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The most innovative biography of 2015 was Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life, and it is still reverberating (it was published in the U.S. last month and following this Scurr lectured on it in America). Long-term followers of Calderonia will remember my enthusiastic posts about it last year (29 April and 5 May), and my no less enthusiastic ones about Scurr’s published views on biography as ‘an art form open to constant experiment’ (6 March). I became curious, therefore, about her other biography, which was of Maximilien de Robespierre and published in 2006 by Chatto & Windus. It is available in paperback by Vintage and I have now read it.
I must immediately admit to a phobia for the French Revolution. It literally makes me feel sick. As a young Russianist, I had to study the Bolshevik Revolution for three years, I then lived in Communist Russia for two and a half, and in the late 1960s/early 1970s the air there was still rancid with fear pheromones. Although not an historian, I subsequently had to make a minute study of Stalinism and the Great Terror. I am aware of how consciously the Bolsheviks imitated the French revolutionaries. At Moscow University in 1970 I once woke up terrified from a dream I had very similar to the one Wordsworth recounts in The Prelude, of ‘long orations which […] I pleaded/Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice/Labouring, a brain confounded’. I have only to read the word ‘executed’, therefore, whether it is by bullet in the back of the head or by guillotine, and I go tense and pale. The French revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks disgust me.
Ruth Scurr opens her biography of Robespierre with a short Preface in which she quotes a list of those condemned to death during the Reign of Terror — ordinary people, guillotined for things like ‘writing’, or ‘sawing down a tree of liberty’ — and then examines the Paris statistics for the last five months of Robespierre’s reign, when as many as sixty people were condemned by a single tribunal in a morning and judicially murdered on the same scaffold in the afternoon. It is an opening that will shock any reader, not just me, and presumably Scurr intends it to. However, in the Introduction that immediately follows she describes her biographical approach thus:
Fatal Purity […] expresses neither partisan adulation nor exaggerated animosity; instead it is motivated by the open-minded interest Robespierre deserves. It tries, whenever possible, to give him the benefit of any rational doubt. […] I have tried to be his friend and to see things from his point of view. But friends, as he always suspected, can be treacherous; they have opportunities for betrayal that enemies only dream of.
I think the least one can say of this statement is that it is ‘contrapuntal’. Of course Robespierre deserves ‘open-minded interest’, but is it possible to give manifest psychopaths like Robespierre, Lenin or Stalin ‘the benefit of rational doubt’? What does it mean to do so? Similarly, one should never write a man’s biography if one does not attempt 100% to ‘see things from his point of view’, but what does ‘try to be his friend’ mean? It sounds gauche and the suggestion that such a biographer has undreamt-of ‘opportunities for betrayal’ looks like coy self-dramatisation.
As I see it, this counterpoint undermines the success of what, I agree with Stuart Kelly in the TLS of 25 February 2015, is a ‘slyly radical biography’ — an original experiment that takes the kind of risks from which Scurr has rightly said ‘good books result’ (The Guardian, 6 February 2016).
Historians have told us that Robespierre is enigmatic because little is known of his pre-revolutionary life and many of his personal documents were destroyed after his execution. In that case, Scurr has performed wonders of investigation, discovery and collocation, because this does read like a detailed cradle to grave biography, despite its reliance on the published political speeches of Robespierre and those addicted to the sound of their own voices around him. Although there are discontinuities, there is certainly a narrative spine, which is even reinforced by a five-page Chronology right at the end.
But there is a great psychological and moral vacuum at the heart of this book, and the reason in my opinion is that it is not only a biography in the traditional sense. Along the journey we may be told that ‘Robespierre became the living embodiment of the Revolution at its most feral’, that he believed he was the instrument of Providence ‘to the point of insanity’, or that he increasingly suffered from paranoia; but we are also fed extraordinarily ingenuous comments like ‘by all accounts he was remarkably odd’. If Scurr’s book were a traditional biography, the process of sustained empathy with her subject would have produced a comprehensive diagnosis of his psychosis and a detailed analysis of his ethics. She does not actually practise authorial empathy in this book, however, but a degree of professional identification with her ‘friend’.
Its title is not Robespierre: A Life, but Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. The ‘purity’ is the ‘perfection’, the ‘incorruptibility’, of the disembodied ideas that Robespierre and the Revolution were equally possessed by (truly in the Dostoyevskian sense). Ruth Scurr is an academic. More particularly, she is an historian of Political Thought, i.e. an historian of ideas. There is an understandable impersonality, therefore, about her interest in ideas that, whilst of course qualitatively different from Robespierre’s, dangerously hovers over it. This nebulous identification is dangerous for two reasons. First, biography is about the life of a person, therefore if this person is obsessed with ideas the biography should address the ontology of their ideas, not the metaphysics. After all, the words ‘democracy’ and ‘virtue’ — two of Robespierre’s favourite shibboleths — are merely abstract nouns describing actions: democracy is a way of doing things without killing people, virtue is the enactment of your moral values. Scurr’s focus on political ideology therefore etiolates her biography. The other danger of detaching political ideas from reality is…fatally obvious.
I need to stress that, like my other posts on biographies, this is not a review. Scurr’s experiment in combining life-story with history of ideas is without doubt innovative and interesting. What particularly interests me is her use of self-identification with/being a ‘friend’ to her subject, rather than empathy (whose limits must be understanding). There are long stretches of her book that are written with superb pace, and as she says, ‘no backdrop can match the French Revolution’. I am also struck by the fact that both Charlotte Bronte and Fatal Purity are enclosed by prologues and codas (is this a fashion?), and both Harman and Scurr end their books with what are in effect extended hypotheses of their own. But these hypotheses could not be more different in kind.
Harman presents the empirical evidence for Charlotte Brontë’s French professor having communicated/not communicated with her as Rochester communicates from afar with Jane Eyre, or Cathy with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and leaves the hypothesis open. The hypothesis is based on fact and Harman does not tell us whether she believes it.
When the badly wounded Robespierre was laid on the plank of the guillotine, his executioner removed the bandage that was holding Robespierre’s face together and Robespierre screamed an animal scream, seconds before being decapitated. Scurr then gives us a final paragraph almost a page long in which she speculates about what this scream ‘was’. It was ‘the point of severance, when Robespierre’s precious vision of a democratic republic, pure and founded on virtue, finally left him […] perhaps his vision went out into the world on the back of that scream […] [perhaps it was] the end of the bright hope for a democratic Republic […] as a biographer, I hear it as the agonised separation of Robespierre and the Revolution: the man and what he lived for’.
I’m sorry, but this is novelistic speculation and even romantic fantasy. Robespierre’s scream was a scream.
Ruth Scurr: ‘A book in which he is still alive’
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If in her first biography Ruth Scurr’s identity approached that of Robespierre as a ‘friend’, in John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015) she seems to have merged her identity with Aubrey altogether. The fundamental problem of modern biography, Scurr has written elsewhere, is ‘always the same: how to find a narrative form that fits the life (or lives) in question’. To quote from her Introduction to John Aubrey, after many false starts she decided to ‘write Aubrey’s life as a diary’, ‘construct’ Aubrey’s diary, ‘conjure’ a diary for Aubrey, by collecting the ‘fragmentary remains of his life […] from manuscripts, letters and books’ and ‘arranging them carefully in chronological order’. She has used ‘as many as possible of his own words’, but ‘added words of my own to explain events or interactions that would otherwise be obscure and to frame or offset the charm of Aubrey’s own turns of phrase’. ‘Ultimately,’ she writes, ‘my aim has been to write a book in which he is still alive.’
The result is a gloriously enjoyable, almost unputdownable long read (422 pages of text and 39 of source-notes); but it is impossible, I think, not to to be aware of the contradictions latent in Scurr’s choice of narrative form. In the first place, is it really that difficult to write a book in which Aubrey is ‘still alive’, when the book is overwhelmingly (one assumes) written by Aubrey? It is overwhelmingly a first-person narrative, the first person in question has the most frank and engaging personality, and the writer Aubrey indubitably deserves to be a bestseller!
If the ‘I’ of the book — Aubrey — wrote most of John Aubrey: My Own Life, in what sense did Ruth Scurr ‘write’ it? Surely it must be an autobiography, as its title informs us, and Scurr merely edited it? But she, Michael Holroyd and Hilary Mantel refer to it as a biography. And indeed, Ruth Scurr created it (is that the sense in which she means ‘wrote’?); she has absolute control over Aubrey. As the creator of last resort, then, the creator of a literary life not her own, she must be called a biographer; the autobiography is a biography… Yet as an autobiography there has to be a lot that is missing from it as a biography (see the Comment from Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Aubrey’s alma mater, Trinity College, Oxford, of 13 October 2016). Finally, Scurr says that she wanted to ‘produce a portrait’ of Aubrey, but a portrait (synchronic) is the opposite of a biography or an autobiography (diachronic)… Yet Scurr’s compositional method has created a portrait of Aubrey, at rest as it were where his autobiography-biography was always moving forwards.
I imagine that Ruth Scurr relishes these paradoxes in John Aubrey. She cannot possibly be unaware of them. More likely she has consciously constructed them, just as she set up the conflict between ideography and biography in Fatal Purity. They are the contrarian heart and soul of her innovativeness as a biographer, and innovation always invites a dual response: you either love it or you dismiss it as fudgery.
Where will Ruth Scurr go from here? There are signs in both of her biographies that she might move towards novelised biography, or even write a novel proper, but her academic discipline and attachment to non-fiction would seem to argue against that. I have read somewhere (but can no longer remember where) that she has been engaged for some time on a book that would address the whole subject of biography — such questions as ‘why we tell the stories of earlier lives’, ‘what is the nature of the relationship between biographers and their subjects’, and whether we ‘honour or betray the dead when we write about them’ (‘Lives, some briefer than others’, The Guardian, 28 February 2015). This would be wonderful for the rest of us and surely a valuable contribution to the study of dialogism. But could it prove a blind alley for her as a biographer? Whatever she publishes next, I thoroughly expect the unexpected from this author.