Audiobooks

The antiquary Anthony Wood described John Aubrey as ‘a shiftless person, roving and maggotyheaded, sometimes little better than crazed’. But it was Wood who encouraged Aubrey in his habit of noting down (‘tumultuously’) whatever he discovered about his contemporaries and the English worthies of the past century – whether drawn from his wide acquaintance and reading, or from what he caught in the web of gossip and hearsay.

The resulting Brief Lives are working notes, usually a page or two, sometimes a paragraph, but they have a heartstopping immediacy and imaginative reach. Starting in the 1640s, but in earnest from 1680 onwards (until his death in 1697), Aubrey recorded what his nose for detail found of interest, with a matching ear for oddity. Francis Bacon ‘had a delicate lively eye; Dr Harvey told me it was like the eye of a viper’. He recorded on the hoof, usually on horseback, mixing trivia with heavy matters, undiluted by transition or comment – an individual life seen by flashes of lightning. Aubrey was quiet-tempered, uncensored and uncensorious. He tells it as he hears it, creating an uncanny sense of unannounced presence, and he gave to people – as to information – the benefit of the doubt. He understood failure, for his own life was accident-prone.

The Naxos audiobook is an abridgement, and aptly so, since Brief Lives is itself both an abridging of individual lives and of a non-existent whole. (It was not published until 1813, and only in complete form in 2015.) In other words, Brief Lives is a work but not a book. It inhabits the fluid early modern world of manuscript, before print fixed things good and proper. It reads like an oral history told by Aubrey to himself, and is on all these counts appropriate for an audiobook.

Brian Cox reads a good cross-section of the Lives: mathematicians and men of science, doctors and lawyers, astrologers and divines, poets and antiquarians, explorers and merchants, actors in the Civil War and Interregnum (Aubrey had connections on both sides), women (notably vivid) and friends.

The delivery is well-sprung and robust, alive to Aubrey’s curious extroversion and his extempore rhythms. Like a dance whose steps are but half-remembered, the sentences are of uncertain length, or like buildings to which wings and parterres keep being added. Cox hears the syntax, and is rarely caught off-guard. His relish is equally suited to Aubrey’s peremptory brevities. Aubrey does not let a reader down gently, and his prose is as candid as a rapier. And we hear quite a bit of Cox silently cackling, after some of Aubrey’s richer remarks – which makes a change from the habitual hush of audiobooks, so fearful of noises off. The whole lasts just two and a half hours, with a hint of musical interlude between each item – a striking up of viols or touching of keyboards, framing one’s sense of the lives, all lives, as themselves performances, entrances and exits.

The Lives are salutary in their remoteness from modern cradle-to-grave biography. For one thing, death often comes halfway through a Life, rather than at the end, and the words keep moving as a current around a rock. Or an end is often reported casually: Aubrey takes no hostages in matters of death or sex. Or take his audacity about his bad memory (imagine a modern biographer telling the reader he cannot remember whether his subject wrote poetry – ‘enjoyed his Muse’ – best at night or in the morning). Not all of this can be put down to Aubrey’s prose being unfinished business. Unfinished, perhaps; self-knowing, certainly. He is writing to himself, but also for someone else, perhaps us.

One day in 1676 as he strolled through Newgate Street he spied in a brazier’s shop the funeral bust of the exquisite Venetia Digby, who had taken ‘viper wine’ to stay youthful, and was said to have died of it – see Viper Wine (2014), Hermione Eyre’s wonderful fictional life of Lady Venetia. Aubrey remarks: ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellows as I put them down.’ In 1975 the French writer Roland Barthes wrote (not long before he was run over by a slow-moving laundry van crossing a Paris street): ‘If I was a writer, and dead, I would like my life to be reduced, thanks to the care of a friendly biographer, to a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections – let’s call them biographemes.’ Let us indeed. He was asking, across the ages, for an Aubrey.