Cultures of Fetishism (24 page)

Finally, because he was unable to “pierce Mr. Vidal’s skillful mask making,”
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Kaplan’s biography is itself “a mask about a mask.”
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As Eder is quick to point out, “Mr. Vidal gives his biographer lots of surface and few openings.”
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The review of Kaplan’s book by William Deresiewicz, a professor of English at Yale University, entitled “His Cigar is Just a Cigar,” goes right to the goring of Kaplan: “Kaplan allows himself to become too identified with his subject, dazzled by the brilliance of his fame, seduced by his charm or the illusion of intimacy. Its effect can be felt on every page. Everywhere Vidal’s view of events is endorsed, his actions defended, his enemies belittled, his hypocrisies and cruelties explained away.”
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Apparently Kaplan accepted Vidal’s remarkable claim that he has no psy- chology. In support of this claim Kaplan quotes Judith Calvino, widow of Italo Calvino and a close friend of Vidal, “Gore is a man without an uncon- scious. . . . There are no bad things lurking somewhere in his mind or body.”
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As he comments on Kaplan’s naïve acceptance of Vidal’s claim of having no psychic life to speak of, the reviewer makes an inadvertant inter- pretation of the relationship between this purported paucity of psychic real- ity and the accumulation of material reality in the Vidal biography. “After a beautifully done opening chapter on Vidal’s family history, Kaplan descends to a prose of depressing clumsiness, as if, having stuffed his word processor with seventy-four years’ worth of date books and account ledgers, he had left the machine to write the damn book itself.”
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As the number of biographies written and published increased, seemingly in harmony with the increasing size of the biographies, the anti-biographical forces rose up with renewed force and conviction. Railing against the biogra- phy genre at large, Stanley Fish, in his
New York Times
Op Ed page column

“Just published: Minutiae Without Meaning,” went on an all-out attack of the biography genre. His article focuses on all of those “details unattached to a master narrative . . . details that don’t mean anything at all, or can mean anything at all, the piling up of details, letters, medical records, the names of boyhood sleds in order to compensate for lack of meaning.”
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Most often biographers are left with “little more than a collection of random incidents the only truth being told is the truth of contingency, of events succeeding one another in a universe of accident and chance.”
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In an essay in the
Sunday New York Times Book Review
, Ellen Willis spoke fervently against the “sheer heft” of contemporary biographies, “overloaded with details that show off the author’s scholarship but fail to distinguish between the crucial and the trivial.”
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The vehemence of the general attack on biography inspired a few writers to try to muster some arguments in its favor. With all good intentions, John Updike’s defense, “One Cheer for Literary Biography,” ends up sounding very much like another attack. The tone is set when Updike begins with an epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks: “There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
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Updike then tries to counter Fitzgerald’s pessimsim by giv- ing a faint cheer. He argues that certain biographies, like George D. Painter’s “splendid” two-volume biography of Marcel Proust, become a way of re-experiencing the novel, with a closeness, and a delight in seeing imagined details conjured back into real ones, “that only this particular writer and his vast autobiograhical masterpiece could provide.”
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Painter’s biography, Updike comments, “is more of the same, mirrored back into reality.”
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Along the way, however, most of what Updike says about literary biogra- phy is not accorded even the weak one cheer. And to compound matters, even this lonely champion of biography is caught up in the page-counting fad. “Although one rarely sees literary biography on the best-seller list, a prodigious amount of it is produced, some of it at prodigious length.”
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Beginning the tour in his library with Holroyd’s three-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw and Edel’s five-volume James, Updike then takes us out to his barn, where he begins a serious count-down.
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Five-hundred pages for Edmund Wilson, Simone Weil, and Joyce Cary; six-hundred for Oscar Wilde and Ivy Compton Burnett; six-hundred-and fifty for Norman Mailer, seven-hundred each for Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett; eight-hundred for Zola; and the real heavyweight of twelve-hundred for the life of James Thurber. Updike then speculates that maybe length of biography has something to do with length of life. Sylvia Plath, dead at thirty, got only three-hundred-and-fifty pages. Anne Sexton, however, having lived a decade longer, got one-hundred pages more than Plath.

Acknowledging that “the life of a writer, which spins outside of itself a secondary life, offers an opportunity to study mind and body, or inside and outside, or dream and reality, together as one,”
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Updike nevertheless pref- aces his apparently reluctant, “one” cheer, “literary biography does perform useful work,”
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with this personal statement: “As long as I am alive, I don’t

want somebody else playing on my jungle gym—disturbing my children, quizzing my ex-wife, bugging my present wife, seeking for Judases among my friends, rummaging through yellowing old clippings, quoting
in extenso
bad reviews I had rather forget, and getting everything slightly wrong.”
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Finally, toward the end of the winter of 2000, the attack on biography could no longer be ignored by serious and committed biographers.

In his personal response to the attacks on long biographies, Fred Karl, biographer of Conrad, Faulkner, and Kafka, wrote an essay entitled, “The Long and the Short of It,” where he counterattacked the critiques of long biographies by scorning the new series of brief biographies that were brought into existence purportedly to “revitalize an aging genre” and to introduce “a new generation of readers to this once popular genre.”
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But, protests Karl, how can this new generation of readers get to appreciate biography through the easier, less demanding reading of brief biographies, “when there is so little biography at hand?”
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“In the brief forms of biography we find no notes or else notes that are very skimpy, no index, little or no bibliography; and most importantly, no new material or new archival research, no expert in the field—instead a well-known writer.”
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Blaming the publishers of this brief biography series for their cynical reliance on celebrity culture as an antidote to the literary and historical values that are the foundation of serious biographical studies, Karl goes on to review several of the misbegotten ventures into brief biography. Along the way, Karl tries to make the point that length is not the important point of argument but rather whether or not the person who presumes to write a biography possesses the proper knowledge of the traditions and skills and tools that make the writer of a biography into a “proper” biographer.

Despite the fervor of his counterattack, Karl, nevertheless, has the gen- erosity of spirit to consider how two brief biographies written by celebrity writers, Mary Gordon’s
Joan of Arc
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and Edna O’Brien’s
James Joyce,
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though they suffer from all the problems associated with the “briefies”— details that are derivative of previous biographies, narratives that are devoid of deep analysis, text not edited, and full of undigested material—finally, do justice to their subjects anyhow. As he looks into these two good briefies, Karl discovers that each of these writers, even though she was not a proper biog- rapher, was able to enlist personal feelings for her subject and was, in addi- tion, passionately attuned to the cultural and social issues that her subject embodied. Apparently, a compelling portrait of a subject can result, even with brevity, and even without deep analysis, if the writer’s “acknowledged” passion and identification with her subject is allowed to play a prominent role in the composition of the biography. In other words, although Karl does not use this language, if a consciousness of transference is brought into play, even a brief biography might be deserving of the term,
biography
.

In the conclusions to his counterattack, Karl takes a few shots at James Atlas, the founder and editor of the Penguin brief biography series he is disparaging. He recalls how Atlas, in his pre–brief biography days, used to give enthusiastic reviews for “full-fleshed,” long biographies. He condemns Atlas’ recent

reviews and essays for hauling long biographies over the coals and bemoaning the state of biography “left in the hands of the long-winded set.”
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In this con- text, he calls attention to the fact that Atlas worked for nearly a decade on his inclusive and exhaustive life of Saul Bellow during the same years that he began his attacks on long biographies. Karl comments: “He is, indeed, a man caught between conflicting ideas, and he begins to sound as if all he has said is self-serving praise for the big boys when he was entering the arena, and then disdain for them when he edits the briefies, and finally positioning himself once again with the big boys when he publishes his Bellow life.”
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Karl contends that it is the very quality of lengthy biography that gives Atlas’
Bellow
whatever positive value it does have. In the first half of the biography, before Atlas became the editor of the brief biography series, the material seems fresh, alive, and insightful. But in the second half, after he became an avid proponent of brevity, the biography deteriorates into an end- less repetition of dates and events, some significant, some inconsequential.
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Whether the material is long or the material is brief, if it is employed in the service of murdering vitality, it can be considered a symptom that has been cultivated and nourished in a culture of fetishism. Either way, long or short, these days a biographical subject seems to end up with the choice of either being drowned by the too much or strangled by the too little of whatever has been evoked in order to bring him to life.

Karl’s positive assessments of
Joan of Arc
and
James Joyce
make the crucial point. If the author allows her own passions to enter into the biography, it does not guarantee that the subject will come to life, but at least the subject stands a chance of beginning to breathe. While unexamined transferences collaborate with archive fevers of the long or the short kind, acknowledged transferences—that is, a knowledge of how one’s own vitalties enter into the composition of a biography—stand, at least, a fighting chance of bringing vitality to the subject.

Brenda Wineapple, author of biographies of Janet Flanner, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, was one of the dozen or so biog- raphers who were invited to respond to the special issues of
American Imago
on “the transferences underlying biographical creation.” By taking a stance that seemingly went against the grain of the assigned topic, Wineapple arrived at a truth about biography that manages to banish the futile longie/briefie debate to the dustbin. Paradoxically, she accomplishes this by demonstrating how the
anarchic, archiviolithic
drive, the death drive that Derrida speaks of in
Archive Fever
, can be transformed into a life-enhancing force. Let me remind you of Derrida’s commentary:

This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin. In other words the
archiviolithic
drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own. As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions. These impressions

are perhaps the very origins of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. Memories of death.
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Though Wineapple never mentions Derrida, her essay is about transforming the
archiviolithic
drive into memories of the lost one. Though she never mentions the word “transference,” she tells us that “All of the subjects of my biographies have suffered loss. In retrospect, I realize I chose them for that reason.”
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As a result of her long experience of thinking about the perils of collecting and hoarding data, Wineapple’s meditation on death and mourn- ing sheds a new light on the archive fevers that haunt every biographical undertaking. By comparing the biographer’s quest to the mourning process, Winneapple demonstrates how archives, with all their potential destructive- ness, nevertheless are also an essential first step in bringing a dead subject back to life, or, for that matter, a still living subject into a biographical life.

She entitles her essay “Mourning Becomes Biography.” At first, Wineapple focuses on the fevers of mourning. But Wineapple has no intention of lingering in the land of the dead. She does not want the archive to become a cocoon in which to hide from the trials of living a life. It soon becomes evident that her larger purpose is to depict the delicate process of transfor- mation from the initial, feverish, phase of mourning the lost one, to the second phase of returning to life, carrying the lost one inside as an aspect of the self. “For biography, like mourning implies retrieval. It constructs an archive of the dead to bring the subject back to life.”
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In other words, mourning befits biography, but the mourning process must eventually metamorphose into a biography of a living person.

Initially the biographer behaves like a mourner, turning the subject “over and over in her mind, remembering details that no one else notices or cares for.”
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“The biographer marshals together all the detritus of a life once lived . . . photographs and letters, lockets of hair, frayed envelopes and dog-eared manuscripts, crinkled slips of paper stained with grease, even waistcoats and buttons smoothed by age and constant wear. Former houses, first editions, old lipsticks and rusty keys.”
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