156
PARTISAN REVIEW
you've got
to
ha ve mastered the h istorica I facts before you ca n move on
to the further stage, which is of course
to
create a text,
to
devise a struc–
ture for your book which will carry its meaning. The third stage is when
you actually come
to
write it. I have often thought that this process has
much in common with an actor putting on his makeup and his costume,
and preparing
to
come before an audience. This is the simple answer
to
why one subject can have many different biographies in different gener–
ations, in different countries. They will bear the same relation
to
each
other as different portraits by different painters of the same subject will
resemble one another. You wouldn't say because we have a Renoir
painting of somebody that we don't want the Degas version, would
you? When one comes
to
paint or write a portrait, there is a degree of
impersonation; there has
to
be. It cannot of course be complete, and it
certainly isn't proprietary because I don't think any good biographer
would claim to know or possess his subject in the way that Denis sug–
gested we do.
In
fact, I can't think of a biographer here at this confer–
ence who has made any such claim. There is, nonetheless, the moment
at which you must attempt some impersonation of your subject because,
if you cannot present how things seemed
to
him or to her at particular
moments, then what was the point of trying it at all?
You must also be able to draw back. You have to see him or her as
he appears in the round, you have
to
try to see him through the eyes of
his nearest and dearest, through the eyes of his enemies, through the
eyes of casual acquaintances, through the eyes of his or her professional
rivals. That is the whole pleasure of it. Biography is an immensely com–
plex activity which one tries to resolve and to give a shape, not simple,
necessarily, but c\car, so that people can take in at least such meaning as
you yourself have managed
to
discern. Of course, this can never be final.
Human beings are a mystery, an eternal mystery, and one you can never
fully penetrate. All you can see is as much as you are capable of seeing,
and that I think is the most any biographer would claim.
Denis Donoghue: I
think biographers should, as a matter of principle,
get themselves out of the way of their subjects, and they should be pre–
pared
to
fail. Unless there is the power of impersonation, which is the
power of dramatic imagination, the exercise is not worth attempting. I
still feel that the word we are missing in all of this is "form." Yeats said,
"The poet is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits
down
to
breakfast." The difference is the submission of all the feelings
in the case
to
the imperative of form, by which of course I don't mean
form in the sense in which a Shakespearean sonnet has fourteen lines. I
