Putting words in the mouth of a 17th-century gossip

Claire Harman reviews this delightful biography of John Aubrey
John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr
Claire Harman19 March 2015

John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr (Chatto, £25)

John Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquarian, collector and intellectual omnivore, only published one book in his lifetime and it wasn’t the one he became famous for later, Brief Lives, a collection of gossipy pen-portraits of his contemporaries now viewed as a turning point in English biography. In his own time, Aubrey was better known as an assistant to other people’s scholarship, the friend of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke and Anthony Wood, whose magpie mind was always storing up observations of flora and fauna, and musing on subjects as diverse as bees’ thighs, lanterns, submarine navigation, soil management, the meaning of Stonehenge or the cloudiness in his turquoise ring.

For a man obsessed as Aubrey was with the conservation of knowledge and preservation of papers, the turbulence of the times he lived through meant constant anxiety. Many of his papers got lost or destroyed and much was left unfinished at his death, so Ruth Scurr has come up with a brilliant and highly sympathetic way of representing what did survive. What if Aubrey had left a diary like his contemporaries Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn? The result is a version of Aubrey’s life constructed from his own words and made to look like a journal or commonplace book.

Her composite text is full of gems, from Aubrey’s reflections on the corpses exposed at St Paul’s after the Great Fire in 1666 (Bishop Braybrook looked “like a preserved fish”, while Dean Colet “lay in liquor, like boiled brawn”) to his observations of “nutbrown shepherdesses” and anxieties about his laundry: “I would much prefer not to stuff up my breeches by wearing two shirts and sweltering on the coach.”

But whose words are they, exactly? In her introduction Scurr says that she has used as much verbatim Aubrey as possible, adding her own explanations of “events or interactions that would otherwise be obscure”, but it remains unclear where one voice ends and the other begins.

For instance, when Aubrey describes being flogged at school — “A terrible day. The master flexed his cane and looked away” — the notes cite Aubrey on Education, but in that book did he really go on to write “I have seen it before, that hard look of anticipation, so deep it is almost behind his eyes, the quick flick of his tongue across thin lips”? This is either a piece of extraordinarily unconventional 17th-century autobiography or a piece of Scurr’s invention — and I’d like to be sure which.

Does it matter if her technique brings the subject to life so vividly? Possibly not, and writers of so-called bio-fiction have been taking liberties like this for years. In some ways Scurr doesn’t seem to intervene enough; there’s a lot you won’t find out about Aubrey here in terms of the facts of his life, his relations with women (very obscure), the causes of his longstanding fight with his brother, or the outcome of anything — in that respect it is truly like a diary.

The net result makes a delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind; but you won’t be able to quote from it to prove anything about John Aubrey.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £20, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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