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Cervantes: A Biography
Recounts the life, adventures, misadventures, and checkered career of the hapless genius, impoverished Renaissance man, and mysterious public figure who created Don Quixote
583 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1978
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May 5, 2012
AFter p. 210
Bryon has given us a highly engaging evocation of Cervantes' time and place. It makes for delightful reading. I will rate the book four or five stars.
That said, I have also to say that the hard evidence that documents the events and circumstances of Cervantes' life during its first three decades - as Byron - or anyone else for that matter - narrates it, would cover as many as ten pages, perhaps, provided that margins are generous. So Byron does what he must, he describes as he can the lives of mid-16th century Spaniards of every degree and station. Hence his highly evocative accounts of time and place. One Cervantes or another makes an appearance now and again when Byron needs a pertinent detail or two to remind us that we are, after all, reading a biography of Miguel de Cervantes.
I can't say that I blame him. I've done the same myself - having labored for years extracting the very last atom of meaning that one might reasonably - and not so reasonably - press from a pitiably small fund of fact. Either that or remain silent altogether - which isn't possible for the enthusiast.
And it is a miracle, of course, that any notice of Cervantes during his childhood, youth and young adulthood survives at all. He was an entirely negligible entity, a scion of lapsed gentry, struggling to maintain a subsistence, not to mention the essential semblances of honor and gentility. Not yet a writer of any sort at that point. Barely a nodding acquaintance of anyone whose work merits a page or two in an encyclopedic collection of 16th and 17th century Spanish letters.
But I can't say that I care one way or another. I am glad to have encountered the work of a biographer who has mastered the high art of making a dollar out of fifteen cents.
At end.
At End.
A book that thoroughly delights in the reading. A book, moreover, that perfectly illustrates the biographer’s procedure when his subject is just barely visible in the fragmentary record that survives.
First the biographer studies, in this case, the literary works of his subject quite thoroughly, and then poses the question: what sort of person could have created such a body of work? And he supplies an answer, more or less tentative.
Then the biographer assembles whatever “facts” of his subject’s life that he or other industrious, and sitzfleissig, scholars have sifted and gathered from the mountainous heaps of documentary remains they mine. My favorites are those of the “life records” variety, such as the published compilation of every scrap whatsoever that bears John Milton’s name or that refers to him in a verifiable manner – fully annotated, referenced and footnoted, of course, so that the record of scholarship overwhelms the record of the life.
So equipped, the biographer then considers every jot and tittle of his subject’s literary remains (“yet once more,” as the venerable JM would note), all in search of autobiographical passages. With these he supplements his rather limited fund of “facts.” Some biographers are more easily persuaded than others that they have discovered in literary texts “facts” that predecessors had not discerned. Byron is among the more skeptical, it seems to me, and imposes a rather stringent standard of plausibility, which strains neither credulity nor patience in the reading. [And besides, I’m easy, especially when there’s nothing whatever at stake.] And so the biographer develops a fuller, more complete sense of his subject as a living, breathing presence in the world, just of the sort he imagined all along.
But what world is that? Here the biographer draws upon the work of legions of historians, such as those chroniclers of Spain of Phillip II, who have described that world, every square inch of it, in astonishing detail. And so the biographer composes the narrative of a “life” as such a person as the biographer imagines his subject to have been would have lived in a particular time and place.
And if the biographer happens to write a so-called critical biography, then he draws upon criticism of other authors or artists so as to place his subject’s work in the context of literary history, art history, and so on. Wider and deeper.
By now the biographer has covered 500-600 pages with words, and concludes his task – once, of course, he verifies the contents of the scholarly apparatus that props up and sustains his enterprise.
Such is Byron’s biography of Cervantes. I certainly can not fault the man. I’ve done the same – with even less hard evidence than Bryon commanded. There is no alternative but incuriosity and silence - and that he (and I) can not endure. And I, for one, am grateful that Byron chose to cobble together as he could a biography of Cervantes, surely a thoroughly admirable, vital and congenial man, whose close acquaintance I would not have made unassisted.
Bryon has given us a highly engaging evocation of Cervantes' time and place. It makes for delightful reading. I will rate the book four or five stars.
That said, I have also to say that the hard evidence that documents the events and circumstances of Cervantes' life during its first three decades - as Byron - or anyone else for that matter - narrates it, would cover as many as ten pages, perhaps, provided that margins are generous. So Byron does what he must, he describes as he can the lives of mid-16th century Spaniards of every degree and station. Hence his highly evocative accounts of time and place. One Cervantes or another makes an appearance now and again when Byron needs a pertinent detail or two to remind us that we are, after all, reading a biography of Miguel de Cervantes.
I can't say that I blame him. I've done the same myself - having labored for years extracting the very last atom of meaning that one might reasonably - and not so reasonably - press from a pitiably small fund of fact. Either that or remain silent altogether - which isn't possible for the enthusiast.
And it is a miracle, of course, that any notice of Cervantes during his childhood, youth and young adulthood survives at all. He was an entirely negligible entity, a scion of lapsed gentry, struggling to maintain a subsistence, not to mention the essential semblances of honor and gentility. Not yet a writer of any sort at that point. Barely a nodding acquaintance of anyone whose work merits a page or two in an encyclopedic collection of 16th and 17th century Spanish letters.
But I can't say that I care one way or another. I am glad to have encountered the work of a biographer who has mastered the high art of making a dollar out of fifteen cents.
At end.
At End.
A book that thoroughly delights in the reading. A book, moreover, that perfectly illustrates the biographer’s procedure when his subject is just barely visible in the fragmentary record that survives.
First the biographer studies, in this case, the literary works of his subject quite thoroughly, and then poses the question: what sort of person could have created such a body of work? And he supplies an answer, more or less tentative.
Then the biographer assembles whatever “facts” of his subject’s life that he or other industrious, and sitzfleissig, scholars have sifted and gathered from the mountainous heaps of documentary remains they mine. My favorites are those of the “life records” variety, such as the published compilation of every scrap whatsoever that bears John Milton’s name or that refers to him in a verifiable manner – fully annotated, referenced and footnoted, of course, so that the record of scholarship overwhelms the record of the life.
So equipped, the biographer then considers every jot and tittle of his subject’s literary remains (“yet once more,” as the venerable JM would note), all in search of autobiographical passages. With these he supplements his rather limited fund of “facts.” Some biographers are more easily persuaded than others that they have discovered in literary texts “facts” that predecessors had not discerned. Byron is among the more skeptical, it seems to me, and imposes a rather stringent standard of plausibility, which strains neither credulity nor patience in the reading. [And besides, I’m easy, especially when there’s nothing whatever at stake.] And so the biographer develops a fuller, more complete sense of his subject as a living, breathing presence in the world, just of the sort he imagined all along.
But what world is that? Here the biographer draws upon the work of legions of historians, such as those chroniclers of Spain of Phillip II, who have described that world, every square inch of it, in astonishing detail. And so the biographer composes the narrative of a “life” as such a person as the biographer imagines his subject to have been would have lived in a particular time and place.
And if the biographer happens to write a so-called critical biography, then he draws upon criticism of other authors or artists so as to place his subject’s work in the context of literary history, art history, and so on. Wider and deeper.
By now the biographer has covered 500-600 pages with words, and concludes his task – once, of course, he verifies the contents of the scholarly apparatus that props up and sustains his enterprise.
Such is Byron’s biography of Cervantes. I certainly can not fault the man. I’ve done the same – with even less hard evidence than Bryon commanded. There is no alternative but incuriosity and silence - and that he (and I) can not endure. And I, for one, am grateful that Byron chose to cobble together as he could a biography of Cervantes, surely a thoroughly admirable, vital and congenial man, whose close acquaintance I would not have made unassisted.
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