INTRODUCTION 9
life was really lived in any given time or place," and that by being
absolutely honest he might well enhance his reputation beyond the
grave.
It
did. Undoubtedly, these diaries left some of his surviving con–
temporaries hurt, angry, and wounded-without the chance to reply or
to confront him. Leonard Michaels's diaries,
Time Out of Mind,
are
also honest, and may upset some of his friends-since they depict the
preoccupations of
his
generation, that is, our own.
It
would seem that serious biographers, when choosing subjects who
are dead and cannot respond, have an easier time. (Biographers who
write about politicians or movie idols usually have an agenda, and I
chose to stay with the lives of writers and artists alone.) However,
chances are that the reconstructions of their subjects' experiences and
relationships are in sync with some of their own convictions, or with
some newly discovered archives or other materials. I assume that Jay
Martin and Jeffrey Meyers may tell us about some of the differences in
unearthing untapped material about living rather than dead subjects;
and how to avoid falling into traps. Of course, the more renowned the
biographer's subject, the greater the chances are that other biographies
exist, or even academic societies of followers whose careers to some
extent have been based on the study of that individual, be it Proust,
Doris Lessing, Edmund Wilson, Emile Zola, or Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Under the circumstances, it is likely that some details of a subject's
life are focused and enlarged on, which often entails specific views, and
thus engenders controversies. As do
parti pris
positions that could be
grounded in politics, on historical facts, interpretations, or method–
ological presuppositions. As you all know, in recent years much has
been added to what we knew about women writers, and minority writ–
ers. In her "Epilogue"
to
George Eliot's biography, Kathryn Hughes
notes that "within ten years of her death, no one was reading her, that
by the
T
890S
she was being portrayed as a Victorian rather than as a
woman whose scandalous, unconventional life had shocked her con–
temporaries." But Frederick Karl stresses that in her case the contradic–
tions, tensions, and polarities that constituted her own personality and
needs, and nourished her fiction, were particularly intense, "inasmuch
as she helped pioneer a new path for women at the same time [as] she
had to preserve a semblance of social coherence," while circumventing
the strict morality of her day. To ask whether Judith Thurman's Colette
was able to thumb her nose at her contemporaries' mores because she
was braver than George Eliot, or because she was bred in France rather
than in an Anglo-Saxon environment, is a moot question.
