Philosophers have been posing the big question for as long as anyone can remember: What Makes Life Worth Living? But the more pertinent question for booksellers is of relatively recent vintage: What Makes Life Worth Reading? I don’t know who first asked that one, but I know who gave the first good answer.
John Aubrey was born in Wiltshire, England in 1626, and from an early age took an interest in the world around him, especially those portions of it that even then were ancient and disappearing. No detail was too petty to escape his attention. He listened to old wives’ tales, sketched ruined abbeys, and made systematic studies of, among other monuments, Stonehenge and the still larger stone circle at Avebury. He was one of the first moderns to recognize that these weren’t built by Romans or Danes, but by ancestral British peoples; today some call him the first English archaeologist.
He also had an avid interest in the newest developments in natural philosophy, becoming one of the first to experiment with the transfusion of blood and befriending such scientific luminaries as Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle. Political theorist Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, was another notable in Aubrey’s circle, as were Isaac Newton, John Locke, Christopher Wren, and many others. In comparison to these, Aubrey had little significance in his time, serving a supportive, peripheral role in the lives of better-known men. He said of himself, “I perform the function of a whetstone, which can make the iron sharp though is itself unable to cut.” Few of the projects he undertook on his own behalf were ever finished.
Partly, this was because his interests were so varied and his attention so divided. No matter what intellectual edifice he was constructing, a shiny, unrelated pebble would appear in the corner of his eye, one that had to be collected before it was lost. He spent a great deal of time gathering baskets full of building material, but not much in stacking it up. He also spared a fair amount of time to spend in society; he once lamented, “How much work I would get done if I did not sit up with Mr. Wylde until one or two in the morning, or if there was someone to get me up in the mornings with a good scourge!” Still more detrimental to his productivity were the frequent financial and occasional romantic reversals he experienced. He was born on an idyllic estate that was lost to creditors, eventually relying on generous friends to provide him hospitality, and he remained a bachelor all his life, suffering unrequited love and at least one acrimonious broken engagement. Throughout all of this he beavered on, storing up arcane knowledge and trivia in the hope that posterity would care more about it than his contemporaries did.
Since I am writing at such length about a man dead more than three hundred years, you are correct to assume that Aubrey’s trust was not misplaced. By the end of his full life (he died in 1697) he’d assembled and organized a sizable collection of notes on the contemporaries he knew and on the immediate predecessors they’d known. His Brief Lives were filled with details both incidental (poet John Suckling invented cribbage between verses) and, in his time, shocking. Describing one knight of the realm, Aubrey wrote, ”Drunkenness he much exclaimed against, but wenching he allowed.” His manuscripts may have been titillating at the time, but they were never scurrilous. Their author conducted interviews, checked the records, and told the truth as best he found it–all of it. His methods defied the then-prevailing hagiographic trend, but his Lives outlasted his era, circulating ever more widely and providing us with much of what we know about the men and women of the 16th and 17th century. A major accomplishment, to be sure, but his real legacy is as the inventor of a literary art form–the biography. He provided the model for all the work that’s done today to give us full, true, affecting portraits of actual human beings, not plaster saints.
A full, true, affecting portrait is exactly what Ruth Scurr has painted in John Aubrey, My Own Life. Few biographies do the excellent job this one does of capturing daily life in a bygone age, and even fewer leave their readers with such a strong sense of knowing their subjects. By the time the last page is turned, Aubrey has come to seem a friend rather than a historical curiosity. Who could help wanting to spend time with a man with this much perspicacity and good humor?:
“I think it is strange that magnifying glasses were so long unknown about in this world. Any good fellow at a tavern cannot escape noticing how much the threads of linen cloth are magnified by a glass (of sack or white wine) that has a stem and a hemispherical or conical bottom to it. At least, so it seems to me, when I stare into the bottom of my glass in a tavern and think about what I can see.”
Scurr achieves her effect of intimacy through an approach to biography nearly as innovative as Aubrey’s. She takes his words from scattered letters, notebooks, and documents and weaves them into a coherent, chronological diary in his own voice. In so doing, she satisfies all the requirements of scholarship and adds a storyteller’s flair. I can’t imagine a Life better written or more worth reading.
At this point you may be thinking, Glad you liked the book so much, but why would I want to read 500 pages about a guy I’ve never heard of? Well, I’d say that this is exactly the kind of book you should be reading. If you can spare a couple more paragraphs I’ll try to convince you.
My theory, one that John Aubrey, My Own Life has crystallized, is that the really interesting biographies don’t focus on famous figures, but on the ones you barely know. For one thing, the most obvious subjects often spent their days under the distorting glare of celebrity. While their lives can be readily documented, much of what’s on record is a presentation of a persona, not a person, and we never know whether we’re looking at a mask or a human face. For another, the excess of biographical material often leads to an excess of biography. Lyndon Johnson doesn’t assume the presidency until the middle of book four of Robert Caro’s projected five-volume series, which is great if you’re a presidential historian, less so for the rest of us.
Far better to take on the life-sized life of someone unfamiliar, someone flawed but fascinating. That’s who you’ll find in Scurr’s book on Aubrey, and also in two of my other favorite literary biographies. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon by Julie Phillips offers up the astonishing life of a brilliant, secretive woman who became a feminist spokesperson by assuming a male pseudonym; Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe tells the story of B.S. Johnson, a troubled avant-garde English writer who may have been born not ahead of, but behind his proper time. Both are riveting accounts. As with John Aubrey, some who read them will be inspired to explore further, seeking out Tiptree’s stories or Johnson’s novels. Most won’t, and that’s all right. One encounter will be memorable and pleasurable enough.
