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PARTISAN REVIEW
The Life and Thought mode easily becomes overly general
and unrealistic; it stresses form to such an extent that any mere
particularity of the subject-much less any foible, low cunning,
or silliness-fades to insignificance. No matter what protesta–
tions to the contrary the biographer may make, thought domi–
nates over life in this mode. The subject seems to have lived only
to think. A sense of limits about this mode seems to me to arise of
its own accord if the biographer simply pauses to reflect that
those who think, those who truly
are
thinkers, think in order to
live, in order to shape and purify their lives into lives worth liv–
ing. Albert Camus made a remark in his
1942-1945
Notebook IV
that contains a warning:
I took ten years
to
win what seems
to
me priceless; a heart
without bitterness. And as often happens, once I had gone
beyond the bitterness, I incorporated it in one or two books.
Thus I shall be forever judged on that bitterness which has
ceased
to
mean anything
to
me. But that is just.
It
is the
price one must pay.
Personality portraiture and crisis capturing easily become
just reflections of the biographer's love or love-hate identifica–
tion with the subject. A sense of limits about this mode can be
learned from psychoanalysis itself: a biographer who remains a
child, and who wishes to fashion the parental figures according
to his or her own desires and aspirations, is bound to fail. The
growing-up process of biography writing has to leave behind the
stage in which character assassination is employed to make par–
ents show their faults or lose their power to dominate. It must
pass into the stage where the subject is accepted, just as a family
is accepled by an adult. Marcel Proust, whose knowledge of rela–
tions between parents and children is exhausting and inexhaust–
ible, offered the maxim for this stage: "After a certain age, the
more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits
become." The biographer must outgrow the wish either
to
be
or
to transform the subject, either to usurp the subject's place or to
rebel. The biographer must be willing and able-able because
possessed of an achieved self-to let the traits of the chosen "fam–
ily," the subject, appear in himself or herself as naturally and in–
exorably as do the traits of the biological family.
