Cultures of Fetishism (23 page)

David Hoddeson, the editor of two special issues of
American Imago

“Transference and Biography,” introduced the issues by describing the

outcomes of biographers trying to ignore and banish their transferences:

That in many biographers’ workrooms transference phenonomena are deliber- ately and programmatically set aside wherever and whenever that is possible— or denied or otherwise repressed where it is not—in every sense goes without saying; until very recently, whatever transferences were recognized in the biographer’s workspace were considered intrusions. That many of these repres- sions return in some (dis)guise during the long labor of researching and writ- ing biography is also predictable; although helping to mask any such conflicts are the conventional attachments to more acceptable and widely understood biographical materials (which often come to carry their own transferential investments): the archives, letters, official documents, and circles of contempo- raries; the biographer’s deepening relationship to a lengthening text.
19

Edel struggles with archives and he struggles with transferences, seldom perceiving the fearful symmetry that binds them. He expresses his fear of transferences with a series of reprimands to some biographers who had succumbed to them.

He begins his litany of transference laments with his best-case scenario, Andre Maurois, the transference-ridden biographer of Shelley, Disraeli, and Byron. In the late 1920s, Maurois was invited to give a series of talks at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had the innocent audacity to praise his infatuations with his biographical subjects. “Biography is a means of expres- sion when the author has chosen his subject in order to respond to a secret need in his own nature.”
20
It was as if Maurois were inviting Edel’s censure, “From the moment a biographer responds to ‘a secret need in his own nature’ he is tangled in his emotional relationship with his subject—he is in trouble.”
21

Maurois, who had never anticipated an Edel, had no awareness of the dangers of his transference, and probably had never heard of the term, persisted in his argument, boldly claiming that his kind of biography was written with “more natural emotion than other kinds of biography, because the feelings and adventures of the hero can be the medium of the biogra- phers’ own feelings. To a certain extent it will be autobiography disguised as biography.”
22
Maurois’ confessionals in defense of his biographical method were proof enough to Edel that Maurois had been afflicted with transference fever.

After disposing of Maurois’ incurable transference misadventures, Edel devotes a few paragraphs to the pathetic case of Mark Schorer’s enmeshment with his subject, Sinclair Lewis. In “The Burdens of Biography,” Shorer con- fessed to the affinities that he discovered between himself and Lewis. They were both “inept and unsuccessful boys” in a Midwestern world of muscular masculinity.
23
They were both guilty of “careless writing,” “ill-conceived ambition,” “bad manners,” “fits of temper,” and “regrettable follies.”
24
Edel, in reporting how Schorer’s transference shifted from positive (blind love?) to negative (blind hate?), seemed to grasp, for a moment at least, the ubiquitous

relationship between (unconscious) transference and archive fever. “The con- fusion in his psyche undermined his project and he was ultimately swamped by his too abundant materials.”
25

There were times when Edel seemed almost possessed, even terrorized by the evils of transference. He always posed it as a problem. In his analysis of Lytton Strachey’s transferences, he inadvertantly exposes some possible motives for his fears of transference.

Strachey’s subject was Victorian hypocrisy, and the four characters he chose to illustrate the hypocrisies of the English spirit were Cardinal Manning and his ruthless use of religious power; Thomas Arnold with his Christian Bible and respectability; General Gordon, a warrior who posed as a saint; and Florence Nightingale, the “lady of the lamp” who turned out to be a tough and unrelenting adversary when it came to defying those who would dare to interfere with her humanitarian gestures.

Summing up Strachey’s biographical sketches, Edel says that they “pit strong queenly women against puny men. He endows the women with masculine strength, feminine endurance and feminine-masculine action.”
26
What family drama might have motivated these cross-gendered fables? According to Edel, it all boils down to Strachey’s complex relationship to his own queen mother, Lady Strachey. Directly from his references to the “queen” mother, without so much as a pause to present some data in support of his ensuing wild analysis, Edel strikes out at Strachey’s homosexuality, those vagrant ambiguities of the human spirit that seem to terrify Edel. “He learned to cope with his own manipulative and assertive homosexuality by becoming the very queens of his stories. In his fertile imagination he could be the mother of his numerous boys—and at the same time their lover.”
27

Edel further claims that Strachey found a perverse delight in identifying with Florence Nightingale, who became the mother “of an entire army of men,”
28
and that he found equal delight in portraying powerful men like General Gordon and Arnold, an educator of boys, as “ridiculous male figures.”
29

In this context of Strachey’s homoerotic predilections, Edel reminds his readers of Strachey’s strategies for eluding archive fevers. In his preface to
Eminent Victorians
, Strachey recommended that a biographer should, “attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined.”
30

It is understandable that the “plodding” Edel might resent Strachey’s cav- alier dismissal of archives. Edel wrestled for decades with the stubbornly unyielding archives of Henry James, who had thrown most of his letters and documents into his fireplace. James had hoped this would prevent some biographer from biographizing him after he was dead. That didn’t stop Edel from developing archive fever in his pursuit of James’s life. Despite his phobic-driven animus toward Strachey’s homoeroticism, he acknowledges that there is some value in Strachey’s remedy of dipping a little bucket into the vast archival waters. The “little bucket” could balance out “the sober monotony” of compiling facts and sorting through all the debris of birth

certificates, genealogies, photographs, letters, old manuscripts, diaries, newspaper clippings, and death certificates.
31

Edel tosses to and fro as he tries to confront the dilemma of archives; at one moment giving tribute to their importance and then, in the next, giving yet another example of their excesses. He admits to being overwhelmed by them. But the instant he hints of his defeat, he finds it necessary to defend archives. “I am not for one moment deprecating their importance or value.”
32

Finally, he weaves a sobering tale of the newest menace that has invaded the archive scene. Universities and libraries are paying writers for every scrap of their legacies, even before they are dead. Many of these artists make more money from their pre-paid archives than from publishing their poems, stories, and biographies.

“In the old days,” Edel tells us (probably thinking of his own archive nemesis, Henry James), “houses were blessed with fireplaces and much paper was automatically consigned to flames.”
33
In the age of the archive, however, “Every chance scribble belongs to posterity.”
34

As we approached the turn of twenty-first century, the malady of archives became a severe affliction, a veritable epidemic that seemed to thrive and reproduce itself as one of the symptoms of a general culture of fetishism, where material goods of one kind or another are traded in for the vitalities of the flamelike human spirit.

In 1999 alone one could hardly read a review of a biography that did not make some disparaging comments about what Richard Eder called “the contemporary fashion for megalography: cutting the biographical suit too large for the subject and with cloth yards to spare.”
35

No pun intended, but, I have come to regard these yards of spare cloth, as a surfeit of material or factual reality, a characteristic symptom of archive fever. From my point of view, it is not the number of words and details nor the size and heft of a biography that would identify it as a victim of the fetishism strategy, but rather the way in which a heavy burden of facts and data serves to stifle the vitalities of the subject. To call up the words of Marx once again, such use of details is tantamount to “endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying human life with a material force.”
36

The fetishism of biographical writing concerns the various ways that facts and details end up murdering the subject. There are those times when the subject strikes back. If the subject is still living, a biographer can sometimes be seriously wounded, especially if the biographer has idealized and idolized his subject, which would be evidence enough that the biographer’s transfer- ence remained unexamined and unconscious. And then there are occasions, probably more often than we realize, when megalography and unexamined transference operate in tandem. Because it is such a dramatic instance of my point, I begin with one of the later travesties of transference and then work my way back to the turn of the century.

In 2004, after publishing the last of his three-volume, 2,25l-page biogra- phy of Graham Greene, Norman Sherry was interviewed by Dinitia Smith in
The New York Times
. He openly confessed his wholesale, irrepressible, blatant transference to Greene. With indignation, Greene’s son and literary excecutor, Francis, confirmed Sherry’s self-analysis: “This book [referring to the third volume], is not about Graham Greene but about Sherry. . . . His obsession with brothels far surpasses that of his subject.”
37

In my opinion, this was not the more usual case of the biographer making over his subject into his own image. Sherry’s variety of transference was dis- tinctive. It was an instance of a biographer’s enthrallment with his subject allowing the subject to consume and demolish the biographer.

Sherry told Smith that he dismissed the bad reviews from the English press as “poppycock, piffle and balderdash.”
38
However, he did not deny bringing himself into the biography. In fact, he seemed to brag about it, as if it were a badge of honor. “Especially when Greene died, I was very moved by his death, so inevitably I had to put myself into it.” “I often felt I must be him.” “I lived within him.”
39

Sherry continues, “If you are going to write about a man who is highly sexed, you can’t change that. Besides, you can’t help but admire him for hav- ing sex with everything in sight.”
40
Sherry describes how his attempt to be honest to every aspect of his subject’s life ruined his health and alienated his family. He got tropical diabetes in Liberia while recreating Greene’s research for
Journey Without Maps
. He contracted dysentery in Mexico while tracing Greene’s path for
The Power and the Glory
. He developed intestinal gangrene while in Paraguay researching the background of Greene’s
The Honorary Consul
; “I almost destroyed myself. By the time I had finished my life had been taken from me.”
41

A few years before Sherry’s confession to Dinitia Smith, Fred Kaplan, the biographer of Gore Vidal, nearly had his life taken from him by his subject. During 1999, when the attack on biography seemed an unstoppable trend, Kaplan’s 890-page biography of Vidal became the standard by which archive fever was gauged. And it was another one of those unfortunate cases, when unexamined transference and archive fever fed off each other. Richard Eder’s critique on the megalography of Kaplan’s biography of Vidal in his
New York Times
review was echoed in Willaim Deresciewicz’s
Sunday Times
review of that volume. They both also called attention to Kaplan’s shameless idealization of Vidal.

When Gore Vidal first approached Fred Kaplan, the eminent biographer of Carlyle, Dickens, and Henry James, to be his official biographer, initially Kaplan observed that, “I prefer my subjects dead.”
42
In his review Eder comments that Kaplan was “dead right in his preferring.”
43
As Kaplan would discover as he neared the completion of the biography, Vidal had actually confused him with that other eminent biographer, Justin Kaplan. But still Kaplan confessed, without shame, “the inevitable happened: I grew fond of him.”
44
Then, adding without a blush, “Had he grown fond of me? There was reason to think so.”
45
But, as Kaplan must have already known before he

made his confession, Gore had thoroughly rejected him, taking the side of those who attached the biography and wishing out loud that he should have gone with the other Kaplan.

In any event, Kaplan had some warnings about the social posturing that covered over the shallow depths of his subject. As he was reading Gore’s semi-memoir
Palimpsest
, Kaplan recognized that it was “a non-introspective memoir without a center of consciousness.”
46
Early on in their talks (presumably when Vidal still thought of Fred as Justin), Mr. Vidal told Mr. Kaplan, “I don’t know how you are going to do this because there isn’t anything there.”
47
This was a “red flag”
48
comments Eder, “and biographers, particularly with the prospect of unlimited access to their subjects are bulls. It is Mr. Kaplan though, who has been gored.”
49

Here Richard Eder is making a convincing case for my hypothesis about the way biographers employ material reality to disguise the paucity of their insights into their subject’s psychic reality. This, of course, does not mean that Gore Vidal has no psychic reality but rather that having unlimited access to a living author’s life can be a disadvantage with a biographical subject like Vidal, whose superficiality and social posturing are devices that are designed to ward off access to his inner psychological world, his psychic reality.