"The task and the duty of biographical narrative is to sort out
themes and patterns, not dates and mundane calendar events which
sort themselves." Edel, the master-biographer of The Master, Henry
James, has been arguing the merits of the artfully constructed,
psychologically sophisticated biography since 1957 - when an
essay-group called Literary Biography first appeared in book form.
Here, he reprints one of those essays ("Quest"), offers revised
versions of several others, and adds a few new pieces from recent
years - urging biographers to be "cold as ice in appraisal, yet
warm and human and understanding." A new essay on "Transference"
warns against the dangers of falling in love with one's subject, of
identifying too closely - with an uneven cluster of examples:
Maurois, falsifying Shelley's life (because of his own romanticism)
and evading Disraeli's (and his own) Jewishness; Mark Schorer's
problems - too sketchily indicated - with a Sinclair Lewis
biography; the excesses and deceptions of Lytton Strachey, "the
eccentric father of modern biography," in dealing with queen-mother
figures; and Van Wyck Brooks, whose biographies were distorted by
his own grappling with "the male-female bondage in which he found
himself." From 1965 comes a lecture on the perils of getting lost
in "the monumentality of modern archives. . . . A biography is not
an engagement book." A 1966 essay salutes Virginia Woolf's
struggles in writing the Roger Fry biography, "caught between her
leaping imagination and mundane fact." (Edel's essay on Woolf's
fictional biography, Orlando, appears too, in a tightened version
of the 1957 piece.) And the volume concludes with three casual
articles about the writing of the Henry James quintet. Less
vigorous and challenging than the biographical studies in Stuff of
Sleep and Dreams (1982) - but an agreeable mixture of Edel's
straightforward basic principles and some intriguing (if not always
fully persuasive) specifics. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Henry James presents here
a revision of his Literary Biography expanded with six further
essays illuminating what he calls the New Biography an approach
that draws on the resources of psychoanalysis, the biographer s own
subjectivity, and the skills of the novelist. Mr. Edel includes a
history of the art of biography since Boswell, criticism of some of
the best-known biographers, advice for the biographer on
documentation and the use of psychological theory, and a discussion
of what Edel calls the supreme problem in biography transference,
the life-writer s emotional involvement with his or her subject."
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