Word: edel
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...letters to Pritchett, Greene said, "one of the major objects of his craft (I speak, of course, of the novelist) is the awakening of sympathy." He demonstrates that same kind of sympathy in Lord Rochester's Monkey but it is overbearing. And as Leon Edel says in his book Literary Biography, "There enters into the process a quality of sympathy with the subject which is neither forbearance nor adulation." Edel describes a certain form of the biographical genre that, in its rejection of chronological order, can "borrow from the methods of the novelist without, however, being fiction." Here again Greene...
...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...
...product is a massive march of minutiae organized by no other apparent guiding force than chronology. Blotner adheres slavishly to "the inexorable tick of the clock" that Edel urged biographers to avoid at all costs. The chapter headings, "Dec., 1918--September, 1919/September, 1919--June, 1920...," are almost selfparodies of Blotner's conception of biography...