Chapter One
Everything Considered
On Literary Biography
(A talk given on November 13, 1998, at the University of South Carolina, in
Columbia, in honor of the two hundredth volume produced by the Dictionary of
Literary Biography. A less discursive version appeared in The New York
Review of Books, January 21, 1999.)
There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He
is too many people, if he’s any good.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his notebooks
Poets don’t have biographies. Their work is their biography.
-Octavio Paz, “A Note to Himself”
The main question concerning literary biography is, surely, Why do we need it at
all? When an author has devoted his life to expressing himself, and, if a poet
or a writer of fiction, has used the sensations and critical events of his life
as his basic material, what of significance can a biographer add to the record?
Most writers lead quiet lives or, even if they don’t, are of interest to us
because of the words they set down in what had to have been quiet moments.
Regardless of what fascinated his contemporaries, Byron interests us now because
of Don Juan and those other poems that still sing, and, secondarily,
because of his dashing, spirited letters. His physical beauty, his poignant
limp, the scandalous collapse of his marriage and his flight from England as a
social outcast, his picturesque European dissipations, his generous involvement
in the cause of Greek independence, and his tragically youthful death at
Missolonghi in 1824-all this sensational stuff would be buried in the mustiest
archives of history did not Byron’s literary achievement distinguish him from
the scores of similarly vexed and dynamic men of this turbulent Romantic era. By
his words he still lives, and they give the impetus to the periodic biographies
of which last year’s, by Phyllis Grosskurth, will soon be followed, next year,
by Benita Eisler’s.
I am not an especial devotee of literary biography. Indeed, I have my reasons to
distrust it. Yet, looking back, I see that I have reviewed a fair amount of it,
and, in addition, have read an amount on my own initiative, to satisfy my own
curiosity. Although one rarely sees literary biography on the best-seller
list, a prodigious amount of it is produced, some of it at prodigious length.
The estimable British biographer Michael Holroyd topped his two-volume biography
of Lytton Strachey with a three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw. Leon
Edel’s biography of Henry James took twenty-one years in the writing and
occupies five volumes, of which the last is the bulkiest. In my barn I keep
those books which, arriving free at the house, I deem too precious and
potentially useful to give to the local church fair, and yet not so valuable as
to win space on the packed shelves within my book-burdened domicile. Venturing
out to my slapdash barn shelves, I note works of roughly five hundred pages on
Edmund Wilson, Simone Weil, and Joyce Cary; six-hundred-page tomes on Oscar
Wilde and Ivy Compton-Burnett; six hundred and fifty pages on Norman Mailer;
seven hundred each on Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett; an eight- hundred-page work
on Zola; and, the heavyweight champion in this vicinity, twelve hundred pages on
the not notably prolific James Thurber. Length of life bears some relation to
length of book; in the department of doomed poets, Sylvia Plath, dead at thirty,
received three hundred fifty pages of attention, whereas Anne Sexton, who lived
to be forty-six, one hundred more. However, Delmore Schwartz had the fifty-three
years of his life compressed into a mere four hundred pages, as did the
drink-raddled but surprisingly long-lived Dorothy Parker. And these are just the
tenants in my barn.
My opening question-Why do we need it at all?-focuses us on the motives
of the consumers, not the producers. Some literary biographies begin as Ph.D.
theses; others as the personal accounts of a friend or acquaintance of the
author. In general, people write books because they think they have some light
to shed and because they aspire to the rewards and satisfactions of having
written a book. We read, those of us who do, literary biographies for a
variety of reasons, of which the first and perhaps the most worthy is the desire
to prolong and extend our intimacy with the author-to partake again, from
another angle, of the joys we have experienced within the author’s oeuvre, in
the presence of a voice and mind we have come to love.
An example of such a prolongation is George D. Painter’s two-volume biography of
Marcel Proust, which I read as a young man not long emerged from the full
stretch of Remembrance of Things Past, intoxicated and thirsty for more.
Painter’s biography, unprecedented in its attempt to treat Proust’s life with
definitive completeness, allows us to enter the vast mansion of the novel by a
back door, as it were, an approach that turns solid and hard and definite what
in the novel was large and vague and inconsecutively arranged and beautifully
charged with Proust’s poetic sensibility. Painter must use research and
investigation to build what Proust constructed out of his memory, but it is
recognizably the same edifice, with some practical additions. Painter restores
great omissions, such as the writer’s younger brother Robert, and is frank and
analytic where Proust was evasive, as in the matter of his narrator’s sexual
preference. The enchanted Combray, where little Marcel is fed a tea-soaked
madeleine by his Aunt Léonie and waits with desperate longing for the bell on
the garden gate to signify that Monsieur Swann has left and his mother is free
to come upstairs and give her son a good-night kiss-Combray becomes Illiers, a
town on the map, not far from Chartres, with a distinct history, cartography,
and set of houses. Aunt Léonie, we are told, was based, almost without
modification, on Proust’s father’s sister Elizabeth Amiot; her house still
stands, and Painter describes little Marcel’s bedroom with some of Proust’s
words but in an altogether more factual accent: “His bed was screened by high
white curtains, and covered in the daytime with flowered quilts, embroidered
counterpanes and cambric pillowcases which he had to remove and drape over a
chair, ‘where they consented to spend the night,’ before he could go to bed. On
a bedside table stood a blue glass tumbler and sugar-basin, with a water-jug to
match, which his aunt always told Ernestine to empty on the day after his
arrival, ‘because the child might spill it.’ On the mantelpiece was a clock
muttering under a glass bell, so heavy that whenever the clock ran down they had
to send for the clockmaker to wind it again; on the armchairs were little white
antimacassars crocheted with roses, ‘not without thorns,’ since they stuck to
him whenever he sat down …” and so on, in a strange but pleasing
transposition of the Proustian world into our own. The schematic principle of
the two “ways” whereby Proust organized his narrator’s massive pilgrimage is
sharply brought down to earth. Painter writes:
“To the child Marcel the two favourite walks of the family seemed to be in
diametrically opposite directions, so that no two points in the world could be
so utterly separated as their never-reached destinations. Whether they left the
house by the front door or by the garden-gate, they would turn one way for
Méréglise and the other way for Saint-Eman…. In his novel Proust called
Méréglise “Méséglise,” for euphony; and as the way there went by the Pré
Catalan, which he had transformed into Swann’s park, he was able to say with
truth that it was also Swann’s Way.”
The biography becomes, then, a way of re-experiencing the novel, with a
closeness, and a delight in seeing imagined details conjured back into real
ones, that only this particular writer and his vast autobiographical masterpiece
could provide. Lovers of Proust will be inevitably drawn to Painter because it
is more of the same, mirrored back into reality. Richard Ellmann’s superb
biography of James Joyce, though also dealing with a concentrated and highly
personal oeuvre, cannot quite offer us such a mirroring, though its chapter
epigraphs, ingeniously chosen quotations from Joyce, make glittering reflective
shards. We read Ellmann not only to revisit Joyce’s Dublin but to understand how
Joyce, modernism’s wonder-worker, did it-how did he produce from the drab facts
of the provincial, sodden, priest-ridden Irish capital such rare and
comprehensive art as is contained in Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist,
Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake? What I remember from my reading, years
ago, in Ellmann’s eight hundred pages is that Ulysses first came to
Joyce as a short story, one more sketch of a Dubliner, and that during its
seven-year composition, even to within a few weeks of its publication day, the
author in his European exile pestered his relatives and friends back in Dublin
for local details. He wrote his aunt Josephine Murray, concerning the Powells
and the Dillons, models for Molly Bloom’s family: “Get an ordinary sheet of
foolscap and scribble any God damn drivel you may remember about these people.”
He asked her such relentlessly circumstantial questions as “Is it possible for
an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of no 7 Eccles Street, either
from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings
till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 of the ground and drop unhurt.”
Ulysses, confronting the banality of modern life, compels quantities of
drivel into a Thomistically schematic mold that parodies the incidents of the
Odyssey; an excess of matter is heroically matched by an excess of form.
Perhaps only writers are interested in the details of craft, and how others
manage the cunning dishevelment of composition. But of literary biographies I
tend to remember curious methodological details: Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote
sitting at one end of a sofa and stored the accumulating composition under a
sofa cushion; Edith Wharton wrote in bed and threw her pages on the floor for a
secretary to pick up and transcribe; Joyce Cary worked at whatever scene of a
novel came to him and trusted them to all tie up at the end; Hemingway wrote
with freshly sharpened pencils while standing at a tall desk; Nabokov wrote on
three-by-five index cards; John Keats would put on his best clothes before
sitting down to write a poem; Henry James, after he suffered an attack of
writer’s cramp, began to dictate to a typist, and his later style was born in
the dutiful transcription of his spoken longueurs, qualifications, and
colloquialisms.
The question How did he or she do it? takes, in the case of William
Shakespeare, the more drastic form Did he do it? A few years ago I went
out and-always a reluctant move for a writer-purchased a book, Dennis Kay’s 1992
biography of Shakespeare. I was interested to see what a modern scholar could
assemble of evidence regarding the historical identity of the greatest writer in
English. I was persuaded, as I had expected to be, that the son of a small-town
burgess and high bailiff, an eldest son presumably educated in the strenuous
Latin curriculum of the King’s New School in Stratford, and evidently enlisted
in a shotgun marriage at the tender age of eighteen, might go to London and
become an actor and playwright and, in a career little more than twenty years
long, write the greatest plays and some of the greatest poetry in the language.
Unlike certain devotees of the nobility, I have never had any problem with the
idea that a child of the middling provincial gentry (Shakespeare’s mother was an
Arden, a family of prosperous farmers) might enter the theatrical profession and
spin a literary universe out of his dramatic flair, opportune learning, and
country-bred street-smarts. Robert Greene’s famous calumny, of “an upstart Crow,
beautified with our feathers,” who “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a
blank verse as the best of you,” fits the case perfectly. Shabby gentility has
ever been the cradle of upstart writers. Nevertheless, there is a worrisome
disproportion between the meagre verifiable biographical facts and the
tremendous literary events associated with Shakespeare’s name. Something of the
same disproportion affects the case of Jane Austen, another exalted literary
performer about whom we seem to know too little, so that the recent biography by
Claire Tomalin must pad its substance with a wealth of detail about the general
period in which Austen lived.
Literary biography in all cases runs up against this limit of determinism: there
is no clear reason why one secluded clergyman’s daughter should have been a
literary genius while hundreds of others were not. Certain generalizations might
be made, in retrospect, about the flowering of, say, Elizabethan poetry or Greek
drama or the Russian novel, but the appearance of a great individual remains an
indeterminate matter of microcosmic luck and will. The cultural situation at the
turn of the last century might be said to have been sickly; but Yeats and Proust
and Joyce all took their beginnings in it. To quote an old couplet of my own:
“--è sickliness became
High-stepping Modernism, then went lame.”
We read literary biography, often, in a diagnostic mood, as if dealing with a
ward of sick men and women. Psychoanalytical theories of compensation and Edmund
Wilson’s moving essay “The Wound and the Bow” have alerted biographers to the
relation of creative drive to human disabilities. Any biographer of Kafka must
deal, for example, with his insomnia, his unnatural awe of his father, his
ambivalence toward his own Jewishness, and his inability, until fatally weakened
by tuberculosis, to achieve a liaison with a woman-the entire psychological
paralysis, in short, dramatized in his grave comedies of modern bafflement. Our
mid-nineteenth-century giants Melville and Hawthorne, linked by an uneasy
friendship, challenge any biographer with the mysteries of their affective
lives. Melville’s mental fragility, his homoerotic vein, his inadequacies as a
husband and a father hardly fit with the humor and vigor of his best creations
and the toughness that saw him through a longish life loaded with
disappointments. And Hawthorne, who spent the years of his youth haunting Salem,
writing in an attic, walking out mostly at dusk, chiefly consorting with an
eccentrically shy mother and a strong-minded sister who was, it has been
speculated, a virtual wife to him-how does this strangeness feed into the
strangeness of his work, lending it a shadowy intensity and an evasive reliance
upon whimsy and the play of fancy? The vocabularies of psychoanalysis and of
literary analysis become increasingly entwined; though we must not forget that
these invalids receive our attention because of the truth and poetry and
entertainment to be found in their creations. A wound existed, but also a strong
bow, and a target was struck.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Due Considerations
by John Updike
Copyright © 2007 by John Updike.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Knopf
Copyright © 2007
John Updike
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ISBN: 978-0-307-26640-8
