Biography Partly Told

For those of us who thought writing literary biography must be a stroll in the park, Scott Donaldson is here with disabusing news. The Impossible Craft makes it clear that, while the rewards for success as a biographer may be real enough, the path to earning them is not without its pitfalls. These include lawsuits, the enmity of the subject’s family and friends, and the fluctuation of literary reputations.

Donaldson, himself a seven-time perpetrator of literary biography, knows whereof he speaks. He had the misfortune in 1987 to be completing a biography of John Cheever at the same time lawyers for J. D. Salinger were taking the biographer Ian Hamilton to court to prevent the publication of excerpts from certain of Salinger’s letters. The eventual court ruling in Salinger’s favor forced Donaldson and his editors to spend weeks scrubbing his Cheever manuscript to fit the new definition of what was permissible as “fair use” of unpublished material. At roughly the same time, Donaldson got crossways with the Cheever family for writing an introduction to a book of hitherto uncollected stories by the late Cheever. Mary Cheever, John’s widow, objected to the “dirty laundry” contained in the introduction and thought the publication of the early inferior stories would damage her husband’s reputation. The Cheevers prevailed in their lawsuit, and the book, along with Donaldson’s introduction, was never published. All of this played out over a considerable period of time and took an appreciable toll on the biographer, in Donaldson’s telling.

It also didn’t help matters that Susan Cheever, John’s daughter, was finishing up a memoir of her father, the well-received Home Before Dark, and Susan saw Donaldson’s book as unwelcome competition. “I wasn’t out to get [Donaldson],” he quotes her as saying, “but we were competing. I wished he hadn’t been writing [his biography].”

Donaldson’s most recent book of literary biography was published in 2007. Its subject was Edwin Arlington Robinson, a poet Donaldson had loved and admired since his schoolboy days in Minneapolis. He spent seven years on the Robinson book, he tells us, the longest amount of time he has given any of his biographies. Unfortunately Robinson’s reputation, which was once as high as an American poet’s gets, has fallen into steep decline. Donaldson devotes more than forty pages of The Impossible Craft to Robinson and the contentious wrangling over the poet’s letters and other effects following his death in 1935. It seems there was a Maine faction, Maine being Robinson’s home state, and a New York faction, New York being where he made his career; the two sides never saw eye to eye, with the result that over time Robinson didn’t get the biography he deserved, only a flawed one nobody trusts—at least not until Donaldson came along some forty years later. “The real loser in the sorry tale of Herman Hagedorn’s unsatisfactory biography and the two camps competing for control of Edwin Arlington Robinson beyond the grave may well have been the poet himself,” Donaldson concludes wistfully. “Had a solid and sound book about him appeared a few years after his death, it could have helped to secure his standing as a great American poet and halted the unwarranted drift of his work into relative obscurity.”

The other subjects of Donaldson’s biographies are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and Charles Fenton. Fenton had been a teacher of Donaldson’s at Yale and had himself written an early book on Hemingway’s apprentice years. He later killed himself in his early forties by jumping from a building. Rounding out Donaldson’s oeuvre, Fenton also wrote a book on the Fitzgerald-Hemingway friendship, poor, storm-tossed relationship that it was.

The Impossible Craft is divided into chapters. The first offers a brief autobiography of the author and the march of his career in the field of literary biography. Then we are treated to a survey of works concerning literary...