Review: Lifescapes: A Biographer's Search for the Soul by Ann Wroe

An extended version of my review for The Spectator last year to mark the publication of Lifescapes in paperback

“‘Deep breath,’ says the doctor. I take one and hold it.” Thus begins the fourth chapter in Ann Wroe’s new book, Lifescapes. It is apt, because this is a book about the breath of life itself. It is good advice for the reader too: Wroe’s writing is intense and visionary, bordering on the ecstatic. But the fact that it stays on that border and never quite plunges on gives it a distinctive quality of quiet mysticism, of transcendence and restraint, that is quite remarkable.

Wroe is best known as a biographer, and she has written weekly obituaries for The Economist for some two decades. Wroe’s technique as an obituarist typically involves looking for fragments of experiential ephemera that speak to the life at hand. Lifescapes is liberally salted with Wroe’s own poems, spare, mostly formal, attempts to catch these fleeting apprehensions and fragments of perception and experience. But it is, in large part, built around fragments of the lives of others. Her touchstone here is the photographer Richard Avedon’s autobiography, comprised of 300 of his own images, arranged to tell a story about himself. A list at the back of Lifescapes lists some 43 obituaries cited, but many more lives, of both the recent and long dead, are referenced.

As a biographer, Wroe is attracted to subjects whose life records are thin and indistinct – Perkin Warbeck, Pontius Pilate, among them – but whose lives she can build and shape from material traces, from scraps and inference. Biography and obituary writing seems for her to be a process of identification, perhaps even of projection. A letter signed by Warbeck, now in the British Library, gives her “a thrill, like a caught breath [from] the thought that his hand and wrist… had moved across the paper where… I had moved mine.” She quotes, in another context, Matsuo Basho, who wrote that inspiration comes “when you and the object have become one; when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there”. It describes her sensibility perfectly.

Wroe, following her biographer’s aesthetic, writes of the trivial, meaningful things she kept after her father and mother died – a blue suitcase, a pedometer; a pencil stub, a rotary egg-whisk. But it seems it is her mother’s character traits she has most inherited: precision, observation, perseverance, thoughtfulness. Those and the memory of the “crisp in-and-out breath” her mother made when shocked or delighted, of the rare moments she dared to sing in church, to hum. “That uncatchable thing, that sigh in the air, was also her,” Wroe writes.

Lifescapes is a mosaic of such moments, of epiphanies and snatches of conversation, of such caught breaths. Arguably, it is itself a kind of literary caught breath. It divides into two sections, Outbreath and Inbreath, each with four chapters with the same names: Possessing, Seizing, Indwelling, Returning. Protean circularity – the eternal certainty of things being various – is everywhere; she quotes Paul Valéry on the sea sighing in and out, toujours recommencée, always different, always the same, always starting again.

Where is Wroe in this? Some might say nowhere; she, I think, would say everywhere. This is not a traditional memoir – or, arguably, a memoir at all. It has some of the intensity of a spiritual biography, except there is no moment of revelation: Lifescapes is all transcendence; grace abounds, if we can but apprehend it. The book it most reminds me of is the 19th-century naturalist Richard Jefferies’ visionary memoir The Story of My Heart, which Elizabeth Jennings – whose quiet, formal poems of faith, reflection and grace Wroe’s own poems somewhat resemble – compared to Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations and the Life of St Teresa of Avila. Wroe’s life, on her telling, has always approached a state of exaltation; which is perhaps another way of saying she has retained the childhood sense of “a world of fixed grown-up limits, but also a universe of marvels”.

Very loosely, the first section Outbreath considers how we express our intimate selves, and what of us is instinct, and what intention. Inbreath is more concerned with what that self comprises, whether it is singular or multiple, coherent or porous and dissoluble, with what ‘breath’ is, besides air, and how it gets in. But really, it is the organising metaphor that matters – what Francis Bacon called the “universal essence… in every life” – not the organisation itself.

Wroe writes that she was raised a Catholic. Her current confessional status is indecipherable; the Christian God is barely mentioned, but a spirit that Wroe calls breath – apotheosised in several of her poems as ‘the Breath’ or ‘the summoning Breath’ – is everywhere. It is the breath of the book’s organising metaphor, the same breath that God breathes into Adam in Genesis, and, in the form of the female principle Wisdom, into the earth and skies in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus. It is a “breathing force… not personalised… simple being, focused power, like the flow of water or air”.

One inspiration here seems to be Rilke, who wrote in his diaries how, in Wroe’s paraphrase, “high-gliding birds and topmost branches followed the least direction of the air… as though absorbed in a power beyond themselves. They rode on the inbreath”. Her idea of breath is analogous to Rilke’s Du – that is, You – “a pervasive longing that might be encountered anywhere… [a] vast enigma, hidden and working in the very depths of things”. One of the many terrors of Covid-19 was that it “taught us to fear breathing”.

There is not much conventional memoir here. We learn a little of Wroe’s childhood – or rather of her experience of childhood, which is not quite the same thing – in the Kentish countryside. She writes with characteristic eloquence, power and insight about the birth of her first child, of feeling “life at its most commanding and implacable”, of being “involved… in something illimitably far beyond myself; an enterprise that depended on me… of which even the stars were somehow curiously aware”. She writes touchingly too of the last years of an elderly uncle, how “the spirit in him seemed to writhe and burn, impatient to be gone”. The death of Wroe’s husband is only glanced at. Some griefs are too bright to gaze on directly, perhaps.

Wroe’s sensibility is deeply drawn to that sense of an illimitable reality coursing through the matter of life, but she is wary of the intensity of the emotions it inspires in her, of the instability and self-obliteration inherent in it. She relates one intense memory of a “rain-soaked lilac bush in a Hampstead garden into which I plunged my face once on a whim, only to find myself bathed in a scent that was overwhelming, strong as love, and as demanding”. Wroe takes refuge in flight, “running from a sudden encounter with more life than I could bear”. She feels the terror in the ecstasy; she is drawn, but she retreats.

“Time and again,” she writes of her subjects, “some incident in childhood is the key to a career.” As a child, Stockhausen was delighted by the sound his toy hammer made on pipes and buckets and such at his family’s farm; Thich Nhat Hanh, the father of ‘mindfulness’, was startled into a sense of nowness by “a draught of water… from a natural well”. But there are others for whom “The evidence of soul is often flickering or has been ripped out, suppressed, as I suppressed mine.” But if there is a key to such strong feelings in Wroe’s young life it is unarticulated here. Perhaps those grown-up limits, the fear of being insufficient, makes such a thing impossible.

This aspect of Wroe’s self is under-explored here, but its power seems equal to the command of wonder: the sense of insufficiency, glimpsed here and there, is inexplicably punishing. Out hill-walking – there is a lot of walking in Lifescapes – she feels “obliged… to add actual music to creation”, but finds her throat too tight and embarrassed to sing. She had “failed at the clarinet and, shamefully, at the recorder too”, but “[this] failure was especially disappointing”. One of the many remarkable things about Lifescapes is that Wroe should feel so mute and incapable when her voice, her writing, already adds such consonance, such alert and graceful rapture, to the music of the world.