Book, let me go.
I don’t want to walk dressed
In a volume …
let me walk on the roads
with dust in my shoes
and without mythology:
return to your library,
I’m going out into the streets.
So announced Pablo Neruda in Ode to the Book (I), championing his political activism over the writing to which he had devoted a lifetime’s equal energy. Unfavourable comparison between the real world and the library has a long tradition mostly expressed, ironically enough, in books.
In Neruda’s poem, devotion to books is imagined as a retreat from the moral claims of daily life. But where does such a division leave the books written about real people? Ever since humans have been making stories we’ve been drawn to telling the complex mass of actual human life and, in their modern guise of biography and memoir, stories about real lives are more popular than ever.
In our fascination with other lives we seek the solaces of gossip—titillation, diversion and reassurance—but not only that, we also look for guidance: one of the central purposes of biography throughout its long life has been instruction. The biographies of divinities and sages are a central means of teaching in all of the world’s religions. In Christianity, for example, there is the tradition of ‘spiritual autobiographies’ and ‘saints’ lives’ (beginning in 993 with Aelfrics’s Lives of the Saints and continuing up to the marvellously lurid 60 Saints for Girls I received as a first communion gift); indeed, the Gospels themselves can be considered biographies. The Greeks and Romans bequeathed a secular tradition of moral exemplars to the West, with Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans presenting a model of civic and military prowess that became widely influential in Europe with Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation. The tradition of the Great Man biography reached its apotheosis with the Victorians, where the vivid intimacy of Johnson’s and Boswell’s 18th-century innovations were replaced with pious reverence: reticence on everything but rectitude was the order of the day.
This vast edifice of Victorian hagiography was punctured in 1918 with the publication of Lytton Strachey’s slim satiric volume Eminent Victorians, which parodied the notions of civic good and spiritual heroism upon which the Victorian tradition was founded. Strachey’s reaction against the didactic purpose of biography has become a hallmark of the modern form. Victoria Glendinning, the award-winning biographer of Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth