Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography by Jerome Boyd Maunsell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography by Jerome Boyd Maunsell Mirosława Buchholtz Jerome Boyd Maunsell. Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography. Oxford UP, 2018. 304 pp. £20.00 (hardback). "There is no such thing as a true portrait. They are all delusions and I never saw any two alike." This opening epigraph culled from Nathaniel Hawthorne seems preemptive, but in fact aptly sums up Jerome Boyd Maunsell's endeavor to expose individual and collective acts and states of delusion in portrait-making. Unabashed by Hawthorne's plump but personal claim, Maunsell digs deeper to the sixteenth-century Italy and brings to light Giorgio Vasari's anecdote of Parmigianino's work on his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Maunsell's reading of the painting, both his own and that mediated by John Ashbery's ekphrastic poem of the early 1970s, leads to the conclusion that artifice and illusion are an inescapable part of the business of portraiture and especially self-portraiture. Parmigianino's disproportionately large hand in the foreground of his Self-Portrait signals ambivalently both making (and thus making available) and blocking the self from view. It seems that throughout the book, Maunsell looks for the writer's hand in its contradictory gestures of offering and withholding. Portraits from Life is refreshingly straightforward in its form: flanked with a short introduction and an epilogue, its seven chapters draw portraits of seven Anglophone novelists who between 1900 and just after WWII worked on their autobiographies [End Page E-4] and in doing so revamped or at least questioned the genre. Maunsell construes autobiographical writing as an act of self-invention, which occurred at different stages of the writers' lives. Hence the chronology in his book has less to do with the dates of birth than with the dates of "their performance as autobiographers" (6). The book is also straightforward in its freedom from both the academic jargon and the obligation to call to witness all the recently important theoretical stances. The author advertises it as "an experiment in biography," which "aims to tell a story, to craft a narrative," and hence "owes more to the procedures of biography than of literary criticism" (6). Despite this disclaimer, the book is well informed and meticulously researched, though it indeed does not seek to solve theoretical dilemmas besetting life-writing studies. For example, the distinction Maunsell makes between "autobiographies," which "broadly take life as a whole and focus on the author," and "memoirs," which "are often focused on only a part of a life, or on other people" (3), sounds provisional and questionable. In fact, on the following page, the crucial claim that "All autobiography is … group biography" (4) subverts this distinction. Uninclined to split hairs, Maunsell takes life writing as it comes with its insoluble complexities. In search of truth, he rightly avails himself of all forms of life writing, including diaries, letters, notebooks, and autobiographical novels. Despite the clear-cut division of the book into seven chapters, seven lives, and seven evolving autobiographical performances, the magic of the study lies to a large extent in various interconnections and entanglements of the seven autobiographical subjects. Parmigianino's oversized hand is still fresh in the reader's memory when in chapter 1, "The secret of my life," Maunsell adds another turn of the screw and shows not one but two hands at work on an autobiography. These are the hands of Joseph Conrad and his collaborator Ford Madox Ford. Henry James was skeptical when this ill-matched pair began working on the novel Romance, but, as Maunsell points out, quoting Nicholas Delbanco, the idea of co-writing fiction must have nevertheless appealed to James. In September and October 1902 he in vain suggested collaboration to H. G. Wells (qtd. in Maunsell 12; Delbanco 146–47) but in 1908 contributed to The Whole Family, a composite novel initiated by W. D. Howells. The immediate incentive for Conrad to collaborate on his autobiographical sea sketches collected later as The Mirror of the Sea (1906) was pecuniary. A model was easy to find in Ivan Turgenev's then widely read and influential Sportsman's Sketches (1852) (13). The uneasy collaboration was...