A slim classic

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

In a very stimulating review of my book in the annual Report of George’s old college, Trinity Oxford, Michael Alexander writes: ‘Should a biographer tell all that has been found, or select to streamline the story? It depends.’

He is right. I put everything I knew about George into my biography because there was no biography before and this might be his only chance for another century. I suspect that Falcetta did the same with his biography of Rendel Harris. ‘Long’ certainly does not equal ‘definitive’, but it may imply it and explain why there is a commercial publishing trend towards long biographies that don’t, actually, contain much new. On the other hand, a biography like Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life (2011) contains so much new material that it thoroughly justifies its length (893 pages).

Biographies may be also be short for a variety of reasons. A vast number of facts may have been available for centuries, but the biographer wants to streamline them to clarify a narrative. Similarly, he/she may have studied a person’s life for decades but want to distil his/her interpretation of it into, say, 30,000 words. Another cause of brevity, of course, may be that there is not a vast amount of known facts in the first place. Or simply that the life of the biography’s subject was not long.

When Jon Stallworthy’s classic biography of Wilfred Owen came out in 1974, I imagine people assumed it was short (less than three hundred pages) because Owen’s life was short. Indeed, Stallworthy stresses the preciousness of time in Owen’s life by marking each spread of pages with his age top left and the year top right — something I’ve not seen in any other biography.

However, it could be that in 1974 Stallworthy simply did not have any more facts at his disposal. Equally, it might be that he purposely ‘streamlined’ the biography. There is certainly a strong sense of shape to the work. Perhaps he felt that less was more.

Despite my visceral love of Owen’s work, I had never read Stallworthy’s biography of him until this week. If I had, some of the many references to Owen in this blog since 2014 might have been better informed! My usual rider applies: I have chosen particular books for these posts on biography because they illustrate issues with modern biography that I want to discuss, not because I am reviewing them. And the issue in question here is length.

Nevertheless, the experience of reading Wilfred Owen: A Biography has been so extraordinary that I must say something about that (which still relates to its extent). Stallworthy was a friend of Wilfred Owen’s younger brother Harold, whose memory of Wilfred seems to have been vivid and encyclopaedic. Harold was also able to supply the biographer with a very large amount of written family material. Wilfred’s childhood, his relations with his mother (in particular), and his adolescence, which take up nearly half of the book, are therefore related in great, and sometimes tedious, detail. Moreover, Stallworthy very rarely intervenes in this part of the book with what I called in my previous post ‘speculating and interpreting’. The effect is almost fatally detached. It was a masterstroke to quote so many of Owen’s poems in autograph images (Owen’s handwriting is very legible), but Stallworthy cannot conceal their adolescent flaws, indeed he tersely identifies them; so that does not exactly enhance one’s reading, either.

Then a miracle occurs, or rather two. In June 1917 Owen was posted to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, to be treated for PTSD. Siegfried Sassoon, a published poet and celebrity, arrived there shortly afterwards for his own reasons. Eventually, Owen plucks up courage and knocks gently on Sassoon’s door. In Stallworthy’s words:

A voice answered, the door opened, and Owen advanced into blazing sunlight and the most important meeting of his life. 

The sensitivity and sheer goodness with which Sassoon recognises Owen’s poetic gift, befriends, encourages, teaches, nurtures and admires him, is incredibly moving. My breath was taken away as Owen now produced one masterpiece after another: ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (five drafts reproduced), ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘The Send-Off’, ‘Greater Love’… One is witnessing the miraculous birth of great poetry. But, astonishingly, the miracle is transferred to the biography. Stallworthy himself rises to the occasion:

It is now possible to see that his gifts were not only gifts of genius, but other gifts that only the gods bestow. He came to the War with his imagination in large measure conditioned and prepared to receive and record the experience of the trenches. Botany and Broxton, Uriconium, and Keats, his adolescent hypochondria, his religious upbringing and later doubts, all shaped him for his subject, as no other. He wrote more eloquently than other poets of the tragedy of boys killed in battle, because he felt that tragedy more acutely, and his later elegies spring from his early preoccupations as flowers from their stem [an image adapted from one of Keats’s quoted earlier]. 

The whole book now advances into blazing light and Stallworthy is never in danger of losing his reader again. Both the story of Owen’s last year and Stallworthy’s telling of it are riveting. The total effect is cathartic. I understand now why Graham Greene called it ‘surely one of the finest biographies of our time’.

So: should this slim classic be longer now that far more (I assume) is known about Owen’s life, for instance about what I take to be his bisexuality? Should it be superseded by a longer biography and indeed has been? The answer, in my view, is that it can always be superseded as a biography, but never as a book. As a unique biographical creation — the poet Jon Stallworthy’s creation — nothing can replace it. But for the rest, I believe there is no such thing as a definitive biography. Like translations, and waves making to the pebbled shore, biographies ‘in sequent toil all forwards do contend’ (Sonnet 60).

The reason I have not appended page numbers to my inset quotations above is that it would be unhelpful given the variety of different editions now available. The book was first published by OUP and Chatto in 1974 and the above image is from a copy of the Oxford Paperback edition (1977) kindly lent to me by a subscriber to Calderonia.

SOME RESPONSES TO THE BIOGRAPHY RECEIVED SO FAR

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.