On Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens

Today, February 7, marks the two hundredth birth anniversary of Charles Dickens. This essay on a new book about Dicken's early years in literature appeared last weekend in The National.

That an increase in information does not always produce an increase in knowledge is one of the lessons of our overdriven age. But on a smaller scale, it might also be seen as one of the essential principles – and, when forgotten or ignored, then criticisms – of the practice of biography.

The fundamental question of biography, or the art of the interpretation of one human being by another, has always been the question of the selection of detail, of the shape of significance. The massive biographies that take a cradle-to-the-grave approach to their subjects, pouring over the distinction of the person every factoid, reminiscence, contextual detail and speculative whisper that can be gleaned from labour in the archives, might be seen as actually dodging this question, content to bask in the reflected light of the subject’s name (Picasso! Steve Jobs! Lady Gaga!).

But a more sensitive and ambitious approach to biography, particularly when applied to over-interpreted subjects, concedes that even a fascinating human being is not evenly interesting, that even in the richest of lives there seem to be periods when every hour is hot with ferment, followed by passages of consolidation, drift, torpor, even regress. If the reason we are attracted to biography is the allure of the drama of human self-fashioning seen from the inside, then these rewards can just as well be gleaned by the choice of a suite of years, and not the whole life.

The excitement of this method – that of the partial, but pointed, biography – is that it is defamiliarising, hovering not above its subject but beside it. In place of the person whom we believe we know, intimately, we are given a figure, answering to the same name, seen confronting a decisive problem in a way that will change both self and world. Through the verb in its title, Becoming Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s study of Charles Dickens in the early years of his career shows us what it wants to give to the celebrations of 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens. It is a Dickens who, throwing himself into the currents of London in the 1830s, could not even be sure of his next move or source of income, much less that his name would still chime in the minds of millions 200 years after his birth.

Indeed, this Dickens was not even sure of the literary appeal of his own name, reaching out to the reading public, after the fashion of the day, through a pseudonym (“Boz”) and reserving his full name for contracts with publishers and letters to the woman he was wooing. Having served, in his teens and early 20s, as a clerk in London’s teeming law courts and a parliamentary reporter for a newspaper, he thought of himself principally as a writer of scenes and sketches, holding on to a chamber in the courts even as he tested the waters of “the most precarious of pursuits” – that of the professional writer.

Douglas-Fairhurst, a scholar of English literature tenured at Oxford, brings to his book two very different kinds of strengths. The first is his knowledge of the literary and social world of 19th-century London, which is his area of academic specialisation. Indeed, with this book, he ties together within his own oeuvre a work about the greatest and most sympathetic novelistic chronicler of the British underclass, Dickens, with the greatest journalistic chronicler of that class, the reporter and editor Henry Mayhew. Mayhew’s massive four-volume work of reportage, London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62), came out last year in a new edition abridged by Douglas-Fairhurst and introduced by him as “the greatest Victorian novel never written”.

Dickens and Mayhew were both captivated by the narrative clamour and despair of a London that, over the course of the 19th century, saw a demographic boom that took its population from a million to six million. (Mayhew writes in the opening pages of his fascinating study Criminal Prisons of London that “in every thousand of the aggregate composing the immense human family, two at least are Londoners”.) In so booming, the city itself became interested in measurement, statistical projection and patterns of complex cause and effect, and cultivated an enormous appetite for newspapers and, indeed, novels.

Trawling the periodicals in which Dickens published his early, atmospheric pieces, Douglas-Fairhurst returns him to the literary-social frame within which he worked out his own method and the form – that of the serialised story, gathering momentum or changing direction over the weeks in dialogue with a feedback loop immediately generated by readers – in which he first published his novels. He shows Dickens “transforming himself from sketch writer to novelist, and from reporter to editor” when these were not at all easy or obvious decisions, although they seem so now because they have been ratified by time.

Douglas-Fairhurst’s other talent is for a very attentive and sophisticated kind of close reading – for tracing the contours of Dickens’ imagination and social vision through the analysis of sentences, phrases, even single words. This is invaluable, because if we are to understand through novels how people are marked by life, we need to pay attention to how characters and situations are marked by the text.

Observing the importance of prisons, real and metaphorical, to Dickens’ imagination – in his childhood, his father was briefly sent to prison for defaulting on debts, resulting in the young Charles having to work in a blacking factory while his sister continued to go to school – Douglas-Fairhurst stops upon a sentence in Little Dorrit. The eponymous protagonist speaks of life with her family in a debtors’ prison and of how it has marked them forever, misting up memory of life before the prison and darkening any future that might lie after it: “Whatever we once were (which I hardly know) we ceased to be long ago, and never can be any more.”

Glossing this remarkable sentence, with its exquisitely balanced clauses (two parts of four words each, then two parts of six, and winding through past-, present- and future-tense constructions in a state of tension with one another), Douglas-Fairhurst remarks, “The prison expands to fit the size of the world, and the world contracts to fit the size of the prison”. Indeed, we might say about the work of literary criticism that it shows how a sentence may expand to the size of the world too.

Again, writing about the sprawl, even the excess, of narrative energy and colour in Dickens, Douglas-Fairhurst writes: “[T]he centrifugal force of his imagination, which could never resist spawning extra characters and narrative details, is always on the verge of escaping from the centripetal force of his plots.” But this very gracefully expressed idea, which serves in this instance as a compliment to Dickens, might also be applied to Douglas-Fairhurst’s own book, and here it becomes a criticism.

The writing is sometimes self-indulgent – never more so than in the opening pages, when, in setting up the idea of Dickens having many competing paths before him as he was “becoming Dickens”, Douglas-Fairhurst supplies a portrait of an imaginary London in 1855 borrowed from a novel, The Difference Engine, published in 1990 by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. This is a very strained kind of counter-factualism and it lays the ground for many later passages when Dickens disappears completely from view and the writing slackens from being centerless.

Douglas-Fairhurst’s other unreliable tic is his penchant for supplying dialectical explanations for situations or states of mind, which is sometimes extended to the point of self-parody (“only by trying to lose his train of thought could [Dickens] find it, just as only by leaving his home could he enjoy returning to it”). These faults mean that, while frequently insightful, Becoming Dickens falls just short of being essential.

On Jonathan Bate's biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age

In a brief but dazzling short story about the life of Shakespeare called “Everything and Nothing”, the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges portrays Shakespeare as a man without a personality. “There was no one in him,” writes Borges, and this explains why Shakespeare could put himself in the shoes of hundreds of myriad-minded characters, imagine them all from within. Thus the paradox: Shakespeare was not fully a man, and yet “nobody was ever as many men as that man.” At some point, "before or after dying", Shakespeare finds himself before God and makes the demand for a stable, discrete personality, for a “myself”. God’s reply comes: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons – and none.”

In his new biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate attempts to take the measure of how a man of such unpromising circumstances – the son of a small businessman, brought up in an insignificant market-town, educated in an ordinary school – managed to expand his mind, his language, and his imaginative and worldly power to become, as the book’s title asserts, the soul of the age. Or, to adapt Borges, how did a man who should have been nothing end up encompassing everything?

Bate has worked on two previous books that involve Shakespeare: he is the author of The Genius of Shakespeare (1998) , and the co-editor of The RSC Shakespeare (2007), a new edition of the complete works. As would befit such a writer, Soul of the Age is itself founded upon a Shakespearean structure. Bate organises his material around the concept of the “seven ages of man” – infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice (or householder), and then two levels of old age, the latter being “a second childishness” – so vividly described by the character Jacques in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It. Making fertile connections between Shakespeare’s plays, what is known of his life, and the beliefs and practices of his times, Bate comes as close to achieving a sense of Shakespeare’s felt presence as any other biographer ever has.

Since he left so few traces of himself, and since so much other evidence has been lost or destroyed, Shakespearean biography has never been a matter of simply collecting and interpreting the sources. Yet there are dozens of other extensive documents left behind by Shakespeare: the plays and poems themselves. Bate quotes approvingly the critic Barbara Everett, who argues, in an essay called "Reade him, therefore" published in the TLS in 2007, that “if [Shakespeare’s] biography is to be found it has to be here, in the plays and poems, but never literally and never provably.” Much of what Bate posits is a result of interpretation, correlation, juxtaposition. But if his method is speculatory, the result is a very rich, educated, and revelatory speculation.

For instance, is it not significant that in Shakespeare’s earlier works, doctors are usually comic figures, but after the marriage of his daughter, Susanna, to a widely respected doctor called John Hall, the doctors in the plays become “dignified, sympathetically portrayed medical men”? If this is one direction taken by Bate in his exploration of medicine in the world of Shakespeare’s plays, then in another sally he takes note of the wealth of plants, herbs, and flowers named in the plays, demonstrating Shakespeare’s deep engagement, as someone who grew up in the country and had a "field education", with “the herbal economy of rural England”.

This then leads Bate into a meditation on how, although Shakespeare is always identified with the London stage, he always had one foot in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. He always lived in rented lodgings in London, and many of his plays shuttle, just as he himself did, between the worlds of city and country. When the London theatres were closed for periods of a year or more because of the plague ("Plague," Bate reminds us, "was the single most powerful force shaping [Shakespeare's] life and those of his contemporaries"), Shakespeare returned home. "It is unlikely to be a coincidence," remarks Bate, "that Shakespeare turned to pastoral romance in the plague years around 1607-10: of all of his plays, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale are the ones to have the most distinctive air of having been written back home in Stratford." Bate dwells on some of the specific descriptions of flowers or plants in Shakespeare, such the mole on Innogen's breast in Cymbeline, "cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops/ I'th'bottom of a cowslip", and asks, "Is there any other English poet, save John Clare, who has such an eye as this?"

Imagine such an approach being replicated with respect to Shakespearean politics and statecraft, Shakespearean language (such as the relationship between Latin, the "high" language of schooling, and English, which was not the self-confident world language that it is now), Shakespearean cosmology, and Shakespeare’s use of both ancient and recent history, and you have some notion of the wealth of ideas and associations in Bate’s book. Bate's discussion of love in Shakespeare, particularly as it is explored through the sonnets, is one of the best I have ever read, and his brilliant analysis of how King Lear enacts a critique of conventional rationalistic philosophy on the subject of suffering and asserts instead, via Shakespeare's reading of Erasmus and Montaigne, the value of the path of "love and folly" in human affairs kept me thinking for several days.

Nor is Bate an unredeemed bardolater. In fact, in one of the best and most surprising moments of The Genius of Shakespeare, he argues that the profusion, range, linguistic depth, and artistic worth of Shakespeare's work were matched in his own lifetime by a contemporary, born two years before him in 1562: the great Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. Lope wrote hundreds of plays and sonnets, and was, like Shakespeare, "wily in his aspectuality". Like Shakespeare, Lope's characteristic form "was a mingle of tragedy and comedy, high and low, the poetic voice accordingly shifting from elegance to coarseness." Perhaps, Bate suggests, it was the politics of empire and of language that played a role in Shakespeare's preeminence:

[Lope] answered to every element of my prescription of a world-genius in literature. But Spain went into decline and Lope was not translated. The whole of Shakespeare has been translated into scores of languages; less than ten per cent of Lope's surviving plays has ever been translated into English.
Twentieth-century physics has made the idea of the co-existence of "alternative universes" easier to comprehend. Picture an alternative world in which Spain triumphed over England. Lope then would have triumphed over Shakespeare and I would be writing a book called The Genius of Vega. What do we learn from our picture? That the apotheosis of Shakespeare was and was not a matter of historical contingency. It was a contingency insofar as it happened to be Shakespeare, not Lope. But it was a necessity because the chosen one had to be a particular kind of genius and could therefore only have been Lope or Shakespeare.

Among the aspects of Shakespeare’s nature that emerge most clearly from Bate’s book is his prudent business sense. Making a survey of the dramatists who were Shakespeare’s competitors – Marlowe, Greene, Kyd, Nashe, Dekker – Bate shows that many of them died young, or in penury. In contrast, Shakespeare not only lived frugally, he was also the first playwright of his time to become a joint-stockholder in a theatre company, thereby ensuring his financial stability through a share of gate receipts, and his indispensability as the company’s in-house dramatist. Even though he never bought a house in London, he acquired and consolidated a massive property back home in Stratford, as if wishing, after his years of physical and mental roving, to retire as a big fish in a small pond. It is these homely details, as much as the evidence of his subject’s genius, that make us warm to Bate’s book, and leave us feeling on such intimate terms with Shakespeare that we too can address him, as God does in Borges’s story, as “my Shakespeare.”

A list prepared by Bate of more than a hundred of the best books on Shakespeare is here. Of these, the two I would most like to read are recent ones with very similar titles but different approaches: AD Nuttall's Shakespeare The Thinker and Phillip Davis's Shakespeare Thinking. And one excellent book Bate doesn't mention, but which I enjoyed enormously, is Allan Bloom's set of resplendent readings of individual plays called Shakespeare on Love and Friendship. Here is an essay by Bate about the authorship controversy associated with Shakespeare: "Scenes from the Birth of a Myth and the Death of a Dramatist", and another recent piece on one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, "The mad worlds of Thomas Middleton", which you should read closely if you are interested in issues of textual scholarship. Among the books mentioned in this essay is "Gordon Williams’s magnificent three-volume compendium of filth, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature", which currently retails on Amazon at just over $500). And Bate offers a short tour of the room in which he works here, as part of the Guardian series on writers' rooms.

And here are two old posts: "Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare" (which also has links to about a dozen excellent essays on Shakespeare), and "Memories of Borges and the old Twentieth Century bookshop". A review of another recent major literary biography, Patrick French's book on VS Naipaul, is here.

On Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul

Biographies always have to navigate between small and large concerns, between the humdrum detail and the world-changing intervention. But rarely is the gulf between high and low as vast as it is in The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s long-awaited biography of V.S. Naipaul. On the one hand, we make an intimate acquaintance with the oddities, infidelities, and perfidies of an exceptionally egotistic and unreasonable man, a man suffered rather than loved even by those closest to him. On the other, we see that the larger journey of this man (from provincial outpost to metropolitan centre, and thereafter eagerly, restlessly, back and forth across the newly decolonized world) is the story of the 20th century in miniature: the story of mass migration, of failed nation-states, of changing race relations, of multiple personal histories and affiliations.

French’s biography is exemplary on the details of Naipaul’s childhood, and later on his troubled (and troubling) conjugal life. One of the best sections of his book is the early one on Trinidad, tracing the Naipaul family story all the way back to the first arrival of indentured Indian labourers in Port-of-Spain in 1845. As Naipaul has himself said on many occasions, his father Seepersad, the son of an agricultural labourer who taught himself to read and write and became a journalist, spurred his dream of becoming a great writer. But French also shows how Naipaul’s projected sense of himself as a Brahmin, a lover of learning with a native sense of entitlement, fastidious about details of food and clothing, is in a way a disguise, as Seepersad was probably not a Brahmin.

Brought up in a fractious joint family, the details of which he would later use in his fiction, the young Vidia longed to escape from Trinidad and set about studying for the scholarship to England that would allow him to do so. Naipaul later saw his arrival in England in 1950 as being at the vanguard of “that great movement of people that was to take place in the second half of the 20th century”. At Oxford, he was to meet his future wife Pat, who offered support for his ambitions and soothed his insecurities about being a brown-skinned man in a predominantly white country.

After Oxford, Naipaul worked grudgingly at a variety of jobs (as a presenter on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices, as a book reviewer, even as a clerk), married Pat, and produced the brilliant early works of fiction (The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, A House For Mr Biswas) that won him acclaim in England as a promising writer from the Caribbean. French is particularly acute in his analysis of how, in his late 20s, realizing that the vogue for Caribbean fiction in England was dying, Naipaul reinvented himself as “a displaced, unaffiliated, un-Caribbean writer” and inserted himself into what the Indian publisher Ravi Dayal called “the mainstream of history”.

Thus began his travels around the world. A commission from the Trinidad government led him to write a short, critical book about the island; he journeyed to India with Pat in 1962 and produced his unsettling and controversial book An Area of Darkness; an offer from a university in Uganda became the launchpad for a series of books on Africa. Naipaul’s life settled into a pattern. He visited several countries, travelled widely with the assistance of local guides, spoke to people, transcribed his notes every evening, came back home and wrote up a book in a burst of focused work. His books, which almost always stoked controversy, tried to unveil the deep structure and crippling malaises of these civilizations through a combination of keen observation and recorded testimonies.

Meanwhile, Naipaul’s relationship with Pat had swiftly degenerated into a scene of relentless egotism and volatility for one, and suffocation and self-abnegation for the other. Sexually unfulfilled, he took to visiting prostitutes. Then, on a trip to Argentina in 1972, he met and instantly fell in love with an Anglo-Argentine woman called Margaret Murray, a mother of three. There began immediately a bruising affair, in both the figurative and the literal sense. Over the next 25 years, Naipaul and Murray loved and lacerated one another without ever coming close to marrying or living together, which was what Murray wanted.

Naipaul could not bring himself to leave his wife, the first reader of his manuscripts, yet, pitilessly, he told her about Margaret and often flew out to meet his lover in different parts of the world, leaving her to deal with her grief. French’s book is as much a biography of Pat as it is of Sir Vidia. He quotes often from her diaries, which are housed in a vast archive of Naipaul’s papers at the University of Tulsa, and closely tracks her attempts to make a life for herself during her husband’s absences. In one of the book's most heartbreaking moments, French shows us Pat living by herself in London, researching, of all things, an anthology of love letters at the invitation of a common friend of her and her husband, the historian Antonia Fraser. French’s narrative ends in 1996, with a moving description of Pat’s death and the scene of a tearful Naipaul and his new wife, Nadira, scattering her ashes in the woods near their country estate.

French beautifully mines and marshals the sources all biographies are made of - entries in diaries and notebooks, letters, recorded interviews, reminiscences of people close to the subject. Sometimes glimpses of a figure - an anecdote, a memory - can tell us more than pages of analysis can. French's narrative is full of such glimpses, which allow us to put together a private picture of Naipaul (French wisely eschews the kind of moralising commentary and retrospective judgments that mar so many biographies).
Moni Malhoutra, an IAS officer who assisted Naipaul with An Area of Darkness, recalls that Naipaul "was very athletic and he used to do a particular movement with his leg, he used to pick it up and bring it up towards his head from the back. It's the kind of posture which you'll see in some sculptures in the Tanjore temples...He loved to do that." Asked to judge a literary competition while serving as a writer-in-residence at a university in Uganda, Naipaul, we are told, "awarded only a third prize". A harried manager of the Taj Hotel in Bombay writes to his demanding guest: "Dear Mr.Naipaul, thank you for filling in the Guest Comments form and bringing to my notice the flaw in the design of the Tea-pots." A journalist requesting an interview with the master is rebuked: "Dear Mr.Bellacasa, Nothing in your questions suggests any knowledge of my work. An interview would be a considerable waste of my time and energy." (That word "considerable" is the funniest part of that sentence).

Naipaul himself gave his consent for the project, and revealed freely of himself to French. “Of all the people I spoke to for this book, he was outwardly the frankest,” writes French of Naipaul. “He believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless, and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility.”

This seems an astute judgment, and French’s biography is certainly candid. But for this very reason, long sections of it make for depressing reading. The darkness of Naipaul’s attachments (if "attachments" is the correct word) is not offset, in French's narrative, by the excitement of the work—and there must have been such an excitement on an almost daily basis, given Naipaul’s ambition, talent, and dedication to his craft.

For instance, since French was given access to all the Naipaul records and papers at the University of Tulsa archive, he had an opportunity to look at the draft versions of Naipaul's books and tell us by what stages they came to acquire their distinction (authors are never more interesting than when revising their work). As Naipaul himself has said, "The value of a literary archive is that it takes us as close as we can get to the innermost self of the writer who produced the work." French does, I think, not fully exploit the potential of the material to which he had access.

In the same way, French does not tell us enough about how Naipaul came to perfect his pellucid, ringing style - the unmistakable sound of his writing voice. Nor is there very much about Naipaul's reading, or the kinds of things he discussed with other writers. Glimpses of Naipaul's attention to the minutiae of composition appear here and there, as in a letter to Random House's Sonny Mehta in which he complains about the work done on his text by a copy editor: "I don't want anyone undoing my semi-colons, with all their different shades of pause; or interfering with my 'ands', with all their different ways of linking."

But the paucity of such material means that French's biography is finally somewhat unbalanced. The World Is What It Is exposes the many skeletons in Naipaul's closet, but it leaves the secrets of his books in the dark. Or to put it another way, French's book is too sexual, and not textual enough.

And two old posts: on Naipaul's book A Writer's People, and on an unusual experiment in literary biography, the Spanish novelist Javier Marias's Written Lives.

Update, April 21: I neglected to mention in my piece that about a third of the Naipaul archive - the notebooks, diaries, and letters of his early career - were inadvertently destroyed by Ely's, the firm which had been storing them. As French writes, "Ely's, instructed to destroy files marked NITRATE (belonging to the Nitrate Corporation of Chile) had taken those marked NAIPAUL as well." This loss would have caused French some difficulty in attending to questions of Naipaul's development as a writer.

A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.

Javier Marias's Written Lives

Written Lives, a collection of essays by the Spanish novelist Javier Marias, may be one of the most unusual and charming books written about writers ever written. Most writers have a healthy interest in the lives and work of others in their trade, believing, to quote from one of Marias's essays, "that in those lives, or in their most secret anecdotes, can be found the key to a writer's work." Often diligent biographers give us access to such details, but with a great deal of dross alongsides, in works often five or six hundred pages long - as Marias notes, we are living in an age of "exhaustive and frequently futile erudition".

In contrast, Marias's attempts to sketch out the shape of the lives of Joyce, Faulkner, Turgenev, Rilke, Nabokov and Kipling, among others, are usually no more than six or seven pages long. His essays are a felicitous mix of precisely weighted observations, whimsical speculation, and telling details or anecdotes. He claims of his selection that "the one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals", although it cannot be denied that, just as a novelist never bothers to write about characters who bore him, so Marias seems to have eliminated from his selection those writers who led quiet, sensible, dull, workaday lives.

Writers emerge here as an eccentric, scatterbrained, and chaotic lot in their personal life, no matter how beautifully alert and composed their work (indeed, perhaps because they gave so much of themselves to their work). Joseph Conrad was so absentminded that "it was not unusual for the book he was reading suddenly to catch fire after prolonged contact with the candle illuminating it". Henry James's speech resembled his written sentences, multi-claused and neverending: "The simplest question addressed to a servant would take a minimum of three minutes to formulate, such was his linguistic punctiliousness and his horror of inexactitude and error". Vernon Lee would come up with "so many arguments in a discussion that she would sometimes contradict herself and it would become hard to follow her". Yukio Mishima was so egotistic that he once made a record "on which he played all forty characters in one of his own plays".

And yet - and yet. Marias says at one point in his chapter on Robert Louis Stevenson, "Nowadays, almost no one takes the trouble to read Stevenson's essays, which are among the liveliest and most perceptive of the past century". If this observation has a faintly unsettling quality, it is because it alerts us to what is missing in Marias's essays, which is some sense not just of a writer's life but also of the particular qualities of his or her work. This lacuna renders some of Marias's essays slightly insubstantial, too much like pleasant trifles. While they are never uninteresting, they serve to remind us that, even at the hands of someone as accomplished as Marias, writers are nothing without their books.

And also perhaps their looks. Tacked onto the back of Written Lives is a long essay, "Perfect Artists", very different in method and manner from the rest of the book. Here Marias delves into his collection of picture postcards of writers, and declares that he is going to look once again at these familiar faces - Dickens, Eliot, James, Baudelaire, Blake - "with pen in hand". Marias's essay on these faces, eyes, poses, gestures, and what they reveal about the personality of the subject - matters that most human beings spend a great deal of time contemplating in their effort to understand each other - contains some of the most delicate and surprising writing one could ever hope to read.

We see Eliot, "a man who had spent decades combing his hair in exactly the same way….He is meticulous, a perfectionist, and he does not find it an effort to remain so immaculate - it is just a question of habit".

Rilke looks absolutely unlike the fragile, questing figure we would imagine from his poems. "His face is frankly dangerous, with those dark circles under deep-set eyes, and the sparse, drooping moustache which gives him a strangely Mongolian appearance….The truth is that he could be a visionary doctor in his laboratory, awaiting the results of some monstrous and forbidden experiment". It is this section of Written Lives that seems likely to become Marias's most enduring contribution to literary biography.

Here are some excerpts from Written Lives: "William Faulkner on Horseback" here, and "Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in Class". A story by Marias, "Fewer Scruples", can be found here. And here's a recent essay by Marias, "Smoking and Fuming", on Spain's new antismoking law.

Marias's translator for Written Lives is Margaret Jull Costa (who also translated the José Saramago book I wrote about recently). The work done by translators often goes unacknowledged. In truth it is translators, more than any other class of people, who allow cultures to gain access each another and who bring the world to our doorstep. Translators help achieve (to use a phrase by Edmund Wilson which I quote from memory, perhaps not entirely reliably) a "cross-fertilisation of cultures", without which we would be more limited people, confined by linguistic boundaries. In my last post, on the Russian writer Ruben Gallego, I linked to a discussion of the craft of translation by Robert Chandler. Here are two more very good essays on translation: "Novels Found in Translation" by J. Peder Zane and "The Mysteries of Translation" by Wendy Lesser.