Abstract
Every biography is in one sense a failure because it cannot duplicate the life of its subject nor recreate its character on the page. The myriad of facts, incidents, relationships and settings that a biographer encounters frequently overwhelms his effort at reconstruction. Forced to select, balance, evaluate and at times suppress aspects of his subject’s life, the biographer is often frustrated in his attempt to unify individual experiences in an artistic fashion. He must condense, eliminate and even forget in the process of writing the life. His goal is to convey something of the personality or identity of his subject; but when this cannot be done, or when his artistic sense is thwarted by a mass of facts, he often compensates by writing an inclusive, encyclopaedic life that emphasizes the newly-gathered materials. But increasingly, this traditional and current practice of biographers, the chronological and comprehensive life, is incommensurate with what we know about the complexity of individual lives. Today, new demands are placed on biography from psychology, anthropology and history; as a literary enterprise, biography must respond by registering in its form and content new means of expressing human experience.
How would it be if the life we had already lived were, so to speak, the first draft of which the second would be the fair copy! Every one of us, I think, would try above all not to repeat himself …
Chekhov, The Three Sisters
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Notes and References
Hayden White argues that ‘every set of events can be emplotted in any number of ways without doing violence to their “factuality”’, in ‘The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert’, The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979) p. 228. Modernism, White explains in the same essay, is the capacity of language to ‘intrude itself into discourse as a content alongside of whatever referent may he signalled on the surface of the text’ (p. 229). This idea has important consequences for the way we read biography as I show in a discussion of figurative language and narrative in Chapter 5. Katherine Frank advances a different explanation for multiple lives in her essay ‘Writing Lives: Theory and Practice in Literary Biography’, Genre, 13:4 (Winter 1980) 499–516. She believes they appear because of the chasm between narrative (popular) lives and analytical (scholarly) lives. The former tells a story, the latter interprets a life and we need both (pp. 506–8). William McKinley Runyan provides a defence of multiple lives via ‘perspectivism’ in his article, ‘Alternate Accounts of Lives: An Argument for Epistemological Relativism’, biography, 3:3 (Summer 1980) 209–24.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London: William Pickering, 1844) p. 170.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London: William Pickering, 1844) p. 170. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; University of Chicago Press, 1970) p. 7.
Leon Edel, ‘Biography and the Science of Man’, New Directions in Biography, ed. Anthony M. Friedson (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981) p. 10. An example of Proust’s importance can be found in the discourse on aesthetics found in Time Regained of Remembrance of Things Past, pp. 917–52. The role of biographer is identical to that of the artist who must go behind the individual’s ‘vanity … passions … spirit of imitation’ and habits to reach ‘the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us’. Proust, Time Regained, tr. Andreas Mayor, Remembrance of Things Past, tr. CK. Scott Moncreiff, Terence Kilmartin, Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981) p. 932. Compare Leon Edel, ‘The Figure Under the Carpet’, Telling Lives, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington: New Republic Books, 1979) pp. 16–34.
Charles Olson, W. H. Auden, The Life of A Poet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979)
Charles Olson, W. H. Auden, The Life of A Poet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979): Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).
Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979) pp. 49–53;
Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979) pp. 49–53; Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson, The Making of a Connoisseur (Harvard University Press, 1979) pp. 67–9. On the controversy generated by these two lives see William Mostyn Owen, Burlington Magazine, CXXIII: 938 (May 1981) 317–18 and Peter Plagens, ‘Biography’, Art in America, 68 (Oct 1980) 13–15.
Lytton Strachey, ‘Gibbon’, Portraits in Miniature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931) p. 160. Strachey continued to argue that ‘facts relating to the past, when they are collected without art, are compilations; and compilations no doubt may be useful; but they are no more History than butter, eggs, salt and herbs are an omelette’ (p. 160). Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: Mentor Books, 1962) p. 70; Richard Ellmann uses the phrase ‘character forming’ in ‘Literary Biography’, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) p. 5.
Mathilde Blind, George Eliot (London: W. H. Allen, 1883) endpaper [p. 219]. All further references are to this edition.
John Walter Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, New Edition (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885) p. V. All further references are to this edition.
Leslie Stephen, ‘Biography’, Men, Books, and Mountains, Essays by Leslie Stephen, intro. S. O. A. Ullmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1956) pp. 132, 140–1. The essay originally appeared in the National Review, XXII (1893).
Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1902; rpt New York: AMS Press, 1973) p. 36. All further references are to this edition.
Robert Gittings, The Nature of Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978) passim.
Anne Fremantle, George Eliot (London: Duckworth, 1933) p. 65. All further references are to this edition.
These terms appear in Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (1971; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) p. 135.
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot, A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) p. 22. All further references are to this edition.
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, 2nd edn (1940; New Haven: Archon Books, 1969) p. vii.
Jerrold Seigel, Marx’s Fate, The Shape of A Life (Princeton University Press, 1978) p. 4.1
Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) p. 126. All further references are to this edition.
Leon Edel, ‘The Poetics of Biography’, Contemporary Approaches to English Studies, ed. Hilda Schiff (London: Heinemann, 1977) p. 42.
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© 1984 Ira Bruce Nadel
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Nadel, I.B. (1984). Versions of the Life: George Eliot and her Biographers. In: Biography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06404-5_4
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