Volume 2, Number 4 · April 2, 1964
This Is Your Life, John Donne
By John Hollander
Take Heed of Loving Me
by Elizabeth Gray Vining
Lippincott, 352 pp., $5.95
There are several reasons, I suppose, for writing fictionalized biographies of writers. The most common and most benign is that the well-documented history of a writer's life and times can easily be melted down and poured into the popular historical-novel mold. Then there is the biographer's attempt to make coherent sense out of problematical data, to take an imaginative leap over the confines of meager evidence. Finally, there is the authentic aim of criticism: to talk more effectively about a writer's work, for example, by trying to imagine what it was like to produce it. The first of these intentions results mostly in high-toned junk; Robert Graves's Wife to Mr. Milton may belong to this group, but it is a brilliant—albeit in a way hateful—book, inspired as much by personal venom as anything else. Thornton Wilder's portrait of Catullus in The Ides of March is a fine example of what the second motive can produce. And the brief characterization of William Shakespeare and some of the circumstances surrounding the composition of Hamlet, delivered orally to an interested group in a Dublin library by Mr. Stephen Dedalus, is (among other things) a case of the third.
Review, 1373 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |