Life’s Illusions: The “Art” of Critical Biography

“I do not disparage archives,” wrote Leon Edel, “I simply groan when I see one.”¹ It was a groan that resounded through his generation. The accidental accumulations of a life left an “imperfect paper trail,” all “gaps and gabble,” wrote Paul Murray Kendall; Justin Kaplan noted that they were also “loaded with duplicities and evasions.”² For Paul Mariani, what lay in the archives was only “words transcribed, written, uttered, words, words, and more words, which the biographer must shape and select and reorder, until a figure begins again to live in our imagination.”³

These biographers, men recreating the lives of men, rejected the certainties of positivism. Biography was more literary than empirical—not in thrall to the archive but transcending it. The biographer’s mission was to lift his subject from the cluttering detritus of his surroundings, to reach towards new levels of psychological understanding and find the “life-myth” that gave him meaning,⁴ to mimic the “sequential heart-beat of a life,”⁵ to spin the “illusion of a life,”⁶ or at least to offer “a plausible, inevitably idiosyncratic reconstruction.”⁷ Conscious that their elusive, mysterious goal, the “essence of a man,” lay beyond their reach, biographers regarded the archives with resignation or disdain, as intractable raw material to be pressed into the service of art.

If the “gabble” of the archive must be suppressed in their narratives, so, too, must the chaotic tangle of daily life itself be ruthlessly pruned and strategically re-ordered. The biographer should certainly, wrote Kendall, “thrust into his reader’s ears the noisy crosscurrents of man’s passage through time, wet his tongue with the salty murk of reality.” But he should make that “passage through time” intelligible by grouping scattered happenings and building them into a coherent narrative of unfolding events. Thematic groupings were vital to the intelligibility of a life, yet on no account should they “block or deform the sweep of chronology.”

In particular, Kendall decreed that thematic groupings could not be “deployed like the topics of an expository essay—exposition is the enemy of biography, dead tissue cumbering a living organism.” Though biography was produced out of engagement between the “brute materials” and the biographer’s “shaping intelligence,” any tendency towards lecturing, speculation, and overt comment should be ruthlessly excised.⁸ To make the reflective processes of the biographer visible would destroy the art of biography. Analysis must proceed, as Peter Cochrane has more recently expressed it, “by stealth”: structured into the narrative itself.⁹ It is a strategy that serves the creator as much as the subject. If the biographer’s transcendent understandings are to carry conviction, their intellectual underpinnings may not be exposed to critical review. Concealment of analytic and empirical labor placed these biographers in a position of magisterial, mysterious omnipotence—an illusion of which they were utterly aware and in which they were utterly complicit.

I do not share their quest, but I envy their assurance. Critical feminist biography pursues different paths and not only because the object of the quest is rarely a “man.” Following the linguistic turn and the “death of the subject,” few of us would so readily dismiss the fragments that lie in the archive, what historian Inga Clendinnen has termed the “gnomic, refractory remnants of past sensibilities,” as “gaps and gabble” which the biographer must exploit, transcend, and suppress so as to create the “illusion” of a life and self.¹⁰ They are, rather, the object of enquiry, the site of self-representation and evidence of the cultural narratives amongst which a sense of self may be forged. We will not readily forgive—let alone claim—the artistic license that extols an “illusion” of identity, encouraging the erasure of evidence of its constitution. Through such erasures, patriarchal hegemonies have been sustained. Critical discourse deconstructs, rendering the labor of creation visible and therefore open to critique—and, perhaps, to change.

Yet as Sheila Kineke has observed, feminist biographers have found it difficult to slough off the convention of silencing the biographer’s process while preserving a semblance of “truth.” Though feminist biographers...