THE ROSEBUD EFFECT: THE MYSTERY IN BIOGRAPHY

8 4 Y T H E R O S E B U D E F F E C T T H E M Y S T E R Y I N B I O G R A P H Y B R E N D A W I N E A P P L E Rudyard Kipling called it the ‘‘higher cannibalism’’; George Eliot said it was a ‘‘disease of English literature.’’ Edmund White dubbed it ‘‘the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.’’ Nabokov labeled it ‘‘psycho-plagiarism’’ (I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds bad), and of course Oscar Wilde said that nowadays ‘‘every great man has his disciples, and usually it’s Judas who writes the biography.’’ Biography: it was considered by Lytton Strachey to be the most humane of all the arts, and yet it’s frequently derided, ignored, and, I’d add, much misunderstood. That’s surprising, really, for biography is an ancient pursuit – consider Suetonius or Plutarch on Julius Caesar, or Tacitus’s biography of his father-in-law. And we’ve been reading biographies for as long as we’ve been commemorating death: consider funeral rites, elegies, elaborate headstones . It’s no surprise, then, that biography often begins in death: the writer Nathanael West lies crumpled over the steering wheel on a California freeway, the horn of his car loudly blowing; Harry Crosby shoots his lover at a studio in the Hôtel des Artistes, then paces for a half an hour, takes o√ his shoes, lies down, and points a revolver at his right temple. In the first chapter of a Stephen 8 5 R Crane biography, a young poet named Wallace Stevens, working as a reporter, covers Crane’s funeral, which he finds absurd; Crane, he thinks, deserved better. And the first chapter of Richard Holmes’s Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, titled ‘‘Death,’’ includes an obituary of Richard Savage that he, Holmes, actually wrote. By opening a biography with the subject’s death, the author might be defending what’s to come: I, the biographer, am no Judas, for I’m going to give Stephen Crane the eulogy he truly deserved. And the biographer is creating a certain degree of suspense . How did W. E. B. Du Bois become so famous that when his death was announced at the 1963 March on Washington, a quarter of a million people immediately bowed their heads in silence? Or, does my biography of Richard Savage resemble a fictitious obituary – and aren’t all biographies, Holmes seems to be asking, in some sense invented? Often the very fact of the subject’s death actually inspires the writing of biography. Claire Tomalin visited the grave of Charles Dickens’s forgotten mistress, Ellen ‘‘Nelly’’ Ternan, and saw that the cross at Nelly’s grave ‘‘had broken o√ and vanished,’’ she notes at the end of The Invisible Woman. ‘‘Quite soon, by the look of it, the grave was likely to disappear altogether. It seemed a good moment,’’ she concludes, ‘‘to start putting something on paper which might restore Nelly to visibility.’’ And in the prologue of my first book, Genêt, a biography of Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker from 1925 to 1975, I told of my having driven to the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis early one February morning. Patches of snow covered much of the wellmanicured grounds. Notebook in hand, I stood over the grave of Janet Flanner’s father, and I panicked: I should have brought flowers, I thought. What was I doing here?, I asked myself. Why had I come? Although I’d never before considered writing a biography, it seemed to me then, and still does now, that the only way I could do justice to the Flanner papers I’d been reading at the Library of Congress and, more to the point, to the people who wrote them was to write a book that respected their complicated lives and their medleyed voices. I began dissecting every biography I could get my hands on, asking of their authors not why they’d chosen their particular subjects, but how they wrote their subjects...