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“Biography adds a new fear to death,” said Oscar Wilde. George Eliot called biography “a disease of English literature.” Thackeray and Matthew Arnold adjured that no biography of them ever be written. Charles Dickens and
Henry James fed great bonfires with their letters in order to protect their privacy from the prying eyes of posterity. Even Auden, who kept few secrets, implored his friends to burn his letters after his death. Nabokov called biographers “psycho-plagiarists” who sought to fill out their own lives through the lives of others. And the “New Criticism,” bent on textual “impersonality,” eradicated the writer's life from literary study, turning “biographical fallacy” into critical dogma.
However, if one agrees that a writer writes out of his total intellectual, emotional, moral, and physical being, then it is difficult to think of a literary work dissociated from the life that produced it. And it is the reunion of the writer's life with his art that Leon Edel seeks to establish in Writing Lives: Principia Biographica.
Drawing from his earlier work and from various introductions, lectures, and prefaces, Edel has drafted an argument for the New Biography in which the writing of lives moves from the craft of the archivist to “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing,” to use Lytton Strachey's phrasing. On this loftier plane, biography brings to the inert archival materials, through the teachings of psychoanalysis (principally the work of Freud and Jung), a deeper understanding of the creative process. It is a movement away from the “graveyard lives, the panegyrics” that Strachey mocked and more importantly, a resistance to the recent tendency to look at poets as though they were dehumanized and their poems impersonal.
Some principles of the New Biography are: First, the life should be approached analytically if the biographer is to penetrate the “rationalizations, the postures, the self-delusions and self-deceptions” of his subje