Literary Biography: Art or Archaeology?

by LOUIS KRONENBERGER

LITERARY biography — the lives of writers — is a form of literature clearly deserving a very judicious survey; yet even within the confines of the English language, there has up to now, so far as I am aware, been no orderly, large-scale history of it. The amount of material, to be sure, is frightening; but at least its all-too-vast lower depths—exhibiting, as they do, stock tendencies and recurrent weaknesses—can be much of the time evaluated on the analogy of the bad apple speaking for the barrelful. And in Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America, Richard D. Altick, the author of The Scholar Adventurers, has gone manfully at the subject, offering a documented, often detailed history from the distant infant days of the Waltons and Fullers to the decade we are living through. He has read “several hundred biographies,” in addition to many nonliterary ones; he has quoted the theorizings, and conceivably the rationalizings, of dozens of biographers; and he has virtually anthologized the critics on the subject, whether they speak in small, specific or in large, general terms. He has himself been critic as well as chronicler; and any names that one might charge him with neglecting can have no vital bearing on how thoroughly he records, or from what a diversity of examples he appraises. Indeed, what his book tends particularly to suffer from is a sense of too-muchness, of a larger framework, a fuller commentary, than the subject seems happy with — whether because, so frequently in the telling, Mr. Altick’s History repeats itself, or because of not enough real substance and significance in the tale. But we might best follow the story first, and discuss its pluses and minuses afterward.

The childhood of literary biography was more backward, the development even slower, than that of biography (the word only dates from the 1660s) itself. Even during the Renaissance, there was small sense of “an essential connection between person and artist”; and beyond that, not just a lack of research methods, but a dearth of research materials. The first native work to matter, Isaak Walton’s famous Lives, has the serious flaw of finding its subjects to be virtually flawless. The first native work to delight, John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, is, as its devotees know, a wonderful ragbag of colored scraps, quaint smut, and glittering hearsay. Thus Ben Jonson

This painting in the blemishes, often without the face, this portraiture-by-anecdote, was to develop during the century to come into a species of biography — or a substitute for it — whether as ana (“Swiftiana,” “Walpoliana”) or as table talk. These blobs, the meager, trivial substance of their own day, have become the flavorers of many later volumes. For, even where it was highbred and cultivated, the eighteenth century developed a very secular spirit and a very gamy taste; and biography, by dishing up a certain number of facts to bear witness to its truth-telling, could insinuate lies and slide effortlessly into fiction. Thus Pope’s publisher antagonist, Edmund Curll, who was to become posterity’s Unspeakable Curll, ran a factory whose hacks shrugged off truth and snatched at scandal while producing, for a mass audience, full-length biographies of criminals and reformers, actors and slave traders, bluestockings and valets. If Curll’s unsavory life stories were said to have “added a new terror to death,” they and their kind yet constituted a new form of writing and found a new public.

Thus biographers of one kind or another were busy all through the eighteenth century; but it was not till near the end of it that with, as it were, a magnificent pas de deux literary biography both came of age and turned immortal. In a sort of calm classical sunset Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets, and then, in a blazing and transforming sunrise, Boswell wrote the Life of Johnson. “The biographical part of literature,” D๔ Johnson once said, was what he loved most; and, as Mr. Altick remarks, he was “the first important English critic to take biography seriously.” He also approached biography very humanly, setting a few minutes’ talk with a man’s servant above much fusty borrowing from books; and though he himself did no great amount of legwork, he sired Boswell’s method of running “over half of London to track down a single date.” Nor did Johnson create between biography and criticism any really vital connection. But if the Lives of the Poets — some of them brief and perfunctory, others ample and solid, the most vivid of them all (the Richard Savage) written long before the rest — produce a misshapen biographical mound, they constitute in their wit, wisdom, and knowledge of life a great personal monument. Even when Johnson’s style skirts self-parody, he can be a total delight:

A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun; but Pope’s excavation was requisite as an entrance to his garden, and, as some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.

Boswell’s Life of Johnson emerged, as everyone knows, one of the supreme achievements of biography in the very act of revolutionizing its approach. Yet Boswell’s Johnson is decidedly open, as literary biography, to criticism. There isn’t space enough to explore the subject here; but I would myself remark that the Life of Johnson is in one sense incomparable precisely for not being literary biography. It essentially celebrates a great talker, a great eccentric, and a great man; and it does so in a great, indeed a transcending, manner. The fact that much else about Johnson the human being, and infinitely more about Johnson the writer, remained to be said only attests that the book, far from being a biographical model, is simply a masterpiece.

Yet for the future, Boswell’s Life could in important respects serve as a model, and nowhere more than from Boswell’s refusal to make his “tiger a cat,” to sacrifice truth to the proprieties. Had the Life not been so essentially truthful, his hero would not have been so gloriously alive, nor his book, either. But though Boswell, as it were, bequeathed to subsequent biographers the close-up, they (unlike him) went in besides for all kinds of makeup and, where necessary, for false beards and even face-lifting. What the Victorians gave to biography in bulk, they took away in forthrightness. A Carlyle, while overstretching his Hero thesis — “the History of the world is but the Biography of great men” — might yet be a rare protester of how much that was unheroic got inked out by respectability, so that, as he remarked, the only English lives worth reading were those of actors, who had “bidden Respectability good-day.” Indeed, the Victorians not only got rid of warts; they inserted dimples. And the life of writers, in particular, had its dark, unseemly episodes; had not only skeletons, but cowering mad folk, transvestite costumes, and flagellants’ whips in its closets, not to speak of very strange bedfellows in its beds. As it happens, the century’s greatest biographical explosion-inprint concerned the Truth About Carlyle, when in 1882 James Anthony Froude exposed Carlyle’s domestic life and his wife’s peevish martyrdom. It was only, however, in his posthumously published papers that Froude recorded the black-and-blue marks Carlyle’s abusiveness had imprinted on Jane’s arms; and told, apropos of Carlyle’s impotence. how on the morning after the wedding night Carlyle “tore to pieces the flower garden ... in a fit of ungovernable fury.”

And indeed, from a certain legitimate concern for privacy, but much more from a constant dither over impropriety, the opposition to Telling All, or sometimes telling anything, was widespread and often high-placed. As late as 1888, Tennyson could roar:

Only a Burns or a Byron, from having been scandalous while alive, could suffer the full posthumous glare of truth-telling (nor was some of the truth, witness the matter of Byron’s homosexuality, aired at all). As against this, there were Official Biographies innumerable: Edmund Gosse joked that a great man’s obit gave the name of the prospective biographer in the same sentence with the time of the funeral. By treating of real people, biography suffered even worse than fiction from repressive influences. These more than offset any progressive attitudes — the desire to see into the writer and relate the writings to the man; or the need of access to letters, journals, authors’ and family papers. For all too much in the letters and papers was ruthlessly withheld or hacked out; and all too stringent were the conditions the family imposed in exchange for “cooperating.” Worse yet, the family might itself elect to write the biography, requiring, for every bottle of ink it used, a can of whitewash, and muffling all unwelcome facts straight on to the anything-but-bitter end, to the hallowed deathbed scene and the lofty, hortatory last words. (In Hannah More’s case, the last words became secondand then third-to-last, for it took three deathbed scenes for her to die.) Moreover, the subjects of the biographies had themselves all too often touched up and toned down their papers and journals, not just writing for posterity, but rewriting for it as well.

IT WAS a long literary era, decked out with many emblems of Victorianism — endless pilgrimages to Stratford or Abbotsford, Buttery quests for a lock of Byron’s or Wordsworth’s hair, a host of Browning (and other) Societies, a flocking to lectures, in America even more than in England (just as, in terms of familial piety, a Hawthorne’s widow kept pace with a Shelley’s daughter-in-law). There was also the cozy habit of taking a Dickens or even a Shakespeare right into the family. “We don’t say Mr. Shakespeare,” remarked Mrs. Cowden Clarke, “but — darling Willie, dear William, beloved Will.” The most that so sentimental an atmosphere and so fervid an adulation could hope to produce was, in Dr. Johnson’s old phrase, “rather nothing that is false than all that is true.” A few still enjoyable biographies survive from Victorian times — for one example, which Mr. Altick does not mention, Trevelyan’s Macaulay; as well as the best volumes in the compact English Men of Letters series. The great Victorian monument is doubtless the Dictionary of National Biography, begun with Leslie Stephen as editor in 1882, and finished with Sidney Lee in 1900. Its 63 volumes ran to 29,120 lives; its unofficial motto was “No flowers by request.” Walter Pater, tradition has it, “religiously” read each volume from end to end as it appeared (rather obligingly, one would think, for a biographer who himself chose to write Imaginary Portraits).

But to a very considerable degree the overstuffed official biography persisted until the epoch-making publication in 1918 of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Never has England produced a work more destructive of biographical sanctities and human reputations alike. The book was a superb new broom, a new broom that swept dirty, that with gusto and glee piled all the available debris right in the middle of the floor. As a brilliant, lean, selective method, presented in a generally knifesharp, scissors-cold, seductive style, it gave biography a wholly new look, and a new luster into the bargain. The method had its great weaknesses: Eminent Victorians, which is in effect an expose of Victorianism, may be said to falsify the whole in proportion as it illuminates the parts; it is a prosecuting attorney’s moderately dishonest triumph rather than a judge’s wholly disinterested one. Queen Victoria, published three years later, is far finer, not just because Strachey half fell in love with his heroine, but because she invited a sustained tone of comedy, offering Strachey less bite but much delightful tongue-in-cheek, and because (not least to Victoria’s own annoyance) hers was social rather than political power. Though Strachey wrote no literary biography, his work has kinship with it from his being the man of letters much more than the historian. His influence, for a time at least, was bound to be overwhelming, as it was bound in the end to be injurious. He made the pendulum swing to the opposite extreme without making the clock keep really accurate time. He begot — rather unfairly to himself—a decade of debunkers, an ostentatious skepticism, a literature of the toplofty sneer. Yet, if only for what he forever rid biography of, Strachey proved invaluable; and his own kind of artistry and brilliance is, as reading matter, worth whatever it entails.

The other great and almost simultaneous influence on literary biography, as substantive as Strachey’s is structural, was Freud — a lasting influence of great value, though also much given to distorting the whole while straightening out the parts. And when the 1920s moved into the 30s, Marxism laid its soothing fist on this or that writer’s frayed nerves or rumbling belly, at times with undoubted point, but never with any permanence. Since then, it seems to me, no approach like Strachey’s, or gospel like Marx’s or Freud’s, has meant half so much in literary biography as has a tireless, predominantly academic quest of “sources” — a burrowing in libraries, newspaper files, courthouse records, family trunks; a bringing new material to light as a prelude to new theories, symptoms, solutions. (A biographer of Robert Louis Stevenson acknowledged the aid of — to name just a few — the Weather Bureau, the Cunard — White Star Line, A. T. & T., the National Tuberculosis Association, the Coast Guard, and the Pennsylvania Railroad.) What, for biographers today, must add a new terror to death equal to the Unspeakable Curll’s, is the fiendishly mounting source material. Consider the letters alone — 11,000 of Dickens, 12,000 of Henry James, 20,000 of Cardinal Newman, not to mention the 98,721 that Lewis Carroll’s record book says he wrote and received.

All this — taken in conjunction with how many writers’ lives, like Jane Austen’s, are undramatic, or, like Wordsworth’s, have only a briefly dramatic first act — has created new problems for literary biography as a specific form, as a practicable craft. There have certainly been good literary biographies of late — Keats, thanks to W. J. Bate, Aileen Ward, and Douglas Bush, has been particularly fortunate — but too often any fair mating of the scholarly approach (exhaustive research and intensive scrutiny) with the artistic approach (gifts of structure and style and a unified total effect) seems hard to come by and almost a contradiction in aims. “The life and the works,” Leon Edel quotes Henry James as saying, “are two different matters.” And far from proving a successful fusion, literary biography seems increasingly a kind of “problem” half-breed, neither outright biography nor critical biography — neither, essentially, about a man who wrote books nor, essentially, about the books a man wrote. The two species, serving different ends, providing different gratifications, calling forth different endowments, might better draw farther apart than come closer together. To reconstruct, portray, and ably interpret a writer’s life with the craftsmanship associated with a good novel, the showmanship implicit in a good play, can provide notable aesthetic rewards; to concentrate on the full significance and aesthetic value of his writings is a far more cerebral and critical, but a far less aesthetic, job.

In any case, the annals of literary biography seem, all in all, neither very illustrious in terms of an art nor very stimulating in terms of an art form. It is the failure of the form itself to absorb us (as the novel or the drama or even the writing of history does) that suggests why Mr. Altick’s book, however well researched, pleasantly written, and nicely seasoned with anecdote, should prove eminently dippable, but not unthinkably skippable also. For, quite beyond the fact that the masterpieces are so few, there is in literary biography not very much striking or significant development, experiment, mutation. Orderliness has to take over the role of organic form, and vigor do the work of subtler qualities. What the history of literary biography chiefly comes down to is, first, a long and arduous struggle to get unimpededly at the facts; and next, a longer and perhaps never-ending struggle to reshape them into truth.

TODAY — when no blinds are drawn, few holds are barred, and infra-red rays defeat most ancient attempts at concealment — today would surely seem an opportune and benign period for literary biography. Nevertheless, the specialist’s need, the academician’s demand for all the facts, all the clues, all the conjectures tend to overshadow the larger aims and livelier pleasures of biography itself. Narrative values are as much discounted, or as much play second fiddle, in “serious” literary biography as in fiction. Is it perhaps a little strange, and even a little symptomatic, how seldom superior creative writers have attempted literary biography at all? One thinks of Moore’s Byron, Scott’s Dryden, Mrs. Gaskell’s Charlotte Bronte; thereafter, a Trollope’s Thackeray. or a Henry James’s Hawthorne, or in our own day, an Angus Wilson’s Zola is a small-scale work, predominantly critical. In other words, writers with the greatest gift for form and structure, storytelling and style, innovation and experiment are virtually strangers to our story. In terms of revolutionizing procedures, it is difficult to add a third name to Boswell’s and Strachey’s (unless we invoke Freud’s, for his making parentage, once a few pages in Chapter I, now motivate entire biographies). A biography would seem to take firm shape, or indeed acquire shapeliness, where it boasts a special approach or visible theme, as with A. J. A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo, Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary, or Justin Kaplan’s recent Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. Otherwise, matters boil down to a number of very good biographies — the first volume of Professor Pottle’s Boswell is the latest and one of the best — all well laid out in their way, but asserting no very distinctive patterns and articulating no really instructive laws. Nor should patterns and laws much matter, provided the gifted and skillful biographer can satisfy his need to select, refine, reorder, omit in an age where the stress is all on digging up new facts, on dredging up new solutions or — better yet — new mysteries.