Ivebeenreadinglately

One of the great pleasures of the two excellent biographies I've read in the past week have been their peripheral figures, those side characters who, in thumbnail sketches or recurrent roles, do so much of the work of fleshing out a well-written life and times. Today I'll share one this brief sketch from Jean Edward Smith's Grant (2001) of the towering abolitionist senator Charles Sumner:

For the president, Charles Sumner personified Puritan elitism at its worst: narrow-minded, sanctimonious, ever ready to transform mundane practicalities into precious issues of principle. In Sumner's case those characteristics were exacerbated by a waspish tongue and an effete manner that were difficult to digest for a soldier like Grant. Above all, however, it was Sumner's intellectual arrogance that annoyed the president. When Boutwell asked one day whether he had ever heard sumner converse, Grant, a twinkle in his eye, observed that he had never had the privilege, though he had "often heard him lecture." Like Massachusetts's Ellbridge Gerry, the quintessential loose cannon of the early republic, Sumner treated politics as the pursuit of perfection. When Grant was told that Sumner did not believe in the Bible, he was not surprised. "Well, he didn't write it," said the president. Years later Grant noted sadly that, "Sumner is the only man I was ever anything but my real self to; the only man I ever tried to conciliate by artificial means."

I admire the way that Smith deploys Grant's quotations there: without ever losing track of the main point of the paragraph, which is to let us see Sumner as a political actor and public figure (Remind you of any Liebermans?)*, he uses the quips to keep the ultimate focus on Grant, and Grant's attitude towards Sumner. The wit those quotes display is a pleasant surprise, though perhaps it shouldn't be: Grant is famous for the clarity and economy of his battlefield orders, and what benefits from clarity and economy more than a bon mot?

This weekend, I'll share some scenes featuring my favorite peripheral character in Victoria Glendinning's Jonathan Swift (1998), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. But before I close this post I have to add an amusing aside that Smith includes in a footnote to an 1869 cabinet meeting, the first after a long, heat-induced summer recess:

Summers in Washington before air conditioning were no treat, and the sumer of 1869 was particularly unpleasant. The temperature in Fish's State Department office, supposedly the coolest in the building, hovered in the mid-90s throughout August. [Attorney General] Rockwood Hoar wrote his wife that Washington "is hot! hotter!! hottest!!! hottentot! hottentotter! hottentottest! more hottentotter! most hottentottest!!!!!!!! The daily bill of fare is as follows: For breakfast, Attorney General broiled; For dinner, Attorney General roasted; For supper, Attorney General boiled, and the same dish kept hot in an oven, and served at any hour of the night."

I'm no fan of air conditioning--I would gladly live without it at home--but a 90-plus-degree office is enough to make me shudder.

One of the most difficult tasks that faces a conscientious biographer is divining the intent behind his subject's actions. The messy, conflicted decisions with which we're all familiar from our own lives must at least to some extent be translated into a convincing narrative, the bare facts of a life given some sort of form and meaning. An honorable biographer will hedge where necessary--but delicacy and hesitation are not the stuff of biography, and ultimately judgment must be rendered, or the life under examination will remain amorphous at best.

Thus it's not hard to see why a biographer might occasionally offer a generous take on questionable episodes in his subject's life; when openly acknowledged, such generosity serves as a more effective form of hedging, reminding us that no matter the information we have available, we cannot fully claim to be the just judges that we would ask for our own lives--that, as Jean Renoir put it, "Everybody has their reasons."

That said, I think Adam Sisman takes that generosity a bit far in this passage about the young Wordsworth from The Friendship:

Wordsworth was preparing to return to England. By this time it must have been obvious that [his French paramour] Annette Vallon was pregnant; she would give birth to a daughter on 15 December. So why did Wordsworth leave France, just as he was about to become a father?

At this point, I can't help but imagine Jon Stewart reading this, his face set in a thoughtful, attentive look that slowly gives way to disbelief, bordering on scorn, as Sisman trots out each of the following possible reasons for Wordsworth's flight:

He was certainly short of money. He may have believed that the time was ripe to publish his poems. Maybe he felt that he must return home to secure his future, to establish himself in the Church or some other profession, so that he would be able to provide for Annette and his child. Possibly he intended to marry her once he was established; Annette's subsequent letters suggest that she expected him to do so. But she may have been deluding herself.

You think?
Sisman continues:

It would have been difficult for him to make a career in the Church, with a foreign, Catholic wife and a child born out of wedlock. Perhaps he made promises to Annette that he did not mean to keep. The frustrating truth is that there is not enough evidence on which to base anything more than guesses at Wordsworth's intentions.

That last statement, while, strictly speaking, true, reeks of weasel. We may not have enough evidence in this particular case, but we do have centuries and centuries of evidence of what relatively privileged young men are thinking when they disappear just before their girlfriends give birth to illegitimate children, and it's not, "Better hurry back and get my poems published!" Sure, it's possible that Wordsworth was more honorable than the typical feckless young man, but the fact that he ultimately let nearly ten years elapse before he again saw Annette, let alone their child, certainly suggests otherwise.

But that seems too sad--even angering--a note on which to end, so in closing I'll turn to a line that Dorothy Wordsworth wrote about her brother to a friend in 1791:

William has a great attachment to poetry, which is not the most likely thing to produce his advancement in the world.

An assessment with which all of us, poets and critics alike, can surely agree--but perhaps we can draw resolve to continue our chosen course from these lines from Emily Dickinson:

Reverse cannot befall
That fine Prosperity
Whose Sources are interior--
As soon--Adversity

A Diamond--overtake
In far--Bolivian Ground--
Misfortune hath no implement
Could mar it--if it found--

Are you listening, crazy finance guys who destroyed the world economy?

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Being someone who fully admits to (oh, let's be honest--revels in) being about as lit-nerdy as you can get without assuming the stifling purposefulness of academia . . . how on earth did I not know that The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2007) existed until I saw its forthcoming paperback edition listed in Oxford University Press's Fall catalog?

Seriously, can you think of anything that would be more up my alley, aside perhaps from The Anthony Powell Guide to Anthony Powell and Friends, with Digressions on Proust and Richard Stark? Gossip, biography, literary opinions, goofiness, gossip--what more could I want? Unwilling to wait for the paperback to be published, I ordered a copy of the hardcover posthaste; the first entry I happened to turn to, on Edgar Allan Poe, did not disappoint.

The Poe section is drawn largely from Jeffrey Meyers's Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy (1992), and anyone who, like me, spent significant portions of their childhood terrified by Poe's dark visions can surely take a grim pleasure from this first selection:

The superstitious skeptic, who could be terrified by his own imagination, later confessed to the editor George Graham that "he disliked the dark, and was rarely out at night. On one occasion he said to me, 'I believe that demons take advantage of the night to mislead the unwary--although, you know,' he added, 'I don't believe in them.'"

Even more fun is this entry, which presents a dialogue recalled by Joel Benton between Poe and poet William Ross Wallace on the streets of New York, shortly after Poe had completed "The Raven":

"Wallace," said Poe, "I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written."

"Have you?" said Wallace. "That is a fine achievement."

"Would you like to hear it?" said Poe.

"Most certainly," said Wallace.

Thereupon Poe began to read the soon-to-be famous verses in his best way--which . . . was always an impressive and captivating way. When he had finished it he turned to Wallace for his approval of them--when Wallace said:

"Poe--they are fine; uncommonly fine."

"Fine?" said Poe, contemptuously. "Is that all you can say for this poem? I tell you it's the greatest poem that was ever written."

I don't know what strikes me more in this exchange, the thought of Poe reading "The Raven" aloud in his "impressive and captivating way"--what that must have been like!--or the circumspect calm of Wallace's "Have you? That is a fine achievement." I deeply admire that degree of unflappability.

My favorite of the entries on Poe, however, is this one, also taken from Meyers, if for no other reason than that it inescapably calls to mind one of Poe's most prominent fans, Jorge Luis Borges:

It was extremely ironic that the author of the article on "Whirlpool" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica gave Poe credit for information that Poe had lifted from an earlier edition of the same Encyclopedia [for his story "A Descent into the Maelstrom"], and then quoted as facts the parts of the story that Poe himself had invented.

Having invoked Borges, I can't help but end with the unforgettable epitaph to Poe that he offered up, relatively casually, at the close of an introduction he wrote for an edition of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener":

Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous publicity, have conspired to make unknown great men one of America's traditions. Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; so was Melville.

Clamorous my support of The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes may be; erroneous I promise you it is not. I'll have more to share from it in the coming months, I'm sure.

{Photo of St. Boniface Cemetery, Chicago, by rocketlass.}

From Hilary Spurling's review in the Guardian of Peter Ackroyd's new Poe: A Life Cut Short:

Poe's brilliant, erratic, abbreviated career stands to gain rather than lose from the form of brief life patented by Ackroyd. A short biography is not a long one shrunk. Instead of patiently accumulated details, emotional complexity and architectural shaping, it operates by lightning strikes, atmospheric colouring, impressionistic techniques of concision and suggestion.

In that passage above, Spurling has hit on exactly what I love about brief lives. By trimming the dross that even an exceptional full-length biography can't entirely avoid--that year, say, when the subject did little but write self-pitying letters to his publisher--the author of a brief life is freed up to concentrate on the important stuff: the goofy details, telling anecdotes, and mostly inconsequential oddities that dot any closely examined life.

The following two paragraphs about J. M. W. Turner's father, from Ackroyd's brief life of the painter, are a good example:

Old Dad settled very happily and comfortably into Sandycombe Lodge, where he took particular pleasure in tending the garden. On Tuesdays he visited the market at Brentford, and would return with the week's provisions stored in a knotted blue handkerchief. In the spring and summer he would supervise the gallery in Harley Street, when his son was exhibiting, and often made the journey from Twickenham on foot. When Constable and Farington once visited the gallery, the old man told them that "he had walked from Twickenham this morning, eleven miles; his age, 68. In two days the last week he said he had walked fifty miles." He might have used his son's pony, Crop-Ear, but for some reason chose not to do so. Perhaps the beast was considered to be Turner's sole possession; he rode on it for various painting expeditions, and declared that "it would climb like a cat and never get tired." When it died, after strangling itself on its own fastenings, he buried it in the garden.

Old Dad did in the end find an alternative mode of travelling. "Why lookee here," he told an acquaintance, "I have found a way at last of coming up cheap from Twickenham to open my son's gallery. I found out the inn where the market-gardeners baited their horses; I made friends with one on 'em and now, for a glass of gin a day, he brings me up in his cart on top of the vegetables."

As much fun as Ackroyd's 150-ish-page lives are, I actually prefer the far more condensed form that was favored by--or that was the product of the general racketiness of--John Aubrey. On almost any page of his Brief Lives, you come across something great, phrased in Aubrey's unique, elliptical style--like this life of mathematician Henry Briggs:

Looking one time on the mappe of England he observed that the two Rivers, the Thames and that Avon (which runnes to Bathe and so to Bristowe) were not far distant, scilicet, about 3 miles. He sees 'twas but about 25 miles from Oxford; getts a horse and viewes it and found it to be a levell ground and easie to be digged. Then he considered the chardge of cutting between them and the convenience of making a mariage between those Rivers which would be of great consequence for cheape and safe carrying of Goods between London and Bristow, and though the boates go slowly and with meanders, yet considering they goe day and night they would be at their journey's end almost as soon as the Waggons, which often are overthrowne and liquours spilt and other goods broken. Not long after this he dyed and the Civill Warres brake-out.

I found myself thinking of Aubrey the other night when reading the Hesperus Press's very satisfying collection of some of Virginia Woolf's biographical writings, The Platform of Time (2007). The opening paragraph of Woolf's brief life of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, which first appeared in the Hogarth Press's edition of Cameron's photographs, has a touch of Aubrey to it:

Julia Margaret Cameron, the third daughter of James Pattle of the Bengal Civil service, was born on July 11, 1815. Her father was a gentleman of marked, but doubtful, reputation, who after living a riotous life and earning the title of "the biggest liar in India," finally drank himself to death and was consigned to a cask of rum to await shipment to England. The cask was stood outside the widow's bedroom door. In the middle of the night she heard a violent explosion, rushed out, and found her husband, having burst the lid of the coffin, bolt upright menacing her in death as he had menaced her in lift. "The shock sent her off her head then and there, poor thing, and she died raving." It is the father of Miss Ethel Smyth who tells the story (Impressions that Remained), and he goes on to say that, after "Jim Blazes" had been nailed down again and shipped off, the sailors drank the liquor in which the body was preserved, "and, by Jove, the rum ran out and got alight and set the ship on fire! And while they were trying to extinguish the flames she ran on a rock, blew up, and drifted ashore just below Hooghly. And what do you think the sailors said? 'That Pattle had been such a scamp that the devil wouldn't let him go out of India!'"

Though I don't know if Aubrey can actually be claimed as an influence on Woolf's biographical technique, he surely would have enjoyed her handling of the unlikely anecdotes.

Which is more than I'm willing to presume about my own sub-Aubreyan efforts, the continuing series of Brief Lives of the Hip-Hop Stars that I'm writing for the New-York Ghost. For those benighted souls out there who didn't take my advice a while back and subscribe to the Ghost, here's the most recent installment:

Levi Stahl's "Brief Lives of the Hip-Hop Stars"

Dr. Octagon

It seems impossible to conclude that Dr. Octagon ever spake any oaths to Hippocrates; rather, his god of choice seems to have been some hideous concoction partaking of the most unseemly Characters of Dr. Crippen and Casanova, if one is to go by the account of his own Rhymes, viz., that the Dr. Octagon did at several times take Liberties, notably of a sexual nature, with the ladies who came to him for gynaecological advice. It is also said of him that once he did introduce a Horse into the Precincts of a Hospital (Quaere de hoc), with many deleterious effects. However, even his staunchest Opponents on the Medical Board, however, could scant deny the innovative nature of his Treatments for Moosebumps, Chimpanzee Acne, and those rare but wracking infestations of Rectal Bees. Some many days, Dr. Octagon was known to site in his Chambers with his Head encased in a Space Helmet, from beneath which he would bellow challenges to philosophically minded guests to prove that he was not, in fact, in Space. In his later years, presumably barred from the practice of medicine, he is said to have assumed the moniker of Kool Keith and taken up some profession relating to robotics, which I confess I little understand.

All of which reminds me that, rather than writing this, I ought to be working on the next installment. While I do that, and while poor John Aubrey rightfully grumbles at me from beyond the grave, you can go here to subscribe to the Ghost, gratis!

To write a life of Mark Twain must be an incredibly daunting task. The man lived a long and eventful life and wrote constantly (including more than 12,000 extant letters!). Much of what he wrote was ephemeral, a lot of it has dated poorly, and some is downright bad. Anyone who can grapple with all of that and come away with a convincing, compelling life is to be praised.

But they should also be sure to get their manuscript into the hands of a close-reading, hands-on editor. Sadly, Ron Powers doesn't seem to have done that with his Mark Twain (2005). A good editor would have prevented the following annoying, recurring problems from marring what is otherwise a fine book: anecdotes, incidents, and quips that are repeated, turning up first in the brief initial sketch of a character or period, then again when they occur naturally in the chronology; overuse of particular pet words, ranging from the wildly obscure ("absquatulate," which Powers plucks from one of Twain's letters and uses four or five times) to the simply uncommon ("anneal," which turns up a few too many times, never in connection with metalworking); the occasional slip into parade-of-events-style contextualization that is the hallmark of lousy biographies; too-easy reference to modern-day cultural figures and events; and simple mistakes, such as identifying Honus Wagner, the greatest shortstop ever to play baseball, as a third baseman.

More important, a truly daring editor would have convinced Powers to drop most of his attempts at humor. I understand the impulse; after reading Twain it's really hard not to start thinking in his sarcastic, ironic terms. But that's one of the jobs of a good editor: to point out that when put up against some of the best humor writing in American history--a fair amount of which, particularly in the letters, is still quite funny--the biographer's sallies are sure to seeem flat at best, lame and forced at worst.

I don't want to sound relentlessly critical; I meant what I said in the opening paragraph. Twain's life is a tough task, and Powers handles it well. He delivers a Clemens that is unsimplified and unreduced: a stormy, fractious, emotional, talented man who seemed to only very rarely be able assess himself with any dispassion or objectivity, which both generated and compromised his art. Powers juggles Twain's crazily peripatetic life, his scads of friends and relatives, and his many, many projects (both completed and aborted) while never losing the narrative thread or allowing the tumult to explode into confusion. It also never bogs down, remaining interesting, even fun, despite the darkness that shadowed Twain's later years.

What I'm most thankful for, though, is Powers's delving into Twain's papers, including his letters and notebooks. Twain's voluminous correspondence--which must have been a brutal slog at times--yields some real gems for the reader. My favorites are the letters sent to Twain in the wake of the success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, many of which were brazen requests for some form of assistance. Many, many people wrote for literary advice:

Do you think you could find time to look over say 400 pages of M.S.S. written. Something out of the treadmill style of the latter day novels?

On that envelope, Twain scribbled, "An absurd request." Others he filed away under "From an ass." No word on how he categorized the following inarguably logical request for funds:

Gracious Sir;
You are rich. To lose $10.00 would not make you miserable.

I am poor. To gain $10.00 would not make me miserable.

Please send me $10.00 (ten dollars). . . .

From Twain's own letters Powers turns up the following lines, which as a Chicagoan I can't resist sharing, written following a visit to Chicago in December of 1871, mere weeks after the Chicago Fire:

There is literally no Chicago here. I recognize nothing here, that ever I saw before.

Then there's this off-hand speculation on genius from Twain's notebook, written December 21st, 1866:

Geniuses are people who dash off wierd [sic], wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter . . . people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.

Finally, because it serves as the flip side of my occasional feature on works lost to fire, I'll close with this extract from a letter Twain sent his friend and editor William Dean Howells in August of 1876:

I . . . began another boys' book--more to be at work than anything else. . . . I have written 400 pages on it--therefore it is very nearly half done. It is Huck Finn's Autobiography. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, & may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.

Have a great New Year's. Be careful what you burn.

I just got back from Christmas travels, so no time for a real post today. Instead, I offer you a couple of lines from Ron Powers's Mark Twain (2005) that serve as a good example of one most fun aspects of biography as a form. The lines describe Samuel Clemens's mother, Jane Clemens, whose mercurial husband had just died, more or less bankrupt, leaving her with a clutch of children to raise. Jane, who was (not unreasonably) never all that stable herself, began to withdraw from active participation in the lives of her children:

Jane Clemens, not yet forty-four, drew inward, wept frequently, became absorbed in omens and dreams. Her flame-colored hair was graying. She took up pipe-smoking, played cards, accumulated cats, and grew deeply absorbed in the color red.

It's just three lines full of throwaway detail, but they deliver an oddly effective suggestion of roundedness and reality, intriguing and suggestive. Their sidelong concision hints of John Aubrey's elliptical style. And instantly we move on, because, despite playing a prominent role in her son's life, Jane Clemens is not the focus of this biography, and it will take hundreds of pages to attempt to limn her son's character alone.

When you read lots of history and biography of a period, occasionally those little incidental portraits start to interconnect, as figures from the margins of one life turn up as central to another; eventually a satisfyingly subtle tapestry of interwoven lives begins to emerge. It's one of the best ways--and maybe the most fun way--I know to really begin to get the flavor of a period.

Finally, how would I fare in that sort of three-line capsule summary? Something like this, perhaps?

Levi, not yet thirty-four, shaved his head and spent ever more of his time reading and running alone. He took up martini-drinking, bought books compulsively, accumulated cats, and became deeply absorbed in the sometimes-pink shade of his wife's hair.

Hmm. Though that last bit may be an exaggeration, it's still clear that I need to get out more.

(Photo by rocketlass)

Saturday night, Stacey and I had Marc, our old friend from my bookselling days (whom long ago became a minister in the Universal Life Church via the Internet so that he could perform our wedding ceremony), over for dinner to belatedly celebrate his and my birthdays.

As always, it was a great night full all sorts of talk--but always circling back to books. Late in the evening, I asked Marc if he'd ever read Laura Riding:

Marc Only her short stories. They're intense--incredibly oppressive. She could describe a tea party and you'd feel like she was in the teapot. In her way, she's as intense as Dickens.

Me But whereas Dickens is standing over your shoulder manically pointing things out because he thinks they're fascinating and he really wants to make sure you aren't going to miss them, she's directing your attention because she wants to make sure you're looking where she wants you to?

Marc Exactly. Those stories are scary. They'll set your chest hair on fire.

I asked Marc about Riding because all I really know of her is through her longtime association with Robert Graves, which I've mentioned in passing before. As Michael Dirda explains:

[Riding was] a hauntingly strange writer--the young Auden called her the "only living philosophical poet" and acknowledged her influence. . . . Graves admired her poems and started a correspondence that eventually led to Riding's being offered a job as his secretary. As anyone might guess, this was a bad idea. Before long, the two poets were lovers, though [Gates's wife] Nancy didn't seem to mind much. A rocky marriage slowly turned into a steady menage a trois.

From all accounts Riding possessed a charismatic, forceful personality, a superb mind, and a psychological acumen that permitted her to bend almost anyone to her will. . . . Robert once remarked, "You have no idea of Laura's holiness."

Having found what he perhaps had needed all his life, Graves really did seem to essentially worship Riding, but that didn't make their lives together any easier. There followed dual suicide attempts, a move to Mallorca, and, on Riding's part, a temporary (but lengthy) renunciation of sex. Later, the couple spent an extremely stormy, destructive, and mysterious summer in an old stone farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. As Dirda explains, "No one likes to talk about the weeks that followed."

But someone eventually did. Those weeks form the malefic heart of Once As It Was (2002), a memoir by former New Directions president Griselda Jackson Ohannessian, who with her parents lived down the hill from the Graves-Riding farmhouse. Though the first two-thirds of the book are a remarkably charming, affectless, even naive account of a Depression childhood--one that calls to mind Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford--the story darkens with the arrival of Graves and Riding in 1939, the summer of Griselda's twelfth year. Of Riding, she says:

I thought Miss Riding a curious sight. She was wearing clothes that seemed to me more like a costume than everyday wear. Maria remembers a sort of elaborate hunting jacket, bright red. She was wearing dangling jewelry and I think she was carrying a parasol or fan. She noticeably had on makeup; one could see the layer of powder on her face. Her looks were intriguing. One didn't usually see ordinary people wearing ankle-length skirts or putting on makeup in the daytime back then. One minute she would seem almost ugly; another, she would look like a regal personage, maybe Egyptian, from long ago. She had very blue deep-set eyes and brown, bushy, wiry hair held back with a headband or a ribbon. Her voice seemed rather odd. She had a bit of a nasal twang and behind her English accent lurked a more plebeian American-city one.

(Graves, meanwhile, "was large and burly and looked as if he had bad breath, as indeed he did.")

Graves and Riding become fixtures at Griselda's parents' house, and it's not long before she begins to notice her parents and their friends falling meekly into line behind Riding:

I did not like the way the other grownups treated her. "Yes, Laura." "Of course, Laura." "You're right, Laura." I did not like Laura's acceptance of their deference. I wasn't comfortable in the heavy atmosphere--all the hustle and bustle, all the talk. Once, when crossing the front lawn, I passed them all sitting in a circle, no one speaking. Then Robert said something and Laura snapped at him. "Be quiet." And he was. I did not like the way either of them had behaved--he subservient, she dictatorial.

The tension builds in the family as Riding extends her control--though she's never able to extend that power to Griselda, which openly angers her. In the manner of Henry James or Richard Hughes, Ohannessian presents the scene through the surprising perceptiveness native to children: though the adults seem to be forcing themselves to deny it, Griselda clearly sees that the situation, suffused with secrecy and malevolence, is becoming untenable. Then one night at dinner Griselda's mother makes her stand:

The meal was almost over. It had not been a pleasant one. Suddenly Ma stood up and announced,
"I am taking the children for a walk."

"Robert will go with you," Laura said.

"No he will not," Ma replied.

"Not now, Katharine," Laura commanded.

"They are my children," Ma replied, "and if I want to take them on a walk, I will do so."

Did Laura say "You will not"? It was at the very least implied. Ma pushed back her chair, got up, and turned toward the door. I had a feeling that I had to stand up to Laura. I stood up, my troops stood too, and we followed Ma.

In the gathering dusk, they walk--and on the way Griselda's mother has an absolutely bloodcurdling breakdown, followed soon after by the first in what would become a decades-long series of institutionalizations.

Griselda, meanwhile, is left with her father and Graves, both completely in thrall to Laura; her confrontation with Riding a few nights later reads like something out of the creepiest of psychological horror novels:

I was stopped in my tracks by a great wave of fear. I was dizzy, there was a buzzing in my ears, I could hardly breathe, I was losing myself, I was going off my rocker. . . . Then I heard the click-clack--Laura's footsteps were always resounding. I knew without a trace of doubt that she was coming and she was coming quickly and I, having moved my bed catty-corner to the door, was trapped. There was no place to hide, no exit. I was cornered and she was coming and I knew she knew the condition I was in. She was going to push me over an edge--that's what I believed and still do.

At the last second, Riding is stopped in her tracks through the inexplicable intervention of what Griselda at the time--and, apparently, for the rest of her life--took to be some sort of higher power. Laura's uncanny power--at least where Griselda is concerned--is broken. At Bookexpo, I mentioned the creepiness of that scene to a woman working in the New Directions booth, and she assured me that Griselda retained that belief in the invisible but palpable workings of good and evil in the world to this day.

Years ago, I remember arguing with a girlfriend about the value of biography as an element of how we understand and judge writers. Back then, young and certain, I took a purist's position, scoffing at the notion that biography could provide any insight into a stand-alone work of art. Now, as evidenced by my love of Javier Marias's Written Lives, I find myself interested in writers' lives not only for what they might teach me about their work, but also, I'm not ashamed to say, on a much baser, near-prurient level as well. The Graves-Riding story is so complicated and fascinating, so shocking, that at this distance, the principals long dead, it has become a sort of work itself--odd and unpleasant, but damned hard to turn away from.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, anyone read Riding? Is Marc right? Will her stories set my chest hair on fire? And, knowing all this, how can I not give her a try?

I've been a casual fan of William James ever since discovering The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) about a dozen years ago. James is one of those philosophers whose writing and very thought give a concrete sense of the person behind them, the life force animating the thinking; his writing gives the feeling almost of being thought through as it's been presented to you--it's an active thought, alive with possibility. Take this, for example, from his lectures on pragmatism, as presented by Robert B. Richardson in his splendid new biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006):

Pragmatism, says James, accepts the possibility that the world is various, pluralistic, "made up of a lot of eaches." It accepts, too, the possibliity that all may not be at last right with the world. "I find myself," he says, "willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying 'no play' . . . I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers and no total preservation of all that is . . . When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is enough to accept."

Richardson's biography is first and foremost an intellectual biography of James, an exploration of the way that his ideas evolved in the context of late-nineteenth century scientific and philosophical thought. But he also delivers a detailed, compelling account of James's life as well, woven thickly with quotations from his writings, speeches, diaries, and letters; what emerges is a portrait of a man who, despite constant physical ailments, neurotic exhaustion, and various forms of depression, was vibrantly alive to new ideas and new experiences, always willing to consider new ways of looking at the world. Fighting against received ideas and philosophies that would limit the validity of human experience in favor of a concept of a purpose or an absolute, James continually returned to the primacy of individual experience and our efforts to make sense of it.

The story of William James also necessarily involves a biographer in the fascinating, complicated story of the entire James family. Of his brother, novelist Henry, William once said, "he is a native of the James family, and has no other country," and that could, it seems, be said of the entire family. His sister Alice is known to us now largely through her diary; she has been taken up in recent decades as a feminist icon, her physical and emotional problems seen as resulting from the strictures placed on women in those days. But none of the James children came through the hothouse childhood atmosphere created by their self-involved, independently wealthy father entirely intact. William and Henry suffered physical and emotional problems all their lives, while Wilky and Bob led difficult, seemingly unhappy lives, neither one ever quite finding his place in the world.

Despite that, the bond among the siblings remains strong and fascinating after all these years--especially the one tying William and Henry and Alice. William's letters to Henry, always full of interesting thoughts and opinions, become remarkably entertaining every time William reads one of Henry's novels: he invariably scolds Henry for not being clear enough, suggesting that he try, just once, writing a straightforward story. It's impossible for me to imagine the outcome had Henry, whose very instruments were occlusion and indirection, taken up his brother's challenge.

The desire that thought be expressed straightforwardly and openly also comes through in the letter William wrote to his sister when he learned she had terminal cancer. In closing, after a frank discussion of her impending death and the uncertain prospect of immortality, he closes with

It may seem odd for me to talk to you in this cool way about your end; but . . if one has things present to one's mind, and I know they are present enough to your mind, why not speak them out"

It's the frankness of a philosopher and of a brother who knows his sister and her mind--and respects both utterly.

Richardson delivers that level of detail and nuance throughout William James. It's a tad too long, and he backtracks a bit too much, occasionally repeating examples, but it's all in service of giving as complete a picture as possible of the man behind the thought. And while Richardson doesn't whitewash James's faults, ultimately he presents a James who is admirable and inspiring. I put down the book seeing James's intellectual energy and openness to new ideas as a real goal to strive for; that, it seems to me, is surely the mark of a good biography.

Tomorrow, more on William James--but this time on James and spiritualism. That's right: ghost stories coming up.

From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755)

Biographer: A writer of lives, a relator not of the history of nations, but of the actions of particular persons.
"Our Grubstreet biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers, on purpose to make a penny of him."—Addison's Freeholders, No. 35

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

When Malcolm Lowry got into trouble in 1946 during his second stay in Mexico and, in an attempt not to be expelled from the country, asked the sub-chief of the Immigration department in Acapulco what there was against him from his previous visit in 1938, the government employee took out a file, tapped it with one finger and said: "Drunk, Drunk, Drunk. Here is your life." These words are as brutal as they are exact, and perhaps, on more compassionate lips, the right word would have been "calamitous," because Lowry does seem to have been the most calamitous writer in the whole history of literature, which is no mean feat, given the intense competition in the field.

From John Aubrey's Brief Lives (169?)

Thomas Chaloner had a trick some times to goe into Wesminster-hall in a morning in Term-time, and tell some strange story (Sham) and would come thither again about 11 or 12 to have the pleasure to heare how it spred; and sometime it would be altered, with additions, he could scarce know it to be his owne. He was neither proud nor covetous, nor a hypocrite, nor apt to do injustice, but apt to revenge

After the restauration of King Charles the Second, he kept the Castle at the Isle of Man, where he had a pretty Wench that was his Concubine; where when Newes was brought to him that there were some come to the Castle to demaund it for his Majestie, he spake to his Girle to make him a Possett, into which he putt, out of a paper he had, some Poyson, which did, in a very short time, make him fall a vomiting exceedingly; and after some time vomited nothing but Bloud. His Retchings were so violent that the Standers by were much grieved to behold it. Within three howres he dyed. The Demandants of the Castle came and sawe him dead: he was swoln so extremely that they could not see any eie he had, and no more of his nose than the tip of it, which shewed like a wart, and his Coddes were swoln as big as one's head.

From Francine du Plessix Gray's Them: A Memoir of Parents (2005)

The very next afternoon, shortly after returning to [the school] Les Roches, Alex started vomiting blood. The nurse at the school infirmary told him that "nobody vomits blood" and that he'd probably eaten too much currant jelly.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

According to contemporary accounts, Rimbaud never changed his clothes and therefore smelled disgusting, left any bed he slept in full of lice, drank constantly (preferably absinthe), and rewarded his acquaintances with nothing but impertinence and insults.

From William Hazlitt's "The Indian Juggler" (1821), reprinted in On the Pleasure of Hating

Ingenuity is genius in trifles, greatness is genius in undertakings of much pith and moment. A clever or ingenious man is one who can do any thing well, whether it is worth doing or not; a great man is one who can do that which when done is of the highest importance. Themistocles said he could not play on the flute, but that he could make of a small city a great one. This gives a pretty good idea of the distinction in question. . . . John Hunter was a great man. That anyone might see without the smallest skill in surgery. His style and manner shewed the man. He would set about cutting up the carcase of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of marble. Lord Nelson was a great naval commander, but for myself, I have not much opinion of a sea-faring life. Sir Humphry Davy was a great chemist, but I am not sure he is a great man. I am not a bit the wiser for one of his discoveries, nor I never met with any one that was.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

Lowry did not make a very good impression during his stay in Ronda and especially in Granada: at the time, although still very young, he was fat, drank wine all the time, and insisted on wearing huge Cordoban hats of a kind that no one has ever worn. In Granada he soon became known as "the drunken Englishman;" people poked fun and the Guardia Civil were also keeping an eye on him. [Conrad] Aiken's wife remembers Lowry walking around the city surrounded by a troop of children who were all laughing at him and whom he was unable to shake off.

From Francine du Plessix Gray's Them: A Memoir of Parents (2005)

Throughout these innocent adventures she had retained much of the anarchic extravagance of her Soviet youth: upon entering a restaurant and seeing a group of her friends at the other end of a crowded room, she had simply jumped onto a table and leaped from table to table until she reached her pals, impervious to any disturbance she might cause to the diners on the way.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

It is hardly surprising that Djuna Barnes should have considered her first name as so unequivocally hers when Anais Nin took the liberty of using it, for most of the names in her family seem to have been chosen precisely so that no one else could usurp them. Suffice it to say that among her own siblings and ancestors were the following extravagant examples, which, in many cases, do not even give a clue as to the gender of the person bearing them: Urlan, Niar, Unade, Reon, Hinda, Zadel, Gaybert, Culmer, Kilmeny, Thurn, Zendon, Saxon, Shangar, Wald, and Llewellyn. At least the last name is recognized in Wales. Perhaps it is understandable that, on reaching adulthood, some members of the Barnes family adopted banal nicknames like Bud or Charlie.

From David Riggs's The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004)

During the months leading up to Marlowe's murder in a hired room near London, the pamphleteer Robert Greene publicly predicted that if the "famous gracer of tragedians" did not repent his blasphemies, God would soon strike him down. A few days before Marlowe was killed, the spy Richard Baines informed the Queen's Privy Council that he was a proselytizing atheist, a counterfeiter, and a consumer "of boys and tobacco."

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

Adah Isaacs Menken had numerous lovers, some of whom, inevitably, were writers, such as Alexandre Dumas pere at the end of his days and that masochistic poet par excellence, Algernon Charles Swinburne, that tiny red-haired, Victorian, homosexual drunkard, addicted to the whip.

From Anthony Powell's review of Rare Sir William Davenant, by Mary Edmond, collected in Some Poets, Artists, and "A Reference for Mellors" (2005)

Miss Edmond has been extremely ingenious in digging out material about Davenant; in fact one is staggered by her research, which proves the point that scholarly biography is by far the most entertaining kind. Davenant, as might be expected, was not very good at paying his tailor, who sued him (though Davenant continued to have his clothes made there), which leads to a lot of relevant information.

From "The Life and Times of John Aubrey," (1949) by Oliver Lawson Dick, in the David R. Godine edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives

Having decided to write a life, Aubrey selected a page in one of his notebooks and jotted down as quickly as possible everything that he could remember about the character concerned: his friends, his appearance, his actions, his books, and his sayings. Any facts or dates that did not occur to him on the spur of the moment were left blank, and as Aubrey was so extremely sociable that he was usually suffering from a hangover when he came to put pen to paper, the number of these omissions was often very large.