2005_04_01_archive

Woolf, dogged by biographers?

Frances Spalding reviews Julia Briggs biography Virginia Woolf: an

inner life. One immediately asks: do we really need another biography

of this particular writer? Spalding reckons Briggs' is worthy of a

welcome because she tries an unusual method:

Abandoning the conventional from-cradle-to-grave procedure, [Briggs]

mentions such rites of passage as birth, education and marriage only

in passing. Chronology, too, goes more or less by the board, with the

result that Briggs sometimes has to bring us up to date in a rather

breathless summary. The focus, as the subtitle reminds us, is on the

inner life. Woolf would have approved. She once remarked on how little

we know of ourselves, let alone of others: "In spite of all this,

people write what they call 'lives' of other people; that is, they

collect a number of events and leave the person to whom it happened

unknown."

Woolf's point corresponds to my own experience of biographies. For

sure, unlike some New Critical ideologues, I don't have a problem with

biography in general, only with the sense of disappointment one almost

invariably gets upon finishing them.

Curiously, it's often by indirection that one gets what one wants from

a biography. Somewhere, I read of Kafka running down a flight of

stairs because he was late for an appointment. The observer described

how his knees jerked upwards and away from his body as he descended.

This is an image I retained while all the facts of his life went in

one eye and out of the other. And the best overall portrait of the

same writer, as I've said on many occasions, came in Kafka's Last Love

where the focus is on his last love, Dora Diamant.

Not that such descriptions make Kafka known as such, only that

indirection is underrated as a means to such knowledge. Perhaps the

moment on the stairs comes from Kafka's public life, so, in addition

to Virginia Woolf: an inner life, Julia Briggs needs to writeVirginia

Woolf: an outer life and then, if she has time, Virginia Woolf: a

shake-it-all-about life.

at 6:57 PM 0 comments

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