52 Times Higher Education8 February 2018
Portraits from Life:
Modernist Novelists
and Autobiography
By Jerome Boyd Maunsell
Oxford University Press
304pp, £20.00
ISBN 9780198789369
Published 11 January 2018
O
ur fascination with celebrity
culture harks back to the
Victorians. With the prolif-
eration of new media – mass-
market newspapers, illustrated
periodicals, photography – came
an obsession with the private
lives of the rich and famous.
The celebrity author became a
particular focus of heightened
consumer interest: by the 1880s
several specialist papers focused
on “news” associated with the
publishing industry, and series
such as Edmund Yates’ “Celebrity
at Home” interviewed well-
known authors relaxing at home
or socialising in their liter-
ary clubs.
“Historians of the
future,” Yates later
wrote in hisRecol-
lections, will
eschew intellectual
biographies and
instead examine
an author’s “daily
life and personal
habits...his tricks
of post-touching and tea-
drinking, his general method of
tossing and goring all those differ-
ing from him in opinion”.
It’s against the backdrop of this
voraciously prurient publicity
culture that Jerome Boyd Maun-
sell sets his study of Modernism
and autobiography. It’s a unique
angle of approach, focusing on
the periods when seven major
novelists – from Henry James,
Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells
to Ford Madox Ford, Edith
Wharton and Gertrude Stein – sat
down to depict their own lives in
memoirs and autobiographies;
or, rather, to perform that act of
public revelation. As Wyndham
Lewis (the final figure under
consideration here, pictured inset)
wrote in a draft preface to his
autobiographyBlasting and
Bombardiering, “I am about to
gossip. I am going to be exceed-
ingly ‘personal’ about certain
persons”, and he placed the blame
squarely on his readers: “it is
because ofyouthat I descend to
these picturesque details”
(although we don’t get quite
as far as learning about how
anyone touched their post or took
their tea).
Many of the writers gathered
together in this short, elegant
book deliberately developed new
forms of life writing, in some
instances dramatically rearranging
events to play with chronology,
memory and identity. Yet if the
forms and functions of autobiog-
raphy changed radically at this
time, Maunsell is less concerned
with experiments in genre or
theory; this is, he warns us, “an
experiment in...group biography”
rather than a critical study.
WhatPortraits from Lifelacks
in dramatic statements, it more
than makes up for in subtle,
unassuming, decisive insights.
Maunsell is right that literary
critics are quick to chart artistic
processes when it comes to
fiction, but the writing of reminis-
cences – a task that frequently
took years, absorbing a writer’s
creative energies sometimes obses-
sively – tended until very
recently “to be
presented...as a fait
accompli, as if
these books some-
how wrote them-
selves”.Portraits
from Life“recon-
structs the act of
remembrance”, as
well as what is being
remembered, and
paints a fascinating
tableau of an alternative side to
literary production in this period
as a result. It’s striking how often
autobiography was produced out
of contingency rather than deci-
sive retrospection: urgent financial
need; to escape writer’s block; at
the urgings of a friend or collab-
orator. It’s not just autobiographi-
calcontentthat is scarred by
absences, gaps, missing evidence- the very process is marked by
disjunction: picked up, put down,
put off, endlessly revised.
Literary self-portraiture may
be an impossibility, never quite
embodying its subject, but it
offers us “achingly close simula-
cra”, Maunsell writes – “lives
frozen, reconfigured, remade”.
Gertrude Stein once wrote that
biography is akin to the detective
novel: it risks killing its subjects,
substituting them for someone
else. Maunsell brings his back
to life.
Charlotte Jones is lecturer in
English literature at St Hilda’s
College, Oxford.Building the Ivory Tower: Universities
and Metropolitan Development
in the Twentieth Century
By LaDale C. Winling
University of Pennsylvania Press
264pp, £33.00
ISBN 9780812249682
Published 13 October 2017“S
cholars have largely written
universities out of urban
history,” writes LaDale
Winling. This statement is mani-
festly untrue of Europe, as the late
Peter Hall, among others, has
published extensively about their
impact on place. Yet having said
this,Building the Ivory Tower
is a fascinating book. It charts
the impact of university develop-
ment on cities in the US, using a
series of typological case studies
to illustrate the transformation
of what Winling calls “the land-
scape of knowledge”. In doing so,
he emphasises “the interaction
between the elites and the grass-
roots...combining both a ‘top-
down’ and ‘bottom-up’
perspective”, bringing together hisextensive historical research, a few
good stories and some very useful
maps he has drawn himself.
Men and women in the early
universities were treated very
differently, with women subject
to stringent rules and curfews
quite unlike those applied to
the men. The universities were
very muchin loco parentis, safe-
guarding morals. Space was used
to reinforce divisions between
the sexes.
The chronological chapters are
developed around a series of loose
themes starting with the inaugura-
tion of Ball State University in
Indiana, which had its origins in
a chance real estate venture that
would transform the fortunes of
the town of Muncie. Then we
move on to the University of
Texas in Austin, a town that iden-
tified with the Confederate South.
Here a model for a new kind of
sprawling, racially and class-
segregated metropolis – for a time
complicit in the Jim Crow laws- was created.
The theme of division continues
Flora Samuel on a study exploring the conflict that
higher education institutions can cause in cities
No campus is an
island entire of
itself