A Night at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hines
(Faber, £14.99)
The Yellow House by Martin Gayford
(Fig Tree, £18.99)
Rousseau's Dog by David Edmonds & John Eidinow
(Faber, £14.99)
In 1855, as she got ready to write the biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell jotted down a note to herself: "Get as many anecdotes as possible. If you love your reader and want to be read, get anecdotes."
In 1922, in the run-up to the much anticipated premiere of Stravinsky's ballet Le Renard, the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet gave an interview to an American journalist. Did he have any quotable anecdotes about his career? asked the journalist. "Write in your article: this artist doesn't have any anecdotes, and it's that which typifies him," Ansermet replied with self-satisfaction.
The last few years have seen a wave of biographies in which anecdotes have become more than mere padding. Anecdotal meetings of minds sit right at their centre. They don't deal with individual lives in a chronological order, but with legendary dinner parties, famous flatshares and historical tête-a-têtes. Penelope Hughes-Hallett's The Immortal Dinner (2000) told the story of a soirée which gathered painter BR Haydon, William Wordsworth, John Keats and Charles Lamb around one table. James R Gaines's Evening in the Palace of Reason (2005) focused on the uneasy relationship between Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great. In February House (2005) Sherill Tippoins told the story of the infamous Brooklyn-based cohabitation experiment which found Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Gypsy Rose Lee, WH Auden and Benjamin Britten under the same roof. Most ambitious of all, because of its sheer scale, is A Chance Meeting (2004) by Rachel Cohen: 36 meetings between various writers, photographers and actors, from Henry James to Mar-cel Duchamp via Charlie Chaplin—a "six degrees of separation" tour through America's cultural heritage.
The first half of this year will see at least three additions to this new biographical genre: as well as Davenport-Hines's A Night at the Majestic, there's Martin Gayford's The Yellow House, the story of the Arles house shared by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin (due out in April), and David Edmonds and John Eidinow's Rousseau's Dog, about the friendship and fallout between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume (May).
Most of these stories are easily told: the material they digest used to be considered sufficient for an article in the New Yorker, perhaps, or a single chapter of a larger work, not whole books in their own right. They make short sharp cuts and take the bits they like best, but they don't dissect and analyse individual lives in their entirety.
In her 1939 essay "The Art of Biography," Virginia Woolf compared the biographer to a miner's canary, venturing into the depths and "testing the atmosphere." It is an analogy that suggests deep truths of talent or wickedness to be uncovered in the subject, and that from these the temperature of the biographer's own time can be taken. How each biographer approached those truths differed. The first great example of the genre, Boswell's Life of Johnson, is drenched in the spirit of Dr Johnson's encyclopedic project. Boswell created a role model out of the simulation of a real, flawed man. Early Victorian biographies were different: applying the lessons they had learnt from Thomas Carlyle's essays on hero-worship, historians created role models reflecting their own ideas of greatness. These bore, in Woolf's words, as little resemblance to real people as wax figure effigies of the deceased bore to the wilted bodies inside their coffins.
In the 20th century, following on from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), life writing became more preoccupied with the flaws than the talents, pulling apart the cracks and irregularities on the surface of the artist's image. Biography changed its focus from the peak of the artist's career to his or her first steps. Whether Oedipus complex, penis envy or Madonna syndrome, the trauma mattered—genius was the side-effect.
Popular biographies of the 21st century seem to be interested in a different type of talent—the talent for networking. This can reflect a cynical view of success: it's who you know, not what you know. But it can also mean a celebration of the patrons, curators, party-throwers, mentors, editors and publishers, the network of collaborators who helped an author or composer to create a masterpiece. Alternatively, the network biography could be said to encourage the reader to set individual talent to one side and make way for the true creative force: collaboration.
In the field of scientific history, Jenny Uglow has written such a book. The Lunar Men (2002) is her account of how a small group of inventors and amateur scientists helped to launch the industrial revolution. Rousseau's Dog, The Yellow House and A Night at the Majestic do not, however, live up to Uglow's standard: they might have the collaborative ideal in their heads, but their hearts beat elsewhere.
Edmonds and Eidinow's book gives us, with David Hume, a glimpse of a modern genius: networking, socialising, open to collaboration. But Hume is not the true hero of Rousseau's Dog—Jean-Jacques Rousseau is. And Rousseau, it turns out, is not good at parties. After the publication of his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, he has Paris's most exclusive intellectual salons at his feet. But he chooses, instead, to seek the solitude of the countryside. Throughout his life, Rousseau displays a remarkable talent for squandering the chances for networking that present themselves—be it in his correspondence with Voltaire or his friendship with Hume.
Much like Hume, the idealistic and rational van Gogh of The Yellow House has an evil twin: not Paul Gauguin, but van Gogh's other self, which scares Gauguin out of their shared home and thus undermines their collaboration. From that point on we are left in familiar territory—wondering about the sources of lonely genius.
Sidney Schiff—the lioniser and aesthete who pulls the strings at the centre of A Night at the Majestic—thought for a long time that he had found a soulmate in Marcel Proust. Proust had a reputation as an extrovert networker like Schiff. But when the first volume of In Search of Lost Time appeared, it became clear that Proust held the social self in deep disregard.
Deep at its core, "art is the apotheosis of solitude," Samuel Beckett noted in his monograph on Proust. In the age of networking, his verdict still holds true—the image of Proust that sticks is the ailing artist in his cork-lined apartment, sealed off from the social world. Rousseau, van Gogh and Proust survive as geniuses of the old order—burning inside, lonely in the knowledge of their own brilliance. And when faced with their contemporary counterparts, they still steal the show.
