Mark Oppenheimer in N Y
TIMES:
In 2011, Roth paid over $60,000 in lawyers’ fees to force Ira Nadel, an
American academic who now teaches in Canada, to delete one sentence — which
said that Roth had “anxieties about being emotionally engulfed by a woman,”
referring to the longtime girlfriend who was the basis for Drenka, the sexually
liberated mistress in “Sabbath’s Theater” — from his “Critical Companion to
Philip Roth.” Nadel was planning a biography, and Wylie informed him that he
could not quote from Roth’s work, and that nobody close to Roth would ever
cooperate with him.
Sick of Miller and contemptuous of Nadel — whose own Roth
biography paints him as terrified of intimacy and was published last month —
Roth kept up the hunt.
SEE in Amazon Books PHILIP ROTH: A COUNTERLIFE, by Ira
Nadel. Poor Roth--the man he was
contemptuous of has published his revengeful book.
This is from my MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE
1. In 1984 Ira Bruce Nadel in his Biography: Fiction, Fact,
and Form declared that “the biographer is akin more to the creative writer than
the historian” (11) and that “in biography language alters fact and draws on
fiction to clarify its form” (209). Factual biographers still dominate the
field, Nadel regrets in his introduction, even though “contemporary theories of
fictional form and narrative technique have clarified our awareness of order
and belief, presentation and authenticity, in biographical writing” (5) so that
we should be redefining “the role of the biographer, transforming him from a
journeyman or manufacturer of lives into a creative writer of non-fiction”
(11); the biographer should be “akin more to the creative writer than the
historian” (11). Grant Webster in Biography (Summer 1986) reviewed Nadel’s book
very hostilely: “Nadel’s central point is that biography ought to be more
fictional . . . . Put another way, factual biographies are bad in the sense
that they are dated, and so do not reflect our current understanding of
reality” (277). Victoria Glendinning in “Lies and Silences” in The Troubled
Face of Biography (1988) could not restrain her outrage (54): “Nadel . . .
asks: ‘To what extent is fact necessary in a biography? To what extent does it
hinder the artistic and literary impulse of the biographer? To what degree does
the biographer alter fact to fit his theme and pattern?’ His view is that the
biographer has every right to change facts in order to make a psychological or
artistic point. This makes me shiver. He also believes in what I would see as
the intrusion of the biographer, suggesting that ‘discovery in biography now
exists equally in what the biographer reveals about himself as well as what he
uncovers about his subject.’ It is probably true that compulsive biographers
immerse themselves in other people’s lives as a way of obliquely investigating
their own; but this is the biographer’s own business. Nadel’s ego-trip is at
one remove. If [Richard Holmes’s] Footsteps were to become a model for all
biographers, we should have to find a new word for the genre.” Elizabeth
Longford offers “Reflections of a Biographer”: “Today in certain quarters
biography has become theory without life. . . . Biography is too important to
become a playground for fantasies, however ingenious; I believe its future is
safe with the reading public, who will keep it human, not too solemn” (148).
Nadel’s arguments may be recognized in twenty-first-century pronouncements. In
a carefully hypothetical scenario in “The Biographer as Archaeologist” (2002),
William St Clair’s speaker, more or less not speaking for St Clair, still frets
trendily (222): “I cannot allow my narrative to be imprisoned within the
confines of so-called biographical facts.” The sturdy Frederick R. Karl in his
2005 Art into Life (x) declares unambiguously: “The thread that binds most of
my pieces is my belief that biography is not ‘fixed’ or set, but a contingent,
almost random genre. More akin to fiction than to history, it is less than a
novel, but sometimes more than history. It is linked to autobiography (of the
writer), frequently full of sound and fury, but signifying significant
information.” In 2009 Michael Benton made what looks like a last-ditch attempt
to oppose biography and history by claiming that biography is a hybrid: “It is
the verifiable facts of history crossed with the conventions of narrative”
(35). I demur: the facts of history can be presented in verifiable
chronological form in annals, without narrative, but otherwise the “conventions
of narrative” are at play in most history just as in biography. I would write a
biography of Abraham Lincoln employing precisely the conventions of narrative I
employed in writing on Melville. In the last few paragraphs of chapter 8 I look
at an attack on biography from within, attempts to define archives out of any
resemblance to storehouses of public and private documents.
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