Lyndall Gordon at the New Statesman:
Does the accuracy vital to biography preclude art? Is this a limited, documentary genre or might imaginative truth co-exist with factual truth? Can biography lend itself to narrative, selection, even subjectivity? The writer Ann Wroe, reconceiving the obituary, believes that the soul is not to be found in lists of achievements but in fleeting intimate moments – “that unreachable thing”. It’s not unlike the “epiphanies” distilled by Joyce in Dubliners.
One of Ellmann’s Oxford colleagues, Bernard Richards, recalls that, in the 1980s, when he asked Ellmann how he was getting on with his biography of Oscar Wilde, “he said something like ‘I am up to 1882.’” How studiedly chronological this is. The line withholds a figure in the carpet (a defining pattern to be discerned in the oeuvre of a great writer, a challenge put forward by Henry James in his tale, “The Figure in the Carpet”). I say “withholds” because Ellmann did, at one stage, contemplate a shorter biography and assured his editor that he had a “coherent” idea of Joyce. The editor vetoed this and Ellmann complied.
more here.
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