The Reading Experience

A Nicer Chap

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has read a biography of V.S. Naipaul and decided she "certainly will not buy another book by this egomaniac." She proclaims:

The man and the writer are not as easily separated as critics would have us believe. Writers don't have to be saints but they do have to have empathy and live as civilised beings within the rules that apply to us all. What would we do if we found Richard Branson beat his mistress and drove his wife to death? Or if the BBC's director general spoke of his addiction to paid sex? Artists are part of our world and must be judged as others are. They cannot claim immunity from decency.

As a matter of fact, the man and the writer are quite easily separated. Step one would be to avoid reading biographies of writers. This would leave you with only the work (about which harsh things might certainly be said, but they wouldn't be inspired by an animus against the man founded on moral disapproval rather than an estimation of the writing founded on literary judgment) and spare you the emotional energy required to work up a good lathering of moral outrage. It would encourage you to regard "criticism" as an act of engaged reading of fiction or poetry rather than the dissemination of gossip. Indeed, if we would all forswear the reading of most literary biographies, such gossip would not become a part of our literary discourse in the first place and the whole question of "separating" the writer and the work would never come up.

If step one proves too difficult, step two might be to acknowledge that writers should indeed "live as civilised beings within the rules that apply to us all," but to further acknoweldge that this is a statement about personal conduct, about the way we interact with other humans in a social context, not about writing novels. What exactly are the rules of fiction-writing that "apply to us all," other than that those who do write novels should do so in an interesting or compelling way? If the writer has not fulfilled that obligation, then refusing to read any more of that writer's work would be an appropriate response, but such a refusal based on violation of rules of behavior (a malfeasance to which many. many writers would have to plead guilty) is just an easy way of avoiding the harder work of considering works of literature on their own terms as works of invention and imagination. It's a way of avoiding literature, which too often doesn't allow us to indulge in our moral certainties.

"Artists are part of our world and must be judged as others are. They cannot claim immunity from decency." Only writers and artists who themselves refuse to separate their lives from their work would stupidly "claim immunity from decency." They take their freedom to flaunt rules of decorum and challenge established conventions (formal and othewise) in their work to mean they have similar freedom in their real lives. This is mostly childishness, which is, I suppose, morally culpable, although again I can't see that it should affect our estimation of whatever genuine insights and aesthetic achievements arise from their iconoclasm as artists. It doesn't seem to me that Naipaul's moral failings can be placed in this category of deliberate indecency, anyway. His is a more garden-variety exhibition of human weakness, and as such will no doubt continue to be noted (probably ad nauseam, by those who don't want to be bothered by mere literature), but ultimately his reputation as a writer will still be determined by the appeal of this work, not by the noxiousness of his behavior, even if the charges apparently leveled at him in this biography are true, which I myself don't accept simply because the biographer claims they are.

As Steve Mitchelmore points out in his own discussion of Alibhai-Brown's condemnation of Naipaul, she "recalls wistfully the days she read and loved Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. As she doesn't say, we can only guess why she loved his work at that time. Was he a nicer chap?" Ailbhai-Brown's own response to Naipaul's artistry in Biswas shows that it is not only possible but preferable to separate the writer from the work. She might have remained blissfully unaware of Naipaul's personal derelictions, or dismissed them the irrelevancies they are, and retained her fondness for his earlier work. Instead she now has to concoct a narrative in which since Biswas Naipaul's books "have got increasingly bigoted and nasty; he was moved more by hate than love, and an ugliness repeatedly broke through his beautifully written prose." How in the world does Alibhai-Brown know that Naipaul was "moved more by hate than love"? She has to cling to some such notion in order to preserve her conviction that Naipaul the man emerges in all his nastiness in the work, but it's a pretty impoverished view of literature that suggests it can be so easily be dismissed through this two-bit piece of psychologizing.

Missing Buttons

In her review of Claire Tomalin's new biography of Thomas Hardy, Julia Keller proclaims that

Life, alas, can't hold a candle to art. Life is ordinary. Life is boring. Life is a stack of day-old dirty dishes in a crusty sink. Life is a pile of soiled laundry. Life is pettiness and tedium. Life is a blouse with a button missing.

Art, though, can be colorful and unexpected and dynamic, and never more so than when it's contrasted with the dreary predictability of life. Thus the biographers of artists must confront a special challenge: How to calibrate the life with the art. How to make the business of living--paying bills, trimming toenails--measure up to the splendid bounty of creativity: novels, plays, poems, paintings.

One would think that, given the general accuracy of that first paragraph, the proper conclusion to draw might be that biographies, especially biographies of artists and writers, and especially biographies of the junk heap variety (if a scrap of information exists, throw it on), are by and large a waste of time. No "calibrating" of life and art is necessary. The dreary reckoning of the "business of living" is never going to equal in its interest value the "dynamic" experience of works of art and literature, and I finally just don't understand why anyone finds it helpful to supplement the experience of art with investigations into the lives of artists. Why would I want to read about "pettiness and tedium," no matter how much they've been gussied up by the biographer's "insight"?

My own latest attempt to read a biography of a writer whose work I admire, Robert Poltito's Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, predictably enough only met with failure (my own failure to complete it). I knew almost immediately that I probably wouldn't make it through the book when I noticed from the table of contents that only a relatively small portion of it was devoted to Thompson's actual writing life. (His most productive period as a writer, the early/mid 1950s, is given about 60 pages in a 508-page book.) Two-thirds of the book is devoted to Thompson's life before he became a writer, and it is packed with the same kind of eye-glazing detail, about the subject's parents and his parents' parents, about the various places in which he lived, about his adventures as a young man, that fills most such door-stopper biographies. Nothing in the book illuminated Thompson's work, the discussions of which amount to plot summaries and tallies of the money Thompson was paid. If anything, I was left with even less understanding of what Thompson was after in his novels, or how his best ones are as good as they are, than before I read Polito's book.

Keller further asks of a "subject" like Thomas Hardy: ". . .what if the artist was a bit on the drab side? What if he wasn't noisy and rude and randy? What if he simply did his job each day, faithfully and well, with little fuss or fanfare?" It seems to me that these questions answer themselves. If we already know such things about a writer, no biography is needed. What else do we need to know? Exactly how he went about being drab? And even if the writer was "noisy and rude and randy," do we need to know the particulars in order to appreciate the work he managed to produce in his quieter moments? Jim Thompson's life was apparently on the noiser side (although Polito recites the facts of his Communist years, of his drinking and his occasional low-living in such a dry and prosaic manner it's hard to hear it), but learning the known facts about how he lived it still falls far short of the uproariousness of The Killer Inside Me or The Getaway or Pop. 1280. Why do we think the proper way to respond to works of poetry and fiction we have enjoyed is to fixate on the "life" of those who created them?

Life indeed can't hold a candle to art.

Connected to a Specific Occasion

Mark Thwaite's interview with John Stubbs, author of the just-published biography of John Donne, Donne: The Reformed Soul, includes this exchange:

MT: You mostly seem to read Donne's poems biographically. But Donne always wore masks and played with the persona of the "I": are you, as a biographer, in danger of a biographically reductive reading of Donne's art?

JS: This is a very important question. The poems are not transparently autobiographical documents. But many of Donne’s poems are explicitly connected to a specific occasion or experience. . .and many more are addressed to a particular person, invoking a specific setting and time. . .The manuscript evidence assembled by Herbert Grierson, Helen Gardner and many later Donneans suggests that some were intended for a fairly wide social audience, while others, especially many of what became his most famous love poems in the “Songs and Sonets”, were of a much more personal nature – kept even from his closest friends. Other texts again have been traditionally associated, since the time of Donne’s earliest readers, with particular moments in his biography. Verbal testimony connected his great poem of farewell and consolation, for example, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (with its famous image of the couple as “stiffe twin compasses”) with Donne’s departure for France in 1611. That tradition has become an inescapable part of the poem’s meaning as we receive it now. Similarly, the social and literary contexts to which other Donne texts were attached are crucial to their style: the settings of the poems, in other words, are vitally important to their register. For me the really grave reduction would be to annul or simplify these contexts, especially in what is after all a biography. We would lose all sense of Donne’s art by losing touch with the historical reality he lived and breathed in and worked with, and which much of his language’s peculiar vividness is given over to revealing.

It's hard to imagine any poem, by any poet, that is not "explicitly connected to a specific occasion or experience" What would be an alternative to this--a poem ocassioned by nothing and conceived in a state of numbness? Yet this hopelessly overbroad generalization about the connection between art and life that motivates 600-page biographies of writers and artists is what is usually trotted out as justification for these exercises in voyeurism and speculation. All "occasions" and "experiences" that might plausibly be brought to bear on all poems, stories, and novels in the author's oeuvre are duly "investigated," and any attempt to help readers more fruitfully enjoy and understand the works themselves is more or less abandoned. I don't say that Stubbs has done this in his biography, although Colin Burrow's conclusion that it, too, focuses excessively on "evidence and symptom"--whereby Donne's poems are read back into his life--doesn't give me that much confidence that he hasn't. The very market niche that literary biography now occupies--somewhere between gossip and Freudian literary criticism--demands that writers' work be seen as the reflection of their lives rather than as autonomous works of art.

But Stubbs's claims for the necessity of biographical/historical analysis of Donne's poetry do otherwise seem relatively unexceptional--mostly because they don't really get us that far. It might be interesting to know which of his poems were written for "a fairly wide social audience" and which were of "a more personal nature," but this does very little in helping us understand what the experience of reading these poems is like or what they might still have to offer a 21st century reader. That the "Valediction" might be associated "with Donne’s departure for France in 1611" might be helpful in getting started on the poem, but it hardly does much for our understanding of that poem's figurative intricacy (". . .endure not yet/A breach, but an expansion,/Like gold to aery thinness beat"). Is it really crucial that a reader know this "tradition" in order to make sense of the poem, lest he/she miss this "inescapable part of the poem’s meaning"? It might be true that "the social and literary contexts to which other Donne texts were attached are crucial to their style" and that "the settings of the poems. . .are vitally important to their register," and if Stubbs's book were to show me that this is the case--specifically that it can be seen in the poems themselves--I would be grateful for it. Still, it seems to me a significant overstatement to say that "We would lose all sense of Donne’s art [emphasis mine] by losing touch with the historical reality he lived and breathed in and worked with." If Donne's poems are great art (and I think they are), they are so even if we do lose touch with his "historical reality."

Unfortunately, most literary biographies are written not to accomplish the reasonably modest goals Stubbs seems to set (to remind us that literature isn't written in an historical vacuum) but to appease the kind of interest expressed in this review of a new biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reviewer Elaine Margolin tells us that

In a determined search for Singer's essence, [Florence] Noiville plunges through letters, personal recollections and interviews with Singer's friends, family and publishing colleagues, hoping to channel the young Singer.

Questions beget other questions. What made him so fearful of intimacy? Why was he so often devastatingly sad? What had created his need to distance himself from those who reached out to him, particularly his young son? What spurred his lust for so many women? How had he become such a skeptic about God?

God save us from biographers in search of a writer's "essence." This is only going to give us a tendentious, partial, and misleading account of the subject in question, as the biographer finds out in her "plunge" through the record that the writer had the same personal imperfections as anyone else. (That Singer had such imperfections, as revealed through Noiville's biography, certainly seems to be the "essence" of Margolin's review.)

As to the questions begat from questions: Who cares what made Singer fearful of intimacy? I want to read his stories, not learn about his psychological hangups. What difference does it make that he was "devastatingly sad" now that he's dead? Probably the sadness contributed to the power of his art, but I surely don't need to know about its source in order to appreciate that art.

The last three questions just take us farther from Singer's art, which is presumably the only thing concerning him that most readers now care about (or should care about.) No doubt his personal demons drove him away from his loved ones, but what could we ever know about what "created" them? It's hard to believe Elaine Margolin doesn't already know what "spurred his lust for so many women." Plus ca change. And Singer may or may not have been a "skeptic about God," but what does it accomplish toward our appreciation of what his stories have to tell us about such skepticism--they actually convey a multitude of feelings about God--to speculate about "how he became" a skeptic?

Margolin's review ultimately suggests that this biography will only deflect attention away from Singer's work and encourage readers instead to debate whether I.B. Singer was "a bad man" or not. How much useless time will be spent (in who knows how many more biographies) discussing this thoroughly irrelevant "issue" while Singer's marvelous short stories go unread?

Disentangling

I mostly agree with Guy Dammann on Gunter Grass:

. . .the trouble with Grass's case is that just as it is impossible to disentangle his literary from his political legacy - his works of fiction, from the Tin Drum to 2003's controversial Crabwalk, are both driven by and intent on driving towards a particular moral and political vision of Germany - so too is it impossible to separate Grass' works from their author. In Germany, at least, having made himself so visible as the author of his works, it seems impossible that the damage done to his personal reputation will not leave deep scars on his books.

In an international environment, though, the case is somewhat different. Further removed from the struggle that has marked the last 60 years of German history, the sense of betrayal is bound to be less keen for those whose relation to Grass's work is a literary and aesthetic one. In a climate where it nowadays seems possible - if not uncontroversial - to admire the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the belated revelation of, as it were, "yet another" shameful episode in the wartime past of a prominent creative personality seems unlikely to make any lasting difference. Moreover, besides its purely literary merit, for non-German readers much of the value of Grass's work has been in the powerful access it provides to the complex morality and psychology of post-war Germany. Given that hypocrisy of precisely the kind now on display by their author is portrayed in his works as having been such an important feature of this psychology, whether you see the books through their author, or the author through his books doesn't seem to make much difference.

It is also arguable that having the kind of growing psychological burden that Grass must have had to carry all these years may in many ways have acted as a kind of stimulus to sustained activity and effort in what may be independently judged as the right direction. His response to the current situation - "My silence all these years was one of the reasons I had to write [my autobiography]" - seems uniformly weak if nonetheless highly plausible, but, as with Conrad's Lord Jim, those with a guilty past are often the most zealous when it comes to repairing the present. If Grass's silence is also partly what spurred him on, then the route to condemnation is less easy.

Hypocrisy is always ugly, but ugliness is no less important to literature than beauty. Grass's crime is to have betrayed those whose spokesman he has sought to be. For those of us lucky enough not to have required his services in this respect, he remains as powerful and as interesting a writer as before.

As far as I can tell, Grass's primary moral failing lies in remaining silent about his service with the Waffen-SS. Essentially, he is guilty of hypocrisy in not heeding his own demands of his fellow countrymen that they face up to their past. To a limited degree, then, he has lost the authority he once might have had in his chosen role as "spokesman"--limited because surely he was and remains correct that Germany must acknowledge its descent into fascism and mass murder. Do we now think Grass was wrong in his analysis of Germany's responsibilities because he apparently did not have the courage to admit he too was caught up in its historical madness?

Yet I can't see why even on a national level, Grass's reluctance to confess should "leave deep scars on his books." Won't their "literary and aesthetic" merits still be available to those readers who retain a respect for "purely literary" values? Won't German readers of the future, themselves no longer in need of his "services" as moral exemplar, be just as able to appreciate Grass's accomplishments as a novelist as those of us outside of Germany who never considered him to be one in the first place? (As opposed to those conservative readers and critics, in Germany and elsewhere, who will always judge him by his "leftist" political sympathies and don't otherwise really care about novels.) I can't imagine that, in the long run, The Tin Drum will be accepted as anything other than the powerful and beautifully rendered work of literature that it is.

Aestheticizing

Another post related to Andrew Delbanco's Melville: His Life and Work. Scott Eric Kaufman remarks of Delbanco's contention that "Melville should not be censured for his failure to condemn slavery because the experience of living in a tumultuous time includes 'both the yes and no of [a] culture'" that "Normally I find this quasi-æstheticist pose painfully insufficient—a flaccid defense of New Critical orthodoxy. . . ."

But this is not an "aestheticist" pose at all. It has nothing to do with aesthetics. "New Critical orthodoxy" would hold that whether Melville was an abolitionist or not has no bearing one way or the other on how we judge his work. We might indeed condemn Melville himself for failing to become an abolitionist (at least overtly), but I can't see how our condemnation would then extend to his fiction. Some of it does deal with slavery ("Benito Cereno"), although even if we were to conclude that, for example, the slave ship captain in this story is portrayed too sympathetically (I don't agree with that interpretation), our literary judgment would (or should) have nothing to do with our moral judgment of Melville's reluctance to see the United States split itself apart to wage civil war.

"Historicism in the service of moral and political complexity," as Scott characterizes Delbanco's approach, is not the same thing as historicism in the service of aesthetic complexity, or any other kind of aesthetic effect. (It should be pointed out that Scott goes on to discuss the merits of "moral and political complexity" in the context of William Dalrymple's NYRB essay, "Inside the Madrassa.") Unfortunately, New Criticism has apparently come to be seen as an all-purpose kind of apologia for complexity of all kinds, a convenient whipping-boy in circumstances in which "complexity" is seen by some as an excuse for evading obvious moral distinctions. But let's be clear: New Criticism was a method of reading works of literature that emphasized the aesthetic qualities of those works, that attempted to identify the characteristics of literature--and of reading literature--that marked it off from other modes of discourse. In doing so, it minimized the importance of history, politics, and ethics, but only to remind us that those are subjects with their own discursive conventions and to suggest how little they are enhanced by yoking poetry or fiction to their service. It says nothing about the role of these subjects--or their complexity--in human affairs more generally.

The only thing "quasi-æstheticist" about Delbanco's account would be an attempt to transfer to Melville's political attitudes a notion of "complexity" that finally applies only to literature, not to life. Melville doesn't get off the hook for transferring the literary complexity of his novels and stories to his decisions in life. (Although some issues are indeed very complex.) Similarly, Delbanco shouldn't be allowed to make Melville's life into another version of his work. I don't say that he does this, but it's the only way I can make sense of the claim that there's something "quasi-aetheticist" about his argument.

Picking Up the Gauntlet

I long ago reconciled myself to the fact that in the "mainstream" print press, only new works of fiction or poetry will be discussed in anything like an approach that could be called "literary criticism." Most book reviews are long on unsubstantiated judgment and free-floating attitude and short on real critical analysis, but at least they do usually concern themselves with the book--the "text"--itself rather than other superfluous items related to the author's life or the sociological context in which the book was written. With most writers from the past--even the very recent past--the situation is quite different. Rarely are the books these writers actually wrote ever regarded as worthy of ongoing consideration in themselves. Instead we get only reviews of the seemingly endless stream of biographies of such writers, themselves a symptom of the way in which talk about writers' lives sadly substitutes for accessible but informed analysis of writers' work.

One might think that real criticism could be found in publications such as the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books, both generally considered "highbrow" sources of book discussion, but even these more intellectual book reviews more often than not confine their "criticism" to reviews of new biographies. Andrew O'Hagan's review of a new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson in the LRB is a good example.

O'Hagan practically admits that interest in Stevenson has been expressed almost exclusively through an obsession with his "life-story":

Robert Louis Stevenson’s afterlife has proved to be an adventure about an adventurer. Friends fought over his belongings, his writings, and the meaning of his character, from the minute he died, and people have never stopped imagining that his life tells a story of human endeavour mounted in the face of impossible odds. Every squeak and turn of his prose has been sounded out for evidence of the living man. . . .

Stevenson is certainly not the only writer whose work "has been sounded out for evidence of the living man." Encyclopedic, multi-volume, and serial biographies of novelists and poets have become commonplace products of the "book industry," and for many readers these biographies must take the place of familiarity with the novels and the poems. Why this should be so is something I don't entirely understand. I am tempted to conclude that "people" aren't finally much interested in works of the imagination, are really much more interested in hearsay and chatter and thus gravitate toward what Steve Mitchelmore in a related post calls "gossipy biographies."

O'Hagan remarks further:

Stevenson’s life has come to seem one that can offer unlimited insight into the mysteries of literary temperament, as if he, practically alone, a hothouse plant, can indicate exactly what it takes to make a human being into a literary personality. . . .

Perhaps this is it. We're more interested in "literary personality" than literature. In the pre-Hollywood past, this is perhaps the closest analogue to a movie star? And for bookish types, obsession with "literary personality" can be safely indulged without seeming as star-crushed as the similar obsessions of the vulgar sorts who read People?

More:

. . .Stevenson’s was a life full of creative compulsions – including the compulsion to be compulsive – and more than other writers he stepped into the role, appearing always to delineate in theatrical detail what it meant to be a writer in the modern world. What it meant to be a male writer, at any rate.

For the psychologically inclined, then. "What it meant [or means] to be a writer in the modern world." I suppose this is more interesting (for some) than "what it means to be a carpenter in the modern world," but, myself, I can't think of a more tedious or inane subject. What it means to be a writer in the modern world is that one writes.

The following is as close to real literary analysis as O'Hagan gets, and, although disappointingly brief, it is exactly the sort of critical insight the further elaboration of which casual readers of Stevenson might appreciate:

For all his verses, his childhood vapours, his vagabond adventures, Stevenson’s real job was to enlarge the psychological potential of the novel. He has nothing in common with Rider Haggard or Jack London. Stevenson’s imagination was filled with the uncanny.

Robert Louis Stevenson is especially the kind of writer who could benefit from, whose books could benefit from, some focused textual analysis. (Not necessarily belabored or overly "academic" exegesis but some "close reading" with a lighter touch.) Too many people think of Stevenson as merely a writer of children's books. Those who have read (seriously read) Kidnapped or The Master of Ballantrae (or even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) know that this is a profound oversimplification. But biographies and reviews of biographies are not going to fulfill the need for extended critical appraisal, without which Stevenson's books may be consigned to the limbo of unread classics.

Are readers really allergic to the kind of modestly-ambitioned literary criticism I am talking about? Given that academic criticism has lost touch with literature itself, not to speak of the needs of general readers, is literary criticism that actually attends to the experience of reading works of literature to be dismissed as a quaint vestige of the past? Perhaps literary weblogs can pick up the gauntlet. (Perhaps they already have.)

Blood from a Stone

In a review of Jay Parini's biography of William Faulkner, J. Peder Zane writes:

We hope that biographies such as Jay Parini's "One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner" will illuminate such episodes. Where did Faulkner get the fortitude to continue chasing what the world and experience saw as only windmills? How to explain the grand artistic leap that produced "The Sound and the Fury"? Perhaps if we know how he did it, we might be able to accomplish the same!

Surely this can't be the reason why otherwise intelligent people would want to read a biography of a writer, particularly one about a writer so disinctive in his accomplishments as Faulkner. Perhaps the idea is that the reader might learn not how to write like Faulkner, but how he summoned up the "fortitude" to continue writing in the face of all evidence that it wasn't getting him anywhere. One could imagine some readers who might be curious about such a thing, but if they have to see the reality of a writer dedicated enough to his talent and his vision to keep at it despite what the world seems to think of him corrorborated in a biography, those readers aren't likely to be the type to "accomplish the same" to begin with.

Why should we want to read biographies, perhaps multiple biographies, of writers whose primary claim on our attention is that they were writers, presumably producing work good enough that we continue to read it? I can't think of any viable reasons why we should. The facts of writing itself, the wheres and hows and how oftens, aren't that interesting, and it is these facts that define the writer's "life" insofar as we ought to have any interest in most writers' lives at all. We should settle for the primary fact that a particular writer found the time and the appropriate circumstances in which to write. Everything else is gossip, at best a record of the sorts of things a writer did when he wasn't writing, which again ought not to be of much concern to us since what separates a writer from everyone else, aside from those facts of writing already mentioned, is the work left behind.

What do biographies usually tell us about that work? In my experience, very little. Perhaps there are some truly great biographical works--Ellman's on Joyce, Edel's on James--that provide insight into their subject's work, that provide us with a way of approaching the work we can't get elsewhere, but unfortunately such books are few and far between. I'm sure Parini's book is perfectly competent, will give its readers a satisfactory enough sense of what Faulkner's life was like. Since Parini is himself both a novelist and a critic, it's quite possible what he has to say about Faulkner's books is interesting as well. But if I want some additional commentary about the books, I'd rather turn to a critical book Parini might want to write about Faulkner's work rather than a biography, which almost inevitably gets caught up in discussions about where ideas came from, upon whom certain characters are based, what episodes in the writer's life were transformed into fiction. I'm more interested in the ideas themselves, in experiencing the characters in their artistically embodied forms. I'm more interested in the fiction.

Zane concludes his review by declaring:

Many questions surrounding Faulkner's life are even harder to answer. Parini does not adequately explain the source of Faulkner's signature achievement: Yoknapatawpha County. Parini focuses on that "matchless time" from the late 1920s to the early 1940s when Faulkner produced at least a half dozen masterpieces, but can't begin to explain why his writing fell off thereafter. And the biographer doesn't explore the suicidal tendencies that fueled his drinking and later his horsemanship (which almost killed him on several occasions).

But then, you can't get blood from a stone. Parini's biography is about as good as it will get, which suggests the need for a different approach. Faulkner requires the kind of attention that has been lavished on another enigmatic William, Shakespeare -- a speculative biography modeled after Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant "Will in the World" or a novel such as Richard Nye's masterful "The Late Mr. Shakespeare." Only by discarding convention can we hope to one day know this unconventional man.

I suppose readers interested in such voyeuristic subjects as Faulkner's drinking or his "horsemanship" might be disappointed in Parini's handling of them, but I can't imagine that anyone interested in Faulkner's fiction rather than his flaws as a human being would care even a microbit about these things. And why Faulkner's "writing fell off" after the early 40s--although I would argue it merely became more uneven--is less important than the fact that it did. The "why" question can even be answered more immediately by looking at the writing itself: Faulkner wrote less well, the concrete explanations for which can be discerned by examining the work itself carerfully.

What would it mean to "explain the source of Faulkner's signature achievement: Yoknapatawpha County." Explain what? Why it is his "signature achievement"? Read the books and find out. Where an analogy to such and such a location or dwelling or geographical feature depicted in the novels might be found in or around Oxford, Mississippi? Who cares? How Faulkner brooded on the history and social realities of Oxford and its environs and was able to transform it all into compelling fiction that also managed to capture something essential about the American south? This is indeed an interesting question, well worth a book, but unfortunately a biography is not the sort of book that is going to be able to answer it very effectively.

As to a "speculative biography" along the lines of Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare: Why on earth would we need such a thing? Greenblatt has written a "biography" meant to compensate for the lack of known facts about Shakespeare. We know the facts about Faulkner. No "unconventional" reshuffling of these facts is going to shed any more light on Faulkner's work. (If we knew the facts about Shakespeare, no such biography of him would accomplish much, either.) I don't know if it's true or not that "Only by discarding convention can we hope to one day know this unconventional man." I still can't figure out why anyone wants to know the "unconventional man" in this way in the first place. Read the books, dammit.

A Prized Local Specimen

Near the beginning of this New York Times Magazine "profile" of Alice Munro, we are told that "she is famously private, someone who needs to be coaxed into giving interviews and finds book touring an ordeal." She ought to have continued to insist on her privacy and turned down this opportunity to meet with Daphne Merkin as well.

Is there some reason why Merkin, who calls Munro "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," also had to tell us that she has "relatively unlined skin," that one finds an "undercurrent of quiet amusement emanating from her gray-green eyes"? Why Munro needed to be quoted as saying that ''I was bulimic for a while before the word existed. I thought I was the only person who discovered it. Most women I knew got a heavy maternal figure. I was determined not to, as part of maintaining my identity.'"? Why we need to know that Daphne Merkin feels "A witty, sometimes brutally observant self, held in check by the need to pass herself off as conventionally and graciously female" while talking to her?

In what way does it help us understand Alice Munro's fiction to know that, where her eldest daughter is concerned, Munro confesses ''She wasn't the utter joy of my life she might have been. I was emotionally more open to the second''? That in high school "I was nice looking, but they left me alone. I would have been so unhappy if I had married one of the boys I went to high school with"? That "Having married at 30 after carving out an independent existence for herself as a schoolteacher, her mother seems always to have yearned for more psychologically and financially luxuriant vistas"?

Is this all a way of cutting the writer down to size, reminding us that, as accomplished a writer as she might be, nevertheless as a human being she's had the same problems as the rest of us, has been as clueless about how to live as we all are? Didn't we already know this? Don't we always know that a given writer has had her share of problems and disappointments, that after searching around for "more clues to the psychological whereabouts" of this writer we're only going to find the same old familiar things? What makes us think that a writer's life must have special interest, or at least that we can't understand her work unless we know for sure her life hasn't? Is this a way of avoiding the task of reading the work in the first place, of finding some external and easy solution to the problem of paying attention to the work itself, taking it on its own terms and settling for the incomplete understanding we'll surely end with?

Must we treat even serious writers of fiction or poetry as if they were celebrities to be interviewed and examined for the quality of their clothing? I have never understood the idea that novels or poems, or even a writer's entire body of work, can't be assessed without knowing something further about the personal circumstances behind them. Nor why biographies of writers have become such a cottage industry. With a few exceptions, most such biographies I have read are essentially excuses for spreading gossip or engaging in ludicrous psychological speculation. Even when the speculation might even illuminate some aspect of the writer's troubled life, rarely does it help us come to terms with the work. Nothing in Daphne Merkin's article helps me understand Alice Munro's fiction more clearly, or, since I have not in the past actually found her fiction all that engaging, why I should it give it another chance. Shouldn't either or both of these goals be more important than that she has "coiffed silvery gray hair," in contrast to "the slightly unkempt curls of her early photos"?