Abstract
At the close of The Development of English Biography, Harold Nicolson predicted an unhappy future for biography because it would be unable to unite the scientific with the literary. Science, along with objectivity and detail, would isolate biography from art. Fifty-three years later, however, Leon Edel perceived a new future for biography precisely because of the way it has adapted the new social sciences, especially anthropology and psychology, to writing lives. The result, he states, is ‘a new province for biographical adventure and knowledge’.1 But has biography conquered the antagonism Nicolson forecasted by discovering original ways to unite literary and scientific methods of understanding character with new means of recording human life? A survey of current approaches to life-writing provides an affirmative answer. Responding to shifting epistemological, literary and cultural changes, biography has replaced its attachment to chronology with themes, its linear development of a life with a spiralling narrative and proleptic use of motifs. To read contemporary biography is to discover new ways of structuring a life by pattern or spatial form rather than by time or history.
Why should a man spend days in authenticating dates and deciphering obscure records when he can evolve all that he wants so much more easily from his own imagination?
Edinburgh Review (1857)
Why must a biography so rigorously enslave itself to chronology? Why can’t it operate like other works of art and find its own kind of order for the job at hand?
Paul Fussell, ‘Boswell and His Memorable Scenes’ (1967)
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Notes and References
Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1927) pp. 154–8;
Leon Edel, ‘Biography and The Science of Man’, New Directions in Biography, ed. Anthony M. Friedson (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981) pp. 6–7. Edel enunciates four useful principles for the writing of biography on pp. 8–10.
For a counter view, strongly opposed to the influence of psychology on biography, see Edward Mendelson, ‘Authorized Biography and its Discontents’, Studies in Biography, ed. Aaron, pp. 9–26. On biography and anthropology see The Biographical Process, ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Donald Capps (The Hague: Mouton, 1976) passim.
William Bingley, Animal Biography in Donald A. Stauffer, The Art of Biography in 18th Century England, Bibliographical Supplement (Princeton University Press, 1941) p. 19. ‘To the female reader’, Bingley added, ‘I must remark, that every indelicate subject is scrupulously excluded.’
Sir Egerton Brydges, ‘Introduction’, Imaginative Biography (London: Saunders and Otley, 1834) n.p.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) p. 64.
Erikson outlines his life-cycle in Childhood and Society, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963) pp. 48–108, 247–74. Richard Noland, ‘Psycho-history, Theory and Practice’, Massachusetts Review, 18 (Summer 1977) 307.
Norman Holland, Poems in Persons, An Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature (1973; New York: W. W. Norton, 1975) p. 142.
For a fuller discussion see Nolan, ‘Psycho-history’, Massachusetts Review, 18 (Summer 1977) 295–322.
Jerrold Seigel, Marx’s Fate, The Shape of A Life (Princeton University Press, 1978) pp. 4, 7, 9, 8.
See Robert Gittings, The Nature of Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978) pp. 42–3. On the importance of economic and social factors see pp. 54–5.
For recent discussions see James William Anderson, ‘The Methodology of Psychological Biography’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XI: 3 (Winter 1981) 455–75;
Donna Arzt, ‘Psychohistory and Its Discontents’, biography, 1:3 (1978) 1–36;
Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors (University of Chicago Press, 1974);
Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The New History’, Commentary, 59 (Jan 1975) 72–8;
Thomas Flanagan, ‘Problems of Psychobiography’, Queen’s Quarterly, 89:3 (Autumn 1982) 576–610;
David Stannard, Shrinking History, On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
For a defence of psychohistory see Cushing Strout, ‘Ego Psychology and the Historians’, The Veracious Imagination (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981) pp. 223–44.
For an explanation of psychohistory see Bruce Mazlish, ‘What is Psychohistory?’, Varieties of Psychohistory, ed. George M. Kren and Leon H. Rappoport (New York: Springer, 1976) pp. 17–37.
Bruce Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill, Father and Son in the 19th Century (New York: Basic Books, 1975) p. 434. All further references are to this edition. For an elaboration of the father-son theme in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature see my essay, ‘From Fathers and Sons to Sons and Lovers’, Dalhousie Review, 59:2 (Summer 1979) 221–38.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (1976; New York: Vintage Books, 1978) pp. 219–24.
James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle, Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger, 1974) p. 7. All further references are to this edition.
Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Fabians (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977) p. 411.
Karl Miller, ‘Eminent Romantics’, New York Review of Books, 36:13 (16 Aug 1979) 31;
Leon Edel, Bloomsbury, A House of Lions (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1979) p. 271. All further references are to this edition.
Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, ‘Foreword’, The Unknown Orwell (London: Constable, 1972) pp. ix, x. All further references are to this edition.
Stansky and Abrahams do not cover the years 1937 to 1950 but remain faithful to their original conception of tracing Orwell’s life only up to Homage to Catalonia. Bernard Crick’s George Orwell, A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), covers the entire life.
Of the title Field writes ‘it is an admission and declaration of inconclusive evidence, of freedom from the fat of irrelevant fact, and that in itself could be disturbing to a subject such as mine, who has been known to praise biographies only for their documentation’. ‘Any given truth’, Field later remarks, ‘may stand very well by itself but be substantively modified upon being placed in proximity to another given truth, and even a statement which is patently false may more often than not involve capillary truths and histories which are interesting in their own right.’ These admissions reveal the dawning awareness by biographers of the limitations and possibilities of their art. Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978) pp. 5–6, 33.
An earlier example of this method of the subject participating in the account, although not actually integrated into the text, is Robert Graves and Liddell Hart, T. E. Lawrence to his Biographers (London: Cassell, 1938). The volume consists of commentary by Lawrence to the authors of his two authorized biographies in response to queries and manuscript drafts. Graves, for example, sent Lawrence the first eleven chapters of Lawrence and the Arabs and received copious annotations and comments.
George D. Painter, Marcel Proust, A Biography (1959; London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) I: xiii.
Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924) p. 180.
See for example, pp. 107–8, 247. This well-paced biography condenses the narrative to analyse the writing in a confident, interpretative voice. The biography incorporates many of the ideas I have stressed, from biography as a corrective genre to the use of central images and emplotment, here the story of the discovery of a vocation by Gibbon and his preparation for the labour of a life. Patricia B. Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon, Gentleman of Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982).
Jean Gattégno, Lewis Carroll, Fragments of a Looking-Glass, tr. Rosemary Sheed (1974; New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976) p. 5.
Sartre in Douglas Collins, Sartre as Biographer (Harvard University Press, 1980) p. 177. Also see ch. 1, especially pp. 21–3. Analogous to Sartre’s technique is the method of Thomas Mann’s artist-biographer in Doctor Faustus.
Sartre, ‘Sur L’Idiot de la famille’, Situations, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) p. 94.
Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) pp. 41, 79.
Earlier ventures in this form include Dimitri Mercjkowski’s The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci (1902),
Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle (1922) and
John P. Marquand’s The Late George Aply (1937).
David Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, Towards A Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) p. 311.
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© 1984 Ira Bruce Nadel
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Nadel, I.B. (1984). Experiment in Biography. In: Biography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09033-4_7
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