John Aubrey: My Own Life (5 page)

It is remarkable that Aubrey resisted employing the method for which Powell rebukes Strachey. It is one of the tricks of the trade for working up the oblique hints, the small brushstrokes that accumulate gradually to become a finished portrait by the biography’s end. But Aubrey never did this. He stayed strictly within the frame of the story, anecdote or incident he found revealing of a Life. He made no attempt to interpret definitively, still less judge or account for, the Lives he wrote. He set out more modestly to record about each of them some things that were true. He was especially concerned to capture the small and incidental details that would otherwise be lost.

I first encountered Aubrey through Anthony Powell’s edition of
Brief Lives
in the library of my school in Slough: ‘a very dirty place’, according to Aubrey, who once passed through the town on a visit to Eton.
Brief Lives
is an evocative title, full of drama and poignancy – I did not know then anyone who had died, still less died young. I first wanted to write about Aubrey when I lived in the Wiltshire village of Wylye in my early twenties. Aubrey’s places – Stonehenge, Wilton House, Salisbury Plain, the rivers and meadows and undulating hills – seemed still touched by his presence. He is one of the finest English prose writers there has ever been. Like all great writers, he lives on in the words he arranged on paper, no matter how scrappy or fragmentary or difficult to decipher the pages in his archive are. He lives on too in the places he loved and wrote about.

It is hard to turn the tables and write a biography of England’s first great biographer. Aubrey was a mild-mannered man who did not impose himself strongly on his subjects. Instead he captured them for posterity, without presuming to know what posterity would make of them. He was a listener. Among the manuscripts and letters
²⁰
that he deposited in the Ashmolean Museum towards the end of his life were some scant autobiographical jottings, ‘to be interponed as a sheet of wast-paper only in the binding of a Booke’. Aubrey’s idea that his record of his own life might serve as endpapers to a book about something or someone else is typically self-effacing. He was, we can be sure, wonderful company. He pursued a wide range of historical and scientific interests and knew or corresponded with a large number of people – many of them cleverer, more confident or flamboyant than he was himself. He was in high demand as friend, guest, intellectual or literary collaborator, informant and recorder. Though impecunious, he survived well in a culture of hospitality, where it was important for the wealthy to fill their homes with interesting guests. When he could no longer afford
²¹
to maintain his own household, he was welcomed into the homes of wealthier friends for weeks on end, paying only with his time. He knew the price was high and would mean that much of his work would be left incomplete, ‘on the loom’, at his death. Aubrey saw himself as a resource for honing other people’s talents; he doubted the power of his mind, doubted even the quality of his distinctive prose, and claimed gratitude to others as his own greatest virtue. In describing himself
²²
, he echoed the words of the poet Horace – ‘I perform the function of a whetstone, which can make the iron sharp though is itself unable to cut.’

The chaotic and fragmentary nature of Aubrey’s work, punctuated as it is by gaps into which he hoped information would be inserted later by himself or others, is matched by the fragmentary record of his life. Aside from his few pages of autobiographical notes, the main sources for Aubrey’s life are the remains of his correspondence, which are necessarily uneven and often oblique. Sometimes it is possible to tell exactly where Aubrey was and what he was doing on a particular date. Sometimes weeks, even months, go by where he cannot be traced. His relationships, especially the most intimate, flash past, illuminated only instantaneously, like a dark landscape beneath a clouded sky when the moon breaks through fleetingly. Unlike Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and other celebrated men of the seventeenth century, Aubrey did not leave a diary. If he wrote one – regularly, intermittently or occasionally – it has disappeared. When I was searching for a biographical form that would suit the remnants of his life, I realised that he would all but vanish inside a conventional biography, crowded out by his friends, acquaintances and their multitudinous interests. Aubrey lived through fascinating times and has long been valued for what can be seen through him; there is no shortage of scholars who appreciate the use that can be made of him. But the biographer has other purposes: to get as close to her subject and his sensibility as possible; to produce a portrait that captures at least something of what that person was like. In the pencil portrait of Aubrey
²³
that survives, he looks like an unremarkable seventeenth-century gentleman, his bland face square between the curtains of a heavy wig. A portrait in words – one that does him more justice – is what I determined to write.

Biography is an art form open to constant experiment. Aubrey is not my first biographical subject. I wrote first about a vehement Frenchman, Maximilien Robespierre, whose life was caught up in revolution and violent change. Afterwards, Aubrey’s sensibility – treasuring the past, rescuing what he could from the forces of destruction and the passage of time – seemed more attractive than ever. I was led back to Aubrey by a deep fascination with how and why we tell the stories of earlier lives. What is the nature of the relationship between biographers and their subjects? Do we honour or betray the dead when we write about them? When Lytton Strachey mocked ‘tombstone’ biographies and offered instead his impertinent
Eminent Victorians
, he liberated future generations of biographers. Instead of forcing lives into conventional books, it is possible to find a form – or invent one – to suit the life in question. After much experiment, trial and error, I decided to write Aubrey’s life as a diary. I was inspired
²⁴
by the vivid sense of self that emerges from the diaries of Pepys, Evelyn and Hooke. I thought: if only we had Aubrey’s diary, his modesty, self-effacement, attention to others would not be such a problem. No one gets crowded out of his or her own diary. Hooke kept an obsessive diary from 1672 to 1683: it is the memorandum book of a secretive man in a perpetual hurry. Pepys kept his diary for a decade
²⁵
– from 1660 until 1669 – and wrote in shorthand, probably not intending it to be read by anyone beside himself. The diary I have created for Aubrey is closer to Evelyn’s. Evelyn’s diary covered almost his entire life and included a retrospective account of his European Grand Tour, to which he added explanations of significant events with the benefit of hindsight. It was written in longhand, with a self-conscious air of moral contrivance, to be read later by family and close friends. In Aubrey’s case, moral contrivance is completely out of the question. Never, in writing the lives of others, did he moralise or sermonise about the evidence he had assembled. Unlike his friend Evelyn, he was not constrained by religious dogma on how to live.

In constructing Aubrey’s diary, I have used as many as possible of his own words. It is a diary based on the historical evidence; a diary that shows him living vividly, day by day, month by month, year by year, but with necessary gaps when nothing is known about where he was or what he was doing. I have not invented scenes or relationships for him as a novelist would, but neither have I followed the conventions of traditional biography. When he is silent, I do not speculate about where he was or what he was doing or thinking. When he speaks, I have modernised his words and spellings and indicated the original sources in endnotes. I have added words of my own to explain events or interactions that would otherwise be obscure and to frame or offset the charm of Aubrey’s own turns of phrase. All dates have been modernised to the Gregorian calendar. When the year, but not the precise month or day, of a piece of evidence is known, I have arranged it with other entries, sometimes clustering themes or events that fit together. There are three distinct kinds of entry in the diary I have conjured for Aubrey: discursive descriptions of events and conversations within specific months or years based on his writing and correspondence; shorter notes about personal events that occurred on particular days; and entries providing brief accounts of public events which begin ‘On this day’.

Aubrey’s approach to his own and other lives was imaginative and empirical in equal measure. In imagining his diary by collating the evidence, I have echoed the idea of antiquities – the searching after remnants – that meant so much to him. I have collected the fragmentary remains of his life – from manuscripts, letters and books, his own and other people’s – and arranged them carefully in chronological order. I have done so playingly (a word he used of his own writing) but with purpose. Ultimately, my aim has been to write a book in which he is still alive.

PART I

Wiltshire

Anno 1634
,
Easton Pierse

I WAS BORN
about sun rising in my maternal grandfather’s bedchamber on 12 March 1626, St Gregory’s Day, very sickly, likely to die. I was christened before Morning Prayer. My father was nearly twenty-two years old, my mother only fifteen and a half. She has cried through the night and given birth to three more babies since, but they have all died.

My mother’s father, Isaac Lyte, is a man of the old time: he wears a doublet and hose and carries a dagger, as men did in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He is a living history. We live with him at Easton Pierse, a hamlet in the parish of Kington St Michael, in the hundred of Malmesbury, in the county of Wiltshire.

My grandfather tells me
¹
that our family sold the manor house and farm at Easton Pierse to the Snell family in 1575, the year before he was born. The house we live in now was built the year following, on the brow of the hill, above the brook, facing south-east. It has a great hall and parlour and a tall, carved chimney stack. In the parlour chimney is carved: ‘T. L. 1576’, my great-grandfather Thomas Lyte’s initials and the year our house was built.

On the chimney in my grandfather’s chamber, where I first drew breath, there are two escutcheons. The first for my grandfather: ‘Isaac Lyte natus 1576’. The second for my grandmother, Israel Lyte, whose family name before she married was Browne.