ABSTRACT
WHEN RICHARD was thirty-eight he got a letter from his friend John Walcott, wishing he would write a portrait of his Cambridge childhood. This portrait remained a blank except for private admonitions from the sitter to himself. Like his model writer Flaubert, Richard hid himself in his achievement. As he saw it, laying out his plan for a book on Henry James, there was no biography except what went into the books. In describing his author’s life, he proposed to offer nothing beyond the barest facts. He said that he regretted all objective reports of himself. When they weren’t objective, he tended to approve. A crank having assured him that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, he saw possibilities in this idea. He said how he himself had the honor of being a direct descendant of the Honorable Lord. That was what his genealogical uncle had told him. If Bacon was Shakespeare, Richard claimed an ancestral part in the work. The face he turned to the public, as regards the real information it conveys, is as vacant as Shakespeare’s, however. Photographs put him off. He thought you shouldn’t wear your face on your sleeve. As a young man he insisted, “I have no biography.” Though he wrote and rewrote entirely in longhand, that wasn’t because typing was impersonal or cold. The less personal, the better. His handwriting was stingy—the Freudians would say it was anal. Even the way he signed himself is close to the vest. “I’ve grown so used to R.P.,” he said, “that anything else seems a monstrous egotism.” He was chary of egotism and declined to spread himself. The other side of the coin is arrogance, of course. “Not to know me argues yourself unknown.”
