(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)
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.
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Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Captain of the 11
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Ruth Scurr: ‘A book in which he is still alive’
(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)
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.
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