Paula Backscheider on Reflections on Biography
Paula R. Backscheider explores why readers love "a good
Death" and looks at the cultural significance of biographies
Too many people told me that I could take my teaching notes,
special lectures, and my experiences writing Daniel Defoe: His Life and
write "a short book on biography." "Won't take you long," they said
merrily. The book took six years to write. I know now that the problem
was that I wasn't much interested in writing up my notes and witticisms
from my teaching. Instead I had a sick fascination with the decisions
biographers make – a kind of NASCAR fan/ ambulance chaser's desire to see
crashes, dented vehicles, and carnage. I should have recognized this for the
addiction it was – after all, I started the research for this book by reading
compulsively other biographers' chapters on childhood (the time for which
almost no reliable evidence ever exists) and, if I knew of a period of
time when the person disappeared off the planet, I went for that chapter. One of my NEH seminars had agreed with relish that readers loved "a good
death." So I sought out "bad deaths" – people who went into that good
night whining or just died of old age uneventfully over, say, ten or
twelve years.
I also collected the records of other biographers' suffering:
Virginia Woolf wrestling Roger Fry and the art of biography to the ground
month after month; Paul Mariani hearing John Berryman say, "You belong to
me. You belong to me." Jean Gattegno presenting Lewis Carroll's life in
alphabetized fragments ("A" - "Assets and Expenditures": "P" - "Papa and
Mama"). Hilarious tales of filing gone awry (all biographers have hideous
stories about filing; it's one of our chief activities).
Well, this was all good fun. Then I began to see just how much
the decisions biographers make matter. I began to read biographies of the
same person, for example, acclaimed biographies of John Keats by Walter
Jackson Bate, Aileen Ward, and Andrew Motion. The truth that, for
instance, Bate's (or Ward's or Motion's) Keats becomes our Keats suddenly
seemed to have individual and cultural significance. Here's a sample of
what I found:
Forrest Wilson passes over the death of the baby girl who would
have been Harriet Beecher Stowe's older sister quickly: "The 1808 Harriet
Beecher lived but one month. In the swarming pioneer families, parents
were apt to waste no effort in naming children. The 1811 Harriet
inherited not only the deceased one's crib... but her name as well." Joan
Hedrick, in contrast, writes that infants with whooping cough, as this
baby had, "were more likely to wake up choking than coughing. After
Stowe's mother had been up night after night with the baby, Lyman told
his exhausted wife to get some sleep; she obeyed, and while she slept the
child died." Both biographers had Lyman Beecher's Autobiography, but
neither gives Lyman's reaction to the death. The effect in the first
biography is to reinforce a commonplace that I have never been able to
accept, that the death of children was so common that it did not cause the
kind of grief such deaths do today. The second comes close to blaming
Beecher for the death of the baby and darkens his character. I would read
this evidence in yet a third way. Lyman Beecher wrote that the babies
death was "my first bereavement." He reflects, "I had lost Aunt Benton,
who seemed like a mother, but this was a very different thing." He writes
that he "perceived that we could do nothing, that the child must die," and
at that point he told Roxana to "lie down and try to sleep." "While she
slept, the child died, but I did not think best to wake her." This
sentence implies that he was awake, watching the child when she died. He
writes about Roxana's resignation, but adds a telling paragraph that again neither biographer includes: "After the child was laid out, she looked so
very beautiful that your mother ... sketched her likeness ... The
likeness, a faint and faded little thing, drawn on ivory, is still
preserved as a precious relic."
So my book took shape. It came to be about the major decisions biographers make, the ways biographers are pushing the form to live up to its obligations to us
and our cultures, and how readers might find even greater enjoyment in
reading biographies.
Paula R. Backscheider
|
VIEW BASKET
