126
PARTISAN REVIEW
biography
and to claim for him the status of a representative elder statesman
(a claim already advanced after Steffens's
Autobiography
made its appearance
in 1931), who made his own the desire for revelation that is now a staple of
American journalism. But while Kaplan feels a sympathetic trust for his
subject, his book did not change this reader's view of Lincoln Steffens.
Of Steffens, it could be said that the man altogether lacked an interior
life. He was the product of his imagination seeking out the times , which is
why, in his
Autobiography
,he chose to portray himself as an individual whom
time had betrayed into political wisdom. But there must have been something
more to him, the reader wants to protest. Unfortunately, all there proves to be
is the writer who had "a conflicted regard for authority and for figures of
authority-Theodore Roosevelt and TomJohnson were precursors of Stalin in
the line ofSteffens's allegiances just as much as Mussolini was." It is the weak–
ness of the man that is interesting. Belief disintegrates as he projects his
personal whims onto historical process. And this is what is both attractive and
annoying about Steffens . He wants to swallow the future . Has there ever been
a journalist so frightened of being lost in the famous dust bin ofhistoty? "He
simply cannot resist the Man on Horseback," wrote one of his critics back in
1934. In the name of belief, he makes ideology useless . He is, as Kaplan
suggests, a kind of ancestor of today 's New Journalists . A man of generous
instincts, he lacked not the capacity to feel but the capacity to think and feel at
the same time. He wanted to be a "historical actor," but it was his fate to
confuse his needs with the inevitable path of history . A few of those who
learned from him, most notably John Reed, were more thoughtful as well as
more daring .
Both Margaret Drabble'sArnold
Bennett
and Gillian Tindall's
The Born
EXIle: George Gissing
are attractive biographies of literary men. Perhaps the
novelist, or at least the novelist who can get away from the needs of his own
ego, is the ideal biographer. On the level of narrative pleasure, they are not
weighed down by scholarly paraphernalia, and they possess a structure that
goes beyond chronology . I do not know Gillian Tindall's novels, but after
having read her
Gissing
I shall certainly seek them out. As biography , this is a
superb little book, although the life it depicts is so painful and depressing as
to make one wonder whether
art
is worth the sacrifice. And there are moments
of irritation. Although she wisely begins her book with a brief biographical
digest of Gissing' slife , she sometimes writes as if she were addressing fellow
members of a Gissing Society . In this country, Gissing remains an interesting
but minor nineteenth-century English novelist. Other than
New Grub Street
and
Henry Ryecroft,
his work is not really known, not in the sense that the
work ofMeredith orWells is known. But he remains what this book calls him,
"a writer's writer, more readily appreciated by his own kind than by the
