The appetite for lives

...There was comfort to be derived from knowing our fellowcreature, it seems, whether or not the fellow-creature even existed...

...Certainly, the unsophisticated procedures of the medieval chroniclers have been discredited for centuries whereas something like these same procedures remain evident in the least stimulating of contemporary biographies...

...Johnson come immediately to mind...

...That the reader of biographies expected to find "the History of particular Mens Lives," in Dryden's phrase, is now redundant and is worth saying only because for a long time the reader of novels had identical expectations...

...Once the novel imitated biography...

...The appetite for lives MARK TAYLOR "THE CONVERSATION of authors is not so good as might be A imagined," Hazlittremarked, "but, such as it is (and with rare exceptions) it is better than any other.'' Hazlitt assumed authors to be innately more interesting than anyone else, and in calling their conversation "better," he meant primarily not that it was more profound, or sprightly, or witty, or urbane, but that it was more revelatory, that it gave us the authentic author as his works would not because of his apparatus of selfcensorship...

...This would hardly agree with the prudery, and somewhat ostentatious claims of authorship...

...In the confidence and unreserve of private intercourse," Hazlitt continued, "they are more at liberty to say what they think...

...Jonathan Wild, the Great...

...among non-literary figures, Douglas Mac Arthur, Liv Ullmann, and Martha Mitchell...

...When things are sequentially intelligible we understand them, but sometimes understanding is arrived at through the imposition of sequential intelligibility...

...In all parts of Biography," Dryden wrote, "Plutarch equally excell'd...

...The idea that fiction is, or once was, mimic biography isn't so extravagant as it may seem...

...Joyce and Woolf found the significance of lives not in sequence of events but in "epiphanies" or "random moments...

...For Professor Edel, however, the recognition is a challenge and an opportunity, not a limitation...

...What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition...

...My comparative estimates of the worth of these volumes extend along a very short arc of judgment...

...Perhaps it is only coincidence, but also in the eighteenth century, when biography was reaching maturity, prose fiction was maturing into the novel...

...or telling the story in the first person voice of one of its participants and pretending to limit his knowledge and insights accordingly...

...Historians probably understand the dangers of a too-easilyarrived-at sense of causality better than most biographers...

...and much more recently, Walton's collected Lives had appeared in 1670...

...Collectively, however, despite their limited scope, these volumes call attention to the enormous appetite that exists these days for biography...

...For a while, perhaps, the comfort was greater if he did not exist, as the popularity of novels far exceeded that of biographies...

...Lawrence, and the author of the other is Anthony Burgess...

...now, biography, if it is to regain our trust and perhaps if it is to survive, must imitate the novel—that is, take the direction the novel took when it liberated itself from the conventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...

...titles, and with minor variation or none it is repeated ad infinitum: The Life of Mr...

...For some biographers, mere compilation of data remains the biographical method...

...Attempts, here by an inspired Speaker, there by an uninspired Babbler, to deliver himself...

...of the grand secret wherewith all hearts labour oppressed: the significance of Man's Life...

...Boswell diffidently pretends that his great work may be unable to satisfy the very high public expectations of it, but he does not find it necessary to justify the very activity of biography-making...

...Two such conventions are narrative coherence and titles...

...There is, perhaps, a posture of essential humility beneath this refusal to select and arrange: who am I, the biographer asks, to interpret for you...

...Frequently biographies begin with descriptions of the place of the subject's birth and of the two or three generations of his family preceding him...

...Carlyle could not have known how hard Boswell worked to make Johnson so exceptionally "Johnsonian...

...Of early English novels the one least linear in structure and most suspicious of narrative coherence is probably The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a title that shows Sterne's residual commitment to biographical convention...

...from the highest category of epic or dramatic Poetry, in Shakespeare or Homer, down to the lowest of froth Prose in the Fashionable Novel...

...The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom...

...It is the case, I believe, that although equally ancient in anticipation (by Plutarch and Suetonius, say, and by the Greek romancers Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius—all from the first three centuries A.D., though proto-biographies and protonovels can be argued from much earlier periods), in the eighteenth century both the biography and novel determine and solidify the conventions that will govern them long after...

...Then, mainly in the present century, something happened: the dubious premises behind narrative coherence were discovered—and by me novelists, not the biographers...

...The novelist tries to have it both ways when he claims subjectivity of interpretation: using phrases such as "It was told to me" and "Long ago I first heard the story of...

...In the latter instance, of course, the particular men were not "real," but that obvious difference should not obscure the fact that fictional realism derived in part from the novel's imitating, and then perfecting, the conventions of biography...

...Commonweal: 22...

...He writes that all of the artists, "cubists, vorticists, impressionists, and the other innovators of our time sought to put on canvas living subjects created out of new visions of reality...

...None of these biographical essays rests on original research, I believe, and most of the authors are not regarded as special authorities on their subjects...

...It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her...

...The contributors to Telling Lives (Justin Kaplan, Doris Kearns, and Barbara Tuchman among them) have all written essays that are interesting pendants to their biographical work, but only Leon Edel confronts theoretical objections to biography of the sort I have been sketching...

...Let any one bethink him how impressive the smallest historical/art may become, as contrasted with the grandest fictitious event...

...This confidence shows that biography had arrived and may be contrasted with the defensiveness that Milton's nephew Edward Phillips had shown a century earlier in his life of his celebrated uncle (1694): "Of all the several parts of history, that which sets forth the lives, and commemorates the most remarkable actions, sayings, or writings of famous and illustrious persons . . . as it is not the least useful in itself, so it is in highest vogue and esteem among the studious and reading part of mankind.'' A century later, this would be generally agreed, and no one would have to say it...

...by and large the biographers remain unaware of the discovery...

...it is a state that we may call imagined gratification of the Guildenstern instinct since Carlyle echoes Hamlet's accusation to that worthy: "You would pluck out the heart of my mystery...

...What are all these but so many mimic biographies...

...sometimes place and persons merge as generations are traced back farther, to the family's settling in the area...

...Carlyle was a nononsense fellow (so he thought) for whom the method of plucking out hearts was itself no mystery: it consisted largely of the amassing of facts...

...A secret myth," he writes, "as well as a manifest myth...

...I've no idea whether more biographies are now published than novels, but I do know people whose preference .in reading has switched from the novel to the biography, and I think it is worth asking why this is so...

...They had all, he continues, "done exactly what I am saying the biographer must now do: they sought to go behind the facade, to penetrate the mask.'' Here, for once, is a biographer on whom the lessons of modernism have not been lost, who realizes that modern art calls into question the truth of all traditional forms of organization (including narrative), not only imaginative ones...

...As for the definite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth...

...Nevertheless, literary modes, like other categories, tend to be defined by the finest achievements they contain, and therefore Boswell's Life of Johnson and to a lesser though still considerable degree Johnson's own Lives of the Poets insist that English biography reached maturity in the eighteenth century...

...Hie books are helpful introductions to their subjects' lives and, as the titles say, "worlds...

...Cavendish finished his Life of Cardinal Wolsey about the same time...

...The History of Henry Esmond, Esq...

...If I claim to be especially pleased by Bradley on Morris and Priestley on Dickens, I call attention, in the first instance, to my earlier ignorance of the variety of Morris's achievement, and in the second, to my delight that what is familiar about Dickens can be so freshly and compassionately stated...

...that will be all except, usually, that each moment is allowed to justify each previous moment and to necessitate each subsequent one...

...Then the subject is born and there follow, in Ruskin's phrase, the "three great divisions—essentially those of all men's lives...

...How inexpressibly comfortable to know our fellow-creature," wrote Carlyle, "to see into him, understand his goings-forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he vie ws it," until finally we "thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on...

...The reader's expectations, for example, on beginning a work in either mode became quite specific, and had consequently to be acknowledged in a way they had not been before...

...But it is unfair to chide a book for not doing what it does not pretend or attempt to do...

...is hidden within every creative life"—it is this secret myth, ignored bj traditional portraitists like Rembrandt, that modern painters, expose—"and, in the gestures of a politician, the strategies of a general, the canvases and statues of art, and the life-styles of charismatic characters, we may discover more than biography has ever discovered in the past...

...It is a good form for...

...There are hundreds more...

...The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit...

...I will kindly not name the most grotesque examples in my mind of the swollen lives whose authors have been unable to ignore any letter, journal jotting, or anecdote—however trivial, repetitious, immaterial to anything—and equally unable to subordinate these documents to any sensible sort of plan...

...I have discussed above the problem with this assumption in biography, and I shall return to it, but it is worth noting that in theory the novel offers a solution to the whole problem since, if we are willing to accept the novelist's invention of events and persons, we should be willing to accept his invention of the relationships among them...

...Like biographies, traditional novels demand the reader's willingness to accept the interrelatedness of events in someone's life whether that life is real or imagined...

...Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries one would be hard put to distinguish great numbers of Commonweal: 20 novels from biographies on the basis of their titles...

...If I claim to be somewhat disappointed by Graves on Lawrence and Burgess on Hemingway, I mean to emphasize that, after all, the subject of one is T.E...

...Professor Edel describes a recent exhibition of portraits done by modern painters at the National Portrait Gallery in London...

...It is also worth asking what biography as a distinct literary form is and does, and whether it has, or should have, evolved much over the last couple of centuries...

...Whatever one holds, the volumes in this interesting series from Scribners (which have been appearing for some years now and include titles on Austen, Pepys, Wilde, and numerous others) are unlikely to offer much support since they illuminate their subjects' lives by neither their works nor their conversations...

...This rapture, occasioned particularly by contemplation of Bos well's Life of Johnson, the "one good Biography in the English language," is perhaps shared from time to time by most regular consumers of biography...

...the days of youth, of labour, and of death...

...The facts of a man's life, on the one hand, and the power of the biog18 January 1980: 19 rapher's imagination, on the other, are related approximately as Nature to Art, respectively* in this formulation of Oscar Wilde's at the beginning of "The Decay of Lying...

...It may be, however, that the problems of biography are illuminated less by'historical writing than by fiction...

...Traditional biography is a species of narrative in which, as in any species of narrative, a succession of events is recounted, and in which, moreover, a causal relationship is assumed to exist among these events...

...It is not to be found in Nature herself...

...Among literary figures of whom major lives have recently appeared.Dickens, Conrad, Forster, Hesse, Bernard Berenson, Delmore Schwartz, and (that neplus ultra of biographer's subjects) Dr...

...The Guildenstern instinct clearly arises from the belief that all men have their hidden aspects, which are, nevertheless, under certain circumstances—and perhaps only to certain inquirers—somehow knowable...

...certainly (if temporarily) it allowed biography to win back much of the ground taken over by the novel...

...It's true that we have always wanted to get inside our authors, and if one agrees with Hazlitt, then any biography that gives us an author's conversations, or, indeed, the events of his life, has its obvious uses...

...The point is not, of course, that events are never causally related but that they are not always so, and thus that total narrative coherence, which may be no more a part of the fundamental structure of events than it is a persistent and congenial faculty of the human mind, may be an illusion...

...More often, however, both to readers and writers of biography, the facts of the subject's life, whether or not they have been selected with much care and analyzed with much sensitivity, imply by their chronological order, more than their simple existence, some kind of inherently meaningful design...

...And, ironically, the more disciplined and selective a biographer is—the more intelligent, persuasive, and methodologically advanced, in other words, that he is over the tiresome compiler—the more he may be insisting upon the objective character of what we perceive only because he taught us to...

...My friend Ira Grushow, who has many good and important things to say about biography, suggested to me that, since the makers of modern fiction are in some sense right about the nature of human experience, traditional biography may be doomed (at least if it ever thinks about itself...

...There is, perhaps, in every thing of any consequence," wrote Boswell, "a secret history which it would be amusing to know, could we have it authentically communicated...

...The word "biography" entered the language in 1683—most fittingly in Dryden's Life of Plutarch, himself the man often, and of course subsequently (and not altogether accurately) called the father of biography...

...Felix Holt the Radical...

...Priestley's essay, incidentally, was first published in 1961 and is, so far as I can tell, the only one of the six listed here that was written neither for the "world" series nor within the past two or three years...

...The first installments of his book preceded by three decades The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., which thus comes, however slightly, to resemble a novel...

...Perhaps this ignorance is necessary for self-preservation...

...perhaps it is an advantage, in this respect, that history is an academic discipline, whose practitioners are answerable to each other, while biography is not...

...their books Commonweal- 18 admittedly offer unexceptionable accounts of the facts of lives only, not the significances, and in such a way as to give continuity to the 100 or more illustrations—usually fascinating and often rare—that accompany each volume...

...Taking as vision the biographer's cultivated blindness, we continue in regarding biography as the' 'true'' portrait of a human being...

...On the other hand, if the novelist asks us to accept these invented relationships—for example, by not questioning his right to authorial omniscience—the price he pays is the admission that his story is fiction not truth...

...Carlyle, who as we have seen had considerable disdain for even "the grandest fictitious event,'' asked his reader to' 'consider the whole class of Fictitious Narratives...

...On the other hand, I suspect that today many people would not agree with Hazlitt's analysis but would assert, to the contrary, that the "real'' author is more easily concealed in the life than in the works...

...the point of Ulysses for the modern sensibility is not that an ordinary day can represent microcosmically a man's whole life (such is a premise of medieval allegory) but that even on that 18 January 1980: 21 day chronology is but one—and one of the least interesting, at that—of the ways that Bloom's experiences are organized, just as turning from one page to the next is but one—and finally one of the least effective—of the ways we read that book...

...I don't want to enter into the largely pointless and entirely tedious debate on whether or not contemporary fiction is wasting its and our time, but it is obvious, surely, that no .novelist today can proceed unmindful of the lessons of Ulysses and hope to convince us that he is getting at the truth...

...Mere, perhaps fortuitous successiveness is seen to be, is unquestioningly accepted as, sequence...

...The corollary of our recognizing the novel's shameless imitation of biography is the recognition that the novel exploited and capitalized on the reason for biography's popularity: the reader's Guildenstern instinct...

...Consequently, his essay, though it, too, is a vindication of his own work, might have very large implications—I hope it will have them—for the future of biography...

...By the time Dryden was writing, biography already had roots deep in the English literary tradition: Roper's Life of Sir Thomas More, usually designated the first English biography, evidently circulated in manuscript in the late 1550s (though it was not printed until 1626...