A Higher Form of Cannibalism?: Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography

by Carl Rollyson

"We used to canonize our heroes," Oscar Wilde wrote. "The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable." Since Wilde's condemnation of modern biography, the genre would appear to have accelerated its descent into bad taste. As Carl Rollyson points out, writers as various as Rebecca West, Ted Hughes, and Joyce Carol Oates have deplored biographers' tendency to cut up lives and render the bloody data so as to make their subjects seem unhealthy, unwholesome, and unsound. Janet Malcolm has compared biographers to burglars; modern novels feature the biographer as grave robber and victimizer. Exactly when did biography take this turn for the worse? Inquiring into the history of the art, and examining his own practices as well as those of biographers from Samuel Johnson to Richard Ellmann, Jeffrey Meyers, and many others, Mr. Rollyson casts considerable doubt on the indictments handed down by Oates, Malcolm and Co. By its very nature, Mr. Rollyson argues, biography is a problematic and controversial genre. That contemporary critics believe it has gone astray only reveals their ignorance of history and their hostility to the biographical enterprise itself―an animosity born of a misguided modernism and a rejection of Enlightenment values. A Higher Form of Cannibalism? explores the nexus between scholarship and biography, and demonstrates how the similarities of method between Leon Edel and Kitty Kelley outweigh the differences. Viewed through the prism of biography, the scholarly and the popular may not be as clearly separated as people suppose.

Genres: History, Biography

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 2005

About the author

Carl Rollyson, Professor of Journalism at Baruch College, The City University of New York, has published more than forty books ranging in subject matter from biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and Jill Craigie to studies of American culture, genealogy, children’s biography, film, and literary criticism. He has authored more than 500 articles on American and European literature and history. His work has been reviewed in newspapers such as The New York Times and the London Sunday Telegraph and in journals such as American Literature and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. For four years (2003-2007) he wrote a weekly column, "On Biography," for The New York Sun and was President of the Rebecca West Society (2003-2007). His play, THAT WOMAN: REBECCA WEST REMEMBERS, has been produced at Theatresource in New York City. Rollyson is currently researching a biography of Amy Lowell (awarded a "We the People" NEH grant). "Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews, a biography of Dana Andrews is forthcoming in September from University Press of Mississippi. His biography, "American Isis: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath" will be published in February 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of her death. His reviews of biography appear regularly in The Wall Street Journal, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Kansas City Star, and The New Criterion. He is currently advisory editor for the Hollywood Legends series published by the University Press of Mississippi. He welcomes queries from those interested in contributing to the series. Read his column, "Biographology," that appears every two weeks at bibliobuffet.com

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carl Rollyson is the nation's preeminent scholar on the history and theory of biography, in addition to being an acclaimed biographer. A Higher Form of Cannibalism, like Rollyson's other dips into the literary history of biography, is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the development of biography as a literary form.

What Rollyson does best is reveal the behind-the-scenes of writing biography. He shows the positives and negatives in a way that is instructive for would-be biographers, as well as anyone hoping to write compelling nonfiction.

If one were to sum up this book in one quote, it would be when Rollyson explains: "Biographers have to get their hands dirty. They need to get into the gore and guts of their subject." (77) Rollyson is a master craftsman. Read this book to truly understand biography and biographers.