What would that biography be like which managed to include every surviving record of a life? Every document, letter and journal entry? Every encounter, known movement, illustration? What we might call the total biography of an ordinary life could take us into the imaginative world of Jorge Luis Borges. In Funes the Memorious, Ireneo Funes is in the frightening situation of forgetting nothing. "Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day." As, of course, it would have to.
On Exactitude in Science describes map-makers' attempts to provide their country with larger, better maps: "The map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province." In time, however, "those Unconscionable maps no longer satisfied". The cartographers "struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it". However, "The following Generations... saw that that vast Map was Useless, and... delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars..."
The total map is like the reconstucted day, or the biography aiming at totality. All are interminable, all are useless.
And yet... there is an instinct in all of us that biographies that are not in some sense complete cannot tell us what people's lives are like. If we miss things out on the grounds that they are unimportant, or because we have not space to include them, or because they do not fit the story we are trying to tell, then all we do is conceal our prejudices.
In Middlemarch, George Eliot wrote about the normally selfish individual seeing him or herself as a "supreme self", around whose life and actions the rest of the world apparently falls into place so that, in her brilliant image, scratches made wholly at random on a mirror fall into concentric circles around a central source of illumination. She was, in effect, describing the technique of modern scholarly biography and nearly all popular biography, which remains stubbornly 19th century in its hero-or heroine worshipping concentration on the life of an individual. Lip service only is paid to the fact that the biographical subject was always the member of surrounding and overlapping groups of people, alive and dead. Modern biography at times seems to have learned almost nothing from history, sociology or even psychology, all of which constantly stress the impossibility of telling any kind of truth about individuals divorced from the impingeing lives and histories of other individuals. We write biographies of individuals as islands: we live as part of the main.
Scholarly biography of Wordsworth and Coleridge has been bedevilled by a need to concentrate defensively upon the person about whom the biography is being written. Actions are interrupted, justified, explained (and explained away) from the point of view of the central figure: it is the others who behave badly. The practice of elevating one figure over the other has dominated Coleridge and Wordsworth biography for decades; to some extent because the very closeness of the two writers was later wrecked by savage disagreement.
In his two-volume biography of Coleridge, Early Visions and Darker Reflections (Flamingo, 1999), Richard Holmes, a passionate defender of Coleridge, locates the poet's "emergent feelings of rivalry with Wordsworth" to autumn 1800, and gives an account of how Coleridge's poem Christabel came to be excluded from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, which Coleridge and Wordsworth put together that year. Holmes concludes: "The rejection of Christabel seems to have been a wholly unexpected blow for Coleridge." His account is similar to that which Thomas McFarland had offered in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, (1995) which states: "Not only did Wordsworth manage to keep Christabel from being published in Lyrical Ballads", but that it was an act of "critical ineptitude".
Molly Lefebure, in her Sarah Coleridge biography The Bondage of Love (1987), also savagely attacked Wordsworth for his "dismissal" of Coleridge as a poet, and concluded: "Wordsworth had no conception of the trauma he had inflicted upon Coleridge." So far as these three commentators are concerned, Wordsworth took a stupid decision, and Coleridge was the helpless (and damaged) victim."
All three are drawing on the authoritative edition of Coleridge's letters, which states of Coleridge: "After a tremendous expenditure of creative energy, he succeeded in composing part two of Christabel, before Wordsworth determined not to include it." But they carry the attack on Wordsworth still further, into accusations of a "lack of generosity" to his old friend. Holmes describes how, at the end of October 1800, Coleridge experienced "a complete writing block", and - like Lefebure - links the block to the damage Coleridge suffered from the rejection of Christabel. Lefebure goes further and states that Wordsworth's behaviour to Coleridge "contributed significantly to... the moment when, poised as he already was on the verge of destruction by opium, he had his feet (metaphorically speaking) knocked from under him".
Both Holmes and Lefebure are repeating a charge that Stephen Parrish had made years earlier in Coleridge's Dejection: The Earliest Manuscripts and Earliest Printings, in a passage quoted by McFarland. They all write from the point of view of defenders of Coleridge; and this makes them critical of Wordsworth.
The evidence for all their statements are some remarks in Coleridge's correspondence, and Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, describing Coleridge's visit to Town End, the house rented by the Wordsworths in Grasmere. The complete record of the visit in the journal is as follows:
"Saturday October 4 1800... Coleridge came in while we were at dinner very wet. We talked till 12 o'clock - he had sat up all the night before wrting Essays for the newspaper (the Morning Post). His youngest child [Derwent] had been very ill in convulsion fits... Exceedingly delighted with the 2nd part of Christabel.
"Sunday morning 5th October. Coleridge read a 2nd time Christabel - we had increasing pleasure. A delicious morning. Wm & I were employed all the morning in writing an addition to the preface. Wm went to bed very ill after working after dinner - Coleridge and I walked to Ambleside after dark with the letter. Returned to tea at 9 o'clock. Wm still in bed & very ill. Silver How in both lakes.
"Monday (October 6) A rainy day - Coleridge intending to go but did not get off. We walked after dinner to Rydale. After tea read The Pedlar. Determined not to print Christabel with the LB.
"Tuesday (October 7) Coleridge went off at 11 o'clock - I went as far as Mr Simpson's, returned with Mary. She drank tea here. I was very ill in the Evening at the Simpsons' - went to bed - supped there. Returned with Miss S and Mrs J - heavy showers. Found Wm at home. I was still weak & unwell - went to bed immediately."
Holmes concludes, after noting the decision not to print Christabel on October 6, "There is no further comment. Coleridge left the next day, and Dorothy, 'weak and unwell' herself, went to bed early. One can conclude that it had been a stressful visit for all of them." One would be most unwise to reach that conclusion. The Wordsworths' illnesses were frequent, and they regularly went to bed during the day - or early to bed. To link Dorothy's illness of the evening of the October 7 with the Christabel decision taken 24 hours earlier looks wilful. And what about Wordsworth's illness of the fifth? A premonition of guilt?
Holmes's version of what "had happened" is, in fact, a rhetorical attack on Wordsworth:
"What had happened was clear: Wordsworth, from a position of apparent weakness, had ruthlessly come to dominate the terms of the collaboration. Having used Coleridge - even, one might think, having exploited him - as adviser and editor, drawing him up to the Lakes for that very purpose, he had entirely imposed his own vision of the collection on the final text... Coleridge had submitted himself to Wordsworth in the most humiliating and damaging way; while Wordsworth had shown extraordinary insensitivity to the effect that this rejection would have on Coleridge's powers and self-confidence."
What is extraordinary is that Holmes's powerful language should be based on a brief journal entry, a few notes of illness, and the idea that at the end of the month Coleridge may have suffered one of his numerous failures to write what was required of him. The evidence for the writing block so important to Lefebure and Holmes is a passage in one of Coleridge's notebooks describing - in the third person - a man who "knew not what to do". Coleridge himself wrote a wide-ranging letter to Josiah Wedgwood the following day, as unblocked as it is possible to imagine.
Should the very great pleasure that both Wordsworths took in the poem, and which Dorothy twice stresses, play no part in how we understand what happened?
Even more significant, however, is Coleridge's own statement to Josiah Wedgwood of November 1: "I proceeded successfully - till my poem grew so long & in Wordsworth's opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume as disproportionate both in size & merit, & as discordant in it's character." This version of its "rejection" is quite different. It suggests that the poem was too good, too long, too different for Lyrical Ballads.
Those who read the episode as Wordsworth's ruthless exploitation of poor Coleridge have another problem: the aftermath. The friendship between the two men continued, rich and untroubled for years. As his letter to Wedgwood shows, Coleridge felt no resentment. He justified the change of policy in letters to his friends. He continued to write prose for the Morning Post. And he continued to work on the Lyrical Ballads volume editorially; he even copied out for the printer the first 200 lines of Wordsworth's Michael, the poem that replaced Christabel." All Holmes can say to explain this remarkable behaviour is that "Coleridge was slow to admit all this to himself". That is, the subject of the biography did feel what the biographer tells us he must have felt, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. He was just rather slow in getting round to it. Holmes needs to escape the fact that the whole structure of exploitation and humiliation which he has erected has no foundation.
It must be possible to write better biography than this. What is needed is biography that takes the writing of all the people concerned (diarists,housekeepers, letter writers and copyists as well as poets) as seriously as it does conversations and ideas: one that looks not only at Wordsworth from Coleridge's point of view, or vice versa, but at all their relationships. In my collective biography of the Gang - Coleridge's description of the close-knit group of friends in the Lake district in 1802, including the Hutchinson sisters, Sara and Mary, with whom he and Wordsworth respectively were in love - I have done that where surviving letters, poems and diaries allow. The material is, fortunately, not so extensive as to risk the production of one of Borges's totalising maps.
• This is an edited extract from John Worthen's preface to The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802 (Yale University Press, price £20.)
