Literary Lives

The biography, which in one form or another exists in every culture that I know of, is a prime example of humanity's irrepressible and inexplicable optimism. In the midst of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the biography serenely assumes that it is possible—in fact, relatively easy—to make sense out of a human life, provided that it is someone else's and not one's own. There are doubtless many reasons why the biography has never lacked an avid audience—the universal interest in gossip, scandal, the desire for illumination, emulation, moral instruction—but surely one major, if unacknowledged, source of its appeal is biography's casual demonstration that the life under focus has a beginning, middle, and end; that there are integuments of development which draw into a pattern the loose threads, the chaotic lurching, the random choices, and the unwanted compulsions, which is what most of us find when we look into our own lives. A biography is thus on its ground level a model of order, and we who are its audience can admire, condescend to, or seek to learn from this presentation of someone's life-trajectory, condensed and simplified to cartoon contours and accelerated in front of us like a movie at warp speed. To what extent a biography can satisfy demands other than those of information and sundry instruction—that is, what, if any, truth-content may emerge beyond that of verifiable fact—will be a subordinate but implied inquiry at the base and around the edges of my discussion.

Literary biographies pose special problems—at least as compared to biographies of nonliterary persons. By the same token they have the potential of producing a greater practical effect than other biographies. Before I emphasize the limitations and perhaps insoluble difficulties of the literary biography, let me first note the unusual power that they can sometimes display. Unlike that of other historical figures, the achievement of an artist is the work that he or she leaves behind. That work may be acclaimed, taken for granted, or virtually ignored. A timely biography of the artist can serve to incite interest in an oeuvre that is apparently moribund—as was the case with the Melville biographies of Raymond Weaver and Lewis Mumford in the 1920s or, to a lesser extent, Genevieve Taggard's and Martha Bianchi's books on Emily Dickinson. Or a biography can so color the reputation of a writer as to mount a special filter through which his works will be viewed—as, most notoriously, did Rufus Griswold's savaging of Edgar Allan Poe—and then, almost a century later, the wild romanticizing reversal of Hervey Allen's Israfel. Lawrance Thompson's acrimonious life of Robert Frost had, perhaps in a slighter way, a similar muting effect on Frost's reputation. And, while Henry James's literary fortunes were not inconsiderable before World War ii, I think it undeniable that Leon Edel's magisterial life provided an extra impetus to raise James's fiction into higher currency.

It is an obvious point but one which should be stressed. The biographies of most achievers—battlefield commanders, actresses, scientists, statesmen, athletes—may very well alter the reputations of these people and change the consensus of what history was and how it occurred; they will not, however, revitalize the marmoreal past—only the present's perspective on it. If a literary biography appears at an opportune time, it can lead readers to an author's work for the first time or cause others to reread with a different horizon of expectations. Whether Gettysburg might have fallen to the Confederate forces had Lee's personality been less impetuous or less dependent on the theatricality of tactics like Pickett's fatal charge is a legitimate question for students of military history and biographers of Lee to ponder. However much they ponder, the Union troops will remain in place at the end of the day, and Lincoln will eventually arrive at the site to commemorate the dead on both sides. But since a poem, unlike a battlefield, can be forever struggled over and delighted in—and because very few readers...