The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [109]
The concept of “biographical truth,” as Judith Anderson argues in a book of that title, could as easily be called “biographical fiction.” The relation between fiction and fact in the period raises questions about what is meant by truth, she suggests. Life writing “occupies a middle ground between history and art, chronicle and drama, objective truth and creative invention.”39 Biography “is a mixed form, having always a tendency to merge on the one side with fiction and on the other side with history.”40 Anderson’s study covers the Venerable Bede’s Life of Saint Cuthbert, Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey, Roper’s Life of Sir Thomas More, More’s History of King Richard III, Shakespeare’s Richard III and Henry VIII (subtitled All Is True), and Bacon’s History of King Henry VII. All these texts, according to Anderson, are “peripherally or essentially literary.”41
What do we mean by literary, when we are discussing works of biography? Is it an indicator of style, of archetype, of mythic quality, of the felt presence of the writer? Anderson says that each of the authors she examines “employs the techniques of fiction,” which include authorial self-consciousness, an awareness of critical interpretation, and an increasing acknowledgment of the writer’s “own creative shaping of another’s life.”42
The pleasure evinced by biographers at the founding of the Levy Center is, to a certain extent, recuperative (gaining respect, visibility, and funding), but in another way, it is classificatory and categorical. We may recall that the authorizing body evincing a wary interest in receiving biographers into the fold was made up of historians. Biography for them, and for many present-day biographers, is a species of history writing, whether the topic is a political or historical figure or a person of literary, artistic, or cultural significance. But the conflation of author and subject that is the central trope—and the irresistible lure—of the memoir creates category confusion when it is transposed into the world of biography.
The “Statement of Purpose” of the Society of American Historians explains that its goal is “To promote literary distinction in historical writing” by awarding a number of prestigious prizes. What is gained, I wonder, by adding the word literary here? If the society’s goal were merely “To promote distinction in historical writing,” what element would be lost? Which is another way of asking, what does the Society of American Historians consider literary, and how is that trait importantly different from the other kinds of writing produced by historians?
A number of career paths lead to success in this field, and some of the most commercially successful practitioners are neither historians nor academics—which does not mean, of course, that they are not scholars. One of the most honored biographers in the United States is David McCullough, an English major at Yale, who then became a journalist and editor (Sports Illustrated; the U.S. Information Agency; American Heritage) before embarking on a career in which he won the Pulitzer Prize (twice) and the National Book Award (twice) for biography. Present-day British biographers like Claire Tomalin (biographies of Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Wollestonecraft, etc.) and Victoria Glendinning (biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope, Jonathan Swift, and Leonard Woolf) are writers whose other activities include journalism, broadcasting, criticism, and (in the case of Glendinning) fiction writing.
The New York Times annual list of notable nonfiction books is always stocked with biographies and memoirs. In 2007, for example, of the fifty books on the