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ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 definitive interpretations of representative modern novels. I endorse with enthusiasm his theoretical presuppositions and feel that they require his kind of forthright proclaiming of them in an era when critics too often dismiss the humane and humanistic implications of literature as irrelevant and unimportant. The general tenor of his book may well have charted the direction that the best critics and scholars will follow in the 1990s. Frederick P. W. McDowell University of Iowa The Biographer's Art Jeffrey Meyers, ed. The Biographer's Art: New Essays. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1989. χ + 184 pp. $30.00 A COMPANION TO JEFFREY MEYERS'S The Craft of Literary Biography (1985), in which the contributors wrote of their own work, stressing the nuts and bolts of biography, The Biographer's Art is meant to respond to Leon Edel's call "for serious criticism of life writing" by offering "both a history of the genre and a substantial analysis of great biographies from the eighteenth century to the modern period." The promised history is merely implicit—in the selection of canonical texts for analysis: Donald Greene on Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, Maximillian E. Novak on James Boswell's Life of Johnson, Millicent Bell on Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians , A. O. J. Cockshut on A. J. A. Symons's Quest for Corvo, Phillip F. Herring on Richard EUmann's James Joyce, Meyers himself on George Painter's Marcel Proust, and Eugene Goodheart on Edel's Henry James. The essays more or less share the assumption, as Meyers puts it, that "life-writers follow the same process as fiction writers and create their own significant works of art." Thus masterworks of biography invite esthetic criticism; each contributor attempts not only to describe but to judge the artfulness of the given text. The results in the main are very impressive; this is among the best of the books on biography that have recently been pouring from the presses. First, however, a few words on the weaker essays. Near the end of a bland and unduly timorous account of the reception of James Joyce (in its two editions) and EUmann's spinoffs (The Letters, Giocomo Joyce), Herring remarks: "Criticizing EUmann's biography of Joyce, as some of us have done, can hardly dent its greatness, for we are like a few small mice nibbling around a royal wedding cake." If Herring is a mouse, as it were, then Meyers is alternately a pit bull, 88 Book Reviews in his snarly and gratuitously personal attacks on some who have dared to doubt the perfection of Marcel Proust, and a lapdog, in his adulation of Painter, whose merits come to seem more dubious for the very vehemence of his admirer's panegyric. By contrast, the other essays in this volume bring to bear a scrutiny that detects weaknesses in the biographies under examination but that finally does them more credit than any amount of uncritical praise. In two cases, in fact, the generic credentials of the biography itself are challenged. "It is magnificent," says Greene of Savage, "but is it biography?" A serious doubt arises from Greene's exposure of Johnson's departures from the ascertainable facts of his subject's life. Although Johnson is often proclaimed a progenitor of the genre, his most substantial biography might more properly be understood as a crypto-autobiography. "A much more plausible thesis is that it is Johnson's theory of biography [especially in Rambler No. 60] rather than his practice that entitles him to praise." Similarly, Cockshut finds that Corvo "is not a biography, but rather a proposal to write a biography" or perhaps "a partial autobiography—the autobiography of the biographer"; and he summarily lists Symons's failures of knowledge: "He did not know enough about the Catholic Church, about the Victorian age, about literature, about biography. Thus he was often unable to put his fascinating material in context, or to evaluate it accurately." The other contributors are equally prepared to put reputations to the test. Eminent Victorians is found by Bell to shrink somewhat beside the Victorian mode it reviled: the conventional life-and-letters upon which Strachey, in fact, fed...

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