Chaos Theory

I see where there is a new biography of Mark Twain, and I intend to clean out the office to see if it might have arrived while I wasn’t looking. It is my shameful practice to deal with most of what I receive here in the mail by stacking it in small pillars that lean and topple until I can gather enough nerve to ask for help, like a drowning man, from one of the interns. I feel like I need to swear them to secrecy before they dig in; they may find obscene letters from angry readers, or bills from my wife’s cell phone. What’s worse, they may not realize that I cannot control what is sent to me. I did not request that exhaustive and exhausting tome on the timeless brilliance of Britpop, for example. I did not ask to be sent reviewer’s samples of four new scents of “personal lubricant.” I do not specifically remember requesting a PR copy of the new Suicide Girls DVD. (Actually, I do remember that, and I also know for a fact that it has not arrived yet.)

I like biographies, generally. THere has been some hue and cry around here about biopics (most seem to be agin’ ’em), but I don’t know about them so much. I don’t go directly to the biographies section at the bookstore, although if I wander in there, I often find myself stuck for a while. But panic inevitably sets in, and I decide not to drop the thirty bucks on a new book.

Biographies tend to make a person feel small. A really well written story about an important person’s life gives it a narrative arc that makes my own life feel like an insane, rudderless, anonymous cacophony of trivialities. Biographies tend to make a reader feel small, too, because the reader realizes this may be the one and only book on the subject that he will ever read, whereas the writer of a good biography should have a firm grip on just about anything that has ever been written by and about his subject. On top of that, a good biographer should have a working knowledge of most of the finest examples of his chosen genre. Inevitably, that pressure is experienced by the reader. You do not have to know what the ten best biographies ever writter are, but you cannot escape feeling like you really ought to know a few of them, since you have now gone on the record claiming to be a big fan of biographies.

I think I’d like to read this biography of Twain, although I am not very happy with WIlliam Grimes review of it. Grimes, I am pleased to say, does seem to have read the canonical biographies of America’s first great writer, which is the least we should expect from a book critic. But he is disappointed that Ron Powers did not aspire to cultivate more controversy about the person of Samuel Clemens. As an example, he suggests that Powers’ review of “Huckleberry Finn” is emblematic:

It is less than satisfactory to have Mr. Powers conclude, after canvassing divided critical opinion on the final chapters of “Huckleberry Finn,” that “nearly everybody agrees that it is one hell of a book.”

True enough. No argument there. And that’s the problem. A biography should give readers something to argue about. Mild, dutiful and inoffensive, “Mark Twain” declines to do so. It is, in the end, too much a Samuel Clemens.

Now, I think Grimes is confusing this sort of thumbs-up, thumbs-down brinksmanship with an earlier complaint that the book does not take enough leaps.

Mr. Powers has marshaled the data and organized and packaged it in a coherent, readable narrative, but the results are less than enthralling. If “Mark Twain” rarely stumbles, it never makes any leaps, either. Like the prairies surrounding Twain’s Missouri birthplace, it just rolls on and on.

Grimes himself is sort of spinning his wheels at this point, but the key to his own befuddled thinking is in his lead.

Throughout his judicious, coolly considered biography, Mr. Powers prefers simple explanations to the complications of psychoanalysis.

When I think back on my favorite biographies, I have a strong preference for works that try to do both things–marshal all the facts from a life, and then try to paint a sort of symphonic, three-dimensional portrait that includes an attempt at an interior, spiritual wire-tap– to speculate from the evidence what only the subject and the subject’s God really know, their unspoken motivations and obsessions and fears and so on. Biographers of highly prolific writers have an especially rich record to draw from. If you’re not too muchg of a post-modernist, and agree that there is some element of autobiography in almost everything the writer publishes, then a man like Twain isn’t so much an open book to be read by the biographer as an open library–for those who know the language.

One of my favorite biographys is Scott Elledge’s life of E.B. White. I don’t know if it is a classic in its genre, but I admire it a lot, because it is a very well written and researched, conscientious portrait of a complex man who led an interesting, taciturn life–but who wrote about himself endlessly, in fact claimed that he did not sympathize with anyone who wasn’t first and foremost interested in himself. So Elledge performed the neat trick of extrapolating from all of the writings of E.B. White, including the private papers and letter, who the man was, what he did, and what he thought about. (Published while White was still alive, White approved of it, though he thought it was too long. This is not necessarily a good thing, of course–to have the living subject of a biography approve it is, to a skeptical mind, evidence that it may be too sycophantic and uncritical. White, though, was undoubtedly wise enough not to quibble out loud, and in any case, there were sharply insightful sections of the book that must have made its writer cringe, knowing White would be reading it.)

The book left me with two strong secondary impulses of sehnsucht. First, I feel bad that an equally good biography has not been written about Katherine White (the one was written by a first-time biographer, and oddly focussed on her septuagenarian hypochondria, a subject that was finally redeemed by her son’s recent scribblings on the matter). Second, I wonder how biographies will be written in the future, now that the age of letter-writing has entirely died.

I suppose my own little life could easily be reconstructed, in its main shape, from my email inbox and outbox. Most of my short- and longterm memory is now stored there, but the boss has reminded me that bandwidth and server space is not endless, and most of this material is being deleted in six-month blocks going back a year or so at a time.