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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Literary woodlice boring needless holes in biographical bedposts

Are there too many biographies? Thomas Carlyle thought so 150 years ago. ‘What is the use of it?’ he wrote growlingly. ‘Sticking like a woodlouse to an old bedpost and boring one more hole in it?’ He was then engaged in his 13-year task of writing the life of Frederick the Great, and spoke from a full and bitter heart. Since then over a million more biographies have been written in English alone. The public is to blame, as it is to blame for any other excesses, distortions, omissions and duplications in the book trade. I have been encouraged to write biographies, and have done six. Publishers will tell you that three in particular will always sell, no matter how many times they have been done before: lives of Byron, Mary Queen of Scots and, above all, Napoleon.

Here again, I am a sinner. At the urgent entreaty of a publisher, who wanted it for a ‘series’, I wrote a short life of Napoleon. I knew the period pretty well, and had already made up my mind about the brute on most points, so it took me only a month. But it has been reprinted many times, translated into numerous languages, gone into big print and disc, etc, and I suppose made me a tidy sum. Also, and most important of all, writing it gave me great pleasure. One of the fascinating things about this man is that new bits of information and memorabilia are always turning up. Some years ago, for instance, a reader sent me a piece of the material used in making him a dress-coat. Genuine? Who knows? There are more items from his wardrobe, or bits of them, floating around and being washed ashore in old curiosity shops than there are fragments of the True Cross.

Last week I had a letter from a gentleman well into his nineties, who had read my Napoleon in the big print edition. He says that in the 1920s he talked to an elderly solicitor, the uncle of a boy he knew at school. This man, born not later than the 1850s, was called Arnott, and was a direct descendant (probably grandson) of the Dr Arnott who was one of the five surgeons, the others being Shortt, Livingstone, Burton and Mitchell, who were present at a post-mortem examination of Napoleon’s body, carried out shortly after his death on St Helena, by the Florentine doctor Francesco Antommarchi. All five signed the report, identifying the cause of death, which was a matter of controversy then and ever since. It appears it was a traditional belief in the Arnott family that Surgeon Arnott, after the post-mortem, abstracted Napoleon’s heart and took it home with him when he left St Helena. Unfortunately, on the voyage, the ship’s rats got at it and ate it.

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