seeks sexual encounters with other men, with the approval of the daughter in the
house in which he is staying. The way in which these philandering episodes are
described implies no reservations towards the narrator’s attitudes. A reader, such as
myself, who innocently supposed that The Swimming Pool Librarywas an instance of
unreliable narration, was mistaken. An author cannot make misreading impossible.
nGenre
Literary biography
Along the novel’s undefended frontiers, other genres have acquired acceptance and
prestige. Literary biography was originally an entirely non-fictional genre, although
the biographies of the leading figures of antiquity vary greatly in the reliability of
their sources. Chaucer wrote fictional portraits of pilgrims, but perhaps the first
memorial portrait of a historical person is Izaak Walton’s Life of Dr. John Donneof
1640 (pp. 145–6). In the 18th century great lives began to be documented from
cradle to grave. Pope and Lord Chesterfield published their own Letters. Boswell’s
Life of Johnson(p. 216) is the grand extended example of what was to come, though
Johnson’s own Lives of the Poetswill always be read. Mrs Gaskell’sLife of Charlotte
Brontëis perhaps the next notable literary biography. The 19th century proliferated
in Life-and-Letters biographies of the eminent in Church and State, a documentary
genre which quarried out the heaps of attested facts from which Leslie Stephen and
his helpers constructed the Dictionary of National Biographyin 60 vols (1885–1900).
His daughter Virginia Stephen (later Mrs Woolf ) reacted away from fact towards
perception and intuition, from externals to internals. Political biography rolled on,
as for example in Duff Cooper’s elegant Talleyrand(1932) and Robert Blake’s schol-
arly Disraeli (1966). Literary biography, the life of a writer, came into its own after
1945:at first of older writers, then of more recent ones, then of the living. The genre
is one that has increasingly flourished, contributing much to the field of literature.
Whatever its demerits – Hugh Kenner called it ‘a minor form of fiction’ – it is more
readable than most academic literary criticism.
One reason for this is that biography appeals in much the same way as some real-
ist novels. It seems to offer a full understanding of a writer and writers are credited
with human understanding. A writer’s biography offers factual scholarship, the
depth promised by psychology, the wisdom of hindsight, and a complex instance of
social history over a lifetime, in an interesting shape. Few novels offer as much. Yet
it is difficult to know or show the workings of an artist’s mind. Documentation of a
writer’s life may not tell us much about a poem and cannot explain a novel. Drafts
ofthe stages of composition of a work would be more illuminating but would
demand study. Popular biography too often takes the books as sources for the life
and the life as the source of the books, and reads across uncritically. But authors have
imagination as well as experience, and read books as well as writing them. If writing
were the product of experience, Shakespeare would have to have met Cleopatra.
There is always a gap between author and book, and between ascertained fact and
fictional shaping. And there is in biography, as there is not in fiction, the question of
histor ic truth: the adequacy of the record, and the quality of the interpretation.
Literary biography has had a long boom. There have been fine lives of Thomas
Hardy and George Eliot, and good ones of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley,
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