Percy Lubbock: ‘Esoteric and intimate portraiture’

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

One of Ruth Scurr’s aims in John Aubrey: My Own Life was to ‘produce a portrait’ of Aubrey, but naturally she did not write it in the biographical genre known as ‘literary portrait’. This genre seems to have grown out of Lytton Strachey’s and others’ journalism. It was particularly favoured by the late Edwardians and not a single recent example of it springs to mind. It seems to have gone completely out of fashion. The nearest that I can think of is the kind of scholarly book that looks at a number of people from the past whom the author did not personally know, for instance Piers Brendon’s fine Eminent Edwardians: Four Figures Who Defined their Age (2003). Otherwise, having presumably started life as the Greek eulogy, the literary portrait has perhaps died into the modern obituary. Lytton Strachey did not personally know the eminent Victorians of his title, but a defining feature of the later ‘literary portrait’, I think, is that it was written by someone who had personally known its subject — and Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) appears to be a prime example.

Early twentieth century readers definitely regarded the literary portrait as biography. Within a week of publication of Lubbock’s George Calderon, John Masefield was writing to Kittie that ‘the book has made its mark already as a fine piece of biography’. In fact, it was regarded as a superior form of biography. In the words of a review of Percy’s book in Kittie’s voluminous collection of press cuttings:

The mere scaffolding of biography — the skeleton of dates and facts — is almost entirely disregarded; the portraiture is esoteric and intimate. Of course, this is much the most difficult form of biography to write; it demands deep personal knowledge and real interpretative power, and both these attributes are continually at Mr Lubbock’s disposal. Selecting incidents and traits which make for the fabric of character, he gradually builds up a rich and very sympathetic portrait.

The operative words here, I feel, are ‘selecting’ and ‘character’. As a selective composition the literary portrait is by definition subjective and not biographically comprehensive; and ‘character’ suggests something settled, whereas we perhaps prefer ‘personality’ or ‘self’ and think of them as dynamic, changing through time, and even discontinuous!

Percy Lubbock assuredly wanted to create a book in which George was ‘still alive’, as Scurr said of her Aubrey composition, and review after review of Percy’s book confirms that he succeeded — both for those who did not personally know George, and those who did. In a letter to Kittie of 15 May 1921, Mary Cholmondeley hit both literary bull’s-eyes: ‘What a noble and entrancing portrait of a most remarkable and lovable character.’ The next day, William Caine summed up for their friends when he wrote to Kittie: ‘What we wanted was not a detailed account of George’s doings and an elaborate analysis of his various works, but what we have here — this brief and brilliant impression. […] the man himself is there.’

However, one cannot get round the fact that the ‘literary portrait’ is a hybrid; a combination of biographical facts, of ‘horizontal’ movement through a life, with ‘vertical’ contemplation of the ‘character’ of its subject recollected in tranquillity. And the problem with hybrid genres (e.g. John Aubrey) is that they always leave some people irritated by the feeling that the result is neither fish nor fowl. Quite exceptionally, an unnamed writer in the Saturday Review of 3 September 1921 sought to articulate this:

[Percy Lubbock] mentions the facts of George Calderon’s career only to brush them away again as something indeed not irrelevant to his subject, but as failing to illuminate it. His method is odd and he himself is manifestly dissatisfied with its result, but for the reader it is extraordinarily successful. George Calderon is not explained, or weighed, or excused, or much praised in these pages. He looks out of them with his secret, still untold, in his eyes.

I have come across no evidence that Percy Lubbock was dissatisfied with the result of his biographical method — quite the contrary — but there is little doubt that Kittie was to some extent unhappy with it. Despite the fact that, in the invaluable letter discovered by Katy George in a charity shop last year, Kittie said that she thought Percy’s ‘Life’ of George ‘quite beautiful […] utterly and completely true yet perfect in its art’, Lubbock recognised her dissatisfaction when he wrote to her after she had read it for the first time: ‘All I can think of is the way in which I find it impossible to help you as I could wish.’

The reason for this was that she had conceived the book in the memorial genre that was so popular after 1918; it was to be a composition of George’s letters from throughout his life, friends’ testimonies, and a biographical essay by Percy that would draw on Kittie’s own vibrant memoir of George. But, as is thoroughly the tendency in literary portraits, Percy’s own agenda took over. His George Calderon is really a book about Percy Lubbock. As much as his next book, Earlham (1922), it is a recherche du temps perdu in Percy’s inimitable Jamesian/Proustian style, with an inordinate amount about Kittie’s first husband, Percy’s uncle Archie Ripley, and life at 17 Golden Square before George even appeared on the scene. Of course, George becomes increasingly the focus of attention in this Sketch from Memory, but it is still George’s ‘character’ that is foregrounded and discussed. The last forty pages of the book, in which Percy skilfully stitches together extracts from George’s war letters with his, Percy’s, narrative, comes across as the Flood that swept the pre-1914 life of Golden Square and Earlham away.

As followers can well imagine, my own response to George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory is a tad complex. It has also changed over the last thirty or so years. I don’t want to discuss it now, as the focus of this post is the hybrid genre ‘literary portrait’ and its resemblance to modern biographical hybrids, e.g. John Aubrey. But I will just touch on two factors. As Mr John Pym, Percy’s great-nephew, has said to me, ‘Percy wrote his book for Kittie’, and that is why he made it include Archie Ripley and the life of Golden Square (with a wonderful portrait of Kittie’s mother) before George Calderon’s appearance there. It is also perhaps relevant that Percy Lubbock was gay and his uncle Archie Ripley bisexual before his marriage. His portrait of Ripley feels much more empathetic and profound than his portrait of George, who was markedly heterosexual. At the end of the day, I am afraid, I feel that Lubbock’s Calderon is only an ‘impression’, to use Caine’s word, made by George at different times upon a much younger man who shared few of George’s interests and did not penetrate far into them. One can understand why after reading Percy’s portrait a reviewer could describe George as ‘a strange, brilliant creature who wrote plays, studied languages, threw himself into industrial disputes, travelled, plied a delicate pencil — did a number of vivid things brilliantly’ (‘and that’s all we know about him’).

Unless it is written by a contemporary who personally knew his subject, I don’t think the literary portrait can satisfy us today as biography. Its highly selective and often unchronological biographical content is limited. William Caine, surely, described what we, as opposed to George’s friends left behind him, need: ‘a detailed account of George’s doings and an elaborate analysis of his various works.’ By attempting that as empirically, objectively, empathetically and  critically as we can, we still display ‘character’ over time for those who want it. I think we are wedded to the idea that a life is extension and not stasis; it inexorably moves forward through Time even if we don’t know everything about every segment of it. The scientific age demands, in the first instance, the best facts available.

Nevertheless, where would I be without the salient biographical pointers that Percy Lubbock provided me with originally? And there is always enormous interest for the later biographer in how his subject looked to his ‘friends’. If we write literary portraits at all now, they should use biographical facts but never pretend to be biographies.