Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography

Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography

Also by Michael Benton TEACHING LITERATURE 9 14 (co-author with Geoff Fox) SECONDARY WORLDS: Literature Teaching and the Visual Arts STUDIES IN THE SPECTATOR ROLE: Literature, Painting and Pedagogy LITERARY BIOGRAPHY: An Introduction

Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography Michael Benton Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Southampton, UK

Michael Benton2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-54957-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may bemade without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issuedbythe Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is theglobal academic imprint of theabove companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarksinthe United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57924-2 DOI 10.1057/9781137549587 ISBN 978-1-137-54958-7 (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustainedforest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benton, Michael, 1939 Towards a poetics ofliterary biography/michael Benton, Emeritus Professor, University of Southampton, UK. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Authors, English Biography History and criticism Theory, etc. 2. English prose literature History and criticism Theory, etc. 3. Biographyasaliterary form. 4. Authors Biography Authorship. I. Title. PR756.B56B48 2015 820.9 492 dc23 2015017423

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, straight forward...he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey s end; but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid;...he will moreover have various Accounts to reconcile: Anecdotes to pick up: Inscriptions to make out: Stories to weave in: Traditions to sift: Personages to call upon: Panegyrics to paste up at this door: Pasquinades at that: All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from. To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be looked into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of: Inshort, there is no end of it. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman I: 14(1760)

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Lives Without Theory 1 1 Art and Artifice in Biography 11 2 Plotting A Life 32 3 The Author s Works (1): Signs of Life? 49 4 The Author s Works (2): Open to Criticism? 74 5 Their Times and Ours 91 6 Framing a Poetics of Literary Biography 118 Notes and References 141 Select Bibliography 159 Index 160 vii

Preface and Acknowledgements My earlier book, Literary Biography: An Introduction (2009), offered a guide for students and general readers who sought a way in to the range of literary Lives available and to the main issues arising from the study of this genre. Although it drew upon recent thinking about narrative, it made no attempt totheorise biography. During the research and writing, however, the question of whether biography had,orneeded,atheoreticalbasis kept recurring. Commentators seemed to think that a theory of biography was either inappropriate or unnecessary; or, conversely, that its absence could be used as a means of denigrating a genre they regarded as lightweight, as little better than drawing-room gossip about favourite authors. At best, those who discussed theory at all were likely to be thought guilty of inflating common-sense principles with unwarranted significance. Yet, whatever the stance taken, the unique character of biography as a form of non-fiction narrative was, with one or two notable exceptions, usually neglected. This seemed odd not only because of the popularity of the genre with everyone in the book business from writers and publishers to readers and reviewers but, more fundamentally, because theoretical battles were being constantly waged in the two areas from which biographical writing draws its character and appeal: historiography andliterary fiction. The underlying question remains unresolved. Is a theory of biography even possible in a genre that necessarily assimilates into its historical narrative a wide range of concepts and approaches from other fields from social studies, psychology, literary criticism, the law, moral philosophy, to name the most obvious? Regarded in this light, asking for a theory feels like the wrong question. But by shifting the focus and examining how biographical writing works one might theorise its practices and contribute to developing a poetics of biography. This, at any rate, is where I started and what has shaped the present book. Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography is a complement to its predecessor. Although the six chapters may be read as free-standing pieces, ix

x Preface and Acknowledgements they are sequenced to take the reader progressively through the main elements that any attempt at a generic study of biography must consider. The figure I had in mind throughout was how the triangular relationships of lives, works and times are represented in biographies and how narrative operates in holding them together. Historiography and fiction have been entwined since the beginnings of modern biography inthe eighteenth century (see my epigraph). Idiscussed this hybrid relationship as a feature of literary history in my earlier book. With the present focus on poetics, it is more appropriate to deal with the implications in different ways asthey arise chapter by chapter. The Introduction argues the case for seeking an understanding of biography through poetics and practice rather than looking for asetof abstract theoretical principles. Chapter 1 considers the nature of the genre, in particular, how biographers reconcile the substantive body of factual data with the relative freedoms of biographical narrative. Chapter 2 takes up this issue and focuses on a single example in order to investigate how biographical writing operates in the space between writing history and writing fiction. The next two chapters concern matters unique to biographies of literary subjects how to regard the author s novels, plays and poems and what to do about them. Chapter 3 looks atthe problems encountered in relating the works to the subject s life. Chapter 4 asks whether criticism has a role and argues that there are distinctive qualities in biographical criticism that can elucidate the creative character and trace the literary development of an author. Chapter 5 places the narratives of authors lives and works in the double context of their times and ours. Two aspects bear upon the poetics of the genre: comparative biography considers how the same subject is treated by different biographers at different historical periods; bi-focalism indicates the problems of writing about figures from the past in twenty-first-century language. In both cases, the issue of gender serves to highlight the social and cultural changes that biographers have to deal with. The final chapter draws together the many aspects of narrative that have been discussed earlier in the subjects lives, works and times and outlines a poetics of literary biography that considers the biographer s storytelling techniques within an overall narrative strategy based on historical representation. In the main, I have deliberately chosen to focus on literary biographies of authors not discussed in my earlier book, from major

Preface and Acknowledgements xi canonical writers such as John Milton and George Eliot to others like George Herbert, Edward Thomas, William Golding and V. S. Naipaul whose Lives were published only inthe past five years, as well as upon Michael Holroyd s fascinating group biography of The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families. Most of my examples are drawn from English authors and biographers but the arguments that they illustrate are widely applicable. A poetics of the genre is transnational. While there may be differences between, say, the characteristics of American and English biographical writing, they share a common poetics. All biographies are grounded in the art of telling stories, that primary act of mind which, at some level, we all engage in continuously in the framing of everyday life. Given the infinite variety of fact and fiction in such stories, it is not surprising that the biographical principles that sustain life stories remain elusive, if not inimical to efforts to pin them down. This, of course, is what provokes the present attempt to do so. I am grateful to the Editor of The Journal of Aesthetic Education for granting me permission to reproduce revised versions of two articles. Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography in Vol. 45, No. 3 (Fall 2011) now appears with minor modifications as Chapter 6; The Aesthetics of Biography: And What It Teaches, in Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring 2015) has been reworked as Chapter 1. My special thanks go to Geoff Fox and to my wife, Jette Kjeldsen, for reading earlier drafts of the text and offering helpful suggestions for improvements as well as saving me from a number of errors and obscurities.