Larry Darrell, a veteran traumatized by his wartime experiences, abandons his fiancée and hopes for a conventional career on a romantic pursuit of wisdom and fulfillment that no one but he is able to understand. The fruit of his lifelong intellectual work is a single volume, which Maugham’s narrator picks up and examines:
It was not in the least the sort of thing I expected. It was a collection of essays of about the same length as those in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, upon a number of famous persons. The choice he had made puzzled me. There was one on Sulla, the Roman dictator who, having achieved absolute power, resigned it to return to private life; there was one on Akbar, the Mogul conqueror who won and empire; there was one on Ruben, there was one on Goethe, and there was one on the Lord Chesterfield of the Letters. It was obvious that each of the essays had needed a tremendous amount of reading and I was no longer surprised that it had taken Larry so long to produce this book, but I could not see why he had thought it worthwhile to give it so much time or why he had chosen those particular men to study. Then it occurred to me that every one of them in his own way had made a supreme success of life and I guessed that this was what had interested Larry. He was curious to see what in the end it amounted to.
Assembling a compendium of diverse biographies inevitably puts the compiler’s own life into greater perspective. It raises awareness of what is remembered and what is forgotten as real lives dissolve into the caricatures on the pages of history. It reveals the impossibility of perfection, but also the inescapable whispers of past crimes.
The lives of great men do not hold all the secrets of human history; world events do not turn solely according to their whims and fancies, as Thomas Carlyle’s followers would claim. Yet, with a less grandiose scope, the lives of the famous or insignificant men reveal much about personal character, success, failure, strengths, weaknesses, personality, and masculinity. Like Darrell’s puzzling selections, what will follow on these pages may seem a disconnected assortment of biographies of and meditations on national icons, obscure politicians, athletes, criminals, movie stars, musicians, fictitious characters, and ordinary men. The only criteria for inclusion are that the subject is interesting in some way, and his experiences interrogate any number of questions. How do auto/biographies, hagiographies, and histories achieve their work of remembrance or forgetting? What is the nature of life, death, and all that? At core, how is a man’s life to be measured?
