“The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography”
Author: Scott Donaldson
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press
Pages: 284
Price: $39.95 (Hardcover)
Scott Donaldson has been for years one of our foremost American literary biographers.
He has written lives of three poets—Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Winfield Townley Scott—but is best known for his biographies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Cheever.
Donaldson’s books are generally considered authoritative and as thoroughly, exhaustively researched as possible, but in this meditation on his craft he reminds the reader Platonic perfection is impossible. No matter how much information the biographer accumulates, how thoroughly he reads his subjects’ journals and letters, how many witnesses he interviews, he can never get it perfectly right. People often misremember and sometimes lie. We can never, never, fully understand another person, especially a person who is not like us—and who is?
But one must try.
To begin with, one must admire the subject’s work. Presumably, it was reading that poetry or fiction that drew the biographer to the project.
It is also helpful to begin at least with an affection for the subject himself; no one’s life, it seems, will stand up to too much scrutiny. There are many examples of a biographer beginning his book in awe approaching love, and ending in disillusionment. This happened with Frost’s biographer and with Sinclair Lewis’.
It was not always so. In a thumbnail history of the genre Donaldson reminds us the earliest “lives” were of the noble Greeks and Romans; the medieval biographies were of saints. Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson,” in the eighteenth century, was revolutionary. Boswell tried to tell the whole story, “warts and all.” Worshipful nineteenth-century biographers, however, ignored distressing flaws—like Byron’s atheism and incest. And then of course the pendulum swung again with Lytton Strachey’s evisceration of the “Eminent Victorians.” Twentieth-century biographers continued to emphasize the author’s faults, sex and drinking usually, sometimes to such an extent that Joyce Carol Oates called such works “pathography” and John Updike labeled them “Judas biography,” in which the living witness attacks the now-deceased former friend or mentor. Of course balance is called for here, but Olympian, Solomonic judgment is in short supply.
After the history comes some advice: do include the faults of your subject, but his virtues also. And with research, should come selection. Just because you have learned the names of the Little League team Faulkner coached does not mean they belong in the biography. Donaldson laments, as many readers do, that contemporary biographies are way too long.
An old pro, Donaldson tells us of his adventures. Some projects go smoothly enough: MacLeish, Fitzgerald, Hemingway.
His chapter “The Cheever Misadventure,” however, describes a walk through a minefield and is a painful story.
The surviving family –widow, two sons and daughter—did not want the extent of John Cheever’s drinking or his bisexuality revealed by a stranger. They had books of their own to write. Susan was working on a memoir, “Home Before Dark”(1984).
Ben Cheever had plans to edit and publish his father’s letters and would in 1988. He felt that quotes from those letters in Donaldson might diminish sales.
Permission to quote from works and letters was granted and withdrawn. Donaldson became involved with editing a volume of Cheever’s uncollected stories, but a lawsuit was threatened.
Donaldson rather candidly lists “mistakes” he made in dealing with the Cheever family.
First, get your permissions in writing, up front. Second, be careful what you ask family members. Fred Cheever was offended when Donaldson asked if it were true he and his father had come to blows.
A slightly different mistake was Donaldson’s enthusiasm for what he was learning about Cheever. The biographer should mostly listen and “should keep his mouth shut and above all, should not make any show of superior knowledge.”
Of special interest to Alabamians will be Donaldson’s chapter on the Fitzgeralds, especially
the Riviera summer of 1924 when Zelda did or did not have an affair with a French aviator, Edouard Josanne.
Over a period of 50 years, there have been 14 biographies of Scott and/or Zelda. Several biographers, usually men such as Arthur Mizener and Jeffrey Meyers, insist the affair was consummated and Scott was devastated. Meyers, with no real evidence, actually dramatizes the event.
Several female biographers, especially Nancy Milford, assert the relationship was a romance— Scott was writing all day long, Zelda was bored—but it was not physical. Sara Mayfield, author of “Exiles from Paradise” (1971), who grew up with Zelda in Montgomery, is especially dismissive. Any Southern belle, she insists, indeed any Southern gentleman, would know Zelda was flirting, and the affair was “an innocent summer entertainment.”
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
