From the issue dated November 3, 2000
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2 Distinct Approaches to Biography, With Bellow and Updike as the SubjectsBy JAY PARINIWriters often strike biographers as subjects worthy of obsessive attention, and there
Good biographers, therefore, become fiction-makers. That doesn't mean that they invent facts; rather, they put them in a particular order, shaping them, placing an emphasis here and not there, dramatizing events that may, to the subject of the biography, have seemed undramatic at the time. In other words, good literary biographers turn the desultory and frequently boring facts of a writer's life into a compelling narrative. They create, or discover, a story that was hiding in plain sight -- even from the subject. I'm a sucker for biographies of authors. It interests me how a writer whose work I admire managed to get from one book to another while, at roughly the same time, paying the bills, raising children, going to the dentist, getting the car fixed, and so forth. It seems useful to know certain details, like the fact that Anthony Trollope got up at 5 in the morning to write for several hours before going to work at the post office, producing a set number of words per hour. It's even inspiring to think of Vladimir Nabokov, during his impoverished early years of exile in Berlin, writing The Gift in the bathroom of his tiny apartment, because it was the only available private space. I have read the five volumes of Leon Edel's majestic life of Henry James three times. Why? A truthful answer would be difficult to formulate, but it has something to do with my amazement at the notion that James wrote so much wonderful fiction while leading such a socially active life. Biographers, of course, take wildly different approaches to the genre. Some -- as in R.F. Foster's recent W.B. Yeats: A Life -- dwell on historical context and the life itself, staying away from literary criticism. Others -- Graham Robb's Victor Hugo, for example -- find the work itself the center of the life, and feel no guilt about spending most of a chapter analyzing a poem or novel. Two recent biographers, treating the careers of Saul Bellow and John Updike, fall generally into the two different camps. James Atlas pushes a shovel deep into Bellow's day-by-day life, unearthing romantic attachments, struggles with wives and children, financial crises. Atlas meditates on the author's controversial role as a public intellectual, maintaining a remarkable level of objectivity. His Bellow is an astonishing, brilliant work. I cannot recall when a living writer was last the subject of such an intimate, full-length portrait. William H. Pritchard, on the other hand, shies away from the personal details of Updike's life, openly deriding "talk show revelations and displays." He argues that "such events pale in interest when put next to [Updike's] writings, products of all those hours sitting at the desk with pencil or typewriter or computer." Pritchard does point to "facts in the life that seem to parallel or even help to account for certain moments in the writing"; for the most part, however, he stands respectfully back from his subject, training his considerable critical acumen on the works themselves. The Atlas book amounts to nothing less than a cultural event. Its author has been a cultural commentator, critic, novelist, and biographer of note for several decades, and the literary world has been awaiting his Bellow for at least a decade. (I played a tiny role, sending Atlas some Bellow letters I had come across in Austria a few years ago, and telling him a couple of personal anecdotes about the author.) Atlas has left nothing to chance, retracing his subject's life with just the sort of imaginative sympathy a biographer ought to possess. He deals patiently with Bellow's endless irascibility, brittleness, and distrust of others, and the biographer's gift for narrating the real drama behind an unfolding literary masterwork is evident throughout. He repeatedly shows how Bellow shattered the calm around him, then retreated into the quiet of the text to re-create a sense of order. While Atlas rarely offers close readings of Bellow's novels, he brings us eerily close to the white flame of creation itself, making us aware of what each book cost Bellow, giving us the illusion that we understand where the work came from, even how it was written. (My skepticism is not meant as a criticism: Biographers can never really know where a work came from or how it got written, but only create the illusion of such knowledge.) Atlas never shrinks from pointing out disparities between Bellow's self-presentation and the reality at hand. In Chicago during the 60's, for example, the novelist appeared regularly on television chat shows. Atlas writes: "He managed to convince himself and others that he was a diffident, reclusive artist even as he sat for journalists and television commentators; nearly every interview with Bellow -- and there were many over the years -- began by claiming that he granted few interviews." Elsewhere, Atlas quotes a letter Bellow wrote to Owen Barfield, the philosopher, in which he implicitly compared himself to Gandhi. "It was a curious association: the much-married, often-divorced novelist identifying with the ascetic apostle of nonviolence," Atlas remarks. One rarely sees a biography of a living writer, composed with the writer's implicit consent, that is not mere hagiography; but Atlas's book is far from hagiographic in tone, even though Bellow cooperated with the project, lending tacit approval by allowing his biographer to quote at length from unpublished material. Atlas has trod carefully here, giving Bellow praise where it seems due -- he is a shrewd judge of the quality of the work -- while describing the novelist's "chronic feelings of embattlement and persecution" and his relentless creation of the myth of Saul Bellow. Atlas tells with genuine sympathy the story of Bellow's journey from obscure beginnings in Montreal and Chicago through his rise in the literary world -- a rise that peaked, in 1976, with the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a writer himself, Atlas is fascinated by the development of Bellow's craft, tracing his subject's intellectual growth with meticulous care. One encounters major cultural figures, including Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, William Barrett, Mary McCarthy, and Hannah Arendt, each of whom played a role in the novelist's development and reputation. Atlas seems at ease in the bracing intellectual milieu that fostered Bellow, whose "congenital suspiciousness" of the WASP literary establishment was not altogether unfounded. Indeed, Bellow -- the son of immigrant Jews -- had to blast his way to the forefront of American literary culture, and exactly how he managed that feat remains at the center of Atlas's drama. By the 60's, Bellow had become the preeminent American novelist, the obvious successor to Hemingway and Faulkner. Unfortunately, his character flaws made him unsuited to the role, especially at a time of political turmoil. Although he opposed the Vietnam War, he could not bear to see himself as part of any social movement. He needed to stand alone: the individualist and genius. Increasingly, his peevishness and egocentrism became the most obvious things about him. Atlas pulls no punches here. Bellow's racism, for example, is on display, as when, in 1970, he derided a bosomy African woman to an acquaintance with a witty but insensitive remark: "It was her country that was underdeveloped," he said, "not herself." I suspect that Atlas grew tired of his subject's tiresome side, but he somehow maintains a generous attitude toward Bellow. He pays homage to the massive talent that lies beneath such remarkable achievements as The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Herzog, and Humboldt's Gift, painting a fiercely detailed portrait of the author in his time. I would place Bellow high on any list of biographies. Atlas is a lovely writer, unpretentiously lucid, and he tells a tale that anyone attracted to the story of postwar American fiction will find irresistible. Pritchard's Updike, in contrast, focuses on the works themselves -- novels, stories, poems, reviews -- as they have unfolded over nearly half a century. Pritchard explains his method: "I am not mainly an interpreter of literature; that is, I am less interested in telling someone else what the novel or poem means, what its 'significance' is, than in suggesting what the experience of reading it is like, and how that experience is a vital one." Rightly, he stands amazed before Updike's "unstoppable production of books and essays," admiring the "seemingly effortless nature of his articulateness." Pritchard remains, throughout, a partisan, defending Updike from all comers, including Saul Bellow. Bellow has criticized Updike for his "writer's reliance on beautiful work" and for blithely accepting "the opposition of public and private as fixed and indissoluble." (One of Bellow's great accomplishments, of course, has been to make the public world seem integral to the mind's interior life. Updike, on the other hand, often appears solipsistic, a writer content to stay within the confines of his own narcissistic bubble.) The New Republic's critic James Wood has recently noted, in a critique of the novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, that Updike commonly refers to religion, but seems like an "oddly calm Barthian," too easily accepting the world's particularity as proof of God's existence, while shying away from God's absence and terror. Wood's commentary has something in common with critiques of Updike by Frederick Crews and others. (Crews pointed to the "morally ambiguous, self-undermining character" of Updike's fiction.) Pritchard attempts to deal with such objections, suggesting that Updike has simply made a choice of method, finding "one way of telling a truth." Pritchard is surely right in saying that the novel, as a genre, can admit "many routes toward truth," and that Updike, in Lilies, is engaged "in patiently constructing a panoramic novel of large proportions." I sympathize with the biographer's attempt to give Updike his due, or even more than his due. For nearly half a century, Updike has put forward a substantial, often beautiful and moving, body of fiction. I personally like him best in his short stories, where the tendency to lavish attention on the world's endless shiny surfaces is held in check by the limits of the form itself. In a handful of stories, such as "Flight," "Pigeon Feathers," "Separating," and "A Sandstone Farmhouse," Updike lifts himself into the highest echelon of American story writers. He has also published a handful of novels -- Of the Farm; Rabbit, Run; Couples; and Rabbit Is Rich -- that define their period; without them, American literature would be poorer by far. Reading Pritchard on those books has made me admire them even more so. He has a good teacher's way of unobtrusively noting patterns and underscoring passages. In discussing the four Rabbit novels, for example, he directs the reader's attention to the gradual accumulation of details that make the setting -- eastern Pennsylvania -- so deeply present and palpable. Nevertheless, Pritchard's defense does not feel convincing. He simply doesn't address the serious issues raised so sharply by Crews and Wood. For all his attention to the religious life of his characters, Updike does seem curiously passive, unwilling to grapple with matters of faith except on rare occasions. But here, as on several issues, Pritchard backs away from head-to-head combat with Updike's detractors. As anyone who has ever picked up The New Yorker knows, Updike is also a prolific critic, willing and eager to take on all comers. To me, Updike seems uneven, at his best when assessing writers with whom he has clear affinities: Hawthorne, Nabokov, Borges, Cheever. But, as Pritchard suggests in a lively chapter devoted to Updike as critic and reviewer, the novelist has had little good to say about satirical writers like Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, or A.N. Wilson. Their wavelength -- brittle, witty, darkly humorous -- eludes him completely. And when Updike approaches women writers, as Pritchard says, he does so at a peculiar remove: "He seems in writing about women ... to operate at less intensity, from a greater amused and tolerant distance, than he does when the novelist is a male whom he feels to be more part of the competition." Despite such reservations, Pritchard still deeply admires Updike's "strongly metaphorical and unabashedly personal testimonies of delight or disappointment," and he appreciates the fact that Updike has aimed his criticism at the lay reader. A professor of English at Amherst College for many decades, Pritchard has evolved his own form of biographical criticism, having previously examined Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, and Randall Jarrell in much the same way that he approaches Updike. He takes chronology seriously, seeing each work as unfolding from previous work, occupying a place in time. He never shrinks from assuming that a given poem, essay, story, or novel emerges from a living writer -- not, as Michel Foucault famously argued in "What Is an Author," from "a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction." Ever since the New Critics began the delicate work of separating texts from authors, there has been a tendency among "serious" critics to shrink from biography. Indeed, in most American college classrooms, a professor would be considered amateurish if he or she dwelt at length on the biographical details of the writer under discussion. Even so, biography has never lacked for readers or writers: The desire to know as much as possible about an author one admires seems unquenchable. In my view, biographers are also becoming quite sophisticated as critics, no longer assuming an unproblematic relationship between life and art. As that happens, they are challenging -- and weakening -- many of the prejudices against biographical reading. Ideally, a literary biography should manage to address both the life and the work, keeping them separate where necessary but never refusing to deal with the complex interaction of the two. Saul Bellow, as James Atlas demonstrates, never hesitated to reach for materials from his own experience when writing a novel. (Throughout his career, as Atlas demonstrates as well, friends and colleagues have complained about his use of their lives.) In short, Atlas has provided a remarkable service to readers by giving us the details that underlie the novels, all the more so because he has accomplished that without degrading or disparaging the fiction. I finished reading Bellow convinced (it may be an illusion, of course) that I had come closer to Bellow's imaginative universe. What more can one ask from either a biographer or critic? Pritchard's Updike, on the other hand, was not meant as a biography. Yet, by taking the biographical matrix of the author's life as a kind of grid against which to examine the writing, Pritchard launches criticism in a direction that seems tantalizing. All along, he has defied the New Critics who held sway when he began writing, by mingling biography with criticism. He does so in a subtle, self-conscious way that seems, implicitly, to suggest that one can increase one's pleasure and sophistication as a reader by knowing about the author who put the words on paper. It's a simple proposition, but one that has somehow been a long time coming. Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His works include John Steinbeck: A Biography (Henry Holt, 1995) and Robert Frost: A Life (Henry Holt, 1999). Books Discussed in This Essay Bellow: A Biography by James Atlas (Random House) Updike: America's Man of Letters by William H. Pritchard (Steerforth Press) http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B14
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Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education