Abstract
“WRITING LIVES,” VIRGINIA WOOLF BELIEVED, “IS THE DEVIL.”1 As a nonfiction genre, biographies are dangerous in that they enlarge or shrink the natural size, talents, and defects of their object of study. Leon Edel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Henry James and Willa Cather, claims that to compose a narrative account of a person’s life, an author must not be genealogically or sentimentally related to him or her; impartiality could be threatened. Data are always malleable and subject to interpretation. Patience, distance, perspective, a love and respect for the subject, these ingredients are critical to the accuracy of the project. Every biographer adapts, revises, and invents, and in the end the text is an indirect account of the author’s mental associations and affinities.2
Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize—
Only be sure always to call it please “research.”
—Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky (1981)
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Notes and References
Virginia Woolf, Letters, edited by Nigel Nicolson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), vol. 6, 245.
Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984), 13–17, hereafter cited in the text.
Not a single female author has ever written a biography of Columbus. The one work written by a woman is the novel The Crown of Columbus (1991), actually by the married couple Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich; it is discussed in chapter 6.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha, part 2, chapter 3, quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1942), hereafter cited in the text. Published on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, a revised edition appeared in 1982, with a foreword by David B. Quinn.
In Spanish the text is known as Vida del Almirante Don Cristóbal Colón; the English-language edition is The Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand, edited by Benjamin Keen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1959), hereafter cited in the text.
José Torre Revello, “Don Hernando Colón: Su vida, su biblioteca, sus obras” (Don Ferdinand Columbus: His Life, His Library, His Works) Revista de Historia de América 19 (June 1945): 45–52. See also two texts by Ramón Iglesia: the prologue to Fernando Columbus, Vida del Almirante Don Cristóbal Colón (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946), 7–19, and El hombre Colón y otros ensayos (Columbus the Man, and Other Essays) (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1944).
A few commentators have suggested that his nephew, Don Luis, the admiral’s grandchild, wrote Ferdinand Columbus’s book. But that would have been impossible. See Iglesia (1946, 15–17).
Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 3 vols., edited by André Saint-Lu (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1986), hereafter cited in the text, in my own translation. Only a selection is available in English: History of the Indies, translated and edited by Andree Collard (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
See Marcel Brion, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Father of the Indians [1927], translated by Coley B. Taylor (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929). Henry Raup Wagner, with the collaboration of Helen Rand Parish, The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967) is a critical edition with biographical information useful to specialists.
Under the encomienda system, each native family was commended to a Spaniard, who took care in converting its members to Christianity and in assimilating them to the economic reality of the colony; see Wilford (35). A history of the encomienda system in Mexico is to be found in Ramon Eduardo Ruíz’s Triumph and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
Columbus delivered his journal to Isabella and Ferdinand, but when the queen died in 1504 it was lost. A copy made by a court scribe survived and was used by Ferdinand Columbus in his biography. According to Wilford, Las Casas must have borrowed it from the navigator’s son. As editor, the priest persuasively tells us that he never exercised any sort of censorship, and that he left untouched the prologue and Columbus’s letter addressed to the Catholic Kings; yet his style can be felt on every page. See Bartolomé de Las Casas, Journal of First Voyage to America of Christopher Columbus, introduction by Van Wyck Brooks (Freeport, Conn.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971; see also Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America. 1492–1493, edited by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), hereafter cited in the text as Dunn and Kelley.
See the back-breaking edition edited by John Harmon McElroy, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Twayne, 1981), which has 589 pages plus an appendix: in total, 1110 pages; hereafter cited in the text.
Washington Irving, Diary: Spain 1828–1829, edited by Clara L. Penney (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1926), 181, hereafter cited as Diary.
His finances suffered a terrible setback after the collapse of speculative enterprises in South American mines in which he had invested. McElroy (xvii–xcvii) describes how Irving’s biography was created as his plans for it evolved in his diaries and correspondence.
Martín Fernández de Navarrete, ed., Colección de los viajes y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los Españoles desde fines del siglo XV (Collection of Voyages and Discoveries Made on Sea by Spaniards at the End of the Fifteenth Century) (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1825).
Washington Irving, Diary, 90.
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo claims: “Today [circa 1892], unfortunately, books of this kind are no longer being written, because the majority of those who are opposed to a dramatic and picturesque historiography are by their opposition making a tacit confession of their own inability to write in this way.” Quoted in McElroy (xcvii).
See Foster Provost, Columbus: An Annotated Guide to the Scholarship on His Life and Writings, 1750–1988 (Providence, R.I.: John Carter Brown Library, 1991), 167–70, hereafter cited in the text.
The exact number is unknown. Some estimate that between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews were expelled. The actual decree had been issued months before, on 30 March 1492, but the deadline was 2 August 1492.
See my book review of Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise, “Dreams of Innocence,” Hungry Mind (Spring 1991): 6, 12.
Kirkpatrick Sale, “A Dark Record,” letter to the editor of the New York Times, 25 July 1991.
An excerpt from Wilford, The Mysterious History—“Discovering Columbus”—that appeared in the New York Times magazine (11 August 1991) was accompanied by a colorful display of Columbus portraits, from one painted by Sebastiano del Piombo 13 years after the explorer’s death, to one by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida painted around 1900, and a 1984 likeness by Leonardo Lasansky.
James Russell Lowell, Selected Library Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 256.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [1855].
John Updike, Hugging the Shore (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), xviii.
Updike, xviii.
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© 1993 Ilan Stavans
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Stavans, I. (1993). Biographical Sketches. In: Imagining Columbus. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63347-0_2
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