Biography as High Adventure: Life-Writers Speak on their Art (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 167 how thorough and competent the reporting was for every geo-political entity but his own area of expertise. Keeping this in mind, I asked two biographers (of a philosopher and a painter) to read and comment upon the entries pertaining to their subjects. The reaction of the first was unprintable; the second described the book as "probably a harmless enough publication, one we might suggest for undergraduates or others who want vague knowledge of a person and do not need serious and in-depth information." I asked a reference librarian at my university to evaluate Chambers, and her response was very much the same as the one just quoted. Together we looked through several guides to reference materials to see how others assessed this volume. This judgement of Walford (A Guide to Reference Materials, 4th ed.) seemed representative: "a good one volume for the small library." But then, just how useful is an entry which states in its entirety that "Matejko, Jan Alois (1838-93)" was a "Polish painter, born at Cracow, noted for his paintings of scenes from Polish history"? Even though it is amusing to read that Agis IV was a king of Sparta who "succeeded in 244 B.C., and, having proposed a redistribution of property, was strangled, 241 B.C." or that "Brownrigg, Elizabeth," was "a midwife hanged at Tyburn in 1767 for the barbarous murder of a workhouse apprentice, Mary Clifford,"—of what use are entries such as these to persons who want genuine information? There are far too many entries listing names followed by one-line descriptions such as "Italian painter" or "Slovene poet." It seems reasonable to assume that anyone who goes so far as to look up these persons in a biographical dictionary would probably know that much already. There are ten subject indices, ranging from art and architecture to science and industry. These consist mostly of authors and titles and inventors and their inventions . All information relates to "relevant articles" within the book and is only given for the better-known in every category, as the editors have chosen to exclude "relatively obscure or insignificant titles and subjects." This sort of editorial selection once again severely limits the volume's usefulness for serious scholars and researchers. The editors would like us to believe that this is "a book which may be read as well as looked up," and indeed it is amusing in parts. They insist that each entry exemplifies "human interest and critical observation," which for me translates as quirky and opinionated. The editors themselves should have the last word: they describe the subject indices as "an invaluable aid for devotees of quiz games and crosswords, for settling arguments, or for the idle pursuit of general knowledge." For this reviewer, the remark serves as an excellent description and evaluation of the entire volume. Deirdre Bair University of Pennsylvania Stephen B. Oates, ed., Biography as High Adventure: Life-Writers Speak on their Art. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. 146pp. Hardback $20.00; paper $8.95. This collection of stimulating essays by various distinguished biographers presents an unbuttoned approach to biography, in contrast to a more systematic scholarly approach. A varied group of writers of lives here unabashedly advocates biography as an art rather than a science. The fascination of attempting to reconstruct the life of another person who has lived, who has a real history as opposed to the invented history of a character in fie- 168 biography Vol. 10,No. 2 tion, remains the center of biography's elusiveness and the source of its fascination. Wobbling between the wandering magnetic poles of history on one side and literature on the other, and in our time subject to the gravitational pull of psychology and sociology , biography is an astonishing interdisciplinary enterprise. Is it really, deeply, a viable enterprise? Is the goal of reconstructing a past life attainable ? Speaking for the negative, Sartre presents us in Nausea with the peevish historian Roquentin, whose mind is soured by the blind facticity of the world. Roquentin, it will be remembered, unable to puzzle out the thread of existence, spends his professional time trying to capture the life of the Marquis...