Hide It From the Biographobes
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To the skeptic, biographies are fraught with the factitious. Written lives are merely shapes of supposition. Biography is an amalgam of fiction and fact that presses us constantly to reconsider what it is we think we know about ourselves and the world that has gone before us. Biographies can never rival the definitive structure of novels because biographers can never own their subjects, becoming the sole proprietors of their worlds in the way William Faulkner did.
Indeed, Faulkner advised Robert Penn Warren, when writing “All the King’s Men,” to scrap the Willie Stark character (based on Huey Long) and concentrate on the purely fictional and haunting story of Cass Mastern, who is the subject of narrator Jack Burden’s Ph.D. thesis. Faulkner wanted to guard the novelist’s Godlike powers, so that no one could dispute his creation of, say, Flem Snopes, fashioned out of whole cloth.
I put it this way after considering Park Honan’s claim in his introduction to “Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy” (Oxford University Press, 448 pages, $32.50) that “I draw modest inferences about personal relationships, and believe that this is incumbent upon a biographer, but the details in this book are factual and true.” Mr. Honan’s wording leaves open contradictory possibilities: Details can be factual but not true, and true but not factual. Rodney Bolt’s “History Play,” published earlier this year, made sport with the facts of Marlowe’s life and Shakespeare’s lives, pretending to show that Shakespeare was in fact (if you will pardon the expression) Marlowe, who did not die in a tavern brawl but faked his own death in order to become the greatest pseudonymous author in world literature.
Mr. Honan, a distinguished biographer of Shakespeare, would have no truck with Mr. Bolt, especially since Mr. Honan avers that there are “surprisingly many biographical facts” about Marlowe – which will come as a surprise to David Riggs, who asserts in his prologue to his “The World of Christopher Marlowe” (2004) that the facts of Marlowe’s “adult life are few, scattered and of doubtful accuracy.” What a field day for the biographobes!
I would, however, invoke R.G. Collingwood’s retort to Descartes: To say that history is unreliable is to imply that a standard of reliability can be established. Between them, Messrs. Honan and Riggs pretty well define the limits of what is permissible in biography – that is, of what passes for “modest inferences about personal relationships.”
The test case is Shakespeare, to whom Mr. Honan devotes many pages and Mr. Riggs few. The latter contents himself with showing how the two playwrights stole lines from each other, which is perhaps why Mr. Honan calls Mr. Riggs’s book “intelligent on Marlowe’s art.” Mr. Riggs does note, however, that while Marlowe never mentioned Shakespeare, “they must have been aware of one another.”
The telltale “must have been,” the biographer’s eternal euphemism for what he does not know, is followed by Mr. Riggs’s comment that Marlowe, a university man, “ranked a cut above the Stratford glover’s son turned actor, and this disparity could have been a source of friction.” The Rodney Bolts of biography can now have their fun by bringing into play another detail: Marlowe was a cobbler’s son. Might he not, for all his two Cambridge degrees, have wanted to pal around with Shakespeare? Marlowe hardly confined his friendships to the university class of men.
Mr. Honan, it turns out, is not as modest as he alleges. He wants to transform the Shakespeare-Marlowe relationship into a symbiosis. Rather like Jack Burden piecing together Cass Mastern’s elusive past, the biographer digresses into a 10-page story about the two playwrights, preceded by a passage that reveals how determined Mr. Honan is not to be put off by the paucity of evidence:
Did they meet often? Or become intimate? Plainly, no record of their conversation survives. No obscure diary tells us of their meetings, though shreds of truth can be discovered if we are willing to be patient, indirect, or somewhat roundabout in assessing Marlowe’s friendship with his prime contemporary.
I was about to sign up for Mr. Honan’s field trip until I ran into the words “Marlowe’s friendship with his prime contemporary.” Apparently the biographer has forgotten the first two questions in this passage – a sure sign that he has given over to novel-writing.
In the end, Mr. Honan provides what he promised at the beginning of his digression: “a circular report, a tentative approach to the most fascinating of all relationships in Marlowe’s working life. This matter is extremely delicate, since it leaves us always at the edge of the unknown.”
In other words, 10 pages later we know no more than what Mr. Riggs established in two pages: The evidence in the plays tantalizes us into musing over what kind of contact the two playwrights established with one another. Mr. Honan’s digression is not without value, however, because it does excite wonder about the playwrights and their plays and does illuminate what Mr. Riggs calls their world. The borderline between fact and fancy in biography is not always easy to observe, and though Messrs. Honan and Riggs draw the line differently, with Mr. Riggs the more agile storyteller, devotees of the genre will feel compelled to read both.
Mr. Riggs, for instance, accepts the traditional autopsy report that Marlowe died instantly after he was stabbed in a tavern brawl. Mr. Honan, a dogged and shrewd researcher, establishes rather convincingly that Marlowe probably lived as much as five or six minutes. To the reader devoted to the intrinsic value of biography, knowing that Marlowe lived even six minutes longer, and that he might have spoken words that were then covered up because he was involved in spying, is of inestimable value. Suddenly the playwright’s death scene becomes much more complex.