Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography

Michael Benton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137549570
• eBook ISBN: 9781137549587
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Drawing upon a wide range of biographies of literary subjects, from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to William Golding and V.S. Naipaul, this book develops a poetics of literary biography based on the triangular relationships of lives, works and times and how narrative operates in holding them together. Biography is seen as a hybrid genre in which historical and fictional elements are imaginatively combined. It considers the roles of story-telling, factual data in the art of life-writing, and the literariness of its language. It includes a case study of the biography of Ellen Terry, discussion of the controversial relationship between a subject's life and works, 'biographical criticism' and, through the issue of gender, the social and cultural changes biographies reflect. It frames a poetics on the basis of its strategy and tactics and demonstrates how the literal truth of verifiable data and the poetic truth of what is narrated are interdependent.

1

Art and Artifice in Biography

Biography is an ancient literary genre. First of all – chronologically and logically – it is a part of historiography.

(R. Wellek & A. Warren, Theory of Literature, 1949)¹

In the family of literature, biography seems to be the product of a strange coupling between old-fashioned history and the traditional novel.

(Michael Holroyd, ‘What Justifies Biography?’ 2003)²

Biography is quite properly regarded as grounded in historiography. Its business, so convention has it, deals with documented, verifiable facts and with deploying them to reconstruct a life story in clear, unembellished language. But historiography, like history itself, moves on and carries biography with it. Modern biographers continue to engage with well-worn arguments about the nature of their genre but, more significantly, following the historians’ lead, they have become increasingly alert to the uncertain status of the stories they tell, the instabilities of ‘facts’ as their raw material, and the idiosyncrasies of the language they use. Biographical writing throws such issues into relief more prominently than writing fiction or writing history not least because its poetics – the generic principles that govern its form and procedures – shares features with both. In what follows, the opening section revisits the basic issues of genre as the context for the subsequent discussion of the three fundamental components of biographical writing: story-making, the role of facts, and the language in which it is cast. This discussion leads to a brief conclusion about the relationship between ‘Lives’ and lives, finding that biography is uniquely well placed to elucidate for readers the primacy of the narrative imagination both in life and literature.

Genre: art, craft or design?

There is no consensus about how to describe ‘biography’ as a genre. All three terms appear in the titles of books and articles, though the first occurs most often.³ But, if it is an art, what qualities are being recognised in a form of literature that appears to be based on verifiable documentary data requiring craft-like skills to put it together? Do biographers practise an art, or a craft, or ‘something betwixt and between’ – whatever Virginia Woolf meant by the phrase?⁴ Do we become aware, during reading, of the biographer’s conscious artifice, of workmanship that shows ingenuity and expediency in making things fit into a manageable ‘Life’? Biography sits uncomfortably between history and literature primarily because of its hybrid nature that Michael Holroyd draws to our attention. Yet even in a book he subtitles, ‘The Craft of Biography and Autobiography’, he vacillates between terms.⁵ At one level, this is unimportant, indicating that to argue the toss about labels is a fruitless exercise. Yet an unstable label is a telling sign that there is uncertainty at the heart of biographical practice; that biography feels uncomfortable in trying to accommodate its factual data, through the application of its craft-like skills, while designing an appropriate shape and development for the story of a literary life. The fact is that some biographers select with an eye to promoting a conscious aesthetic in form and language, invested with the imaginative empathy that we associate with art (Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens:. A Life, 2011); while others, writing about the same subject, exhibit the no less necessary abilities and techniques in organising and shaping masses of information into a coherent, comprehensive and intricately detailed whole – the skills we recognise as those of the master of a craft (Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, 2011). Of course, these are emphases not alternatives.⁶ Both Tomalin’s and Slater’s biographies are highly successful in their own terms. Each provides a plausible narrative of Dickens’s life. Quibbles about art and craft become irrelevant when we accept that biography is both.

David Cecil said as much when he argued that the biographer’s task is ‘to discern amid the heterogeneous mass of letters, diaries, memoirs which are his raw material, the continuous theme which will compose them into a work of art’. And he likened the biographer to a practitioner in another medium where art and craft complement each other: ‘Like the maker of pictures in mosaic, his art is one of arrangement; he cannot alter the shape of his material, his task is to invent a design into which his hard little stones of fact can be fitted as they are.’⁷ ‘Design’ – perhaps this is what Virginia Woolf had in mind. For its constructive principle combines the form of an artwork with the compositional dexterity to arrange pre-existing raw materials. Nor is David Cecil alone in championing the idea of biography as design. More recently, Bruce Redford has adopted a similar stance in his study, Designing the ‘Life of Johnson’⁸ in which he takes on Boswell’s detractors, notably Donald Greene who regards biography as belonging exclusively in the domain of history. Redford operates on a different principle, regarding biography as a dualistic genre:

Informing my analysis is the premiss that successful biography both reflects a contingent reality (which can be verified outside the text) and creates an internal reality of its own (whose hallmark is what the eighteenth century would have called ‘integrity’). To write a life is to design a life.⁹

He goes on to distinguish ‘designing’ from ‘fabricating’ – a useful reminder to those biographers tempted to exercise the imagination with unfettered novelistic freedom rather than drawing upon its power to create, in Johnson’s phrase, ‘a judicious and faithful narrative’ based on evidence. Redford is comfortable with the hybrid nature of biography – with ‘the seeming paradox [of] its responsibility to the twin claims of fact and art’.¹⁰ And it is important that we live with this paradox and not regard it as a contradiction. For, while biography is an empirical discipline concerned with the factual content of knowledge, it also entails the aesthetic shaping of this knowledge in the very act of exercising this discipline. The challenges to every biographer are ones of both authenticity and representation.

Yet, while Cecil’s analogy is apt and Redford’s case is persuasive, both accounts beg questions about the nature of the facts that comprise the raw material. The biographer’s facts may be as brightly coloured as pieces of mosaic, but they are a good deal softer and more malleable than stones. The historiographical foundations upon which biography builds have been destabilised in the half century or more since Cecil’s remarks and Wellek and Warren’s confident assertion above. One of the main theorists undermining traditional approaches to writing history has been Hayden White. Often regarded by historians as a subversive post-modernist wanting to collapse the distinction between history and fiction, White’s later work¹¹ shifts the emphasis from pointing to the inevitable ‘fictive’ element in historians’ writings as they (re)construct their subjects to a clearer acknowledgement of the difference between writing history and writing fiction. Distinguishing between the historian’s imagination and that of the novelist whose imaginary subjects live in an invented world, White argues that writing history entails imagining ‘both the real world from which one has launched one’s enquiry into the past and the world that comprises one’s object of interest’.¹² But this sort of bifocalism only tells us about the imaginative awareness involved in all history writing; Richard Holmes’s remarks complement this, in respect of biography, in more pragmatic terms. He describes ‘the biographic process’ as comprising ‘two main elements, or closely entwined strands’:

The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling of chronological order of a man’s ‘journey’ through the world – the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the ‘life and letters’. The second is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a ‘point of view’ or an ‘interpretation’, but a continuous living dialogue between the two as they move over the same historical ground, the same trail of events.¹³

This blending of the factual and fictional in the writing of biography raises some basic issues about the nature of the genre. Holmes refers to the long-standing debate among biographers about whether their work is ‘an art form, like the novel, or narrative history’.¹⁴ How, then, might the status of biography as a literary genre within historiography be conceptualised? The question may best be answered by looking at literary biography which, by its nature, forces the issue more powerfully than do biographies of statesmen or politicians.

The conventional description of biography as ‘a form of non-fiction narrative’ is a significantly evasive way of identifying a literary genre, again one which betrays uncertainty. For, defining one genre against another merely tells us what it is not (it is not fiction), implies (not states) that its contents are primarily ‘factual’, and indicates that the means of displaying these contents – the details and development of a subject’s life – is that of storytelling. As a definition it leaves a lot of loose ends. First, what sorts of stories do biographers tell? Do they come ready made in the biographer’s sources, or are they fashioned according to some literary models? How do the anecdotes, letters, diaries, memorabilia and the like fit into the overall life story of the subject? Second, in what sense are the biographer’s facts ‘historical’? How reliable is their provenance? What is the status of the subject’s literary works? What is the process by which facts become interpreted as evidence? Third, if the substance as well as the effect of a tale lies in its telling, what are the implications for the biographer’s language? Is the detached, unembellished prose of traditional history-writing appropriate? Does figurative rhetoric have a place? These three interrelated areas are addressed in turn.

Biographical narrative

Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles and ends … Narrative qualities are transferred from art to life.

(Louis Mink, ‘History and Fiction as
Modes of Comprehension’, 1987)¹⁵

Narrative … cannot be regarded simply as an aesthetic convention … but must be seen as a primary act of mind transferred to art from life.

(Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners, 1975)¹⁶

Narrative is one of the teasing issues that continue to exercise philosophers of history: the nub of the matter is whether stories are found or imposed, whether discovered in the documentation of primary sources or fashioned into patterns by the historian.¹⁷ One camp tends to regard historical research as an archaeological dig uncovering a past that reveals a recognisable skeleton, stripped of much detail but its outlines clear; whereas the other sees only fragments, old bones and body parts, waiting to be assembled and put together, with no certainty that all the bits are there. The argument has particular significance in biography. Do biographers’ sources – varied as they are in letters, memoirs, interviews and other documents – already contain the essential storylines of their subject’s life to which they must give form and expression? Or do biographers work with data that is shapeless, heterogeneous, essentially miscellaneous, and enjoy a comparatively free hand to create a coherent narrative from these materials? On the face of it, the latter would seem to be the case. The idea that the past is narratively structured already, that the life-story is already laid down and simply requires exhumation, is implausible. Yet it is evident that the lived experiences of the subject constitute a chronicle of verifiable facts. The contentious issue is at what point and in what ways this chronicle is deemed to become a story by virtue of ordering its events into beginnings, middles and ends.

Hayden White’s concept of ‘emplotment’ is his way of arguing that stories are imposed, that the data are inert in their various sources until the historian/biographer comes along and gives them order, continuity, coherence and closure – literally and metaphorically, gives them a ‘Life’.¹⁸ White’s ‘emplotment’ has received wide currency, tending to obscure the counter argument expressed most clearly by David Carr and Barbara Hardy. Carr argues that what interests historians (and biographers) is not the mere chronicle of verifiable facts but the actions and experiences of particular people – the ‘real events’ that make up their lives. Moreover, these events have a built-in temporality: human experiences (pace Mink) are organised in temporal sequences involving beginnings, middles and ends. These ‘proto-narratives’ (Carr’s term) are the stories we live by: ‘Our very lives are organised in this way: the unity of a life can be seen as the unity of a life-story, an implicit autobiography, which each of us is always in the process of composing.’¹⁹ Barbara Hardy makes the same point from a literary perspective in the epigraph to this section; and she goes on to paint a compelling picture of how every moment of life is suffused with narratives.²⁰

Where does this leave biographical narrative? It appears to be stranded between two extremes, one which claims that ‘narrative qualities are transferred from art to life’, the other claiming the opposite, that stories are lived as well as told. But in biography these positions are not mutually exclusive. Barbara Hardy drops a hint at how the apparent contradiction may be resolved when she urges us to look at the ‘cells of narrative instead of the whole body’.²¹ For, in life-stories, it is apparent that the many elements of the subject’s life which constitute the biographer’s source material already have a temporal dimension: letters, memoirs, diaries and the like not only date from particular times but also possess beginnings, middles and ends. These mini-narratives are researched and found; they are the cells that give evidence of the subject’s lived existence; but, in order to become a life-story, they need to be fashioned into the ‘whole body’, to become parts of a coherently organised narrative imposed upon them. Biography can thus be said to have a cellular structure: all the anecdotes, incidents, episodes, scenes – the various manifestations in which stories appear – are selected and shaped into a master narrative. Lower case stories go towards creating an upper case Story. Narrative is both discovered and imposed.

But what of the relationship between this master narrative and the life as lived, with all those experiences that did not make it into the ‘Life’ – the fish that the biographer’s net did not catch in Julian Barnes’s well-known metaphor? As he says, ‘there is always far more of that’.²² Biographers are aware that, in fashioning a story from their documentary material, they are making a symbolic narrative that is a thinned-down précis of the life that has been lived. This process of collating materials to make sense of the life in fact simplifies it; so that, paradoxically, the more one knows about the subject, the more one realises how much one does not know, and the more distant from real life the portrait created in the symbolic narrative becomes. Claire Harman senses this when introducing us to Robert Louis Stevenson:

The fact that some things become less knowable about a subject the more data accrues around them is of utmost im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Lives Without Theory
• 1. Art and Artifice in Biography
• 2. Plotting A Life
• 3. The Author’s Works (1): Signs of Life?
• 4. The Author’s Works (2): Open to Criticism?
• 5. Their Times and Ours
• 6. Framing a Poetics of Literary Biography
• Notes and References
• Select Bibliography
• Index