Writing the Lives of Writers

344 Pages·1998·32.93 MB·English

by  Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds.)

WRITING THE LIVES OF WRITERS
Writing the Lives of
Writers
Edited by
Warwick Gould and Thomas R Staley
in association with
PALGRAV E MACMILLAN
First published in Great Britain 1998 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-26550-3 ISBN 978-1-349-26548-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0
First published in the United States of America 1998 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-21403-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Writing the lives of writers 1 edited by Warwick Gould and Thomas F.
Staley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21403-6 (cloth)
1. Authors, English-Biography-History and criticism-Theory,
etc. 2. Authors, American-Biography-History and criticism-
-Theory, etc. 3. American prose literature-History and criticism-
-Theory, etc. 4. English prose literature-History and criticism-
-Theory, etc. 5. Authors-Biography-Authorship. 6. Biography as a
literary form. I. Gould, Warwick. II. Staley, Thomas F.
PR756.B56W75 1998
820.9-dc21
[B] 97-52922
CIP
Selection and editorial matter © Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley 1998
Chapters 1-22 © the various contributors 1998
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1s t edition 1998
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements viii
Notes on the Contributors xii
1 A Matter of Life and Death 1
Martin Stannard
2 Life over Literature; or, Whatever Happened to
Critical Biography? 19
John Haffenden
3 The Birth of the Author 36
Lawrence Lipking
4 Re-creating Chaucer 54
Ruth Kennedy
5 William Tyndale: Bricks without Straw 68
David Daniell
6 Writing Contexts in William Roper's Life of
Thomas More 79
Mark Robson
7 Life-Writing without Letters: Fielding and the
Problem of Evidence 90
Martin C. Battestin
8 Acquainted with all the Modes of Life': The Difficulty
of Biography 107
Isobel Grundy
9 The White Doe of Rylstone: An Exercise in
Autobiographical Displacement 125
John Williams
v
vi Contents
10 The Right to Privacy/The Will to Knowledge:
Henry James and the Ethics of Biographical
Enquiry 135
Richard Salmon
11 Ford, Eliot, Joyce, and the Problems of Literary
Biography 150
Max Saunders
12 'Witch' or 'Bitch' - Which? Yeats, Archives, and the
Profession of Authorship 173
Warwick Gould
13 The Biographer and Perspective 191
John Worthen
14 Explaining the Abnormal: D. H. Lawrence and
Tuberculosis 204
David Ellis
15 "'The Past" is with me, seen anew': Biography's
End in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage 212
Joanne Winning
16 Am I Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 224
Hermione Lee
17 Devilish Repressions: Bertrand Russell's Use of
Fiction as Autobiography 239
Ray Monk
18 Constructing the Biographical Subject:
The Case of Malcolm Lowry 266
Gordon Bowker
19 Textual Biography: Writing the Lives of Books 277
Antony Atkins
20 Vignettes: Leavis, Biography and the Body 293
Ian MacKillop
Contents vii
21 Richard Wright: Intellectual Exile 302
Hazel Rowley
22 Private Scandals and Public Actions: The Politics
of Reputation in the Career of Brian Penton 313
Patrick Buckridge
Index 320
Preface and
Acknowledgements
A decade ago, Lord Skidelsky wrote that the roots of biography lie
in ancestor worship. 1 For the biographer, however, such worship
must manifest itself not in adoration, but in that other ancient
human activity - storytelling. The main elements of biography, as
Richard Holmes so revealingly shows, are two closely entwined
strands. The first is the obvious gathering of factual materials, the
assembly in chronological order of the action, words and thoughts
of the subject. But the second, and by far the more challenging,
Holmes writes,
is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between
the biographer and the subject ... a continuous living dia-
logue ... there is between them a ceaseless discussion, a
reviewing and questioning of motives and actions and conse-
quences, a steady if subliminal exchange of attitudes, judgments
and conclusions. It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the
subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must
come to act and think of his subject as if he can.2
It is the nature of this dialogue, or this subliminal exchange, that
forms the central subject of this volume. Each of the essayists in one
way or another engages the persistent questions posed by this
dialogic relationship between biographer and subject. Bernard
Malamud is no doubt right when he asserts that 'no life can be
recaptured wholly' and that 'biography is ultimately fiction/. 3 But
when the biographical subject is a writer, the dialogue of re-creation
that engages us (as it has engaged the contributors to this volume)
takes on some distinctive responsibilities.
Yet literary biographers face an obvious extra problem: writing
itself takes up a great deal of writers' lives. Readers demand to be
satisfied, and have an undeniable - at times inexorable - interest in
other aspects of those lives; yet, as David Hare acknowledged in a
keynote address recently in Austin, 'the daily rituals of being a
writer are of themselves isolating'. 4 Reader expectation cannot be
viii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
allowed to erase the difficult duty to fact which is involved in
writing about writing itself. Confronting the popularity of literary
biography, John Haffenden recalled some unflinching words from
Helen Vendler:
In what way is the life of a poet relevant to the work (except in
the most obvious sense)? How is the development of a poet best
described? What would be the inner dynamic of the life of a
poet? Would all poets have a comparable dynamic, or are there
real varieties of the writer's life? If so, to what variety does this
life belong?
The writing of literature over a lifetime requires from its author a
form of heroism. The narrative of that heroism - its successive
battles, its defeats, its re-groupings, its perplexities, its leaps
towards certainty - makes a thrilling story, rightly told. Often,
too, the story has mysterious episodes, some of which have become
cliches of literary history. Why did the poetry of Wordsworth show
a falling-off, in spite of his industry and sobriety? Why couldn't
Joyce or Faulkner, those masters of language, write poetry? Why
are there years of silence in Stevens' career? The biography of an
author ought to take as its centre the imaginative dynamic by
which one can make sense of the oeuvre. Otherwise there is no
suspense, no anxiety, no crowning triumph, no desolate worry.5
These obstinate questionings and justifications of the literary
biographer's efforts were invoked at 'Writing the Lives of Writers',
an international conference (1-3 June 1995) hosted by the Centre
for English Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of
London. This was the inaugural event in a series of annual confer-
ences held alternately in London and Austin under a joint pro-
gramme of the University of London's new School of Advanced
Study and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin.
The selected essays printed here have been developed or revised
from conference papers. Martin Stannard has substituted for the
paper he delivered at the conference his inaugural lecture first
delivered at the University of Leicester, 23 January 1996. As the
conference involved plenary sessions with longer papers, inter-
spersed with shorter papers delivered in panels, no attempt has
been made to constrain the published sample of papers to a set
length or formula.
x Preface and Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement for access to and permission to print
unpublished material is offered to a number of literary estates and
their agents: to Dame Muriel Spark, and to Sidney Huttner, McFar-
lin Library, University of Tulsa; Dr Omar Pound and Mary de
Rachewiltz, the agents for the trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary
Property Trust; New Directions Publishing Corporation; Miss Anne
Yeats and Mr Michael B. Yeats, and Linda Shaughnessy of A. P. Watt
& Son; and Professor John Kelly on behalf of Oxford University
Press. The following institutions are also acknowledged with
thanks for access to unpublished materials and for (in some cases)
permission to include hitherto unpublished material from their
various collections: The British Library; the BBC Sound Archives;
the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas
at Austin; The New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations) for quotations from the Henry Wand Albert Berg
Collection, and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division; the Yale
Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu-
script Library, Yale University.
Richard Salmon gratefully acknowledges the permission of Cam-
bridge University Press to publish his essay, which is a revised
version of part of a chapter from his Henry James and the Culture of
Publicity (1997). Martin C. Battestin is grateful to the Editor of Eight-
eenth-Century Studies where a portion of his argument was first
published in July 1996 as 'The Cusum Test: Escaping from the Bog
of Subjectivism'. Other individuals to whom various authors are
grateful are cited in the individual essays and their endnotes. At
Macmillan, Charmian Hearne and Tim Farmiloe were particularly
helpful during the preparation of this volume, as were Rebecca
Dawson and Lucy Frank at the Centre for English Studies.
WARWICK GOULD
THOMAS F. STALEY