The Lives of Others

‘My wife doesn’t understand me,’ the man said to his Jewish psychoanalyst. ‘I should be so lucky!’ was the reply. It’s a common complaint, not being understood. Yet surely only the most shameless would like others to know us exactly as we are or as we know ourselves. This is one reason some writers shrink from the prospect of having their Life written. Kipling called biography ‘the higher cannibalism’, and tried to pre-empt one by writing his own decidedly reticent memoir, Something of Myself. Something indeed, but not a lot. Subsequently, his widow, Carrie, burned letters and other papers; their daughter, Elsie, suppressed Frederick Birkenhead’s biography without giving a reason, and when at last consenting to one, tied its author Charles Carrington’s hands. One sees their point. In life Kipling concealed everything but his opinions; why should a biographer be free to expose what had been kept hidden from view.

Thomas Hardy, equally shy of the world’s gaze, adopted a different stratagem. He wrote his own biography, to be published posthumously under his wife’s name. The device failed to choke off the higher cannibals. He has repeatedly attracted the attention of biographers. We know much more about Hardy than he wished to be known.

Auden went further:

Most genuine artists would prefer that no biography be written. A great deal of what passes for scholarly research is an activity no different from reading somebody’s private correspondence when he is out of the room, and it doesn’t really make it morally any better if he is out of the room because he is in his grave.

This is Auden in his best pontifical vein. Yet he must have known that he would himself be the subject of a biography, and indeed his friend Charles Osborne wrote a frank and sympathetic one only a few years after the poet’s death.