In this fall’s glut of literary biographies sex or substance abuse spices up most of the lives: even poor old Henry James’s homosexual yearnings again come under scrutiny. But the appeal of these books isn’t just the hot skinny on Denis Diderot’s mistresses and marital rows, Evelyn Waugh’s nth alcoholic embarrassment or what Allen Ginsberg did in bed with Neal Cassady 45 years ago. Nor is it just the weird little factlets: that Waugh aspired to be a cabinetmaker, that Stephen Crane’s funeral was covered by cub reporter Wallace Stevens, that art critic Harold Rosenberg (Mary McCarthy’s Partisan Review colleague) created Smokey the Bear and that Ginsberg spent a month as a NEWSWEEK book reviewer. No, we read these books the better to understand the creative process. Don’t we, class?
But do we need all these books? Certainly Martin Stannard’s Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years, 1939-1966 (523 pages. Norton. $29.95) and Christopher Benfey’s The Double Life of Stephen Crane (294 pages. Knopf. $25) are amply justified. Waugh’s previous biographer, Christopher Sykes (1975), admitted his work wasn’t definitive. Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer (1923), invented episodes and even forged letters that he passed off as Crane’s; such successors as John Berryman (himself the subject of two biographies) trusted Beer too much. In his preface to Diderot: A Critical Biography (528 pages. Knopf. $30), P. N. Furbank disarmingly admits he doesn’t know as much about his subject as Arthur Wilson, whose “magnificent” two-volume biography appeared in 1972; Furbank focuses more on the work than on the man.
Not all biographers are so forthright. Neither Michael Schumacher in Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (769 pages. St. Martins. $35) nor Carol Brightman in Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (684 pages. Potter. $30) wastes words over earlier, less complete biographies; their silence may be benign neglect. But crank-’em-out biographer Jeffrey Meyers (Hemingway, Conrad, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis … ) ought to have told what his Edgar Allan Poe (348 pages. Scribners. $30) adds to the work of his 20-odd predecessors-including Kenneth Silverman, whose splendid life of this most tormented of literary souls appeared last year. Instead, in his bibliography, Meyers refers us to his review of Silverman’s book in the Virginia Quarterly-where he called it the best of a bad lot, and coyly noted “there is still room … for a shorter, less psychoanalytical, and more dramatic narrative of Poe’s fascinating life.”
Nervier still is Fred Kaplan, whose Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (620 pages. Morrow. $25) has no introduction at all, and neglects to mention anywhere in the text the definitive five-volume biography by Leon Edel, completed in 1972, then condensed and revised in 1985. Only Kaplan’s flyleaf attempts to justify the book’s existence: not on the grounds that anything new has come to light but because it’s the first James biography “conceived in the light of twentieth-century attitudes about feminism and homosexuality.” Take that, Leon. In fact, Edel presents unjudgmentally much the same material Kaplan does to demonstrate James’s homoerotic sensibility and his apparently chaste crushes on younger men. Why Edel should be deemed insufficiently feminist is anybody’s guess.
Kaplan’s passing reference to Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Gold Bug” as “ghost stories” makes us wonder how careful he’s been with less peripheral facts. (Well, it’s better than Meyers’s calling the hero of “Treasure Island” Johnny Tremaine.) Yet his view of James as a lonely, good-hearted man who lived for his work is the James we know from Edel (and from R.W.B. Lewis’s 1991 “The Jameses”). Kaplan’s fanciest move is to catch James in unintended double entendres. (". . Don’t, oh don’t, my dear boy," he wrote one young man, urging informality, “insert the hard wedge of ‘Mr’–as if for splitting friendship in twain.”) Benfy contrast, saddles his Crane biography with the overelaborate thesis that Crane “lived his life backwards”: writing its events, then acting them out. When Benfey gets fancy, look out. Crane, who’d been involved with women named Cora and Dora, is shipwrecked aboard a vessel called the Commodore; Benfey tells “it was as though a pun hidden in three names had been worked out: Cora is like Dora. Cora como Dora. Commodore.” Oh wow.
It’s a relief to turn to the judicious Stannard, who never makes something out of nothing, and even refuses to sensationalize a potential bombshell: a letter in which Waugh says his “Sexual passion for my ten year old daughter is obsessive … I can’t keep my hands off her.” He knows Waugh well enough not to inflate impulse into incest. Stannard’s affinity for the mandarin Waugh shows in his allusive style. At a fancy-dress ball, he records, Waugh stayed on until 3:30 a.m., “when at last he retired, leaving the young in one another’s arms.” (The phrase is from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”) Similarly, Brightman’s sharply sententious prose echoes McCarthy’s. “A literary marriage never ends,” she writes of McCarthy and ex-husband Edmund Wilson. “Only a literary tie permits its partners the gratification of playing the match out forever on a multitude of screens. . .”
Affinity, though, needn’t mean the biographer sits still for all the subject’s nonsense. Schumacher, granted Ginsberg’s cooperation for “Dharma Lion,” recounts solemnly his silliest monkeyshines; much of his “criticism” paraphrases the poet in vague, flat language: “In his opinion,” writes Schumacher of one poem (it hardly matters which), “understanding the vast consciousness affecting every human being was the key to solving the puzzling riddle of everyday problems on earth.” Brightman had similar help from McCarthy but still busts her both on her politics (she “accommodated herself to the end-of-ideology ethos” of the ’50s) and her veracity. Wilson, a violent drunk, was truly a husband from hell, but McCarthy wasn’t “so helpless a victim of [his] powerful will as her memoirs, fiction and interviews suggest.” (True, it’s easier to stand up to a dead subject; McCarthy died in 1989.)
If only Brightman had taken an equally hard line against using fiction as a source comparable to memoirs and interviews. The literary biographer’s besetting sin is to think, as Meyers tritely puts it, that an author’s works can be “illuminated by relating them to the events of his life.” But a work of art is self-contained. For better or worse, it’s beyond help from whatever real-life events it may have liberated from context. Naming the actual Vassarites in McCarthy’s “The Group” or telling which of Ginsberg’s buddies did what in the celebrated beginning of “Howl” is gossip, however scholarly. At best, it illuminates how the writer worked, not the work itself. Which is fine. Boswell, the archetypal literary biographer, was a great gossip and a bum critic. But writers believe the work transcends the life. Biographers might keep that in mind.
