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31:4 Book Reviews days and his enlistment. The prose is quoted extensively until two facts emerge. First, it becomes absolutely clear both that the poetry grew gradually out of the prose, and also that this growth was inevitable in that what Thomas was attempting in prose could only be done in poetry. This, of course, bears on an issue that is, to my mind, as irrelevant to the poetry itself as it has been contentious: namely, the role played by Robert Frost in Thomas's recognition of his vocation as a poet. Professor Thomas's examination of the prose leads also to what is the primary value of his biography. We are apt to think of Thomas the poet as a keen but sensitive observer, a solitary in the world, a man torn by the tension between a profound and minute awareness of the natural on the one hand and a powerful tendency to endorse social values on the other. But it is intimated here that there is something more in the poetry. Professor Thomas points out that Thomas was interested in the writings of mystics, discusses Thomas's views on the relationship between speech, writing and the ineffable, and illustrates repeatedly Thomas's persistent awareness of the irrational. Significantly, he ends his book with this quotation from Thomas's Light and Twilight (1911): ... I shall go on, something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable ... a strong citizen of infinity and eternity. The confidence and ease had become a deep joy: I knew that I could not do without the Infinite, nor the Infinite without me (309). Professor Thomas's book suggestively implies that we might in the end profitably think of Edward Thomas in relation to writers such as Graves and Lawrence: writers, that is, who, despite their many manifest differences, when faced with the collapse of their culture's traditional modes of religious expression, tried to keep open our traffic with what had become rationally inexpressible. P. E. Mitchell University of Toronto BIOGRAPHY CONSIDERED Eric Hornberger and John Charmley, eds. The Troubled Face of Biography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. $29.95 William H. Epstein. Recognizing Biography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. $29.95 Biography is the last refuge of classic realism. As the editors of Troubled Face remark, "the novel and biography long cohabited within similar narrative structures"; biographers share with novelists "a love affair with narrative." It is easy to discern resemblances between the Victorian triple-decker and the well-stuffed modem biography. The trouble, however, is that "the foregrounded story, the authorial presence, traditional chronological design, and the stately scene setting of the major biography are no longer typical of contemporary 461 31:4 Book Reviews fiction." By and large, biography has remained unperturbed by "self-reflexivity , ontological uncertainty, distrust of the structures of explanation, the uncertainty over 'the real' and 'the fictional'"—in short, by postmodernism. In the concluding essay to this volume, which collects conference papers given at the University of East Anglia in 1985, Malcolm Bradbury points out that we live simultaneously in "the age of the Literary Life" and "the age of the Death of the Author": "the age of the author studied, pursued, celebrated and hyped; and the age of the author denied and eliminated, air-brushed from the world of writing with a theoretical efficiency that would be the envy of any totalitarian regime trying to remove its discredited past leaders from the record of history." Bradbury's arresting analogy expresses the mildest form of the resistance in this book to ideas that have put biography on the defensive. Bradbury, after all, concludes that the genre, if it is to remain vital, has little choice but to follow the contemporary novel "down the labyrinth of writing, with all its refracted images . . . where biography's own construction becomes part of contemporary writerly anxiety." Except for Robert Skidelsky, however, none of the other contributors, including some of the most accomplished British biographers, has any truck with what some of them (dimly) understand to be poststructuralist theory. "If deconstruction rejects the historical," opines Ann Thwaite, "considering that all works of literature only exist in...

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