The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography by Scott Donaldson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography by Scott Donaldson Ben Downing (bio) Scott Donaldson, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (The Pennsylvania State University Press), 296 pp. In the spring of 2004, under the headline “New Cheever Biography Planned,” the Westchester Journal News ran an article in which Benjamin Cheever, who’d been interviewed for it, was quoted as follows: “My father used to say that to have a bad biographer was to be stuck with a bad roommate for all eternity. I like the idea of him getting a good roommate at last.” The good roommate was Blake Bailey, whose biography of John Cheever would appear in 2009. The bad one was Scott Donaldson, whose own biography of John Cheever had been published in 1988, and who brings up the article in The Impossible Craft, his survey of (as the jacket copy puts it) “the rocky territory of literary biography.” It’s a wince-inducing moment, but also a nice illustration of the rockiness, which has a way of bruising and provoking everyone involved. Love them or hate them, biographers are here to stay. If you become sufficiently famous, you can be sure that, pre- or post-mortem, one or more of them will come sniffing around, wanting to nail down the minutiae of your life, fix them in some sort of interpretive framework, and thrust the resulting doorstopper into the public domain, where critics and pundits will treat it as an occasion to pass sweeping judgment on you, pro or con. It hasn’t always been thus. Though it goes back at least to Plutarch, biography as an inevitable concomitant of fame is a fairly new phenomenon, and its inclination toward pitiless, almost Sauron-like omniscience and exposure—its insistence on ferreting out all your nasty little secrets—more recent still. But now that’s just how things are, and those who aspire to immortality know that they can no more reach the Elysian Fields without [End Page 588] picking up a biographer or two than a dog can romp through terrestrial ones without getting burrs and ticks. Writers, who attract more than their fair share of biographical attention, tend to be particularly alert to all this, and to have particularly strong feelings about it. And so literary biography has ballooned into something more than a semi-popular subgenre, its actual product—the books itself, that is—at times seeming to be dwarfed by a surrounding sea of gossip and contention. While alive, a big-name writer will either stonewall prospective biographers or, hoping to shape his or her own legacy, play along with them; once the writer is gone, family, friends, acolytes, and executors will get into the act. By the time the biography appears (if it does—many are smothered in the cradle), it’s bound to come trailing a history of skirmishes, power struggles, and perceived betrayals, and when word of these leaks out (as it always does) more Sturm und Drang are sure to follow. But the real struggle takes place on a higher, more abstract plane. Creative writers typically want to be known only through their work, and the biographer threatens to undo their hard-won apotheoses, to spoil the magic. Small wonder that creative writers—novelists, usually—are wont to get revenge on biographers by casting them as stupid or unscrupulous characters. But back to Donaldson. In addition to his life of Cheever, he has published lives of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Archibald MacLeish, the poet Winfield Townley Scott, and the scholar and writer Charles Fenton, as well as a study of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship; while I’ve unfortunately read none of these, collectively they seem to command a good deal of respect, and a friend whose opinion I trust speaks very highly of the last-named book. Now in his mid eighties, Donaldson has been writing literary biographies and pondering the nature of the genre for over forty years (though presumably not both at once), and in The Impossible Craft he brings it all to bear, detailing his time in the trenches, presenting several case studies, and stepping back to consider the challenges and pitfalls of the enterprise. The...