Fiona Sampson Explores the Ways We Can Blend Reality With Fictionalization
Where does the “literariness” in literary biography belong? With the book’s subject—or its author? Traditionally, it’s attached to both, and to a third element too. Literary biography also cares about the writing its subjects produce, and has done so ever since that arguably founding text, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817 Biographia Literaria, which is subtitled Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. “And Opinions” indeed: for publishers, critics and authors alike, so much of literary life consists in what John Updike tellingly called “Higher Gossip.”Article continues after advertisement
By its very nature, literary biography does more than simply stand alongside other genres on the bookshelf. It explicitly engages in a dialogue with them. True, every book does this to some extent. After all, no writing is innocent. All language comes to us “preloved”; even hot off the press, each book is second-hand. Simply by adopting the forms of publication, let alone one existing literary form or another, new work finds itself prepacked with elements that are already in use. The dream of lyric poetry—that it be a truly personal confession, an utterly independent magic—is just that.
