The art of life

Biographer Jay Parini on his favorite biographies, about such writers as James Joyce, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Ralph Waldo Emerson

By Jay Parini

Nov 19, 1997 | I've been addicted to reading writers' biographies for 30 years or so. Literary lives attract me, in part because I'm curious about how the great writers were able to assemble their masterworks and, somehow, also manage to get to the dentist, play with their children, pay their bills, visit elderly relatives and do all the time-consuming things one must do in the natural course of a life. What often fascinates me is the source of writers' inspiration and the specific details of their working lives: how many hours they spent at the writing table, under what conditions and with what results.

I'm hardly alone in liking, even loving, biographies. The art of biography is an ancient one, preceding the novel by centuries. Among the first major biographers was Suetonius (A.D. 75-150), who wrote "Lives of the Noble Caesars" -- a book I often thumb through for gossip about Caligula, Nero and Tiberius. These manic, grandiose emperors may never recover from their first biographer, who lingered over the most salacious and melodramatic aspects of their lives. Indeed, this scandal-mongering style of biography has rarely been out of vogue, although in recent years we have been deluged with examples of what Joyce Carol Oates has called "pathographies" -- biographies that dwell on, revel in, the dark side of the subject. (As a biographer myself, I often wonder why anybody would bother to spend years and years doing research on somebody they didn't actually admire.)

Dishing the dirt in the mode of Suetonius gave way, in the Middle Ages, to hagiographic lives of saints, which were meant to inspire devotion more than entertain the reader. But literary biography, in English, got underway with a bang in the 18th century with Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets" and, of course, Boswell's "Life of Johnson." These were both works that raised the genre of literary biography to the level of art. In the case of Boswell, certainly, the biographer was in love with his subject, and the resulting book remains a model of sorts, the biography-as-work-of-love.

Despite the grand achievements of Johnson and Boswell, the 20th century has been, in fact, the consummate age of biography, beginning with Aylmer Maude's "Life of Tolstoy," first published in 1910 but considerably revised and expanded in later editions over three decades. Maude was a brilliant critic who also knew Tolstoy well as a friend. In the tradition of Boswell, he spent a good deal of time in the company of his subject, taking notes on conversations, quizzing Tolstoy's contemporaries, interrogating the great man himself. Maude's Tolstoy offers a pioneering example of modern biographical practice.

It is commonly agreed (and I concur) that the two best examples of recent biographical scholarship are Richard Ellmann's "James Joyce" (1959) and Leon Edel's five-volume "Henry James" (1952-1972). These books will be hard to surpass. While neither is exactly hagiographic, both biographers adored their subjects, and they lavished decades of careful attention on them. They made every attempt to understand their subjects' foibles and failures, too, although they put them in the context of lives filled with achievements -- personal and artistic.

Ellmann's "Joyce" bowled over most readers when it first appeared -- no one had seen such scholarly detail, such professionalism, such astute use of modern critical techniques. Ellmann was teaching at Yale at the time, and was rigorously prepared for writing this book by years in the classroom. Having already written two groundbreaking books on William Butler Yeats, Ellmann had a remarkable command of Anglo-Irish literary politics. He also understood the complex ways that life and art interweave. "The life of an artist," he wrote, "but particularly that of Joyce, differs from other lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command his present attention." Joyce was, of course, an extreme example of the writer-as-autobiographer, which made him an excellent subject for a full-scale biography like Ellmann's.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Instead of allowing each day to lapse back into the fold of vague memory, Joyce was perpetually reinforcing and reshaping his experience, making art out of life. Ellmann is able to trace this process in vivid, almost three-dimensional detail, taking us back to Dublin, introducing us to the characters who would emerge in "Dubliners," Joyce's first volume of fiction. We also meet the prototype of Stephen Dedalus, the hero of "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man." Indeed, you can hardly read that great novel in any deep sense without having a huge amount of biographical knowledge, and therefore Ellmann becomes a necessary adjunct to the serious reader. Ellmann's narrative moves slowly forward, letting the details accumulate as Joyce abandons Ireland for the Continent, marries, becomes a father, supporting his family through various ill-paid jobs in Italy, France and Switzerland throughout the years when he was writing "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake." As Ellmann puts it: "In whatever he did, Joyce's two profound interests -- his family and his writings -- kept their place. These passions never dwindled. The intensity of the first gave his work its sympathy and humanity; the intensity of the second raised his life to dignity and high dedication." Ellmann is dedicated to the idea of the artist, and so is Leon Edel, whose "Henry James" is a model of the biographical art. Edel devoted himself to James for several decades, immersing himself in the novelist's unpublished notebooks and letters, in the rough drafts of his novellas and novels, his stories and essays. Edel published this biographical series over a period of two decades, somehow managing to sustain the narrative tension from the first volume to the last. I've read Edel's five substantial volumes three times, word for word, slowly. I don't know how many people can say this, but I suspect they are few and far between. I expect to read them again soon, my fourth journey through this extraordinary life, which begins in the nest of an intellectually gifted, wealthy family who spent a good deal of time in elegant European hotels. James was immensely sophisticated, by background and education. His brother, William, became a famous philosopher, and his sister, Alice, was also a brilliant writer. James became the quintessential expatriot, and Edel is artful in the way he evokes a sense of place as James arrives in Florence, Paris, Rome or London. Edel's biography provides, for me, the satisfactions of the old Victorian three-decker novel. The details of daily life are here in profusion. Although James' life was never dull, I'm especially drawn to the young Henry --- the ambitious writer who takes London by storm in the second volume, which is subtitled: "The Conquest of London, 1870 to 1881." Readers are more familiar with the magisterial James who spent the last 15 years of his life in Rye and Chelsea, a Johnsonian figure whose legendary reserve and imperial manners frightened away casual visitors. The younger James was "more ardent and less circumspect," Edel observes. "He met life eagerly and often with exuberance. He was in the fullest sense an 'addicted artist,' but one who was guided at every turn by his intellect. And he was a man of action and a man of the world as well. No novelist of his time addressed himself more assiduously to wooing fame and fortune." This makes a breathtakingly good tale -- and a wonderful introduction to Victorian life, which James encountered in all its complexity and color. It certainly does matter whether or not the subject of a biography actually "did" something in his or her life in addition to writing books. I like it when people in books go places and do things, when they mingle and compete in the great world. Financial and marital crises also make for good reading. All tragedies are useful, from a narrative viewpoint. Ill health can help, too. Fortunately (for the biographer), most lives are full of problems and crises, so there is plenty of available suspense to create a compelling narrative. Charles Dickens has always been a favorite subject for biographers, since his life was easily as large and entertaining as his novels. It is a marvelous rags-to-riches tale, with suspense at every turn as the author's fame and fortune zig and zag, if always on an upward curve. The first Dickens biography was by his closest friend, John Forester, whose book appeared in 1874. Dozens of biographies have been written since then, but one of the best is the most recent: "Dickens" (1990) by Peter Ackroyd. Ackroyd is himself a talented novelist, the author of many novels, including "Chatterton," "The Trial of Elizabeth Cree" and "Milton in America" -- all works of fiction with a distinctly biographical bent. But "Dickens" remains his masterpiece: a vast, 1,195 page book, as capacious and varied as its subject. Ackroyd has a novelist's gift for pacing, and this biography rips along, with lurid descriptions of slum life in London and Paris and colorful portraits of major Victorian figures from William Makepeace Thackeray and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (two rival novelists) to Queen Victoria herself, who invited Dickens to Buckingham Palace for tea. I can think of no biography that provides a better sense of an author's working life. Ackroyd invokes the smell of paper and ink, the frenzy of writing novels in installments, the effort of having to meet each looming deadline, the confusion created by an endless stream of proofs in need of correcting. He gives us the numbers: how many pages Dickens wrote per day as well as how many pounds per page he earned. From the beginning of his career, Dickens was a fluent writer, Ackroyd tells us. With "Pickwick Papers," his first major production, he "was writing quickly but such is the sureness of his invention that the manuscript in his strong and confident hand is remarkably free of corrections. He numbers each page at the top as he goes along with his flowing pen -- there are two or three small deletions on each page which look as if they were made at the actual time of writing, and there are others which were clearly made when he looked over the manuscript after he had completed it," the biographer explains. One puts down "Dickens" with a rich, complete sense of the writer's life and mind, and with some feeling for how he might have written so many astonishing books. Two other, more recent, biographies that strike me as extraordinary works are "Anthony Trollope" (1992) by Victoria Glendinning and "Emerson: The Mind on Fire" (1995) by Robert D. Richardson Jr. The life of Trollope, of course, rivals that of Dickens for worldliness and productivity. He wrote more than 40 novels and kept company with most of the important people of his day: statesmen, authors, industrialists, actors and aristocrats. Glendinning tells the whole story in vivid detail, examining the strange separation between the robust, outgoing man-about-town who was often seen in the fashionable clubs of London and the vulnerable artist who suffered from extreme self-doubt, a man haunted by a sometimes painful childhood during which he was dominated by a flamboyant mother and an aggressive older brother. His rise to national, then international, prominence as an artist is beautifully told. Glendinning ingeniously uses ample quotations from Trollope's work to suggest what the author himself might have been thinking about aspects of his own life. Similarly, Richardson offers an entirely fresh sense of Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's premier thinker, essayist and archetypal man of letters in the 19th century. "Emerson is the great American champion of self-reliance," says Richardson, "of the adequacy of the individual, and of the importance of active soul or spirit." More than any recent biography I have read, Richardson's "Emerson" challenges the reader to live at the level of spiritual intensity that was Emerson's natural gift. It was Matthew Arnold who called Emerson "the aid and abettor of all who live in the spirit." Richardson brings this Emerson to life, and makes him available to our overwhelmingly materialistic age in a miraculous fashion, creating a vivid sense of the "vanishing volatile froth of the present," as Emerson called his life. This book is, in itself, a work of art. It may be some years before critics, who are always behind the times, quite realize what is before them: the Age of Biography. In the meantime, readers who understand as much can still thrill to the spectacle.

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