Celebrity gossip is such a fixture of modern life that it’s easy to assume we invented it. But long before TMZ, the E! channel, and People began chronicling the lives of the glitterati, the Englishman John Aubrey (1626-1697) was jotting juicy tidbits about his contemporaries and near-contemporaries in the cultural and political elite. Whether he was profiling Shakespeare or Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes or Erasmus, Ben Jonson or Sir Thomas More, Aubrey typically framed his subjects in no more than a handful of pages and sometimes as little as one. His brevity came less from design than from a native impatience with lingering on anything for very long.
Aubrey, a restless purveyor of the thumbnail sketch, defies easy summary himself. He had diverse talents, but no real occupation; many interests, but no clear vocation; reams of notes, but only one published work at the time of his death. Aubrey’s friends didn’t quite know what to make of him, just as generations of readers haven’t quite known what to make of his principal legacy, a collection of his anecdotes about the great and the powerful called Aubrey’s Brief Lives.
My local library keeps the Lives in its reference section, within solemn shelves of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases, among the books meant to be consulted but not savored. It’s a peculiar fate for a work that doesn’t take itself too seriously and that, like any book of gossip, is filled with observations that are interesting and sometimes provocative, though not uniformly true. This is not a book, like Webster‘s Dictionary or the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that navigates by the fixed star of accuracy; it’s a flight of fancy, an omnibus of oddments in the tradition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. I like David R. Godine’s sturdy softcover reprint of Oliver Lawson Dick’s 1949 edition, which I dip into randomly as an antidote to boredom. Aubrey wasn’t a systematic writer—his Lives is really more of a brainstorm than a book—and his hopscotching narrative liberates his readers to be as capricious as he is. I’ve skipped around Lives off and on and here and there for years now, in the same way I might browse the dog-eared magazines at the dentist’s, bent on casual entertainment rather than instruction. But Aubrey often manages to teach something in spite of himself.
His entry on William Shakespeare is a fair enough sample of his technique. The Bard had already been dead a decade when Aubrey was born. From scraps of local lore, Aubrey assembles his crazy-quilt chronicle, the narrative stitched together by gossamer threads of hearsay and speculation:
Beyond the place of Shakespeare’s birth, everything else here seems either wrong or difficult to verify. Shakespeare’s father was a glover, not a butcher, so the story about the future dramatist declaiming over a side of beef beggars belief. But the tale perhaps hints at what the Stratford folk wanted to be true about their hometown hero, which is a useful insight in itself. Shakespeare as the tradesman-playwright, using language to elevate his butcher’s block into a pulpit—it all squares nicely with his legend, then in its embryonic state, as the people’s poet.
Aubrey is a more plausible commentator when he writes about those with whom he had firsthand contact, such as Hobbes, a longtime friend. Despite his affection for Hobbes, Aubrey’s entry deftly refrains from arid hagiography. It shimmers with humanizing detail:
The solemn thinker touched by the anxieties of his age, even in the womb, then distanced from his peers at the very start, an intellect apart from the crowd—this is all part of Aubrey’s novelistic sensibility, in which description is seldom merely decorative, but almost invariably points to meaning. It’s just like Aubrey to mention Hobbes’s black mane, which hung like a shadow above a mind keen to humanity’s darker potential: its instinctive capacity, if left unchecked, to yield a life that Hobbes famously described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Aubrey aimed his prose as much at the eye as the ear, suggesting (like any observer of celebrity) that how people looked might reveal how they lived. “If ever I had been good for anything,” he once confessed, “ ’twould have been a painter, I could fancy a thing so strongly and have so clear an idea of it.”
“It was this powerful visual imagination which dominated his writing,” Anthony Powell said of Aubrey, “and which, in the last resort, laid the foundation of his place in history.” The title of Powell’s 1948 biography—John Aubrey and His Friends—reminds us that Aubrey often wrote about people who were within, or connected to, his social circle, an intimacy that inclined him to pull his punches. He didn’t have that instinct for the jugular we associate with the true gossip: As Oliver Lawson Dick noted, “Aubrey was so kind a man that his gossip rarely turned to scandal, and his wit, in Disraeli’s phrase, was excessively good-natured, and, like champagne, not only sparkled, but was sweet.”
But Aubrey could be salacious, catty, even downright mean, and these instances, though the exception rather than the rule, are what give his Lives its faintly illicit tabloid pulse. His entry on Eleanor Radcliffe, a tissue of insult and innuendo, seems to anticipate the baser impulses of modern Fleet Street. Notice his parenthetical asides, the grammatical equivalent of a raised eyebrow:
Countess of Sussex, a great and sad example of the power of Lust and Slavery of it. She was as great a beautie as any in England, and had a good Witt. After her Lord’s death (he was jealous) she sends for one (formerly her Footman) and makes him groom of the chamber. He had the Pox and shee knew it; a damnable Sott. He waz not very handsom, but his body of an exquisite shape (hinc sagittae). His Nostrils were stufft and borne out with corkes in which were quills to breath through. About 1666 this Countess died of the Pox.
Aubrey not only wrote gossip, but was frequently, we may assume, the subject of it; he had the kind of troubles people like to talk about. Edmund Wilson, a fan of the Lives, described Aubrey as
Aubrey endures as one of history’s most inspired dabblers. He was an enthusiastic antiquarian and folklorist, an early champion of Stonehenge’s anthropological value. Miscellanies, the only book he brought to press in his lifetime, lists various myths and suspicions, such as the belief that ringing church bells could stop thunder.
Essentially penniless after losing his estates, he considered going to America or becoming a cleric, then decided that neither would be much fun. Aubrey developed a running list of 62 money-making schemes, among them a plan to open a coal mine. They were all daydreams. He followed through on very little, his habits fitting the profile of what we would now call attention deficit disorder. Various benefactors tried to straighten him out, but Aubrey’s biggest advocate arrived centuries after his death, when Dick brought his authoritative edition of the Lives into print.
From Aubrey’s muddled manuscript, Dick alphabetized and annotated 134 entries, coupling them with an ambitious biographical account of Aubrey that could be a book in itself. But Aubrey’s slapdash sensibility can be refined only so much: The abiding complication of the Lives, and a large part of its charm, is its unevenness, its impetuosity. His entry on the great literary translator John Florio runs only five paragraphs and reads as dryly as a résumé, but it neighbors a swashbuckling account of William Fleetwood, a royal official saved from almost certain death by the quiet stoicism of his horse.
One learns to take the good with the bad in Aubrey’s Brief Lives. It’s a lively case study in genius and ambition, but also the fallibility that touches Aubrey’s subjects, Aubrey himself, and, by implication, the readers who flip through his pages, wondering what will happen next.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Advocate in Baton Rouge, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
