Reviewing Biography, Part Two: Literary Critics

Literary critics, I tweeted, should not be allowed to write reviews of biography. I’d make a few exceptions, I thought, but not many.A tweeter responded: “Not for literary figures?” I retweeted with a reply: “Especially not for literary figures.”Many years ago at the New York University Biography Seminar, an academic literary critic gave a talk about his biography of the poet Marianne Moore. He spoke of working in the Rosenbach Foundation archive. At the end of his talk, he was asked to comment on the interviews he had conducted.After a dramatic pause, the biographer/scholar sniffed, as if a bad smell had infiltrated the room. Then he said, “Interviews, they’re so messy.” He had expressed precisely what draws literary critics to literature: texts, manuscripts, letters, records — whatever can be written down.Confronted with a biography, the literary critic blanches. What is not on a page is probably problematic. After all, the critic will solemnly intone: “It’s the work that counts.” Not the gossip, the he said/she said that plagues the rest of us. Interviewing is messy because it makes that seemingly stable page the critic holds onto less solid and more a part of a fluid, changing world. Yet at most the critic/scholar will investigate the drafts of texts a subject has produced and that can be brought by an archivist to the academically minded. Think for a moment what it would mean for scholars to engage in sustained studies of biographies. Like the biographer, a scholar/critic would need to investigate both the primary and secondary sources on the subject — say, the major biographical works on Hemingway, Faulkner, and Frost that have appeared in the last several decades, and the sources on which those books have been built. How could a literary critic/reviewer master and evaluate the enormous volume of data presented by a biography, and other biographies of the same subject? How many scholars may have thought of tackling the field of biography and then withdrawn, not knowing how to encompass it?I have rarely read reviews of biography that actually assess how a biographer has handled evidence that the reviewer has also examined, though some exceptions occur — mostly in scholarly journals in which a biographer is asked to assess a fellow biographer’s work.In newspapers, magazines, and journals, you will rarely find a review of, say, a T.S. Eliot biography by another Eliot biographer. I suppose that is because such a review might be suspect — especially if it is negative. Readers might say: “Well, that biographer/reviewer is just taking down the competition.”The alternative is worse, though, since the literary critic, out of his or her depth, and often scornful of biography anyway as second-rate compared to the novel, will treat the biography as mostly raw material for reflections on the biographical subject.To the critic, a biography has very little to offer in its own right. It is a derivative work, feeding off its subject, and not in itself a work of literature that belongs on the same field as fiction, poetry, and drama. There are honorary exceptions, such as Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” — but not many.For the critic, assigned to review a book on deadline, it would take more time and hard work that is not worth the trouble and the small payment a review earns.It is, I know, too much to ask for this lamentable state of reviewing biography to change. Editors have to meet their deadlines too, and must rely on reviewers who deliver on time and whose prose sparkles. So it is not sensible, l will admit, to call for a revolution in reviewing biography. At the very least, though, readers of reviews can begin to question the often unspoken prejudices that reviewers of biography articulate with such certainty and superiority. Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Biography: A User’s Guide.”

Reviewing Biography, Part Two: Literary Critics

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