Chapter - 2

Biography as Fiction

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 CHAPTER - 2
Biography as Fiction

The most reason obvious reason behind the existence of a work of art is its creator,

the author; and hence an explanation in terms of the personality and life of the writer has

been one of the oldest and best -established methods of literary study. Biography can be

judged in relation to the light it throws on the ac tual production of poetry; but we can, also

defend and justify it as a study of the man of genius, of his moral, intellectual and

emotional development, which has its own intrinsic interest; and finally, we can think of

biography as affording meterial for a systematic study o f the psychology of the

writer.These three points of view should be carefully distinguished. For our conception of

'literary scholarship' only the first thesis, that biography explains and illuminates the actual

product of poetry, is d irectly relevant. The second point of view, shifts the centre of

attention to human personality. The third considers biography as material for a science or

future science, the psychology of artistic creation.

Biography is an ancient literary genre. First of all chronologically and logically - it

is a part of historiography. Biography makes no methodological distinction between a

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statesman, a general , an architect, a lawyer and a man who plays no public role. And

Coleridge's view that “any life, however in significant would, if truthfully told, be of

interest is sound enough.’’ In the view of a biographer, the writer is simply another man

whose moral and intellectual development, external career and emotional life, can be

reconstructed and can be evaluated b y reference to standards, usually drawn from some

ethical system or code of manners. His writings may appear as mere facts of publications,

as events like those in the life of any active man. So viewed, the problems of a biography

are simply those of a his torian. Somerset Maugham once said, “Familiarity with the life of

an author enriches the experiences of reading his or her work.’’(1)

He has to interpret his documents, letters, accounts by eye -witnesses, reminiscences,

auto-biographical statements, and to decide questions of genuineness, trustworthiness of

witnesses, and the like. In the actual writing of biography he encounters problems of

chronological presentation, of selection, of discretion or frankness. The rather extensive

work which has been done on biography as a genre deals with such questions, questions in

no way specially literary. In our context two questions of literary biography are crucial.

How far is the biographer justified in using the evidence of the wor ks them selves for his

purpose.

How far are the results of literary biography relevant and important for an

understanding of the works themselves. An affirmative answer to both questions is usually

given. To the first question it is assumed by practically all biographers who are specifically

attracted to poets, for poets appear to offer abundant evidence usable in the writing of a

biography which will be absent or almost absent, in the case of many for more influential

historical personages. We must distinguish two ages of man, two possible solutions. For

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most early literature we have no private documents which a biographer can draw upon.

We have only a series of public documents, birth register, marriage certificates, lawsuits,

and the like, and then the evidence of the works.

We can, for example, trace Shakespeare's movements very roughly, and we know

something of his finances; but we have absolutely nothing in the form of letters, diaries,

reminiscences, except of a few an ecdotes of doubtful authenticity. The vast effort which

has been extended upon the study of Shakespeare's life has yielded only few results of

literary profit. They are chiefly facts of chronology and illustrations of the social status and

the associations of Shakespeare.

Hence those who have tried to construct an a ctual biography of Shakespeare, of his

ethical and emotional development, have either arrived, if they went about it in a scientific

spirit, as Caroline Spurgeon attempted in her study of Shakes peare's imagery, at a mere list

of trivialities, or if they used the plays and sonnets recklessly, have constructed

biographical romances like those of Georg Brandes or Frank Harris. The whole assumption

behind these attempts which began probably with a fe w hints in Hazlitt and Schlegel,

elaborated first, rather cautiously, by Dowden is quite mistaken. One cannot, from fictional

statements, especially those made in plays, draw any valid inference as to the biography of

a writer. One may gravely doubt even t he usual view that Shakespeare passed through a

period of depression, in which he wrote his tragedies and his bitter comedies, to achieve

some serenity of resolution in The Tempest.

It is not self -evident that a writer needs to be in a tragic mood to write tragedies or

that he writes comedies when he feels pleased with life. There is simply no proof for the

sorrows of Shakespeare. He cannot be held responsible for the views of Timon or Macbeth

35
or like, just as he cannot be considered to hold the views of Doll Tearsheet or Iago. There

is no reason to believe that Prospero speaks like Shakespeare ; authors cannot be assigned

the ideas feelings, views, virtues, and vi ces of their heroes. And this is true not only of

dramatic characters or characters in a novel but also of the I of the lyrical poem. The

relation between the private life and the work is not a simple relation of cause and effect.

Proponents of the biogra phical method will, however, object to these contentions.

Conditions, they will say, have changed since the time of

Shakespeare. Biographical evidence has, for many poets, become abundant because the

poets have become self -conscious, have thought of thems elves as living in the eyes of

posterity(like Milton, Pope, Goethe, Wordsworth or Byron) and have left many

autobiographical statements as well as attracted much contemporary attention. The

biographical approach now seems easy, for we can check life and wo rk against each other.

Indeed, the approach is even invited and demanded by the poet, especially the Romantic

poet, who writes about himself and his innermost feelings or even like Byron, carries the

'pageant of his bleeding heart' around Europe. These poe ts spoke of themselves not only in

private letters, diaries, and autobiographies, but also in their most formal pronouncements.

Wordsworth's Prelude is a declared autobiography . It seems difficult not to take these

pronouncements, sometimes not difficult i n content or even in tone from their private

correspondence, at their face value without interpreting poetry in terms of the poet, who

saw it himself, in Goethe's well-known phrase , as 'fragments of great confession.'

We should certainly distinguish two types of poets, the objective and the

subjective: those who, like Keats and T.S. Eliot, stress the poet's 'negative capability', his

openness to the world, the obliteration of his concrete personality, and the opposite type of

36
the poet, who aims at display ing his personality, wants to draw a self -portrait, to confess,

to express himself. For long stretches of history we know only the first type: the works in

which the element of personal expression is very weak, even though the aesthetic value

may be great. The Italian novelle, Chivalric romances, the sonnets of the Renaissance,

Elizabethan drama, naturalistic novels, most folk poetry, may serve as literary examples.

But, even with the subjective poet, the distinction between a personal statement of an

autobiographical nature and the use of the very same motif in a work of art should not and

cannot be withdrawn. A work of art forms a unity on quite a different plane, with a

different relation to reality, than a book of memories, a diary, or a letter. Only by a

perversion of the biographical method could the most intimate and frequently the most

casual study of the actual poems were interpreted in the light of the documents and

arranged accordingly to a scale entirely separate from or even contradictory to that

provided by any critical judgment of the poems. Thus Brandes slights Macbeth as

uninteresting because it is least related to what he conceives to be Shakespeare's

personality; thus Kingsmill’s complains of Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum too is in the same

tone. Even when a work of art contains elements which can be surely identified as

biographical, these elements will be so arranged or transformed in a work that they would

lose all their specifically personal meaning and become simply concrete human ma terial,

integral elements of a work than the writer.

The whole view that art is self -expression pure and simple, the transcript of

personal feelings and experiences, is demonstrably false. Even when there is a close

relationship between the work of art a nd the life of an author, this must never be

constructed to mean that the work of art is a mere copy of life. The biographical approach

37
forgets that a work of art is not simply the embodiment of an experience.It is rather the

latest work in a series of such works; it is a drama, a novel, a poem determined , so far as it

is determined at all, by literary tradition and convention. The biographical approach

actually obscures a proper comprehension of the literary process, since it breaks up the

order of lite rary tradition to substitute the life -cycle of an individual. The biographical

approach ignores even the also quite simple psychological facts. A work of art may rather

embody the 'dream' of an author than his actual life, or it may the 'mask', the 'anti -self'

behind which his real person is hiding, or it may be a picture of the life from which the

author wants to escape. Further more, we must not forget that the artist may 'experience'

life differently in terms of his art: actual experiences are seen with a view to their use in

literature and come to him already partially shaped by artistic traditions and

preconceptions.

Biographical interpretation and use of every work of a rt needs careful scrutiny and

examination in each case, since the work of art is not a document for biography. Wade's

Life of Traherne takes every statement of his poem s as literal biographical truth. M any

books about the lives of the Brontes which have s imply passages from Jane Eyre or

Villette. There is The Life and Eager Death of Emily Bronte by Virginia Moore, who

thinks that Emily must have experienced the passions of Heathcliff ; and there are others

who have argued that a woman could not have writ ten Wuthering Heights and that the

brother, Patrick, must have been the real author. This is the group who argues that

Shakespeare must have visited Italy, must have been a lawyer, a soldier, a teacher, a

farmer. Ellen Terry gave the crushing reply to a ll this when she argued that, by the same

criteria, Shakespeare must have been a women But, it will be said , such instances of

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pretentious folly do not dispose of the problem of person ality in lit erature. While reading

Dante , Goethe or Tolstoy we know that there is a person behind the work.

There is an indubitable physiognomic similarity between the writings of one

author. The question might be asked, however, whether it would not be better to

distinguish sharply between the empirical person and the work, which can be called

'personal' only in a metaphorical sense. There is a quality which we may call 'Miltonic' o r

Keatsian' in the work of the authors. But this quality can be determined on the b asis of the

works themselves , while it may not be ascertainable upon purely biographical evidence.

We know what is 'Virgilian' or 'Shakespearian' without having any really definite

biographical knowledge of the two great poets.

Still, there are connec ting links, parallelisms, oblique resemblances. The poet's

work may be a mask, a dramatized conventionalization, but it is frequently a

conventionalization of his own experiences, his own life. If used with a sense of these

distinctions, there is use in biographical study. First, no doubt, it has exegetical value: it

may explain a great many allusions or even words in an author's work. The biographical

frame work can be helpful in studying the most obvious developmental problems in the

history of liter ature - the growth, maturing, and possible decline of an author's art.

Biography also accumulates the materials for other questions of literary history such as the

reading of the poet, his personal associations with literary men, his travels, the lands cape

and cities he saw and lived in : all these questions z may throw light on literary history, i.e.

the tradition in which the poem was placed ,his formative influences and the materials

on which he drew.

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 No biographical evidence can however change or influence critical evaluation. The

frequently adduced criterion of 'sincerity' is thoroughly false if it judges literature in terms

of biographical truthfulness, and its correspondence to the author's experience s or feelings

as they are attested by outside evidence. There is no relation between sincerity and value

as art. Byron' s 'Fare Thee Well... .' is neither a worse nor a better poem because it

dramatizes the poet's actual relations with his wife. The poem exists; the tears shed or

unshed, the personal emotions, are gone and cannot be reconstructed, nor do they need to

be .

By 'biography as Fiction' we may mean the psychological study of the writer, as

type and as individual, or the study of the creative process, or the study of the

psychological types and laws present within works of lit erature , or, finally, the effects of

literature upon its readers. The poet is the 'possessed': he is unlike other men , at once less

and more; and the unconscious out of which he speaks is felt to be at once sub and super -

rational.

The Muse took away th e sight of Demondocos'e eyes but 'gave him the lovely gift

of song' , as the blinded Tiresias is given prophetic 'vision. Handicap and endowment are

not always, of course, so directly correlative; and the malady or deformity may be

psychological or social instead of physical. Pope was a hunchback and a dwarf; Byron had

a club foot; Proust was an asthmatic and partly neurotic neurotic ; Keats was shorter than

other men. After the event, any success can be attributed to compensatory motivation, for

everyone has liabilities which may serve as spurs.

According to Freud ,

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 The artist is originally a man who turns from reality because he

cannot come to terms with the demand for the renunciation of

instinctual satisfaction as it is first made, and who then in

phantasy- life allows full play to his erotic and ambitious wishes.

But he finds a way of return from this world of phantasy back to

reality; with his special gifts, he moulds his phantasies into a new

kind of reality, and men concede them as a justification as valuable

reflections of actual fife. Thus by a certain path he actually

becomes the hero, king, creator , favourite he desired to be without

circuitous path of creating real altera tion in the outer world.( The

Art of Literature 76)

There is a di stinction to be made between the mental structure of a poet and the

composition of a poem, between impression and expression. The painter sees as a painter;

the painting is the clarification and a completion of his seeing. The poet is a maker of

poems; but the matter of his poems is completely his perception of life in which c reative

habits, as well as stimulants and rituals play significant role. Alcohol, opium and other

drugs dull the conscious mind, the over - critical ' censor' and release the activ ity of the

subconscious. Coleridge and De Quincy made a more grandiose claim that through opium,

a whole new world of experience was opened. Different writers like to write in a special

different kind of atmosphere. Schiller kept rotten apples in his de sk; Balzac wrote in the

robes of a monk. Some require silence or solitude; but other authors assert that the y can

write only in certain seasons, as did Milton.

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 How far these transcriptional modes affect the literary style. Hemingway thinks

that the typew riter solidifies one's sentences before they are ready to print while others

think that the instrument is just for journalistic style. Any modern treatment of the creative

process will chiefly concern the relative roles played by the unconscious and the conscious

mind. The authors most given to discussing their art wish naturally to discuss their

conscious and technical procedures. The literary man is a special ist in association

dissociation and re-combination. He uses words as his medium. For the poet, t he word is

not primarily a 'sign', a transparent counter, but a 'symbol', valuable for itself as well as in

its capacity of a representative, it may even be an 'object' or a 'thing'.

The creation of characters may be supposed to blend, in varying degrees, inherited

literary types, persons observed, and the self. 'One man's mood is another man's character'

the more humorous and separate his ch aracters, the less define d his own 'personality'

would seem. Whether the author has really succeeded in incorporating psychology into his

figures. Mere statements of his knowledge or theories would not court. They would be

'matter' or 'content' like any other type of information to be found in literature e.g. facts

from navigation, astronomy, or history. The attempts to fit Hamlet or Jaques into some

scheme of Elizabethan Psychology seem mistaken, because Elizabethan Psychology was

contradictory, confusin g and confused and Hamlet and Jaques are more than types. In

some cases, psychological insight seems to enhance the artistic value. For some conscious

artists, psychology may have tightened their sense of reality, sharpened their powers of

observation; and in the work itself, psychological truth is of artistic value only if it

enhances coherence and complexity.

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 Fiction is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation. Such

traditional literary devices as symbolism and meter are soc ial in their very nature. They are

conventions and norms which could have arisen only in society. But, furthermore, fiction

represents life and life is in large measure, a social reality, even though the natural world

and the inner or subjective world of t he individual have also been objects of literary

imitation. The writer himself is a member of society, possessed of a specific social status;

he received some degree of social recognition and reward; he addressed an audience.

Fiction has usually arisen in close connection with particular social institutions.

The relation between fiction and society is usually discussed by starting with the

phrase, derived from De Bonald, t hat 'Fiction is an expression of society'. Since every

writer is a member of society, he can be studied as a social being. Though his biography is

the main source, such a study can easily widen into one of the whole milieu from which he

came and in which h e lived. It will be possible to accumulate information about the social

provenance, the family background, the economic position of writers.

In modern Europe, fiction recruited its practitioners largely from the middle

classes, since aris tocracy was preoccupied with the pursuit of glory or leisure while the

lower classes had little opportunity for education. In England, this generation holds good

only with large reservations. The sons of peasants and workmen appea r only infrequently

in older English literature: exceptions in the works of Burns and Carlyle can be explained

by reference to the democratic Scottish School system. the role of the aristocracy in

English literature was uncommonly great -party because it was less cut of from the

professional classes than in other countries. All modern Russian writers were aristocratic in

origin with a few exceptions.

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 The cases of Shelley, Carlyle and Tolstoy are obvious examples of such 'treason' to

one's class. Outside of Russia, most communist writers are not protective in origin. The

social origins of a writer play only a minor part in the questions raised by his social status,

allegiance and ideology; for writers, it is clear, have often put themselves at the service of

another class. Most co urt poetry was written by men, who, though born in lower estate,

adopted the ideology and taste of their patrons. The social allegiance, attitude and ideology

of a writer can be studied not only in his writings but also, frequently, in biographical

extra-literary documents.

The writer has been a citizen, has pronounced on questions of social and political

importance, has taken part in the issue s of his time. Much work has been done upon

political and social views of individual writers, and in recent times more and more

attention has been devoted to the economic implication s of these views. Ben Jonson's

economic attitude was profoundly medieval, shows how, like several of his of his fellow

dramatists, he satir ized the rising class of usurers, monopolists, speculators, and

'undertakers'. Many work of literature -e.g. the 'histories' of Shakespeare and Swift's

Gulliver's Travels have been reinterpreted in close relation to the political context of the

time. Pronouncements, decisions, and activities should never be confused with the actual

social implications of a writer's works.

The problems of social origins, allegiance, and ideology will, if systematized, lead

to a sociology of the writer as a type, or as a typ e at a particular time and place. We can

distinguish between writers according to their degree of integration into the social process.

The writer is not only influenced by society; he also influences it. Art not merely

reproduces life but also shapes it. P eople may model their lives upon the patterns of

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fictional heroes and heroines. They have made love, committed crimes and attempted

suicide according to the book. The most common approach to the relations of literature and

society is the study of works of literature as social documents, as assumed pictures of

social reality. The relation between fiction and ideas can be conceived in very diverse

ways. Frequently literature is thought of as a form of philosophy, as 'ideas' wrapped in

form; and it is analyzed to yield 'leading ideas'. Fiction can be treated as a document in the

history of ideas and philosophy, for literary history parallels and reflects intellectual

history.

The close integration between philosophy and literat ure is frequently deceptive.

Arguments in its favour are overrated because they are based on a study of literary

ideology, professions of intentions and certain programmers which, necessarily borrowing

from existing aesthetic formulations, may sustain only remote relationship to the actua l

practice of the artists. The assumption of a common social background may really be

deceptive. Philosophy has frequently been cultivated by a special class which may be very

different from the practitioners of poetry, both in social affiliations and prov enance.

Philosophy, much more than literature, has been identified with the Church and the

Academy.

Philosophy, with its ideological content, and in its proper context, can enhance

artistic value because it collaborates se veral important artistic value like complexity and

coherence. A theoretical insight may increase the artist's depth of penetration and scope of

reach. The artist will be hampered by too much ideology if i t remains unassimilated.

Sometimes in the history of literature however there are cases, when ideas take a concrete

form , when figures and scenes not merely represent but actually embody ideas, when

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some identification of philosophy and art seems to take place. Image becomes concept and

concept becomes Image.

The earliest biographical writings probably were f uneral speeches and inscriptions.

The origin of modern biography can be traced to Plutarch's moralizing lives of prominent

Greeks and Romans. Few b iographies of common individuals were written until the 16th

century. The major developments of English biography come in the 18th century. with

such works as James Boswell's life of Johnson. In modern times impatience with Victorian

reticence and the deve lopment of psychoanalysis have led to a more penetrating and

comprehensive understanding of biographical subjects.

When Fiction was presented as biography, it was a brilliant success. But these do

not masquerade as lives, rather, they imaginatively take the place of biography where

there can be no genuine writing about a life writing for lack of materials. Among the life

highly regarded examples of this genre are, in the guise of auto biography, Robert Graves's

books on the Roman emperor Claudius and Cla udius the God and his Wife Messalina,

Mary Renault's the king must Die on the legendary hero Theseus, and Marguerite

yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.Some novels using fictional names, are designed to evoke

rather then re -create an actual life, such as Some rset Maugham's Moon and Robert Penn

Warren's All the king's Men.

There exists a large class of works that might be labelled as ‘‘special-purpose"

biography which has become the servant of other interests. They include potboilers

(Written as propaganda or as a scandalous expose) and "as - told -to publicize a celebrity.

The category includes also "campaign biographies" aimed to work for at for a political

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candidate, pious works that are properly called hagiography, or lives of holy men, written

to edify the reader.

Informal autobiography manifests a wide variety of forms, beginning with the

intimate writings made during a life that were not intended for publication. Whatever its

form or time, autobiography has helped define a nation’s citizens and political ambitions.

The form is crucial to not only to show how an individual meets the challenge of stating "I

am" but also how a nation and a historical period does so.

Letters, diaries and journals represent a series of increasingly self -conscious

revelation. Collected letters, especially in edited modern editions such as W.S. Hewish's

the correspondences of the 18th - century man of letters Horace Walpole can offer a

rewarding though not always predictable experience: some eminent people commit little of

themselves to paper, while other lesser figures pungently re -create themselves and their

world. The 15th -century P astor- letters constitute an in valuable Chronicle of the web of

daily life woven by a tough and vigorous English family among the East -Anglican gentry

during the wars of the Roses. Mozart and the poet Byron, in quite different ways, are

among the most revealing of letter writers.

Memoirs and reminiscences are autobiographies that usually emphasize what is

remembered rather than who is remembering, th e author, instead of recounting his life,

deals with those experience of his life, people, and events that he considers most

significant.

Formal autobiography offers a special kind of biographical truth: a life, reshaped by

recollection, with all of recol lection's conscious and unconscious omissions and

distortions.

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 The novelist Graham Greene says that, an autobiography is only "a sort of life" and

uses the phrase as the title for his autobiography. Any such work is a true picture of what,

at one moment i n a life wished or is impelled to reveal that life. An event recorded in the

autobiographer's youthful journal is likely to be some what different from that same event

recollected in later years.

There are a few and scattered examples of autobiographical literature in antiquity

and the Middle Ages. In the 2nd century b.c. the Chinese classical historian Siam Quran

included a brief account of himself in the "Historian Records". It is stretching a point to

include, from the Ist century b.c, the letters of C icero and Julius Caesar's commentaries tell

little about Caesar, though they present a masterly picture of the conquest of Gaul and the

operations of the Roman military machine at its most efficient. The confessions of St.

Augustine, of the 5th century, be long to a special category of autobiography. The 14th

century letter to posterity of the Italian poet Petrarch is but a brief excursion in the field.

The first full - scale formal autobiography was written a generation later by a

celebrated humanist public ist of the age, Enema Silvia Piccolo mini, after he was elevated

to the papacy, in 1458, as Pius II- the result of an election that he recounts with astonishing

frankness spiced with malice.

Specialized forms of autobiography might be grouped under four h eads: the matic,

religious, intellectual and fictionalized. The first grouping includes books with such

diverse purposes as Adolf Hitler's Main Kemp (1924), The Americanization of Edward Bok

(1920). and Richer Wright's Native son (1940). Religious autobiog raphy claims a number

of great works, ranging form the Confessions of St- Augustine and Peter Abelard's Historic

Calamitous in the Middle Ages to the autobiographical chapters of Thomas Carlyle's

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Sartor Resartus and John Henry Cardinal Newman's Beautifully wrought Apologia in the

19th century.

In the western world, biographical literature can be said to begin in the 5th century

b.c. with the poet Ion of Chios, who wrote brief sketches of such famous contemporaries as

Pericles and Sophocles. It continued th roughout the classical period for a thousand years,

until the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the 5th century.

The first half of this period exhibits a considerable amount of biographical activity,

of which much has been l ost, such fragment as remain are largely funeral elegies and

rhetorical exercises depicting ideal types of character or behavior and suggest that from a

literary point of view the loss is not grievous. Biographical works of the last centuries in

the classical period, characterized by numerous sycophantic accounts of emperors share the

declining energies of the other literary arts. But although there are few genuine examples

of life writing, in the modern sense of the term, these few are master pieces.

The two greatest teachers of the classical Mediterranean world, Socrates and Jesus

Christ, both prompted the creation of magnificent biographies written by their followers.

The same century, the first of the Christian era, gave birth to the first truly "professional"

biographers- Plutarch and Suetonius. The re volution brought about by the growth of

Christianity is signalled in a specialized autobiography the Confession of St. Augustine; but

the biographical opportunity suggested by Christian emphasis on the individual soul was,

oddly, not to be realized. The demands of the Church and the spiritual needs of men in a

twilight world of superstition and violence transformed biography into hagi ography. There

followed a thousand years of saint's lives and the art of biography was forced to serve ends

other than its own.

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 Middle Ages was a period of biographical darkness, an age dominated by the priest

and the Knight. The priest shaped b iography into an exemplum of other -wordiness, while

the knight fount escape from daily brutishness in allegory, Chivalric romances, and a brood

of the saints' lives, like Eadmer's life of Anselm,contain anecdotal materials that give some

human flavours to their subjects, like the 13th - century French nobleman Jean, sire do

Joinville's life of St. housie.

Most remarkable, a self - consciously wrought work of biography c ame into being

in the 9th century: this was the life of Charlemagne, written by a Derris at his court named

Einhard. He is aware of his biographical obligations and sets forth his point of view and his

motives, ‘‘ I have been careful not to omit any facts that could come to my knowledge, but

at the s ame time not to offend by a prolix style tho se minds that despise everything

modern...... No man can write with more accuracy than I of events that took place about

me, and of facts concerning which I had personal knowledge.’’

Biography stirs into fresh life with the Renaissance in the 15th century . Biography

was chiefly limited to uninspired panegyrics of Italian princess by their count humanist,

such as Simonton's life of the great condottiere, Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan.

During the first part of the 16th century the English now stimulated b y the "new

learning" of Erasmus, John Colet, Thomas More and others, there w rote three works that

can be regarded as the initiators of modern biography: More's History of Richard III ,

William Roper's Mirrors of Virtue in Wardle Greatness; the life of Card inal Wales ; The

history of Richard III unfortunately remains unfinished and it cannot meet the strict

standards of biographical truth since, under the influence of classical historians, a third of

the book consists of dialogue that is not recorded from lif e. However, it i s a brilliant work,

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exuberan with wit and irony, that not only constitutes a biographical landmark but is also

the first piece of modern English prose.

In the 17th century the word biography was first employed to create a separate

identity for this type of writing. That century and the first half of the 18th presents a busy

and sometimes bizarre biographical landscape. It was an era of experimentation and

preparation rather than of successful achievement. In the new world, the American

colonies began to develop a scattered biographical activity, none of it of lasting

importance.

The last half of the 18th century witnessed the remarkable association of two

remarkable men, form which sprang what is generally agreed to be the world's supreme

biography, Boswell's life of Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson, literary dictator of his age, critic

and lexicographer who turned his hand to many kinds of literature, himself, created the

first English professional biographies in the Lives of English poets . In essays and in

conversation, Johnson set forth principles for biographical composition: the writer must

tell the truth ‘‘ the business of the biographer is often to...... display the minute details that

re-create a living character; and men need not be of exalted fame to provide warty

subjects.’’

The life of Johnson may be regarded as a representative psychological expression

of the Age of Enlightenment, and it certainly epitomizes several typical characteristics of

that age: devotion to urban life in comm on sense, emphasis on man as a social being. Yet

in its extravagant pursuit of the life of one individual, in its laying bare the eccentricities

and suggesting the inner turmoil of personality, it may be thought of as a part of the

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revolution in self-awareness, ideas, aspirations, exemplified in Rousseau's confessions, the

French Revolution.

The period of modern biography was ushered in, generally speaking, by world war

I. All the arts were in ferment, and biographical literature against 19th century conventions,

partly as a response to advances in psychology, and partly as a search for new means of

expression. The revolution, unlike that at the end of the 18th century, was eventually

destined to enlarge and enhance the stature of biography. The chief devel opments of

modern life writing may be conveniently classified under five he ads: an increase in the

number and general competence of biographies throughout the western world, the

influence on biographical literature of the counter forces of science and fic tional writing,

the decline of formal autobiography and of biographies springing form a personal

relationship, the range and variety of biographical expression and the steady, though

moderate, growth of a literature of biographical criticism.

Little has been said about biography since the renaissance in Germany, Spain, Italy,

Scandinavia and the Slavic coun tries. In Russia, there had been comparatively little

biographical literature and because biographical trends, particularly since the end of the

18th ce ntury, generally followed those of Britain and France . Russian literary genius in

prose is best exemplified during both the 19th and 20th centuries in the novel. In the 19the

century, However, Leo Tolstoy's numerous autobiographical writings, such as childhood

and Boyhood , and Sergey Aksakov's Years of childhood and A Russian Schoolboy .

Maxims Gorky's autobiographical trilogy (childhood; In the world and my Universities,

1913-23) represent, in specialized form, a limited biographical activity. The close con trol

of literature exercised by the 20th century communist governments of Eastern Europe has

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created a wintry climate for biography. The rest of Europe outside the iron curtain, has

manifested in varying degrees the fresh biographical energies and practice s illustrated in

British-American life writing: biography is now, as never before, an international art that

share an almost common viewpoint.

The second characteristic of modern biography is its being subject to the opposing

pressures of science and fict ional writing, has a dark as well as a bright side. Twentieth -

century fiction, boldly and res tlessly experimental, has on one hand, influenced the

biographer to aim at literary excellence, to employ devices of fiction suitable for

biographical ends, but, on the other, fiction has also probably encouraged the production of

popular pseudo biography, hybrids of fact and fancy, as well as more subtle distortions of

the art form. Science has exerted two quite different kinds of pressure: the prestige of the

traditional science in its emphasis on exactitude and rigorous and an uncom promising

scrutiny of evidences. But a vast accumulation of scientific facts has helped to create an

atmosphere in which today's massive, note -ridden and fact -encumbered lives prolif erate

and has probably contributed indirectly to a reluctance in the scholarly community to take

the risks inevitable in true biographical composition.

The particular science of psychology, as earlier pointed out, has conferred great

benefits upon the responsible practitioners of biography. It has also accounted in large part,

for the third characteristic of modern biography: the decline of forma l autobiography and

the grand tradition of biography resulting from a personal relationship. For psychology h as

rendered the self more exposed but also more elusive, more fascinatingly complex and, in

the darker reaches, somewhat unpalatable. Since honesty wo uld force the autobiographer

into a self-examination both formidable to undertake and uncomfortable to pub lish, instead

53
he generally turns his attention to outward experiences and writes memoirs and

reminiscences. France somehow offers something of an exception in the journals of such

writers as Paul Valery and Julian Green.

Biography as an independent art f orm, with its concentration upon the individual

life and its curiosity about the individual personality, is essentially a creation of the West.

In Asia, for all its long literary heritage, even in Islam, biographical literature does not

show any developm ent, to assume the impo rtance, of Western life writing. In India it is

the enduring concern for spiritual values and for contemplation or mystical modes of

existence that have exerted the deepest influence on literature from the Ist millennium b.c.

to the present, and this has not provided a milieu suitable to biographical composition.

Generally speaking, the literary history of Japan, too, offers only fragmentary or limited

examples of life writing.

In the United States, Great Britain and the res t of the Western world , biography

today enjoys a moderate ly popular but critical esteem. In the year 1929, at the height of

the biographical boom there were published in the United States 667 new biographies; in

1962 exactly the same number appeared, the populat ion in the meantime having increased

by something like 50 percent.

Biographical drama has of course been staged even before the time of Shakespeare;

it continues to be popular, whether translated from narrative to the theatr e. The cinema

often follows its versions of such plays; it likewise produces original biographical films,

generally with indifferent success. Television, too, offers historical "re -creations" of

various sorts, and with varying degrees of responsibility, but has achieved only a few

notable examples o f biographical illumination, the conflict between gripping visual

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presentation and the often unromantic but important, biographical truth is difficult to

resolve.

Biography, indeed, seems less innovative, less rewarding of experiment, and les s

adaptable to new media, than does fiction or perhaps even history. Words are no longer the

only way to tell a story and perhaps in time will not be regarded as the chief way; but so

far they seem the best way of unfolding the full course of a life and ex ploring the quirks

and crannies of a personality. Anchored in the truth of fact, though seeking the truth of

interpretation, biography tends to be more stable than other literary arts; and its future

would appear to be predictably a steady evaluation of its present trends.

A natural conclusion follows that there is no such thing as absolute objectivity and

that every text including biographical accounts should be considered as fiction since a

certain degree of reconstruction as well as personal involveme nt is involved. Biography

written as fiction or "biofiction" is a newly emerging genre in literacy fiction. It captures

the characterization, plot and protagonist in fascinating and readable ways. The term

Fictional autobiography has been coined to define novels about a fictional character written

as though the character were writing their own biography of which Daniel Defoe's Mall

Flanders is an example. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is yet another example of fictional

autobiography. The term autobiographi cal novel is difficult to define. Novels that portray

settings and situation with which the author is familiar are not necessarily

autobiographical. Neither are novels that include aspects drawn from the author's life as

minor plot details. To be considere d an autobiographical by most standards, there must be

a protagonist modeled after the author and a central plotline that mirrors events in his or

her life.

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 In Charles Dickens David Copperfield many elements within the novel follow

events in Dicken's own life. In the preface to Charles Dickens edition he wrote, ‘‘....... like

many fond parents. I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David

Copperfield ”(David Copperfield 21). The notions of biography and fiction are very close

to each other, so much so that one could easily state that all fiction is biographical and all

biography is fictional. It is not surprising, when writers use their own lives as the subject

material for their fiction. They recreate their own predicaments in their characters, weaving

together fact and fiction. There are three temporal moments to be considered when looking

at the relation between biography and fiction the time when it happened, the time when it

was fictionalised and the time when it was written as an autobiography. The transitiona l

movement from fact to fiction and from personal to universal, when successful, is a

subjective emanation to the artistic.

It is apt that there needs be a reassessment of Indian -English contribution to English

literature and Kumar does this admirably through the prism of his own experience. Like

Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival Kumar extrapolates this experience In the preface to his

memoir Bombay-London-New York Amitava wrote: ‘‘This book bears witness to my

struggle to become a writer ”(5). Today he is a respected literar y figure but one gets the

sense that the struggle to write, to understand how to write, is an ongoing process for him.

The natural and unforced humility of Kumar's personality is reflected in his writings.

While reading his work, one gets the unsett ling impression that the writer's ego is entirely

absent. When asked about his humility in an interview, Amitava Kumar puts, ‘‘may have

come from my long-time admiration for George Orwell. I was very much influenced by his

honesty and contour, and I wanted to be like that. ” In Bombay-London-Newyork he

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speaks of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion

of fundamentalism. Kumar's personal musings cover perhaps a fourth of his book but have

an impact far beyond their length. The slender volume of his personal odyssey has enough

pathos to over shadow and assimilate his intermittently interesting but mostly de scriptive

treatise into his own upon arriving in America, he gorges on beer and beef, and later

reminisces on parallels to the story of another Indian expatriate in London: Mahatma

Gandhi. By examining immigrant literature through a highly personalized perspective,

Kumar brings immediacy to his account of Indian literature. In Husband of a Fanatic he

describes his life as an Indian Hindu and his marriage to a Pakistan Muslim at a tim e when

their respective countries were in active warfare. Given the title the book expected to look

at Muslim-Hindu relationships at a very personal level but instead it is a long, repetitive

ramble through various communal riots on the subcontinent.

Kumar's personal life is scattered like tinsels throughout his book, the snippets from

Kumar's past are dazzling. They are so woven in t he narrative that the emerging pattern

emits a breath of truthfulness and authenticity thereby engulfing it in the air and colours of

conviction.

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 WORKS CITED

Dickens,Charles.David Copperfield.London:Bradbury and Evans, 1850. Print.

Kumar,Amitava.Bombay-London-Newyork.London:Penguin Books. India,2002

Maugham,Somerset . “of Human Bondage’’NewYorker.Print.

Kumar,Amitava.E-mail interview. 5 Aug, 2010 .

Web.net.edu/new soffice/1993/novelist-0929-html.web

Welleck, Rene,Austin Warren.The Theory of Literature.U.S.A.:Jonathan

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