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English Love sms
Every biographer who mounts a platform knows this one. Not so much a question, more a challenge, hurled with an edge to the voice, as if anticipating the unwanted answer.
The wanted answer is Hermione Lee's. The biographer of Virginia Woolf (and the new Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford) fervently believes that ''you have to have emotional feeling to do the work.'' She felt a profound sense of bereavement when she finished her biography and had to give Woolf back to the wider world. Silly, she knows -- but ''I felt she had been mine.''
Ann Douglas, who reviewed Barry Miles's biography of Jack Kerouac in The New York Times Book Review, also thinks deep affinity is essential. Douglas, who teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia, expects ''a love affair, even a marriage, between author and subject.'' Sadly, she found Miles's treatment more like ''a one-night stand.''
Many biographers take the opposite view. When Hermione Lee asked Peter Ackroyd, who has written the lives of T. S. Eliot and Charles Dickens, whether he liked his latest subject, Thomas More, Ackroyd bristled. Liking is irrelevant, he answered. Biography is a job, and he gets on with it.
I'm in the Ackroyd camp. I know well the cries of dismay this admission brings. My second biography was about Nora Barnacle, the adventurous and quotable chambermaid from Galway who became the lifelong wife of James Joyce. Many readers loved her. So, at question time, they (''they'' being the nice people who go out in the rain to listen to talks about books) would smile when asking, ''Surely you feel you know her better than anybody you've ever ever known in your life?'' Or, rhetorically, ''You must have seen a lot of yourself in her?''
The answer to both is ''No.'' I wrote the life of Nora Joyce, not because I felt I knew her but because I didn't. She was a mystery to be solved. There were tantalizing glimpses in Richard Ellmann's great biography of Joyce, but no more. Ellmann tried to ward me off. She was an uninteresting woman, he said, about whom there was little to say; besides, all her friends were dead, so the chances of getting new information were minimal.
But as a longtime journalist, I knew that real people leave real traces and that any life is interesting when looked at close up. As a subject, moreover, Nora was virtually untouched -- a journalist's dream. That Nora turned out to be highly amusing, candid in the Irish manner, was pure gravy. (When in her widowhood she was asked which authors Joyce had liked to read, she replied, ''Mostly he read himself.'')
The idea of biography as journalism may be deeply disillusioning to those who prefer to see it as a literary genre rather than a branch of ''hold the front page.'' But my iconoclasm goes even farther. I would argue (if anyone would listen) that there is no such thing as biography -- only ''books about.'' There are so many approaches -- historical, psychological, popular, academic, authorized, unauthorized, flattering, investigative -- not to mention so many different kinds of lives -- literary, political and royal, to name but three -- that the books hardly belong in the same section of the bookstore.
Biography is a touchy subject these days. John Updike, in The New York Review of Books, took aim at ''the Judas school'' -- former wives and friends who, like Paul Theroux on V. S. Naipaul, package and retail the very worst from past private conversations. The family of Jacqueline du Pre is said to be deeply divided over the current biographical film ''Hilary and Jackie,'' which shows the late cellist having an affair with her brother-in-law. And Sir Tom Stoppard recently sounded off against the ''Ira somebody'' who, uninvited, is writing his life. Sir Tom might be reassured to hear that the view of the biographer in question, Prof. Ira Nadel of the University of British Columbia, is that there is ''no need to be buddy-buddy with your subject but an appreciation of the work or accomplishment is pretty basic. Otherwise, why bother?''
I took soundings from some other fellow practitioners and found them taking a dim view of the need to be half in love with your subject. Paul Ferris, whose biographical roster includes Dylan Thomas, the actor Richard Burton and Sigmund Freud, accepts that writing anyone's life demands from the writer a serious commitment of resources. ''Liking is something else. Be excited by, be appalled at, be envious of, be angry with -- these are all possible responses, often with the same subject in the course of a day's writing. The subject is always an enemy; a pursuit is always in progress.''
Does the hunter ''like'' the fox? Not necessarily. Ferris's toughest target was Caitlin Thomas, Dylan's wife, his slave (according to her) and, in later life, his greedy, drunken widow. Ferris admits ''Mrs. Thomas wasn't my cup of tea; nor was I hers.'' When his ''Caitlin: The Life of Caitlin Thomas,'' in which she collaborated (for a fee), was published, one of her sons asked him the dreaded question: ''But did you like my mother?'' All Ferris could do, he says, was lie.
Nobody ever asks Nol Riley Fitch whether she liked the subject of her latest biography, ''Appetite for Life.'' Who doesn't like Julia Child? Or Sylvia Beach, about whom Fitch wrote ''Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation''? But Anas Nin, compulsive liar, second-rate pornographer? Nin was a struggle, Fitch admits: ''She slept with her father when she was 30 years old, for God's sake.'' In the end, Fitch had to settle for finding the subject of ''Anas: The Erotic Life of Anas Nin'' ''fascinating in a sometimes morbid way.''
If liking were a prerequisite, who would do famous monsters like Kipling, Robert Maxwell and William Randolph Hearst? When Anne Chisholm, biographer of Nancy Cunard and Rumer Godden, turned her attention to Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian newspaper magnate, people asked her, ''How could you bear to spend years with such a man?'' Her reply: ''You don't exactly have to like your subject, but you have to be continually interested. People think of you as living with the person. But it's not like that; what they do is occupy a lot of space in your mind.''
How could it be otherwise? Years of research go into setting a figure against a backdrop. You need to find out about the politics, the weather, the clothes, the social mores and the economy of the period in question. Making it all into a coherent narrative is like doing an enormous jigsaw. The pieces of sky are just as important as those of the eyebrows or the hands.
There are bound to be unpleasant surprises as you go along. Every biographer of D. H. Lawrence has to deal with the ugly incident of his kicking his dog. I forgave it. Poor D.H.L. was in great pain from half-eaten lungs at that late stage in his short life, and when writing my biography I did a lot of research into ''tubercular rage.'' I was far more moved by his marvelous, witty, compassionate letters. ''No one,'' I said in my introduction, ''could read his letters and not like him.'' This drew the inevitable retort from a reviewer: ''I've read the letters and I still don't like him.''
My first biography (thanks for asking) was about Elizabeth Taylor. I was then on the staff of The Economist and writing about the economic affairs of 20th Century Fox; I thought Taylor would be pleased to have the attentions of a serious journalist. She was not. Not, at least, according to the aide with a double-barreled name who rang up to warn me that her lawyers were richer than my lawyers. ''Liking'' was made even harder by the refusal of friends to talk to me. This left me talking only to enemies (apart from the saintly Rock Hudson) and resolving never again to write the biography of a living person.
Biography is a craft, not a profession. But perhaps the biographer, in one way, is a little like a doctor. Initial detachment gives way to genuine sympathy after seeing someone through so much. By the end, you can't help liking the object of your attentions -- unless you have accumulated a thick file of letters from lawyers
English Love sms
Every biographer who mounts a platform knows this one. Not so much a question, more a challenge, hurled with an edge to the voice, as if anticipating the unwanted answer.
The wanted answer is Hermione Lee's. The biographer of Virginia Woolf (and the new Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford) fervently believes that ''you have to have emotional feeling to do the work.'' She felt a profound sense of bereavement when she finished her biography and had to give Woolf back to the wider world. Silly, she knows -- but ''I felt she had been mine.''
Ann Douglas, who reviewed Barry Miles's biography of Jack Kerouac in The New York Times Book Review, also thinks deep affinity is essential. Douglas, who teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia, expects ''a love affair, even a marriage, between author and subject.'' Sadly, she found Miles's treatment more like ''a one-night stand.''
Many biographers take the opposite view. When Hermione Lee asked Peter Ackroyd, who has written the lives of T. S. Eliot and Charles Dickens, whether he liked his latest subject, Thomas More, Ackroyd bristled. Liking is irrelevant, he answered. Biography is a job, and he gets on with it.
I'm in the Ackroyd camp. I know well the cries of dismay this admission brings. My second biography was about Nora Barnacle, the adventurous and quotable chambermaid from Galway who became the lifelong wife of James Joyce. Many readers loved her. So, at question time, they (''they'' being the nice people who go out in the rain to listen to talks about books) would smile when asking, ''Surely you feel you know her better than anybody you've ever ever known in your life?'' Or, rhetorically, ''You must have seen a lot of yourself in her?''
The answer to both is ''No.'' I wrote the life of Nora Joyce, not because I felt I knew her but because I didn't. She was a mystery to be solved. There were tantalizing glimpses in Richard Ellmann's great biography of Joyce, but no more. Ellmann tried to ward me off. She was an uninteresting woman, he said, about whom there was little to say; besides, all her friends were dead, so the chances of getting new information were minimal.
But as a longtime journalist, I knew that real people leave real traces and that any life is interesting when looked at close up. As a subject, moreover, Nora was virtually untouched -- a journalist's dream. That Nora turned out to be highly amusing, candid in the Irish manner, was pure gravy. (When in her widowhood she was asked which authors Joyce had liked to read, she replied, ''Mostly he read himself.'')
The idea of biography as journalism may be deeply disillusioning to those who prefer to see it as a literary genre rather than a branch of ''hold the front page.'' But my iconoclasm goes even farther. I would argue (if anyone would listen) that there is no such thing as biography -- only ''books about.'' There are so many approaches -- historical, psychological, popular, academic, authorized, unauthorized, flattering, investigative -- not to mention so many different kinds of lives -- literary, political and royal, to name but three -- that the books hardly belong in the same section of the bookstore.
Biography is a touchy subject these days. John Updike, in The New York Review of Books, took aim at ''the Judas school'' -- former wives and friends who, like Paul Theroux on V. S. Naipaul, package and retail the very worst from past private conversations. The family of Jacqueline du Pre is said to be deeply divided over the current biographical film ''Hilary and Jackie,'' which shows the late cellist having an affair with her brother-in-law. And Sir Tom Stoppard recently sounded off against the ''Ira somebody'' who, uninvited, is writing his life. Sir Tom might be reassured to hear that the view of the biographer in question, Prof. Ira Nadel of the University of British Columbia, is that there is ''no need to be buddy-buddy with your subject but an appreciation of the work or accomplishment is pretty basic. Otherwise, why bother?''
I took soundings from some other fellow practitioners and found them taking a dim view of the need to be half in love with your subject. Paul Ferris, whose biographical roster includes Dylan Thomas, the actor Richard Burton and Sigmund Freud, accepts that writing anyone's life demands from the writer a serious commitment of resources. ''Liking is something else. Be excited by, be appalled at, be envious of, be angry with -- these are all possible responses, often with the same subject in the course of a day's writing. The subject is always an enemy; a pursuit is always in progress.''
Does the hunter ''like'' the fox? Not necessarily. Ferris's toughest target was Caitlin Thomas, Dylan's wife, his slave (according to her) and, in later life, his greedy, drunken widow. Ferris admits ''Mrs. Thomas wasn't my cup of tea; nor was I hers.'' When his ''Caitlin: The Life of Caitlin Thomas,'' in which she collaborated (for a fee), was published, one of her sons asked him the dreaded question: ''But did you like my mother?'' All Ferris could do, he says, was lie.
Nobody ever asks Nol Riley Fitch whether she liked the subject of her latest biography, ''Appetite for Life.'' Who doesn't like Julia Child? Or Sylvia Beach, about whom Fitch wrote ''Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation''? But Anas Nin, compulsive liar, second-rate pornographer? Nin was a struggle, Fitch admits: ''She slept with her father when she was 30 years old, for God's sake.'' In the end, Fitch had to settle for finding the subject of ''Anas: The Erotic Life of Anas Nin'' ''fascinating in a sometimes morbid way.''
If liking were a prerequisite, who would do famous monsters like Kipling, Robert Maxwell and William Randolph Hearst? When Anne Chisholm, biographer of Nancy Cunard and Rumer Godden, turned her attention to Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian newspaper magnate, people asked her, ''How could you bear to spend years with such a man?'' Her reply: ''You don't exactly have to like your subject, but you have to be continually interested. People think of you as living with the person. But it's not like that; what they do is occupy a lot of space in your mind.''
How could it be otherwise? Years of research go into setting a figure against a backdrop. You need to find out about the politics, the weather, the clothes, the social mores and the economy of the period in question. Making it all into a coherent narrative is like doing an enormous jigsaw. The pieces of sky are just as important as those of the eyebrows or the hands.
There are bound to be unpleasant surprises as you go along. Every biographer of D. H. Lawrence has to deal with the ugly incident of his kicking his dog. I forgave it. Poor D.H.L. was in great pain from half-eaten lungs at that late stage in his short life, and when writing my biography I did a lot of research into ''tubercular rage.'' I was far more moved by his marvelous, witty, compassionate letters. ''No one,'' I said in my introduction, ''could read his letters and not like him.'' This drew the inevitable retort from a reviewer: ''I've read the letters and I still don't like him.''
My first biography (thanks for asking) was about Elizabeth Taylor. I was then on the staff of The Economist and writing about the economic affairs of 20th Century Fox; I thought Taylor would be pleased to have the attentions of a serious journalist. She was not. Not, at least, according to the aide with a double-barreled name who rang up to warn me that her lawyers were richer than my lawyers. ''Liking'' was made even harder by the refusal of friends to talk to me. This left me talking only to enemies (apart from the saintly Rock Hudson) and resolving never again to write the biography of a living person.
Biography is a craft, not a profession. But perhaps the biographer, in one way, is a little like a doctor. Initial detachment gives way to genuine sympathy after seeing someone through so much. By the end, you can't help liking the object of your attentions -- unless you have accumulated a thick file of letters from lawyers
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
English Love sms
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