Biographer's Footsteps

We meet here tonight under the benign, but watchful, shadow of Ernest Jones, Freud's first great biographer (1953–1957). But was he really the first? In May 1936 the East German novelist Arnold Zweig proposed writing Freud's biography. But he was persuaded against it. Freud's reply is fascinating. He said that he was far too fond of Zweig to permit such a perilous undertaking. 'To be a biographer', Freud told him, 'you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisy, hero-worship; and even in hiding your own lack of understanding. For biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were, we could not use it'. Then Freud added, with what we make take to be a smile and a puff of the cigar: 'That kind of truth is unobtainable. Humanity doesn't deserve it. And anyway, isn't our Prince Hamlet right, when he says—if we all had our deserts, who would 'scape whipping?' (Freud, 1970, p. 127).

My experience after 20 years as a working biographer suggests that Freud was right about the attendant perils of the vocation. (When I was first in France, working on Stevenson, I proudly put 'writer' in my passport; but found every café owner, every auberge -keeper read it as 'waiter'. A Freudian slip of course.) But perhaps Freud was wrong about biographical truth being unobtainable. In the English-speaking world biography has risen to power as a new literary form, precisely because it offers a vision of human truth, candour, and wholeness—the 'whole man or woman', which we seek in ourselves.

In this sense we meet tonight under a second, benign shadow: that of James Boswell, whose great Life of Dr Johnson was first published almost exactly two centuries ago, announcing the birth of modern literary biography (1791). Boswell in his Preface issued this manifesto: 'I will venture to say that Johnson will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived. And he will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write, not his panegyric, which