Biography: What should we expect from the biography of a major literary figure? Some of Iain Finlayson's liveliest pages are devoted to precisely this question, writes Brian Cosgrove.
He recalls Proust's disagreement with Sainte-Beuve, the latter advocating investigations into such largely factual matters as a writer's diet, daily routine, religious ideas, or attitudes to money, with Proust insisting that our main concern should be with "moi profond", the writer's deeper self which "shows itself only in his books". The possible limitations in the Sainte-Beuve approach are intimated in some remarks by Virginia Woolf in her notebooks: "Facts have their importance - But that is where the biography comes to grief. The biographer cannot extract the atom. He gives us the husk".
Iain Finlayson is acutely aware of the distinction in Browning (more pronounced after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning) between the public and private man (the inspiration for one of Henry James's most compelling stories, 'The Private Life'). Yet in spite of his own subtitle, A Private Life, his concern is primarily with the externality of Browning's experience, and he offers "a conventional, chronological biography" that has finally much more to tell us about the life than the poetry.
That said, one cannot fault Finlayson's authoritative grasp of the facts (which do "have their importance").
The core of this substantial work is its middle section - the longest of the three - which carries the title 'Robert and Elizabeth 1846-1861'. Finlayson does full justice not only to one of the most intriguing marital relationships in literary history but also to that forbidding Victorian patriarch, Edward Barrett, who died stubbornly unreconciled with Elizabeth following her decision, against his wishes, to marry Robert; and he is at his best in his subtle analysis of both the letters exchanged between the two lovers prior to marriage, and the possible psychological tensions in the marriage itself (two writers, after all, in a state of potential rivalry, the husband younger than the wife). These, nonetheless, seem to have been cancelled by a deep and abiding mutual love. Robert's account (in a letter) of Elizabeth's death recalls how, held in his embrace, she kissed him "with such vehemence that when I laid her down she continued to kiss the air with her lips". Robert, on his side, despite his lifelong attraction and attractiveness to women, matched her commitment.
Finlayson tells us that, weeks after the death, Robert would "weep frantically", crying out: "I want her! I want her!" On the level of fact we are, in addition, kept well-informed of the passion of the Brownings for Italy (and from that acquired cosmopolitan perspective they could be severe both on England and "the loutish English" - Finlayson's phrase - that they met abroad), as well as their continual interest in Italy's protracted evolution, from 1848, towards unity and nationhood. And the quality of Finlayson's research allows him to range over the major political and cultural events of the day (including spiritualism), with a cast that includes such luminaries as Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson and James, as well as (in Paris) George Sand, and (from Ireland) William Allingham and Father Prout (Francis Sylvester Mahony).
One returns, however, to Proust's feeling that it is, after all, the writer as revealed in his writings that matters. It is significant that the most memorable critical comments on the poetry here are quoted from others, such as Clyde DeVane.
True, Finlayson is wholly upfront about this, and there is never a suggestion that this is to be a critical biography of a great writer. But even if the poetry itself is not wholeheartedly "taken on", one misses any real attempt to engage with Browning's sense of what poetry is or ought to be - as in, say, his 'Essay on Shelley'. The distinction there between subjective and objective poetry entails rather more than their obvious meanings. The subjective poet emerges as one who seeks a unitary apprehension of experience; the objective poet embraces phenomenal multiplicity, precisely that "confused multitudinousness" that alarmed Matthew Arnold.
Browning (and his Fra Lippo Lippi) are surely in that sense objective artists, and part of Browning's modernity (Pound, Finlayson reminds us, called Browning his "poetic father") lies in his acquiescence in the fragmented and the fragmentary. To indict Browning, as Santayana did, on the grounds that he had "no grasp of the whole reality" is perhaps to miss the point; and to complain that he "remained in the phenomenal sphere" is merely to reiterate as an adverse judgment what Browning positively espoused in the 'Essay on Shelley'.
Yeats grumbled that, to Browning, "the world was simply a great boarding-house in which people come and go in a confused manner". But then (subjective?) Yeats was reluctant to part company with the visionary Shelley (or Blake) as completely as Browning, in his anti-Platonic phenomenalism, chose to do.
Brian Cosgrove is professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Browning: A Private Life. By Iain Finlayson, HarperCollins 758pp. £30