Biographers Seek to Air Subjects’ Dirty Laundry

When Oliver Cromwell, the plain-spoken earthy soldier, agreed to sit for his portrait, he admonished the artist to paint him just as he was, with “pimples, warts and everything.”

That was 350 years ago. If the Lord Protector had lived in the last days of the 20th Century, warts would have been the least of his problems.

Sexual peccadilloes, personality defects, private prejudices--all are fodder for biographers, historians and other latter-day portraitists who have taken on the role, wittingly or unwittingly, of cultural iconoclasts.

H.L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, legendary journalist and editor, master compiler of “The American Language,” opponent of bombast and prejudice, is the latest example.

He has been indicted, more than 30 years after his death, as an anti-Semite and racist through his own words culled from his private diaries.

There have been many others. Joseph Campbell, John Lennon, John Cheever, James Joyce, Jean Stafford, Shirley Jackson, Paul de Man--all admired for their work in life, all pictured after their deaths as having secret weaknesses or personal failings.

Writer Joyce Carol Oates calls the revealing of the warts “pathology. Its motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct,” she writes in a review of David Roberts’ biography of Stafford.

Roberts’ book is a dark study of the novelist’s life, concentrating on the alcoholism and mental and physical collapse of her later years.

Some biographers, Oates says, “so relentlessly catalogue their (subjects’) most private, vulnerable and least illuminating moments as to divest them of all mystery save the crucial and unexplained: How did such a distinguished body of work emerge from so undistinguished a life?”

Biographies that paint less-than-glorious portraits of cultural figures are not new--Robert Frost and Sinclair Lewis come off poorly in the definitive biographies by Lawrence Thompson and Mark Shorer.

Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington portrays Pablo Picasso as a manipulative, abusive genius who ground a cigarette into a lover’s cheek.

And there have always been those who dismissed the biographer as low-life: “Biography, like big-game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be,” wrote Philip Guedalla in 1920.

But recent biographies have been more graphic, less decorous, less respectful of their subjects. Why?

“This country is publicity mad. This is all part of the information revolution of our time,” says critic Alfred Kazin.

There is a preoccupation with gossip and with personal quirks, he says. And there is an academic mania for the collection of personal papers. “If you publish one novel in America, the University of Southwestern Idaho wants your files and love letters,” he said.

“We live in an era in which there is remarkable license,” says Albert Goldman, author of biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon.

Goldman himself has been accused of excessive intrusions into his subjects’ personal lives and of being inaccurate.

Friends and admirers rushed to debunk Goldman’s depictions of Presley as a drug-addicted recluse with limited talents and of Lennon as a volatile, debauched drug user who had a homosexual affair with manager Brian Epstein.

But Goldman says there is a growing understanding among biographers that drugs and alcohol “profoundly affect” a person’s life, and psychoanalysis has made it clear that sexual matters are all-important.

What is gained from revelations about artists? Some biographers say it helps explain the artist’s work; others say they set out to create a complete account of a life, and these things can hardly be ignored.

Goldman says his subjects are more than artists and require more than a low-keyed critical biography: “John Lennon was ultimately far more than an artist--he was a saint and a martyr. Elvis Presley was a myth.”

Some disclosures have fueled debates within the academic community: disclosures that philosopher Martin Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party, and that Paul de Man, founder of the school of literary criticism known as “deconstruction,” wrote anti-Semitic articles in Belgium in the early 1940s.

Do their transgressions invalidate--or explain--their theories?

A wider debate involves Joseph Campbell, the mythologist who gained national fame when his conversations with Bill Moyers were broadcast--posthumously--by the Public Broadcasting Service.

Campbell’s credo that you should “follow your bliss”--ignore convention to find ways to be happy--drew converts. His books became best-sellers.

But Brendan Gill, longtime New Yorker magazine editor and critic, complained in the New York Review of Books that not only were Campbell’s philosophies vague and imprecise, but that Campbell had privately made anti-Semitic remarks. After humans landed on the moon, Campbell allegedly told a student that “the moon would be a good place to put the Jews.”

Since September, when Gill’s article was published, the war has raged between those who believe him and those who say Campbell was innocent.

Gill is unyielding: “When he became a conspicuous public figure and got a response of millions of people, then I had to take up arms against him.”

It is not clear whether his efforts to alter Campbell’s reputation have had much effect.

“There’s still an extraordinary interest in his point of view. Sales have been excellent on the Campbell book (‘The Power of Myth’) for the past four months,” said Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Bantam Books.

Campbell, of course, is not around to defend himself; he has been dead more than two years. Most biographers do not have living subjects to contend with, and the dead cannot be libeled.

But when Ian Hamilton attempted to write a biography of J. D. Salinger, he found that the reclusive writer was very much alive and willing to fight back.

Salinger took Hamilton to court to prevent him from quoting from his private letters, which he had copyrighted. Salinger won, and Hamilton was reduced to writing a book about how he tried to write a Salinger biography.

Surviving relatives of cultural figures can be divided into three camps.

Some cooperate with biographers. Some have become biographers themselves: When novelist and short story writer John Cheever died, his daughter, Susan, disclosed his alcoholism and homosexuality in a memoir, “Home Before Dark.”

“I did it out of anguish and love,” she said.

Cheever’s son, Ben, published his father’s letters (including sexually explicit love letters to men and women) and is preparing a volume of his father’s journals.

But other survivors are reticent, and some are angry. Stephen Joyce, grandson of James and Nora Joyce, was angered by Brenda Maddox’s use of a sexually explicit correspondence between the Joyces in her book, “Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom.”

Stephen Joyce destroyed letters he had received from his aunt Lucia--James Joyce’s daughter, who spent time in a mental institution--and letters from playwright Samuel Beckett to Lucia. Beckett had requested that his letters be destroyed; the rest were destroyed to guard his aunt’s privacy.

“I firmly believe that there is a part of every man or woman’s life, no matter how famous he or she may be, that should remain private,” Stephen Joyce wrote in a letter to the New York Times. “Furthermore, I believe that the Joyce family’s privacy has been invaded more than that of any other writer in this century. Enough is enough, even too much.”

Writing in the Times, Janna Malamud Smith, daughter of novelist and short story writer Bernard Malamud, said her family might burn her father’s papers.

Biographers, she said, “can extract a high and often hidden price in exchange for satisfying our curiosity. Too often readers end up with theories about Hemingway’s identity confusion or alcohol abuse, but lose their pleasure in his fiction. Some mystery about the writer helps maintain the work. I remember how much my father enjoyed knowing little about Shakespeare’s life, relishing the untethered quality that absence conferred upon his plays.”

But Goldman says biography should not affect how we look at art: “A biographer is concerned with the man--a critic is concerned with the art.”

Nor will Americans be culturally bereft if they find their idols have feet of clay, says Kazin: “If we had any culture in America, it would be harder.”

Mencken did not destroy his diaries. He placed them in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, to be sealed for 25 years after his death, and then to be opened to “students engaged in critical or historical investigation.” He did not mention publication; the trustees debated the issue before going ahead.

The book is mostly a list of Mencken’s daily doings, mixed with a few observations about people and events, and the complaints of a notorious hypochondriac. Just a few words are objectionable.

The editor, Charles A. Fecher, says the diaries prove Mencken was an anti-Semite and felt that blacks were inferiors. The revelations led the National Press Club to consider renaming the Mencken Memorial Library and to inducing the winner of an award named after Mencken to refuse the honor.

But New York Times columnist Russell Baker, who knew Mencken from his early days at the Baltimore Sun, noted that there is no evidence Mencken ever acted in a bigoted way. The diary entries were “night faults,” Baker said.

Others argue that the offensive jottings were more reflective of Mencken’s times--an era when racist and anti-Semitic words were the stuff of conversation--than of Mencken himself.

What would Mencken have said? Should a man’s private musings affect the way his public accomplishments are regarded? “The public . . . demands certainties. It must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties,” he once wrote.

But he also wrote: “Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.”