Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Pity literary biographers. There are few writers less appreciated, there are none more despised. There they sit, with their church bulletins of family trees and their dental records, their interviews with ex-lovers, mad uncles, and discarded children, and go about “reconstructing” the life of someone they never knew, or knew just barely. To George Eliot, biographers were a “disease of English literature,” while Auden thought all literary biographies “superfluous and usually in bad taste.” Even Ian Hamilton, the intrepid chronicler of Robert Lowell, J. D. Salinger, and Matthew Arnold, thought that there was “some necessary element of sleaze” to the whole enterprise. And yet biographies of writers continue to excite the reading public’s imagination. Last year alone saw big new accounts of the lives of W. G. Sebald, Fernando Pessoa, Philip Roth, Tom Stoppard, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Hardwick, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, and Sylvia Plath. The most controversial of these, of course, was Blake Bailey’s biography of Roth, which was withdrawn by its publisher just a few weeks after it appeared owing to accusations against Bailey of sexual assault and inappropriate behavior. Even before these accusations were reported, Bailey was criticized by some reviewers for being too sympathetic toward his subject — and for posthumously waging many of Roth’s quarrels and vendettas, particularly against ex-wives and lovers. He presumptuously called his book Philip Roth: The Biography. The biography? As opposed to what? Whatever privileges Bailey was granted by Roth, his biography will not be the last (it wasn’t even the first), nor will it be once and for all definitive. No biography can be. The entire notion of an authorized or definitive or “official” biography is mostly humbug; new information will always come to light, and fresh perspectives will eventually become necessary. (In the case of Roth, a fresh perspective already seems necessary.) That said, a “definitive” biography may serve as a temporary bulwark against the author-industrial complex. Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath is, by my count, the fourteenth biography of Plath, a poet who published just two books before her suicide at the age of thirty, and whose every letter, journal entry, and laundry list has been subjected to forensic analysis by a termitary of critics, scholars, relatives, schemers, and biographers. But to what end, exactly? I have read three of those biographies, as well as several volumes of Plath’s letters and journals, and I still don’t have the faintest idea who Plath really was. (“For all the drama of her biography, there is a peculiar remoteness about Sylvia Plath,” wrote Hardwick.). Each new biographical intervention feels like a paving over of the previous one, adding yet another layer between the reader and the subject. But perhaps the cases of Roth and Plath are too unusual to be representative. After all, few writers’ lives are subject to the kind of bitter posthumous contention in which Plath’s family and friends have engaged, and even fewer are embroiled in the criminal accusations against the life-chronicler. On the whole, very little happens to writers in the practice of writing, even to those who, like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Mann, or Naguib Mahfouz lived in the thick of history, with all its peril and precariousness. Consider Mann: born four years after the unification of Germany, he lived through the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the postwar division of Germany. He was hurled into exile, stripped of his citizenship, put on an arrest warrant for Dachau, and surveilled by the FBI for alleged communist sympathies. In America, his social circle included Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others. All of which amounts to an exceptionally fascinating life, but it tells us little or nothing about what finally matters: the fiction. In every account of his life, every time he sits down at his desk, whether in Munich, Küsnacht, Princeton, or Los Angeles, Mann disappears from view. We can reconstruct his punctilious routine, we can describe the texture of his desk, we can even name the various brands of cigar that he liked to smoke — but we cannot be present for the moment when the author of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain put pen to paper and chose this word over that word and refined this idea or that idea and generally brought his fictional world to life. Writing is not an activity that can be meaningfully described from the outside. “Surely the writing of a literary life,” said Leon Edel, Henry James’ celebrated biographer, “would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation.” But can this really be done? What is the bridge from the external to the internal? There are exceptions to the above, of course, when the writer’s external circumstances are so extreme that they penetrate more closely to the heart of the mystery of his or her art. Consider Osip Mandelstam, for instance, or the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, composing verse surrounded by the worst totalitarian horrors. Nor do I mean to suggest that one shouldn’t try to imagine the act of literary creation, or that it cannot be meaningfully documented in some way. But a straight historiographical method may not be the best way to get at the elusive target. In recent years, for example, there has been a flurry of biographies of individual books, and biographies of individual novels, including Portrait of a Lady, The Stranger, and Les Misérables. By reversing the role of the writer and the writing, placing a single text at the story’s center, these studies liberate the historical and documentarian impulse of literary biography from some of its sleazier and more invasive aspects. It prefers the achievement of the writing to the psychology of the writer, which in many cases would be a welcome reversal. Still, if the process of