THE LITERARY BIOGRAPHY Also by Dale Salwak KINGSLEY AMIS: A Reference Guide JOHN BRAINE AND JOHN WAIN: A Reference Guide JOHN WAIN A. J. CRONIN: A Reference Guide LITERARY VOICES: Interviews with Britain's 'Angry Young Men' A.J.CRONIN *THE LIFE AND WORK OF BARBARA PYM (editor) CARL SANDBURG: A Reference Guide *PHILIP LARKIN: The Man and His Work (editor) *KINGSLEY AMIS: In Life and Letters (editor) BARBARA PYM: A Reference Guide MYSTERY VOICES: Interviews with British Crime Writers KINGSLEY AMIS, MODERN NOVELIST ANNE TYLER AS NOVELIST (editor) THE WONDERS OF SOLITUDE THE WORDS OF CHRIST *Published by Palgrave Macmillan The Literary Biography Problems and Solutions Edited by DALESALWAK Professor of English Citrus College, California Editorial matter and selection © Dale Salwak 1996 Text © Macmillan Press Ltd with the following exceptions: Chapter 2 ©Antony Alpers 1996; Chapter 7 ©Russell Fraser 1996; Chapter 8 ©Linda H. Davis 1996; Chapter 9 ©Dale Salwak 1996; Chapter 10 © Diane Wood Middlebrook 1996; Chapter 12 © Natasha Spender 1996; Chapter 18 © Elizabeth Longford 1996 Reprint ofthe original edition 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-65746-1 ISBN 978-1-349-24960-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24960-2 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 For Edwin A. (Eddie) and Amy Dawes Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xii Notes on the Contributors xiii 1 A Culture of Biography Justin Kaplan 1 2 Biography - The 'Scarlet Experiment' Antony Alpers 12 3 Those Wonderful Youths and Maidens, My Reviewers N.JohnHall 22 4 The Necrophiliac Art? Martin Stannard 32 5 Read that Countenance Catherine Aird 41 6 Reflections on Writing the Plath Biography Linda Wagner-Martin 47 7 Problems and Pratfalls of a Literary Biographer Russell Fraser 56 8 The Red Room: Stephen Crane and Me Linda H. Davis 66 9 Discovering Kingsley Amis Dale Salwak 80 10 Spinning Straw into Gold Diane Wood Middlebrook 86 vii viii Contents 11 On Being a Witness Katherine Ramsland 91 12 Private and Public Lives Natasha Spender 101 13 Mather, Poe, Houdini Kenneth Silverman 107 14 Breaking In Andrew Motion 117 15 Shilling Lives: An Interview Anthony Curtis 121 16 The Authorized Biographer Eric Jacobs 130 17 Sharing the Role: The Biographer as Sleuth Margaret Lewis 137 18 Reflections of a Biographer Elizabeth Longford 146 19 The Biographer's Revenge John Halperin 149 Notes 167 Related Works 174 Index 177 Preface This book brings together nineteen essays, the majority of them written especially for the occasion, on what has been called 'the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing'l -the biography, in this instance, the literary biography. Included in this genre are not only books with the life of a writer as their focus but also, as Justin Kaplan argues, any book that possesses literary merit, that attempts to stimu late a reader's imagination through 'the magic of language.'2 Ranging from an examination of the traditional biographical form, which stud ies in detail the relation of a writer's art to his or her life, to psycho biography, which is guided by psychological theory, the essays in this volume explore the myriad ways a literary biographer approaches the craft, the immense complexities involved in recounting a life, and some possible solutions to the dilemmas that arise in the process. As several of the contributors acknowledge, the biographer faces many challenges, among them the limitations and constraints of the chosen form. No matter how many letters, diaries, unpublished manu scripts, earlier biographies, memoirs, photographs, and other sources are available to the researcher, there remain what Victoria Glendinning calls 'lies and silences'3 in the public record. 'Biography is the clothes and buttons of the man,' wrote Mark Twain, 'but the real biography of a man is lived in his head twenty-four hours a day, and that you can never know.'4 Unlike the novel, here omniscience is impossible. There's so much that can never be known, and finding those bounds can be both daunting and intriguing. Other obstacles confronting the biographer stem from the faulty memories of interviewees, the inability to verify facts or documents, conflicting accounts of the same events, problems of copyright, and publishers who increasingly want less rather than more detail. Construction also poses a special challenge. What shape shall the book take? Straight narrative? Topical treatment? Essay? Where should the story begin? And how should it end? What is the biographer's proper relationship with the subject? These matters, and many others, are covered in the essays that follow. 'Never mind if one has met these questions before, and answered them,' says Catherine Drinker Bowen. 'Each book one writes is different in content and therefore in form; with each book old problems present themselves in guises new and strange.'S ix Preface X Writing about authors whose lives are over is itself difficult. But writing about living authors presents its own set of problems, includ ing the subject's natural anxiety over the biographer's scrutiny, the seemingly endless research necessary to keep current with the pri mary and secondary works, the possible loss of objectivity, the per ils of misinformation and miscommunication, and a lack of closure. Many biographers have experienced the frustration of not being able to consult restricted material because the author, friends, or family are understandably concerned about harmful ramifications. When writing about Sir Kingsley Amis, for example, I approached (with the author's permission) the Bodleian Library about reading Amis's let ters to Philip Larkin for 'ideas', not for personal information, but was told this would not be possible. 'They are so very personal,' one librar ian wrote, 'that even if Sir Kingsley himself did not mind them being read, the people he wrote about certainly would. Unfortunately, this is one of the hazards of working in the modem field where most of what one writes on a living author is bound to be provisional.'6 Opening the door to private lives clearly raises ethical and legal questions as well. How far should biographers go in respecting the privacy of the subject-or of other people implicated in the lives they describe? Are private lives always relevant to biography? Is it ethical to disregard instructions in documents left by the dead, even more to use those documents as a basis for further diagnosis? Surely the biog rapher has a responsibility in the selection of evidence: eye-witness vs gossip or hearsay, the scrupulous weighing of facts vs the prefer ence for conjecture, and so on. 'It is the experience of many of my friends,' wrote one contributor to this volume, 'that often their giv ing witness to an error of fact is greeted by a biographer as an outra geous attempt to interfere with his or her creativity, as if his creation of a legend is more important than the facts of the lives he describes.' Such public vs private issues become all the more troubling now that many biographers are no longer unwilling to explore intimate ques tions of gender, race, culture and sexuality. John Updike laments, 'The trouble with literary biographies, perhaps, is that they mainly testify to the long worldly corruption of a life, as documented deeds and days and disappointments pile up, and cannot convey the unearthly human innocence that attends, in the perpetual present tense of liv ing, the self that seems the real one. '7 What, then, does it take to understand another human being and then convey that understanding to the reader in a way that is humane ly truthful? In the preface to her life of Frank Lloyd Wright, Meryle