BiographyOld-fashioned cookbooks listed ingredients, specified exact amounts, and explained how things came together. They were particular about sequence and times, and were boring to read unless you had a job to do.
The new cookbooks, often written to accompany television programmes, go for colour and effect. They describe how finished meals look and taste, and entertain with information about calories or food miles. You can usually derive more pleasure from reading a new cookbook in bed than struggling with a disaster in the kitchen.
It's the same with the old and new biographies. Time was when a biography set out the known facts in temporal sequence, and a new biography was justified by the discovery of facts hitherto unknown. The genre served a practical purpose and was often boring if you hadn't a prior interest in applying what they told you. The new biography starts from the premise that a biography is a book to read for itself. It entertains in the way illustrations of finished desserts can be savoured by readers who have no thought of going through the business of preparing them. Or, more thoughtfully, it debates a general issue, as one might read a book about cod with no enlightenment as to how to cook it.
The new breed of biographers takes for granted that dull scholars have uncovered the facts, and they are more interested in ways to serve things up. They aim to shed new light not by adding to the wattage but by changing the angle from which illumination comes. Thus, among recent biographies of the English Romantic poets, about whom so much is already known, Richard Holmes revived popular interest in Coleridge by following in the author's footsteps, communicating vividly the feel of the places in which he lived. Last year, Adam Sisman wrote a dialogic biography, unravelling Coleridge's story as it happened in relation to Wordsworth, reversing the usual assumptions about who influenced whom for the better.
Being Shelleyis new cookbook biography in that it presents PB Shelley from the inside out. It makes no pretence to be based on original research. It does not present the events of Shelley's life as they happened, or introduce his friends in the sequence in which he met them, or explain in any coherent way his relation to the times in which he lived or the way his poetry relates to other writing of the time. The title is a literal description of what is on offer: a quest seen from the position of the quester, all other co-ordinates jettisoned. The dust jacket blurb is frank about what the book is not: "Rather than following a daily round in which poetry erupts occasionally, it tracks the inner adventures of a spirit struggling to escape and create."
Ann Wroe's previous biographies have centred on figures who were hardly there. Her life of Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the English throne during the reign of Henry VII, is about a man who was absolutely not what he wanted to appear. Her life of Judas Iscariot is subtitled "The Biography of an Invented Man". Relatively little is known about either figure, and less about the second than the first, so a lyrical, allusive method of presentation had free rein.
As she admits at the outset, Shelley is a daunting subject for a biographer simply because the record is so full, and she solves the problem by focusing on his poetry. As it happens, almost the whole of his literary writing, drafts and fragments included, is available in photographic reproduction and, with particular reliance on this, Wroe is able to suggest her Shelley in the act of thinking. Her aim is to immerse the reader in the poet's quest for himself even as it evolved and was shaped. Everything is relegated to this single consideration.
The book is organised in four chapters under the headings Earth, Water, Air, Fire - each of these divided into three sections with its own subtitle. Wroe is attempting to describe a process of gradual clarification, so the end is in the beginning and the interior quest is explored four times over in different ways. The opening chapter contains the largest ingredient of biographical fact, which the second goes over again, filling gaps and at a more rarified level. Chapter three concentrates the emergent theme on poetry in technical detail, and chapter four then expands the perspective to its furthest extent.
The design is a mosaic - filling in and thickening, confirming and broadening a pattern - and Wroe's skill at managing the making of it is considerable. She writes perceptively of Shelley's sense of musical interval (p245-6), and the same insight informs the varied pacing and arrangement of the sections within each chapter. Further chapter subdivisions are marked by asterisks, and within these again by double spaces between some paragraphs. At telling moments - characteristically in the penultimate subdivision of a chapter, notably in the opening subdivision of the final chapter - the pace is quickened by lists of instances, and from them a shift of perspective evolves. Literalism intersects the metaphoric structure and opens it up. The skill involved in the presentation of the material becomes a pleasure in itself.
ANN WROE CALLS her book an exercise in metaphysics. It is likely that the late, great John Moriarty would have agreed with her, but I return to it now as an example of the new biography. A reader looking for a biography with a clear storyline or containing newly discovered facts about Shelley's life will be disappointed, might reckon it an updated variation of André Gide's best-selling Ariel(1924), but it is qualitatively different and distinctively of our time. It offers a way of imbibing a transformative experience without having to cook the meal. Wroe fully admits the worst that can be said about Romantic Shelley as Gide could not - the human damage that followed in his wake - but her method puts it through the blender.
True, Red Shelley needs to be given a rest and we need another reason to read him. He is of interest because he wrote great poetry - as Wroe herself argues - but the case is not proved by using the poetry simply to construct the biography of a cosmic vision.
Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself By Ann Wroe Jonathan Cape, 452pp. £25
JCC Mays is an emeritus professor at UCD. His N11: A Musing was reissued last year by Coracle Books in its Little Critic series