The Perils of Literary Biography

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By EDWARD CHAMPION

Two things can be said about the ever-popular genre of literary biography: Trade and university presses show no reticence in chipping and pulping the forests on behalf of almost any conceivable figure. And both increasingly prize conjecture over scholarship, with biographers salivating over half-baked thoughts frosted with significance and treating minor foibles as if they were as important as an author's work. That is not to suggest that personal territory can't be excavated, provided there is a reasonable conduit between a writer's life and work. But the era when "pathobiographies" were considered a disreputable subspecies pursued by those preferring a Q score to scholarship seems to be coming to a close. Indeed, current developments suggest a convergence between the academic biography and its commercial counterpart.

Has the time come to identify how the shovel can be employed in more purposeful ways? Or is there hope beneath all that dirt?

The framework was set down in 1918 with Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Strachey sought to free the biography from its heavy Victorian shackles, suggesting that the biographer's first duty was "a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant." Decades later university presses began putting Strachey's iconoclastic maxims in action to accentuate scholarship in academic biographies like Ernest Samuels's three volumes on Henry Adams. The books, published by Harvard University Press, explored how Adams's life differed from his own account in The Education of Henry Adams. Samuels went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the work. Meanwhile there were commercial biographies like Earl Blackwell and Cleveland Amory's International Celebrity Register, which provided mass audiences with capsule biographies of more than 2,000 public figures. Here, writers and intellectuals appeared alongside baseball players and former madams, and Truman Capote's "foliage of blond and somehow defensive bangs" was as important as his nonfiction innovationsif not more so.

Both academic and commercial biographies evolved, sometimes dabbling with and adopting elements of the other. Academic biographies became influenced by emerging social concerns. Commercial biographies applied greater sophistication. A casual glance through the current crop of literary biographies reveals the telltale signs of convergence. You couldn't get more respectable than Yale University Press, which soon is bringing out Richard M. Cook's Alfred Kazin: A Biography. You couldn't get more commercial than Harper, which put out David Michaelis's Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography in October. Those books join recent work on Nancy Cunard, Thomas Hardy, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Edith Wharton, and others.

All biographies afford some speculation upon their subjects. But speculation is less savory when the conclusions are formed outside the biographer's expertise. Cook's forthcoming biography of the literary critic Kazin offers an example. He quotes Kazin musing, just before his 49th birthday, "So much of my moral energy has gone into an awareness of the mother, into courting the mother, into disobeying and even cheating on the mother." From there, Cook jumps immediately to the question, "Was it any wonder that he became a self-admitted 'mama's boy,' that he saw the important women in his life as mother figures on whom he depended for his sense of well-being and against whose authority he felt he needed to rebel?"

That's a great psychological leap for an associate professor of English. Cook, who teaches at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, is not a psychoanalyst. If Kazin defied and deified his mother, and if there were indeed specific parallels in his writings on that point, the many juicy items that Cook digs up, including the boorish manner in which Kazin treated his wives, don't explain what any of them have to do with an academic appraisal of the writer's work.

Cook's speculation is more reasonable when he taps more-concrete sources. He observes that Kazin's liberalism didn't extend to radicalism, but that Kazin had an often-conflicted view of politics that he felt compelled to be vociferous about. Kazin was concerned about the anti-intellectualism of the New Left, but he sympathized with the student rebels in the 1960s. Later Cook delves into Kazin's communications with his son, Michael, whom he corresponded with at length during the Reagan era after a protracted estrangement. In his later years, Kazin boasted to Michael of having written a stinging article on neoconservatism: "So you see that, despite my being ideologically null and void, I am not entirely hopeless." With specific examples taken from Kazin's writings, Cook demonstrates that Kazin did, indeed, see himself as a malcontent of letters and that it was one of the reasons some of his essays were vocally against neoconservatives in the 1980s. Unlike the fixation upon Kazin's mother, that personal detail shows a reasonably informed speculation directly related to how Kazin operated as a critic during a particular period in his career.

Even the best contemporary biographers are taken with insinuative speculation. Hermione Lee, holder of a prestigious chair at the University of Oxford, is already known for her biographies of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather. Nevertheless, her Edith Wharton (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) — declared by Booklist's Brad Hooper likely to be "the definitive biographical treatment" — cannot, despite its tight research, entirely escape the need to burrow into innuendo. Upon Wharton's death, an unpublished fragment, "Beatrice Palmato," was discovered among her papers and eventually published in R.W.B. Lewis's 1975 biography. The incomplete tale was striking because its erotic and taboo-breaking tone stood in sharp contrast to Wharton's image as a genteel socialite. As Lee observes, various scholars squawked in subsequent decades about that "smoking gun." Based on a few intuitive hunches, they concluded that Wharton must have been involved in an incestuous relationship with her father, George Frederic Jones. Lee rightly observes that "there isn't a shred of evidence to support an incestuous affair." But even she can't help dropping a hint that "a concealed secret remains a secret."

And while more restrained than Cook, Lee still hunts for additional skeletons. She considers Wharton's childhood memory of sitting on a family friend's knee to hear stories of the Greek gods, for example, and declares the practice "tinged with a faintly creepy eroticism." Unless the dutiful scholar wishes to observe priapism in every gesture of affection, isn't a cigar just a cigar?

Last spring Columbia University Press published the well-received Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, by Lois Gordon, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Cunard, herself a poet, served as a muse and often more to T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, and Ezra Pound, among others. Gordon can, therefore, make a reasonable case for some scholarly titillation. But at times, for example when dwelling on Cunard and Neruda's love life, she does away with the data altogether: "One can only imagine Neruda reading to her an erotically audacious poem such as 'Body of a Woman,' which, like the poems in the Song of Solomon, addresses a woman/deity about passionate yearning and fulfillment," Gordon writes. "She is a cosmic power, and she both subdues and elevates his spirit. It is more difficult to imagine Nancy reading to Neruda the love poems she was composing, such as 'Aramanth of Sunset,' about her fear of their inevitable separation." Why stop there? Why not imagine Cunard reading to Neruda? Or why not speculate upon the frequency of lovemaking or the amount of squeaks the bedsprings made in their pied-à-terre?

Such needless drifts into personal waters bear the telltale nevus of commercial influence. The need to know more, or infer more, may be a highbrow answer to best-selling celebrity memoirs. Not unrelated to the trends in literary biography, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982, recently published by Ecco, offers insight here. While there is some value in reading about the circumstances in which Oates wrote Bellefleur, her first New York Times best seller ("I hope for a large gorgeous sprawling work, like nothing I've ever done," her journal tells us. "A commercial failure, I suppose ... "), the overall problem of much of the testimony remains. Take, for instance, this entry from August 1, 1980: "Susan Sontag telephoning. And sounding, as she frequently does, rather melancholy ... alone ... over the phone. A few days later Stephen and I laughed fondly over her predicament: Now that she has at last plugged in her telephone no one has called. Or so she says. Three weeks of near-isolation ... she has gone out a total of five times. ... " And more of the same.

Maybe there's something meaningful lost within the ellipses. Oates may have been very concerned for her friend. And the passage may be of some service to Sontag scholars. But how does it help us to understand Oates's fiction, much less Oates's creative faculties? The only real value is an additional primary source confirming what we already knew from other sources, that Sontag was holed up trying to write fiction in the summer of 1980. And why do we need Oates's thoughts on the subject when Sontag's papers are available at the University of California at Los Angeles's Charles E. Young Research Library? Enough is enough.

Another problem with more-commercial biographies is that when they have endnotes, the citations aren't always clear enough. That is especially unfortunate with Michaelis's book on Schulz, because the biographer discovered sentences from various jottings and letters that were later uttered by characters in the Peanuts comic strip. Of an affair Schulz conducted with Tracey Claudius, Michaelis relates: "Sparky's delight in needling Tracey took him straight back home, and when he observed the niceties of an old-fashioned courtship by opening and closing the passenger door for her, she came right back, reaching over as he rounded the car to lock him out, then smiled out at him with a wrinkled nose." That same story, with the details preserved, is related by Charlie Brown to Peppermint Patty, as they sit underneath a tree in a 1971 Sunday strip. "Then she'd just sit there and wrinkle her nose, and grin at him," Charlie concludes. "That's what I think love is."

Michaelis's access to United Media permitted him to search the entire Peanuts archive by key word and find specific nexus points. For future researchers hoping to connect the artist with the art, the findings will provide helpful starting points. Where Michaelis's reportage gets thorny, however, is with his endnotes. Michaelis opts for a collection of notes that are simply associated with chapter subtopics. But since some of the chapters go on for almost 40 pages, and subtopics often weave in and out through each chapter, explicit quotes cannot be lined up with their precise sources — especially troubling because Michaelis's efforts were roundly denounced by the Schulz family upon the book's publication.

Then there are all those details intended to flesh out the portrait of personality, but that feel like a tedious pile-on. If the important questions of a literary biography — most notably how life and work relate to each other — aren't asked, then why bother to learn about the precise brioche à t�te an author had for breakfast? As the critic Terry Eagleton has noted in a recent review of Thomas Hardy, by the journalist and longtime biographer Claire Tomalin: "If you are going to record, as Tomalin dutifully does, that Hardy's mother hailed from a part of Dorset well endowed with apple orchards, there simply isn't enough space left to come to grips with narrative structure in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. In a sense, the whole point of the writer's enterprise — the writing itself — is consigned to secondary status. It becomes a peg on which to hang the life — a life that often has scant bearing on the literature."

Perhaps Tomalin has immersed herself in such details because, as academic and commercial biographies continue to twist into a Gordian knot, another Victorian age of ponderous, overly detailed volumes may be in our future. But if biographies of all stripes consider an author's life closely in relation to the work, then the convergence to come may be of value for scholars.

In Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, published by Yale, Malcolm, an often-controversial journalist, points to Alice Toklas's difficulties in subsisting on the riches left by her partner Gertrude Stein. In a prefatory aside, Malcolm waxes at length, telling us: "Wills are uncanny and electric documents. They lie dormant for years, and then spring to life when their author dies, as if death were rain. Their effect on those they enrich or disappoint is never negligible, and sometimes unexpectedly charged. They thrust living and dead into a final fierce clasp of love or hatred. But they are not written in stone — for all their granite legal language — and they can be bent to subvert the wishes of the writer. Such was the case with Stein's will." It is bad enough that Malcolm notes something obvious, but consider the needless literary embellishment: the clumsy simile ("as if death were rain"), the redundant stone imagery, and the melodramatic depiction of a commonplace condition.

Malcolm's slim volume also has a paucity of endnotes and no index, but numerous instances of a not-very-exacting standard for using sources. A letter to the editor of a magazine publishing an excerpt from Stein's Wars I Have Seen is taken, with no corroboration except hearsay, to counter Stein's claim of being unaware of nearby Gestapo activities. An interview with a woman who had a brief friendship with Stein and Toklas leads to unverified accusations of Stein's callousness to Jews in Nazi-occupied France.

If it is getting more and more difficult to tell scholarly biographies from mass-market ones, there nevertheless remain recent examples that hold great promise for literary biography. Take Julie Phillips's James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which came out last year from St. Martin's. Not only has Phillips, a journalist, offered vigorous citations for her sources, including specific dates for letters, but she has chosen a subject where it is almost inconceivable to consider the writer apart from the writings.

James Tiptree Jr. was the alter ego of Alice Sheldon. Tiptree maintained an elusive identity and carried on correspondences with many big names in science fiction, including Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin. Phillips has carefully sifted through the public record, as well as gone out of her way to interview many of the people who talked with Tiptree, and the magic combo clarifies any quibbles scholars and loved ones might have. Thus we have accountability and transparency.

Phillips shares Tomalin's descriptive emphasis ("Sun, sand, and no American news helped ease the depression."), but for the most part sticks to details that are germane to the writer's life and work. We get a strong sense of Sheldon's feminism through historical and anecdotal evidence. Phillips presents the political climate of 1947 and Tiptree's letters to friends about the "woman problem." If Phillips speculates, she doesn't often let matters linger there. She follows up. In presenting details about Sheldon's sexuality, we are informed that "she couldn't have an orgasm through intercourse" and given multiple sources (for example, Tiptree's journal and an unfinished memoir) discussing her desire to be equal to a man in her sexual wants. In light of her impersonation of a man throughout her writing career, that is a valid line of inquiry.

Phillips's book represents the literary biography done right. It was written by a journalist and published by a commercial press. If there is any commercial inspiration here for academics, it is in the selection of an appropriate subject — a discussion of a writer's life in relation to his or her writing. That's where the convergence in types of literary biography should be heading.

Edward Champion is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and runs the blog Return of the Reluctant at http://www.edrants.com