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PARTISAN REVIEW
an excuse for
les perfides Albions
to dish the dirt as usual. The biogra–
pher, from this viewpoint, is not only cheap and vulgar but ruthlessly
exploitative as well, rightly stigmatized in the popular imagination as a
scavenger, butcher, or carrion crow. The traditional defense at this point
is that the claims of Truth and Justice should override the basic human
instinct to cover up the murkier aspects of reality. But from the French
point of view, historical accuracy-what actually happened,
les domzees
or the given facts-is of minimal interest. What counts is the intellectual
structure that can be erected on nature's crude unpolished base. Any
essay, thesis, book, even a humble biography, will be judged not by its
initial
donn ees
but by the da zz ling display of philosophical and imagi–
native pyrotechnics thrown up around them.
I don 't want to discuss specific French biographies, still less biogra–
phers, but I will quote the words which made me finally decide a decade
ago that there might be room for an Anglo-Saxon biography of Henri
Matisse. They come from the doyen of Matisse experts in France, my
distinguished colleague, Pierre Schneider, who prefaced his seminal
study of the painter with this magisterial disclaimer: "History will be
present in this book as a sort of latent menace, a negation that will have
to be constantly warded off." That in a nutshell is the Cartesian view. It
explains why the French published the first volume of their
Dictionnaire
de hiographie franr;aise
half a century after our own
Dictiolzary of
National Biography,
and why they have now abandoned it again, hav–
ing taken sixty-six years to reach the letter
H.
The sixty-three volumes
of the British DNB came out in fifteen years flat. Its editor was Leslie
Stephen, whose daughter, Virginia Woolf, claimed to have been crushed
by the
Dictionary
in the womb. The french would have sympathized
with her predicament, because inevitably their dim view of our fact–
grubbing trade is self-fulfilling.
A biographer operating along Cartesian lines seeks
to
rise above actu–
ality by overriding its surprises and smoothing out its rough or dirty
places to comply with higher theoretical requirements. This sort of biog–
rapher runs the perennial risk of falling into Holroyd's second category
of academic practitioners, history's butlers who serve up their subjects
on a metaphorical silver salver. Schneider solved the problem with char–
acteristic elegance by separating off his account of Matisse's life and
stowing it below stairs, so to speak, tucked away behind the literary
equivalent of a green baize door. The facts (at any rate such facts as he
had got, or been given) were relegated to a brief section at the back of
his book, where they obligingly confirmed its author's view of history as
a menace: tawdry, shallow, mundane, and misleading.
