For his part, Larkin felt envy toward Amis for his easy success with women. He also harbored a secret grudge on the ingratitude side of the ledger, for it was he who suggested and worked on some of the funniest parts of Lucky Jim, including the famous lecture, delivered drunk, on Merrie England. In letters to Monica Jones, Larkin makes plain how much of the novel was owed to him. He also grew tired of playing confessor to Amis, and of the one-sided relationship that, in their meetings, seemed to have Amis doing most of the talking. Larkin ceased to answer Amis’s letters. As with Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, years went by without the two supposedly best friends meeting. At Larkin’s funeral, one learns from James Booth’s recent biography of the poet, Amis remarked, “I sometimes wonder if I really knew him.” Turns out, Bradford persuades us, that Amis was right. The man he viewed as his dearest friend was nearly an enemy.
The general effect of Literary Rivals is to detract not from the grandeur of literature but from the people who compose it. Writers, one comes away from this book feeling, often operate under the same low motives, feel the same unpleasant emotions, as everyone else. Their literary struggles with truth and beauty seem not to have done much to improve their characters.
Lest my attempt at a magisterial tone here has fooled anyone into believing I am myself above all this, let me assure him that I have felt many of the same unpleasantly contentious authorial emotions described in Bradford’s book. I have felt anger and puzzlement at what I take to be the unearned success of fellow writers, enjoyed holding on to grudges against some among them, delighted in learning of the personal failures of others. After a career as a writer of more than 50 years, it could scarcely be otherwise. Examples abound. Allow me to present merely a few.
As a writer of short stories, I do not understand the vaunting of Alice Munro, who in 2013 won the Nobel Prize. Her stories all seem to me one and the same: A woman of middle years in provincial Ontario is having a love affair, or has recently had a love affair, or long ago had a love affair, with a man not worthy of her, and has been, or soon will be, plunged back into the doldrums of provincial life. Neither dazzling in the telling, nor satisfying in their endings, Munro’s stories, all washing into one, are not in the least memorable. Yet they command attention and respect that is beyond my comprehension—the kind of attention and respect, not to put too fine a point on it, I should like to have for my own stories.
Some years ago, in the 1990s, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a letter to the New York Times insisting that I be fired, for reasons of political incorrectness, from my job as editor of the American Scholar. Since that time I have kept a cold spot in my heart for Miss Oates, whose dark and unrewarding novels I gave up reading long before that letter appeared. So imagine my pleasure when not long ago I read that Gore Vidal said that the three most depressing words in the English language are Joyce Carol Oates. Little as I normally care for Vidal’s toad-tongued wit, this time the old scold, our cut-rate Voltaire, scored heavily with me.
A critic I much disliked, though he never criticized any of my writing, was Alfred Kazin. One day I learned that he had had a heart attack. I remember telling my wife that I genuinely detested Kazin, his schmaltziness, his phony virtuousness, the meanness that was the other side of his literary and political sentimentality, but that, nevertheless, I didn’t want him to die. My wife replied that she quite understood. “You merely want him to have more stress in his life,” she said. Yes, I thought, exactly, I hoped that Kazin had had painful divorces, children who despised him, a plethora of professional and personal disappointments. When Alfred Kazin’s Journal was posthumously published, it turned out all my hopes had come true. Kazin’s life was a one-man domestic dystopia: he paid heavy alimony, was charged with wife-beating, had children who found him impossible—the full catastrophe. I read his Journal with a little marimba band gaily playing in my heart.
Competitiveness, envy, Schadenfreude—you and me, I fear, will never be quits. Why should we? I am, after all, a writer.
Why Read Biography?
(2016)
When I come upon artists, philosophers, scientists, statesmen, athletes I admire, I find myself interested in their backgrounds, which is to say in their biographies, in the hope of discovering what in their past made possible their future eminence. I find it more than a touch difficult to understand anyone so incurious as not to have a similar interest.
I have myself written scores of biographical essays, but never a full-blown biography. I once took a publisher’s advance to write the biography of the American novelist John Dos Passos, a figure now slowly slipping into the vast limbo inhabited by the once famous but now nearly forgotten. I was thirty-two, John Dos Passos was then seventy-three, and would die a year later. After I had signed my publishers contract, I wrote to inform Dos Passos that I hoped to write his life, and sent him some samples of my own published writing. He wrote back to say that he would be pleased to help me in any way he could, though he would prefer I put my liberal politics in moth balls and promise never again to use the word “explicate.”
Three great facts, or so I thought, dominated John Dos Passos’s life. The first is that he was born a bastard—but, an interesting twist here, an upper-class bastard, the son of a man who was a successful American lawyer and of a mother who was a Virginian of high social standing. He, John Dos Passos, went to Choate under the name John Madison, and thence to Harvard. The second fact is that he wrote a, if not the, Great American novel, USA by title, a work using modernist techniques to explore the pressures that society puts on men and women of all social classes; it is a book that, when I first read it at the age of nineteen, greatly moved me. The third fact is that Dos Passos underwent a strong political conversion, from a man who in 1932 voted for William Z. Foster, the Communist Party candidate for President, to a man of deeply conservative principles and views. The work of the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War, prepared to kill the innocent to gain their ends, not only changed Dos Passos’s politics forever but turned such old friends as Ernest Hemingway against him.
A splendid biography of John Dos Passos was there to be written, but, alas, I never wrote it. Life, in the form of demands too elaborate and dull to go into here, intervened, and I was forced to that most odious act known to the professional writer: having to return my publisher’s advance. Others have since written biographies of John Dos Passos, but none, to my mind, altogether successfully. Dos Passos’s own fame is perhaps now too far faded for anyone of high literary power to take on the task of writing a first-class biography of him. Not that, let me add, at thirty-two I was myself likely to have been up to the job. I have come to believe that at the heart of any fully realized literary work, apart perhaps from satire and parody and lyrical poetry, is honoring the complexity of the subject, and in the case of John Dos Passos I am fairly certain that I could not have done so at that relatively early age.
A successful biography is at a minimum one that conveys what the world thinks of its subject, what his closest family and friends think of him, and, finally, crucially, and sometimes most difficult to obtain, what he thinks of himself. I have lately read two excellent biographies of Cicero (106–43 BCE), one by the German classicist Manfred Fuhrman, the other by the nineteenth-century French classicist Gaston Boissier, and what makes both biographies especially good is the large cache of 900 or so of Cicero’s letters that have survived along with another hundred or so letters from his correspondents. These letters reveal Cicero in all the pride, fear, hope, disappointment, vanity, and grandeur of a man playing Roman politics at the highest level. Cicero’s letters, marshalled into pertinent order by brilliant biographers, bring him to life in a far more intimate way than any other figure in classical antiquity.
I read these biographies of Cicero, along with some among his voluminous writings, because Cicero is one of the hundred or so key figures in western history, and my ignorance of the details of his life is one of the many thousand gaps in my ow
n knowledge of that history. I read them because one of the pleasures of biography is reading about men and women who played the game of life for higher and more dramatic stakes than one has oneself, or is ever likely to do. I read them also because they reveal Cicero to be perhaps the first example of the intellectual in politics—he is the political intellectual par excellence—a subject of long fascination to me, an intellectual not in politics.
Cicero was a human type of the highest interest: the man riven by the division between his ideals and his personal ambition. He felt himself drawn to the Roman aristocracy yet put off by its insolence, felt the natural conflict between the temperament of the man of letters and the politician (for he was both). He was alternately fascinated and disgusted by politics, regularly retreating from them to his library at his villa at Tusculum, then drawn back to the fray at Rome. He was a man who knew disappointment in a mistaken marriage, and tragedy in the loss of a beloved daughter when she was thirty. He left a bibulous son, in whom his family line petered out. Attempting always to avoid extremes, longing for a return to the glories of the Roman Republic, about which he may have been guilty of fantasizing, Cicero ended up being killed by Marcus Antonius’s men, who nailed his severed head and the hands that wrote attacks upon Antonius up in the Forum for all to see.
In Gaston Boissier’s brilliant biography, Cicero and His Friends, one is offered dazzling portraits of such figures as the financier Pomponius Atticus, of whom Boissier writes: “. . . he was the most adroit man of that time, but we know that there are other forms of praise that are of greater value than this.” Of Cicero’s protégé Marcus Caelius Rufus, Boissier writes:
Those cautious and clear-eyed persons, who are entirely taken up with the fear of being dupes, and who always see the faults of others so plainly, are never anything but lukewarm friends and useless allies.
Boissier describes Cicero’s brother Quintus playing the “ungrateful and difficult part of younger brother of a great man.” He provides portraits of leading female figures of the day, including Clodia, the Lesbia of Catullus love poems, of whom it was said that “she danced better than it was proper for an honest woman to do.” These observations on women are capped off by the remark of Cato “that the day that they [women] become your equals they will be your superiors.”
I hope you find some of these remarks about Cicero’s friends and contemporaries as interesting as do I. If you do, I trust the reason is that you share my interest in human character, and in that still, that probably perpetually, mysterious force behind it, human nature. “The proper study of mankind,” as Alexander Pope had it, “is man.” If there is a more interesting subject than human character, I do not know it. Part of its interest derives from its bottomlessness, its inexhaustible variety. Why does one person, despite all the disadvantages dealt him by the lottery of birth, survive, surmount, and go on to achieve greatness, while another, with every advantage allotted to him, stumbles, falls, goes down? Biography is the most promising place to seek out the answers.
Some people read biography to compare the subject’s life with their own. In the cant term, they “identify.” One wonders, though, if this isn’t a crude way of reading biography. I read Peter Green’s biography of Alexander the Great, I promise you, without once thinking of weeping because I had no more worlds to conqueror. Nor did I identify when I read E. F. Benson’s The Life of Alcibiades; instead I marveled at the hijinks of a man who may been the world’s greatest seducer and con artist. I should have to be a fantast of the first water to imagine myself as in any way comparable to such men.
Identifying with historical figures is reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s remarking on the coarseness of identifying with characters in fiction. The best readers, he felt, identified with the artist. By this I take it Nabokov meant that when a character in fiction gets in a tight spot, don’t worry about that character, worry instead about how the artist will get him out of it. One ought to read biographies in roughly the same spirit, with a certain sophisticated detachment, if worrying, then expending that worry not on the life of the subject but on the skill of his chronicler, the biographer, whose task it is to take the measure of the person he is writing about with reasonable exactitude and penetrating judgment, all going to form a persuasive portrait.
Many years ago I read through the five volumes of Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James. As a writer, I cannot say that I identified with James, a man infinitely more subtle than I. But I did, I like to think, take a few lessons from Henry James. James, some of you will recall, wrote a story called “The Lesson of the Master,” in which a famous novelist advises a young writer not to marry because it will impede his art. When the wife of the famous novelist dies, he turns round and marries the woman the young writer loves. Might the lesson here be that the best advice is not to take advice, at least in matters of the heart?
Edel’s biography provides the best account I know of the quotidian life of the professional writer. The biographer recounts James’s dealings with editors and publishers, his hopes for popularity and commercial success (“I can stand lots of gold,” James once remarked, though little enough of it came his way through his writing), above all his loneliness and the almost certain loneliness of anyone who chooses, as James did, the spectatorial, as opposed to the active, life.
Henry James was both fascinated and repelled by biography. He himself wrote a biography of the American sculptor William Wetmore Story. The biographical question plays out in many of James’s own stories, and in none more than in the story called “The Figure in the Carpet.” The narrator of that story seeks to discover the animating force behind the work of an older novelist he admires named Hugh Vereker. Verker allows that there is such a force—“It’s the very string that my pearls are strung on,” he tells the narrator—but he isn’t about to reveal what it is. Another literary critic, a man named George Corvick, claims after long effort to have discovered it, this repeated theme that turns up ever so subtly in Vereker’s work, “something like the figure in a Persian carpet.” Before revealing it in a book he is writing, Corvick dies in a carriage accident. He had revealed the great secret to his wife, but she, too, is not telling. Vereker himself dies, and the great underlying force propelling his work is never discovered, which, one senses, is fine with Henry James.
The metaphor of the figure in the carpet is wonderfully suggestive, causing us to look into our own lives to discover if there is some repeated pattern or theme that has guided our destiny, made us succeed or fail, brought us contentment or depression. Galen Strawson, the English philosopher, in a chapter of a recent book called Life-Writing, thinks otherwise, holding that life is what we make of it, free fall, essentially patternless, leaving us all in the condition not of Persian but of shag rugs. Is this so? If it is, does this not leave us little more than mere bugs in a vast rug of a design beyond all possible fathoming?
About Henry James’s strange story one thing is clear: James sides not with his narrator but with his invented novelist Hugh Vereker. In another, more widely known story, “The Aspern Papers,” James writes with contempt about the prying biographer ready to do anything to acquire the letters of a long-dead famous poet—by some thought to be Lord Byron—from his now elderly lover. Such is the want of scrupulosity on the part of the biographer that James has one of the other characters in the story call him a “publishing scoundrel.”
Late in life Henry James burned a vast quantity of his letters, an act meant to discourage any possible biographers of his own life. An empty gesture, as it turned out, for so charming were James’s letters that everyone else saved those he sent to them, with the consequence that the University of Nebraska, which is publishing all his extant letters, is this year to bring out its tenth volume of Henry James letters, and this volume goes up only to 1880. James lived on to 1916.
Leon Edel, who much admired Henry James, nonetheless could not resist Freudianizing him. Edel’s rather orthodox Freudianism
mars but does not destroy his five-volume work. He does not lock James into an Oedipus Complex. (“Greek myths covering private parts” was Vladimir Nabokov’s characterization of Freud’s thought.) But he does make great hay out of what he takes to be the sibling rivalry between Henry James and his equally brilliant if utterly different older brother William, even hinting at homoerotic feeling for William on the part of Henry. Was the rivalry truly there? My own view is that the two brothers were so different in their mental makeup—the intellectual note sounding most strikingly in William, the aesthetic in Henry—that rivalry wasn’t really at issue. They played different games, philosophy for William, literature for Henry. Comparing the two is rather like asking who was the better athlete, Michael Jordan or Roger Federer.
Leon Edel does show remarkable restraint—for a Freudian, that is—in not prying into Henry James’s sex life. So far as is known James never had physical relations with anyone, male or female. Anticipating those later biographers and critics who would write in a less decorous time, Edel, considering the possibility that James was homosexual, noted that there is no firm evidence to suggest that Henry James ever engaged in acts of homosexuality, and lets it go at that.
Biographers who came after Leon Edel, alas, have not. For some among them Henry James’s homosexuality is presumed; his active pursuit of his true sexual nature is assumed to have been restrained only by his timidity. (“The art of the biographer,” James wrote, “that devilish art, is somehow practically thinning; it simplifies while seeking to enrich.”) The Master, a biographical novel by the Irish writer Colm Toibin portrays homosexuality as at the center of James’s life, and has him ogling handsome male servants. The problem here is not just a case of mistaken identification, but the effect this figures to have on skewering the interpretation of James’s novels and stories in a homosexual direction. Henry James, were he alive, would have been appalled.
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