College and Research Libraries Recent Publications BOOK REVIEWS Whittemo~e, Reed. Pure Lives. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. 159p. $16.95 (ISBN0-8018-3548-8). LC 87-16822. We live in an age (though not the first) of bloated biographies, books that seem to have as one of their goals to duplicate the body weight of their subjects. If we stay the course and endure one of them from first page to last, we may learn more about the subjects than friends ever knew who were intimate with them for fifty years. But how much of what we learn will be but the accidents of a life? And how do they adhere to its substance? Is there indeed a substance-some irreducible core- identified by the biographer as the life's informing force? Is it finally the duty of the biographer to give us accidents ("the mi- nute details of private life," in Dr. Joh~-- / son's words) or substance-or the two in clarified, or at least clarifying, juxtaposi- tion? The relentlessly accumt1lative con- temporary approach is .apt to tell us that the biographee has! the habit of cutting his fingernails !l-Ot from thumb to little finger, or little firiger to thumb, on a hand but rather working from the middle finger al- ternatively out to either end-make of that what we will. The concern is not so much to render a life with form and definition and essence as to sow our minds with its millions of seconds and hope that some portion of the scatter will take hold and grow to a shape we can grasp. _ In Pure Lives, Reed Whittemore reminds us that there was once a more expeditious way to document a life. He ruminates on the history of the genre of biography (a word he tells us in an early footnote Dry- den may have been the first to use}, begin- ning with Plutarch and his comparative lives and moving lightly down the ages to the eighteenth century. Whittemore promises in his first paragraph to focus on five collections of early biography: Plu- tarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Aelfric' s Lives of the Saints, Vasari' s Lives of the Artists, Holinshed' s Chronicles, and Johnson's Lives of the Poets. But he is being modest, for, in the essays that follow, the five texts prove but pretext, and his reach and curiosity encompass much more. He instructs us about key figures in the his- tory of the genre and about some (Ma- chiavelli and Shakespeare and Lawrence Sterne) we might never have thought to .associate with it. In the process, the book comes to be about character and the shift- ing criteria for judging the quality of a life. The figures Whittemore seems most to admire stand at one end (Plutarch) and the other (Lawrence Sterne) of his essays, as ill-matched bookends. Whittemore is an admirably sympathetic reader of Plutarch. He takes comfort in the recurrent struc- ture imposed on most of the lives, which are the prototype of ethical biography. Plutarch measures conduct, not thought, and judges his subjects by the nature of their public acts and achievements-by standards appropriate to public figures and by the extent to which they adhered to or bent from those standards. He belongs to the tradition, notes Whittemore, in which "the shape of a written life was de- termined by something beyond chronol- ogy.'' 363 364 College & Research Libraries Because Plutarch's subjects are great public figures, whose lives he shapes around the nature of their public achieve- ment, his biographical essays inevitably become enmeshed in history. Plutarch was too conscientious a fellow not to be perplexed and troubled by the attendant questions: How does one separate biogra- phy as genre from history as genre? What precisely is biography? How does one work within the conventions it imposes? The questions set Whittemore off on his exploration. What did subsequent practi- tioners who measured their subjects by public acts and by the standards and char- acter of the groups to which they belonged (kings, saints, artists, etc.) make of their responsibility to the Plutarchian tradition? These biographers did not seek ''a self'' as explanation or measure, a psychic center as dominant, ordering force. There was no need. Public acts were the externalization of the private self and were the core about which one shaped judgments. Biogra- phers to the time of Boswell and Johnson thought the accomplishments of states- May 1989 men, or poets, to be, in effect, displaced egos, the displacement being not a con- cealment of the true self but rather a nor- mal, healthy action and manifestation of the self. Whittemore guides us through the work of Aelfric and the hagiographers, of Ma- chiavelli and Cellini and Vasari, of anony- mous chroniclers and the famous Holm- shed and Shakespeare himself. He runs at last smack up against Boswell and the transformation of the genre that occurs in the eighteenth century, when the private self, with its burden of indiscriminate de- tail, crowds public man from the stage. Whittemore displays a nice degree of an- noyance with Boswell's methods (he notes, for example, that printing the com- plete contents of a journal or a diary or a castle is neither the only nor perhaps the best way of coming to a knowledge of the self) and is reluctant to concede him the pride of place he is often allowed in the evolution of the modern biographical ap- proach. That Dr. Johnson, whose own bi- ographical writings observed Plutarchian Join the Group that's Writing the Book on Instructional Software Add your school to the growing list of more than 70 major institutions that now belong to Wise-Ware, a primary distributor of the latest research and instructional software available for MS DOS-based microcomputers. Through Wise-Ware, your faculty can both locate and distribute software in almost every field of study. Campus, Individual and Class License options exist for your institution. A demonstration center with more than 100 products is also available for your library or micro lab. More than 40 Wise- Ware products run under Windows. ~ 4>~ Call 800-543-3201 ~ J B For a FREE Membership Guide . 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He locates the confusion in all the literary forms that by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave authors the opportunity to break the rules and to ignore custom, as early biog- raphy surely did not. Three pre- Boswellian works in particular are said to be evidence of the favorable cultural cli- mate for expanding the base of biography: Pepys' Diary, Defoe's Moll Flanders, and above all, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which is, for Whittemore in a spirit of Shandean exuberance, "of course the finest book ever written." Whittemore's attention to Sterne is a surprise-a Shandean move, even. He sees in him "a man who found the life of the self to be suddenly spacious to a degree he had not previously imag- ined." As such, he was a powerful influ- ence on formal biographical practice and on psychobiography, though he was not himself a biographer-just ''a mock-up of what a biographer would be if he did not take on great public figures, and if he looked not at his subjects' performances but at their sentiments." Whittemore was not going to let pass the opportunity to write about Sterne, and the chapter is as provocative as it is unex- pected. But then so is much of the book, which accounts for its great charm. It is rather like walking a museum not with a guide constricted on cassette but in the company of a civilized man of forthright opinions and idiosyncratic views who will say the most surprising things to instruct and to provoke, and say them without re- course to the critical fatuities of our age- the anemic prose, its lifeblood deficient, that tortures thought and language and reader in equal measure in the process of twisting about to bite its own tail. Whitte- more is of a different school-of the school that once persuaded students to care pas- sionately about literature not because it is pretext for t~eory but because it is text Recent Publications 367 from life, and sometimes even for life. Bi- ography indeed. This is a short book but not in the least a slight one. Whittemore promises a sequel carrying the argument from Boswell to the present. Godspeed to his good work-James M. Morris, The An- drew W. Mellon Foundation, New York, N.Y. Literary Reviewing. Ed. by James 0. Hoge. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1987. 139p. $24.95 (ISBN 0-8139-1146-X). LC 87-8309. This slim volume collects essays by such authorities as Richard D. AI tick, Stanley Weintraub, Angus Easson, and Derek Pearsall on the techniques of reviewing lit- erary scholarship. Six essays cover genres of scholarly production-theory, history, biography, editions, and bibliography (two on the last)-and three provide more general considerations of the practice of reviewing from the viewpoints of an edi- tor, a publisher, and a producer of literary scholarship. The essays are largely taxo- nomic and prescriptive and are saved from dullness less by particularly new, or newly stated, insights than by numerous anecdotes of offences against the review- ing principles being recommended. De- spite the contributors' occasionally con- flicting views of these principles, librarians who are asked advice on review- ing a particular type of academic produc- tion can cite with assurance the appropri- ate essay here. Librarians themselves will find some of the essays of interest as well. For example, Altick's essay accuses ''the library press'' of encouraging shoddy bibliographies, questions the reliability of reviews in pro- fessional library periodicals, and asserts that librarians seldom keep themselves in- formed of scholarship outside their own profession and even less frequently per- mit their professional judgments to be in- fluenced by such scholarship as they do read-all in an essay which calls for in- creased cooperation between librarians and literary scholars. The two essays by Bruce Macphail and Robert Patten are use- ful surveys of the place of the review in the scholarly communication matrix. Despite these attractions, Literary Reviewing is a confused production. The dust-jacket's