A great many books are longer than they need be. Everything is improved if whatever can be left out is. John O'Hara, who wrote excellent short stories, but was perhaps at his very best writing novellas - a terribly neglected and under-rated form. O'Hara's "Imagine Kissing Pete" in Sermons and Soda-Water may well be his masterpiece. His novels, on the other hand, are bloated and graceless.
As for what I like to call laundry-ticket biographies (they include every scrap of information the biographer has been able to dig up, including the subject's laundry tickets), they tend to be catalogs of research rather than true biographies. To be a work of art, a biography must be a selection of the most significant details of a life arranged into a harmonious whole. What we want are not chronicles of a life, but a portrait from life. To create such requires an exercise of judgment and a willingness to take risks.
Albert Jay Nock wrote an excellent essay about this, called "The Purpose of Biography," in which he deplores the "notion that knowing something about a subject, or even knowing a great deal about him, is the same thing, or just as good, as knowing the subject himself..." It isn't.
More people to need to read Plutarch.
As for what I like to call laundry-ticket biographies (they include every scrap of information the biographer has been able to dig up, including the subject's laundry tickets), they tend to be catalogs of research rather than true biographies. To be a work of art, a biography must be a selection of the most significant details of a life arranged into a harmonious whole. What we want are not chronicles of a life, but a portrait from life. To create such requires an exercise of judgment and a willingness to take risks.
Albert Jay Nock wrote an excellent essay about this, called "The Purpose of Biography," in which he deplores the "notion that knowing something about a subject, or even knowing a great deal about him, is the same thing, or just as good, as knowing the subject himself..." It isn't.
More people to need to read Plutarch.
Novellas indeed, Frank - I'd swap Julia Strachey's two novellas for all Virginia Woolf's novels.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip, Nige. I don't know these, but they're now on my summer reading list.
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