The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography by Scott Donaldson (review)

In this handsomely presented book, Scott Donaldson draws upon his own expertise as well as the methods and the testimony of other writers whose work he admires to offer a sympathetic scrutiny of what Lytton Strachey called in Eminent Victorians (1918) “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing” (vi), the biography. In this instance, Donaldson focuses on the literary biography.

Full of anecdotes, hard-won advice, details of craft, and compelling case studies, this text is also an engaging and disarmingly honest account of the problems he encountered, and the pleasures he experienced, while trying to reconstruct “without prejudice” but with definitive completeness the life and work of a gallery of uniquely American authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Winfield Townley Scott, Charlie Fenton, Archibald MacLeish, and Edwin Arlington Robinson.

He has divided his book into five sections: Beginnings, Topics in Literary Biography, The Impossible Craft, Case Studies, and, where he is at his most exhilarating, The Cheever Misadventure. Following a sketch of the complex history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Donaldson chronicles his own biography and explains how it influenced his path toward writing about other people’s lives. From Yale, Donaldson went on to become a Morse code intercept operator during the Korean War, a reporter for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, a publicist at Pillsbury, an editor and publisher of a fledgling weekly, The Bloomington Suburbanite, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and, finally, a professor at the College of William and Mary.

During a summertime reading of the poet Winfield Townley Scott’s letters and journals at Brown University’s John Hay Library, Donaldson explains, his future was sealed: “There was no clap of thunder, but I’d found something I could do, something I really wanted to do. … I would be a literary biographer” (11). The more he learned about Scott and then other literary figures, he says, the more eager he was to display that learning on the page while pursuing at the same time his principle occupation as a university professor. He had become, as Richard D. Altick famously called such a person, a “scholar adventurer” (4).

Although with each project Donaldson gave full and earnest study to his subjects, at every step of the way he was faced like all biographers with tremendous barriers. No matter how many letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts, earlier biographies, memoirs, photographs, and other sources were available to him, he says, there remained what Victoria Glendinning called “lies and silences” (49) in the public record. “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man,” wrote Mark Twain, “but the real biography of a man is lived in his head twenty-four hours a day, and that you can never know” (qtd. in Kaplan 9). There’s so much about every individual that remains beyond reach no matter how thorough the search, and finding those limits was, Donaldson writes, both daunting and intriguing; that’s what makes biography an “impossible craft.”

Other workaday problems confronting Donaldson stemmed from the inability to verify facts or documents, from encountering conflicting accounts of the same events, from the complexities of copyright and securing permissions, and perhaps the most difficult of all, deciding on how to construct the work. What shape shall the book take? Straight narrative? Topical treatment? Essay? Where should the narrative begin? How should it end? What is the biographer’s proper relationship with the subject? Donaldson examines these matters and many others.

Opening the door to private lives clearly raised ethical and legal questions as well. How far should he go in respecting the privacy of the family—or of other people implicated in the life he is describing? Is it ethical to disregard instructions in documents left by the dead, even more to use those documents as a basis for further diagnosis? Surely, Donaldson writes, the biographer has a responsibility in the selection of evidence...