“Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality,” T. S. Eliot wrote in the first of his Four Quartets.1 Variously misremembered and misquoted as “Mankind cannot bear very much reality” and—with a deplorable indifference to the rhythms of blank verse—“Mankind cannot bear too much reality,” this phrase, lifted from its context, has achieved the status of an aphorism, and—what seems always to follow—a truth. Since this chapter will offer a resistant account of reality as it has come to be valued in the world of literature and writing, we might begin by asking how much is “too much”—or, alternatively, what is it that makes “reality” real or reality “real”? The problem is already apparent.
What is the use of reality in literature? Sometimes contemporary writing is itself referential—pointing toward or running parallel with actual events and persons, as, for example, in novels by E. L. Doctorow or Don DeLillo, or in the genre of the “occasional poem,” written to commemorate an event. But what happens when reality becomes a trait, or a criterion, for the success, excellence, or sincerity of a piece of writing?
The brief celebrity of the nonfiction novel in the 1960s, following the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, presented real events narrated in the style and using the techniques of fiction. My interest here, however, is in the converse situation: works that present themselves as true and that disclose themselves, or are forcibly disclosed, to be invented.
The normative distinction on best-seller lists is between fiction and nonfiction. But like all binaries, this one is difficult to sustain. What is interesting about the fiction/nonfiction divide is precisely the formal pretense that these things are opposites, or alternatives, to each other, rather than versions of each other, or aspects of a larger category of writing and reading. There is a certain irony in the fact that we praise works of fiction for being true-to-life, and condemn works of nonfiction when they turn out to be fabrications. I have sometimes found myself sharing the ethical outrage of those who feel duped by false memoirs. But from a critical rather than a moral or ethical standpoint, should these deceptions be telling us something about the nature of writing?
We might also want to consider the curious status of a term like nonfiction, which implies that the standard kind of writing—what linguists and anthropologists would call the unmarked term—is fiction. Why is the true-story narrative for modern readers defined in terms of a double negative? Is nonfiction the equivalent of “not untrue,” and how is that different from “true”?
The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris offered some thoughtful commentary on the vexed question of reenactment in film and television:
Critics argue that the use of re-enactment in documentaries suggests a callous disregard on the part of a filmmaker for what is true. I don’t agree. Some re-enactments serve the truth, others subvert it. There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood. There is no veritas lens that provides a “truthful” picture of events. There is cinéma vérité and kino Pravda but no cinematic truth.
The engine of uncovering truth is not some special lens or even the unadorned human eye; it is unadorned human reason. It wasn’t a cinéma vérité documentary [The Thin Blue Line] that got Randall Dale Adams out of prison. It was a film that re-enacted important details of the crime. It was an investigation—part of which was done with a camera. The re-enactments capture the important details of that investigation. It’s not re-enactments per se that are wrong or inappropriate. It’s the use of them. I use re-enactments to burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth.
Is the problem that we have an unfettered capacity for credulity, for false belief, and hence, we feel the need to protect ourselves from ourselves? If seeing is believing, then we better be careful about what we show people, including ourselves, because regardless of what it is we are likely to uncritically believe it.2
This chapter will focus on the memoir boom and its discontents, including a proliferation of hoaxes so numerous, and so successful, as to create what is essentially a new literary genre. I want to explore the complicated relationship of the memoir style not only to the genre called autobiography but also to a certain kind of imagined, artful, or speculative biography, all of which make claims to truth. What interests me is what is called real and what is called literary, and what the two might, or might not, have to do with each other.
Sir Philip Sidney had declared in his Defence of Poesy (1595) that “The poet nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”3 In my edition of the Defence, the headers at the top of the page reinforce the point: “The historian captive to truth,” reads one, and another says with equal directness, “The poet is least a liar.”4 For Sidney the word poet, or maker, meant the writer of imaginative literature, whether in verse or in prose. The goal of poesy was not factual accuracy, but something else, something different, something more like Horace’s famous dictum that art should both delight and instruct. Thus, comparing the usefulness of history and poetry, Sidney could assert that “a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example.”5
But today it seems to be the real (or the faux real) that is actively, and avidly, sought. Let’s consider an example that is also a cautionary tale—although, as will quickly be evident, it is hard to decide who, or what, is being cautioned. The story of Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust “memoir,” Angel at the Fence, hit both Oprah Winfrey and the publishing world with dismaying force when the “truth” unraveled in December 2008. Oprah had welcomed Herman and Roma Rosenblat as guests on her show in 1996, after Herman won a contest sponsored by the New York Post for “the best love story sent in by a reader.”6 The story he told was of his internment as a boy in a Nazi concentration camp, and how he was sustained by a young girl who threw apples over the fence to him. Many years later, in Israel, he went on a blind date with the same girl but did not recognize her. Subsequently, they met again in New York and married.
When the Rosenblats returned to The Oprah Winfrey Show eleven years later, Winfrey lauded their romance as “the single greatest love story, in twenty-two years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air.” The story was picked up in the “couples” volume of Chicken Soup for the Soul and was ultimately sold, in book form, to Berkley Books. Then the scandal broke. The story turned out to be a fantasy, an embellishment, or a lie (depending upon who you asked), and Berkley canceled the book before its scheduled release.
Reporter Gabriel Sherman, who raised significant questions about the Holocaust “memoir” in The New Republic, noted dryly that the publisher had advertised Angel at the Fence (subtitled The True Story of a Love That Survived) as “a perfect Valentine’s Day gift.”7 Not only the astonishing coincidences, but also the on-the-ground facts, were quickly put in doubt by persons familiar with the geography of Buchenwald. No such fence, it was noted, existed; it would not have been possible for a civilian to gain such access to a prisoner in the camps. The result, as Sherman reported, was—unsettlingly but unsurprisingly—backlash not against Herman Rosenblat, but against those who questioned the verisimilitude of the story, including Deborah Lipstadt, a distinguished professor of history and Holocaust studies and the author of the 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. Doubters were lambasted as “going after a Holocaust survivor without any proof.”8 In effect, they were pilloried as Angel deniers.
What was the scandal here? What was the crime? Had Rosenblat called his narrative a fiction, would Oprah have been interested in it? Would a publisher have put it under contract? Would the advance have been less?
The excuse given for the support of the book’s claims were in some ways more problematic than the claims themselves, since, as the Valentine’s Day publication date suggested, the story was supposed to be all about love. Love, it was said, clouded memory and embellished it. Love, Rosenblat himself asserted, made him do it. Why did he invent the story about the girl and the apples? “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many.”9 Although he and his brothers were in fact interned in the camp, what “brought hope to many” and attracted the attention of an agent, a publisher, and Oprah Winfrey was not the survival but the love story.
The next step seems, in retrospect, inevitable. Within days of these revelations, a publisher began negotiating to issue the book as a work of fiction. What was to be published, though, was not the original text but a version based on a screenplay already in production. The book thus became the secondary partner in a book-and-movie tie-in deal. The publisher, York House Press, issued a statement that tried to explain, as well as to explain away, what had happened:
Mr. Rosenblat, now age 80, fantasized that his wife of 50 years came as a girl to nourish him by tossing apples to him over the barbed wire at a sub camp of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. This is a story he told himself and others repeatedly until it was integrated seamlessly into his otherwise factual account. It is beyond our expertise to know how Holocaust survivors cope with their trauma. Do they deny, rationalize or fantasize and promote fiction along with truth? Perhaps the coping mechanisms are as individual as the survivors themselves. Would, for humanity’s sake, that Mr. Rosenblat’s fantasy were true and that not just one girl, but a whole crowd, had come to toss apples over the fence, and to liberate those within much sooner than was actually the case.10
In this interesting mix of popular psychology (“coping mechanisms”), guilt-trip apologia (“it is beyond our expertise”), and resistance to the facts (all accounts suggest that there was no fence that bordered on public access, so that even “a whole crowd” of apple-tossing empathizers would have been unable to perform the rescue operation as described), the publishers sought to rehabilitate, even to reenoble, the author-fantasist. The problem with the “false memoir,” they implied, did not lie with Herman Rosenblat but with the tragic fact of the Holocaust itself, and the refusal of history to make his fantasy retroactively true. “Mr. Rosenblat’s motivations were very human, understandable, and forgivable,” they wrote. What does human mean in such a context? Or very human? Fallible? Exculpable? Full of pathos? Compare this to “for humanity’s sake,” in the paragraph above. Rosenblat is human, all too human. So is his story, whether fictional or factual. It is history that is, and was, inhumane. In fact, it might be the case that it was not love but history that made him do it.
And after the apologia, the assertive declaration: “York House Press is in serious discussion to publish a work of fiction in early spring that is based on the screenplay, tentatively called Flower at the Fence, about Herman Rosenblat’s life and love story, that is grounded in fact and that rises to the proper levels of artistic value, ethical conduct and social responsibility.” Here, presumably, is the claim to literary legitimacy, however oblique. Whatever the “proper levels of artistic value” may be construed to be, how do they intersect with ethical conduct (on whose part? author? publisher? screenplay writer?) and social responsibility? What is the social responsibility of a work of fiction? And in what sense is the work to be “grounded in fact”? Pretty clearly, the publishers want to have things both ways: the unutterable truth of the Holocaust and the forgivable fiction of the love story.
Furthermore, the “serious discussion” in which the putative publisher is engaged (presumably a conversation about contractual issues) becomes linked, by a kind of rhetorical slippage or legerdemain, to an implied seriousness of the work. What is being discussed is a “work of fiction” that is also based on “fact.” Because if it were not—if, for example, the entire narrative had been invented by a twenty-five-year-old creative-writing student with no personal link to the Holocaust—the commercial possibilities for both the film and the book to be derived from it (“can we now call it a ‘novelization’?”) would be much more limited. Was the Rosenblat scandal really just a category crisis, readily resolved by resituating the book on a shelf marked fiction?
With perhaps predictable regularity, hoax memoirs have returned again and again to the topic and the ground of the Holocaust, the overdetermined historical locus of witnessing, testimony, survivors—and deniers. But the tendency persists in all testimonial, confession, autobiographical writing, even in the writing of other lives. The claim of truth invites not only the suspicion but perhaps even the formal inevitability of the lie. “There is no testimony,” writes Jacques Derrida, “that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury.”11
Yet another supposed memoir, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, told the story of a Jewish child who killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense, trekked over a thousand miles through Europe in quest of her deported parents, and was adopted by a pack of wolves. And this entire story, too, it developed, was a fabrication. The author, Misha Levy Defonseca, acknowledged that she was born in Belgium to Roman Catholic parents who were arrested and killed during the resistance; her birth name was Monique De Wael. Despite the revelation that the claims made in the book—which had been translated into eighteen languages and made into a movie in France—were false, De Wael deployed the language of “reality” to justify what she had done. “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” she said in a statement released by her lawyers.12 She asked forgiveness of “all who felt betrayed” and said she “felt Jewish” and had felt so “since forever.”
Daniel Mendelsohn, the author of a book on his quest for the story of his great-uncle and other Jewish victims of the Nazis, dismissed this empathetic banality with brisk contempt: “ ‘Felt Jewish’ is repellent; real Jewish children were being murdered however they may have felt.”13 Mendelsohn thus countered De Wael’s claim of an alternative reality with his own deployment of real, then followed it up with an extended discussion of what it means to say “my reality.” “It’s not that frauds haven’t been perpetrated before,” he observed. “What’s worrisome is that, maybe for the first time, the question people are raising isn’t whether the amazing story is true, but whether it matters if it’s true.”
Mendelsohn drew attention to the borderline between memoir and fiction and on the differential value that modern readers and writers seemed to place on them as bearers of emotional and historical truth. Why do we feel so outraged and bamboozled when a memoir turns out to be a fake? Is our indignation moral, ethical, aesthetic, stylistic—or, indeed, feigned? Does the use of the memoir change or disappear when it is proved not to be true?
The number of hoax memoirs on all topics has been on the increase, with the claims ever more extravagant and exploitative. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival was the title of a “heart-wrenching” memoir of gang life in South Central Los Angeles that turned out to be a fabrication. “Heart-wrenching” was how the book was described by a feature-article writer in a profile of the author, “Margaret B. Jones,” later revealed to be the nom de laptop of Margaret Seltzer. Here is how The New York Times feature story on the author described the book:
Her memoir is an intimate, visceral portrait of the gangland drug trade of Los Angeles as seen through the life of one household: a stern but loving black grandmother working two jobs; her two grandsons who quit school and became Bloods at ages 12 and 13; her two granddaughters, both born addicted to crack cocaine; and the author, a mixed-race white and Native American foster child who at age 8 came to live with them in their mostly black community. She ended up following her foster brothers into the gang, and it was only when a high school teacher urged her to apply to college that Ms. Jones even began to consider her future.14
The following week this personal biography was exposed as a hoax, the publisher, Riverhead, recalled the book and offered refunds to purchasers, and the editor and publisher said they had never met the author prior to publication, relying instead on the word of a literary agent and the author’s signed statement that she was telling the truth.
Margaret Seltzer, it turned out, had grown up with her biological family in the wealthy L.A. neighborhood of Sherman Oaks and attended Campbell Hall, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. When interviewed on the radio in connection with book promotions, Seltzer/Jones had spoken in an African-American vernacular, although she and her family are white. The publisher, editor, agent, and newspaper profiler all faced public criticism, and the press drew the expected comparisons with other hoax authors: James Frey, who fabricated the story of his supposed memoir of drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (powerfully promoted by Oprah Winfrey), and Laura Albert, the real author behind the memoirist “J. T. LeRoy,” whose invented personal narrative described him as an addict and the son of a West Virginia prostitute. Albert went to the extreme length of having someone impersonate “LeRoy” in public, confessed to the hoax in a Paris Review interview in 2006, and was successfully sued for damages. A movie contract made with “LeRoy” was found by the courts to be null and void.
More than one commentator, including the novelist Anne Bernays, asked why Selzer didn’t just forthrightly declare her work fiction. Bernays wrote a letter to the editor of the Times:
It’s clear that Margaret Seltzer, author of “Love and Consequences,” is a gifted writer with a soaring imagination. It seems perverse, then, that she chooses to deny her destiny as a novelist.
Ms. Seltzer’s insistence that only nonfiction can “make people understand the conditions that people live in” is way off the mark.
Has she never read Charles Dickens—or even Jane Austen?15
It’s tempting to reflect on Seltzer’s title, since Love and Consequences obliquely echoes “Truth or Consequences,” the name of a long-running American quiz show. “Love” rather than “truth”; “and” rather than “or.” Is this the contemporary fantasy of “having it all,” with no repercussions? Or an example of Freud’s dictum about dreams: there is no no in the unconscious?
James Frey had written a memoir that turned out to be a fiction. In his op-ed piece for The New York Times Daniel Mendelsohn, citing Frey as the standard for contemporary authorial deception, described Frey’s book as a “novel—er, memoir.”16 Mendelsohn’s phrase may remind us of how oral written speech has become; this slip of the tongue that is not a slip of the tongue playfully performs the act of false naming that, on a far more serious scale, Mendelsohn was determined to expose and condemn.
The early history of the novel in English, interestingly, could be described—if inelegantly—by a reverse formulation as “the memoir—er, novel.” The original title of the 1722 Defoe novel we call, for short, Moll Flanders, was The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders, &c.: who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years, besides her childhood, was twelve year a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother) twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent: written from her own memorandums.17 In other words, the claim of truth or reality was part of the publishers’ apparatus and, presumably, part of the appeal: written from her own memorandums. Moll’s story of suffering and redemption, even if it does not include cohabiting with wolves, seems to fit in rather nicely with the preferred narrative of the modern best-selling memoir. Yet Moll’s first-person narrative was written by a man, and one whose own personal adventures did not resemble hers.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (more properly The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe; of York, mariner: who lived eight and twenty years, all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself: with an account how he was at last strangely deliver’d by pyrates in two volumes, written by himself, published in 1719) had likewise presented the author as editor of a “true” account: “The Editor,” Defoe wrote in his preface, “believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.”18
The first edition of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela (1740) credited him as the “editor” of what was presented as an authentic set of letters, with only names and places altered. Nothing else, it was claimed, was done to “disguise the Facts, marr the Reflections, and unnaturalize the Incidents.” As a result, what was offered to the public was “Pamela as Pamela wrote it, in her own Words, without Amputation, or Addition.”19 Here the claim to historical accuracy, coupled with the immediacy of the letters’ apparent composition (Pamela “breaks off” writing when interrupted, her tears fall on the page, etc.), created a form in which it became problematic to separate truth from fiction—or, as Michael McKeon describes it, “the epistemological status of Pamela is difficult to disentangle from that of Pamela—from her claims to, and her capacity for, credibility.” Since Pamela’s story was that of an attempted rape by a wealthy squire (“Mr. B.”) of a young female servant in his household, the plot is, and was, sensational enough to elicit accusations of licentiousness. The only side of the story we hear is Pamela’s: her account of her employer’s initial kindness, the attempted seduction, her imprisonment in his country house, the illegitimate child he had with a former lover. Pamela periodically talks about her writing supplies—her pens, paper, ink, and wax—especially when she is imprisoned and worries that her access to writing will be curtailed.
I don’t want to overemphasize the commonalities between the emergent-novel form of the eighteenth century and the resurgent real-life memoir of the twenty-first. But there are some striking connections. Richardson’s Pamela was modeled on the conduct books of the time, forerunners of today’s self-help manuals (and yesterday’s etiquette books). Like the memoir, these genres now appear with great regularity among weekly best sellers and are prominent in displays at airport bookstores and chain stores. By combining the risk of personal hazard with notions of virtuous conduct and putting both into the epistolary first person, Pamela anticipates some of the hardship tales of privation, suffering, addiction, or rescue that still captivate readers today.
The phrase false memoir has obvious analogies with the notion of false memories, or false memory syndrome, and repressed or recovered memory. Much has been written on this phenomenon, comparing such false allegations to the witch trials of past centuries and chronicling the capacity for abuse by psychotherapists and other counselors. Pursuing this analogy may well land us in the murky territory of writing as pathology or writing as therapy. Researchers like James Pennebaker have worked on the problem from the side of psychology;20 Freud and Breuer long ago called it abreaction, the liberation of repressed ideas by reviving and expressing them.
The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely “cathartic” effect if it is an adequate reaction—as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be “abreacted” almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g., a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective tone.21
Catharsis, which means purgation in both a medical and a theatrical sense, was used at this foundational moment in psychotherapy as a way of describing a purgation of the emotions. Psychotherapy, in this sense, is theater performed for an audience of one.
When Freud abandoned his so-called seduction theory in favor of the idea that fantasy, not real experience, was at the heart of many patients’ accounts of child sexual abuse, he developed the theories about infantile sexuality that became central to psychoanalysis. As he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in a letter announcing his change of heart (“I no longer believe in my neurotica”), this decision was based partly on the unlikelihood that actual abuse was so widespread (“in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse”), but even more importantly, on the impossibility of distinguishing truth from fiction: “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.”22 Cathected with affect: that is, highly charged with emotion.
The unconscious, Freud says, has “no indications of reality,” so when a patient describes past events it is not possible from such internal evidence to distinguish between things that really happened and things that feel as if they happened. Indeed, these events have, we might say, “happened” psychically, even if they have no basis in external fact. This theory was controversial then, and it is certainly not less controversial now. But it is, as you can see, closely related to the phenomenon of the false memoir. And—even more directly—it is related to the larger question of creative writing, the literary imagination, and the use and abuse of literature. Indeed, the coincidental presence of the word abuse (borrowed from a celebrated translation of Nietzsche’s essay on history writing) offers a convenient hook or hinge. Is literature a use or an abuse? Is it caused by abuse?
Manifestly not all memoirs are alike. Many have become memorable—and indeed have become literature—because of their style at least as much as their content. Among these works are, for example, the Confessions of St. Augustine and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau but also more recent writing—say, the nonfiction of James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tobias Wolff, or Elie Wiesel. But rescuing the baby doesn’t mean bottling and selling the bathwater. The fact that something really happened isn’t any guarantee of its credibility in a piece of writing. And some of the most famous memoirs, of course, have been fictional, like John Cleland’s erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), better known as Fanny Hill.
The word memoir only gradually began to mean reminiscences (often in the plural, as in “writing one’s memoirs”) and then biography or autobiography; the original uses were more legal or official, related to the memo, or written account containing instructions or facts to be judged. So the memoir has moved, perhaps inexorably, from fact to narrative embellishment, from other to self. But what is this addiction for books about addiction—or gang warfare, or child abuse, or deprivation? Not surprisingly, this kind of personal privation and struggle has often had appeal, and not only in the twenty-first century. It is not enough to say we live in hard times. Nor have other literary genres skated lightly over pain, loss, illness, conflict, betrayal, murder, or untimely death: this is a fair catalog of some of the central incidents of Greek tragedy, early modern English drama, and many classic works of nineteenth-century fiction. But the memoir craze, like American Idol and reality television, makes everyone a hero. Pathos, once a key ingredient in the response to tragedy and lyric, is now evoked in and by the memoir, the personal story, “my” story even if, in written form, it is occasionally “as told to” someone else.
Which comes first, the life or the “life story,” the craft of life writing? To what extent is the shape of a life conditioned by our literary expectations about crises, turning points, growth, and change? “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences,” wrote Paul de Man, “but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?”23
This is true for “high” or “literary” versions of autobiography (de Man is thinking about Rousseau, St. Augustine, and Wordsworth), but it is equally relevant to popular and celebrity accounts. How did the great man or great woman—or these days the representative, proudly “ordinary” man or woman—become him- or herself? The dramatic or literary arc is already in place: early life, setbacks, signs of genius, promise, or unusual attainment, sundering from fellows or family, the first professional break or breakthrough, a triumph, a tragedy, reflections, recriminations, late style, etc.
The modern autobiography is occasionally written by the subject but more often with (or, functionally, by) a writing partner or amanuensis. These partners are sometimes called ghostwriters, but there is a distinction to be made between the invisible ghostwriter and the credited collaborator, and down the line, these attributions of authorship have something to do with that elusive category of reality, or truth, in writing. Here are a few examples.
The New York Times best-seller-list description for Real Change, “by Newt Gingrich with Vince Haley and Rick Tyler,” included Haley, Gingrich’s research director at the American Enterprise Institute, and Tyler, Gingrich’s director of media relations, as the book’s coauthors. On the Conservative Book Club website and on the book cover, however, Real Change is credited entirely to Gingrich, and the accompanying ad copy tells potential readers that in the book Newt Gingrich explains the role of the conservative majority. Whatever things may be real about Real Change, the claim of authorship is not prominent among them. Plus ça change.
Another book on the Times list that week, I Am America (and So Can You!), like the Gingrich book, bore on its cover a large photo of the credited author, Stephen Colbert, as well as a tagline send-up of book-promotion-speak as “From the Author of I Am America (and So Can You!)” The Times conscientiously listed Colbert’s coauthors from his television show, The Colbert Report, describing I Am America as “by Stephen Colbert, Richard Dahm, Paul Dinello, Allison Silverman et al.” But none of these names appears on the book cover. By contrast, the book jacket of another cowritten work on the list, Send Yourself Roses “by Kathleen Turner with Gloria Feldt,” declares straightforwardly, in reasonable-sized print, that the book, the biography-memoir of the actress, was written “in collaboration with Gloria Feldt.”
Authorship may not seem to be one of the key reality principles so much as a matter of truth in packaging. Nonetheless, for the time being, let’s note that these nonfiction books are jostling for public favor with books described as memoirs, autobiographies, meditations, or spectacularly—and unexpectedly—posthumous accounts. The attraction of these real-life narratives and their “ripped from the headlines” appeal seems undeniable, a symptom of the times (and the Times). Thus, on the same best-seller list, we find:
Presumably, considerations of space in this last item produced the verbal compression “a posthumous look,” suggesting that Bhutto is writing after her own death—a development that would have made her the literal ghostwriter of her own book.
What might be the use of such personal accounts of the self? Let’s recall Philip Sidney’s dictum: “a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example.” We might likewise note that a bad example has as much force to teach as a good example. The good example is a model for conduct, in the mode of Plutarch’s Lives or the lives of the saints, where allegory displaces mimesis and acts are symbolic in the first instance, real only—or preeminently—in their power to induce imitation. In a more modern sense, this is the Profiles in Courage, ordinary-hero snapshot, the inspirational feature story writ large. The obverse is schadenfreude, or the bad example. Triumphs over adversity, addiction (drugs, alcohol, sex, fame, chronic lying, you name it). It doesn’t take much to see that this is itself a seductive mode. If St. Augustine—or Rousseau—had had nothing to confess, would we read their memoirs?
Under a strict definition of literature, few if any of these memoirs, real or false, would qualify. Conceivably, if any had surpassing literary merit—however we were to determine that elusive criterion—it might somehow transcend the dialectic of truth and lie. But faked and false and lie and wholesale fabrication are damning terms when the public is deceived and not delighted.
The best-selling book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (Free Press, 2002) was made into a successful film entitled 21 in 2008. The book, by Ben Mezrich, was listed as a work of nonfiction, and he went on to produce other books in the same vein with similarly explanatory subtitles: Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions (2005), Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees (2005), and Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai (2007).25 (Are we sensing a pattern here?)
Questions about the truth value of Bringing Down the House resurfaced with the opening of the movie and the concurrent revelation of several less than fully truthful memoirs. The public was now on the alert for falsification and in a mood to equate it with deception rather than with the art of fiction. Mezrich had conflated some characters, fabricated others, and invented some significant details in the story. “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable,” he told an interviewer. “The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.”26 But Mezrich’s book was published with a disclaimer explaining that the names, locations, and other details had been changed and that some characters were composites. As the Boston Globe reporter noted, though, the disclaimer was “in fine print, on the copyright page” and might readily have been missed by readers. Other editors and nonfiction authors, when consulted, expressed skepticism about Mezrich’s techniques: “It’s lying,” said Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm. “Nonfiction is reporting the world as it is, and when you combine characters and change chronology, that’s not the world as it is.”27 Gay Talese, often regarded as one of the inventors of the modern nonfiction genre, was similarly emphatic: taking liberties of this kind is “unacceptable” and “dishonest.”28 Mezrich, when asked, invoked the word literary to describe the choices he made: “I took literary license to make it readable.”29
What does literary mean in this connection? Is it a version of the more familiar phrase poetic license? License in such a context has more to do with giving, or taking, permission than with legal sanction.
A few years later, Mezrich was back with a new book, The Accidental Billionaires, subtitled The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, in which the boundaries of fact and fiction were unapologetically, indeed triumphantly, blurred. As with James Frey, who transformed himself from faux memoirist to fiction writer (and profited by the exchange), so Ben Mezrich declared that he would capitalize on what had been perceived as a transgression of the rules: “I see myself as attempting to break ground. I definitely am trying to create my own genre here,” he told an interviewer. “I’m attempting to tell stories in a very new and entertaining way. I see myself as an entertainer.”30 A bookstore owner noted that copies originally piled on a table for new nonfiction, would later be relocated to the business section. Mezrich’s book included imagined and re-created scenes, some in the “he might have” mode that has become popular in certain kinds of biography. One review, dryly adopting the book’s style of unabashed psychological guesswork, began, “Though we cannot know exactly what went through Ben Mezrich’s mind as he wrote The Accidental Billionaires, his nonfictionish book about the creation of Facebook, we can perhaps speculate hypothetically about what it possibly might have been like.”31 The film version, called The Social Network, told the story of Facebook’s founding through the accounts of several characters, never indicating which of them was “true.”
If memoirs often tend to veer in the direction of self-fictionalizing, the venerable practice of biography, literally “life writing,” would seem to depend to a certain extent on telling the truth. Thus, biography is often poised somewhere between the categories of literature and history. While in many ways this would seem to increase the prestige of biography as a genre, since these days history is a less suspect, more rational and evidence-based category than literature, it has made for a slightly anomalous role for the modern practitioner of this ancient craft.
Biography, it seems, has been suffering from an inferiority complex of sorts even as its practitioners triumph in the bookstores. The founding of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York was described by its faculty director, David Nasaw, himself a distinguished biographer (Andrew Carnegie; William Randolph Hearst), as a way of changing the perception of biography as “the stepchild of the academy.”32 The editor of The American Historical Review commented that “increasingly historians are turning to biography,” even though in the past they “haven’t considered it a kind of legitimate scholarship in some respects.”33 The new center supports biographers working in a wide range of modes, including film, television, and graphic novels, and the executive director, Nancy Milford, author of biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay, told a reporter that she “insisted that at least half the fellows come from outside the academy.”34 So on the one hand, biographers are seeking credibility and standing within the academy (as non-academicians call the world of universities and colleges). On the other hand, they stand proudly outside it. Where does the readership come from? According to the head of the Leon Levy Foundation, Levy’s widow Shelby White, her enthusiasm for the project came from “a love of biography and history and reading about other people’s lives. I guess I’m a snoop.”35
The gratification of snooping, or even of a more seemly curiosity, was not the stated goal for biographers from ancient times through the Victorian period. Once upon a time, biography was supposed to model character and the conduct of life. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans placed, side by side, biographies of famous men from these two periods. Plutarch announced in the opening sentences of his Life of Alexander that his objective was to depict the character of his subjects rather than every detail of their daily existence. “It must be borne in mind,” he wrote (in the celebrated translation by John Dryden), “that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges …” Plutarch compared his art to that of the portrait painter, who focuses attention on the lines and features of the face, rather than on other parts of the body, as the most indicative signs of character.36 This comparison between the biographer and the portrait painter or sculptor would become a favorite in later biographies, and calls attention, tacitly but importantly, to the degree of artifice involved in making something “true to life.”37
The historian Jill Lepore cites a story told by David Hume in his 1741 essay “Of the Study of History.” Having been asked by a “young beauty, for whom I had some passion,” to send her some novels and romances to read while she was in the country, Hume sent her, instead, Plutarch’s Lives, “assuring her, at the same time, that there was not a word of truth in them.” She read them with pleasure, apparently, until she came to the lives of Alexander and Caesar, “whose names she had heard of by accident,” then indignantly sent the book back to Hume “with many reproaches for deceiving her.”38
The story is amusing, but it is also condescending, the more so because the writer is conscious of its charm. Both the description of this female reader as a “young beauty” and the fact, so casually dropped, that she had heard of the two famous heroes of antiquity only “by accident” put her firmly in her place, which is quite a different place from that of Hume. The first sentence of the essay sets the tone: “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history, as an occupation, above all others, the best suited both to their sex and education, much more instructive than their ordinary books of amusement, and more entertaining than those serious compositions, which are usually to be found in their closets.” Hume playfully deplores the preference of “the fair sex” for fiction: “I am sorry,” he says, “to see them have such an aversion to matter of fact, and such an appetite for falsehood.” By contrast, “truth,” he insists, “is the basis of history.” Though he will later change his tone from “raillery” to something more serious (and at that point will introduce as his anticipated readers two male subjects: “a man of business” and “a philosopher”), he maintains that even a witty and well-bred woman can have nothing interesting to say to “men of sense and reflection” unless she is conversant with the history of her own country and of ancient Greece and Rome. Plutarch, for Hume, is history. And history is based on truth.
The concept of “biographical truth,” as Judith Anderson argues in a book of that title, could as easily be called “biographical fiction.” The relation between fiction and fact in the period raises questions about what is meant by truth, she suggests. Life writing “occupies a middle ground between history and art, chronicle and drama, objective truth and creative invention.”39 Biography “is a mixed form, having always a tendency to merge on the one side with fiction and on the other side with history.”40 Anderson’s study covers the Venerable Bede’s Life of Saint Cuthbert, Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey, Roper’s Life of Sir Thomas More, More’s History of King Richard III, Shakespeare’s Richard III and Henry VIII (subtitled All Is True), and Bacon’s History of King Henry VII. All these texts, according to Anderson, are “peripherally or essentially literary.”41
What do we mean by literary, when we are discussing works of biography? Is it an indicator of style, of archetype, of mythic quality, of the felt presence of the writer? Anderson says that each of the authors she examines “employs the techniques of fiction,” which include authorial self-consciousness, an awareness of critical interpretation, and an increasing acknowledgment of the writer’s “own creative shaping of another’s life.”42
The pleasure evinced by biographers at the founding of the Levy Center is, to a certain extent, recuperative (gaining respect, visibility, and funding), but in another way, it is classificatory and categorical. We may recall that the authorizing body evincing a wary interest in receiving biographers into the fold was made up of historians. Biography for them, and for many present-day biographers, is a species of history writing, whether the topic is a political or historical figure or a person of literary, artistic, or cultural significance. But the conflation of author and subject that is the central trope—and the irresistible lure—of the memoir creates category confusion when it is transposed into the world of biography.
The “Statement of Purpose” of the Society of American Historians explains that its goal is “To promote literary distinction in historical writing” by awarding a number of prestigious prizes. What is gained, I wonder, by adding the word literary here? If the society’s goal were merely “To promote distinction in historical writing,” what element would be lost? Which is another way of asking, what does the Society of American Historians consider literary, and how is that trait importantly different from the other kinds of writing produced by historians?
A number of career paths lead to success in this field, and some of the most commercially successful practitioners are neither historians nor academics—which does not mean, of course, that they are not scholars. One of the most honored biographers in the United States is David McCullough, an English major at Yale, who then became a journalist and editor (Sports Illustrated; the U.S. Information Agency; American Heritage) before embarking on a career in which he won the Pulitzer Prize (twice) and the National Book Award (twice) for biography. Present-day British biographers like Claire Tomalin (biographies of Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Wollestonecraft, etc.) and Victoria Glendinning (biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope, Jonathan Swift, and Leonard Woolf) are writers whose other activities include journalism, broadcasting, criticism, and (in the case of Glendinning) fiction writing.
The New York Times annual list of notable nonfiction books is always stocked with biographies and memoirs. In 2007, for example, of the fifty books on the list, there were fifteen biographies and eight memoirs, including biographies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Pablo Picasso, Leni Riefenstahl, Henry Morton Stanley, and the cartoonist Charles Schulz. The memoirs covered topics from waiting tables at a posh Manhattan restaurant to growing up with (a) a Haitian family, (b) an orthodox Jewish family, (c) a Catholic family, (d) a minister’s family, and (e) an Iowa farm family during the Great Depression.
In 2008 the pattern was similar: biographies of Andrew Jackson, Dick Cheney, Samuel de Champlain, Condoleezza Rice, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife, not the contemporary actress); memoirs of an English childhood, an African childhood, an “appalling upbringing at the hands of … catastrophically unfit parents,”43 and a novelist’s memoir-response to the stillbirth of her first child.44
In short, biography today is not one thing—and never has been. The crossover between “popular” and “serious” in biographies is probably greater than in many other categories, since airport readers and other adults who choose books as a favorite entertainment option will often buy biographies—in hardcover—if they are attracted by the subject or have seen the book mentioned or blurbed in the media.
There are historian-biographers, literary biographers (which is to say, biographers of literary figures who address the author’s works as well as the life), celebrity biographers, and biographical memoirists whose personal memoirs include the narrative history of a parent, partner, or other central personage. (A classic hypothetical example is Bennett Cerf’s quip about a book that would be an automatic best seller, “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”)
Authorized biographies give the writer access to privileged materials but often also assume that the result will be laudatory. Music stars, actors, artists, humanitarians, sports heroes, and other public figures tend to be the subject of authorized biographies, with Pat Robertson, Cecil Beaton, Pope John Paul II, Konrad Adenauer, and Helen, the queen mother of Rumania, also among those whose representatives gave permission to their biographers, in some cases selecting them as fit repositories of information and potential praise.
A celebrity biographer like Donald Spoto researches and writes about the lives of film stars, movie directors, playwrights, saints, and glamorous people in the public eye: Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Diana, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Preston Sturges, Lotte Lenya, Tennessee Williams, Alan Bates, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kramer, St. Joan of Arc, St. Francis of Assisi. Others working in this genre include J. Randy Taraborrelli, chronicler of the lives of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Cher, Diana Ross, Janet Jackson, Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot—and Kitty Kelley, author of Jackie Oh!, and books on Nancy Reagan, the Bush dynasty, and Frank Sinatra. The subtitles of Kelley’s books on Sinatra and Mrs. Reagan frankly call them “unauthorized” biographies, a term that, while once presumably opprobrious, is now a guarantee of high-level gossip.
A literary biography, as we’ve noted, is the account of the life and work of a writer. This term seems as if it contains a misplaced modifier, since while the subject may be a poet, novelist, or playwright, this does not guarantee that the resulting book will be literary. The contrary is quite often the case, despite the idealized early examples of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and of the defining work in the genre, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
To a certain degree, these categories are self-evident. But we could make another kind of provisional distinction based upon the presentational nature (and thus the ideology) of the printed text—between those biographies that display the research that has gone into them with a proliferation of marked footnotes and endnotes, and those that hide the research process, providing either silent footnotes or, in some cases, none at all, just a list of sources at the back of the book. The distinction would suggest something of the book’s desire and self-image (or the desire and self-image of the author, publisher, literary agent, or press). But more important, it would say something about how these various makers hope the book would be read. Is the experience to be like that of reading a novel (with the added pleasure of knowing that it is “true”)? Or is it more like what anthropologists, before they, too, became more literary, used to call “writing up” the findings of their fieldwork?
Some twentieth- and twenty-first-century biographers utilize a kind of unmarked endnote which is intended to preserve the smooth unbroken surface of the text, making the book read more like a novel than a piece of scholarship—no intrusive superscript numbers to break the illusion. If a quotation or a fact appears in the text and the reader wants to know where it comes from, he or she can turn to the back of the book, where the page number and a brief citation from the text is followed by an indication of the source.45 Many skilled practitioners follow this style, including Goodwin, David McCullough, and Meryle Secrest, to name just a few.46
This is not a low/high distinction in terms of quality but, rather, a presentational and performative style, with consequent effects upon the reading experience and upon the sense of intimacy and connection developed between reader and biographical subject. Although the author/biographer (some websites even identify these writers as “celebrity biographers”) is often recognized as a public intellectual, what is celebrated is his or her knowledge, research, clarity, and what is often called a “magisterial” command of the material. Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes, Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison, Robert McCrum’s biography of P. G. Wodehouse, Ian Kershaw Smith’s biography of Adolf Hitler, Nigel Saul’s biography of Richard II, and Jacques Roger’s biography of Buffon all were hailed as magisterial by reviewers, and this list could be almost infinitely extended, since magisterial, the Latinate version of masterly, is the mot juste or the highest accolade for biographical writing. It seems to connote a rising above the fray. The biography is a masterwork; it brings the subject to life; it is definitive and defining; it tells at least one convincing version of the truth. As such, it seems like the opposite of the kind of hoax memoirs we began by discussing. Yet the two genres—the one magisterial, the other often, predictably, unauthorized—have some key elements in common. For one thing, both of these mainstays of the nonfiction best-seller list are, in their own ways, fictions.
Virginia Woolf used the subtitle A Biography for three of her own works: Orlando, a groundbreaking novel written in a series of historical literary styles and inspired by the life of Vita-Sackville West; Flush, the life story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, a brilliant device for telling Browning’s story through the eyes and mind of a cocker spaniel; and Roger Fry, an impressionistic biography of the art critic, a close friend. All three of these works are literary, no quotation marks needed. Whether Woolf herself felt any “anxiety of influence” with regard to biography is a fair question: she was the daughter of one celebrated biographer (Sir Leslie Stephen, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography) and a lifelong friend of another (Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians; Queen Victoria; Elizabeth and Essex). In an essay called “The New Biography,” Woolf wrote that the task of the biographer was, in part, to combine the “incompatible” truths of fact and of fiction. “For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life.”
The term biography is a fairly recent one, dating in origin to the end of the seventeenth century; the OED traces it back to Dryden, who applied it to Plutarch. Woolf credits the emergence of modern biography to James Boswell’s Life of Johnson:
So we hear booming out from Boswell’s page the voice of Samuel Johnson: “No, sir; stark insensibility,” we hear him say. Once we have heard those words we are aware that there is an incalculable presence among us … All the draperies and decencies of biography fall to the ground. We can no longer maintain that life consists in actions only or in works. It consists in personality.47
From this height, Woolf suggests, biography fell—becoming more prolix, more prosy, more lengthy, and more tedious:
[T]he Victorian biography was a parti-coloured, hybrid, monstrous birth. For though truth of fact was observed as scrupulously as Boswell observed it, the personality which Boswell’s genius set free was hampered and distorted … the Victorian biographer was dominated by the idea of goodness. Noble, upright, chaste, severe: it is thus that the Victorian worthies are presented to us.48
And not only the Victorian worthies. Some Victorian biographers—Woolf singles out Sir Sidney Lee—contrived to write multivolume biographies, “worthy of all our respect,” books that are monumental “piles … of hard facts,” in effect noble and upright but irretrievably boring to read: “we can only explain the fact that Sir Sidney’s life of Shakespeare is dull, and that his life of Edward the Seventh is unreadable, by supposing that both are stuffed with truth, although he failed to choose those truths which transmit personality.”49
Woolf is here teasing Sidney Lee with a phrase of his own design—“The aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality”—with which she begins her own essay, only to suggest that the two elements, truth and personality, are extremely difficult to “weld into one seamless whole,” which is why “biographers for the most part have failed” to do so.50 Lee’s life of Shakespeare is 776 pages long; his biography of Edward VII ran to two volumes. This scrupulous heft, detail piled on detail in the service of “truth,” was increasingly typical, indeed, increasingly expected. “The conscientious biographer may not tell a fine tale with a flourish but must toil through endless labyrinths and embarrass himself with countless documents.”51 The method, however painstaking, strikes her as exhibiting “prodigious waste” and “artistic wrongheadedness.” One of the virtues of the “new biography,” as Woolf goes on to describe it, is that it is, in contrast, relatively brief, pithy, and lively.
We might pause for a moment to reflect upon Woolf’s choice of Sidney Lee as the epitome of the achievements and problems of Victorian biography. Lee, born Solomon Lazarus Lee, was a close friend and associate of Woolf’s father and succeeded him in 1891 as the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen was not only an editor but a prolific biographer, author of books on Pope, Swift, Hobbes, Samuel Johnson, and George Eliot. He died in 1904; Lee lived until 1926; Woolf’s essay was written in 1927. In selecting Sidney Lee as the antitype of the new biography, Woolf both sidesteps and sideswipes her father’s work and his demands, upon which she reflected in her diary a year later, on his birthday (November 28): “His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.”
In writing about the “new biography” Woolf thus resolutely turns a page between the past and the present, the parental generation and her own. “With the twentieth century,” she says,
a change came over biography, as it came over fiction and poetry. The first and most visible sign of it was in the difference in size. In the first twenty years of the new century biographies must have lost half their weight. Mr. Strachey compressed four stout Victorians into one slim volume [Eminent Victorians]; Mr. Maurois boiled the usual two volumes of a Shelley life into one little book the size of a novel. But the diminution in size was only the outward token of an inward change. The point of view had completely altered. If we open one of the new school of biographies its bareness, its emptiness makes us at once aware that the author’s relation to his subject is different. He is no longer the serious and sympathetic companion, toiling even slavishly in the footsteps of his hero. Whether friend or enemy, admiring or critical, he is an equal … He chooses; he synthesizes; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist.52
We might think that this opens the door to the self-fictionalizing abuses of the faux memoir. But Woolf has something different in mind; she is fairly ferocious about the importance of “the substance of fact.” Where she wants the biographer to act like a novelist is in the matter of style, not in embroidery or speculation: “the biographer’s imagination is always being stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life. Yet if he carries the use of fiction too far, so that he disregards the truth, or can only introduce it with incongruity, he loses both worlds; he has neither the freedom of fiction nor the substance of fact.” Mixing the worlds “of Bohemia and Hamlet and Macbeth” with the world “of brick and pavement; of birth, marriage, and death; of Acts of Parliament,” etc. is “abhorrent.”53
So what is literary about biography to Virginia Woolf is the complicated freedom of the biographer in the matter of writing. Not in making things up, but in making them vivid and in establishing equality with the subject from the point of view of—point of view. Woolf herself uses an early version of unmarked notes in Flush, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. The dramatic (or melodramatic) last line of one chapter reads, “He was stolen.”
… suddenly, without a word of warning, in the midst of civilisation, security and friendship—he was in a shop in Vere Street with Miss Barrett and her sister; it was the morning of Tuesday the 1st of September—Flush was tumbled head over heels into darkness. The doors of a dungeon shut on him. He was stolen.54
In Woolf’s text—unlike, alas, in mine—no superscript note is present to mar the stark drama of the moment. But the event related is verified and qualified by a deadpan unmarked note at the back of the book:
P. 82: “He was stolen.” As a matter of fact, Flush was stolen three times; but the unities seem to require that the three stealings shall be compressed into one. The total sum paid by Miss Barrett to the dog-stealers was £20.55
What was new about the new biography, as performed by writers like Lytton Strachey (and by Woolf) was its combination of rigorous scholarship, psychological insight, and wit.
Strachey’s narrative style subsumed the scholarship into an apparently seamless narrative. Although there are no identifying notes after each character’s utterances or inner thoughts, Strachey follows his sources very closely. Consider this wryly empathetic passage from Queen Victoria (1921), in which Strachey describes the situation of Prince Albert:
The husband was not so happy as the wife. In spite of the great improvement in his situation, in spite of a growing family and the adoration of Victoria, Albert was still a stranger in a strange land, and the serenity of spiritual satisfaction was denied him. It was something, no doubt, to have dominated his immediate environment; but it was not enough; and besides, in the very completeness of his success, there was a bitterness. Victoria idolized him; but it was understanding that he craved for, not idolatry; and how much did Victoria, filled to the brim though she was with him, understand him? How much does the bucket understand the well? He was lonely. He went to his organ and improvised with learned modulations until the sounds, swelling and subsiding through elaborate cadences, brought some solace to his heart. Then, with the elasticity of youth, he hurried off to play with the babies, or to design a new pigsty, or to read aloud the “Church History of Scotland” to Victoria, or to pirouette before her on one toe, like a ballet-dancer, with a fixed smile, to show her how she ought to behave when she appeared in public places.56
The brilliance of this account lies at least in part in its artful use of free indirect discourse, in which the thoughts and even the speech of characters are communicated to the reader in a reportorial mode, so that it remains unclear whether the sentiments are those of the narrator or of the first-person subject. The term derives from the French style indirect libre, and one of its pioneering practitioners in France was Flaubert. The effect of this style—a style expertly employed in English by writers like Woolf and Joyce—is to produce ironic disjunction and implicit commentary at the same time that it offers an opportunity for narrative identification with fictional or historical characters. Strachey’s delicately ironic empathy with the prince consort, like Woolf’s empathy with the dog Flush, slides into and out of Albert’s consciousness while always tethering itself to verifiable details. A prefatory note, appearing opposite the dedication page (“To Virginia Woolf”), informs the reader that “Authority for every important statement of fact in the following pages will be found in the footnotes. The full titles of the works to which reference is made are given in the Bibliography at the end of the volume.” A footnote to this passage cites three pages from the Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttelton.
Strachey’s descriptions and impressions are not speculations, as is often the case in twenty-first-century biography (the subject “might” have thought such-and-such, or he “could” have thought; or, cloaked in the form of a rhetorical question, “Did” he think, or “Might he have” thought …). Instead, Strachey draws his dialogue directly from letters and other written accounts. To give some sense of how he does this, I want to quote briefly from these letters. You will see both how close he is to the source, inventing no detail, and how the conversion from a third-person account to free indirect discourse brings the subject (as we so easily say) “to life.”
Here, then, is an excerpt from Lady Lyttelton’s letter to the Hon. Caroline Lyttelton, Windsor Castle, October 9, 1840:
Yesterday evening, as I was sitting here comfortably after the drive, reading M. Guizot, suddenly there arose from the rooms beneath oh such sounds! It was Prince Albert—dear Prince Albert—playing on the organ, and with such master skill as it appeared to me, modulating so learnedly, winding through every kind of bass and chord, till he wound up into the most perfect cadence and then off again, louder and softer … I ventured at dinner to ask him what I had heard. “Oh, my organ!—a new possession of mine. I am so fond of the organ! It is the first of instruments—the only for expressing one’s feelings—and it teaches to plan—for on the organ, a mistake! Oh, such a misery!” and he quite shuddered at the thought of the sostenudo discord …57
And there is this, from a letter five years later, September 22, 1845, reporting that Lady Lyttelton had, in “a fit of courage,” spoken frankly to the queen and prince about how Victoria was perceived on a recent trip abroad:
The Prince advised her (on her saying, like a good child, “What am I to do another time?”) to behave like an opera-dancer after a pirouette, and always show all her teeth in a fixed smile. Of course, he accompanied the advice with an immense pirouette and prodigious grin of his own, such as few people could perform after dinner without being sick, ending on one foot and t’other in the air …58
And finally, from a letter yet another five years later (July 22, 1850), which finds Lady Lyttelton once again musing on her reading, this time from the royal residence at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, when she is interrupted by the sound of Albert at the organ:
—Last evening such a sunset! I was sitting gazing at it and thinking of Lady Charlotte Proby’s verses, when from an open window below this floor began suddenly to sound the Prince’s orgue expressif, played by his masterly hand. Such a modulation, minor and solemn, and ever changing, and never ceasing, from a piano like Jenny Lind’s holding note, up to the fullest swell, and still the same “fine vein of melancholy”! And it came in so exactly as an accompaniment to the sunset. How strange he is! He must have been playing just while the Queen was finishing her toilette. And then he went to cut jokes and eat loads at dinner, and nobody but the organ knows what is in him—except, indeed, by the look of his eyes sometimes.…59
These letters are delicious period pieces, and they show Lady Lyttelton’s continuing fondness for “dear Prince Albert.” But what is so striking is the way Strachey selects his details from this wealth of correspondence (scrupulously footnoting each) and resists distraction. Lady Lyttelton, so tempting an epistolary subject, disappears; what is retained, pared down, and made significant are the evidences of Albert’s musical solace, domestic liveliness, and private melancholy. In a passage of two hundred words, the biographer distills material gleaned from letters that span ten years of the royal marriage.
Strachey made his reputation on two biographies, both Victorian in subject matter though emphatically not in style. Eminent Victorians, his brief but telling narratives of the lives of Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, Cardinal Manning, and General Gordon (the “four stout Victorians” wittily described in Woolf’s essay) was a bombshell and an instant success. Queen Victoria, a few years later, secured both his reputation and his income. As Woolf wrote in her essay “The Art of Biography,” “Anger and laughter mixed; and editions multiplied.”60 Here is Strachey’s own account of Victorian biography and its discontents, from the preface to Eminent Victorians:
… the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.61
For Strachey, “the first duty of the biographer” is to preserve “a becoming brevity—a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,” and the second duty, “no less significant,” is “to maintain his own freedom of spirit.”62 He considers his job “to lay bare the facts of the case,” not to extrapolate or fantasize. He appends a list of principal sources at the end of each biography in Eminent Victorians. His art is in the arrangement of details, and in letting the telling detail speak. Although his book has been described as ironic, he calls it dispassionate and impartial. Often the wit inheres in what he does not say.
After Eminent Victorians, aptly described by Virginia Woolf as “short studies with something of the over-emphasis and the foreshortening of caricatures” (we might compare them to modern-day New Yorker profiles), Strachey turned to larger projects, and here, as Woolf observes, the challenges of the genre became evident:
In the lives of the two great Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he attempted a far more ambitious task. Biography had never had a fairer chance of showing what it could do. For it was now being put to the test by a writer who was capable of making use of all the liberties that biography had won: he was fearless; he had proved his brilliance; and he had learned his job. The result throws great light upon the nature of biography. For who can doubt that after reading the two books again, one after the other, that the Victoria is a triumphant success, and that the Elizabeth by comparison is a failure? But it seems too, as we compare them, that it was not Lytton Strachey who failed; it was the art of biography. In the Victoria he treated biography as a craft; he submitted to its limitations. In the Elizabeth he treated biography as an art; he flouted its limitations.63
About Victoria, much was known, much recorded, much available to the diligent and responsible researcher. “The biographer could not invent her, because at every moment some document was at hand to check his invention.” So Strachey “used to the full the biographer’s power of selection and relation, but he kept strictly within the world of fact. Every statement was verified; every fact was authenticated.” But in the case of Elizabeth, the opposite conditions obtained. “Very little was known about her. The society in which she lived was so remote that the habits, the motives, and even the actions of the people of that age were full of strangeness and obscurity.” The opportunity was there for biography to approach the condition of poetry or drama, that “combined the advantages of both worlds,” of fact and fiction.
And yet in Woolf’s view, the attempt failed. Despite the consummate skill of the biographer, “the combination became unworkable; fact and fiction refused to mix. Elizabeth never became real in the sense that Queen Victoria had been real, yet she never became fictitious in the sense that Cleopatra or Falstaff is fictitious.”64 This is a point on which Woolf, the author of those two masterful fictional “biographies,” Orlando and Flush, clearly feels strongly. “The two kinds of fact will not mix.” Her essay is called “The Art of Biography,” and she begins by putting that concept in question (“Is biography an art?”).
Nonetheless, Woolf foresaw a time when, she thought, biography would evolve to meet changing circumstances in the world. Writing after Strachey’s death, and many years after she had hailed “the new biography” in 1927, she looked ahead to a moment when the biographer would revise traditional techniques to meet the opportunities and demands of modern culture. “[S]ince we live in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed, by newspapers, letters, and diaries, at every character from every angle, he must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face. Biography will enlarge its scope by hanging up looking-glasses at odd corners.”65
Virginia Woolf, who died in 1941, could hardly anticipate the supersaturated media environment in which today’s biographies are written, reviewed, and read: a 24/7 bombardment of news cycles, Internet gossip, YouTube, e-mail, and text messaging. What she regarded as frenetic interruptions—newspapers, letters, diaries, even those “thousand cameras,” a phrase I think she must have intended as hyperbolic—sound rather leisurely in a paparazzi world. The truth of a life today often involves scandal, confession, and self-exposure. And what has become of the art of biography and its relation to literature?
We might think that the days of the Victorian doorstop biography, in many pages or sometimes multiple volumes, has returned in a new guise. The second volume of Robert Skidelsky’s 1994 biography of John Maynard Keynes, subtitled The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937, covers seventeen years of Keynes’s life in 635 pages, plus notes and sources. The third volume, Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946, is 580 pages long. Peter Manso’s biography of Marlon Brando, also from 1994, came in at 1,021 pages, not including the notes and sources. These are not atypical numbers: consider Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (1994, 830 pages plus notes); James R. Mellow’s Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences (1992, 604 pages plus notes); Harrison Kinney, James Thurber: His Life and Times (1994, 1,077 pages plus appendices and notes). I pulled these books from my shelves—this is a random rather than a systematic survey—but the pattern seems fairly consistent. David McCullough’s highly regarded book on Harry Truman (1992) was 1,117 pages long, his John Adams (2001), 751 pages. It is hard to think of another trade-publishing genre that is so lengthy and yet is considered commercially viable. In hardcover and paperback, these books sell.
Clearly—leaving aside for the moment the question of style—such biographies are not literary in the sense described by Strachey, dominated by a sense “of selection, of detachment, of design.” Modern biographies that chronicle the life of literary figures tend to include in their accounts of the subject’s life a description or assessment of the work, including plot summary and analysis, together with some sense of the work’s reception, qualifying them for the technical description of literary biography—a genre described by novelist John Updike as liable to abuse (the “Judas biography,” containing unflattering portraits from the testimony of a former friend or spouse; the inaccuracies reprinted from previously published, erroneous accounts), as well as the potentially useful work of reacquainting the reader with an author (albeit via what Updike calls a “nether route”).66 Within this genre, there is, again, a wide range of literary expertise and critical objective. The biographies of Sylvia Plath by Diane Middlebrook and Jacqueline Rose, both talented literary scholars, were consequential and important for the analysis of her poetry. Another version of the same life story, Janet Malcolm’s biography of Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, addressed the unreliability of memory and the difficulty, when dealing with interested parties, of separating fact from fiction. “In a work of nonfiction, we almost never know the truth of what happened,” Malcolm observed. And with a controversial matter like that of Plath’s life and death, she noted, the problems are especially acute. “The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not negligible, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living.”67
The technique that Lytton Strachey used in Queen Victoria—the judicious quotation from letters and other sources to produce a kind of biographical dialogue—still distinguishes the best modern biographies, like Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin or David McCullough’s John Adams. Emotional responses, internal thoughts, and other novelistic devices are crafted from the archival information, the “facts” upon which Woolf so strongly insisted. The biographer’s gift is one of deploying information, not of inventing it. Thus, describing the arrival of a letter to Adams that dispatched him to the Court of France, McCullough writes,
Thinking the packet must be urgent business, Abigail opened it and was stunned by what she read. Furious, she wrote straight away to Lovell, demanding to know how he could “contrive to rob me of all my happiness.
“And can I, sir, consent, to be separated from him whom my heart esteems above all earthly things, and for an unlimited time? My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension, and must I cheerfully comply with the demands of my country?”68
Active and emotive terms like “thinking,” “stunned,” furious,” and “demanding” are all inferred, effectively, from the source material, and “straight away” is derived from the date. The dramatic or literary effect (what would, in fact, eventuate in a screenplay) is elicited from within, not imposed from without.
Likewise, Janet Browne describes Darwin’s proposal to his future wife:
… on Sunday he spoke about marriage to Emma. Not unexpectedly, the event deflated both of them—Darwin was too exhausted by the nervous strain, with a bad headache, and Emma was “too much bewildered” to feel any overwhelming sense of happiness. To Darwin’s astonishment, she accepted him. Even so, the proposal caught her so unprepared that she went straight off to the Maer Sunday school as usual. Darwin’s exclamation in his diary that this was “The day of days!” was wildly misleading in its retrospective intensity …
“I believe,” said Emma afterwards, “we both looked very dismal”: An elderly Wedgwood aunt thought something quite the reverse had happened: that Darwin had asked but received a rejection.69
Here, too, it is possible to see how the emotional responses of the protagonists and the dramatic arc of the story are derived from source materials: the headache, the bewilderment, the astonishment, the very mood of the day, even the comically erroneous response of an onlooker, misreading the “dismal” expressions of the couple. Reality, in this case, means sutured to a certain kind of evidence.
We might contrast this way of writing a life with the kind of work that resembles the televised docudrama or “dramatic re-creation.” In the filmic version, actors perform on-screen as a voice-over offers the play-by-play of a real (but restaged) event. Shadows loom out of the darkness; scenery (a lonely road, a family mansion) offers an atmospheric B-roll boost; flashbacks increase the suspense. The language associated with the voice-over narrations in docudramas is heavy with subjunctives—would, could, might—and suppositions masquerading as rhetorical questions: “Did she know?” “Would he attempt?” “What was going through his mind at that moment?”
I have been calling the mode of biography that functions in this manner speculative, by which I mean a language heavily laden with subjunctives and similar suppositions: “There is reason to think that if she had”; “Were he to meet her then, as perhaps he did, they might have found”; “Having been to France, he would have known that.” Rather than being brought to life by specific textual evidence (Darwin’s diary, Abigail Adams’s letter), these hypotheticals are presented instead of evidence. By a certain authorial sleight of hand, they become the evidence whose absence they conceal. Moreover, contemporary culture has increasingly come to accept such fantasy projections as evidence, so eager are we to “know” the characters (historical, modern, famous, or infamous) about whom these real-life stories are told.
My favorite example of this kind of projection taken to its logical extreme is Laura Hillenbrand’s fascinating biography Seabiscuit: An American Legend, in which the technique of imagining what is going through the mind of the protagonist is employed to show us the inner thoughts of a racehorse.70
The word celebrity appears a number of times in Hillenbrand’s narrative, and appropriately so. The horse, who, in his racing heyday, liked to pose for photographers, was called “Movie Star” by reporters. As the reader follows the “making of a legend” from obscurity to celebrity to calamity to bittersweet triumph, it becomes clear that the book can be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. But there is one way in which Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit differs, of necessity, from the celebrity biography. A staple of the celebrity biography is that curious set of tenses and moods (from optative subjunctive to free indirect discourse) through which the author attempts to project the thoughts, or putative thoughts, of the celebrity subject. “One aspect of pre-production which pleased Garland was the make-up tests.”71 “The visitor was unwelcome, though Marlene realized that one way or another he was as inevitable as history.”72 “As always, when in trouble, Jack turned to his father.”73 A certain genre of horse (or dog) story uses the same kinds of voice and mind projection—think Jack London—or even, as in the case of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, is told in the first-person voice of the subject: “When I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass.”74
In Seabiscuit, the central figure’s consciousness is never so baldly anthropomorphic. But at the center of the book, surrounded by taciturn trainers and jockeys, is the silence of the equine legend, a silence marked, as if anxiously, by recurrent attention to what was going on in his mind. “Seabiscuit had the misfortune of living in a stable whose managers simply didn’t have the time to give his mind the painstaking attention it needed,” we are told about the horse’s early overraced and undervalued years, while jockey Red Pollard’s natural empathy “had given him insight into the minds of ailing, nervous horses.”75 At a turning point in Pollard’s career, when he finally guides Seabiscuit to a significant victory, the author’s prose can’t resist turning toward the psychological projections familiar from a certain mode of celebrity biography:
Seabiscuit stood square under his head-to-toe blanket, posed in the stance of the conqueror, head high, ears pricked, eyes roaming the horizon, nostrils flexing with each breath, jaw rolling the bit around with cool confidence.
He was a new horse.
In the fiftieth start of his life, Seabiscuit finally understood the game.76
In its own way, this description is a triumph. It makes the point that the author wants to make, but in order to do so it becomes necessary to project her feelings, or the reader’s, into the mind of the horse.
Seabiscuit is meticulously documented, with silent notes placed at the back of the book, so as not to disturb the narrative flow. Given the nature of the story, most of the sources are newspaper articles, features from Turf & Sport Digest or the Daily Racing Form, audiotapes of race calls, films and newsreels, or previous versions of Seabiscuit’s life story. But in none of these is there a viva voce interview with the biographical subject. If Seabiscuit felt that he was “a new horse,” if he brimmed with “cool confidence,” if he “finally understood the game,” it was something said by others, or by the biographer, not (how can one resist this? it is, after all, the point of the cliché) straight from the horse’s mouth.
Since the distinctions I am drawing—between the technique of speculation and the style of free indirect discourse—may seem to be minor or evanescent, let me try to make them sharper by saying that what I’ve called speculative biography imputes motives, intentions, and causes, linking historical events in an arc of character intentionality that is a fictional construct. Why did X do this or that? Perhaps he thought; did she imagine; were they hoping? Here it may be helpful to see how a reviewer described a recent book about the life of the poet Robert Frost:
The book is billed as a novel, but this is only because it is speculative rather than veritable; it is more properly classified a vie romancée, a bio enhanced with the loosey-goosey methods of fiction. Variations on this form have become increasingly fashionable in recent years—so fashionable, in fact, that two fictional portraits of Henry James alone were published in 2004, with another trailing along the next year.77
In a work like Colm Tóibín’s The Master: A Novel (one of the two fictional books about James noted in the review) it seems as if the term novel allows the author to have things both ways: the gravitas of biography and the freedom to identify and psychologize that comes with the writing of a certain kind of fiction.
Half a century ago René Wellek and Austin Warren wrote briskly in their Theory of Literature about the relationship between literature and biography—a relationship they considered dangerously misleading:
No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation. The frequently adduced criterion of “sincerity” is thoroughly false if it judges literature in terms of biographical truthfulnesss, correspondence to the author’s experience or feelings as they are attested by outside evidence. There is no relationship between “sincerity” and value as art.78
As specific counterexamples, they adduce “the volumes of agonizingly felt love poetry perpetrated by adolescents,” and “the dreary (however fervently felt) religious verse which fills libraries.”
The sincerity issue (Wellek and Warren are clearly speaking back to Lionel Trilling) connects to biography and to the memoir. Their point, firmly stated and reinforced by examples, was that any assumption about a direct or causative relationship between the facts of a life and the work of a writer disregards something fundamental about the nature of literature: “The whole view that art is self-expression pure and simple, the transcript of personal feelings and experiences,” they contend, “is demonstrably false.” Again, “the biographical approach actually obscures a proper comprehension of the literary process, since it breaks up the order of literary tradition to substitute the life-cycle of an individual.” It also “ignores” what they call “quite simple psychological facts”: that a work of art may embody the “dream,” “mask,” or “antiself” of its author, rather than facets of the actual life.79 So for Wellek and Warren, much literary biography is not literary.
Perhaps inevitably, their chief example is a selection of biographies of Shakespeare, which from the vantage point of midcentury meant the work of Georg Brandes, Frank Harris, and their nineteenth-century precursors, Hazlitt, Schlegel, and Dowden. Since “we have absolutely nothing in the form of letters, diaries, reminiscences, except a few anecdotes of doubtful authenticity,” they point out, there is no real biographical information, only “facts of chronology” and illustrations of Shakespeare’s “social status and associations.”
The vast effort which has been expended upon the study of Shakespeare’s life has yielded only few results of literary profit … One cannot, from fictional statements, especially those made in plays, draw any valid inference as to the biography of a writer.
There is no logic to the idea that emotions and fictional descriptions are linked by anything causal. “One may gravely doubt,” write Wellek and Warren, “even the usual view that Shakespeare passes through a period of depression, in which he wrote his tragedies and his bitter comedies, to achieve some serenity of resolution in The Tempest. It is not self-evident that a writer needs to be in a tragic mood to write tragedies or that he writes comedies when he is pleased with life. There is simply no proof for the sorrows of Shakespeare.”80
They insist that there is no more reason to identify the playwright’s views with that of a wise protagonist like Prospero, or a disaffected speaker like Timon of Athens, than with those of Doll Tearsheet or Iago: “authors cannot be assigned the ideas, feelings, views, virtues and vices of their heroes.”81 Moreover, the same is true of the first-person I of a lyric poem. Whether Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud or not has no effect upon the artistic merit or propositional truth of his verse.
So what uses might biography have? Again Wellek and Warren are clear. Biographical information can explain allusions in the work, can accumulate materials for literary history (what the author read, where he or she traveled, etc.). By literary history they mean tradition, influences, sources. But where they draw the line, as we have seen, is at evaluation. Biography has no “critical importance.” A work of literature need have no correlation with events or data related to the author’s life, nor do those events explain (or cause) the work.
If biography is not literature—or if only some biographies are literature, and those are considered so for reasons of style and form rather than a supposed fidelity to facts—then why worry about the uses of biography? One response would be that the truth claims—and explanatory claims—made on behalf of biographical, autobiographical, or personal facts have, to a certain extent, preempted or short-circuited the role of criticism and interpretation when it comes to assessing literature, not only for “the common reader” but for many specialists as well.
If it is not only the acknowledged faux or hoax memoirs that are fictions, but also all memoirs, and much biographical writing of the speculative (“if he knew this, did it influence him when he did that”) mode, then their truth claims, which may be compelling (or not), have the status, precisely, of fictional truth. Aristotle famously said about plots that he preferred a plausible impossibility to an implausible possibility, and “truth” in this sense, with or without quotation marks, is Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief. The most effective (and compellingly literary) passage on this matter remains that of Nietzsche, in “On Truth or Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.82
This remarkable paragraph is often assumed by hasty readers—especially those who associate it with deconstruction and thus, by a series of leaps, with nihilism—to be a rejection of the idea of truth rather than a genealogy of truth’s maturity. In fact, we could read the passage as “the biography of truth.” One of its lineal relations is Francis Bacon’s “Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.” Nietzsche’s essay doesn’t say that there is no such thing as truth, but that what is true may change over time, depending upon the intellectual and cultural framework. “Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.” Human beings, Nietzsche claims, “lie unconsciously” in this way, and “precisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth.”83
The art of biography, for all the reasons we’ve noted, seems to be at an interesting crossroads. We have entered a time when books about the lives of writers sometimes elect to take the form of memoirs, describing the author’s experience of reading. Consider two striking cases in point, both about Marcel Proust (and both published in 1997): Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, and Phyllis Rose, The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. Rose is a biographer by profession, the author of well-received books on Victorian marriages and on the black jazz performer Josephine Baker. De Botton is a fiction writer and cultural critic. Like his book’s title, his chapter headings read, cleverly, like the titles of self-help books: “How to Suffer Successfully”; “How to Express Your Emotions”; “How to Be Happy in Love.” If not Proust Lite, or even Proust Without Tears, this is Proust Without the Eggheads. And, to a certain extent, Proust Without the Proust.
Like the famous Bette Midler line, “But enough about me. What do you think of me?,” these snapshots of readers watching themselves reading—or living—are engaging on first bounce. In a review of Rose’s memoir, Victor Brombert remarks that despite the presence of Proust’s name in the title, “he plays a minimal role” in the book, and observes that this decision may have discouraged readers not familiar with Proust’s work and frustrated those who were.84 (Brombert’s review begins by recalling André Malraux’s comment in Anti-Memoirs: “What do I care about what only I care about?”)
Michiko Kakutani described de Botton’s book as “quirky” but possessed of a “certain genial charm,” and she noted that its author had “hit upon a formula for talking about art and highbrow concerns in a deliberately lowbrow way.”85 De Botton went on to “expand upon that formula” with The Consolations of Philosophy, finding helpful hints in the works of philosophers like Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Socrates. The book begat a television program in England, where its author was metamorphosed into a philosophical advice-giving figure known as Dr. Love. This is presumably one of the uses of literature, after a fashion. How-to is definitely use; whether these adapted sound bites from Montaigne (or Proust) retain their tang as literature or have crossed over into the soothing realm of banality is another question.
Perhaps inevitably, Pierre Bayard’s book on how not to read a book (How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read)86 focuses, at the outset, on Proust, an author Bayard is proud not to have read, and who—as he hastens to tell us—Paul Valéry also hadn’t read and made much of not reading. Bayard gets lots of mileage in this short book by citing long passages from writers who discuss not reading. Whether he himself has read these books (or skimmed them, or heard of them, to use two of his book’s chosen designations) is unclear and, in the long (or short) run, unimportant. What does seem at least fleetingly important is that such a book can not only be published but gain a fandom of sorts. Its most praised section, on the anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s retelling of the plot of Hamlet to an African tribe, is a familiar story based upon a well-known essay, retold here as if there were no history of discussions of this famous incident.87 Bayard’s book is not a book about reading, and it is not a book about not reading, and it is not even a book about the social pretense (and pretension) of “having read.” It is a book about the theme of not reading as located in a few idiosyncratically chosen texts.
The back cover of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read asks which of a group of great books the reader has ever talked about without reading: Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, Invisible Man, A Room of One’s Own, Being and Nothingness, In Cold Blood, The Scarlet Letter, The Man Without Qualities, Lolita, Jane Eyre, The Sun Also Rises. But of this list, Bayard discusses only one, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. This slim volume is full of long block quotations, separated by passages of plot summary for those who haven’t read what Bayard hasn’t read, and occasional in-your-face bromides. If he weren’t French and telegenic, he would never have gotten away with it.
Taken together, de Botton’s book on Proust as a self-help manual and Bayard’s book about the theme of not reading may say something about the cachet of French cultural essayists in the American market, or about the defensive self-congratulation of American anti-intellectualism (here validated by a generation of French “intellectuals” who write in a style distinctly different from the “difficult” Derrida, Lacan, or Foucault) or about what it means to be “after the humanities” in the most negative sense. To the extent that the books discuss the use of literature, that use is turned, however wittily, into a social function rather than an intellectual or aesthetic one. As such, books like these are symptomatic. They are the “On Bullshit” of literary life.
A third book we might put on the shelf of books about repurposing the reading of great books is Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books, subtitled, in that explanatory way to which we have become accustomed in subtitles of late, An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read.88 Kelly is not French, and his book even has an index, albeit a brief one. In a series of short chapters (typically three to five pages), he identifies, historicizes, and speculates about lost books by famous writers, from Anonymous and Homer to Sylvia Plath and Georges Perec. For some reason, the most recent authors are listed by their full formal names (Dylan Marlais Thomas, William Seward Burroughs, Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV), making them sound vaguely parodic. And not all of the lost works are equally persuasive; Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won is a constant source of speculation, Lowell’s notional epic on the crusades less so. Basically, the book is literary gossip. It’s probably unfair to quote from the jacket flap—which the author almost surely didn’t write—but the cascade of adverbs and adjectives is indicative: “In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination.”
Why do I classify this book with How to Talk and the Proust books? Because all are para-literary, alluding to literature obliquely. None requires that the reader actually have a firsthand encounter with the great works on which they are propped. In the case of Kelly’s book, all the works are conveniently unavailable, objects of speculation rather than contemplation. For Bayard, reading is not only unnecessary but sometimes counterproductive; for de Botton, Proust becomes a sophisticated advice giver, a Dr. Marcel to rival television’s Dr. Phil. Decades after the culture wars worried about whether college students were being taught the right stuff, these books suggest that you can have a literary experience without having to bother to experience literature, and that it’s stylish—even cool—to do so.