Ultimately Fiction: Design in Modern American Biography (review)

176 biography Vol. 6, No. 2 Dennis W. Petrie, Ultimately Fiction: Design in Modern American Biography. West Lafayette, Indiana; Purdue University Press, 1982. 240 pp. $10.95. Ultimately Fiction is compelling, important, provocative, thoughtful, and steeped in the scholarship of biography. Unfortunately, it is also flawed in terms of its organization and its thesis. Dennis Petrie's stated purpose is "to examine both utilitarian and aesthetic problems and possibilities in the field of modern American literary biography" (p. 20), an objective he carries out by setting up three subtypes of literary biography followed by an analysis of a representative book for each category . Unlike Paul Murray Kendall, James L. Clifford, or Leon Edel, pioneer critics of biography who established classification systems for all kinds of biography, Petrie deals only with the life-stories of writers, which he divides into the following three categories based on the biographer 's approach to both the life and the literary works of his subject: "Monument of the Famous Writer," "Portrait of the Author as a Man or Woman," and "Vision of the Artist." For Petrie, the "Monument," as exemplified by Joseph Blotner's Faulkner, lacks artistry because it focuses too narrowly and intensely on the author's life, supported by monumental detail rather than by a selective pattern of interpretation. The "Portrait," typified by Andrew Turnbull's Scott Fitzgerald and W. A. Swanberg's Dreiser, fails to tie its artistry to the subject's works and lacks a balance between the author as writer and the author as a real person, according to Petrie. He sees the "Vision," illustrated by Leon Edel's Henry James, as the only category worthy of high praise for its matchless combination of design and truth—its attention to the design of its subject's life, both as a person and as a writer of famous books, and to both the literal and figurative truth ofthat life. Petrie's classifications have the strength of clarity and intelligence; they are intended "purely for illustration, not limitation" and the author advises that his "study is intended to be heuristic, not in any way exhaustive" (p. 24). On the other hand, the classifications and their subsequent illustration by only four biographies seem finally too narrow. The book is limited to biographies of twentieth-century male novelists, although occasional references are made to other works. Aside from its scope, the major problem with this book's organization is that too little space is devoted to actual analysis of the four representative biographies: of 240 pages, fifty-eight, just under one-fourth, are notes, bibliography, and index. The remaining three-fourths of the text reviews 177 is often over-organized, each chapter subdivided into introduction and from four to eight sub-sections. The opening chapter, for instance, spends too much time setting the reader up for what is to follow. After a discussion of truth, definitions of biography, and an historical overview of biographical criticism from Plutarch to the present, the author finally gets around to his own theories, which are surrounded by extended quotations and excessive support. Petrie's intelligent and original assertions are unnecessarily buttressed by less important and often tangential references to others. Much of this problem doubtedlessly stems from Ultimately Fiction's origins as Petrie's 1979 doctoral dissertation at Purdue University. The second chapter, "The Biographer's Design," begins to develop an interesting and valid argument about Steven Millhauser's mockbiographical novel, Edwin Mullhouse, which leads to the conclusion that literary biography should strive to balance its attention to detail and fidelity to truth with fiction's sense of story and stylistics. Instead of devoting a complete chapter to Millhauser's important book, however , the author, after quoting at length from the novel, again imparts a feeling of merely setting up without development when he writes, about a particular passage from Edwin Mullhouse, "diction, sentence structure and variety, tense, rhythmical movement of the language, metaphor" could be analyzed in Millhauser's novel. Not only does Petrie not have space to actually analyze the passage at all, thus undercutting his important point about the novel and biography, but he leads the reader to wonder why he quoted it in the...