A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

DR. JOHNSON

 

Why does one write at all? After some sixty years spent in this pursuit, I still scarcely know. The first of my writings to be printed was, at the age of ten, a prize-winning essay in Little Folks. For this I received ten shillings and sixpence, a copy of The Christmas Carol, and a moment of as pure and unalloyed pleasure as has ever come to me out of an envelope. But the essay itself was imitative and flat, like all my other childish works. ‘A sedulous ape’, I covered a great deal of paper between the ages of ten and seventeen, producing several long romances, many attempts at verse, some translations of Sappho, Leopardi and Pascoli, and a biographical study of the Medici children. These works show much industry, some versatility, and not much talent—a fact which I fully realised myself—and, indeed, I have scarcely more facility now. Some people, it appears, set well-turned, elegant phrases on paper at once, which only require a little subsequent polishing. “I think,” said my step-father, Percy Lubbock, when I once commented on the exquisitely neat and decorative pages of his manuscript, “I think, before I write.” I do not, alas, resemble him. I have seldom written a sentence which did not have to be altered and trimmed and often entirely recast. Nor have I ever written a book about which I did not ask myself, at some stage, how it was conceivable that anyone should wish to read it. I write because, exacting as it may be to do so, it is still more difficult to refrain, and because—however conscious of one’s limitations one may be—there is always at the back of one’s mind an irrational hope that this next book will be different: it will be the rounded achievement, the complete fulfilment. It never has been: yet I am still writing. From the age of twenty-one, however, the year of my engagement, to that of thirty-five, I never wrote at all. Those were the first years of my marriage, of my son’s childhood, and of my attempts to lead, at La Foce, an entirely new kind of life; to identify myself with the work of our farm and with my husband’s interests, and to become, if I could, a rather different kind of person. Then, in 1933, after Gianni’s death, in an effort to find some impersonal work which would absorb at least a part of my thoughts—I turned back to writing again. It was then that one aspect of my training in youth stood me in good stead.

When I was working with Professor Monti, at the time of the first War, I went to Florence daily on the Fiesole tram, which then took an hour to reach the town. The old trams were falling to pieces, the roof leaked and it was often difficult to get a seat, but since it was the only time in which I could do my homework, I learned my Greek verbs or Latin verses all the same, acquiring a habit which has been of use to me all my life. Far from having a padded room, like Carlyle, I have written in trains and planes, during illnesses, in an air-raid shelter, in a nursery, and among all the ordinary interruptions of domestic life—not always, I admit, without irritation, but at least getting on with the book. And I do not really believe that this has ever done me or my writing any harm.

Iris in 1936

When I began to write again, I thought that I had better start by trying my hand at biography. I knew that I had neither the creative imagination nor the sharp ear for dialogue which produces good novels; I had long ago given up the hope of becoming a poet. I lacked the historian’s training which I might have obtained if—as I had wished at eighteen—my mother had allowed me to go to Oxford, instead of ‘coming out’. But for many years I had preferred memoirs and letters to any other form of reading, and I hoped that I might perhaps have a certain aptitude for observing and assembling the different parts of a character and a life until they came together into a pattern, giving a man what Virginia Woolf called ‘a kind of shape after his death’.

My first subject I found made to my hand: a life of Leopardi, about whom at that time no study existed in English, except an interesting essay by James Thomson and the scholarly Introduction to the translation of his works by G. L. Bickersteth. Leopardi—apart from being one of the greatest Italian poets—was an almost ideal subject for a biography in the thirties, especially for a generation whose taste had been formed by Strachey and Maurois, by Harold Nicolson and Virginia Woolf. He was young, deformed, lonely, ambitious and embittered; he lived in an old-fashioned, pious family of the noblesse de province in a little town of the Marches, and violently rebelled both against the rule of his parents and the restrictions of his environment; he was extremely articulate, setting down his loneliness, his grief, his contempt for his fellow citizens, his longings for friendship and love and his literary aspirations, in what eventually turned into five volumes of letters, as well as in the seven volumes of his daybook, Lo Zibaldone. ‘In depicting his despair and total disenchantment’—the phrase is his own—‘he drew the colours from his own heart.’

Moreover he belonged to a closed society into which English travellers have seldom penetrated (his contemporary, Byron, was perhaps the first to do so, but that was through his mistress) and about which they have consequently felt very curious. ‘You must have wondered’, wrote Basil de Selincourt in one of the first reviews of my book, ‘what went on in the huge rooms of the seemingly unoccupied palazzi … Here is a book that will put the key of the mystery into your hands.’

It is to these circumstances that I attribute the considerable success—perhaps greater than it deserved—of my first book. Its chief merit, it now seems to me, was the fullness with which I quoted from my subject’s letters and notebooks. For while I read those letters myself—sometimes long-winded and self-pitying, but often unendurably poignant—a man had indeed taken shape for me, whom I came to know better than most of my friends and to whom I wished to offer the only tribute that a biographer can pay to his subject—to tell (in so far as is possible) the truth about him.

This has always been one of the cardinal problems of biography: to what extent can or should one tell the truth—and what, indeed, is the truth about any of us? The second question is the more difficult one to answer. ‘The world will never know my life’, said Carlyle (and the words stand on the first page of his Life by his closest friend, Froude) ‘even if it should write and read a hundred biographies of me. The main facts of it are known, and are likely to be known, to myself alone, of all created men.’ Not only are there facts that we do not tell, but some that we ourselves do not know; at best, some small facet of the truth occasionally catches the light, and it is that which the biographer must try to seize. ‘For there is’, as Virginia Woolf remarked, ‘a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.’1

Johnson himself maintained that ‘in order to write a man’s life’ one must at least ‘have eaten and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him’. But did even Boswell see Johnson’s real life? Would the great Doctor himself have thought that he perceived it? A few days ago I received a letter from Archibald MacLeish in which he was turning over precisely this question in his mind. ‘We can set down’, he wrote, ‘a record of happenings which seem to have a shape or meaning: expectation, achievement, defeat, death; a drama with a beginning, a middle and an end; a drama often interesting, fascinating, moving; but is that a life or only a Life?’

Perhaps the biographer should be less ambitious; indeed, if he has not had Boswell’s inestimable advantages, but is writing about a dead man, or one whom he only knew slightly, he will have to be. He will have to be satisfied if he can catch an occasional glimpse of a face or sound of a voice. And even to do this, he will have to accumulate a vast amount of material and then, if his biography is to be a work of art, to prune and select … But is it possible to choose without bias, to reject without falsifying?

There is a revealing paragraph in A Writer’s Diary, in which Virginia Woolf—who was both an artist and a very honest woman—hints at this process; after six pages of meticulously exact description of a visit of hers to Mr. and Mrs. Hardy, factual, detailed, convincing, reproducing scraps of conversation, she proceeds, the next day, before turning all this into an article, to ruminate on the nature of art and thought. ‘If art is based on thought, what is the transmuting process? I was telling myself the story of our visit to the Hardys, and I began to compose it; that is to say, to dwell on Mrs. Hardy leaning on the table, looking out, apathetically, vaguely; and so would soon bring everything into harmony with that as the dominant theme. But the actual event was different.’

Is ‘the actual event’ invariably different? I think it is. We can hang mirrors, as Virginia Woolf advised, at every corner—we can look at our subject’s face at every angle and in every light. We can discover strange and curious pieces of information: that Dr. Johnson liked to carry an orange-peel in his pocket, that Aristotle had a hot-water bottle made of leather, filled with hot oil, and that Leopardi, during the cold winters in Bologna, spent his day in a bag lined with feathers, from which he emerged looking like Papageno. But never, never, can we see enough. Here is Howell’s description of Mark Twain in his old age: ‘He was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a remote sort of absence: you were all there for him, but he was not all there for you.’

For when indeed—except perhaps for a few brief moments between lovers—is the whole of another human being ever there for us? To Virginia Woolf the central problem of biography was how to weld ‘into one seamless whole’ the ‘granite-like solidity’ of truth and the ‘rainbow-like intangibility’ of personality. The problem was one that fascinated her, not only in literature but in life. “Go on, this is enthralling,” she would say, when a friend had brought her an exciting piece of gossip. “I feel as if a buried statue were being dug up, piece by piece.” One of her friends once said, that on a cold November evening he came upon her standing in the fog beside an apple-barrow, asking the woman in her deep, quiet, compelling voice: “Tell me, what does it feel like to stand in the fog on a dark evening, selling apples?” I cannot vouch for the truth of this story, but certainly it was a question that she liked to ask. I vividly recollect the day on which, not without some misgivings, I took the typescript of my Allegra—which had just been accepted by the Hogarth Press—to Tavistock Square. The office was downstairs, but as I was leaving it, Virginia’s voice came floating down the stairs: “Bring her up, Leonard, bring her up.” And a minute later, we were sitting at a round tea-table, with my hostess pouring out from a large brown tea-pot and asking: “Now do tell me—what does it feel like to wake up in the morning on a Tuscan farm?” I am afraid I only gaped at her, quite unable to make an intelligent reply.

Iris by Augustus John, 1936

But she was right. It is only by discovering what life ‘felt like’, to our subject—at least in fleeting moments—that we can become aware of him as a person at all. And this implies an attempt to see him in every attitude: not merely riding in triumph at the head of his victorious troops, or unveiling a monument in a frock-coat and top hat, but (in so far as possible) in his private, unguarded moments. In this respect, indeed, the aim of classical biography was much nearer to our own than the mediaeval one, which aimed at producing Lives of great men chiefly for edification, about subjects who conformed to God’s pattern for mankind, while the taste of the seventeenth century again veered back towards the classical attitude. Dryden, in particular, admired Plutarch precisely because he had dared to show his heroes in undress. ‘You may behold’, he wrote, ‘Scipio and Laelius gathering cockleshells on the shore, Augustus playing at bounding-stones, and Agesilaus riding on a hobby-horse among his children. The pageantry of life is taken away: you see the poor reasonable animal as naked as ever nature made him, are acquainted with his passions and his follies, and find the demigod, a man.’

Here, surely, is the prelude to modern biography. But with the admission that heroes, too, might be shown as naked and fallible, the problem arose as to whether this picture was likely to dismay or corrupt the reader—and if this danger existed, had the biographer the right to speak?

Pascal maintained that the real danger of describing a hero’s vices as well as his virtues was that it would always be the former that would be imitated. ‘The example’, he said, ‘of Alexander’s chastity has produced fewer continent men, than those whom his drunkenness has rendered intemperate.’ Dr. Johnson, however, when asked if it was right to reveal Addison’s miserliness towards his friend Steele, was of precisely the opposite opinion: whatever the interpretation, he said, the facts should be told, for ‘if nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything.’ He believed, in short, in presenting the unadorned facts for a very characteristic reason: ‘It keeps mankind from despair.’ But in the nineteenth century the suppression of unedifying or inconvenient facts came into favour again. ‘Too long and too idolatrous!’ was the comment of Leslie Stephen on one of the three-volume Victorian Lives, and ‘How delicate’, exclaimed Carlyle, ‘how decent is English biography, bless its mealy mouth!’

There is, however, one temptation even more insidious than suppression, and that is sheer invention. An excellent instance is the one by Professor Trevor Roper in a somewhat merciless attack on Lytton Strachey: the length of Dr. Arnold’s legs. Strachey had formed a very clear picture in his mind of Dr. Arnold: he saw him as a noble, pompous figure, and to introduce just the right additional touch of absurdity, of debunking, it was necessary that his legs should have been too short. Unfortunately, however, as Strachey once admitted to a friend, there is absolutely no evidence to show that Dr. Arnold’s legs were shorter in proportion to his body than those of any other man. Now the danger of this kind of invention is that, once discovered, it shakes our capacity to believe anything the narrator has said. ‘A story’, said Dr. Johnson, ‘is a picture, either of an individual, or of life in general; if it be false, it is a picture of nothing.’ Even a touch of fantasy may be disproportionately destructive. ‘Suppose we believe one half of what he tells’, suggested Lord Mansfield to Dr. Johnson, about a common acquaintance whose stories, he said, ‘we unhappily found to be very fabulous’. ‘Yes’, Dr. Johnson replied, ‘but we don’t know which half to believe. By his lying we lose not only all reverence for him, but all comfort in his conversation.’

Strachey himself said that a biographer’s equipment consists of three qualities: ‘a capacity for absorbing facts, a capacity for stating them, and a point of view’. The definition is a good one, for without a point of view no history can be written, but there is a danger that it may not only shape, but distort the facts. The biographer who puts his wit above his subject will end by writing about one person only—himself. My personal complaint about Eminent Victorians, on re-reading it after over thirty years, would not be that it is inaccurate, but that it is thin, and that its thinness springs from condescension. If you wish to see a person you must not start by seeing through him.

Moreover, while it is certainly the biographer’s business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be very meagre if these individual traits are not also seen as part of a universal drama—for each man’s life is also the story of Everyman. The biographer has, of course, a fixed pattern: he is, as Desmond MacCarthy said, ‘an artist upon oath’. But the calls upon his imagination and intuition are hardly less exacting than those of the novelist or dramatist. They too, after all, do not compose their characters out of a void, but out of experience or intuition. Shakespeare himself invented hardly any of his plots, but having accepted a ready-made pattern for his characters’ actions was then free to give his whole attention to bring them to life. And so, surely, too, the biographer’s true function—the transmission of personality—may also be, within its own pattern, an act of creation.

But there is yet one more snag to guard against: the snares of sheer ignorance, of insufficient acquaintance with the background of one’s subject. Behind each biography there should always be a rich treasury of unformulated knowledge, a tapestry that has not been unrolled. (That is, to take only two instances, why David Cecil’s Lord M and Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln are such good books.) We should know more, a great deal more, than what we tell.

I remember only too vividly an occasion on which I gave myself away as lacking precisely this sort of knowledge. It was kindly pointed out to me in a letter by Rebecca West. I had mentioned, as an example of Mrs. Carlyle’s touchiness, the disastrous Christmas party at The Grange at which Lady Ashburton presented her, from the Christmas tree, with a silk dress, after which Jane returned to her bedroom in a huff. I thought that she had made a great deal of unnecessary fuss. Rebecca West, however, pointed out my mistake. Her great-aunt, Isabella Campbell, who belonged to the Carlyle circle, had often spoken of the episode, and had considered it ‘a most extraordinary thing for Lady Ashburton to have done’, as a silk dress was the recognised present for a housekeeper and a friend of the family would have felt bewildered at receiving it. To wear a dress which one had not ordered from the start and had fitted according to one’s own measurements was a sign of social inferiority. Plainly, therefore, on this occasion Jane was right to be offended, and I did not know what I was talking about.

In my first book, I tried very hard to avoid mistakes of this kind. I had lived in Italy since the age of seven, and through both books and people had tried to make myself familiar with the kind of provincial society into which the poet was born, and of which vestiges still remained in some small country towns. I took the advice of Italian friends and scholars. I steeped myself in Leopardi’s works. I thought about little else. And, of course, I repeatedly visited Recanati, since I am convinced that, when it is not possible to follow Dr. Johnson’s precept, one can at least make it one’s business to visit the home of the man one wishes to describe. Nothing that can be learned from papers and books (even from one’s subject’s own words) can take the place of a direct visual image, of the sensation of having lived (even if only for a few hours or days) in the same physical environment. I never knew what Leopardi’s hours of study were like until I had actually stood in the icy rooms of his father’s great library on a winter’s day, beside the desk at which he wrote and the closed bookshelf in which, among the writings proscribed by the Church, his sister Paolina one day sadly locked his own Operette Morali, and felt the thinness of the woollen rugs which, as he worked on through the night by candlelight, he placed over his shivering knees and shoulders. I did not fully realise the extent of his sensation, as a boy, ‘of subjection and dependence, and of not being his own master, indeed of not being a whole person, but only a part and member of someone else’2 until I saw his bedroom, to which, like his brothers, he only had access through his mother’s own bedroom. I walked about the streets of Recanati, peering into the courtyards of the shuttered palaces, and felt the biting blast of the tramontana which would sweep the poet’s black cloak off his hunched shoulders, while the street boys jeered, “Ecco il gobbetto!”3 I went into the parish church where he made his First Communion and saw the bench still inscribed, Gentis Leopardae. I went back to Recanati in the summer and walked about the surrounding countryside, seeing ‘le vie dorate e gli orti’4 and the grassy banks beside the roads from which his donzelletta cut her bundle of grass. I saw the church steps on which some old crones still sat at dusk, gossiping about the days of their own youth, and looked across the square towards the window at which he saw Silvia singing at her loom. I climbed the hill from which he gazed at the far horizons of L’infinito, and heard, as he had, the wind sighing among the branches. I saw the moon rise above his hills, on a still summer night:

And only after seeing all this, and letting it sink into me, did I feel that I could even begin to write. For such journeys are more than a sentimental pilgrimage: they are more akin to the need felt by a man whose sight is dim, to pass his hands over a face.

Nevertheless, eighteen years after the publication of this book, I was dissatisfied with it. Some of its comments—especially on the Leopardi family and the Recanati background—seemed to me both glib and insufficiently informed; and the passages about his writings both thin and second-hand. So I decided to write the book all over again. One excuse, which I proffered in the introduction to this new version (which I called Leopardi, A Study in Solitude and which was published in 19536) was that, in the interval, two more volumes of the poet’s correspondence had been published, as well as some important Italian critical works and biographies. But the real reason was a different one: that, like a friend whose life one has shared for many years, I felt I had got to know him (and I might have added, his country) a little better.

In the particular case of Leopardi, moreover, I have not been the only biographer who has felt the need to retrace his footsteps. I remember telling the distinguished Leopardian scholar and critic, Giuseppe de Robertis, who was then engaged on the back-breaking task of compiling a subject-index of the Zibaldone, that after eighteen years, I was just beginning a second life of the poet. He began to laugh. “I see that you have caught it, too,” he said, “il vizio leopardiano. This won’t be your last book on the subject,” he foretold—and indeed he was right, since only two years ago, in collaboration with John Heath-Stubbs, I produced a volume of Leopardi’s Selected Prose and Poetry (John Heath-Stubbs translating the poetry and I the prose, with biographical notes). Here the main change in the prose section of the book, since its purpose was to serve as an introduction to Leopardi’s work in English and American universities, has been that I have only used my own words when they were indispensable, to state a fact, sketch in a background or frame a picture. The rest of the story is told by Leopardi himself.

For more and more, as I have gone on reading and writing about other people, it is the subject’s own voice that I want to hear. When a biographer can record what a man actually said, he awakens a degree of conviction denied to any other form of narrative. “I wonder why we hate the past so,” says Howell ruminatively to Mark Twain, and when the latter replies, “It’s so damned humiliating,” we know, without a doubt, that this is precisely what the great man did say. This is the kind of material, the small change of daily life, that I have always found irresistible, and that caused me to write, some time after Leopardi, two books about persons who (in their very different ways) would not otherwise have been my choice: Lord Byron, and the fourteenth-century merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini.

* * *

At this point I have necessarily begun to ask myself: has there really been any connecting link, however tenuous, between the subjects I have chosen? They fall—apart from my little wardiary, which was a straightforward account of personal experience—into two sections: studies of figures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy, and of the nineteenth century both in England and Italy. The mediaeval studies are about a merchant and a saint; the nineteenth-century ones about two great poets; about (on a smaller scale) Byron’s little daughter, Allegra, and his Venetian friend, Contessa Marina Benzon—kind, florid, amorous, floating in her gondola down the Venetian canals (with a slice of steaming hot polenta, to nibble at now and then, concealed in her ample bosom); about some figures of Victorian England; Mazzini lecturing to Carlyle and Jane in Cheyne Row and being lectured back, Carlyle and Lady Ashburton caught in the meshes of their confused, tormented, innocent friendship and, finally, a figure totally incongruous to the others, that of Marie Lenéru, the French writer and playwright whose extraordinary Journal reveals the triumph—within her own terms—over many years in which she was both deaf and blind.

What, I must again ask myself, was it that drew me towards such different characters and backgrounds? I think that the answer is quite a simple one: I did not choose them because I felt especially drawn to poets, merchants or great ladies, to the disabled, or even to saints, but because of an avid interest in people. “L’historien” said Marc Bloch, “ressemble à l’ogre de la fable. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier.” Yes, that was what I was trying to find. Like E. M. Forster, I believe that ‘the true history of the human race is the story of human affections’. The biographer’s real business—if it is not too arrogant to say so—is simply this: to bring the dead to life. If he succeeds, it does not matter a rap whether his subject was great or humble, good or bad; and any other information that may come to light in the process is only relevant in so far as it makes the dead man a little more alive. Of course one cannot write a book about Leopardi or Byron without bearing in mind that they were poets; nor about Francesco Datini without referring to trade in the fourteenth century; still less can one write about San Bernardino without mentioning that he was a famous preacher. But unless what comes out of the book is a living person, whom you feel you might meet in the street tomorrow, it will not be a good biography.

The process by which this transmission of personality can be achieved varies, of course, very much. Sometimes a single phrase is enough. “This was a good dinner, to be sure: but it was not a dinner to ask a man to”—from whose lips could this remark have issued, but from Dr. Johnson’s? “When Poodle Byng comes here”—the comment is on a fellow-guest in a Victorian country house, and the voice is Sidney Smith’s—“all the hedgerows smell like Piccadilly.” And here is Carlyle, on his eightieth birthday, when some ladies presented him with a clock: “Eh, what have I got to do with Time?” he said. Sometimes, however, this shorthand will not do. In the case of Francesco Datini, for instance, his personality was so tightly bound up with his possessions and his trade that it was necessary to put together a very detailed mosaic of small facts before a man appeared. And with San Bernardino, whose tool was the use of words, harsh or compassionate, compelling, witty or persuasive, it was necessary to quote a good many of them, to reveal his vision of this world and the next.

I must, however, add a confession: my choice of at least two subjects—Byron and Datini—was not due to a personal liking for either of these two men, nor even to an especial interest in their achievements, but largely to the accident of stumbling upon some irresistibly good material. This is not generally, I think, a good plan: in literature, as in life, one is most perceptive about the people one likes best. (The alternative, as Voltaire showed, is hatred and contempt: ‘écrasez l’infâme!’). Yet to make use of such material is a very great temptation and the process, once it is found, of rounding it out, of ferreting below ground, of plunging, in short, into an entirely new world, is fascinating. I will not apologise for describing some of my experiences, in the hope that my readers will agree with the statement of the great French historian Marc Bloch: ‘Le spectacle de la recherche est rarement ennuyeux. C’est le tout fait qui répand la glace et l’ennui.’

* * *

My first acquaintance with Byron’s world (apart from a general acquaintance with his Letters and Poems) was made immediately after my first book about Leopardi, when it occurred to me to find out what had happened to the children of some of the great writers of the nineteenth century, and to inquire whether the forcing-house in which they had lived had stimulated their growth or crippled it. The book was to be called Poets’ Children and was to be a study of the children of Leigh Hunt (‘dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos’, said Byron), of Coleridge, of Byron himself, and of the Brownings’ idolised, pampered little Pen, driving in his velvet suit through the streets of Florence in a pony-carriage. This book was never finished. The only story I did write, except for a brief article on Coleridge’s son, Hartley, was that of Byron’s illegitimate daughter by Claire Clairmont, Allegra, whom he took away from her mother to join him in Venice and then in Ravenna, and whom finally, when he had tired of her, he packed off to a convent-school in the middle of the Romagna marshes, where she died of a low, lingering fever before her fifth birthday. It was then that I became acquainted with a Byron I had not known before: the man who prided himself on having become assimilated, through his love affair with Teresa Guiccioli, into Italian provincial society. ‘Now I have lived among the Italians,’ he wrote, ‘not Florenced and Romed and Galleried and Conversationed it for a few months, and then home again—but been of their families, and friendships and feuds, and loves and councils, in a part of Italy least known to foreigners; and have been amongst them of all classes, from the Conte to the Contadino.’7

It seemed to me that there must be a good deal more to learn about this aspect of Byron’s life, and with some trepidation I set off to Florence to try to persuade Count Carlo Gamba, the great-nephew and heir of Contessa Guiccioli, to allow me to consult the papers of his great-aunt. My fear of meeting with a refusal was not unfounded, since Count Gamba—an old gentleman of much taste, who was both old-fashioned and very deaf—had already refused access to several people, including André Maurois, to the papers of ‘poor dear aunt Teresa’. I don’t remember how I persuaded him to change his mind, since it is very difficult to be persuasive or reassuring at the top of one’s voice, but I suspect that he did so, not because of anything I said, but merely because his niece knew me, and he did not think that I looked too foreign or unreliable. In any case, he accepted my promise that I would, of course, show him anything I proposed to publish, and then, ringing the bell, told his man servant to bring down ‘Contessa Teresa’s chest’. “It’s all at your disposal,” he said courteously, indicating, as he lifted the lid of the carved mahogany box, many bundles of letters, tied up in ribbon (“These, I think, are Lord Byron’s—but I don’t know about the others”) and a variety of objects, to which Teresa always referred as Byron’s ‘relics’. There was the locket containing her hair and hung on a chain of her hair which Byron was wearing when he died and which Augusta Leigh sent back to Teresa; there was another locket containing Byron’s own hair which he gave to Teresa when he sailed for Greece. There—carefully wrapped up by Teresa, with an inscription in her writing—were a piece of the wall-hangings in the room in Palazzo Gamba where Byron used to visit her, his handkerchief and a fragment of one of his shirts and, from Newstead Abbey, a crumbling rose-leaf, the twig of a tree and a small acorn. There was a good deal more hair. And finally the Count drew out a fat little volume bound in purple plush: the copy of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, which Byron and Teresa often read together, on the fly-leaf of which he wrote one of his most famous love-letters to her8 (in English, refusing to translate it for her on her return).

In the book, a number of passages were underlined in the same ink as the letter. ‘I had learned to love’, one said, ‘from the poets, but real love is not like that. There is in the realities of existence something arid, which every effort is vain to alter.’ Finally, at the bottom of page ninety-two, there was a footnote in Byron’s writing: ‘I knew Madame de Staël well—better than she knew Italy, but I little thought that, one day, I should think with her thoughts … She is sometimes right, and often wrong, about Italy and England; but almost always true in delineating the heart.’

Count Gamba showed me these passages, and then replaced the book with the other ‘relics’ in the mahogany box, while the bundles of letters were transferred into a suitcase for me to take away. Even the most cursory glance at them, as this was happening, showed that there were many letters that were not in Byron’s writing: I caught a glimpse of the signatures of Lamartine, of Lady Blessington, of Pietro Gamba and of Teresa herself. Had the letters been listed, I asked the Count, did he realise that they were very valuable?9 But he waved my scruples aside: no, no, he did not know exactly what the letters were—perhaps I would tell him when I returned them. But how did he know, I persisted, that I would not lose some of them, or sell them to an American library? Would he not like a list to be made at once, and perhaps witnessed by his lawyer? He replied by telling his servant to put the suitcase in my car.10 And so, returning to my hotel bedroom, I emptied the whole case on to the bed and spent a fascinating evening. For as I glanced through Byron’s love-letters to Teresa (in a style often closely resembling that of an Italian letter-writing manual) and perused the seventeen hundred pages of her own Vie de Lord Byron en Italie, I realised that I had indeed come across a new facet of the poet’s intricate, complex personality. And, I wondered, might it not be possible to unearth some other local material, which would show him in this Italian world from the angle of his observers, instead of from his own? So I started looking. I received some lively accounts of provincial life in Ravenna in the 1820’s, as well as permission to quote from papers in their family archives from Conte and Contessa Pasolini dall’Onda in Ravenna; I consulted the libraries and state archives of Venice, Bologna, Forli, Florence, and Lucca. Gradually a very curious picture began to take shape. I saw Byron not only through the eyes of the Gamba and Guiccioli families and his other Italian acquaintances, but through those of his fellow-conspirators among the Carbonari, and of the Papal, Austrian and Tuscan spies, who dogged his footsteps.11

The process of unearthing all these accounts was very odd. It had (like any form of research) the fascination of a crossword puzzle, but it was also a little like walking in Madame Tussaud’s Gallery of Mirrors, in a world in which everything (and Byron himself most of all) was slightly out of focus, every motive misinterpreted, every image magnified or dwindled. I also learned a little more about a much more sympathetic side of Byron’s character—the one which, perhaps, in the end earned him a place in Westminster Abbey—‘his intensity and strength, his power and passion … in resisting the enemies of Freedom’.12 These qualities found full scope in his association with the Gamba family, since both Teresa’s father, Conte Ruggero, and her young brother Pietro (‘wild about liberty’, wrote Byron) were considered pecore segnate (branded sheep) by both the Austrian and Papal governments. It was through them that Byron made the acquaintance of the local Carbonari and soon became the head of one of their bands, the Cacciatori Americani. He met the conspirators in the pine-forest; he concealed their weapons in his house; he felt himself to have become, at last, a man of action.

Finally, before the book13 was finished, I was allowed to visit the villa at Settimello, near Pistoia, which had belonged to Teresa (then the widow of the Marquis de Boissy) in which she spent the last seven years of her life, and where she kept her books and Byronic ‘relics’. It was strange to take down her books and to find, in the fine, pointed handwriting which she had acquired at S. Chiara, her distressed, indignant comments at the manner in which Byron’s friends had treated what she considered the most perfect and unflawed romance. Often she confined herself to exclamation marks or to the words, ‘Non!’ or ‘Mensonge!’ or even ‘Pah!’—and in Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and His Contemporaries, ‘Faux! faux! Hypocrite! Menteur!’ In the margin of Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Lord Byron, beside the passage describing ‘the bad and vulgar taste predominating in all Lord Byron’s equipments’, Teresa angrily scribbled, ‘Mais ce sont des mensonges, pour faire plaisir à Dorset’ (sic). On the other hand the simple remark, ‘Byron’s was a fine nature’ elicited the comment, ‘Oh, true!’ and a similar approval was granted to the passage in which Lady Blessington remarked that ‘all the malice of his nature lodged itself in his lips and the fingers of his right hand—for there is none, I am persuaded, in his heart’. But it was Moore’s Life which upset Teresa most. ‘The word “Adultery” is cruel’, she wrote, ‘and could at least be sostituted (sic) by another less odious.’ Her final comment is on the last page of Moore’s book: ‘It was a duty in his (Byron’s) friends to employ delicacy in this task. In what manner they have satisfied it, this work must show sufficiently.’

Poor Teresa! Yet, in setting all this down, I did not feel that I was betraying her great-nephew’s trust in me. His original purpose in suppressing the publication of her papers had been to safeguard her reputation—but indeed, when the whole story lies before us, it is she who comes out best. Of all Byron’s friends, she and her brother Pietro were the only ones who took him entirely seriously, who doggedly, whole-heartedly and against all evidence, believed in him. They believed not only in his poetic genius and his noble aspirations, but in his romantic attitudes, his kindness, his heroism. Pietro died in Greece—two years after the poet himself—for the cause that Byron inspired. And Teresa, her silliness and vanity fallen away from her in old age, wrote that it was her wish that all her papers, ‘whatever the effect upon my reputation’, should be published, for the sake of showing ‘Lord Byron’s good and kind heart’.

* * *

In the case of The Merchant of Prato, my researches led me into very different paths. I had written a monograph14 about the importation into Florence, after the decimation of the population by the Black Death in 1348, of foreign slaves from the Black Sea, the Balkans, and Africa: and in the course of my researches, I had come across the deed of sale to a merchant of Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini, of a little Tartar slave-girl of ten. In the letter in which he instructed his agent in Genoa to find such a child, he had been very specific. She was to be ‘young and rustic, between eight and ten years old, of good stock, strong enough to stand much hard work, and of good health and temper, so that I may bring her up in my own way’. Was the slave-trade, I wondered, one of this merchant’s many activities, or was he merely dealing with his own family’s servant problem? The latter proved to be the truth. But as I discovered this, I also realised that Datini’s papers—his long correspondence with his wife, his partners in Italy and abroad, his factors, his relations and his friends—might provide the material for a family picture of the fourteenth century as detailed and as vivid as that which emerges, for instance, from the Paston Papers or from the letters of the Ménagier de Paris to his young wife. This indeed proved to be so. Datini’s papers—which consisted not only of his 575 voluminous account-books and ledgers (bound in white parchment and headed ‘In the name of God and profit’) but of nearly 126,000 business and private letters—had lain for over three hundred years in sacks in a recess under the stairs of his own house in Prato (occasionally, but not badly, nibbled by worms or mice), and though in 1870 they had been discovered and filed, the use that had been made of them by historians and economists had chiefly emphasised his achievements as a merchant: those relating to his private life had only been very superficially surveyed. As soon as they were transcribed (with the assistance of a skilled archivist, Dr. Gino Corti) I realised that they contained precisely what I had hoped to find: a glimpse of the daily life of a household of the fourteenth century, the relationship of its members to each other, and especially, of Francesco’s own dealings with his active, intelligent, argumentative wife. Such a detailed correspondence as theirs was still very rare. Husbands and wives seldom had occasion to write to each other since, if the husband was away, it was probably on a Crusade or trading in foreign ports, where opportunities for letters would be few. But here was a wife living in Prato, to look after her husband’s house, while he was busy with his trade in Pisa or Florence; and their letters, together with the washing and the fresh bread and vegetables and fruit from the farm, went up and down between Prato and Florence on muleback once or twice a week. Yes, here was the chair humaine that I had been seeking.

To trace the necessary information, however, was often a slow and laborious process. To discover, for instance, the extent of one single item of Margherita’s wardrobe it was necessary to examine many pages of washing lists, account-books, and letters merely to be able to write down, at the end of a day’s work, the two words ‘seven shifts’. Equally, to find out what Francesco ate and drank, I had to consult not only his bills and account-books but his letters to his apothecary and his doctors, who, in later years, forbade him to indulge in too many spices and also, oddly enough (since he suffered from constipation), in much fresh fruit. Among the most illuminating items—for few things reveal a man more clearly than the way he chooses to spend his money—were those which referred to his gifts: very extravagant ones to the rich and great, more modest ones (such as bales of herrings or crates of oranges) to kinsmen and the poor. After the terror, however, brought to Tuscany by the recurrence of the plague in 1400, and as he felt old age drawing near, his alms became much more generous: dowries to poor girls, ransoms for men in prison, gifts to hospices and convents. In the end, he left the whole residue of his large fortune to his Foundation for the poor of Prato, ‘for the love of God, so as to return to His Poor what has been granted to me as His gracious gift’.

* * *

Looking back, I do not regret the time spent upon these researches, nor indeed upon any of my biographies, though I do sometimes wish that I had devoted some of my energies instead to writing two books which are still lacking in English: full, up-to-date Lives of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and of Lorenzo de’ Medici—both men who not only saw, but to a large extent provoked, the dawn of a new era. But were I to write these books now, I think they would be somewhat different in tone and treatment from my earlier ones, for a reason which became clear to me, some years ago, after a conversation with George Santayana. During the last months of his life, when he was revising his Life of Reason, I asked him whether his opinions had become very different from those he had expressed some forty years before. “No,” he gently replied, “I feel I have much the same things to say—but I want to say them in a different tone of voice.”

Essentially, this reflects a state of mind not unlike that of Dr. Johnson when, ten days before his death, he asserted that he was ‘now ready to call a man a good man, on much easier terms than formerly’. With the passing of time, a writer’s judgements are likely to become a little gentler and to be expressed in a quieter voice; and of course it is also possible that, in the interval, he may have learned a little more. This is not to say that the works of a person’s later years are necessarily better than those of his youth; something may have been lost, as well as gained. But certainly they will be different.

They will be different, too, for other, less subjective reasons. Any writer who has gone on working for many years, is inevitably affected by the changes that have taken place during this time by the Zeitgeist, which is something more than a change in literary fashion. He will become aware that his earlier work has become, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘dated’. What Virginia Woolf, writing in the 1930’s, called ‘the new biography’—referring to the works of Lytton Strachey, Harold Nicolson and their followers—has not been so for a long time now. Indeed in recent years there has been a tendency to revert, especially in America, to solid lives in several volumes, less moralistic in tone than their Victorian predecessors, and generally more fully documented, but above all, factual. I think it is, on the whole, a salutary change. There is also a tendency to produce long, detailed records of some single episode, like a presidential election or assassination, or the Cuban crisis—books which to some extent make use of the technique, and convey the feeling of actuality, of a documentary newsreel. And, indeed, some technique of this kind must be evolved today, if only owing to the immense amount of material available to a writer, especially about a public figure. What must Franklin Roosevelt’s biographer have felt, surveying the forty tons of documents at his disposal? We live in a historically—or at least journalistically—minded age, and I understand that a certain American statesman was in the habit of having even his telephone conversations recorded in large notebooks. Certainly, too, a great change has been brought about by the radio and by television, which can satisfy people’s curiosity about their neighbours’ lives more directly and dramatically than any written page; every housewife in America could watch Alger Hiss on trial for treason, and follow the progress of the funerals of Jack and Bob Kennedy. And during this very summer, we have all watched, holding our breath, two men taking their first staggering steps upon the moon.

I do not believe, however, that these new outlets for the imagination will necessarily destroy the old. The slow development of character, the processes of thought of the writer and artist, and above all, the relation of human beings to each other—these are things that fortunately cannot be simplified, and will always have to be set down, however imperfectly, in words. Only, perhaps, in slightly different words, and with a different emphasis.

Marie Lenéru, when she was in touch with life again after some years of deafness and blindness, wrote that her desire was ‘to write, not as a form of expression, or even for writing’s sake, but in order to be, to enter more and more completely into one’s own thoughts and one’s own heart’. It is not necessary to have been deaf or blind to feel like this. But such an intention does imply that an inner change has taken place. If I were to start writing again today, with twenty or even ten years of energy and leisure still before me, I think I would write some quite different books, not in order to meet changes in fashion and approach, but rather in myself. Even when I disagree with what some young writers of today have to say, and do not always like the tone in which they say it, I am more interested in the world to which they belong than in that of my own youth. It is more violent, certainly, and cruder; but perhaps more vital and certainly more socially, religiously and politically involved, an involvement which I respect and from which I cannot now dissociate myself. The books I should like to write now, if any, would be connected with the subjects which most often fill my mind, and which belong, at least in part, to the vision bequeathed to us by the Second Vatican Council. They would probably be concerned with either sociological or religious problems and, even if they dealt with the past, would probably not be as detached as the works of my youth from the swiftly changing world in which we live.

Not that I nourish any illusions that a partial agreement with the ideologies of the younger generation, or at least a vivid awareness that they exist, will necessarily bring me any closer to them. On the contrary, I think that people of my age should have the courage to maintain a certain loyalty to the taste that they have acquired through many years of devotion to one of the arts, and frankly to admit what they do or do not enjoy. One need never again, for instance, listen to an opera by Wagner, if that happens to be one of one’s blind spots, nor read the novels of Stendhal, nor the works of Simone de Beauvoir, nor look at a picture by Dali. But, on the other hand, what a subtle delight can be brought by a return to those works of which the flavour still endures or by the sharp tang of pleasure caused by an unknown young author’s new book—a pleasure enriched and enhanced by all that one has known before encountering it. Virginia Woolf has somewhere described an evening during which Roger Fry, in a friend’s house, was called upon to decide whether a certain picture was or was not by Degas. ‘It was a very good picture beyond a doubt; it was signed by Degas—he was inclined to think on the whole that it was by Degas. And yet there was something that puzzled him … As if to rest himself, he turned away and took part in a discussion that was going forward in another part of the room … Then there was a pause. Suddenly he looked up and said: “No, no, that is not by Degas!”’

I do not know how old Roger Fry was when this little incident occurred, but I would wager that he was not a young man, or at least, that he had already been an art critic for a considerable number of years. For that long process of stepping back to reconsider and compare, perhaps not even wholly consciously, with a hundred other similar objects seen over many years, is precisely one of the great rewards of having analysed and savoured one of the first for a very long time, until the moment comes when one is sure and can say, “No, that is not by Degas”, or, on reading a work by a new young author, “Yes, that is a good book.”

All this, however, only applies to the critical faculty, to one’s assessment of other people’s work. What about one’s own? Should one go on writing indefinitely—that is, as long as one can listen, read, discriminate and enjoy? This is, of course, a highly personal matter and has little to do with calendar years. But for most writers who are no longer young one obstacle may arise which is both painful and disconcerting. Just as many actors and public speakers form a habit—in order to prevent their speech from becoming lifeless—of singling out in their audience one responsive face and addressing their remarks to it, so a writer is almost always—consciously or unconsciously—writing for someone, for a friend or friends who, he knows, have a similar turn of mind, who will understand and like what he says, or will disagree in a manner as stimulating as agreement.

At my age, however, it is almost inevitable that one should sometimes wonder for whom one is writing. It is not only that many friends of one’s own generation—the eyes in the audience which one was certain one could catch—have disappeared or are disappearing, but that they have taken with them both reassurance and zest. Yet, when I look at the question detachedly, I know that this is not its crux. One should surely try to go on renewing oneself, both in form and substance, so long as one is capable of thinking and feeling at all and—if one’s profession happens to be that of a writer—one should also go on writing, even for a changing and perhaps dwindling audience, as long as one believes that one has anything valid to say. In short, I would give to myself in old age the same advice that I have often given to young writers about to take their first plunge: write only because you must, but, if you must, do not let yourself be discouraged by either youth or age. For ‘of making many books there is no end’.

1 Granite and Rainbow, p. 149: ‘The New Biography’.

2 Poesie e Prose, II, pp. 5–6: Pensieri, II.

3 “Here’s the little hunchback!”

4 ‘The golden ways and gardens’: A Silvia.

5 The night is soft and clear, and no wind blows;

The quiet moon stands over roofs and orchards

Revealing from afar each peaceful hill

La sera del dì di festa (Translated by John Heath-Stubbs).

6 Resissued by Pushkin Press as A Study in Solitude: The Life of Leopardi – Poet, Romantic and Radical, 2017

7 Letters and Journals, V, p. 79. To John Murray, September 23, 1820.

8 L. J., IV, p. 50, August 25, 1819 (quoted from Moore).

9 The value was even greater than I myself realised. Only recently, at Sotheby’s, a letter of Byron’s was sold for £500.

10 Eventually, with the help of Elsa Dallolio, all the papers were sorted, dated (when possible) and properly filed before they were returned to Count Gamba, who presented them to the Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna.

11 There were, for instance, the anecdotes of Conte Francesco Rangone, a literary nobleman and gossip of Ferrara, who wrote a pamphlet entitled, ‘Peep at a very cultivated, rich but strange Mylord … dear to the Learned and not less so to the Fair.’ There was the diary of Cavaliere Angelo Mengaldo, a persistent Boswell, who held a swimming-match with Byron down the Grand Canal and even ventured to scold him about his love affairs, ‘mais mes sermons n’étaient pas de son goût’. There were the reports of a Tuscan spy, Angelo Valtancoli, who, with some difficulty, since he was too much in awe of Milord to draw near to him, kept watch over his movements in Bologna and reported that ‘the true object of his residence is still neither his literary pursuits nor his amorous occupations, but the destruction of the Established Government’. And finally there were the accounts of Cavaliere Luigi Torelli of Pisa, known as ‘the spy of spies’, whose highly exaggerated reports caused the Tuscan Government to banish the Gamba family from Tuscany.

12 From William Plomer’s address on unveiling the Memorial Tablet to Byron in Westminster Abbey, on May 8, 1969.

13 The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, Pushkin Press 2017

14 The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the XIV & XV Centuries, published in Speculum, vol. XXX, No. 3, July, 1955.