Ultimately Fiction: Design in Modern American Literary Biography (review)

Dennis W. Pétrie. Ultimately Fiction: Design in Modern American Literary Biography. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue Univ. Press, 1981. 240 pp. $10.95. In Ultimately Fiction Dennis Pétrie hypothesizes that "biographical theory is still in its adolescence"; apparently he intends to help it come of age. After delineating the typologies of James L. Clifford and Leon Edel, Pétrie synthesizes their classifications into his own system of three major types of literary biography. He analyzes certain modern American literary biographies, among them Edel's Henry James, in terms of those classifications. One of the real virtues of this useful book is its apparatus: 58 pages (in addition to the 182 pages of text) of careful notes with ample comments, an extensive bibliography, and an index. Together, the introduction and the apparatus introduce not only this book but the study of biography. In summarizing, synthesizing, and cross-referencing the works of others, Pétrie exhibits his command of an extensive number of works on biography, literary biography, and biographical theory. Given that command, I only wish Pétrie had better justified his claim that the theory of biography is in its adolescence. In his first chapter—"The Biographer's Design"—Pétrie reviews the major controversies surrounding literary biography: whether or not to integrate the art with the life? to psychoanalyze? to anticipate? to present characters as formed or as forming? to speculate? to shape the subject's life by form and style? Here Pétrie does not so much innovate as synthesize arguments and then take a stand. With Richard Ellmann, he insists that the biographer must present characters forming, must integrate life and art, and must "offer speculations, conjectures, hypotheses," including, of course, psychoanalytical hypotheses. Following Ellmann, Pétrie concludes that the biography "must be presented completely as the picture conceived by the biographer." He concludes his first chapter with a thesis: "literary biography should indeed 'aspire to the condition of fiction' in its aesthetic design." Pétrie illustrates those controversies and that thesis with references to a 1972 "novel-biography-satire" by Steven Millhauser entitled Edwin MuI!house: The Life and Death of An American Writer, 1943-54, by Jeffrey Cartwright. Certainly, one of Pétrie's real contributions is to create a new readership for this "beautifully-written piece of fiction, a satire of modern American literary biography." Using Edwin Mullhouse to focus his discussion of biographical controversy, Pétrie makes this background chapter concrete and (thanks largely to Millhauser) amusing. The exaggerations of Edwin Mullhouse, for instance, raise the issue of the biographer's right to shape his subject's life to fit the design of his biography. In that pseudobiography, the twelve-year-old biographer of the important author who died mysteriously on his eleventh birthday writes that a "life could not be considered a design with beginning, middle, and end until it ended." (Incidentally, Millhauser must have had Edel in mind when he divided the book into three sections: "The Early Years"—birth to age six; "The Middle Years"—ages six to nine; and "The Late Years"—ages nine to eleven.) To complete his own biographical design, Edwin's biographer, following relentless aesthetic logic, has killed the precocious Edwin on his eleventh birthday. If Jeffrey (the biographer) sacrificed life to design, he also knows that design rescues his subject from obscurity; he writes, "the artist creates the work of art, but the biographer, so to speak, creates the artist. Which is to say: without me, would you exist at all, Edwin?" Because THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 203 SPRING, 1982 Edwin Mullhouse explores (in absurdly exaggerated form) such questions as the biographer s obligations to his subject, himself, his design, and his readers, Petrie uses it effectively to focus those issues. But I wonder if finally Petrie does not miss the point of Millhauser's satire. Petrie thinks that the "most serious thrust of Millhauser's satiric fiction is, in fact, ridicule of modern literary biography for supposing that it is 'under no such obligation' to attend to the formal aspects of any well-told, interesting story." It seems to me, on the contrary, that Millhauser's most serious thrust is against those biographers...