BIOGRAPHY: 'What can we know of a man today?" Jean-Paul Sartre's question, posed in the introduction to his biography of Flaubert, hovers over this volume of criticism, which is the latest addition to the extensive literature on biographical practice and theory.
The best essays in this collection are in the spirit of Sartre's open-ended inquiry, recognising the importance of grounding literary considerations in a philosophical context when discussing what is increasingly called "life-writing"; not only the "uses" but the meaning and purpose of the biographical genre are held up to the light.
The editors, both senior British academics, have opted for a chronological sequence of 18 essays, charting the development of the genre in Western culture from the ancient world to the present, taking a grand tour of Renaissance Italy, 18-century France, 19-century Germany and early 20-century Russia, but mainly concentrating on the development of English literary biography. The book is published in a series celebrating the centenary of The British Academy, and most of the contributors are academic specialists. The exceptions are two practicing biographers: Miranda Seymour, who writes a thought-provoking essay on the ethics of biography, and Richard Holmes, who, having recently been appointed professor of biography at the University of East Anglia, considers the suitability of biography as an academic discipline.
Some of the inclusions seem a bit random, such as an essay on the bio-pic, while others are jargon-choked, or simply dutiful surveys without a point of view, "resembling nothing so much as a very large heap of sawdust", as the historian and biographer Lytton Strachey dubbed such writing.
Strachey is omnipresent here; his Eminent Victorians (1918) and other biographical writings brought iconoclastic energy, brevity, irony and, above all, an emphasis on interpretation to a genre which, in the preceding century, had tended towards lapidary and hagiographical accumulation of facts. "Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past," he wrote in Eminent Victorians. "With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one."
In an absorbing essay on biography and modernism, Laura Marcus discusses the ways in which Strachey's work became synonymous with what his friend and occasional literary combatant Virginia Woolf characterised as "the new biography".
Biography was central to Bloomsbury culture, with its emphasis on self-consciousness; and, as many of the contributors here observe, Woolf's critical writings on biography have proved to be almost as influential as those of Strachey, especially to feminist critics and biographers of the 1970s and 1980s. (Kay Ferres discusses this in an essay on 'Gender, Biography and the Public Sphere'.) Woolf's fictional meditations on biography, Orlando and Flush, are the literary forerunners of recent excursions into that territory by Peter Ackroyd (Chatterton) and Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot), as well as Richard Holmes: his innovative work of meta-biography, Footsteps (1985), introduced playfully discursive and fictional techniques, fused with a self-conscious reflexiveness that has since become commonplace in biographical writing.
Strachey was one of the first biographers to be influenced by Freud's elucidation of the unconscious. In a fascinating essay, 'Freud and the Art of Biography', Malcolm Bowie discusses the cognate nature of psychoanalysis and biography - "the consulting room is a tension-filled biographical workshop" - and traces Freud's own less-than-successful attempts at writing biography per se, as distinct from his case studies. There's no doubt that the insights of psychoanalysis enormously enriched 20-century biographical writing, but as Stephen A. Black's recent psychoanalytic biography of Eugene O'Neill demonstrates, the interpretive excesses of "psychobiography" can smother the subject at birth.
Any model or theoretic scheme, of course, needs to be employed with restraint and flexibility to allow the sense of human life being lived. In a superbly lucid essay, 'Writing lives Forwards', Mark Kinkead-Weekes advocates a chronological approach to writing biography, tracing the experience of the subject through time, rather than adopting thematic or regressive/progressive methods, which, he argues, impose interpretations too early or too rigidly and distort our understanding of how mutable and complex human consciousness is.
By way of illustration, he favourably compares the chronological method of Roy Foster's Yeats biography (Vol. 1) to the earlier, thematic approach adopted by Richard Ellmann in Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1949). He also discusses Sartre's life of Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971), which aimed, by means of a regressive/progressive method, to offer "a total explanation" of Flaubert's life, combining the insights of existentialism, psychoanalysis and Marxism. In a nice example of the multiple perspectives contained in these essays, Kinkead-Weekes finds the three-volume work "very determinist, despite Sartre's insistence on free will and choice", while in a later essay Christina Howells praises it as "a radical dialectical interplay between Marxism and psychoanalysis". (Neither of them mentions that it is unreadable.)
Both essays grapple with the views of human life and of the self on which biographical writing is predicated, and which have developed, inevitably, as historical and cultural contexts have altered. When Kinkead-Weekes argues that chronological biography depends on humanistic assumptions that the self is "ultimately undetermined, contingent and changeful", he is touching on an issue that is crucial to the experience - and enduring appeal - of reading and writing biographies. It seems that our freedom as human beings to choose, and to be responsible for our choices, actions and predicaments, is a burden that we would willingly jettison for the seductiveness of an over-arching design, a series of meaningful patterns, a progressive trajectory, a teleology.
Observing the arc of a human life in its completion between book covers, we momentarily swap the terror of being the author of our own life's design for the omnipotence of being the author of someone else's.
While this volume is, like biography itself in Woolf's words, "a record of the things that change", it also reminds us that some things don't.
Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography. Edited by Peter France
and William St Clair. Oxford University Press/British Academy, 350pp. £35
Helen Meany is a freelance writer and editor