FACTS AND FICTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
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to establish any kind of moral or temporal perspective. But it seems to
me imperative to try.
There is a sense in which everyone who hears or reads these words
has been influenced by Matisse, whether or not they have ever looked
at one of his pictures. The paintings that once provoked such vitupera–
tion, making the public in Paris, New York, and London howl with
laughter or rage, these same canvases seem suffused with radiant tran–
quillity today. This is not a passing fad or whim.
It
is a fundamental
shift in vision, and Matisse's struggles to bring it about have been at
least partially obscured by a false and conventional view of him. At its
simplest leve l, biography is a work of clearance: a humble but necessary
job of garbage disposal, followed by cleaning, renovation and restora–
tion. On another level it is a matter of reclaiming and revitalizing the
past, of giving rather than taking life.
It
is natural enough for the French, whose approach to gardening
developed so differently from ours in Britain, to look on our books as
weeds sprouting untidily from the ruins of their own handsome and
orderly theoretical structures. They view us Anglo-Saxon biographers as
a gang of hooligans bursting into their clipped avenues and smooth
parterres, scuffing the gravel, overturning the urns, trampling down
neat rows of alternating orange marigolds and scarlet dahlias. But if we
are to be classed as weeds, then I would sooner see us as the brilliant
purple buddleias, the crimson rose bay willowherb, the cascades of cow
parsley, tumbling elder, and spikes of pussy willow, sprouting into
strange growth at odd angles from unexpected places, that make the
glory of the luxuriant jungly garden of British and American biography.
Joanna S. Rose:
Our final speaker of the conference, the internationally
renowned Denis Donoghue, has held for twenty years the Henry James
Chair of English and American Letters at New York University. An Irish–
man by birth, he lectures throughout the world, and has most recently
written a critical biography of Walter Pater, books on the practice of
reading, and
Words Alone: The Poet T
S.
Eliot.
Soon to appear is
Adam's Curse,
a volume of the Erasmus lectures he gave at Notre Dame
on literature and religion. The title of his talk is "My Only Memoir."
Denis Donoghue:
The reason for which I have been invited to speak at
this conference seems to me frail indeed. I am not a professiona l
philosopher or a professional biographer. The only reason I can discover
for being at this conference is that in
I990
I published a short book
called
Warrenpoint,
a memoir of the first seventeen years of my life. I
