122
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE PERFORMING SELVES
THE LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON.
2
vols. By Richard B. Sewall. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux. $30.00.
FAULKNER: A BIOGRAPHY.
2 vols. By Joseph Blotner. Random House.
$25.00.
LINCOLN STEFFENS: A BIOGRAPHY.
By Justin Kaplan. Simon and
Schuster. $10.00.
THE BORN EXILE: GEORGE GISSING.
By Gillian Tindall. Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich. $10.00.
ARNOLD BENNETT: A BIOGRAPHY.
By Margaret Drabble. Alfred A. Knopf.
$10.00.
It
is the purpose of biography that is not altogether clear when the
~ubject
is
the life of a writer. To deal with the life of a Henry Ford or a
Harold Wilson is to face the singular condition of biography, one already
apparent in Plutarch . Autobiography , on the other hand, is metaphorical ;
it mythicizes the self that is created for the reader. From St. Augustine to
Henry Adams, the proper subject of autobiography has been life
transformed into metaphor. I suspect that this accounts for why the line
between fiction and autobiography, always tenuous, now threatens
to
disappear entirely. But biography is written from outside its subject . What
it offers is not metaphor but example-one is tempted to write
exemplum.
But the writer as
exemplum?
The confirmation of the writer 's self is to
be found not in his life but in his books , and the biography of the
writer is usually the story of his evolution as an artist. He differs even from
his fellow artists in that he deals with words , the stuff of his biographer,
too .
It
is the work that is the proper subject for examination, not the writer.
Of course, with writers such as Byron and Hemingway, where the work and
the lite are so intertwined as
to
make the one unavailable without the
other, the writer becomes a figure in his own right. But the lives of most
writers are of interest only
to
other writers ,
to
people, that
is,
who practice
his craft and aspire to his profession .
The best biographies of writers recreate life as a dramatic sequence out
of which the work emerges ; but it is ultimately the work in which we are
interested. George D. Painter's great work on Proust's life and Leon Edel 's
monumental study of James's life hold our interest not, certainly, for the
quality of the lives they place before us but , rather, because these lives
assume purpose only in literature; having read the lives we can read the
books. The question that one must ask of the biographer who chooses a
