"The Aspern Papers" and Modern Biography

I

In Rambler 60 Samuel Johnson, who would compose the Lives of the English Poets, authoritatively declared, "no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest" (319). James Boswell, the greatest example of a biographer who knew his subject personally, believed in Johnson's greatness as a writer, yet it was the man who delighted him. He recorded the details of Johnson's life and conversation as a duty owed to posterity. In the last volume of his journals Boswell sought the reader's sympathy for the titanic task of creating the Life of Johnson:

You cannot imagine what labour, what perplexity, what vexation I have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials, in supplying omissions, in searching for papers buried in different masses—and all this besides the exertion of composing and polishing.

(19)

A century later, the influential French critic Sainte-Beuve went a stage further, arguing that knowledge of the author's life was indispensable for understanding his work, that "a personal acquaintanceship with a writer, and a knowledge of his biography, were the surest bases for sound literary judgment" (Brooks 202).

Biography has always been suspect. In the twentieth century the eminent historian Richard Cobb, using military and sexual metaphors to define Johnson's "irresistible interest," described his own Boswellian quest to discover the deepest secrets of a complex personality:

It has been an almost obsessive urge with me to get my foot in the door, to get behind the façade, to get inside. That, after all, is what being or becoming a historian [and biographer] is most about—the desire to read other people's letters, to breach privacy, to penetrate into the inner room.

(20)

Contra Boswell, Cobb acknowledges that the biographer's instinct to dig into secrets is both human and selfish. He needs to know everything about them in order to discover the facts of history and place his subjects in the context of their culture.

Christina De Stefano, biographer of the Italian investigative journalist Oriana Fallaci, recognized the ambiguous nature of biography and felt guilty about her quest. She had troubling dreams in which she was condemned by Fallaci and her essential information disappeared before her eyes: "I had a recurring dream in which Oriana insulted me, screaming that I didn't understand anything, and then showed me her diary. But when I drew close to read it, the words faded, as if immersed in water" (269). The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein thought it was "nasty" to even think about the inner truth of people's lives. But he believed this unpleasant aspect of biographical research was absolutely essential: "[It is] difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important" (McKillop 403).

In an eloquent passage in his 1897 essay on George Sand, Henry James foresaw a troubling trend. He condemned biographers and expressed his determination to resist all pernicious assaults on his private life:

the cunning of the inquirer, envenomed with resistance, will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything we to-day conceive, and the pale fore-warned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years.

(SLC 160)

James especially wanted to hide, among other secrets, his "obscure hurt," the mysterious genital injury he suffered when he was eighteen, and his homosexual love for the handsome American sculptor Hendrik Andersen. James fiercely repelled such importunate approaches to his well-guarded privacy and destroyed all his personal papers in a cataclysmic bonfire. The fictional biographer fails in "The Aspern Papers." But in real life Leon Edel besieged James's castle, toppled his vulnerable tower of art, and produced a superb five-volume biography.

James's novella "The Aspern Papers" (1888) was...