The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  Forster’s three-volume work,*10 published two years after Dickens’s death, was an amiable portrait that depicted the great novelist as a genius whose fevered, explosive imagination and “generous nature” made him an attractive figure. I won’t call Forster’s Dickens a hagiography, but their relationship was marred by no rift, no tension lurking just beneath the surface. They hung out together in Bath and Edinburgh and the clubs of London, the dutiful biographer taking dictation in direct quotes of suspicious length that not even the master scribe Boswell could rival. Forster read Dickens’s work in manuscript and again in page proofs; accompanied him on holiday; and advised him on business deals. He was Dickens’s closest friend, “a member of the family,” according to Forster. It was Forster who informed Dickens of the death of his child, Dora. And it was Dickens who consoled Forster on the untimely death of his brother: “You have a Brother left. One bound to you by ties as strong as Nature ever forged. By ties never to be broken, weakened, changed in any way.” (Their chumminess didn’t prevent Dickens from satirizing Forster as the pompous Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend.) “They were always at ease with one other, with no need to pose or pretend,” Claire Tomalin observed in her exemplary biography.

  This intimacy, though it compromised the book’s usefulness as an “objective” biographical work, was edifying. Forster’s biography captures Dickens’s “sparkling, clear, and sunny utterances” intercalated with “bits of auto-biography unrivalled in clearness and credibility.” The story—told in every biography—of the novelist going by a grand home on Gad Hill as an impoverished child and dreaming that he would one day occupy it, acquires a deeper resonance when it’s recounted by the author in the first person: “Very often had we travelled past it together, many years before it became his home,” the biographer writes in the opening pages, “and never without some allusion to what he told me when I first saw it in his company.”

  Reading Forster, you can trace the origins of these stories directly to their source, without the spurious omniscience of later biographers. Dickens’s traumatic labor as a boy in a blacking factory, an episode that would eventually become mythologized as the formative episode of his life—or was mythified as such—would never have come to light, Forster asserts, had it not been for the accidental revelations vouchsafed by their mutual friend Mr. Dilke of a visit Dickens’s father had once made to “his uncle Barrow,” who told him…ten readings of this passage in its minute type can’t unravel the sequence of events, or whose father was whose uncle. But at least we learn—sort of—how David Copperfield came to be written.

  How much did Forster leave out? From the prying perspective of our time, a great deal. Only by scouring the appendix do we learn of Dickens’s affair with the actress Ellen Ternan, whom he met when she was eighteen and he was forty-five, which is widely regarded as responsible for the dissolution of Dickens’s marriage. Leave it to others to write the warts-and-all*11 accounts. For now—I would say if I were reviewing Forster’s triple-decker in The Edinburgh Review in 1872—we have an admiring portrait that conveys the vitality of Dickens’s genius and brings us closer to the man. So what if it’s not objective? All it has to be is true.*12

  —

  Another way the biographer/subject relationship can go wrong: you start out a friend of your subject and end up hating him, as Lawrance Thompson did in his notorious biography of Robert Frost. Every biographer is familiar with this train wreck; Jay Parini, Frost’s most sympathetic biographer, called it “a three-volume assault on Frost’s character in the shape of a literary biography.” Thompson died before he could complete the third volume, to the relief of all concerned, and it was finished by his student R. H. Winnick, but the damage was done. His biography stands as a monument to the danger of writing about someone you know.

  It began as a promising match. Thompson wasn’t just Frost’s biographer; he was the authorized biographer, appointed by Frost after he read an admiring book Thompson had written on his poetry. The admiration was apparently provisional, since it didn’t prevent Thompson from giving a hostile review to a play of Frost’s in the Times Book Review or, stranger still, having an affair with Frost’s mistress, Kay Morrison, the wife of Theodore Morrison, a poet and professor of English at Harvard. Now that’s access. Is it enough to call this a conflict of interest, or is it transgressive?

  “Thompson’s intimacy with Kay allowed him to participate in and even change the course of the life he was writing,” wrote Jeffrey Meyers, one of Frost’s many biographers. He urged Morrison to reject Frost’s proposals of marriage and be “tough” with him, even though Thompson knew—it was his job to know—every detail of their affair.*13 I can’t help wondering what their pillow talk was like.

  Thompson’s animosity toward Frost was hard to miss. As Jay Parini points out, the index includes the derisive categories “Anti-intellectual,” “Brute,” “Charlatan,” “Hate,” “Insanity,” and “Monster,” among other opprobrious terms. Thompson loses no opportunity to snipe. Frost’s creative process, he writes, “caused him to mingle self-deception with little falsehoods; it even caused him gradually to convince himself that some of these fictions were genuine truths.” The young Frost was characterized by “jealousy, sulking, temper tantrums, vindictive retaliations and self-pity in the guise of threatened suicide.” He cheated at card games and tennis.

  It’s true that Frost was a flamboyantly terrible man, not your average bad-boy poet but someone who once started a small bonfire at a rival poet’s reading to call attention to himself, and is said to have threatened his wife with a gun, insisting their daughter choose between them. Even so, Thompson’s hatred of his subject seems at times pathological. How account for it? Maybe he had authority issues. Maybe he was disappointed about his own failed career as a poet. Maybe he just didn’t like Frost—many didn’t. But what’s so fascinating about this “case” is how unanalyzed Thompson was. He was willing to destroy his own book, the work of decades, in order to destroy his subject.

  But is that the whole story? I was electrified when I came across an essay about Thompson’s heroic efforts to “get” Frost (in the analytic, not the threatening sense) that laid out the steep challenges facing even a self-aware and psychoanalytically sophisticated biographer. Its author was an English professor named Donald Sheehy who had gained access to two thousand pages of Thompson’s notes in the University of Virginia Library. It showed how hard he had worked to understand his obdurate, prickly subject, who defied whatever sympathy a biographer could manage to extend. Frost had gone through four biographers by the time he settled on Thompson; one actually produced a draft, only to have it rejected by Frost on the grounds that the biographer’s “longstanding affection” for his subject had spoiled his objectivity; another one died. Frost didn’t want a biographer who focused on the “dross and dirt” of him, but he didn’t want a biographer who adulated him either (or so he claimed).

  As a guide to better insight, Thompson turned to Karen Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization: “If it had mentioned Frost on every page it couldn’t have come closer to giving a psychological framework to what I’ve been trying to say in the first volume of the biography.” According to Horney, self-knowledge is the key to the development of an integrated personality. But a hostile environment like the one in which Frost grew up—his father beat him, his mother was overindulgent—could have a disastrous influence on character; the drive to excel could become “vindictive.” In such a scenario, “the motivating force stems from impulses to take revenge for humiliations suffered in childhood.” Achievement expresses itself as a form of aggression. It was this dynamic, Thompson argued, that made Frost capable of such vicious behavior. He had to win in order to validate himself.

  In the end, Thompson’s close personal relationship with Frost, rather than providing greater opportunities for insight, proved a hindrance. He spent whole summers on Frost’s farm, accompanied him to Israel and Russia, and kept a detaile
d journal of their conversations.*14 But the biographer’s intimacy with his subject conspired against him in ways he couldn’t have foreseen. “The very objectivity that Frost had sought in choosing Thompson had brought them into a relationship far closer than either had expected,” Sheehy noted. “Such a relationship precluded the impersonal biography of ideas that Frost had originally hoped Thompson would write.”

  Only how adversarial was it? Thompson warned that Frost’s correspondence would reveal the private man’s “periods of gloom, jealousies, obsessive resentments, sulking, displays of temper, nervous rages, and vindictive retaliations,” but his interpretation of this volatile mix went a long way toward exonerating or at least explaining Frost:

  Permit any excruciatingly sensitive young man to develop all the ambitions and drives of an incipient artist. Let early failures make him self-protectively proud and scornful of scorners. Add extra measures of physical illness, often inseparable from emotional and mental anxieties. Enable him to succeed at nothing he thinks important through years of more intensely ambitious effort than he would ever be willing to acknowledge afterward. Give him enemies enough; and even give his enemies reasons to mock him for his pride, arrogance, and failure, until he is nearly forty years old. Then suddenly grant him unexpected attention and fame—abroad. Let him come home to the vicissitudes of criticism and praise, but let him keep trying, striving, driving until he has earned a steadily increasing recognition and adulation. Under these circumstances anyone might become unbearably vain. Robert Frost did not; but his later letters indicate an unquenchable thirst for honor and glory, as though the ultimate balm of innumerable tributes could never quite heal the wounds he suffered in those agonizingly long years of failure.

  What comes through, writes Sheehy, is “a sincere, if troubled admiration for the man.” If Thompson sometimes lost it, he tried mightily to be fair:

  It’s easy enough to get mad at that old bastard, but when you get down deep enough to understand that he was victimized by a whole set of drives that he couldn’t control, then the value of explaining the complication is the value of treating them sympathetically and of giving him credit for having intermittently triumphed over his troubles as well as he did….The point is that here was a man who actually achieved a well-deserved and lasting fame as an artist-poet; a man who in spite of his flawed human qualities, was at times extremely lovable; a man, who in spite of his meanness to so many people, really went out of his way to help certain people—and did help them. I must keep reminding myself of this.

  I was moved by this self-hortatory, somewhat tortured expression of impatience. Read in its belated context, after the damage has been done, it shows the biographer fighting to overcome his own distaste for his subject—and failing. Yet Thompson came to his task better equipped than most biographers. His job was to understand not only his subject but himself. Critics complained that he was biased. No one knew that better than he did.

  —

  I found the story of Andrew Field, Vladimir Nabokov’s first biographer, even more unnerving than Thompson’s debacle. Field had written a smart but fawning critical study, Nabokov: His Life in Art, and the exacting novelist had pronounced it “superb.” Not long afterward he made Field, then only twenty-nine, his “first” biographer.

  It was a peculiar decision, given Nabokov’s reclusive nature. “He had a hypertrophied sense of privacy,” observed Brian Boyd, Field’s successor. He was a control freak*15 who at one point decreed a fifty-year ban on the papers he deposited in the Library of Congress; stipulated that interviewers had to write out their questions in advance; and insisted on the right to read Field’s book in manuscript as a condition of quoting from the work.

  Their collaboration—for that’s what it was—got off to what both thought was a promising start. Field set up shop in Nabokov’s suite at the Palace Hotel in Montreux, transcribing his subject’s recollections of Russia—preliminary notes for the classic Speak, Memory—while Nabokov, turning the tables, played the biographer. Joining Field after a nap, the novelist conjured up a description of himself as he imagined the biographer would see him: “I remember him shuffling in looking old and wretched, and a moment later he was bubbling with good spirits.” In the biography, boldface indicates that Nabokov is speaking. Or maybe Field is quoting him or imagining what Nabokov would say. The point is that the biographer has broken down the wall between reader and subject that exists in a formal interview, where only one party is permitted to ask questions and one to answer them, and made of it a conversation. Biography as dialogue.

  Things started to go wrong when Nabokov learned that Field was—quite reasonably—interviewing people who had known his subject. Didn’t he have all he needed with the papers and interviews with the author himself? Nabokov wrote Field in the third person (perhaps hoping to dissociate himself from the book he himself had enabled): “V.N.’s biographer can learn very little by getting in touch with V.N.’s sporadic relatives, schoolmates, literary acquaintances, or academic colleagues, and the worst he can do is to collect the vulgar gossip that always buzzes around a ripe old author ready to be biographized.”

  It got worse when Field began to share with Nabokov his work-in-progress. “On January 28th”—the enumeration of the date sounds ominous, as if we’re reading a police report—“Nabokov began reading Field’s typescript. He thought he had braced himself for the worst, but what he found outdid his gloomiest apprehensions.” Over the next three weeks, Nabokov “clocked up a hundred hours of work on the ms,” according to Boyd. By page 285, he could write his wife, Vera: “The number of absurd errors, impossible statements, vulgarities and inventions is appalling.” His corrective memo came to 180 typed pages. They spent the next four years communicating through lawyers.

  Field’s biggest mistake was deciding to go it alone. “Upon rechecking this collection of quotes and notes,” wrote Nabokov, “I find myself wondering what strange ‘block’ prevented you from simply consulting me in hundreds of instances when my wife and I could have come to your assistance.” He was particularly irate about scenes that he felt Field had invented or embellished to fill in the picture: “The little feet of the limping anecdote have to be orthopedically shod. And since by no amount of imagination can one conjure up the details one does not know in a setting with which one is not familiar, the description of the event becomes at best a clumsy cliché and at worst an offensive farce.”

  Nabokov’s determination to protect himself inflamed Field—to know why, one would have to write his biography. As with a love affair that goes off the rails, enchantment led to disillusion. “There is an absence of that glow of affection I felt for Speak, Memory,” Nabokov complains to his biographer, predicting the end of their harmonious relationship: “It will not be violins, but trombones.” It’s poignant that a writer as famous as Nabokov cared what his biographer thought: no one is exempt from the need for approval, not even geniuses.

  The problem was that Field couldn’t tolerate the self-suppression that biography requires, the willingness to subjugate one’s ego to the task at hand. Instead, he put himself in an adversarial position: he charged Nabokov with “avoiding facts” in Speak, Memory, that lyrical classic of remembrance, and claimed that it was unreliable. Determined to prove his independence, to show that he was “his own man,” he made it clear that he no longer needed Nabokov’s help. After all, what did he know about his own life? All biographers feel this way at least some of the time, but Field admitted it, declaring in the first chapter that he was his subject’s “competitor.” A competitor of Nabokov, one of the greatest stylists in the language? Give me a break.

  Field’s reading of the work is heavy-handed, his narrative meandering, his research—what Dwight called “kitchen-work”—lazy: “Someday no doubt registries and municipal records from the 19th century will be able to be examined in key Siberian shopping places.” Aren’t you supposed to be doing that? Yet there’s a kind of intimacy about this odd biography that makes it
feel entertaining and true (even when it’s false). In one scene, where Nabokov has to lend Field a jacket for the dining room, he says, or Field has him say, or maybe just think: “Now I can see for the first time how I look in that coat. I never realized that there was so much yellow in it.” Wearing his clothes: how much more inside your subject can you be?*16

  Boyd, whose two-volume “definitive”*17 biography followed Field’s by just two years, is the good cop to Field’s bad cop.*18 A conscientious biographer, he clops through the chronology for twelve hundred pages—“A week later…” “A month later…” Boyd is a master of his trade, firmly in command of the mass of material generated by an incessantly productive novelist, critic, poet, playwright, lecturer, and correspondent over more than half a century. He has read and absorbed every word Nabokov ever wrote and every word written about him in English and Russian; he interprets the work with authority, the person with sympathy and wit. There is no fact he doesn’t know: should the reader wish to learn Nabokov’s income from Czech translation rights in 1934, when he was living in Berlin, the number is right there: 103 Reichsmarks.

  Boyd, unlike Field, keeps himself mostly out of the narrative. On the rare occasions when I appears, it is unobtrusive, and even gives the book a kind of casual authority (“Many readers—and for a long time I was one…”). It is only from his engaging collection of essays, Stalking Nabokov, published twenty years after the biography was complete, that we get the full story. The note of aggression in the title is ironic, or perhaps unconscious; the essays radiate warmth. Boyd’s intense scrutiny of the work is in itself a tribute, and he describes with enthusiasm the long hours (“from morning until after midnight”) spent scrutinizing the vast archive of manuscripts and letters. His genial attitude toward his subject is reflected in the biography, which manages to be at once indulgent and critical.