ON PARNASSUS FOR 15 MINUTES

It's a relief to turn to the judicious Stannard, who never makes something out of nothing, and even refuses to sensationalize a potential bombshell: a letter in which Waugh says his "Sexual passion for my ten year old daughter is obsessive ... I can't keep my hands off her." He knows Waugh well enough not to inflate impulse into incest. Stannard's affinity for the mandarin Waugh shows in his allusive style. At a fancy-dress ball, he records, Waugh stayed on until 3:30 a.m., "when at last he retired, leaving the young in one another's arms." (The phrase is from Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium.") Similarly, Brightman's sharply sententious prose echoes McCarthy's. "A literary marriage never ends," she writes of McCarthy and ex-husband Edmund Wilson. "Only a literary tie permits its partners the gratification of playing the match out forever on a multitude of screens. . ."

Violent drunk:

Affinity, though, needn't mean the biographer sits still for all the subject's nonsense. Schumacher, granted Ginsberg's cooperation for "Dharma Lion," recounts solemnly his silliest monkeyshines; much of his "criticism" paraphrases the poet in vague, flat language: "In his opinion," writes Schumacher of one poem (it hardly matters which), "understanding the vast consciousness affecting every human being was the key to solving the puzzling riddle of everyday problems on earth." Brightman had similar help from McCarthy but still busts her both on her politics (she "accommodated herself to the end-of-ideology ethos" of the '50s) and her veracity. Wilson, a violent drunk, was truly a husband from hell, but McCarthy wasn't "so helpless a victim of [his] powerful will as her memoirs, fiction and interviews suggest." (True, it's easier to stand up to a dead subject; McCarthy died in 1989.)

If only Brightman had taken an equally hard line against using fiction as a source comparable to memoirs and interviews. The literary biographer's besetting sin is to think, as Meyers tritely puts it, that an author's works can be "illuminated by relating them to the events of his life." But a work of art is self-contained. For better or worse, it's beyond help from whatever real-life events it may have liberated from context. Naming the actual Vassarites in McCarthy's "The Group" or telling which of Ginsberg's buddies did what in the celebrated beginning of "Howl" is gossip, however scholarly. At best, it illuminates how the writer worked, not the work itself. Which is fine. Boswell, the archetypal literary biographer, was a great gossip and a bum critic. But writers believe the work transcends the life. Biographers might keep that in mind.

© 1992