Beyond Belief: The Real Life of Daniel Defoe, and: The Bi-Sexuality of Daniel Defoe: A Psychoanalytic Survey of the Man and His Works (review)

John Martin's book is aptly titled, since his revisions of the standard biography of Defoe are literally incredible. For Martin, Defoe's "real life" encompasses a dramatically active bisexuality that previous biographers have ignored or somehow not noticed. Although he depends upon the standard modern accounts of Defoe's life by Frank Bastian, James Sutherland, Paula Backscheider, and Maximillian Novak for his basic narrative, Martin claims that his research has uncovered situations and relationships that they neglected. As he presents them, many of these claims are certainly detailed and circumstantial, since Martin has carefully gone over such records as exist of Defoe's complicated personal life and shady financial dealings. He seems to have a firm grasp of the documentation surrounding most of the unresolved events and gaping lacunae in Defoe's life.

Martin is a serious biographer, intent upon revising radically the traditional understanding of Defoe's life. I do not doubt his sincere intentions and his obviously strong convictions. One can only wish that his racy version of Defoe's life were convincing or indeed plausible, since such a revised sense of Defoe's sexuality would open new approaches to his life and work, although I am not convinced that a hidden private truth entirely trumps the public life of a writer like Defoe. But in the end virtually all of Martin's sensational assertions about Defoe, especially his homosexuality, are conjectural and even fanciful, most based on assumptions about direct links between his fiction and his life that strike me as untenable. "If it is assumed that Daniel's central characters are real life figures," writes Martin early on (48), and just about all his claims derive from that extraordinary assumption. I can readily grant that novelists draw upon their own experience in their writing (and Defoe did hint in the preface to Serious Reflections ... of Robinson Crusoe that Robinson Crusoe was an allegory of his life), but Martin's biography depends upon a literal, single-minded reading of Defoe's fictions as directly and fully autobiographical. And he cannot prove that they are; he can only assert.

Some of the time, Martin's speculations involve the more or less harmless imaginings that popular biographers are fond of: dramatized and fanciful aspects of Defoe's life and experiences. For example, in evoking Defoe's childhood Martin imagines a strict Presbyterian household in which punishment involved "banishment to a bedroom from which the only escape would be out of the window and across a rooftop to a neighbouring lane. Through an open window, Daniel would have heard the shouts of street vendors and the rattle of carriages: signals of excitement and danger which became irresistible to him" (31). But there is a rapid transition in Martin's narrative from quasi-fictional romantic imagining like this to outright and even more sensational fiction with no basis in anything except Defoe's impersonation of female characters in two of his novels some forty years later: "At some time during puberty Defoe realised that he was homosexual" (42). By Martin's reasoning, if Defoe was indeed an adult homosexual he must at some point in his early life have realized that orientation. That logic licenses Martin to indulge in further flashy speculations: as a young man Defoe "must have been sexually active ... His intensity and interests in the unconventional, deprived and depraved would have made him disturbing and attractive to both men and women" (60). Note the sliding towards an unearned certainty in the auxiliary verbs from "must" to "would," as Martin makes something out of what is basically nothing. No smoking gun lingers in any of this...