Word: edel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three-volume megabiography of Henry James, Leon Edel avoided pedantry and trivia while still painting a detailed picture. Realizing the significance of this achievement, Edel explained his principles in a book called Literary Biography. His conclusions now stand as an apt indictment of Joseph Blotner's eight-and-a-half pound Faulkner: "the writing of a literary life would be nothing but a kind of indecent curiosity, and an invasion of privacy, were it not that it seeks always to illuminate the mysterious and magical process of creation." Blotner fails this test; he does not disengage the essence of Faulkner...
...Edel's and Blotner's differing approaches delineate two modes of megabiography, a field defined by Boswell in his study of Samuel Johnson. There is the "definitive" biography, which leaves the reader on a first-name basis with the subject, weeping at his funeral. And there is the "picayune" biography, which leaves the reader with so many personal, intimate but unnecessary and non-integrated facts that he feels like taking a shower. Often, the picayune biography is an "authorized" work, written by a worshipping professor after the death of a great writer. Lytton Strachey anticipated Blotner's contribution to this...
...discovery of this massive array of facts makes Blotner's failure to approach the mind of the writer all the more inexcusable. He could have, as Edel suggests, used psychology, like Freud's Leonardo da Vinci, Erikson's Young Man Luther, and David Donald's Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. Henry James was suited to Edel's psychological approach--in fact demanded such treatment--because, as the editor of the James letters said, "his life was no mere succession of facts such as could be recorded and compiled by another hand; it was a densely knit...
...fiction. His works (with the exception of Mosquitoes) are not directly autobiographical, but rather imaginatively derived from the totality of his experience. Like James he regretted that letters lived on as a record of his private life, and tried to have them destroyed. But whereas Edel gives details on James only as they relate to the life of the mind--he analyzes James's doodles and word-games, and his "Freudian" slips in mis-writing dates on letters--Blotner presents all of the minute details as pedantic facts. Even the events that cry out for psychological interpretation--Faulkner's wife...
...half has not been distinguished by pioneer literary criticism, it was certainly an age of great literary biographies. A few primary examples come to mind: Richard Elimann's biography of James Joyce (1959). W.J. Bate's of John Keats (1963), Henri Troyat's of Tolstoy (1967) and Leon Edel's of Henry James of which the final volume appeared early in 1972. All are definitive studies and brilliant. Quentin Bell's new biography of the British feminist critic and novelist. Virginia Woolf, while lacking the voluminous scope of some recent works because it intentionally avoids a critical evaluation...