Fiona Sampson explores the ways we can combine reality with fantasy
Where is “literariness” in literary biography? With the book’s subject—or its author? Traditionally, it is associated with both, and also the third element. Literary biography also cares about the writing that originates from its subjects, and has been so since perhaps its founding text, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817. Biography Literariawhose subtitle is Biographical sketch of my literary life and ideas. Indeed “and opinion”: for publishers, critics, and writers alike, much of literary life is what John Updike called “high gossip.”
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By its nature, literary biography is more than just standing out alongside other genres on the bookshelf. It clearly involves a conversation with them. True, every book does this to some extent. After all, no writing is flawless. All languages seem “dear” to us; Even off the press, every book is second-hand. By merely adopting methods of publication, let alone one existing literary form or another, the new work finds itself filled with elements already in use. The dream of lyric poetry – that it be a truly personal confession, a completely free spell – is just that.
but literary biography Owner The depth of its connection with the world of books. No need to mention the magazines: It’s impossible to resist the quirky enthusiasm of the New York literary village in Francis Kiernan’s 2002 biography of Mary McCarthy, watching mary planeBenjamin Moser’s sontag (2020), or Darryl Pinkney’s 2023 literary memoir come back in september.
Such works remind us that literary importance lies not just in the subject’s work but in its environment. In this sense, every literary biography is also a group portrait. For example, I loved Marie Gabriel’s 2019 group study on female abstract expressionists, ninth street lady. But equally impressive, willy-nilly, is a biography like Richard Holmes Shelley: Pursuit (1974). Radical in its time, but also in its influence on the reception of Shelley’s circle. It so successfully sidelined Mary Shelley that even in 2018, when I published my biography of the female prodigy, I faced the dual claim that she was not In fact She was a writer herself, but instead she harmed the “real” writer, the poet.
By its nature, literary biography is more than just standing out alongside other genres on the bookshelf. It clearly involves a conversation with them.
This kind of layered literaryness suggests a kind of total immersion within an author’s biography. I think it also creates a kind of space for influence. Praise may be extended well before it becomes apparent. That’s how long it took my teenage, autodidact self to find words for the bright spark she discovered in Henry James, or the incredible dynamism of Virginia Woolf’s thought. So for a literary biographer the search for a topic may begin with something like intuition. As in all writing, there is a feeling There are some: There is some lump or density to be detected. But it should also have a slight echo of alternative affinity. Which does not mean placing oneself at the same literary high table as JW von Goethe or one’s subject. I greatly admire the trio of great Romantic women writers to whom I have devoted the past decade: Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Sand. But I do not consider myself his equal in any way.
and yet. I recognize some character traits. The emotional literal mentality with which Mary Godwin imbued Percy Bysshe Shelley. How the young Elizabeth Barrett hated the word “feminine” and its self-limiting demands. The dogmas of George Sand. Such belief Is A form of intimacy; Something like falling into friendship. This is also something I try to tease out in biography, not to dismiss these extraordinary figures, but on the contrary so that we continue to engage with them.
Life is unattainable; No self can ever be known completely. Literary biography is an interpretive art. Like other arts of literary interpretation with which I have sometimes been deeply engaged – editing, literary translation – it requires intense precision and is also dependent on moments of spontaneous connection. Those glimpses of insight when for once we cannot, as TS Eliot had it, “hear the words and not understand the meaning”; Or when Henry James’s “pattern in the carpet” becomes apparent. As Mary Shelley wrote in a biographical essay about the Renaissance biographer Pietro Metastasio, the success of the biographer is “to gather together the distinctive character of a man – his difference from others – by bringing out subtle but distinctive details.”
It’s also worth noting how essential it is for this process – like translating a poem or editing a magazine – to be embedded in a literary context. That hinterland called “discourse” is actually a mixture of experience and technical knowledge. And it accommodates the apparently unremarkable: George Sand’s 67th novel versus, say, Mary Shelley’s poetic youth. Working on a biography means spending time in the land of what we call “literature.” This means communicating with other writers and with the writing itself. But like all interpretive arts, it requires disciplined humility. The biographer speaks from a secret place; Perhaps the most obvious is in ventriloquy. at a certain point in becoming georgeFor example, I use George Sand as an embodiment of women’s rights and its welcome.
All this makes what we might call, borrowing from Virginia Woolf, the “new biography” that is as exciting as it is demanding. To understand the facts of another writer’s life without invention requires the most detailed primary research, not only in literary archives but also in almanacs, old newsprint, civil records. Yet it also requires that the vast storehouse of resulting knowledge be properly digested; Hidden by an attractive, writerly surface.
This kind of formal necessity, as every poet knows, is the mother of literary invention. “Literary” does not mean “fiction”. Still, literary biography seems to walk between the Scylla of fiction (never pay attention to the facts, feel the prose) and the Charybdis of non-literary history (never pay attention to the prose, feel the facts). It can be personally disappointing when an interviewer has not read your actual book, in which you is a writer Myself, but just some wiki notes on your topic. As if that topic had somehow risen from the grave and gone to the review pile on its own.
Yet perhaps the real challenge to literary biography today is the account that plays to the gallery but uses fictional anecdotes. As if it doesn’t matter what we say about our subjects. As if they are not real people for whom our duty of care is the biographer’s contract. As if we no longer have that duty of caring for the truth.
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Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand By Fiona Sampson Available from WW Norton & Company.
