`What We Can Turn to Use'

“Chekhov’s privacy is safe from the biographer’s attempts upon it – as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.”

This is from Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001), a hybrid of literary criticism, travelogue and secondary-source biography, a 200-page digressive essay, most successful when Malcolm follows a whim of temperament and doesn’t take herself too seriously. She adores Chekhov and visits the places in post-Soviet Russia where he lived and worked, and where he set some of his stories and plays. Her book begins above the beach at Oreanda, near Yalta, the site of a crucial scene in “The Lady with the Dog.”

The passage above I cite as evidence of Malcolm’s authorial humility. She has no illusions about gaining “insights” into Chekhov, the man or the work, by visiting Melikhovo or Taganrog. She visits them for the same reasons we read a biography of someone we admire – awe, curiosity, emulation. Call it a human-specific strain of biophilia. We enjoy our friends’ company. Why not the company of a writer who died more than a century ago? This reasoning, of course, is anathema to the cadres of neo-New Critics who shun anything outside the text. The subject of the premiere biography in the language had this to say on written lives:

“I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.”

That’s Johnson quoted by Boswell in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. To study his life is to wish to emulate him, to “turn [him] to use” – if not for his depression, then his lifelong struggle to ameliorate it. Few of us have known ourselves half so well, and in comparison we’re blind. To read in tandem Johnson and his biographers, beginning with Boswell, is to approach what Malcolm calls “the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life” -- sometimes more than we know of ourselves.

The last 30 years may some day be regarded as a golden era for literary biography -- W. Jackson Bate’s life of Johnson; Richard Holmes’ Coleridge; Robert D. Richardson’s Thoreau, Emerson and William James; Roy Foster’s Yeats; and Jonathan Bate’s John Clare. Bad biographies – Blotner’s Faulkner is emblematic – outnumber these titles 10,000-to-one, but that’s hardly a modern blight. Consider Johnson’s assessment in The Rambler #60:

“Biography has often been allotted to writers who seem very little acquainted with the nature of their task, or very negligent about the performance. They rarely afford any other account than might be collected from public papers, but imagine themselves writing a life when they exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments; and so little regard the manners or behavior of their heroes that more knowledge may be gained of a man's real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.”