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 Dennis Kersten (bio) Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography Jerome Boyd Maunsell Oxford UP, 2018, 304 pp. ISBN 978-0198789369, $28.95 hardcover. In Cynthia Ozick's short story "Dictation" (2008), the female secretaries of Joseph Conrad and Henry James concoct a plan to write themselves into literary history by secretly inserting passages from Conrad in James's stories and vice versa. This never actually happened (although we can never be entirely sure), but early twentieth-century authors did appear in each other's writing, both fictional and nonfictional. As Jerome Boyd Maunsell shows in his new study about the interconnectedness of the lives and life stories of a group of Modernist novelists, these authors reinvigorated the genre of autobiography, often by employing the narratological techniques they had experimented with in their innovative fiction. Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography takes as its main subject the life writing of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Edith Wharton, H. G. Wells, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis with the aim of "revealing interactions" between them (5). Its seven chapters function as "platforms" from which to view these authors' lives, so the book doubles as (group) biography. Each chapter first discusses the writing process of an author's autobiography or memoir, including his or her views on life writing in general. Then, and this is where the emphasis in each chapter lies, there is a close reading of primary texts with a focus on their story-shaping and/or fictionalizing strategies. Lastly, the chapter pays attention to the reception and afterlives of these texts. Running through the book, and especially in the early pages, is a sense of regret at not being able to get to the "truth," which explains the special interest in how some of the authors' autobiographies excel at "evasion." The opening paragraphs set the tone: they focus on the artificiality of self-portraiture, which offers only "achingly close simulacra" of truth (2; my emphasis). Boyd Maunsell seems to be especially on his guard with his novelist subjects. Surely, these writers will be even more adept at evasion and fictionalization in their autobiographies than others. Their "very métier consists in making things up," he writes in his introduction (3). Portraits from Life is a meticulously researched and thoroughly sourced book, presenting vivid portraits of its main (life) writing subjects in an accessible and engaging style. Despite their level of detail, its chapters are admirably concise and on-topic; they will undoubtedly entice many readers to seek out the largely forgotten autobiographical works by Conrad et al. (and possibly even reevaluate their more strongly canonized fictional oeuvres). The book certainly succeeds in its aim to contextualize the novelists' life writing, and it shows how a study of the creation of their autobiographies and memoirs provides insight into both their private and professional lives. There is a point to be made for the idea that the scrutiny of an author's struggles with his or her autobiography will be most insightful biographically. And it is true, or at least convincingly argued by Boyd Maunsell, that the way [End Page 908] novelists view and write about autobiography is indicative of their poetics, and thus produces a glimpse into their authorship. Indeed, it makes sense to read, for example, Virginia Woolf's essays about the art of biography in conjunction with her reflections on realism and the representation of reality in fiction elsewhere. In fact, in a book about Modernist authors and their fascination with autobiography, it is rather puzzling to find Woolf relegated to the epilogue, even if it initially reads like a discarded "proper" chapter on her autobiographical practice. This choice raises the question of why exactly Portraits from Life focuses on Conrad, James, Ford, Wharton, Wells, Stein, and Lewis. Were they chosen as exemplary life writers, or was their status as canonical authors of fiction the first criterion of selection? In other words, are these the most interesting autobiographers in the 1900–1945 period, or are they the most interesting among the authors whose fiction has been most heavily consecrated since? With Stein, yes...