Reading--O'Brian bios
While alternately binging and then shying away from the news when the pain and frustration goes too high, I've been toting about the first volume of Nikolai Tolstoy's biography of Patrick O'Brian. I read some, then turn to the Dean King bio.
King did do the best he could. The style is sometimes teeth gritting (if I had one penny for every time he used the construction 'he would' instead of a plain past tense, I could probably buy the Taj Mahal), and the way he extrapolates conclusions about O'Brian's life from the Aubrey/Maturin novels made me so restless I could hardly sit in my chair at times, but he did do his best with no cooperation from the principal and sporadic from other sources. I don't think King has the kind of intuition that a great biographer needs.
Tolstoy, partisanship notwithstanding, might. Tolstoy resists the impulse, so far, of hammering King for small errors, acknowledging that King could not get access to the crucial papers and people who might have set the record straight, due to O'Brian's fanatical devotion to altering or indeed hiding his past. So far the deviating details are quite small, the main thrust is roughly the same, but it's still interesting reading. The Tolstoy tends to be ponderous, repeating quotes and points over and over though they are relatively minor. But I'm enjoying it for the fascinating bits of insight, even when I don't always agree with some of his conclusions. Like when he and King both go on about how O'Brian was sickly as a kid, yet they cannot pinpoint any specific illnesses, so they decide either he was wheezy or else lying. Yet one of the quotes Tolstoy makes is O'Brian's rueful assertion that he did try to sit to the Dartmouth exam at thirteen, with an eye to getting into the navy, but (I paraphrase since someone dropped the book and all my markers fell out) he didn't pass as he had too few teeth, a rotten spine, and no brains. Well, by thirteen one has adult teeth already, therefore was it possible he suffered from the sort of excruciating toothache problems that plagued Charlotte Bronte and L.M.Montgomery from very early ages? That would account for a lot of lying about feeling miserable--but in those days toothache was so common no one much mentions it, except in passing as one of life's ills. Another, they go on and on about whether or not he had formal tutors, when the word (I believe, though I could be wrong) could conceivably extend to brothers or his father.
Nevertheless. This is all the early years, and the really painful years, when he was reinventing himself and shunning his family, supposedly come in the next. This one seems to set up just what an emotional wreck he was, making his achievements in literature the more amazing...but as for the truth about some of the mysteries surrounding his later life, well, Tolstoy himself quotes Johnson's famous remark:
...most accounts of particular persons are barren and useless. If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.
To which can be added, as the editors of L.M. Montgomery's papers pointed out in private letters to people asking why the publication of the journals was so slow, that sometimes you had to wait until controversial figures were dead. In which, of course, secrets--the real stories behind fraughtful interactions--die with them.
King did do the best he could. The style is sometimes teeth gritting (if I had one penny for every time he used the construction 'he would' instead of a plain past tense, I could probably buy the Taj Mahal), and the way he extrapolates conclusions about O'Brian's life from the Aubrey/Maturin novels made me so restless I could hardly sit in my chair at times, but he did do his best with no cooperation from the principal and sporadic from other sources. I don't think King has the kind of intuition that a great biographer needs.
Tolstoy, partisanship notwithstanding, might. Tolstoy resists the impulse, so far, of hammering King for small errors, acknowledging that King could not get access to the crucial papers and people who might have set the record straight, due to O'Brian's fanatical devotion to altering or indeed hiding his past. So far the deviating details are quite small, the main thrust is roughly the same, but it's still interesting reading. The Tolstoy tends to be ponderous, repeating quotes and points over and over though they are relatively minor. But I'm enjoying it for the fascinating bits of insight, even when I don't always agree with some of his conclusions. Like when he and King both go on about how O'Brian was sickly as a kid, yet they cannot pinpoint any specific illnesses, so they decide either he was wheezy or else lying. Yet one of the quotes Tolstoy makes is O'Brian's rueful assertion that he did try to sit to the Dartmouth exam at thirteen, with an eye to getting into the navy, but (I paraphrase since someone dropped the book and all my markers fell out) he didn't pass as he had too few teeth, a rotten spine, and no brains. Well, by thirteen one has adult teeth already, therefore was it possible he suffered from the sort of excruciating toothache problems that plagued Charlotte Bronte and L.M.Montgomery from very early ages? That would account for a lot of lying about feeling miserable--but in those days toothache was so common no one much mentions it, except in passing as one of life's ills. Another, they go on and on about whether or not he had formal tutors, when the word (I believe, though I could be wrong) could conceivably extend to brothers or his father.
Nevertheless. This is all the early years, and the really painful years, when he was reinventing himself and shunning his family, supposedly come in the next. This one seems to set up just what an emotional wreck he was, making his achievements in literature the more amazing...but as for the truth about some of the mysteries surrounding his later life, well, Tolstoy himself quotes Johnson's famous remark:
...most accounts of particular persons are barren and useless. If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.
To which can be added, as the editors of L.M. Montgomery's papers pointed out in private letters to people asking why the publication of the journals was so slow, that sometimes you had to wait until controversial figures were dead. In which, of course, secrets--the real stories behind fraughtful interactions--die with them.