Lives of the Novelists

By Carl Rollyson

Is there a right way to write a literary life? In this collection of columns from the New York Sun, Carl Rollyson explores the relationship between narrative and literary analysis. Should biographies be written in the style and form of novels? How to balance the life and the work? How much literary criticism can a biography absorb into its narrative?

Rollyson proposes a number of apologias for biography-including the thought that in the right hands the literary biography is a continuation of the writer's work and life. In such instances there seems to be a symbiosis between biographer and subject. In other cases, biographies spearhead the rediscovery of important writers. He rejects the idea that literary figures are not good subjects for biography because they are not men and women of action. That literary biography is a kind of strip mining, a pathography laying bare the subject's life to no good purpose is another canard this book demolishes.

The pieces here also expose the genre's weak points: a proclivity for overstatement and excessive length, the failure of biographers to build upon their predecessors' work (Rollyson invents a term-biographology-in order to discuss the biographical tradition).

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 21, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595815920

Carl Rollyson

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1 & 2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

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Copyright © 2005 by Carl Rollyson

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

BIOGRAPHY AND ITS BODY PARTS

BIOGRAPHY AND THE NOVEL (1)

BIOGRAPHY AND THE NOVEL (2)

BIOGRAPHY AND THE NOVEL (3)

THE NOVEL AND BIOGRAPHY (1)

THE NOVEL AND BIOGRAPHY (2)

HOW LITERARY DOES A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY HAVE TO BE? (1)

HOW LITERARY DOES A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY HAVE TO BE? (2)

HOW LITERARY DOES A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY HAVE TO BE? (3)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHER AND SUBJECT (1)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHERAND SUBJECT (2)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHER AND SUBJECT (3)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHER AND SUBJECT (4)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHERAND SUBJECT (5)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHER AND SUBJECT (6)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHERAND SUBJECT (7)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHER AND SUBJECT (8)

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN BIOGRAPHER AND SUBJECT (9)

VULGAR GREATNESS AND THE LITERARY LIFE (1)

VULGAR GREATNESS AND THE LITERARY LIFE (2)

SIZING UP BIOGRAPHY (1)

SIZING UP BIOGRAPHY (2)

BIOGRAPHY AND THE OVERLOOKED WRITER (1)

BIOGRAPHY AND THE OVERLOOKED WRITER (2)

BIOGRAPHY AND THE OVERLOOKED WRITER (3)

BIOGRAPHY AND OVERSTATEMENT

BIOGRAPHY AND UNDERSTATEMENT

BIOGRAPHOLOGY (1)

BIOGRAPHOLOGY (2)

BIOGRAPHOLOGY (3)

BIOGRAPHOLOGY (4)

BIOGRAPHOLOGY (5)

BIOGRAPHOLOGY (6)

BIOGRAPHOLOGY (7)

BIOGRAPHY AND PATHOGRAPHY (1)

BIOGRAPHYAND PATHOGRAPHY (2)

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

Is there a right way to write a literary life? In this collection of my columns from the New York Sun, I explore the relationship between narrative and literary analysis in the lives of novelists. It seems to me—even when the biographer is resistant to the analogy—that biography most resembles the novel. After all, very few biographies have been written in the form of plays or poems.

But should a biography of a novelist be written in the style and form of a novel? How to balance the life and the work? How much literary criticism can a biography absorb into its narrative? That I keep coming back to these questions suggests that there are no answers to suit everyone, and that biographers have employed different stratagems to limn the lives of novelists.

If the questions cannot be definitively answered, exploration of how they are handled will provide, I believe, an enlarged sense of what is possible in literary biography, and what makes the genre an art. Too often reviewers treat biographies as merely conveyers of content—or at best critics consign a single paragraph to praising or blaming the biographer at hand. It seems to me, however, as a practicing biographer, that there are an infinite number of ways of writing literary biography—as many ways as there are of writing novels.

Along the way, I’ve proposed a number of apologias for biography—including the thought that in the right hands literary biography is a continuation of the writer’s work and life. In such instances there seems to be a symbiosis between biographer and subject. In other cases, biographies spearhead the rediscovery of important writers and find new audiences for the writers’ work. I reject the idea that literary figures are not good subjects for biography because they are not men and women of action. The notion that literary biography is a kind of strip mining, a pathography laying bare the subject’s life to no good purpose is another canard my reviews have sought to demolish.

If biographers have learned a good deal from novelists—as Leon Edel has argued—I contend in this book that novelists have learned a good deal from biographers. Indeed, many fine novels have been written as quasi-biographies.

Although my partiality for biography is apparent on every page of this book, the pieces here also expose the genre’s weak points: a proclivity for overstatement and excessive length, the failure of biographers to build upon their predecessors’ work (I have invented a term—biographology—in order to discuss the biographical tradition),

For this book, I’ve arranged my columns—as well as a few pieces first printed in The New Criterion and Magill’s Literary Annual—to form, as nearly as possible, a continuous argument about the nature of literary biography. The issues explored in one column are restated in another, demonstrating, I believe, a developing consciousness of how literary lives are composed.

BIOGRAPHY AND ITS BODY PARTS

Body Parts by Hermione Lee

What’s in a nose? Apparently a good deal when it comes to Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic appendage in The Hours, a film based on a novel by Michael Cunningham, who based his book on Mrs. Dalloway, a novel by Virginia Woolf, who is the central character in both the novel and the movie. Whew! What a provenance for a proboscis!

And therein lies the problem for biography. It is a genre dependent on a multitude of sources—portraits and stories, documents and anecdotes—that make for a fraught chain of evidence. Look hard at any biographical fact, Hermione Lee suggests, and it begins to shimmer, lit up in different ways depending on the biographer.

Biographies can never deliver the whole person. They are made up of body parts—to use the British title of Ms. Lee’s book. Generations of biographers argue over exactly what happened to Shelley’s heart: Did Edward Trelawny really burn his hands rescuing the poet’s organ from the pyre that consumed his drowned body? Or is the story just another of that eccentric’s efforts to preserve the poet for posterity? And was it even a heart that Trelawny snatched in just the way he filched Shelley’s other effects from his intimates? Some accounts suggest the prized part was the poet’s liver.

Virginia Woolf scholars and other adepts of that literary icon have deplored the movie’s portrayal of a beaky, suicidal, humorless writer. Lee, herself a biographer of Virginia Woolf, confesses that the film’s inaccuracies trouble her. Why, she asked the film’s director, was Woolf s suicide shot in sunny June rather than in the bleak months of winter when it actually happened? Because, the director replied, he had Ms. Kidman’s services for only the month of June.

The director might also have said, It’s only a movie. Isn’t it tiresome—all this blather about how novels and films distort history? Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, literature is made to distort history, to transform it into a drama of the author’s own making. If you like your history or biography straight, don’t watch movies or read novels. Anyone who believes that Oliver Stone’s JFK, for example, is history, probably believes in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. What is the point of hammering a Stone?

But those who would stone moviemakers are, Ms. Lee recognizes, possessive about their subjects. The spirit of Edward Trelawny rises when an academic complaining about the Kidman performance remarks that it is treading on her territory. An aghast Michael Cunningham rightly asked how anyone could think of Woolf as territory.

And yet biographers and their readers tend to feel they own their sub-jects—that they can get to the heart of a Woolf, and that anyone who offers a different arrangement of body parts has created a monster. So not only do readers attack moviemakers and biographers, biographers also attack each other, transforming biography into a blood sport.

Trelawny and Mary Shelley struggled over possession of Shelley’s heart. Each account of Chekhov’s death became more elaborate and dramatic, Ms. Lee notes, as his survivors and biographers attempted to resuscitate their own takes on the writer. It is curious, how that word, take—used to describe the camera’s recording of a piece of action—is now also a way of acknowledging the each of us has a take or interpretation, however fleeting or fragmentary.

Janet Malcolm—also known as the biographer’s scourge—shows in Reading Chekhov and in her earlier evisceration of Plath biographers, The Silent Woman, just how fanciful biographers can be. Ms. Lee does much the same, manifesting what a megillah biographers have made of the fact that Jane Austen fainted when she learned that her family was moving to Bath. She plotzed—several biographers surmise—because she dreaded her removal to that vulgar spa town. No, no, writes the contrarian biographer, David Nokes; she got the vapors because she was really not the Jane Austen of legend, the circumspect lady who confined her satire to the page, but actually something of a party girl who passed out with excitement over the prospect of so much diversion.

But did Austen faint? We actually know much less about Jane Austen than her biographers would have us believe, concludes John Wiltshire, whose Recreating Jane Austen Ms. Lee relies on. The fainting story comes from one Austen relative; anything relayed by an Austen has a dubious provenance because the family worked hard at restricting access to her papers and writing their own memoirs and biographies to shape the writer to suit the family’s rather staid image of itself.

Unlike Ms. Malcolm, however, Ms. Lee has not turned state’s evidence, trading her proof of biographers’ malfeasance for immunity. Biographers, no less than moviemakers, are villains in her book. Instead, biographers become rather like Rico and other family embalmers in the HBO series, Six Feet Under. If the biographer is as skillful as Rico, the family and friends come in for a viewing and are amazed at how—even after the gruesome accidents of life—he has captured their loved one’s likeness in a casket.

Of course biographies distort, but that is no argument against biography. Indeed, to say that biographies distort is to say that we have some measure by which to judge that distortion. Thus Ms. Lee draws our attention to what she calls biographical hooks for plausibility such as seems likely and must have been. Such phrases are what biographers try to hang their stories on. And it is very hard to let go of these props, as Ms. Lee shows in discussing novelist Carol Shields’s short Jane Austen biography, which asks: Can she really have fainted, she who in her earliest work mocked extravagant emotional responses, especially those assigned to women? Shields, Ms. Lee reports:

draws attention to the unreliability of the evidence (not securely embedded in eye-witness reports…the story is muddled and riddled with inconsistencies), and notes that unanswered questions remain: Did other choices occur to her? Were other possibilities offered? Still her main line agrees with [Claire] Tomalin’s, that this was a painful uprooting which would have required extraordinary feats of adjustment; she thinks the letters to Cassandra [Austen’s sister] sound merry and expectant and feverishly false, and she agrees with Tomalin that there can be little question that Jane Austen’s rather fragile frame of creativity was disturbed following the move to Bath."

Curiously, Ms. Lee does not comment much on this passage. Why does Shields assume that writers are like their books? Just because Jane Austen mocked extravagant emotional responses in her work does not mean she was not prone to them herself. It is as dangerous to believe that the work can be taken as evidence of a life as to presume that a life can be employed to explain the origins of the work. As a biographer myself, it occurred to me to exclaim, Watch out when Ms. Shields says ‘there can be little question.’ David Nokes, for example, thinks the letters Ms. Shields calls feverishly false are feverishly true.

As Ms. Lee suggests elsewhere in her book, biographies are retrospective constructs, not records of lives that moved forward in contingent fashion. In hindsight, certain events look inevitable, but that is because, Ms. Lee observes, many lives change their shape as we look back on them. Biographies are selective. Some body parts go missing, and biographers have to reconstruct them. A silent

Jane Austen (no correspondence for a month after she arrives in Bath) means to certain biographers that she was still trying to come to terms with her traumatic arrival. No, no, rejoins Mr. Nokes, it means she was having such a good time she had no time to write. Neither interpretation can be conclusive, no matter how many times biographers nose through the evidence and recast their narratives. We cannot know for certain that Austen did not write during that month; what she did pen may have perished.

In the end, what matters is the critical eye and a sense of genre. The critical eye spots the wish fulfilling must have been, and the reader realizes the biographer is trying to play novelist. A viewer endowed with a sense of genre lingers over Nicole Kidman’s prosthesis and realizes it is the moviemaker’s de-Kidmanizing of the movie, defamiliarizing the movie star so that she can play a kind of Virginia Woolf. To complain that Kidman is not a Virginia Woolf s scholar’s idea of Virginia Woolf seems futile to me, especially since there are now—what? a dozen Woolf biographies? (I’ve lost count). And even this breadth of coverage cannot begin to settle once and for all who Virginia Woolf was.

Norman Mailer wrote in Pieces and Pontifications that historians collect thousands of facts and distill them into hundreds and call them history. Movies and plays necessarily truncate biography and history even more—or elongate certain parts a la Kidman. It is the nature of the beast.

BIOGRAPHY AND THE NOVEL (1)

Author, Author by David Lodge

The Master by Colm Tóibín

Felony: The Private History of The Aspern Papers by Emma Tennant

A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art

Henry James: The Imagination of Genius by Fred Kaplan

In the acknowledgments to his nicely nuanced novel David Lodge writes: "A few weeks after I delivered the completed Author, Author to my publishers in September 2003, I learned that Colm Tóibín had also written a novel about Henry James which would be published in the spring of 2004. The also" refers to Emma Tennant’s novel, Felony, subtitled The Private History of The Aspern Papers, which Lodge first became aware of in November 2002. So as not to be distracted or influenced by a work he gathered centered on James’s relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, Lodge decided not to read Felony or reviews about it while working on his own novel. He concludes his acknowledgments with the tantalizing line, I leave it to students of the Zeitgeist to ponder the significance of these coincidences.

I am no expert on the Zeitgeist. As a biographer, though, I look for sources. Although Lodge provides a bibliography and claims that his biggest single debt is to Leon Edel, he also mentions, among a listing of other sources, that he profited particularly from Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (1998). A private life of Henry James? What could that mean? Surely that is a title more suited to a novel. Emma Tennant’s subtitle is clearly meant to echo Gordon’s, and Tennant forthrightly identifies Gordon’s primacy in the acknowledgments to Felony.

Gordon, I believe, has a particular appeal for novelists because she writes about evidence that has disappeared. Her mission is to reveal what Henry James wanted buried: the precise meaning of his relationships with Minnie Temple, the inspiration for many of his finest fictional characters, and with Constance Feni-more Woolson, the grand niece of James Fenimore Cooper, an author herself. Woolson would later commit suicide—perhaps because James was not willing to share more of his life with her. Gordon follows Leon Edel’s line that James felt he was to blame for Woolson’s death: "The very urgency of his repeated denials of responsibility calls attention to