Category Archives: Books

A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography is forever linked in my mind to Janet Malcolm’s book about Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman.  The books are different in many ways, but the subtitle “An Experiment in Biography” could serve equally well for them both; both of them attempt to lay bare the experiences that go into creating biographies — the moment of inspiration, the research, the interviews, the wrangling over permission to quote, the exciting discoveries.  Both authors describe the emotions involved in researching a person’s life — the obsession, the frustration, the determination, as well as the complicated mix of feelings they develop toward the person him or herself.

Symons’s book was published in 1934, and it opens with the moment a friend hands him the novel Hadrian the Seventh, Baron Corvo’s most famous work.  He falls in love with it, whereupon his friend hands him some of Corvo’s letters, which produce an entirely different reaction — he is horrified by decadence and corruption he finds in them.  The combination of these two entirely different pieces of writing from the same person troubles and fascinates him, and his quest begins.  He discovers that not much is known about Baron Corvo, whose real name is Frederick Rolfe, so he follows what leads he has and soon is uncovering the details of Corvo’s life — some of them inspiring, but many of them pathetic and sordid.

The Quest for Corvo tells multiple stories — it outlines Symons’s research into Corvo’s life, it tells the story of the life itself, it tells of Symons’s response to that life, and it attempts to account for why Corvo is who he is.  Symons soon finds he has become obsessed with a very wonderful and strange man:

… nearly everyone who knew Rolfe thought him the most remarkable man of their acquaintance.

Corvo could certainly charm people and was quick to make friends and persuade people to help him — but he was the type of person who always needed help.  He tried to make his living in various ways, including painting and writing, but he always failed and was always in financial trouble.  His charm would inevitably fade, and a darker side would appear; Corvo was one of those people who seem to be working toward their own success while they are actually in the process of undermining it.  He would misuse money until his current benefactor lost patience and then would be horribly shocked and hurt when that benefactor began to ask questions and make demands.  He would end up in misunderstandings — somehow or other — with the friends he depended on, and would then react in a manner violently out of proportion to any perceived slight he received.  If his friend tried to make amends, he would refuse to consider the appeal as being beneath his dignity, even though he depended on this friend for the very food he ate.

In short, the man was completely insufferable, and yet — and here is the question at the heart of the book — he managed to write works of genius.  (At least, they were works of genius in Symons’s mind; not very many people have agreed, obviously, since Baron Corvo is not a well-known name, and I suspect that if I were to try to read even his most famous work, I wouldn’t like it.)  How does it happen that someone with mental problems we wouldn’t have too much trouble diagnosing these days, someone who made such a mess of his life, someone who managed to alienate every single person he interacted with in his life, could write so beautifully?  Symons offers some answers to the question of what made Corvo the strange person he was, but he acknowledges that the larger questions about art remain unanswered.  Art and creativity and the ability to work magic with words remain a mystery.

I loved this book because of its strangeness — the unusual structure as well as the unusual subject — and I loved it in spite of the fact that I became convinced I would disagree, probably vehemently, with Symons’s assessment of Corvo.  Symons tries very hard to be fair and to acknowledge what a horror Corvo was to his friends, but he is clearly fond of him and wants readers to be fond of him too.  I, however, would stay far away from Corvo if he were still alive, and I found it hard, not having had the experience of falling in love with his writing, to see what could possibly make the man appealing.  But it’s a testament to the strength of Symons’s writing that I found the book fascinating in spite of my distance from Corvo — or perhaps the truth is that this disagreement with Symons made for another interesting layer in an already very rich book.

Thanks for all your comments about how you choose books; I enjoyed reading about people’s methods.  In addition to the Nam Le book of stories (which I’m now half way through and am enjoying a lot), I picked up Adeline Mowbray, a novel published in 1804.  I figured if I’m going to read something from 2008, I should also read something from an earlier century.  Both choices have turned out well so far.

But I never gave you my final thoughts on Janet Malcolm’s book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Silent Woman (first thoughts here).  In short, it was wonderful.  Litlove talked about enjoying nonfiction with “a bit of a twist to it,” and this book fits that description perfectly.  It takes familiar genres — biography and memoir, mainly, but also philosophy and literary criticism — and turns them upside down.  It’s a book about biographies, the various ones written about Plath and Hughes, and also a book about biography itself, the paradoxes of the genre and the trouble it can get people into.

Malcolm places herself in the middle of the book, describing her experiences interviewing the various people involved in shaping the Plath myth.  Each meeting becomes a little story, a vignette that reveals something about Plath or Hughes, or more often about the interviewee or about Malcolm herself.  By placing herself in the center of things, she acknowledges that biography is far from an objective form of writing, and that the biographer shapes the story almost as much as a fiction writer does.

The book is actually a little like a novel in the way that it sets out to tell a story and then keeps your attention so well you can’t wait to find out what turn the action will take next.  I usually read nonfiction slowly, but I flew through this book, drawn in by the fascinating characters — particularly Ted Hughes’s sister Olwyn, a woman you might see as a villain if you find yourself sympathetic to Plath or wanting to write a book about her (she was in charge of the Plath estate for many years), and Anne Stevenson, a writer who had a disastrous time working with Olwyn to produce a biography of Plath only to find herself villainized by Plath advocates (“libbers” as Olwyn calls them because most of them are feminists).

Malcolm says that any writer, including biographers, must take sides, and that she has taken the side of Hughes, defending him against those who have turned his life into a living hell by invading his privacy and pronouncing judgment on his most intimate moments.  But my sense is that in spite of her claims about the impossibility of objectivity and her obvious emotional involvement in the story she tells, she has produced a book as close to objective as is possible.  She may take Hughes’s side at times, but she also describes moments when her feelings toward him harden, and while she writes about how difficult and disturbed a woman Plath is, she also portrays her with great understanding and sympathy.  By being honest about her personal reactions to the players in this story, Malcolm earns the reader’s trust, or at least she earned my trust; I couldn’t help but feel that here was a writer doing her very best to tell the story as accurately as possible, and while she might fail now and then, she has succeeded as much as any writer can.

To give you a sense of what her writing is like (extraordinarily vivid, I thought) and what kinds of conclusions she draws about biography, here is a passage on the subject (lengthy, but worthwhile):

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world.  The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.  The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity.  The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor.  He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses.  There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail.  The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre.  The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

Even if you are not remotely interested in Plath and Hughes (I am interested in them, although not enough to read traditional biographies; this book does, however, make me want to read more of their poetry), there is much to enjoy here.  Even if you aren’t interested in biography as a genre (which I suppose I am, although that fact surprises me, as I never realized it before), you will still like the book — in short, unless my description leaves you completely cold, read this!

First of all, make sure to check out the choices for the next Slaves of Golconda group reading — everyone is welcome to participate!

I have now finished the second half of Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England, and I found the second half at least as interesting as the first (which I wrote about here).  The second half contains chapters on “Prudent Economy,” “Elegance,” “Civility and Vulgarity,” and “Propriety.”  Some of these chapter titles don’t fully make sense to me, as the chapter on propriety is about all the public entertainments that were available to women at the time and doesn’t analyze the word propriety at all, but that’s a small quibble.

The chapter on “Prudent Economy” was particularly interesting as it was about women’s duties as household managers, and it emphasizes the point that maintaining a household was seen as a prestigious and important role, and women were determined to enjoy what power that role gave them and not let men encroach on it:

As the mistress of a household, the genteel bride tasted of administrative power and exuded quasi-professional pride.

Now, of course, being able to manage a household would be small comfort to a woman who wanted to do other things and couldn’t, but Vickery’s point is that many women did take pride in this work and it did require considerable management ability.

One of the hardest parts of this management job was dealing with servants; when people complained about a “servant problem” it wasn’t just idle and privileged complaining.  Vickery points out that servants’ wages rose throughout the 18C and opportunities for other kinds of work, in factories for example, became more plentiful.  So genteel women were constantly having to replace their servants, particularly their female servants, who were much more likely to leave than their male counterparts.  Vickery makes the job of managing servants sound complicated:

… in its staffing the household functioned like most eighteenth-century commercial enterprises.  In the acquisition, coordination, and direction of a range of different workers, the managerial effort of the genteel mistress-housekeeper was akin to that of a putting-out master or gentleman farmer,  and far removed from the received picture of the unruffled lady of the manor.

Hiring servants was one part of the problem, but maintaining authority over them was another:

The construction and maintenance of a mistress’s authority over her servants could not be taken for granted; a point reinforced by the detailed printed advice on the preservation of supremacy and widespread warnings about a lack of innate deference in the servile.

Now this makes me wonder what the experience of the servants was; I’m pretty sure I can’t blame them for running away so often, but Vickery’s focus is specifically on the experience of genteel women, so I’ll have to find out about that in another book.  She does say that women servants seemed not to worry much about whether they could get a good reference or not and that they were “strikingly independent and mobile.”

The chapter on “Elegance” covers women’s experiences with fashion, particularly clothes and household furnishings.  Vickery’s argument here is that shopping was considered a “form of employment” and was not a frivolous pursuit as some historians have assumed; women were not simply consumers buying up the latest fashion in order to compete with their neighbors, but rather shopping functioned as a way of establishing networks among women who would help each other get information and make decisions:

Beyond its instrumental role, the exchange of information ‘in the fashion way’ had wider implications for feminine culture.  Filling their letters with ‘fashions, flounces, and flourishes’, women shared doubts, advice, and experience.  Basic to female relationships was the exchange of consumer services.

The last chapter is particularly interesting, arguing that the possibilities for entertainment outside the home increased dramatically over the course of the 18C.  Vickery goes through many examples of what was available, including the theater, various kinds of musical entertainments, and other spectacles such as militia reviews, ladies’ processions, firework displays, magic shows, and trials, which were public.  There were also assemblies, masquerades, ridottos, musical parties, and routs, as well as pleasure gardens where people could gather and experience a greater degree of freedom (and also potential danger) than they found elsewhere.  Women also participated more and more in charitable institutions, as well as other kinds of clubs devoted to literature or science.  Many of these social opportunities were available in London, but increasingly they were also popular in outlying cities.

There is so much to learn from this book. I found it highly readable; it is an academic book, so she spends a good bit of time discussing what other historians have argued and arguing against their conclusions, but it’s interesting to learn about the debates that historians have engaged in about the time period.  Overall, it’s a great description of what women of the genteel classes in the 18C were likely to experience, and a good example of history that is a pleasure to read.

I just finished Amanda Vickery’s book on women in the 18th and early 19th centuries, The Gentleman’s Daughter, and I enjoyed it very much; I learned a lot from it, it was very well written, and it had cool pictures — lots to like there!  I hope to post on it again soon.

But having finished one nonfiction book, my eye was just caught by two others, one of which has to do with the same time period as Vickery’s book.  It’s Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly, and I heard about it in a New Yorker review by Adam Kirsch.  I love Keats, and so any book about him would catch my eye, but this one focuses on ideas about death and immortality and is subtitled “A Personal Biography,” both of which sound particularly appealing.  Here is what Kirsch says about it:

Instead of simply recounting the life and analyzing the poems, Plumly pursues his intuitions through a series of linked essays, all of them concerned with aspects of the poet’s death and afterlife … Through this interweaving of themes and episodes—a “walk around in Keats’s life and art, not simply through them”—Plumly emphasizes, as a more conventional biography never could, the fatal, fated quality of Keats’s career. He shows how Keats, in a way that feels unique even among the doomed Romantics, became posthumous while he was still alive.

Everything about this appeals to me, from the pursuit of intuitions to the series of linked essays to the quotation about walking around in Keats’s life and art.  I do love biographies that take unusual approaches (although truthfully I haven’t read that many, which doesn’t make sense, but … it’s true).  This sentence from Kirsch was interesting:

To understand why Keats meditated so constantly on death, it is not necessary to look to his biography; one need only listen to his writing.

Plumly’s book is biographical, and yet from what I can tell from the review, it doesn’t look for easy answers in the biography, but makes more complicated arguments about the relationship of art and life.

Perhaps I should read a more conventional biography of Keats too, but this kind of book appeals to me more.

The other book that caught my eye also came from the New Yorker.  One of their short reviews mentioned Collections of Nothing by William Davies King, an autobiographical book about collecting things nobody wants, like food packages and labels and illustrations from old dictionaries.  Collecting as a hobby doesn’t really interest me, but something about a person who collections illustrations from old dictionaries does.  And I like the idea of an autobiography told from a particular slant.  Here’s what the review says:

What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one.

Now that I think about it, midlife crises don’t interest me either, but still, I want to read this book!  The author strikes me Nicholson Baker-esque, and you all know how I feel about Nicholson Baker.  Plus the author spent hours in the Yale library “reading the most obscure books he could find.”  Doesn’t he sound interesting?

This is my favorite kind of nonfiction — the kind that takes a familiar genre such as biography or autobiography and tweaks it a little to create something new.