Buch lesen: «Fanny Burney: A biography»

Preface

Dr Johnson: Ay, never mind what she says. Don’t you know she is a writer of romances?

Sir Joshua Reynolds: She may write romances and speak truth.¹

By dint of outliving her parents, five siblings, husband and child, the novelist Fanny Burney (then Madame d’Arblay) became the caretaker of a vast quantity of family papers in her later years. Her father’s archive alone seemed at one point to be taking over her life, for, as she discovered when she began to sort through his literary remains in the 1820s, he seemed to have ‘kept, unaccountably, All his Letters, however uninteresting, ceremonious, momentary, or unmeaning’. She destroyed quantities of these papers and edited the remaining ones ruthlessly using scissors and heavy black ink; a process she applied to her own archive in the last decade of her life and which was continued after her death by her niece and literary executrix Charlotte Barrett, who pasted over more than a thousand passages in Madame d’Arblay’s diary, and cut out or deleted many others.

Millions of words remain, nevertheless, in tens of thousands of family letters, diaries, memoirs, drafts, notebooks, manuscripts and Fanny Burney’s famous journal covering the period from 1768 until shortly before her death in 1840. The historical and literary importance of the Burney papers was recognised early on. Fanny Burney was one of the best-known and most highly respected novelists of her generation, whose ‘uncommonly fine compositions’² had been admired by writers as diverse as Jane Austen and Lord Byron. She had also led a long and eventful life which brought her into contact with some of the most famous men and women of her time; David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Warren Hastings, Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, Napoleon. She was a member of the Royal Household during the period of George Ill’s ‘madness’ in 1788 and a refugee in Brussels during the Battle of Waterloo: she had been an intimate of Dr Johnson in the 1780s, yet lived long enough to meet Sir Walter Scott. When the Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay were published in seven volumes between 1842 and 1846, she began a new posthumous career as the leading journalist of the Georgian age.

The first edition of the Diary and Letters was a re-editing, with some deletions, of Burney’s own selection, bequeathed to Charlotte Barrett in 1839 ‘with full and free permission … to keep or destroy’,³ though Burney must have calculated that the loyal and scholarly ‘Charlottina’ was unlikely to destroy much. The diaries have been in print ever since, in one form or another. Some editions, like Christopher Lloyd’s,⁴ were short and sweet, presenting Fanny Burney as a sentimental Regency ‘miss’; others, like Austen Dobson’s of 1904, attempted to put the work in its historical context. Annie Raine Ellis’s 1889 edition of the Early Diary (using material not touched by Mrs Barrett, who began her selection with the publication of Evelina in 1778) was remarkable for its thoroughness and completeness: she included everything she could read of the mauled manuscripts (cut away and pasted over by several generations of the author’s heirs) and included excerpts from Susan and Charlotte Burney’s papers as well.

Ellis’s approach prefigured that of modern scholars, who have laboured to recover every obliteration by means of the latest x-ray and photographic technology. The Burney Project at McGill University is dedicated to this task, which has been going on for some thirty years and is not yet within sight of an end. Joyce Hemlow, the great Burney scholar and biographer, brought out the first of what she expected to be a ten-volume edition of Fanny Burney’s Journals and Letters in 1972. In the event, she oversaw the publication of twelve volumes between that date and 1984 and the present team (under Professor Lars Troide) has published three of a projected further ten volumes of the Early Journals and Letters. Recently there have also been scholarly editions of Fanny Burney’s plays (all but one unperformed in her lifetime), Sarah Harriet Burney’s letters, Charles Burney’s letters and fragmentary manuscript memoirs, and there are plans to publish the letters of Susan Burney and possibly of Charlotte Burney too. By the time the Burney Project has exhausted its rich mine of material, we will know more about this logomaniac tribe and their associates than any other eighteenth-century family.

The very length and thoroughness of Fanny Burney’s journals and letters enforce their standing as a trustworthy record, but while they provide almost unrivalled documentation of fact, they also represent a huge input of authorial control over the interpretation of her life. Basically, a writer who seems to leave no stone unturned is not inviting interpretation at all. ‘Mystery provokes Enquiry’, as Burney herself warned her cousin Rebecca Sandford⁵ when she was arguing to keep intact the text of her forthcoming Memoirs of Doctor Burney – a book which, as we shall see, provides countless examples of the manipulation and invention of biographical fact. Burney’s nephew Richard was anxious about the book exposing the family’s humble origins, or, more specifically, his humble origins, since he had omitted to tell either his wife of twenty years or the College of Arms (when he was applying for armorial bearings in 1807) of his grandmother’s ‘undignified Birth’, not to mention – if he knew of it – his own mother’s illegitimacy. Fanny’s refusal to withdraw the Memoirs might seem to cast her in the role of fearless truth-teller on this occasion, but her motive was far more to avoid provoking Enquiry than to dispel ‘mystery’ per se. Her version of her father’s life may not have been the whole truth, but it was full: everything seemed to be accounted for. As a way of controlling information about the family it was highly effective; as proof of Fanny’s veracity it left much to be desired.

The Memoirs have consistently been viewed as an aberration, both of style and technique, an embarrassing filial rhapsody written by a woman in her dotage. Biographers look to Burney’s diaries (especially the early ones) as much purer sources of information: ‘we never turn from the Memoirs to the Diary without a sense of relief’, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his well-known essay on Madame d’Arblay; ‘the difference is as great as the difference between the atmosphere of a perfumer’s shop, fetid with lavender water and jasmine soap, and the air of a heath on a fine morning in May’.⁶ But since Memoirs of Doctor Burney was essentially Madame d’Arblay’s autobiography, based on and superseding her journals, they cannot be dismissed quite so readily. Nor does Macaulay’s delight in the heathy freshness of the Diary acknowledge the artificiality of the form which we take to show Fanny Burney at her most open and truthful. Burney began her diary in March 1768, aged fifteen, with a famous address to Nobody, surely one of the most self-conscious, attention-grabbing pieces of supposedly confidential writing ever composed:

To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance & actions, when the Hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a Journal: a Journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole Heart! But a thing of this kind ought to be addressed to somebody – I must imagion myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends – to one in whom I should take delight in confiding, & remorse in concealment: but who must this friend be? – to make choice of one to whom I can but half rely, would be to frustrate entirely the intention of my plan…. To whom, then, must I dedicate my wonderful, surprising & interesting adventures? – to whom dare I reveal my private opinion of my nearest Relations? the secret thoughts of my dearest friends? my own hopes, fears, reflections & dislikes? – Nobody!

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved – to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life!⁷

Behind the elaborate joke of this is the admission that the whole enterprise is unsound, that there is, literally, nobody with whom the diarist can be completely unguarded.

On matters of ‘unlimited confidence’ and ‘unremitting sincerity’ Burney was, like all diary-writers, on shaky ground. Matters of fact, on the other hand, she felt to be her forte. Fanny Burney was blessed with a phenomenal memory and could repeat back quantities of conversation on one hearing, as if, as her father joked, ‘you carry Bird Lime in your Brains – for every Thing that lights there, sticks’.⁸ This knack seems to have had an affinity with her sister Hetty’s prodigious ability to transcribe or play back pieces of music (Hetty amazed the composer Sacchini in 1773 by playing from memory the overture to his new opera Il Cid, which had not yet been published).⁹ When Fanny memorised speech, the sound of the words was pivotal: ‘my memory was not more stored with the very words than my voice with the intonations of all that had passed’, she said when recalling part of the trial of Warren Hastings.¹⁰ On another occasion she wrote of a friend’s speech-mannerisms, ‘I think, if possible, his Language looks more absurd upon Paper even than it sounds in conversation, from the perpetual recurrence of the same words’, which suggests that she was transcribing from memory word for word. This wasn’t the only way Fanny Burney recorded speech – sometimes she remembered the argument and reconstructed the wording more loosely (I have included an interesting example of this process at work in her recollection of Warren Hastings’ trial in the Appendix) – nor was her diary always freshly written, however spontaneous it sounds. She came to rely on ‘writing up’ her journal – sometimes at a distance of weeks or months – using notes she had jotted down on erasable ivory tablets. There was some element of hindsight at work in almost all her autobiographical writing.

Fanny Burney’s phenomenal powers of memory may well have made her overconfident about her own rightness, which she extended from being reliable in matters of fact to being correct in interpretation. Even in her own lifetime, some people thought Fanny Burney too much of a novelist to be taken seriously as a historian or biographer, and when in her later years she published Memoirs of Doctor Burney, the critic John Wilson Croker thought her ‘recollections’ betrayed ‘consummate art – or a confusion of ideas which has had the same effect’.¹¹ More damningly, several readers who had personal knowledge of people and events mentioned in the Memoirs objected very strongly to Fanny’s version. Her stepbrother Stephen Allen leapt to the defence of his mother, the second Mrs Charles Burney (who, as we shall see, came off extremely badly in the Memoirs), and Mrs Delany’s ex-servant, Anne Agnew, felt the portrait of her former mistress so faulty that the author ‘must fancy she was writing a novel and therefore could embellish her story in any way she liked’.¹² In the light of these criticisms, the affectionate joke that Samuel Johnson made about Fanny back in the 1780s rings a little hollow: ‘[N]ever mind what she says. Don’t you know she is a writer of romances?’¹³

Ironically, Madame d’Arblay prided herself on her ‘reverence for truth’;¹⁴ indeed she seems to have been obsessed with it. ‘I can use no softer term than Defamation for the least attack upon my veracity’, she wrote defiantly during the row with Stephen Allen following the publication of the Memoirs. Joyce Hemlow, the author of the first scholarly biography of Fanny Burney in 1958, defended her subject’s veracity rather weakly on the grounds that:

While she did not always tell the full truth about some of the family difficulties, sins, and errors, she did not tell un-truths. As a biography, therefore the Memoirs is limited by the point of view and selection of material, but within its limits it is authoritative, and more authoritative than anything else written on Dr Burney, or likely to be written. It is based on knowledge that no other biographer can hope to have.¹⁵

This was surely exactly the response Fanny wanted to provoke: no one could ‘know more’ about her father than she did, and any sins of omission she may have committed by suppression of certain facts were in the cause of filial piety and family privacy, and therefore excusable. Unsurprisingly, biographers of Charles Burney have taken a less charitable view of Fanny’s tampering with the evidence. Roger Lonsdale claims, very plausibly, that the effect is sometimes ‘to destroy the true nature of [Charles] Burney’s personality’,¹⁶ and concludes that Fanny was ‘consciously dishonest’ at times, to the effect that she ‘cannot be trusted’.¹⁷

It seems likely that the experience of going through her father’s papers in the last twenty years of her life made Madame d’Arblay acutely aware of the problem of how to control her own posterity. She was shocked to find how much the self-portrait that emerged of her father differed from her own view of him and decided to ‘set the record straight’. This led to a general overhaul of her own ‘record’ too. Fanny’s account in the Memoirs of her first meeting with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale on 20 March 1777, originally described in a letter to her elderly mentor Samuel Crisp, provides one of innumerable examples of how she rewrote biographical evidence to suit her own purposes better. In the Memoirs, the letter she quotes as offering ‘genuine detail’ of the occasion is an elaborate augmentation of the original. It is fascinating not just as an example of hindsight and score-settling (particularly in the material relating to Mrs Thrale) but of Fanny exercising an assumed right to shape her material; you can see in it both a novelist’s anxiety to convey character and a memoirist’s concern not to look foolish in his private and peremptory judgements. This particular letter was a prime candidate for careful polishing up, affording Fanny the opportunity to set in stone her ‘first impressions’ of the great man. Much of what she adds in her later version is decorative. Johnson arrived at the Burneys’ house in St Martin’s Street later than the other guests (Mrs Thrale, Miss Thrale, their cousin Miss Owen and the writer William Seward), disturbing the performance of a duet by Fanny’s sisters Hetty and Susan. Johnson was no music-lover, and was even more short-sighted than Fanny or her father. Instead of sitting and listening to the duet, he drew his chair up to the harpsichord and ‘poked his Nose over the keys’, as Fanny related in her original letter, expanding her description by several paragraphs in the Memoirs to include an account of her sisters’ discomfort at his behaviour and William Seward’s amusement at it. At other points in the Memoirs version, a few cracks begin to show. Not only does Fanny add a great deal more detail about Johnson’s uncouth appearance – ‘He is, indeed, very ill-favoured’ – but queerly apologises for noticing it at all, apparently addressing Crisp thus:

But you always charge me to write without reserve or reservation, and so I obey as usual. Else, I should be ashamed to acknowledge having remarked such exterior blemishes in so exalted a character.¹⁸

The description of Mrs Thrale – with whom Fanny later had a famous friendship and an even more famous quarrel – is brief in the original 1777 letter:

Mrs Thrale is a very pretty woman still, – she is extremely lively and chatty, – has no supercilious or pedantic airs, & is really gay and agreeable.¹⁹

In the letter quoted in the Memoirs this becomes a whole paragraph, with the superlative removed from ‘pretty’ and the following qualification added: ‘though she has some defect in the mouth that looks like a cut, or scar’. Giving with one hand in the revamp (‘she is full of sport, remarkably gay, and excessively agreeable’), Fanny is all too ready to take away with the other:

I liked her in every thing except her entrance into the room, which was rather florid and flourishing, as who should say, ‘It’s I! – no less a person than Mrs. Thrale!’ However, all that ostentation wore out in the course of the visit, which lasted the whole morning; and you could not have helped liking her, she is so very entertaining – though not simple enough, I believe, for quite winning your heart.

The last part of that sentence points up a bizarre aspect of Fanny’s rewrite: its ostentatious address to Samuel Crisp. Like almost everyone else mentioned in the original letter, Crisp was long dead by the time Fanny produced her new, longer version, but if anything, she invokes his goodwill and solicits his approval more in the false letter than in the real one. The futility of introducing such material is rather striking. Other sentimental tributes include an interpolation after the mention of the duet played by Hetty and Susan. Not only does Fanny adjust her elder sister’s name to the familiar ‘your Hettina’ (and use the opportunity to insert a jibe against the Thrale party’s lack of musical appreciation), she adds a convoluted and archly-worded eulogy to her father and Crisp: ‘But every knowledge is not given to every body – except to two gentle wights of my acquaintance; the one commonly hight il Padre, and the other il Dadda. Do you know of any such sort of people, Sir?’ Crisp’s answer, had he lived to read this, would have been a firm No, since Fanny never addressed him in her real letters in quite such gushingly intimate terms (though it is possible of course that she spoke like this).

Making up ‘private correspondence’ specifically for publication is a fairly unusual way of asserting one’s authority as a truthful historian. It gives some idea of the lengths to which Fanny Burney would go to create a strong enough impression of what she considered to be the truth. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that none of the best-known stories about her life bears close inspection; each is riddled with contradictory statements, inconsistencies, evidence of editing or elaboration. In the light of this, the extensiveness of the Burney papers begins to look less like a gift to a biographer than an intolerable burden. One begins to long for lacunae like those Cassandra Austen so thoughtfully provided for posterity when she burned her sister Jane’s private papers. And as the Burney archive continues to grow with the recovering of more and more formerly obliterated material, the problem becomes even more complicated. It is fairly obvious in most cases why particular passages in the family papers were suppressed – dullness, scandal, a hasty judgement, a literary blemish – but the reasons why others were rejected remain obscure, or worse, seem trivial. Trivial erasures are the most disturbing of all: the subjectivity of the whole procedure comes sharply before us.

Should we worry about Madame d’Arblay’s second and third thoughts? Are they not as likely to get us near the truth as her original statements did, for all her claims to being able to act like an eighteenth-century form of tape-recorder? As one pores over the details of her life, finding inconsistencies in the record, what is a biographer to make of this strangely creative autobiographer? Is she an inveterate liar, or an inveterate writer? I hope to demonstrate in this interpretation of her life that the layers of autobiographical information left by ‘a writer of romances’ may not be equally trustworthy, but can be equally significant. Fanny Burney understood intuitively that remembering things is a cumulative process, even a collective process, which the act of putting into words helps to arrest. Things didn’t ‘happen’ to Burney until she had put them into words. She then, typically, went on to find more words, and more again. By unpicking the layers of that record we may hope to see more clearly how her anxious and active imagination worked.