“To the Emersonian formula
‘it’s only in the interest of living,
not having lived,’
Carlyle had replied,
sitting that ‘a well-written life
it’s almost as weird
like a well-lived life.'”
Felix Lizaso
What comes to us from the individual? Why is someone writing about the human of others and at the same time familiar? A different and unique way of life. It is no coincidence that the beginnings of the biographical genre had praiseworthy intentions than moralizing. From ancient writers like Plutarco; from Vasari and some of his co-landers; from the chroniclers of the Indies and those who came after, what is sought in the biography? We seek human attitudes and abilities that inspire us to be better men and women in the world. We want to find intimacy and personality nice. Generally, we feel an emotional and ethical contribution when reading from other stocks.
We appreciate the attentions of historical figures of biographers reputed of contemporaneity such as Stefan Zweig, Emil Ludwig, André Maurois…; however, the qualms of current Ian Gibson and Paul Johnson in personalities, whether writers and artists, have no waste. Now, there are authors who, without pretending it, have also conceived, halfway between semblance and critical exercise, a kind of biographies worth considering, a case of George Santayana when he unveiled his Three Philosopher Poets; also by José Ortega y Gasset when, excusing himself because he was not an art historian, he wrote about Velázquez and Goya two meritorious books. As he traveled through the work of historian Jules Michelet, Roland Barthes conceived an exceptional volume. Knowing the man and the creator, Jorge Mañach illustrated his extraordinary biography Martí, the Apostle… and, before the latter mentioned and others such as Leon Edel and Lytton Strachey, is the figure of the American Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who wrote in 1850 Representative Men, a set of biographical essays on authors who were and are still in the category of classics.
Emerson lived in a century where the biographical proliferated for good and evil, for, according to Felix Lizaso,
“[…] in the nineteenth century it acquires characteristics of regrettable epidemic, and in closer times reaches real limits of discredit, since, as Wilbur L. Cross points out, any man capable of paying his price, can make himself write and publish his life in two thick volumes, including his correspondence, and ilurating them with his own photographs and those of the places where he has lived and made his fortune.”1
In the first pages of Representative Men (“Utilities of Great Men”) the author stops at the function or “the morality of the biography” to expose the criteria that will prevail in his book. We appreciate not only the leader of transcendentalism,2 but the supporter of revolutions and changes determined by an influential minority in the rest of humanity. In fact, he is a humanist who believes in the strength of human understanding. But he does not trust any absolutism starting with that of reason’s own empire. It also shows a respect for nature and advocates that everyone contribute to the maintenance of what it grants. Emerson’s “New Thought” embraces the advantages of science-based industrialization. However, by the belief in the unity of the world and of God, and in the permanence of the former, the philosopher defends a humanization that begins even by the same technical language, which he does not want to complete. He aspires to foster harmony between all and all. The human being, Emerson thinks, is more voluntary as he understands more, although affections influence. On the other hand, it legitimizes the relativity and variability (“Everyone in turn is teachers and disciples”) of the human species in its life course because “none of us is a complete being”. It is also apparent from these initial pages – and this is an epochal attitude – of their underestimation of women by generalizing (mentions very few names of females) a support of them with regard to the moral and intellectual elevation of their husbands. When he raises: “Life is sweet and bearable only by our faith and trust in such company; actually or in mind, we become familiar with these higher beings,” he very much confirms his entrenched machismo.
Includes Emerson in Men representative of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Goethe. The short list is also significant in order: the philosopher, the mystic, the skeptic, the poet, the man of the world and the writer. This cast is a summary of faculties and conditions for a time of expedited modernity: thought and spirituality, doctrines and impulses, reason and passion. But, contrary to what might be thought, by focusing on each of these individuals you necessarily have to consider more personalities, if not characters who endorse the uniqueness of the aforementioned protagonists. Thus he tells us of the student of Socrates: “The way to know Plato is comparable, not to Nature, but to other men.”
Now, by participating in what you relate as a thinker, aren’t you telling us that, after all, we are all representative men? Yes, what Emerson throws at us is that there will always be those outstanding subjects – “active beings” – to stimulate or guide the vast majority. Therefore, it does not underestimate, since it implies the possible or probable ways of being and being in the world: “We are all wise in power, though very few in action. With a wise man who finds in a meeting, everyone is cautious: so fast is contagion.”3
Does it come only as a moralist and a critic or are we in the presence of a mere screenmblance editor who narrates psychologies of famous characters? Knowing various branches of knowledge, Emerson is able to biograph, while chronically balancing other eras. Nor does he miss the opportunity to make art criticism such as when he rehearses over Avon’s Bard in “Shakespeare, or the Poet.” Here it reads:
“It is already a scale of literature, which anyone who has been able to write with originality, has the right to shoot at will the works of others. The thought is of the one who does it and the one who understands it and who puts it in its place. Knowing how to take advantage of other people’s thoughts, they are already their own.”4
In short, its method is that of generic confluence. However, a simple and colloquial style is allowed, where we notice quotes well brought or placed in an attractive discourse. Don’t be missed by the reader who, without abusing, Emerson tented the sentencious. Statements show seductive thinking thanks to solid language by estetized. And, even aware of his virtues as a writer and thinker, we quickly contrived with man by that kind tone with which he tries and, not infre selly, manages to persuade us.
According to Rafael Esténger: “What gives the biography novel amenity is not the invention of events, but precisely ‘the expectation of the future, that every day we are on the verge of an abyss that is tomorrow’. […] but the excess of definitions, as in some biographies of Stefan Zweig, transforms narrative interest into the theorizing fervor of the essay.”5 For Emerson, rehearsing and recounting in the biography is both a comfort and a success. “Between the field of literature and history they operate as communicative vessels and in the case of the biographical genre it is unpredictable as it is subject to the fiction of the novelist. Biography is an intellect of the past, so it’s history.”6
After the criteria of Gastón Baquero and José Rodríguez Feo – not forgetting josé Martí’s important essay – of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work and figure, we get the first Cuban edition of Representative Men, a book, in truth, more mentioned than read in our context. We thank the team of the Editorial Capiro (Santa Clara, 2018) for the right idea of bringing the reader closer to a work still tempting by the current so-called “the sage of Concord”. Ω
Notes
1 Félix Lizaso: “New concept of biography”, in Notebooks of the Universidad del Aire, No. 26, 15 July 1933, Havana, Editorial Minerva, p. 153.
2 Referring to the American philosophical, political, and literary movement that prospered between 1836 and 1860, José Rodríguez Feo recalls: “In short, transcendentalism underpinned that almost religious faith in democracy which the founders of the nation had forged over the principles of the philosophes of the French Revolution. But if they based their rationalist philosophy on newton and Locke’s ideas, the transcendentalists of New England incorporated to theirs the German idealism of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel”, in American Themes, Havana, Editorial Cuban Letters, 1985, pp. 29-30.
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Santa Clara, Editorial Capiro, 2018, p. 23.
4 Ibid., p. 145.
5 Rafael Esténger: “The Art of Biography”, in Notebooks of the Universidad del Aire del Circuito CMQ, No. 10, November 1949, Havana, Lex Publishing Workshops, p. 54.
6 Rafael Acosta de Arriba: “The biography, search for the absentee” in Los silencios quebrados de San Lorenzo, 3rd. corrected and augmented edition, Havana, Ediciones Abril, 2018, p. 71.
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