Biography is of course subject to other skewerings, in our time the political not least among them. The politics of the biographer, if he allows them into his work, can have fatal effect. I first noted this some years ago in Andrew Motion’s biography of the poet Philip Larkin. Humorlessly picking his way through the Philip Larkin-Kingsley Amis correspondence and other of Larkin’s letters, Motion, with a great display of self-virtue, convicts Larkin of misogyny, racism, and the other standard charges leveled in the court of political correctness. This has since been set right by a recent biography of Larkin by a man named James Booth, who has shown Philip Larkin to be a more than decent man in his relations with women, the people who worked for him at Hull University Library, and everyone else who ever encountered him.
Years before this, something similar befell H. L. Mencken, who was also brought in by the political correctness police, anti-Defamation League division. In Mencken’s case, to the usual complaints of racism and sexism, anti-Semitism was added. These charges, too, turned out to be unjust. Mencken, such was the largeness of his heart, married a woman knowing she was dying; he did so principally to bring comfort to her. Mencken’s best friends were, in fact, Jews. Dim-witted biographers seem unable to decipher the difference, as in the cases of Larkin and Mencken both, between comically expressed reactionary opinions and lives marked by gracious actions.
A flagrant case of politics ruining biography is that of a Stanford professor named Arnold Rampersad in his biography of the novelist Ralph Ellison. I came to the Rampersad biography, published in 2007, with a special interest, hoping he might solve a minor but genuine mystery for me. Many years ago Ralph Ellison invited me to join him for lunch at the Century Club in New York. I met him there on a sunny winter’s day at noon, and departed in the dusk at 4:30 p.m., with the same happy glow as a boy I departed double-feature movie matinees. We talked about serious things, gossiped, told each other jokes, laughed a great deal. I enjoyed myself hugely, believed Ellison did too, and departed the Century Club confident I had made a new friend of a writer I much admired.
Soon afterward I wrote to Ralph (as he now was to me) to thank him for the lunch and an immensely enjoyable afternoon. No answer. A week or so later, I wrote to him again, inviting him to write for The American Scholar, of which I was then the editor. No answer. After an interval of another three or four weeks, I wrote yet again to inquire if he had received my earlier letters. Nothing. Puzzled, I wrote to him no more. Had I so misperceived what I thought the reciprocal pleasure of that lunch at the Century Club?
A few years after this, I had a letter from a reader of mine asking if I knew Ralph Ellison. He went on to say that he and his wife had met Ellison and his wife at the Newport Jazz Festival, and the four of them spent the most pleasing weekend together. Afterwards, though, Ellison had answered none of his letters. What, he wondered, as I earlier had wondered, might have gone wrong?
On the strangeness of Ralph Ellison’s behavior in these instances, Professor Rampersad, his biographer, sheds no light. Instead much of his attention is taken up by finding Ralph Ellison nowhere near so virtuous a man as he, Arnold Rampersad, apparently is. Rampersad’s charge against Ralph Ellison, adding on to his being a bad brother and a poor husband, is that, in Rampersad’s words, Ellison’s “life is a cautionary tale to be told against the dangers of elitism and alienation, especially alienation from other blacks.”
What Ralph Ellison turns out to have been guilty of is not having, so to say, got on the bus. He was and remained an integrationist, and thought the black power movement a grave mistake. He insisted on the complexity of black experience in America, and refused to play the victimhood game, refraining from the rhetoric of public rage and demagoguery. He was an artist before he was a politician, and in the realm of art was an unapologetic elitist, believing in pursuing the best in western high culture and African-American folk culture to the exclusion of all else. He did not line up to praise young black writers simply because they were black. Art, he held, was color-blind. Nor did he praise established black writers—James Baldwin, Toni Morrison—if he did not think them truly praiseworthy. Rampersad’s charge finally comes down to what he takes to be Ralph Ellison’s pernicious opinions, and the way one knows they are pernicious is that they do not comport with his biographer’s opinions.
Left to speculate upon what was behind Ralph Ellison’s odd behavior toward me and, I gather, others he had charmed, I have concluded that Ellison was a gracious and gregarious man who later came to regret his own natural sociability. In 1952 at the age of 39 he wrote Invisible Man, a novel that won all the prizes and worthy acclaim of its day. Although he lived on for another forty-two years and produced two excellent collections of essays, Ralph Ellison never wrote another novel. How this must have worn on him psychologically one cannot hope fully to know. He would go out into the world, his natural charm easily making him friends, and afterwards return to his desk, the scene of decades-long defeat, determined not to waste further time on these newly made friends. Or so I have conjectured.
In his biography of Ralph Ellison, Professor Rampersad not merely wrongly degraded a good man, but, in his biography’s pretense to definitiveness—the work runs to 672 pages—the book is likely to scare away other Ellison biographers for decades, which is a sadness and an injustice. To be definitive has increasingly become the goal for contemporary biographers. A definitive biography, by current standards, leaves nothing out. Straightaway one sees the impossibility of the goal. Unless one does a day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute account of a life, definitiveness, defined as utter thoroughness, cannot be achieved.
The greatest biography ever written, James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which I reread within the past year, is not definitive. For one thing, the book largely shirks Samuel Johnson’s early life, and concentrates on the twenty-one years during which Boswell knew Johnson, roughly from 1763 to 1784, beginning when he was twenty-two and Johnson fifty-four. Nor has any biographer ever intruded himself, in a biography, so completely as Boswell did in his book about Johnson. So much is this the case that some have claimed that the Life of Johnson is, two for the price of one here, both a biography and an autobiography.
The making of the Life of Johnson is of course Boswell’s emphases on Samuel Johnson’s habits, his “inflexible dignity of character,” his ponderous physical presence, above all his brilliant conversation, into which Boswell often all but goaded him. Samuel Johnson was an extraordinary writer. The essays from The Rambler are among the finest we have. As a biographer, his The Life of Richard Savage and The Lives of the Poets hold up splendidly. In “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” he composed a poem that still lives. His Dictionary is one of the most impressive one-man intellectual performances of all time. Along with Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, Samuel Johnson is one of the three indispensable literary critics in all of English Literature.
Yet it took James Boswell to bring him to life. Boswell held that in his biography Johnson “will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write neither panegyric, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect.” Boswell claimed that in his book Johnson was seen “more completely than any man who has ever yet lived,” and he made good, I believe, on the claim. With all his gruffness, his blunderbuss conversation in which he “often talked for victory,” his intellectual bullying, his acts of extraordinary Christian charity, Samuel Johnson emerges in Boswell’s Life, flaws and all, a moral hero. Without Boswell, Johnson would perhaps not have found his prominent place in the pantheon of English Literature. No biographer has ever rendered his subject a greater service than James Boswell did Samuel Johnson.
The tendency of modern biographies, under the tyranny of definitude, has been for them to grow longer and longer. This may have begun with Mark Schorers’s 869-page biography of Sinclair Lewis (published in 1961). A recent biography of Bob Hope runs to 565 pages, the first
volume of Gary Giddins’s biography of Bing Crosby to 768 pages, James Kaplan’s recent biography of Frank Sinatra to 992 pages, J. Michael Lennon’s biography of Norman Mailer to 960 pages, and the first volume of Zachary Leader’s biography of Saul Bellow to 812 pages. Why are these biographies so lengthy? They are so because of their authors’ mistaken ambition for biographical definitiveness. They not only want every word redeemable about, but the last word on, their respective subjects.
Along with being longer, contemporary biographies are less interested in moral heroism (Samuel Johnson) or simple greatness (Alexander of Macedon, Thomas Edison) of the kind that aroused the interests of earlier readers. Modern biographers labor in search of secrets, often ones linked to sexual behavior. Owing to Lytton Strachey’s biographical essays in Eminent Victorians (1918), modern biographers are as frequently eager to demean as to exalt their subjects. Strachey undertook to deflate the Victorians, who, with such figures among them as John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Disraeli, and George Eliot, constitute perhaps the greatest intellectual efflorescence of any period in history. The book made great waves at the time of its appearance, and had a strong if not necessarily salubrious influence in changing the nature of biographical writing toward the iconoclastic.
Perhaps the best vantage for a biographer is to admire his subject without being chary of recounting his weaknesses. A model of such a book, in my own recent reading, is the Russian-born Henri Troyat’s Turgenev. Troyat, who also wrote biographies of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov, brought his Turgenev in at a mere 162 pages. The biography conveys a literary artist’s life and character in a lucid and illuminating way. When one has come to its end one feels that one knows Ivan Turgenev well and has a clearer view of his novels than formerly. If anything is left out, one feels it cannot have been essential.
“The history of the world,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “is but the biography of great men.” Not everyone would agree. Sir Ronald Syme, who wrote impressive biographies of Sallust and Tacitus, is among those who would not. “At its worst,” wrote Syme in his The Roman Revolution, “biography is flat and schematic; at its best it is often baffled by the hidden discords of human nature. Moreover, undue emphasis upon the character of a single person invests history with dramatic unity at the expense of truth.”
Biography and history are of course not the same, and yet biography is what many among us find most enticing in history: as when Tacitus writes about Poppaea, Nero’s second wife, that she possessed
every womanly asset except goodness. . . . To her married or bachelor bedfellows were alike. She was indifferent to her reputation—insensible to men’s love and unloving herself. Advantage dictated the bestowal of her favors.
Ronald Syme himself greatly enlivens his history of The Roman Revolution with dab biographical touches, as when of a secondary figure named L. Munatius Plancus he writes: “A nice calculation of his own interests and an assiduous care for his own safety carried him through well-timed treacheries to a peaceful old age.”
In the end, biography is one of the best safeguards against the conceptualizing of history— “Create a concept,” wrote Ortega, “and reality leaves the room”—and of the belief that human beings are invariably defeated by the overwhelming forces of history. Biography counters determinism, the notion of history being made chiefly, or even exclusively, by irresistible tendencies, trends, and movements; it reinforces the idea that fortune, accident, above all strong character can rise above the impersonal forces of politics, economics, and even culture, to forge human destiny and change the flow of history itself. For this reason, and many more, I say, long live biography.
Part Three
Jewish
Sholem Aleichem
(2014)
“Let’s talk about something more cheerful. Have you any news of the cholera in Odessa?”
—Sholem Aleichem
On his first trip to America in 1906, Sholem Aleichem was introduced to Mark Twain by a New York judge named Samuel Greenbaum. Sholem Aleichem, Greenbaum remarked by way of introduction, was “the Jewish Mark Twain.” Twain graciously responded, “Tell him I am the American Sholem Aleichem.” Whether Mark Twain and Sholem Aleichem read each other is unclear, but they had a fair amount in common. Both had wide public recognition, each was beloved by his readers.
Mark Twain and Sholem Aleichem also had in common that they were money writers. They were both in constant need of funds to finance their rather grand styles of living. Twain married the daughter of a wealthy coal dealer from Elmira, New York, and forever after struggled to keep her in the manner to which she had been brought up. In the effort to do so, he made several bad investments and fell into deep enough debt to have his financial life taken over by Henry Flagler, a Rockefeller partner, who sent him off to Europe while he sorted out and paid off his debts. Life on the Mississippi, one of Twain’s best books, is ruined by a padded-out second half, required to make it long enough to qualify as a work that could be sold by subscription, which would bring in greater royalties. Money was never for long out of Mark Twain’s mind.
Nor was it out of Sholem Aleichem’s. He was born Sholem Rabinovich in 1859, son of a moderately successful trader and shopkeeper. His father, Nochem Rabinovich was traditionalist in his religion yet modern in his intellectual outlook. Cheated by a partner, he went bust; and not long after, his wife died of cholera when her son, the future writer, was thirteen.
After three years in a Russian secular school, Sholem Aleichem, at seventeen, left home to go out on his own. He worked briefly as an assistant to a lawyer, then as a tutor in Russian to the children of well-to-do Jewish families. He would later be employed as a “crown rabbi,” a job that entailed gathering statistics on the births, deaths, and conscriptions of small-town Jews for the Russian government.
The great turning point in Sholem Aleichem’s life came in 1883 when at the age of twenty-four he married, much against her father’s will, a girl he had earlier tutored named Olga Loyeff, the daughter of a successful estate manager. Two years later, his father-in-law, Elimelekh Loyeff died, leaving his daughter, his only remaining child, the equivalent in current dollars of $2.6 million. Under Russian law, the money belonged to her husband. At twenty-six, Sholem Aleichem found himself a wealthy man.
Sholem Aleichem and his wife Olga, with the first two of what would eventually be their six children, moved into a plush apartment in the city of Kiev (the Yehupetz of so many of his stories). Technically, they lived there illegally, for the Jewish populations of Russian cities, under the laws of the Pale of Settlement, were held to strict quotas.
In these, his newly rich days, Sholem Aleichem devoted quite as much time to business as to writing. He founded a company speculating in commodities; he played heavily on the Jewish version of the bourse in Kiev. He never had a seat on the Kiev exchange, but was a kind of day-trader avant le lettre. Like his fictional character Menakhem Mendl, the ever hopeful loser, Sholem Aleichem, too, tapped out, and before long dissipated his father-in-law’s inheritance. His mother-in-law paid off his debts; and though she lived with him, never spoke to him again.
While still flush, Sholem Aleichem published a large anthology of Yididsh writing. He paid his contributors handsomely, and put considerable energy into the editing of their work. He felt that he had a stake in Yiddish as a literary language, and wanted a hand in helping to direct its future. Yiddish literature may have been his only sound investment.
All this and a great deal more I learned from Jeremy Dauber’s excellent new biography of Sholem Aleichem. Dauber’s is chiefly a biography of the day-to-day life of a writer and an examination of the meaning of his works. He recounts Sholem Aleichems complicated relations with editors and publishers, his travels, his literary ambitions, the origins and meaning and fate of his writing. The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem expends little space on tracing out its subject’s neuroses or delving into scandalous behavior. Sholem Aleichem d
evoted so much of his relatively short life to work that there was scarcely time for either.
“Sholem Aleichem’s rueful realism provided ironic counterbalance to his rampant optimism,” Dauber writes. The optimism is less easily explained than the realism, which came from his having been brought up and lived as a Jew in Russia. From czars to commissars, the Russians have always treated their people as if they were a conquered nation. But they seemed to take especial pleasure in making life hard for the Jews.
One of the dirty little secrets of art is that sometimes the worst social and political conditions prove the most fertile ground for its growth. Think of the Italian Renaissance, with its many despots, its taste for vendette and other manifold cruelties, out of which derived the greatest visual art the western world has known. Think of nineteenth-century Russia, until 1862 still a slave-holding country, barbarous in so many other ways, which in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov produced the greatest writers of fiction in all of literature.
Sholem Aleichem came of age at a time when the Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe generally were oppressed from without and riven from within. Yet these conditions were richly promising for the right artist. Sholem Aleichem, the right artist, was a man who loved his fellow Jews, experienced firsthand the despotism tormenting them, and strongly felt the conflicts dividing them.
The Ideal of Culture Page 40
