Biography Cosmography

I’ve just finished A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (Chatto & Windus, 2000): I will say, because it occurred to me so solidly as I was two-thirds of the way through the novel, that I give it 88%.  I don’t mean to assign the book a grade by way of reviewing it for whoever reads this post.  Rather, I think the percentage reflects my sense of the novel as wholly conceived in a sometimes deeply satisfying way, and yet as also marked by eccentricities and gaps that almost irritated me.  I understand the novel is intended to be in some measure fantasy, particularly in the context of the surreal quality of the novel’s dominant theme of seemingly infinite analogy (between people, facts, fiction).  But at times elements of this fantasy veered into a too-pointed whimsicality.  Or else into a literary self-referentiality that sometimes came off as self-reference for its own sake.  The self-referential, self-critical passages play into a number of thematic lines: the novel’s pokes at literary theory; the analogy between the world of the reader and that of Phineas, the first-person narrator; the presence of multiple voices in the text, and in Phineas, as well; Phineas’s insecurity and self-consciousness, and his consciousness of these things as he makes his way to some happier, more comfortable state; Phineas’s (eventual) consciousness of writing his life, figuring BT as (fictional) shadow autobiography; the role of self-awareness in modifying statements, in gesturing toward the “precision” something like biography tries to get at (“precision” being an “ideologically unloaded idea” Phineas uses—drawing from his spiritually impoverished critical inheritance—“to avoid the problem of the decay of belief in the idea of objectivity” (250)).  That’s all I can think of right now (I know there is more, but I lost some of it while writing.)  To re-route, à la BT, to my point about what I did not enjoy about this novel: the whimsicality and Phineas’s self-referential comments on what he writes (or narrates) sometimes result in preciousness.*  I should, however, distinguish between self-reference in the novel and what are often beautiful self-aware moments of meta-commentary. 

The cohesiveness of BT is often called forth by such statements.  I say this meaning to invoke the novel’s sometimes mystical atmosphere, as well as the possible analogy biography bears to calling forth—as a stirring of all things connected to the biographical subject.  This brings me to the book’s cosmic vision, something one of the characters summarizes as “dangerous”: “False analogy . . . and the desire to construct a theory of everything from received ideas close at hand” (156).  The novel, as its epigraph, from Goethe’s Elective Affinities, suggests, becomes a dream-like series of suggestions of analogy after analogy.  Linnaeus, Galton, and Ibsen become refractions of the elusive Scholes Destry-Scholes, the subject of Phineas’s attempt at biography—Phineas G. Nanson himself becoming Phineas “‘Nanson, son of Nanson,’” triads leaping out (248) (the novel’s characters can be divided into sets of two or three, depending on how you consider the relations between them).  Phineas’s inadvertent self-(re)production in the act of attempting biography—of constructing another—mirrors that Phineas reads into Destry-Scholes.  And all who research and write from the standpoint of the person in control, the person who surveys, composes, composites, the biographer, the eugenicist, the taxonomist, are themselves subsumed by another of their kind.  There was something almost mesmeric about reading this novel; what began as challenging allusions to naturalist history gradually resolved into a grand poetic scheme of taxonomy and relations: Phineas lays facts and fictions beside one another, as Destry-Scholes once did, and it becomes impossible not to “find the same structures, the same velleities . . . in the most disparate texts” (144). 

There are, of course, things I haven’t figured out about the novel, things I suspect may fall outside this scheme or that belong to secondary (?) themes.  The Ibsen passages in the novel are particularly enigmatic.  There are some lurking father/son and mother/son patterns and a pervert, Maurice Bossey, that serve more than  as simply pokes at or allusions to psychoanalytic literary interpretation.  Maurice Bossey may, I think, be some kind of anti-Phineas.  (It can certainly be argued that he’s a kind of foil to Phineas.  At the same time, in the multiplicitous spirit of the novel, it can also be argued that Maurice is a foil to Erik and Christophe, or to that mysterious satyr-like man Christophe sports with in the park).  I’d also like to think more about the structure of the novel, with its first third or so fixed firmly on Destry-Scholes’s biography of Elmer Bole, another figure I suspect has a more complex significance than is immediately apparent. 

But I should stop now.  So I’ll just say that what intrigues me most about what I understand of BT in a more general way is how the novel opens up from being a series of statements on the nature of (writing) biography into being a somewhat mystical enquiry into the idea of order; it can be a very beautiful book.

 

*I cringe a bit at other things that contribute to the fantasial quality of the novel—marbles, affected menus (something from American Psycho, if that helps you to imagine what I mean), somewhat two-dimensional female characters, considering the amount of time spent on them.  

Edith Wharton

I’m still slogging through Hermione Lee’s eponymous biography of Edith Wharton (2007), having picked it up last May and returned to it sporadically up until . . .well, now.  Don’t get me wrong—it’s a wonderfully written biography.  But I do feel that, just as Lee’s portrait of Wharton is of someone who is in some ways “‘inaccessible’” to those who knew her (558; Vintage, 2008), so there is something inaccessible to the reader about Wharton.  When reading Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf I didn’t have this problem of having to put down and return to the book: almost every page held something vulnerable and telling about Woolf, and part of me thinks this has to do with Woolf’s character itself as something fragile, erratic, and charming.  Probably the difference between the two biographies also has to do with the materials available to Lee; Woolf has diaries and diaries to draw from, whereas with Wharton there are mostly letters (some of which, notably those written to Henry James, she had destroyed).  But I can’t help feeling that, even with this issue of available materials and with the possible ways in which the biographer’s craft can enhance the reader’s interest in the subject, the attraction of the reader to the biography will depend on the attractiveness of the subject herself.  (I realize my feelings toward Wharton in Lee’s biography may be mine only—may be subjective—but I do think there is something slightly uninviting about Wharton’s character, less inviting to being known than Woolf.)  By contrast with this emphasis on the potential attractiveness of the biographical subject, up to now I’ve thought of biography as more like fiction-writing—as works measured not by the potential attractiveness of their subjects to readers, but by the craft of authors.  I am weary, though, using this term ‘attractiveness’: I think I’m assuming that my reader interest in Wharton as a biographical subject coincides with my personal sense of her attractiveness as a personality.  I’m not sure how to separate these two things; I wonder how they could be separated.

Large portions of Edith Wharton are dedicated to cataloguing gardens, architecture, and interior design that Wharton admired or such projects as she undertook.  While these can sometimes be tedious to read, design was a big part of Wharton’s life and fiction.  There are a few really interesting passages in which Lee describes the relation between Wharton’s passion for design and her character; these, in turn, speak to some of the central themes of Wharton’s works.  Lee’s quotation of Daisy Chanler on Wharton’s renowned garden at Ste Claire in Hyères, France, makes some sense of Wharton’s gardening:

‘“What are you saying about my garden?” she [Wharton] seems to ask, and I hardly dare to say more.  She could do it so much better herself, but I doubt if she would try to describe it.  It would be telling something too intimate, for her garden is somehow an image of her spirit, of her inmost self.  It shows her love of beauty, her imagination, her varied knowledge and masterly attention to detail; like her, it is somewhat inaccessible.  Her garden is a symbol of the real Edith.’ (557-8)

Lee makes explicit Chanler’s latent comparison:

it might not be too fanciful to think that gardening and novel-writing have something in common.  The mixture of disciplined structure and imaginative freedom, the reworking of traditions into a new idea, the ruthless elimination of dull, incongruous or surplus materials, and the creation of a dramatic narrative, all come to mind . . . John Hugh Smith reported to [Percy] Lubbock, in 1938, that ‘she told me that she thought her gardens were better than her books.’ (559)

The artistry of the garden—or of interior design, or architecture, for that matter—is similar to that of the novelist.  Although I don’t know Wharton’s works well enough to say how widely Lee’s comparison applies to Wharton’s fiction, I am immediately reminded of House of Mirth (which I had to read for a course this last term, American Literature 1865-1914) and one of Wharton’s short stories, “Souls Belated” (1899).  The big issue for the heroine of House of Mirth, Lily Bart, is, of course, that she cannot reconcile her desire to break free from the constraints of wealthy society with the opportunities for self-realization wealth allows her.  Lily’s best self lies in her artistry, and this artistry finds expression in expensive objects and their design: “the setting she had pictured for herself” is

an apartment which should surpass the complicated luxury of her friends’ surroundings by the whole extent of that artistic sensibility which made her feel herself their superior; in which every tint and line should combine to enhance her beauty and give distinction to her leisure. (110; Penguin, 1986)

We cannot separate Lily from her social set and its physical surroundings.  And Lily’s best audience, the person most equipped to appreciate her artistry, is Sim Rosedale, a Jewish magnate in social ascent.  Somewhat similar to Lily in predicament, Lydia in “Souls Belated” doesn’t have the strength to leave her lover, Gannett, and the comfort they’ve achieved pretending to be a married couple in a kind of high society colony on the Mediterranean.  Although it is not suggested that Lydia requires her social trappings for the same reasons Lily does, it is impossible for us and for Lydia to conceive of her outside the story’s particular social milieu.  Lydia and Lily, then, embody something of the way in which Wharton insists on the relationship between self-realization and the social.  Judging from Lee’s portrayal of the attitudes of Wharton and others to Wharton’s gardens and houses, Wharton’s own individual self-expression has strong thematic presence in (at least some of) her works. 

Lee reveals much of Wharton that feels very personal, for instance, the intimate details surrounding her affair with Morton Fullerton.  But it would seem that we are also supposed to get a strong sense of Wharton through the description of the gardens and houses she puts together and admires.  Perhaps this (inevitable?) figuration of Wharton through what are essentially art objects—gardens, houses and their rooms—contributes to my feeling of her inaccessibility; perhaps Wharton in some way comes across as more like a series of objects than a person.  Putting down Lee’s biography yet again I do feel as though I understand Wharton—I just don’t sympathize with her.  This brings up questions of the aims of biography: whether these involve reader sympathy; to what degree reader sympathy can be differentiated from understanding the subject; and to what degree reader sympathy can be separated from reader interest, my measure in the first paragraph of this post.  I think these questions are a re-articulation of my problem with using the word ‘attractiveness,' above, and may get at the heart of my issue with reading Edith Wharton.