Imaginary Lives

PREFACE

The historical sciences leave us uncertain about the individual. They reveal to us only those points by which people are connected to public actions. They inform us that Napoleon was feeling unwell on the day of Waterloo, that Newton’s excessive intellectual activity can only be attributed to the complete sexual abstinence that fueled his temperament, that Alexander was drunk when he killed Cleitus, and that Louis XIV’s fistula was perhaps the cause of some of his resolutions. Pascal reasoned upon the length of Cleopatra’s nose, and what might have changed had it been shorter, or upon a grain of sand in Cromwell’s urethra. All of these personal details retain value only because they modified events or diverted the course of things. These are real causes, or possible ones. They must be left to the scholars.

Art stands in opposition to general ideas, describing only the individual, desiring only the unique. It does not classify; it declassifies. For all that it concerns us, our general ideas could be similar to those in circulation on the planet Mars, and three lines that intersect each other form a triangle at any point in the universe. But examine a leaf from a tree, with its capricious veins, its hue varied by shadow and sun, the swelling given rise to by a drop of rain, the bite mark left by an insect, the silvery trace of a little snail, the first mortal gilding that marks the arrival of autumn. Look for a leaf exactly the same in all the great forests of the Earth: I defy you to find one. There is no way to predict the tegument of a leaflet, or the filaments of a cell, the curvature of a vein, the compulsions of a habit, the twists and turns of a personality. That a given individual had a crooked nose, one eye higher than the other, a gnarled articulation of the arm; that he had the habit of eating a chicken breast at such and such a time, that he preferred Malvasia to Château Margaux—now these details are what are without parallel in this world. Just as well as Socrates, Thales could have been the one to say: ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ; but he would not have rubbed his leg the same way in prison before drinking down the hemlock. The ideas of the greatest men are the shared heritage of humanity: but all each of them actually possessed was his own peculiarities. The book that describes a man in all his irregularities will be a work of art, like a Japanese print where we can forevermore see the likeness of a little caterpillar glimpsed on a single occasion, at a certain hour of the day.

The history books remain silent on these things. The crude accumulation of materials that first-hand testimonies tend to furnish does not include many singular and inimitable fragments. The ancient biographers are especially miserly. Valuing little more than public life and grammar, they have relayed to us nothing of the great men but their speeches and the names of their books. It was Aristophanes himself who gave us the joy of knowing that he was bald, and if Socrates’s pug nose hadn’t been made use of for literary analogies, if his habit of walking around barefoot had not been a part of the philosophical system he built around his contempt for the body, we would have retained nothing of him but his interrogations on morality. Suetonius’s idle gossip is nothing more than hateful attempts to stir up controversy. Every so often, Plutarch’s genius made him an artist. But he did not comprehend the essence of his own art, as he imagined it in terms of parallels—as if two men, properly described in all their details, could resemble one another! We are reduced to consulting Athenaeus, Aulus Gellius, the scholiasts, and Diogenes Laërtius, who believed he had devised a sort of history of philosophy.

The sense of the individual has developed further in modern times. Boswell’s oeuvre would be perfect had he not judged it necessary to include Johnson’s correspondence and digressions on his books. Aubrey’s Brief Lives are more satisfying. Aubrey had, without the least bit of doubt, the instinct for biography. How upsetting it is that the style of that excellent antiquarian was not on par with his conceptualization! His book would have provided endless relaxation for astute minds. Aubrey never felt the need to establish a correlation between individual details and general ideas. It was enough for him that others had marked for celebrity the men in whom he took interest. Most of the time, we have no idea whether it is a question of a mathematician, a statesman, a poet, or a clockmaker. But each of them has his unique trait, which differentiates him among men forevermore.

The painter Hokusai hoped to reach the ideal of his art by the time he reached 110 years of age. By then, he said, every point, every stroke traced by his brush would be as though alive. By alive, he meant individual. Nothing is more similar than points and lines: geometry is founded on this very premise. Hokusai’s perfect art demanded that nothing be more different. In this same way, perfection for the biographer would mean infinitely differentiating the thinking of two philosophers who had invented a metaphysics that was more or less the same. This explains why Aubrey, who worked only with mankind, did not attain perfection: he did not understand how to accomplish the miraculous transformation longed for by Hokusai, that of resemblance in diversity. But Aubrey also didn’t live to the age of 110. He is nonetheless quite estimable, and he was aware of the significance of his book. I remember one saying of General Lambert’s, he writes in the preface he penned for Anthony Wood, "‘That the best men are but men at the best,’ of this you will meet with divers examples in this rude and hasty collection. Now these Arcana are not fit to let lie abroad, till about thirty years hence; for the author and the persons (like medlars) ought to be rotten first."

We should be able to discover certain rudiments of Aubrey’s art among his predecessors. Thus Diogenes Laërtius teaches us that Aristotle wore a skin of warm oil on his stomach, and that after his death, a very large number of dishes were found in his home. We will never know what Aristotle did with all that pottery. And the mystery of it is every bit as pleasing as the conjectures that Boswell passes on to us about the use Johnson made of the dried orange peels he kept in his pockets. Here Diogenes Laërtius elevates himself almost to the sublime heights reached by the inimitable Boswell. But these are rare pleasures. Whereas Aubrey gives us one with every line. Milton, he tells us, pronounced the letter R very hard. Spenser was a little man, wore short hair, little band and little cuffs. Barclay "was in England tempore regis Jacobi. He was then an old man, white beard; and wore a hat and a feather, which gave some severe people offence. Erasmus loved not fish, though born in a fish-town. For Bacon, none of his servants dared appear before him without Spanish leather boots; for he would smell the calf’s leather, which offended him. Doctor Fuller had a very working head, in so much that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eat up a penny loaf, not knowing that he did it. On Sir William Davenant he made this remark: I was at his funeral. He had a coffin of walnut tree. Sir John Denham said it was the finest coffin that ever he saw. About Ben Jonson, he wrote: I have heard Mr. Lacy, the player, say that he was wont to wear a coat like a coachman’s coat, with slits under the armpits. Here is what struck him about William Prynne: His manner of study was thus: he wore a long quilt cap, which came two or three, at least, inches over his eyes, which served him as an umbrella to defend his eyes from the light. About every three hours his man was to bring him a roll and a pot of ale to refocillate his wasted spirits. So he studied and drank, and munched some bread; and this maintained him till night, and then, he made a good supper. As for Hobbes, in his old age he was very bald; yet within doors, he used to study and sit bare-headed, and said that he never took cold in his head, but that the greatest trouble was to keep off the flies from pitching on the baldness." He tells us nothing of James Harrington’s Oceana, but relates that the author, in "Anno Domini 1660, was committed prisoner to the Tower, where he was kept for a time, then to Portsey castle. His durance in these prisons (he being a Gentleman of a high spirit and a hot head) was the procatractic cause of his deliration or madness; which was not outrageous, for he would discourse rationally enough and be very facetious company, but he grew to have a fancy that his perspiration turned to flies, and sometimes to bees, ad cetera sobrius; and he had a versatile timber house built in Mr. Hare’s garden (opposite to St. James’s park) to try the experiment. He would turn it to the sun, and sit toward it; then he had his fox-tails there to chase away and massacre all the flies and bees that were to be found there, and then shut his windows. Now this experiment was only to be tried in warm weather, and some flies would lie so close in the crannies and the cloth that they would not presently show themselves. A quarter of an hour after, perhaps, a fly or two or more might be drawn out of the lurking holes by the warmth; and then he would cry out, ‘Do you not see it apparently that these come from me?’"

Here is all he tells us of Meriton. "His true name was Head. Mr. Bovey knew him. Born … was a bookseller in Little Britain. He had been amongst the gypsies. He looked like a knave with his goggling eyes. He could transform himself into any shape. Broke two or three times. Was at last a bookseller, or towards his later end. He maintained himself by scribbling. He got 20s. per sheet. He wrote several pieces: The English Rogue, The Art of Wheedling, etc. He was drowned going to Plymouth by long sea about 1676, being about 50 years of age."

Finally, we must cite his biography of Descartes:

Monsieur RENATUS DES CARTES.

"Nobilis Gallus, Perroni Dominus, summus Mathematicus et Philosophus, natus Turonum, pridie Calendas Apriles, 1596; denatus Holmiae, Calendis Februarii, 1650. (This inscription I find under his picture graved by C. V. Calen.) How he spent his time in his youth, and by what method he became so knowing, he tells the world in his treatise entitled Of Method. The Society of Jesus glory in the fact that their order had the educating of him. He lived several years at Egmont (near the Hague), from whence he dated several of his books. He was too wise a man to encumber himself with a wife; but as he was a man, he had the desires and appetites of a man; he therefore kept a good conditioned handsome woman that he liked, and by whom he had some children (I think two or three). ’Tis pity but coming from the brain of such a father, they should be well cultivated. He was so eminently learned that all learned men made visits to him, and many of them would desire him to show them his … of instruments (in those days mathematical learning lay much in the knowledge of instruments, and, as Sir H. S. said, in the doing of tricks). So he would draw out a little drawer under his table, and show them a pair of compasses with one of the legs broken; and then, for his ruler, he used a sheet of paper folded double."

It is clear that Aubrey was perfectly conscious of the nature of his work.