Inward turns

“We live by admiration, hope and love.” William Wordsworth and a phrase I have of late kept near. There is likewise the stoic counsel to, when down, “think of the virtues of those who live with thee”. This week I was depressed about two profiles I really wanted and just lost, and how much better my output would be now, almost halfway through the year, had I achieved those. I turned to books of short, admiring biographies, and it was indeed uplifting.

I absolutely adored Michael Foot’s Debts of Honour. It features Benjamin Disraeli, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Paine. But Foot says “the biggest creditor of the lot” was his wife Jill. My favourite essay was the one on his dad, which is where I got the Wordsworth quote. My next favourite was the essay on William Hazlitt, and that led me to Hazlitt’s own book of short biographies, The Spirit of the Age. Foot calls Hazlitt “the Shakespeare prose writer” and it is true that reading him you have that fresh delightful shock that you feel when you rejoin true genius, where brilliant inspiration starts flowing and flashing past in such a trusty torrent that you just surrender and love everything. You tell yourself to remember that you should spend all your time doing this.

Other good news for my spirits is that I have now gotten right back where we started from, meaning by “we” what Marshall McLuhan called “Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization”, meaning by all that that I am on holiday in Greece. I have taken my new taste for short biography with me and am reading Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. His idea was to match Greeks to Romans, so Theseus and Romulus are together as the city founders, Alexander and Caesar as the conquerors, and so on.

By most accounts, Plutarch was the beginning of biography. It is interesting how changes in biography track changes in how we understand ourselves. Most striking is that Plutarch hardly starts before his subject is twenty, while in biographies today the early years, with their intense childhood psychology, are among the longest chapters. Focus transitioned, it seems, from impressiveness to impressionability.

“Character” originally meant something like a stamp – a relic survives in us calling typed letters “characters”. Who you were was the mark you made on the world. Today, you could almost define character as the bit of us that exists regardless of world outside. The concept has been introverted.

Some argue internal life grew under the Christian practice of confession. Others name Shakespeare’s “abysses of self”. A professor on the In Our Time about Parallel Lives describes modern biographical practices as “post-Freudian”. In the chronological halls of Florence’s Uffizi galleries, after lots of heroes then lots of devotions, I only felt at home and interested once the self-portraits arrived. Paul Johnson in Intellectuals says “the prime achievement of the Renaissance” was “the discovery of the individual”.

It is very hard to imagine your way back past the shift. Writing fiction, I am struggling with a character I want who does not trust thought and never thinks about himself as something that can be changed. The above is material I have picked up on my search for ways through. If you have any suggestions, particularly novels, I would thank you.

Thanks anyway, though, to all of you for the sustained encouragement, and in particular to the veteran PL readers who used to tolerate week after week in this flailing failing style! Someone told me recently “They were digressive, so damn digressive.” Thanks all of you for reading. I’d really appreciate if you would share this with anyone who you think might be able to clue me into ways into that character I mentioned.

Have a nice weekend 🙂

GM