The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [113]
We might think that this opens the door to the self-fictionalizing abuses of the faux memoir. But Woolf has something different in mind; she is fairly ferocious about the importance of “the substance of fact.” Where she wants the biographer to act like a novelist is in the matter of style, not in embroidery or speculation: “the biographer’s imagination is always being stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life. Yet if he carries the use of fiction too far, so that he disregards the truth, or can only introduce it with incongruity, he loses both worlds; he has neither the freedom of fiction nor the substance of fact.” Mixing the worlds “of Bohemia and Hamlet and Macbeth” with the world “of brick and pavement; of birth, marriage, and death; of Acts of Parliament,” etc. is “abhorrent.”53
So what is literary about biography to Virginia Woolf is the complicated freedom of the biographer in the matter of writing. Not in making things up, but in making them vivid and in establishing equality with the subject from the point of view of—point of view. Woolf herself uses an early version of unmarked notes in Flush, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. The dramatic (or melodramatic) last line of one chapter reads, “He was stolen.”
… suddenly, without a word of warning, in the midst of civilisation, security and friendship—he was in a shop in Vere Street with Miss Barrett and her sister; it was the morning of Tuesday the 1st of September—Flush was tumbled head over heels into darkness. The doors of a dungeon shut on him. He was stolen.54
In Woolf’s text—unlike, alas, in mine—no superscript note is present to mar the stark drama of the moment. But the event related is verified and qualified by a deadpan unmarked note at the back of the book:
P. 82: “He was stolen.” As a matter of fact, Flush was stolen three times; but the unities seem to require that the three stealings shall be compressed into one. The total sum paid by Miss Barrett to the dog-stealers was £20.55
What was new about the new biography, as performed by writers like Lytton Strachey (and by Woolf) was its combination of rigorous scholarship, psychological insight, and wit.
Strachey’s narrative style subsumed the scholarship into an apparently seamless narrative. Although there are no identifying notes after each character’s utterances or inner thoughts, Strachey follows his sources very closely. Consider this wryly empathetic passage from Queen Victoria (1921), in which Strachey describes the situation of Prince Albert:
The husband was not so happy as the wife. In spite of the great improvement in his situation, in spite of a growing family and the adoration of Victoria, Albert was still a stranger in a strange land, and the serenity of spiritual satisfaction was denied him. It was something, no doubt, to have dominated his immediate environment; but it was not enough; and besides, in the very completeness of his success, there was a bitterness. Victoria idolized him; but it was understanding that he craved for, not idolatry; and how much did Victoria, filled to the brim though she was with him, understand him? How much does the bucket understand the well? He was lonely. He went to his organ and improvised with learned modulations until the sounds, swelling and subsiding through elaborate cadences, brought some solace to his heart. Then, with the elasticity of youth, he hurried off to play with the babies, or to design a new pigsty, or to read aloud the “Church History of Scotland” to Victoria, or to pirouette before her on one toe, like a ballet-dancer, with a fixed smile, to show her how she ought to behave when she appeared in public places.56
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