Books
Life class
by Paula Morris
Biographer and literary critic Hermione Lee has written authoritatively about the lives of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, but is well aware that “biography always appeals to the base part of human nature”.
In the early 1880s, historian JA Froude published several accounts of the life of his celebrated friend and mentor, Thomas Carlyle. Froude not only exposed Carlyle’s many character defects and suggested that the great man was a little too close to his mother, he implied that Carlyle’s marriage was unconsummated and that Carlyle was impotent. Victorian readers – such as the elderly Alfred Lord Tennyson, who promptly made sure his biography was in the safe hands of his eldest son – were outraged. Froud’s four-volume Life, according to biographer and literary critic Hermione Lee, was “the biggest biographical scandal of the century”.
These days, Lee contends, readers are less easily scandalised, though biography is still a source of revelation, exposure and controversy – Patrick French’s damning recent portrait of VS Naipaul as a racist, sadist and frequenter of prostitutes is a case in point. But “a book about a writer who’s impotent wouldn’t be greeted with such shock”, says Lee. “One generation’s taboos are another’s occasion of sympathy.” And it’s part of a biographer’s job, she suggests, to nudge those taboos, citing Virginia Woolf’s view that biography must “go slightly ahead of morality, like a miner’s canary!”
Lee – who will deliver the Michael King Memorial Lecture at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival on May 17 – is an impeccable source on the art of biography, not to mention Woolf: she’s written authoritative biographies of Woolf, Willa Cather and, most recently, Edith Wharton. She’s also edited anthologies, written numerous critical studies and published an accessible and engaging collection of essays, Body Parts. For the past decade, she’s taught life-writing seminars at Oxford University, where, in October, she takes up a new position as president of Wolfson College. It’s her first “full-scale managerial” post. “I turn 60 this year,” she says, “and thought I should try one more challenge before I drop off the branch.”
When we speak, Lee’s just back at her home in Oxford – where, like Woolf, she writes in a shed in the garden – after what she calls an “Edith in paperback” book tour of the United States. In the US, she says, the new fashion is for “collected biography”, profiles of groups rather than individuals. “They’re moving away from what I’ve just done – the 800-page monster,” she sighs. “Maybe people are ceasing to have enough of an attention span!”
Lee, however, isn’t a creature of fashion. If there’s pressure these days on biographers to conjecture and surmise, and to re-create scenes and dialogue – that is, to use even more of the conventions of a fictional narrative – she’s not budging. “I resist it,” she declares. “Fiction and biography are two different things. A biography of Virginia Woolf is not the same thing as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Biographers shouldn’t make up imaginary conversations or hypothesise about psychic traumas they can’t prove.”
She’s not a fan of the New Historicist methods of a writer like Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World, who uses the miscellany of the times to expand on the skimpy particulars of the life – in this case, William Shakespeare’s. “I’m -anxious about what’s become a frequent biographical device – we don’t know what a subject was doing, but we know what others were doing at the time, and therefore we can prove the subject was doing it, too. You’ve got to put danger warnings around something like that.”
This doesn’t mean that Lee’s approach to her subjects is dry or bloodless. “I get interested in topics and want to communicate my enthusiasm for them,” she explains, well aware that “biography always appeals to the base part of human nature”.
Thanks to her persuasive combination of sharp mind, voracious curiosity and clear, fluent writing style, Lee moves easily between the worlds of academia and commercial publishing. She’s a respected fixture on the review pages of Britain’s broadsheet press, has presented arts programmes on both television and radio, and chaired the Man Booker Prize judging panel in 2006. In a piece she wrote for the Guardian that year, Lee said that the ideal judges for a literary award should be “independent-minded and unworldly, a strange, protected species of abnormally compulsive readers”, arguing that what mattered most with the Booker was not publishers’ hype or bookies’ odds, but “the future of reading, the power of story-telling, the adventure of language”.
In part because her allegiance seems to lie with books and authors rather than literary theory, Lee is close friends with many writers, including Philip Roth and Julian Barnes. But she has little interest in writing a biography of a living subject. “It would be very daunting,” she says, talking about James Atlas’ fraught relationship with his subject, Saul Bellow, which included long periods of uneasy silence. “And I detest the words ‘authorised’ and ‘definitive’. Authorised often means that you’ve been censored, or you’re not telling the whole truth.”
Even the dead can be difficult subjects. Wharton was “not an easy person to live with. I revere her, and passionately love the work, but she’s difficult”.
Page 1 2 
