Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art , and: Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (review)

Abstract

Reviews Leon Edel, Justin Kaplan, Alfred Kazin, Doris Kearns, Theodore Rosengarten, Barbara Tuchman, and Geoffrey Wolff, Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art. Ed. Marc Pachter. Washington, D.C: New Republic Books/National Portrait Gallery, 1979. 155 pp. $9.95. Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. New York: J. B. Lippincott , 1979. 288 pp. $12.95. In the now famous codicil to his will, T. S. Eliot forcefully objected to the writing of any study of his life. In death, he held tenaciously to his earlier distinction between "the man who suffers and the mind which creates." Like Matthew Arnold before him, Eliot wished to be remembered for his "creative literature," not for the quality of his life. Many other outstanding figures—artists and statesmen alike—have cast a cold eye on the biographer's art, a fear of the inquisitorial and adversary nature of biography. This impulse, in part, may be viewed as an instinct for self-protection, and in the case of the literary artists, as an insistence on the value of literature as literature. From a series of lectures first presented at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. in November 1978, Telling Lives is a provocative exploration by accomplished biographers into the nature and form of the art of life study. In his compact and brilliant essay, "The Figure Under the Carpet," Leon Edel conceives biography as a "young" art form, still evolving. As an art form, biography has been, until recent years, an amorphous effort based upon no standard or crit- 358 biography Vol. 3, No. 4 ical principles. Past biography has all too frequently assumed its shape and form from the view and intentions of the biographer, each holding a different mission, a different rationale for exploring the private life of a subject. In a tentative and theorizing approach to the biographer's art, Telling Lives offers a series of reflections on "the joys, limitations, and challenges of defining a life." Echoing Lytton Strachey's comment "that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as it is to live one," Marc Pachter in his opening essay, "The Biographer Himself: An Introduction ," defines the distinction between biography as an element in popular culture and fine biography: "Distinguished biography . . . bears no resemblance to the voluminous, indiscriminate compendia of facts-shoveled-on-facts in which the writer buries alive both his hero and the reader." The current rage of biographies and autobiographies of movie celebrities, famous gangsters and killers, and notables of the jet set exists mainly for expose and exploitation. They are factoids of popular culture, and unrelated to the art of distinguished biography. Such works are not the concern of Telling Lives. In creating fine biography today, it is no longer true that a subject's public career is selfsufficient and central in the drama of life. In the 19th century, the biographer generally saw his task as "testimonial" and the fundamental drama of a life consisted of the narration of a great public event. "The idealizing biography, like the standard boardroom portrait and other totems of respectability, begs to be ignored." The biographical studies of Lytton Strachey have radicalized modern biography because he opens the biographer's art to new possibilities, to an "honest evocation of the truth of a life." The modern biographer must portray "the whole sense of a person." Only as the biographer comprehends the dynamic in a personality—its evolving sense of itself as it is and as it would like to be—is the vital truth uncovered. The biographer's drive is our human curiosity made intense and particular; his "passion for life" is a will to know the true shape of another's experience. In Pachtern words, fine biography challenges the pose to find the personality. W. H. Auden once complained that biography was "always superfluous " and "usually in bad taste." In "The Figure Under the Carpet ," Leon Edel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the life of Henry James, re-affirms Andre Maurois' metaphor of the relationship between the portrait painter/sculptor and the biographer. Some painted portraits are "mere facades," suited more for an archive or a family album. Edel believes that...