Nonetheless, Woolf foresaw a time when, she thought, biography would evolve to meet changing circumstances in the world. Writing after Strachey’s death, and many years after she had hailed “the new biography” in 1927, she looked ahead to a moment when the biographer would revise traditional techniques to meet the opportunities and demands of modern culture. “[S]ince we live in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, he must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking-glasses at odd corners.”65
Virginia Woolf, who died in 1941, could hardly anticipate the supersaturated media environment in which today’s biographies are written, reviewed, and read: a 24/7 bombardment of news cycles, Internet gossip, YouTube, e-mail, and text messaging. What she regarded as frenetic interruptions—newspapers, letters, diaries, even those “thousand cameras,” a phrase I think she must have intended as hyperbolic—sound rather leisurely in a paparazzi world. The truth of a life today often involves scandal, confession, and self-exposure. And what has become of the art of biography and its relation to literature?
Larger Than Life
We might think that the days of the Victorian doorstop biography, in many pages or sometimes multiple volumes, has returned in a new guise. The second volume of Robert Skidelsky’s 1994 biography of John Maynard Keynes, subtitled The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937, covers seventeen years of Keynes’s life in 635 pages, plus notes and sources. The third volume, Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946, is 580 pages long. Peter Manso’s biography of Marlon Brando, also from 1994, came in at 1,021 pages, not including the notes and sources. These are not atypical numbers: consider Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (1994, 830 pages plus notes); James R. Mellow’s Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (1992, 604 pages plus notes); Harrison Kinney, James Thurber: His Life and Times (1994, 1,077 pages plus appendices and notes). I pulled these books from my shelves—this is a random rather than a systematic survey—but the pattern seems fairly consistent. David McCullough’s highly regarded book on Harry Truman (1992) was 1,117 pages long, his John Adams (2001), 751 pages. It is hard to think of another trade-publishing genre that is so lengthy and yet is considered commercially viable. In hardcover and paperback, these books sell.
Clearly—leaving aside for the moment the question of style—such biographies are not literary in the sense described by Strachey, dominated by a sense “of selection, of detachment, of design.” Modern biographies that chronicle the life of literary figures tend to include in their accounts of the subject’s life a description or assessment of the work, including plot summary and analysis, together with some sense of the work’s reception, qualifying them for the technical description of literary biography—a genre described by novelist John Updike as liable to abuse (the “Judas biography,” containing unflattering portraits from the testimony of a former friend or spouse; the inaccuracies reprinted from previously published, erroneous accounts), as well as the potentially useful work of reacquainting the reader with an author (albeit via what Updike calls a “nether route”).66 Within this genre, there is, again, a wide range of literary expertise and critical objective. The biographies of Sylvia Plath by Diane Middlebrook and Jacqueline Rose, both talented literary scholars, were consequential and important for the analysis of her poetry. Another version of the same life story, Janet Malcolm’s biography of Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, addressed the unreliability of memory and the difficulty, when dealing with interested parties, of separating fact from fiction. “In a work of nonfiction, we almost never know the truth of what happened,” Malcolm observed. And with a controversial matter like that of Plath’s life and death, she noted, the problems are especially acute. “The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not negligible, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living.”67
The technique that Lytton Strachey used in Queen Victoria—the judicious quotation from letters and other sources to produce a kind of biographical dialogue—still distinguishes the best modern biographies, like Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin or David McCullough’s John Adams. Emotional responses, internal thoughts, and other novelistic devices are crafted from the archival information, the “facts” upon which Woolf so strongly insisted. The biographer’s gift is one of deploying information, not of inventing it. Thus, describing the arrival of a letter to Adams that dispatched him to the Court of France, McCullough writes,
Thinking the packet must be urgent business, Abigail opened it and was stunned by what she read. Furious, she wrote straight away to Lovell, demanding to know how he could “contrive to rob me of all my happiness.
“And can I, sir, consent, to be separated from him whom my heart esteems above all earthly things, and for an unlimited time? My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension, and must I cheerfully comply with the demands of my country?”68
Active and emotive terms like “thinking,” “stunned,” furious,” and “demanding” are all inferred, effectively, from the source material, and “straight away” is derived from the date. The dramatic or literary effect (what would, in fact, eventuate in a screenplay) is elicited from within, not imposed from without.
Likewise, Janet Browne describes Darwin’s proposal to his future wife:
… on Sunday he spoke about marriage to Emma. Not unexpectedly, the event deflated both of them—Darwin was too exhausted by the nervous strain, with a bad headache, and Emma was “too much bewildered” to feel any overwhelming sense of happiness. To Darwin’s astonishment, she accepted him. Even so, the proposal caught her so unprepared that she went straight off to the Maer Sunday school as usual. Darwin’s exclamation in his diary that this was “The day of days!” was wildly misleading in its retrospective intensity …
“I believe,” said Emma afterwards, “we both looked very dismal”: An elderly Wedgwood aunt thought something quite the reverse had happened: that Darwin had asked but received a rejection.69
Here, too, it is possible to see how the emotional responses of the protagonists and the dramatic arc of the story are derived from source materials: the headache, the bewilderment, the astonishment, the very mood of the day, even the comically erroneous response of an onlooker, misreading the “dismal” expressions of the couple. Reality, in this case, means sutured to a certain kind of evidence.
We might contrast this way of writing a life with the kind of work that resembles the televised docudrama or “dramatic re-creation.” In the filmic version, actors perform on-screen as a voice-over offers the play-by-play of a real (but restaged) event. Shadows loom out of the darkness; scenery (a lonely road, a family mansion) offers an atmospheric B-roll boost; flashbacks increase the suspense. The language associated with the voice-over narrations in docudramas is heavy with subjunctives—would, could, might—and suppositions masquerading as rhetorical questions: “Did she know?” “Would he attempt?” “What was going through his mind at that moment?”
I have been calling the mode of biography that functions in this manner speculative, by which I mean a language heavily laden with subjunctives and similar suppositions: “There is reason to think that if she had”; “Were he to meet her then, as perhaps he did, they might have found”; “Having been to France, he would have known that.” Rather than being brought to life by specific textual evidence (Darwin’s diary, Abigail Adams’s letter), these hypotheticals are presented instead of evidence. By a certain authorial sleight of hand, they become the evidence whose absence they conceal. Moreover, contemporary culture has increasingly come to accept such fantasy projections as evidence, so eager are we to “know” the characters (historical, modern, famous, or infamous) about whom these real-life stories are told.
Horse Sense
My favorite example of this kind of projection taken to its logical extreme is Laura Hillenbrand’s fascinating biography Seabiscuit: An American Legend, in which the technique
of imagining what is going through the mind of the protagonist is employed to show us the inner thoughts of a racehorse.70
The word celebrity appears a number of times in Hillenbrand’s narrative, and appropriately so. The horse, who, in his racing heyday, liked to pose for photographers, was called “Movie Star” by reporters. As the reader follows the “making of a legend” from obscurity to celebrity to calamity to bittersweet triumph, it becomes clear that the book can be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. But there is one way in which Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit differs, of necessity, from the celebrity biography. A staple of the celebrity biography is that curious set of tenses and moods (from optative subjunctive to free indirect discourse) through which the author attempts to project the thoughts, or putative thoughts, of the celebrity subject. “One aspect of pre-production which pleased Garland was the make-up tests.”71 “The visitor was unwelcome, though Marlene realized that one way or another he was as inevitable as history.”72 “As always, when in trouble, Jack turned to his father.”73 A certain genre of horse (or dog) story uses the same kinds of voice and mind projection—think Jack London—or even, as in the case of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, is told in the first-person voice of the subject: “When I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass.”74
In Seabiscuit, the central figure’s consciousness is never so baldly anthropomorphic. But at the center of the book, surrounded by taciturn trainers and jockeys, is the silence of the equine legend, a silence marked, as if anxiously, by recurrent attention to what was going on in his mind. “Seabiscuit had the misfortune of living in a stable whose managers simply didn’t have the time to give his mind the painstaking attention it needed,” we are told about the horse’s early overraced and undervalued years, while jockey Red Pollard’s natural empathy “had given him insight into the minds of ailing, nervous horses.”75 At a turning point in Pollard’s career, when he finally guides Seabiscuit to a significant victory, the author’s prose can’t resist turning toward the psychological projections familiar from a certain mode of celebrity biography:
Seabiscuit stood square under his head-to-toe blanket, posed in the stance of the conqueror, head high, ears pricked, eyes roaming the horizon, nostrils flexing with each breath, jaw rolling the bit around with cool confidence.
He was a new horse.
In the fiftieth start of his life, Seabiscuit finally understood the game.76
In its own way, this description is a triumph. It makes the point that the author wants to make, but in order to do so it becomes necessary to project her feelings, or the reader’s, into the mind of the horse.
Seabiscuit is meticulously documented, with silent notes placed at the back of the book, so as not to disturb the narrative flow. Given the nature of the story, most of the sources are newspaper articles, features from Turf & Sport Digest or the Daily Racing Form, audiotapes of race calls, films and newsreels, or previous versions of Seabiscuit’s life story. But in none of these is there a viva voce interview with the biographical subject. If Seabiscuit felt that he was “a new horse,” if he brimmed with “cool confidence,” if he “finally understood the game,” it was something said by others, or by the biographer, not (how can one resist this? it is, after all, the point of the cliché) straight from the horse’s mouth.
Since the distinctions I am drawing—between the technique of speculation and the style of free indirect discourse—may seem to be minor or evanescent, let me try to make them sharper by saying that what I’ve called speculative biography imputes motives, intentions, and causes, linking historical events in an arc of character intentionality that is a fictional construct. Why did X do this or that? Perhaps he thought; did she imagine; were they hoping? Here it may be helpful to see how a reviewer described a recent book about the life of the poet Robert Frost:
The book is billed as a novel, but this is only because it is speculative rather than veritable; it is more properly classified a vie romancée, a bio enhanced with the loosey-goosey methods of fiction. Variations on this form have become increasingly fashionable in recent years—so fashionable, in fact, that two fictional portraits of Henry James alone were published in 2004, with another trailing along the next year.77
In a work like Colm Tóibín’s The Master: A Novel (one of the two fictional books about James noted in the review) it seems as if the term novel allows the author to have things both ways: the gravitas of biography and the freedom to identify and psychologize that comes with the writing of a certain kind of fiction.
Insincerely Yours
Half a century ago René Wellek and Austin Warren wrote briskly in their Theory of Literature about the relationship between literature and biography—a relationship they considered dangerously misleading:
No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation. The frequently adduced criterion of “sincerity” is thoroughly false if it judges literature in terms of biographical truthfulnesss, correspondence to the author’s experience or feelings as they are attested by outside evidence. There is no relationship between “sincerity” and value as art.78
As specific counterexamples, they adduce “the volumes of agonizingly felt love poetry perpetrated by adolescents,” and “the dreary (however fervently felt) religious verse which fills libraries.”
The sincerity issue (Wellek and Warren are clearly speaking back to Lionel Trilling) connects to biography and to the memoir. Their point, firmly stated and reinforced by examples, was that any assumption about a direct or causative relationship between the facts of a life and the work of a writer disregards something fundamental about the nature of literature: “The whole view that art is self-expression pure and simple, the transcript of personal feelings and experiences,” they contend, “is demonstrably false.” Again, “the biographical approach actually obscures a proper comprehension of the literary process, since it breaks up the order of literary tradition to substitute the life-cycle of an individual.” It also “ignores” what they call “quite simple psychological facts”: that a work of art may embody the “dream,” “mask,” or “antiself” of its author, rather than facets of the actual life.79 So for Wellek and Warren, much literary biography is not literary.
Perhaps inevitably, their chief example is a selection of biographies of Shakespeare, which from the vantage point of midcentury meant the work of Georg Brandes, Frank Harris, and their nineteenth-century precursors, Hazlitt, Schlegel, and Dowden. Since “we have absolutely nothing in the form of letters, diaries, reminiscences, except a few anecdotes of doubtful authenticity,” they point out, there is no real biographical information, only “facts of chronology” and illustrations of Shakespeare’s “social status and associations.”
The vast effort which has been expended upon the study of Shakespeare’s life has yielded only few results of literary profit … One cannot, from fictional statements, especially those made in plays, draw any valid inference as to the biography of a writer.
There is no logic to the idea that emotions and fictional descriptions are linked by anything causal. “One may gravely doubt,” write Wellek and Warren, “even the usual view that Shakespeare passes through a period of depression, in which he wrote his tragedies and his bitter comedies, to achieve some serenity of resolution in The Tempest. It is not self-evident that a writer needs to be in a tragic mood to write tragedies or that he writes comedies when he is pleased with life. There is simply no proof for the sorrows of Shakespeare.”80
They insist that there is no more reason to identify the playwright’s views with that of a wise protagonist like Prospero, or a disaffected speaker like Timon of Athens, than with those of Doll Tearsheet or Iago: “authors cannot be assigned the ideas, feelings, views, virtues and vices of their heroes.”81 Moreover, the same is true of the first-person I of a lyric poem. Whether Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud or no
t has no effect upon the artistic merit or propositional truth of his verse.
So what uses might biography have? Again Wellek and Warren are clear. Biographical information can explain allusions in the work, can accumulate materials for literary history (what the author read, where he or she traveled, etc.). By literary history they mean tradition, influences, sources. But where they draw the line, as we have seen, is at evaluation. Biography has no “critical importance.” A work of literature need have no correlation with events or data related to the author’s life, nor do those events explain (or cause) the work.
If biography is not literature—or if only some biographies are literature, and those are considered so for reasons of style and form rather than a supposed fidelity to facts—then why worry about the uses of biography? One response would be that the truth claims—and explanatory claims—made on behalf of biographical, autobiographical, or personal facts have, to a certain extent, preempted or short-circuited the role of criticism and interpretation when it comes to assessing literature, not only for “the common reader” but for many specialists as well.
If it is not only the acknowledged faux or hoax memoirs that are fictions, but also all memoirs, and much biographical writing of the speculative (“if he knew this, did it influence him when he did that”) mode, then their truth claims, which may be compelling (or not), have the status, precisely, of fictional truth. Aristotle famously said about plots that he preferred a plausible impossibility to an implausible possibility, and “truth” in this sense, with or without quotation marks, is Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief. The most effective (and compellingly literary) passage on this matter remains that of Nietzsche, in “On Truth or Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”:
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 26