There Are Too Many Overweight Biographies
Is biography necessary? Sigmund Freud didn't think it was, or at least thought it wasn't primary when it came to understanding a person's true nature. Mark Twain felt that a biography is "but the clothes and buttons of a man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written." Marcel Proust, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, set out all the shortcomings of standard biography, "which consists, if you would understand a poet or a writer, in greedily catechizing those who knew him, who saw quite a lot of him, who can tell us how he conducted himself in regard to women, etc.—precisely, that is, at every point where the poet's true self is not involved." George Orwell, who held that all autobiography "is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful," wished to have no biography written about himself, a wish quickly flouted after his death. Henry James burned many of his letters to discourage future biographers, which didn't stop Leon Edel from producing a five-volume biography of James.
Americans seem to specialize in lengthy biographies. This began with Mark Schorer's 1961 biography of Sinclair Lewis, which weighed in at 867 pages. Ron Chernow's new biography of Mark Twain is 1,174 pages. Robert Caro's still unfinished biography of Lyndon Johnson, which currently runs to more than 3,000 pages, is in its fifth volume and is only now dealing with the bulk of Johnson's presidency. Sam Tanenhaus's biography of William F. Buckley Jr. is 1,140 pages and took, we are told, no less than 30 years to write. If this trend continues, biographies of the future may be longer and take longer to write than the lives they purport to describe.
The most famous, and most successful, biography ever written is James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson. Johnson owes much of his continuing fame to it. Boswell knew that in Johnson he had a grand subject. He admired the man, but not to the point of uncritical adulation. The perfect mating of subject to author is what makes Boswell's biography the great work it is—this and the fact that the Samuel Johnson was himself a figure of great fascination.
Plutarch, born around 40 C.E., was not the first biographer, but he is preeminent among the biographers of antiquity. Montaigne, writing 15 or so hundred years after Plutarch's death, greatly admired him. Montaigne wrote: "Now the most appropriate historians for me are those who write men's lives, since they linger more over motives than events, over what comes from inside more than what happens outside. That is why, of historians of every kind, Plutarch is the man for me."
Parallel Lives is Plutarch's best-known work, one comparing Greek and Roman figures. It features biographies that generally run between 20 and 25 pages long. Good as they are, no one has wished them longer. At the opening of his "Life of Timoleon," the Corinthian general and statesman, Plutarch sets out his purpose: "It was for the sake of others that I first commenced writing biographies; but I find myself proceeding and attaching myself to it for my own; the virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life." He then goes on to explain his method, which is "by the study of history, and with familiarity acquired in writing, to habituate by my memory to receive and retain images of the best and worthiest characters. I am thus enabled to free myself from any ignoble, base, or vicious impressions contracted from the contagion of ill company that I may be unavoidably engaged in; by the remedy of turning my thoughts in a happy and calm temper to view these noble examples."
Apart from mere curiosity, isn't this what we all look for in reading biographies: stories of lives lived more grandly than our own, of the struggle on the part of biographical subjects against all that puts itself in the way of their achieving a good and significant life? In reading biography, we also hope to gain some further insight into that mystery of mysteries, human nature, about which the best biographies often supply substantial hints.
_____________
I have not myself written a biography, though I have published a volume titled Essays in Biography (2012). In my early thirties I signed on to write a biography of John Dos Passos, who was still alive. I wrote to Dos Passos to ask if I might have his cooperation in writing his biography. He replied instantly, saying that he would help me in any way he could, on the condition that I "put my liberal ideology in mothballs" and pledge never again to use the word "explicate." Alas he died soon thereafter, and I, for a complex of reasons, decided not to write the book.
Three facts in Dos Passos's life stand out. First, he was born out of wedlock to wealthy parents—a bastard, in other words, but an upper-class bastard. Second, during the Spanish Civil War, when he discovered that the Soviets endorsed killing, he radically changed his politics, from far left to deeply conservative. Third, in his trilogy U.S.A. (1937), he wrote a great American novel—and, given its wide coverage of so many American social classes and his skillful deployment of modernist technique, perhaps the great American novel. I have no regrets about not writing his biography, for I am fairly certain that in my early thirties I was unprepared to write a good one, of Dos Passos or of anyone else.
Biography has no Poetics. No Aristotle-like figure has come along to lay down the law on how a biography ought to be written. Such law would set out what criteria ought there to be for who is or isn't qualified as a subject. It would take up the question of whether chronology is always the best organizing principle for biography, and how important should one consider domestic, not to say, sexual life, in the formation of character. These and so many other questions about biography have never received anything like serious consideration, or even discussion. The genre has been left to proceed on its own without a strong theoretical foundation.
At a minimum, a biography ought to report what the world at large thinks or thought about the subject of the biography, what his or her family and friends thought about him or her, and what he or she thought about him- or herself. But that minimum doesn't cover anything like all that is needed to write a good biography. A good biography needs somehow to get inside its subject, discover what impressed him, what disappointed him, what pleased, what frustrated him. Through imagination, the great novelists can decipher and display personality and character, and touch on human nature. The biographer, like the detective in the old Dragnet television show, is restricted to "just the facts, ma'am." He hopes that the facts, brought together and smoothly elided one into the other, like a giant puzzle, will end in supplying the truth of the life he is writing about.
The model of the modern biography is thought to be Richard Ellmann's James Joyce (1959). The book won all the awards of its day: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, et alia, and the plaudits of Frank Kermode, Christopher Ricks, and other formidable critics of the time. Even now it continues to maintain its literary prestige as a serious book on a serious subject written by a serious author. The book's influence has also been notable. The success of Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Lyndall Gordon wrote in the New Statesman, "ensured the dominance of monumental biography for the rest of the century and well into ours." Muriel Spark, novelist and short-story writer, has argued that "biographical writing which adheres relentlessly to fact" distorts the subject, "because facts strung together present the truth only where simple people and events are involved, and the only people and events worth reading about are complex."
_____________
Zachary Leader's Ellman's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker, is an example of a new trend in publishing: accounts of the writing and publication of other books. Princeton University Press has recently brought out Joseph Luzzi's Dante's Divine Comedy: A Biography and Alan Jacob's Paradise Lost: A Biography. Now we have the first biography to have a biography written about it. Leader has previously written biographies of Kingsley Amis and of Saul Bellow (the latter in two volumes that take up 1,680 pages). In the final paragraph of his Ellmann's Joyce, he writes: "This book is an attempt to show how and why long biographies ought to be written, in the process honoring both James Joyce and the admirable scholar/artist who was its author." This, Leader's most recent biography, is a mere, a breezy, 449 pages.
The first half takes up the life of Richard Ellmann, whom I knew at Northwestern University, though he left in 1968, or four years before I myself began teaching there. I found him a most congenial fellow, haimish and with a pleasing sense of humor. Dick grew up in the Middle West, in Michigan, under strong Jewish immigrant parents. His lawyer father advised him on how to lead his life, through stern letters all his days. They didn't approve of his marriage to the gentile Mary Donoghue. In his correspondence with his parents, Dick always referred to his wife as Joan, her middle name, the name Mary being too goyishe for his parents to tolerate. He made his bones on biographies of two other Irishmen, Yeats and Wilde. After the success of James Joyce, he climbed the cursus honorum of academic life, departing Northwestern for Yale and thence to Oxford. Leader recounts his childhood, adolescence, military service during World War II, and academic life. The one piece of gossip in his account is Ellmann's love affair with the English literary scholar and novelist Barbara Hardy, though not much is said about this apart from Ellmann's desire to keep it secret. He died in 1987 at 69, of motor neuron disease.
I read Ellmann's biography not long after it was first published and came away with the overriding impression that James Joyce was not a man I should have liked to have known. "A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism" is the way Joyce described himself to C.G. Jung. He was a serious boozer, a philanderer who feared cuckoldry, a man who incurred debts he had no intention of ever repaying. Above all, Joyce believed that the artist has no need to live, as others do, within the bounds of what passes for moral decency. In his introduction to James Joyce, Ellmann, who never doubts his subject's greatness as an artist, writes: "This kind of greatness can be perceived in his life, too, though camouflaged by frailties."
Leader recounts how Ellmann, with diplomatic grace, acquired a cache of some hundred crucial letters from Mrs. W.B. Yeats that Joyce sent to his long-suffering brother Stanislaus. He provides accounts of Ellmann chasing down friends and acquaintances of Joyce's for what information they had of him that might be useful to his biography.
And yet one is sometimes left to wonder about the validity of Ellmann's interviews. "Talk to six Dubliners," the critic Hugh Kenner wrote, "and you'll get six different highly circumstantial versions. This fact is of especial import for the biographer of Joyce, much of whose early life we must get at through oral testimony. Since in general Prof. Ellmann's notes record no contradictions, we must assume he's resolved them all with what we're forced to trust all through James Joyce, his sense of what will fit his narrative."
In rereading Ellmann's James Joyce, I came away thinking that, yes, when it comes to information, one can have too much of a good thing. Mid-book, to cite one of many such examples, we come upon the following passage:
[Joyce] told Herman Gorman of his laborious excursions to reach one of his pupils, a Captain Dehan, who commanded a boat that used to come every fortnight to Trieste from Ban. "On these days," Gorman says, "Joyce would leave his house, walk across the Piazza Giambattista Vico, walk through the tunnel of Montuzza, take an electric train to the gate of the Free Port, enter and take a horse tram to the Punto Franco, make signals to the ship until a small boat was sent out for him, board the boat and be taken to the ship, climb aboard and have a search for the Captain, look for a quiet spot to give the lesson, give it (the Captain was intensely stupid), then look for the sailor to take him back to the Punto Franco, enter the horse tram, and ride to the gate of the Free Port, board the electric tram which would take him to the mouth of Montuzza tunnel, walk back through it, cross the Piazza Giamattita Vico and so reach his house. For this exhausting exertion he received payment amounting to thirty pence [62c]."
He neglects here only to tell us whether Joyce stopped along the way, up or back, to relieve himself. Add to anecdotes like this the endless endnotes and hundreds of asterisk footnotes at the bottom of the biography's pages, and one begins to wonder whether, as the posters from World War II had it, this trip were necessary.
Ellmann took six years to write his biography, the same amount of time Joyce took to write Ulysses. Joyce said that since he spent six years writing his novel, it was only reasonable if it took readers six years to read it. Ellmann calls Joyce "the major prose stylist of his century," a conventional view at the time he published his doorstopper. T.S. Eliot called Joyce "the best living prose writer" and thought Ulysses "a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape." Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, escaped it. She thought the novel "a mis-fire," saying, "Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. . . . It is entirely absurd to compare him to Tolstoy." Indeed, for all its virtues, there's almost no one alive today who would rank Ulysses alongside the great Russian novels, or those of Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac, or Proust, as a work of art.
Which raises the question: Can any biography, lashed as the genre is to facts, hope to qualify not merely as artful but as true art? The only such biography I can think of is Boswell's, and this is because the subject contributed quite as much to it as did the biographer.
No, the most that biographers can hope, as I suppose the creators of the monumental biographical tomes of our time hope, is to be definitive, which is to say authoritative, conclusive, complete, surpassing the work of previous biographers and waving off future biographers because they have done the job, a job that cannot be improved upon.
The biographer of the current day sets out to know the character of his subject in the most intimate manner, as the great novelists of the 19th century knew theirs. Lashed to facts as biography is, that goal cannot really be achieved. And so the novel remains, and always will remain, the more truth-bearing form.
No comments:
Post a Comment