Burying
Scott
Marilyn Butler
- The Life of Walter
Scott: A Critical Biography by John Sutherland
Blackwell, 386 pp, £19.99, January 1995, ISBN 1 55786 231 1
London Review
of Books – Vol 17, no. 17 – 7 September 1995, p. 10-11
John Sutherland’s pithy,
cynical Life of Scott
is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in
a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at
least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its
kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott
(1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives
is in opposite directions. Sutherland has come to bury Scott, while Lockhart,
the great man’s son-in-law, praises him in a public-relations exercise calculated
to maintain the family’s prestige and income. Yet Lockhart in the 1830s was
quite as committed as Sutherland in the 1990s to a commercially-driven real
world, as he proves by his mastery of its classic plot-line, ‘making it’.
Lockhart presents Scott’s
rise and rise as an exemplary fable for a commercial age, heavily reliant on
its author-hero’s middle-class virtues – hard daily work, bonhomie and of
course family values. Each success comes lightened by homely, humorous touches
that bring out not Scott’s towering genius but his ordinariness and niceness.
Before his years of fame, an Edinburgh neighbour is traumatised by the
apparition, which he sees towards dawn from his window, of a disembodied hand
travelling tirelessly across the page: no ghost story, but the neat framing of
Scott’s life in terms of the homely myth of the Industrious Apprentice. In a
series of transformations Lockhart’s Scott becomes both the Wizard of the North
and the rich Laird of Abbotsford, graced with titles (baronet and sheriff),
broad acres and his own baronial hall.
Success is the central
theme of John Sutherland’s book too. But step by step he unwraps Lockhart’s
packaging, beginning with the anecdotes. Too many couldn’t have occurred at the
date specified: Sutherland refers drily to Lockhart’s ‘usual pragmatism about
chronology’. Place can also be a problem: there isn’t a local vantage-point,
apparently, from which Scott’s novel-writing hand could have been seen.
As for the great man’s
amiability, Sutherland wheels out his own tales of Scott the cold-hearted and
neglectful son, brother, husband and father, a paterfamilias with a
track-record of absenting himself from key family deathbeds and funerals. In
dealing with his betters, from clan chiefs to politicians in power, he was
obsequious and manipulative. He stole the materials and labour of writer
friends and co-authors. He deceived creditors, and manipulated or where
necessary sacrificed his business partners. Sutherland swings the hatchet, for
the same reason at least one recent biographer has hacked at Scott’s
contemporary Jane Austen, another writer bleached by 19th-century family
laundering. And reviewers have taken it personally, as though an old and close
friend is being traduced, which indeed is close to the mark.
Sutherland has one good
answer to those who hate his book: his subtitle, which is in fact the
series-title of a list of new literary biographies under Claude Rawson’s
general editorship. If you want an uncritical biography, Sutherland might say,
don’t buy this one but stick to Lockhart, or to some other modern academic
biography (such as Edgar Johnson’s two volumes, 1970) which essentially accepts
Lockhart’s facts and interpretations. At its best this book establishes that
received literary history, often based on biography, is too credulous, and that
writers and their advocates may have interests in lying. It can’t replace
Lockhart or Johnson as a detailed biographical record (it’s a fraction of the
length of either), but can and does target the ways in which they and their
kind deceive.
Rather like saints’
lives, to which they have a family resemblance, literary biographies exist to
exalt a writer and recruit admirers for an oeuvre. The soft focus hasn’t been
an absolute requirement (witness Lytton Strachey), but the soft pedal is common
to academic and nonacademic authors. It’s not Sutherland’s style to debate what
literary biography mostly does or what his will do. He is, however, already the
biographer of Mrs Humphry Ward, a personality he found at least as
objectionable as he finds Scott. He chooses to work against the grain – by
insisting that his subjects are anything but admirable characters, and by
adding that their fame exceeded their talent.
Sutherland cuts Scott
down to size in his trim discussions of each of the longer poems and novels in
their chronological place. Partly because Scott was so prolific, these
discussions can be bite-sized, at not much more than a page. Even at the
maximum eight pages, they come several to a chapter. It’s conventional in a
biography to give priority to hard facts – information about the first idea, if
any, then composition, publication and reception. But it seems to me a fault in
Sutherland’s method that he takes a consistently narrow view of the first and
last of these categories. First ideas tend to be something external that just
turned up – a crisis in the Peninsular Wars, a visit to the field of Waterloo,
or one or more grandees Scott wanted to compliment. Reception is less likely to
include a book’s reviews than its sales figures.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n17/marilyn-butler/burying-scott
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