The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [111]
Some twentieth- and twenty-first-century biographers utilize a kind of unmarked endnote which is intended to preserve the smooth unbroken surface of the text, making the book read more like a novel than a piece of scholarship—no intrusive superscript numbers to break the illusion. If a quotation or a fact appears in the text and the reader wants to know where it comes from, he or she can turn to the back of the book, where the page number and a brief citation from the text is followed by an indication of the source.45 Many skilled practitioners follow this style, including Goodwin, David McCullough, and Meryle Secrest, to name just a few.46
This is not a low/high distinction in terms of quality but, rather, a presentational and performative style, with consequent effects upon the reading experience and upon the sense of intimacy and connection developed between reader and biographical subject. Although the author/biographer (some websites even identify these writers as “celebrity biographers”) is often recognized as a public intellectual, what is celebrated is his or her knowledge, research, clarity, and what is often called a “magisterial” command of the material. Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes, Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison, Robert McCrum’s biography of P. G. Wodehouse, Ian Kershaw Smith’s biography of Adolf Hitler, Nigel Saul’s biography of Richard II, and Jacques Roger’s biography of Buffon all were hailed as magisterial by reviewers, and this list could be almost infinitely extended, since magisterial, the Latinate version of masterly, is the mot juste or the highest accolade for biographical writing. It seems to connote a rising above the fray. The biography is a masterwork; it brings the subject to life; it is definitive and defining; it tells at least one convincing version of the truth. As such, it seems like the opposite of the kind of hoax memoirs we began by discussing. Yet the two genres—the one magisterial, the other often, predictably, unauthorized—have some key elements in common. For one thing, both of these mainstays of the nonfiction best-seller list are, in their own ways, fictions.
“The Fictitious Life”
Virginia Woolf used the subtitle A Biography for three of her own works: Orlando, a groundbreaking novel written in a series of historical literary styles and inspired by the life of Vita-Sackville West; Flush, the life story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, a brilliant device for telling Browning’s story through the eyes and mind of a cocker spaniel; and Roger Fry, an impressionistic biography of the art critic, a close friend. All three of these works are literary, no quotation marks needed. Whether Woolf herself felt any “anxiety of influence” with regard to biography is a fair question: she was the daughter of one celebrated biographer (Sir Leslie Stephen, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography) and a lifelong friend of another (Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians; Queen Victoria; Elizabeth and Essex). In an essay called “The New Biography,” Woolf wrote that the task of the biographer was, in part, to combine the “incompatible” truths of fact and of fiction. “For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life.”
The term biography is a fairly recent one, dating in origin to the end of the seventeenth century; the OED traces it back to Dryden, who applied it to Plutarch. Woolf credits the emergence of modern biography to James Boswell