Who Do You Think You Are?

All kinds of writings involve some kinds of fictions. But the oddest kinds of fictions being published today are perhaps those which peep from behind the shutters of the seemingly factual edifices which we call literary biographies. Debates about the possible, practicable, and appropriate relations between fact and fiction in biography have been trundling on for centuries, and writers from Bloomsbury’s Virginia Woolf to the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani have jumped on the various wrong ways in which biographical writers have embellished their representations of verifiable facts. Most recently, Colin Burrow argued persuasively in the London Review of Books that all literary biography was ‘intrinsically pernicious, however well it’s done’: because of its strange and silent habit of fictionalising; because of its need for a strong (and perhaps equally fictional) thesis; and because of its reduction of literary work to the status of either evidence for – or (worse) symptom of – biographical detail.¹

There is enough of the first and third of these kinds of fictions for Burrows to go to town and stay out all night on Adam Sisman’s latest literary biographical offering, The Friendship, documenting the intertwined lives of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The obvious points need hardly be made. Of course we can know (beyond reasonable doubt) that certain literary figures made a certain trip on a certain day. But we cannot know, unless they have told us, how the sun felt on their faces, whether their shoes pinched them, how they felt about their destination, and whether the trip struck them as symbolically prescient of a certain kind of future. And yet all this, and more, is what Sisman not only claims to know but presents as fact at the end of his second chapter. He has been describing Wordsworth’s walk with his sister Dorothy from Kendal to Grasmere in April 1794. Having made the aforementioned assertion about their sense of the walk’s significance, and quoted a comment from one of Dorothy’s letters (in which she only mentions the walk’s taking place), Sisman elaborates as follows:

It was early April when they set out, a day of mixed sun and showers. At their first stop, Staveley, they drank a basin of milk at a public house, and Dorothy washed her feet in a brook, afterwards putting on a pair of silk stockings at her brother’s recommendation. A little further on they reached Windermere, and continued north on the road that runs along the east bank of the lake to Ambleside. They picnicked beside a beck below Wansfell. Towards sunset, as they approached Grasmere, they left the road and followed the footpath along the south side of Rydal Water. The slanting yellow light cast deep shadows before the surrounding mountains.

(pp. 59–60)

Is it churlish to ask for a footnote here? Possibly: the scruples of the academy are not necessarily applicable or relevant to a book designed, essentially, to tell a good story to a popular market. This is a persuasive rebuttal. But don’t we have to ask whether its persuasiveness springs partly from its being essentially flattering to the scholars? It generously makes concessions to a popular market which it thereby patronises; more strangely, it appropriates for scholarship the essentially and even banally human trait, observable almost from birth, of curiosity. All people have brains, whether or not they have anything to do with a university, and most people, faced with something like this, will not unnaturally ask something along the lines of ‘And how the hell do you know?!’

The debates which have been waged about fictionalisation in biography are not mere scholarly grumbles over whether or not to name sources. They are, in the last analysis, debates about power. Biographers like Sisman exercise power over their subjects’ lives by fictionalising and embellishing. Their subjects...