CHAPTER IV—WHAT IS TRUTH?
These changes in the proof of what was afterwards called “Lavengro” were, it need hardly be said, made in order to bring the words nearer to a representation of the idea in Borrow’s brain, and nearer to a perfect harmony with one another. Take the case of Jasper Petulengro’s arm. Borrow knew the man Ambrose Smith well enough to know whether he had a long or a short arm: for did not Jasper say to him when he was dismal, “We’ll now go to the tents and put on the gloves, and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!” Possibly he had a short arm like his father, but in reading the proof it must somehow have seemed to Borrow that his Jasper Petulengro—founded on Ambrose Smith and at many points resembling him—ought to have a long arm. The short arm was true to “the facts”; the long arm was more impressive and was truer to the created character, which was more important.
It was hardly these little things that kept Borrow working at “Lavengro” for nearly half of his fourth decade and a full half of his fifth. But these little things were part of the great difficulty of making an harmonious whole by changing, cutting out and inserting. When Ford and John Murray’s reader asked him for his life they probably meant a plain statement of a few “important facts,” such facts as there could hardly be two opinions about, such facts as fill the ordinary biography or “Who’s Who.” Borrow knew well enough that these facts either produce no effect in the reader’s mind or they produce one effect here
and a different one there, since the dullest mind cannot blankly receive a dead statement without some effort to give it life. Borrow was not going to commit himself to incontrovertible statements such as are or might be made to a Life Insurance Company. He had no command of a tombstone style and would not have himself circumscribed with full Christian name, date of birth, etc., as a sexton or parish clerk might have done for him. Twenty years later indeed—in 1862—he did write such an account of himself to be printed as part of an appendix to a history of his old school at Norwich. It is full of dates, but they are often inaccurate, and the years 1825 to 1833 he fills with “a life of roving adventures.” He cannot refrain from calling himself a great rider, walker and swimmer, or from telling the story of how he walked from Norwich to London—he calls it London to Norwich—in twenty-seven hours. But in 1862 he could rely on “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye”; he was an author at the end of his career, and he had written himself down to the best of his genius. The case was different in 1842.
He saw himself as a man variously and mysteriously alive, very different from every other man and especially from certain kinds of man. When you look at a larch wood with a floor of fern in October at the end of twilight, you are not content to have that wood described as so many hundred poles growing on three acres of land, the property of a manufacturer of gin. Still less was Borrow content to sit down at Oulton, while the blast howled amid the pines which nearly surround his lonely dwelling, and answer the genial Ford’s questions one by one: “What countries have you been in? What languages do you understand?” and so on. Ford probably divined a book as substantial and well-furnished with milestones as “The Bible in Spain,” and he cheerfully told Borrow to make the broth “thick and slab.”
Ford, in fact, doubled the difficulty. Not only did Borrow feel that his book must create a living soul, but the soul must be heroic to meet the expectations of Ford and the public. The equestrian group had been easy enough—himself mounted on Sidi Habismilk, with the swift Jew and the Gypsy at his side—but the life of a man was a different matter. Nor was the task eased by his exceptional memory. He claimed, as has been seen, to remember the look of the viper seen in his third year. Later, in “Lavengro,” he meets a tinker and buys his stock-in-trade to set himself up with. The tinker tries to put him off by tales of the Blazing Tinman who has driven him from his beat. Borrow answers that he can manage the Tinman one way or other, saying, “I know all kinds of strange words and names, and, as I told you before, I sometimes hit people when they put me out.” At last the tinker consents to sell his pony and things on one condition. “Tell me what’s my name,” he says; “if you can’t, may I—.” Borrow answers: “Don’t swear, it’s a bad habit, neither pleasant nor profitable. Your name is Slingsby—Jack Slingsby. There, don’t stare, there’s nothing in my telling you your name: I’ve been in these parts before, at least not very far from here. Ten years ago, when I was little more than a child, I was about twenty miles from here in a post chaise, at the door of an inn, and as I looked from the window of the chaise, I saw you standing by a gutter, with a big tin ladle in your hand, and somebody called you Jack Slingsby. I never forget anything I hear or see; I can’t, I wish I could. So there’s nothing strange in my knowing your name; indeed there’s nothing strange in anything, provided you examine it to the bottom. Now what am I to give you for the things?”
(I once heard a Gypsy give a similar and equal display of memory.) Dr. Knapp has corroborated several details of “Lavengro” which confirm Borrow’s opinion of his
memory. Hearing the author whom he met on his walk beyond Salisbury, speak of the “wine of 1811, the comet year,” Borrow said that he remembered being in the market-place of Dereham, looking at that comet. [{30}] Dr Knapp first makes sure exactly when Borrow was at Dereham in 1811 and then that there was a comet visible during that time. He proves also from newspapers of 1820 that the fight, in the twenty sixth chapter of “Lavengro,” ended in a thunderstorm like that described by Borrow and used by Petulengro to forecast the violent end of Thurtell.
Now a brute memory like that, which cannot be gainsaid, is not an entirely good servant to a man who will not put down everything he can, like a boy at an examination. The ordinary man probably recalls all that is of importance in his past life, though he may not like to think so, but a man with a memory like Borrow’s or with a supply of diaries like Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff’s may well ask, “What is truth?” as Borrow often did. The facts may convey a false impression which an omission or a positive “lie” may correct.