emerge.
To animadvert once more to the terms of Wayne Booth’s theory of fiction, discussed in chapter five, in both of these books we have an author and an implied narrator. In the case of Luhan’s book, author and narrator are notionally one and the same. In Cusk’s case they diverge. The author is Cusk; the narrator is Luhan. Personally they are quite distinct, but at strategically important points their perspectives merge as, only too powerfully, they do here.
EXERCISE FIVE:
Write a version of the scene recounted by Mabel Dodge Luhan and Cusk from the point of view of one of the following, or else as a passage in a biography of one of them:
a. Brett;
b. Lawrence;
c. Tony Luhan.
Again, you have a free choice of tenses. You may also change the order of events, the period or the location.
EXERCISE SIX:
Take a recent incident from a newspaper, or as recorded on social media. Work it as both of the following:
a. An episode in the biography of one of the individuals involved, couched either in the past tense, or the present historic;
b. An episode in a novel or short story. In this case, you may have to change the names, genders or economic circumstances of the personalities involved. You may phrase it either in the third person, as if by an omniscient narrator, or in the first person from the perspective of one of the characters involved. You may use either the past or the present historic tense. Again, you may change the location, the period or the order of events.
Towards a Conclusion: The Writer’s Contract
Traditionally, genre divisions have been conceived, and sometimes imposed, from above or beyond the writing and reading act. As we saw in chapter one, the critical literature on this score in extensive, and much of it is set out in the Bibliography below: from Aristotle’s On Rhetoric to Locke and Corneille in the Enlightenment to Jacques Derrida’s Law of Genre and Carolyn R. Miller’s influential article “Genre as Social Action” in the twentieth century. Pragmatically, though, genres are more effectively regarded from within as a set of contracts between writer and reader (and, arguably too, the other way round), which readjust themselves with each and every act of experimentation and innovation, even – it might well be claimed - with each and every text. In chapter five we had a look at the “autobiographical pact” that in 1975 Philippe Lejeune set out for the writer of autobiography. The auto-biographer or memoirist, Lejeune proposed, is defined by a very particular undertaking according to which he or she guarantees for the reader’s sake that the identity of the narrator is the same as that of the author and, what is more, that both author and narrator are the same person as the subject of the text.
Lejeune’s model can fruitfully be extended. The biographer, one can argue, also offers a contract. Its terms are very different. The identity of author and narrator are here less important than an implied promise that the circumstantial details set out in the text are supported by the kinds of evidence usually respected by the historian. They are true in the sense in which evidence given is court it true. The novelist takes no such oath. Instead she says, “I am building a world that is credible. Come with me.’ The principal criteria of effectiveness in the writing of fiction are, and can ultimately only be, aesthetic. A novelist may present real people and verifiable situations in her work, but she cannot be held morally accountable if the result is not in the strict sense accurate. She may, of course, when dealing with recent events, be held accountable in law, but that is a civil and public matter beyond the scope of critical inquiry. We spoke earlier of various elements involved in the shaping of dramatic episodes. With reference to the comparisons examined above, these four-fold elements, and their salient variants can now be summarised, thus:
Inclusion and Exclusion
A biographer’s decision as to what to include or exclude in a given episode is governed by empirical considerations which boil down to a double law of authenticity and causality. The biographer’s oath takes this form: I will only tell you what happened insofar as I understand it, and to the extent the evidence that I have seen supports it. I will never offer you something that is not true. I will not lie. In a given episode I will include the circumstances that are relevant to its outcome, but - so as not to weary your patience - I will exclude those which clutter the narration with details that have little bearing on the forward momentum of events.
The novelist makes no such undertaking. She cannot lie, because she does not deal in facts. The exceptions are cases, such as Vladimir Nabokov and W. G. Sebald, where the author is deliberately attempting to play games with the reader and to present fabrication as if it was fact. With these provisos, authenticity and causality are also applicable yardsticks for a novelist, but they are reworked. Authenticity here entails fidelity to the world that is created for the sake of the work, and causality to the factors that govern or effect it. In order to render that world more convincing, in order to assist that necessary suspension of disbelief, the novelist may well withhold contingent factors, or choose to indicate them indirectly (as we experience Sophie von Kuhn’s agony on the operating table through the cries that Frau Winkler overhears at the foot of the stairs, cries that the novelist chooses not to evoke). Or she may rearrange the chronology of events so as to indicate patterns of experience that transcend the temporal order. The only technical limit to such re-arrangement is framed by the reader’s understanding. If the reader cannot follow her, the novelist has failed.
Rhythm
The tempo of any prose text must in all instances be different from the tempo of that which it describes; we set out the logic of this in chapter two. But all episodes that are worthy of, or which hold, the reader’s attention possess a rhythm of their own which is akin to musical rhythm. Prose exposition lacks a background pulse of the sort heard in metrical poetry (especially, for example, in rap). It is impossible to measure the rhythm of prose because all readers read at different speeds. Instead, it corresponds to what musical theorists term rubato: it flexes and strains, it bubbles and relaxes. It goes faster, then slower, it goes backwards and forwards, in and out. Paragraph and sentence structure are essential to it.
These observations are appropriate whatever the contract struck between the writer and the reader (unless, that is, the first is trying to be boring). The reason for this is that life, whether observed across longer periods or from second to second, has a rhythm of its own. The assassination of Caligula, the father’s assault on the young Cromwell, the medical intervention in Jena, the domestic squabble in Taos, are all rhythmical events. The challenge for the biographer, as for the novelist, is to find an equivalent sufficient to sustain an illusion of verisimilitude. This is equally true of all genres, whether the events described are (to return to the terminology of chapter two) imaginary, or simply imagined. In all cases, the writer’s task is to convince, whether of the contents of her imagination or the contents of the world. To borrow a term from Aristotle, these are all varieties of the art of rhetoric. They either gather you in, or they do not.
Dialogue
Conversation is overwhelmingly likely in most human situations; and all genres must reflect this reality in some way or another. Conventionally, in the ages before sound recording, this obligation has been something of a stumbling block for the biographer, as for the historian. James Boswell, who published his life of the man of letters, lexicographer, poet, conversationalist and sometime biographer Samuel Johnson in 1791, seven years after his subject’s death, got round this difficulty in a way not available to all authors: from May, 1763, when the two men met, he kept a journal in which he reproduced Johnson’s obiter dicta every day, while they were still fresh in his memory. Thucydides, writing in the fifth century BC, on other hand, admits that he has no record of what was said by the politicians and warriors involved in the Peloponnesian war; instead, at one point in his History, he lays down this rule of thumb: that he will be true to what is likely to have been said, and what seems to him to have been appropriate in the situation. His guiding rule, in other words, is one of mimesis, just as it was for every one of the authors above in our Short History of Reconstructed Speech. To that extent, the biographer and the novelist are in a very similar boat, with the exception that, for the biographer, appropriateness means aptness to an imagined or reconstructed course of events, and for the novelist it means consistency within an imaginary scheme. This proviso is reinforced in the case of written testimony, such as are provided for in diaries and letters, which leads us to our last element.
Voice
Whenever we read, through the kind offices of what T. S. Eliot called the “auditory imagination” we hear someone speaking. The sound of that voice echoes in the chamber of our mind. If it does not, we are not reading properly. The only question is whose voice is it that we hear?
Of one thing we may be sure: it is almost never the author’s voice, or at least not only the author’s. That may seem an extreme claim, but to recognize its pertinence, consider again our final case history above. Cusk has borrowed Mabel Dodge’s voice, even if at times it echoes her own convictions and thoughts. Mabel Dodge is presenting us with the persona that emerged during her tortuous relationship with Lawrence, an author who at times himself insisted that a text always speaks its own language, independent from the flesh-and-blood individual who produced it.
It is these facts that lie behind Wayne Booth’s theory of fiction. We cannot read a book without imagining the personality that is addressing us. Nor, indeed, can we write a book without imagining a personality that peruses it. The contract which Lejeune sets out is, to some extent at least, a contract between imagined persons. The implied author is one such person, and the imagined reader is another. And, in both instances, the imagined person is very often a projection of ourselves, whether we are writer or reader
In biography we are often, but not always, permitted to hear another voice: that of the subject or subjects: through journal or diary entries, through surviving letters and, in more recent biographies, through interviews. This is the biographer’s equivalent of dialogue, and in the heyday of Victorian biography it predominated. Its value as evidence, however, is limited by various factors. In Victorian “lives and letters”, many of which were compiled by a surviving spouse or other relative, the correspondence was very often edited, or in effect censored, in order to create an impression of the subject with which the author felt comfortable. Even where this is not the case, the voice that we hear never represents the whole personality of the subject. We all have different voices which we deploy in registers appropriate to the setting, or to the person to whom we are writing, or to whom we are speaking. You do not write, or text, to your girlfriend in the same voice as you do to your mother. And this sort of modification applies even to journal entries in which the author conceives of herself as the addressee, since what is expressed is contextualised by time. To re-read a journal entry or a blog of one’s own several years after it was written is very often to encounter someone else, a person whom we may not even recognise.
Robert Fraser is Emeritus Professor in the Open University’s Department of English and Creative Writing, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Asiatic Society. His twenty-eight published books include biography, criticism, international book history, poetry, fiction and memoir. His book Tartini’s Rest: Tales Two Brothers Told is to be published in June, 2025.
[1] Marina Warner, Inventory of A Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (London: William Collins, 2021), 46.
[2] Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Usage (London: Routledge, 1937), 558-9. For another fictional example set in the wartime period, see Olivia Manning, The Battle Lost and Won, the second novel of her Levantine Trilogy, which takes place just before and during the Battle of El Alamein (1942), p.50. Away from the front, two of the “lower ranks” are speculating on the course of the battle. Confessing his ignorance, a sergeant-major refers his subordinate to their commanding officer, who is standing some way off: “Better ask his nibs”.
[3] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.34 – 2.36.
[4] Acts, Chapter 17, verses 22-31.
[5] Acts, Chapter 26, verses 2-29.
[6] Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana, VIII, 3.
[7] Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983), 46-7.
[8] Ewen Bowie, “Philostratus: Writer of Fiction” in John Robert Morgan and Richard Stoneman eds, Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 181-200.
[9] Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction & the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2012), 165-207.
[10] Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves, Rev. Michael Grant (London: Allen Lane, 1957), 158. Translating Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, De Vita Caesarum Liber IV (Gaius Caligula), LVIII.
[11] Robert Graves, I, Claudius, from the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Emperor of the Romans, born B.C. 10, murdered and deified and A.D. 54 (London: Arthur Barker, 1934), 489-490.
[12] Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), 3.
[13] Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Life (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 1 – 11.
[14] Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (London: John Murray, 2022), 90-92.
[15] Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (London: Flamingo, 1995), 190-194.
[16] Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013), 386 – 406.
[17] Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos: D.H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan
(London: Martin Secker, 1933), 161-2.
[18] Dorothy Brett, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship (London: Martin Secker, 1933), 128-9. Brett’s impression, however, is that Luhan had stalked away because she and Lawrence had painted Adam and Eve in brown.
[19] David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[20] Rachel Cusk, Second Place (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021), 159-162.