The Use and Abuse of Literature (34 page)

After
Eminent Victorians
, aptly described by Virginia Woolf as “short studies with something of the over-emphasis and the foreshortening of caricatures” (we might compare them to modern-day
New Yorker
profiles), Strachey turned to larger projects, and here, as Woolf observes, the challenges of the genre became evident:

About Victoria, much was known, much recorded, much available to the diligent and responsible researcher. “The biographer could not invent her, because at every moment some document was at hand to check his invention.” So Strachey “used to the full the biographer’s power of selection and relation, but he kept strictly within the world of fact. Every statement was verified; every fact was authenticated.” But in the case of Elizabeth, the opposite conditions obtained. “Very little was known about her. The society in which she lived was so remote that the habits, the motives, and even the actions of the people of that age were full of strangeness and obscurity.” The opportunity was there for biography to approach the condition of poetry or drama, that “combined the advantages of both worlds,” of fact and fiction.

And yet in Woolf’s view, the attempt failed. Despite the consummate skill of the biographer, “the combination became unworkable; fact and fiction refused to mix. Elizabeth never became real in the sense that Queen Victoria had been real, yet she never became fictitious in the sense that Cleopatra or Falstaff is fictitious.”
⁶⁴
This is a point on which Woolf, the author of those two masterful fictional “biographies,”
Orlando
and
Flush
, clearly feels strongly. “The two kinds of fact will not mix.” Her essay is called “The Art of Biography,” and she begins by putting that concept in question (“Is biography an art?”).

Nonetheless, Woolf foresaw a time when, she thought, biography would evolve to meet changing circumstances in the world. Writing after Strachey’s death, and many years after she had hailed “the new biography”
in 1927, she looked ahead to a moment when the biographer would revise traditional techniques to meet the opportunities and demands of modern culture. “[S]ince we live in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, he must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking-glasses at odd corners.”
⁶⁵

Virginia Woolf, who died in 1941, could hardly anticipate the supersaturated media environment in which today’s biographies are written, reviewed, and read: a 24/7 bombardment of news cycles, Internet gossip, YouTube, e-mail, and text messaging. What she regarded as frenetic interruptions—newspapers, letters, diaries, even those “thousand cameras,” a phrase I think she must have intended as hyperbolic—sound rather leisurely in a paparazzi world. The truth of a life today often involves scandal, confession, and self-exposure. And what has become of the art of biography and its relation to literature?

We might think that the days of the Victorian doorstop biography, in many pages or sometimes multiple volumes, has returned in a new guise. The second volume of Robert Skidelsky’s 1994 biography of John Maynard Keynes, subtitled
The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937
, covers seventeen years of Keynes’s life in 635 pages, plus notes and sources. The third volume,
Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946
, is 580 pages long. Peter Manso’s biography of Marlon Brando, also from 1994, came in at 1,021 pages, not including the notes and sources. These are not atypical numbers: consider Juliet Barker’s
The Brontës
(1994, 830 pages plus notes); James R. Mellow’s
Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences
(1992, 604 pages plus notes); Harrison Kinney,
James Thurber: His Life and Times
(1994, 1,077 pages plus appendices and notes). I pulled these books from my shelves—this is a random rather than a systematic survey—but the pattern seems fairly consistent. David McCullough’s highly regarded book on Harry Truman (1992) was 1,117 pages long, his
John Adams
(2001), 751 pages. It is hard to think of another trade-publishing genre that is so lengthy and yet is considered commercially viable. In hardcover and paperback, these books sell.

Clearly—leaving aside for the moment the question of style—such biographies are not literary in the sense described by Strachey, dominated by a sense “of selection, of detachment, of design.” Modern biographies that chronicle the life of literary figures tend to include in their accounts of the subject’s life a description or assessment of the work, including plot summary and analysis, together with some sense of the work’s reception, qualifying them for the technical description of literary biography—a genre described by novelist John Updike as liable to abuse (the “Judas biography,” containing unflattering portraits from the testimony of a former friend or spouse; the inaccuracies reprinted from previously published, erroneous accounts), as well as the potentially useful work of reacquainting the reader with an author (albeit via what Updike calls a “nether route”).
⁶⁶
Within this genre, there is, again, a wide range of literary expertise and critical objective. The biographies of Sylvia Plath by Diane Middlebrook and Jacqueline Rose, both talented literary scholars, were consequential and important for the analysis of her poetry. Another version of the same life story, Janet Malcolm’s biography of Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, addressed the unreliability of memory and the difficulty, when dealing with interested parties, of separating fact from fiction. “In a work of nonfiction, we almost never know the truth of what happened,” Malcolm observed. And with a controversial matter like that of Plath’s life and death, she noted, the problems are especially acute. “The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not negligible, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living.”
⁶⁷

The technique that Lytton Strachey used in
Queen Victoria
—the judicious quotation from letters and other sources to produce a kind of biographical dialogue—still distinguishes the best modern biographies, like Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin or David McCullough’s
John Adams
. Emotional responses, internal thoughts, and other novelistic devices are crafted from the archival information, the “facts” upon which Woolf so strongly insisted. The biographer’s gift is one of deploying information, not of inventing it. Thus, describing the
arrival of a letter to Adams that dispatched him to the Court of France, McCullough writes,

Active and emotive terms like “thinking,” “stunned,” furious,” and “demanding” are all inferred, effectively, from the source material, and “straight away” is derived from the date. The dramatic or literary effect (what would, in fact, eventuate in a screenplay) is elicited from within, not imposed from without.

Likewise, Janet Browne describes Darwin’s proposal to his future wife:

Here, too, it is possible to see how the emotional responses of the protagonists and the dramatic arc of the story are derived from source materials: the headache, the bewilderment, the astonishment, the very mood of
the day, even the comically erroneous response of an onlooker, misreading the “dismal” expressions of the couple. Reality, in this case, means sutured to a certain kind of evidence.

We might contrast this way of writing a life with the kind of work that resembles the televised docudrama or “dramatic re-creation.” In the filmic version, actors perform on-screen as a voice-over offers the play-by-play of a real (but restaged) event. Shadows loom out of the darkness; scenery (a lonely road, a family mansion) offers an atmospheric B-roll boost; flashbacks increase the suspense. The language associated with the voice-over narrations in docudramas is heavy with subjunctives—
would, could, might
—and suppositions masquerading as rhetorical questions: “Did she know?” “Would he attempt?” “What was going through his mind at that moment?”

I have been calling the mode of biography that functions in this manner
speculative
, by which I mean a language heavily laden with subjunctives and similar suppositions: “There is reason to think that if she had”; “Were he to meet her then, as perhaps he did, they might have found”; “Having been to France, he would have known that.” Rather than being brought to life by specific textual evidence (Darwin’s diary, Abigail Adams’s letter), these hypotheticals are presented
instead of
evidence. By a certain authorial sleight of hand, they
become
the evidence whose absence they conceal. Moreover, contemporary culture has increasingly come to accept such fantasy projections as evidence, so eager are we to “know” the characters (historical, modern, famous, or infamous) about whom these real-life stories are told.

My favorite example of this kind of projection taken to its logical extreme is Laura Hillenbrand’s fascinating biography
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
, in which the technique of imagining what is going through the
mind of the protagonist is employed to show us the inner thoughts of a racehorse.
⁷⁰

The word
celebrity
appears a number of times in Hillenbrand’s narrative, and appropriately so. The horse, who, in his racing heyday, liked to pose for photographers, was called “Movie Star” by reporters. As the reader follows the “making of a legend” from obscurity to celebrity to calamity to bittersweet triumph, it becomes clear that the book can be compared to works like
Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend
(David Shipman),
Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend
(Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. But there is one way in which Hillenbrand’s
Seabiscuit
differs, of necessity, from the celebrity biography. A staple of the celebrity biography is that curious set of tenses and moods (from optative subjunctive to free indirect discourse) through which the author attempts to project the thoughts, or putative thoughts, of the celebrity subject. “One aspect of pre-production which pleased Garland was the make-up tests.”
⁷¹
“The visitor was unwelcome, though Marlene realized that one way or another he was as inevitable as history.”
⁷²
“As always, when in trouble, Jack turned to his father.”
⁷³
A certain genre of horse (or dog) story uses the same kinds of voice and mind projection—think Jack London—or even, as in the case of Anna Sewell’s
Black Beauty
, is told in the first-person voice of the subject: “When I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass.”
⁷⁴

In
Seabiscuit
, the central figure’s consciousness is never so baldly anthropomorphic. But at the center of the book, surrounded by taciturn trainers and jockeys, is the silence of the equine legend, a silence marked, as if anxiously, by recurrent attention to what was going on in his mind. “Seabiscuit had the misfortune of living in a stable whose managers simply didn’t have the time to give his mind the painstaking attention it needed,” we are told about the horse’s early overraced and undervalued years, while jockey Red Pollard’s natural empathy “had given him insight into the minds of ailing, nervous horses.”
⁷⁵
At a turning point in Pollard’s career, when he finally guides Seabiscuit to a significant victory, the author’s prose can’t resist turning toward the psychological projections familiar from a certain mode of celebrity biography: