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The Impossible Craft the impossible craft 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd i 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd iiii 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM literary biography Scott Donaldson the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd iiiiii 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Donaldson, Scott, 1928– author. Th e impossible craft : literary biography / Scott Donaldson. pages cm — (Th e Penn State series in the history of the book) Summary: “Explores the challenges and rewards faced by literary biographers. Details the author’s experiences writing the lives of writers including Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, and Archibald MacLeish”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-271-06528-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Biography as a literary form. 2. Authors—Biography—Authorship. 3. Authors, American—Biography—History and criticism—Th eory, etc. 4. Biographers. 5. Donaldson, Scott, 1928– . I. Title. II. Series: Penn State series in the history of the book. ct21.d68 2014 920—dc23 2014035170 Copyright © 2015 Th e Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by Th e Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 Th e Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of Th e Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. Th is book is printed on paper that contains 30 post-consumer waste. 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd iviv 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM YYetet aagain,gain, andand always,always, for Vivie 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd v 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd vivi 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM contents Abbreviations / ix 1 beginnings / 1 Biography: A Background Sketch / 1 Becoming a Biographer / 6 And Th en I Wrote . / 11 Th e Editor’s Hand: Hemingway / 14 Fitzgerald and the Craft / 17 Th e Amazing Archibald MacLeish / 23 A Dual Biography of Fitz and Hem / 31 Recovering Robinson / 37 Other Chores, On to Fenton / 42 2 topics in literary biography / 47 Fact and Fiction / 47 Writers as Subjects / 53 Ethical Issues / 65 Sources: Letters / 71 Sources: Interviews / 77 3 the impossible craft / 87 Th e Issue of Involvement / 87 Trying to Capture Hemingway / 93 Th e Mythical Ideal Biographer / 100 What Biography Can’t Do / 108 And Yet . / 119 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd viivii 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM viii contents 4 case STudies / 131 Telling Robinson’s Story: Th e Fight over a Poet’s Bones / 131 Summer of ’24: Zelda’s Aff air / 173 Hemingway’s Battle with Biographers, 1949–1954 / 188 5 The Cheever Misadventure / 213 Writing the Cheever / 213 Th e Lawsuit / 238 Th e Next Biography / 254 Bibliography / 262 Index / 271 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd viiiviii 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM abbreviations Colby Miller Library, Colby College: ear papers Columbia Butler Library, Columbia University Gardiner Gardiner (Maine) Public Library: Yellow House papers (Richards family), Lawrance Th ompson ear Notes Harvard Houghton Library, Harvard University jfk Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston lc Library of Congress Newberry Newberry Library, Chicago: Malcolm Cowley papers nypl New York Public Library: Lewis Isaacs papers, Macmillan Co. papers Princeton Firestone Library, Princeton University Virginia Alderman Library, University of Virginia Yale Beinecke Library, Yale University jc John Cheever mc Malcolm Cowley sd Scott Donaldson fsf F. Scott Fitzgerald zf Zelda Fitzgerald eh Ernest Hemingway ear Edwin Arlington Robinson 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd ixix 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd x 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM beginnings Biography: A Background Sketch Th e fi rst biographies aimed to teach, on the assumption that the reader might learn by example from the lives of the great. Plutarch, as much a moralist as an historian, linked Greek and Roman fi gures in Parallel Lives, arranging them in tandem to illuminate their common virtues or, less oft en, failings. “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us,” the author of Ecclesiastes counseled, and for the most part early biographers adopted that policy. In medieval times writers celebrated lives of the saints—not the whole life but a few incidents testifying to sanctity—as the genre drift ed toward hagiography, shrouded in what Samuel Johnson called “a mist of panegyrick” (Garraty, 43, 54–55; Fruman). Th e magisterial Dr. Johnson (1709–84) was himself a biographer, writing a life of the poet Richard Savage in his youth and the six-volume Lives of the Poets in his fi nal years. Johnson rebelled against the high-minded accounts of the hagiographers, recommending instead that biographers depict “the minute details of daily life” as well as “those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness” (quoted in Holroyd, “How I Fell,” 98). Th at was exactly what his disciple James Boswell did in his masterly biography of Johnson. Th e much younger Boswell dogged the great man’s footsteps for years, recording just about everything that happened. When Johnson declaimed brilliantly of an evening, Boswell wrote about it. When Johnson drank too much, he wrote about that as well. Th is kind of account went by the boards during the blight of Victorian- ism, when close friends or family members assumed the role of offi cial 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd 1 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM 2 the impossible craft biographer. Th ey presented subjects in the noblest possible light. Lives were tidied up to remove any humanizing hints of indecency—certain things were not to be spoken of—and to exemplify qualities schoolchildren might aspire to. Sometimes these long and excessively eulogistic eff usions ran to two or three volumes of life and letters. Th e eff ect on literary biography was disastrous. “Suppression, distortion, evasion, and outright falsehood” abounded in lives of the English Romantic poets. De mortuis nil nisi bonum became the standard. Charles Cowden Clarke, Keats’s early mentor, maintained that no gentleman would ever knowingly publish anything that could give pain to a living person or refl ect badly on the deceased. Wordsworth was furious when a biographer of Rob- ert Burns revealed his drunkenness and sexual adventures, and enraged when Coleridge’s biographers disclosed his opium addiction and abandon- ment of his family. It was considered far better to portray William Blake as an “enthusiast” than to raise the issue of mental illness (Fruman). Th e most sensational case was that of Lord Byron, a bisexual who commit- ted incest, a radical in politics, and a foe of conventional religion. While in exile from England, Byron wrote his memoirs for posthumous publication. Th ese proved so incendiary that Byron’s friends, gathered in the London offi ces of his publisher three days aft er the poet’s death, duly consigned them to the fl ames (Fruman). Family members set about shining up the image of Shelley, whose sexual exploits, revolutionary politics, and irreligious views rivaled those of Byron. Th e fi rst generation of survivors delayed access to such sensational matters until potential biographers dwindled into respectable Victorians willing to forget or to conceal. In the second generation, Lady Jane Shelley took over the task of idealizing her ancestor, and a feminized bloodless fi gure of the poet emerged in the accounts of those apologists who gained her approval. It remained for Richard Holmes, in 1974, to present Shelley as agitator, athe- ist, and apostle of free love as well as brilliant poetic innovator: a gift ed man who embraced rebellion whatever its cost (Lee, 12–15). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, historians tended to subordi- nate personal character and accomplishment to great cultural movements of the past. Th e importance of individual human beings was similarly chal- lenged by the economic determinism of Karl Marx and the rise of natural- ism. Th en the disillusionment of World War I made the touched-up portraits of the Victorian era seem foolish, even wrong. Lytton Strachey’s infl uential Eminent Victorians (1918) introduced a new kind of debunking biography. In brief and incisive sketches of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Th omas Arnold, and General Gordon, Strachey demonstrated the moral hypocrisy of the Victorians. “It is not the business of the biographer to be complimentary,” Strachey declared. “It is his business to lay bare the facts of 118654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd8654-Donaldson_ImpossibleCraft.indd 2 11/9/15/9/15 33:15:15 PPMM beginnings 3 the case as he understands them” (quoted in Skidelsky, 6). But not all the facts, for such an exhaustive recital would militate against the selectivity that art demanded. With Freud, everything changed. Biographers still wrote about people of achievement, but with a more or less uncomfortable awareness—Freud’s ideas having pervaded the culture—that accomplishments derived from sublimated sex drives, that personalities were shaped in childhood, that everyone entertained fantasies. Th ese concepts diminished the luster of the subject, as Freud felt they should. He had a lively interest in biography, and believed that his own case histories improved on the usual practice of the genre. In his study of Leonardo da Vinci (1910), Freud argued that most biogra- phers were “fi xated on their heroes,” for whom they felt a special, and very likely infantile, aff ection.
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