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By Root 965 0

that chronicle the life of literary figures tend to include in their accounts of the subject’s life a description or assessment of the work, including plot summary and analysis, together with some sense of the work’s reception, qualifying them for the technical description of literary biography—a genre described by novelist John Updike as liable to abuse (the “Judas biography,” containing unflattering portraits from the testimony of a former friend or spouse; the inaccuracies reprinted from previously published, erroneous accounts), as well as the potentially useful work of reacquainting the reader with an author (albeit via what Updike calls a “nether route”).66 Within this genre, there is, again, a wide range of literary expertise and critical objective. The biographies of Sylvia Plath by Diane Middlebrook and Jacqueline Rose, both talented literary scholars, were consequential and important for the analysis of her poetry. Another version of the same life story, Janet Malcolm’s biography of Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, addressed the unreliability of memory and the difficulty, when dealing with interested parties, of separating fact from fiction. “In a work of nonfiction, we almost never know the truth of what happened,” Malcolm observed. And with a controversial matter like that of Plath’s life and death, she noted, the problems are especially acute. “The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not negligible, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living.”67

The technique that Lytton Strachey used in Queen Victoria—the judicious quotation from letters and other sources to produce a kind of biographical dialogue—still distinguishes the best modern biographies, like Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin or David McCullough’s John Adams. Emotional responses, internal thoughts, and other novelistic devices are crafted from the archival information, the “facts” upon which Woolf so strongly insisted. The biographer’s gift is one of deploying information, not of inventing it. Thus, describing the arrival of a letter to Adams that dispatched him to the Court of France, McCullough writes,

Thinking the packet must be urgent business, Abigail opened it and was stunned by what she read. Furious, she wrote straight away to Lovell, demanding to know how he could “contrive to rob me of all my happiness.

“And can I, sir, consent, to be separated from him whom my heart esteems above all earthly things, and for an unlimited time? My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension, and must I cheerfully comply with the demands of my country?”68

Active and emotive terms like “thinking,” “stunned,” furious,” and “demanding” are all inferred, effectively, from the source material, and “straight away” is derived from the date. The dramatic or literary effect (what would, in fact, eventuate in a screenplay) is elicited from within, not imposed from without.

Likewise, Janet Browne describes Darwin’s proposal to his future wife:

… on Sunday he spoke about marriage to Emma. Not unexpectedly, the event deflated both of them—Darwin was too exhausted by the nervous strain, with a bad headache, and Emma was “too much bewildered” to feel any overwhelming sense of happiness. To Darwin’s astonishment, she accepted him. Even so, the proposal caught her so unprepared that she went straight off to the Maer Sunday school as usual. Darwin’s exclamation in his diary that this was “The day of days!” was wildly misleading in its retrospective intensity …

“I believe,” said Emma afterwards, “we both looked very dismal”: An elderly Wedgwood aunt thought something quite the reverse had happened: that Darwin had asked but received a rejection.69

Here, too, it is possible to see how the emotional responses of the protagonists and the dramatic arc of the story are derived from source materials: the headache, the bewilderment, the astonishment, the very mood of the day, even the comically erroneous response of an onlooker, misreading the “dismal” expressions of the couple. Reality, in this case, means sutured