Outsider Biographies

As the title suggests, Ian H. Magedera's new study covers about two-and-a-half centuries, as well as a wide variety of figures who have been the subjects of biography and/or bio-fiction. This broad coverage is one of the most appealing features of the book—but it also, I believe, entails some shortcomings.Magedera is concerned to compare the Anglophone and French traditions of biography. He does value biographies that seek to establish the facts about their subjects' lives—especially when these have been occluded by myth-making. But his overall preference is for the kind of biography, increasingly prominent in recent years, that recognizes the tentative nature of truth claims, and thus acknowledges that any pretension to a comprehensive understanding of a biographical subject is very tendentious—especially any total grasp of their life from cradle to grave. In tandem with this development, he notes, there has been a tendency for biographers to discuss, in their texts and/or paratexts, their own conceptions of their biographical projects.The biographical enterprise is complicated for Magedera when the subject is both a writer and an outsider, and this is the paradox he claims for the seven figures who are the focal points of his book. More precisely, he argues that these seven men are criminals in the legal sense. Hence they are inherently problematic as biographical subjects: their achievements as writers are what makes them admirable (and worthy of study), but their criminal activity invites censure.This paradox is most salient for the earliest figures covered here: Richard Savage (1698–1743), memorialized by Samuel Johnson in 1744 (and much later by Richard Holmes); the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), subject of many biographies; and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1847), treated by Oscar Wilde and then recently by Andrew Motion. Savage killed a man in a pub brawl, de Sade was accused of poisoning and perpetrated sexual abuse, and Wainewright, eventually transported for forgery, very likely committed at least one murder for gain. In particular, Magedera's discussion of Johnson on Savage, as well as of various de Sade biographers, brings out the paradox very clearly. He demonstrates how Johnson deploys various tropes of failed parenthood to account for Savage's failings, but is unable to reconcile the contradictory elements in his friend's behavior and present a stable identity for him—thus foreshadowing the characteristics found in many contemporary biographies. Meanwhile de Sade has attracted numerous biographers with varying takes on the connection between crime and writing. Nonetheless, the Marquis remains ultimately inscrutable.The two other French writers featured here, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) and Jean Genet (1910–1986), exemplify the “Base Crime and High Art” paradox less persuasively than does de Sade. Rimbaud was an “outsider” in his alienation from bourgeois and heterosexual respectability, and eventually from France itself, but his criminal record was sketchy, while Genet's criminal activity largely preceded his activity as a published writer. Nonetheless, Magedera's chapters on both these writers are very rich, and full of fascinating insights. He covers numerous versions of Rimbaud, from the early, whitewashing family accounts to the significant biography by Jean-Luc Steinmetz and the bio-fiction by Pierre Michon, which appeared at the centenary of the writer's death in 1991. As a scholar who has already published extensively on Genet, too, Magedera is very familiar with the biographical material on the writer in both French and English. Genet is a remarkable biographical subject, not because of his criminal past as such, but because Jean-Paul Sartre produced the extraordinarily extended biographical apologia for him, Saint-Genet, in 1952—and this was the first of several biographically oriented works on the writer published well before his death. So immersed in an atmosphere of myth-making was Genet, however, that the first factually reliable (but not at all reductive) biography, by Edmund White, came out only in 1993.In the cases of all three French writers covered here, what emerged most strongly for this (Anglophone) reader was not the criminality/author binary, but how they were consistently interpreted in terms of the priorities of the age and/or the biographer. Magedera discusses biographies of de Sade in the context of how life writing has been practiced in France since the mid-nineteenth-century “man and his work” approach associated with Sainte-Beuve. Of Rimbaud, he observes that up to 1949, he was “co-opted by every major ideology and expression of culture: ... as communard, as Christian, as Oriental mystic, as existentialist, as Freudian and as Resistance sympathizer” (220). Similarly, Sartre's Saint-Genet sought to recuperate Genet in terms of the philosopher's own social critique and psychological interests. Some French biographers come across as having a powerful personal investment in their subjects arising from sources of which they are themselves hardly aware—including Sartre himself, as well as Sade biographer Gilbert Lely, and especially René Etiemble, who devoted many years and four volumes to deconstructing other people's versions of Rimbaud. In this respect, the most significant aspect of the French writers' criminality consists of its myth-making potential. Like their nonliterary counterparts, “outsider” writers can easily seem larger than life. More than their nonliterary counterparts, however, they have the capacity to contribute to this aura themselves.Magedera much admires the way bio-fiction, since it is less constrained than biography by the obligation to take account of documented facts, might offer suggestive hypotheses about writers. Thus he commends Pierre Michon's Rimbaud le fils, which uses a Freudian approach to explore the impact on his poetic development of Rimbaud's “ever-present mother and his absent father” (239), as well as Jean-Pierre Renault's Une enfance abandonnée: Jean Genet à Alligny en Morvan (2000), a reconstruction of Genet's rural childhood as a adopted orphan. Such fictions are compared to biographies of the same writers in illuminating ways. Yet when it comes to his Anglophone subjects, except for Savage, Magedera focuses on bio-fiction alone. He seems to appreciate Dr. Johnson's foreshadowing of the way some modern biographies acknowledge the unknowability of the subject, but otherwise, he finds current Anglophone biographical practice largely too traditional. Hence, when seeking criminal writer subjects in Anglophone culture, he elects to treat bio-fiction rather than biography: that is, Andrew Motion's Wainewright the Poisoner (2000), Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (2000/2002), and Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems (1970/1989). Unlike some of the emotionally invested French biographers whom Magedera covers, these writers are highly self-aware about the questions raised by their works.Even listing these three books, however, highlights a possibly unintended paradox in Magedera's handling of Anglophone bio-fiction about writer outsiders. The authors of these three bio-fictions are among the most distinguished of current writers in English, but it would be hard to claim similar literary distinction for any of their subjects. This circumstance is not very problematic in the case of Wainewright, since he was a published writer (of criticism, rather than creative works), and one motivation for Motion was actually to recuperate Wainewright's literary output, overshadowed as it has been by both his criminal history and his connections with better known contemporaries. But as regards Ned Kelly and Billy the Kid, it is the modern bio-fictionists themselves who conjure writers from the outlaws: Ondaatje makes Billy the Kid a poet, while Carey shows his Kelly growing into a writer through his autobiographical narrative. Magedera's exploration of all these bio-fictions is very compelling, but the parallels with the other cases dealt with (Savage, de Sade, Rimbaud, and Genet) are not.This difference is unfortunately exacerbated, as regards the Carey and Ondaatje texts, by Magedera's failure to explore biographical accounts of Ned Kelly and Billy the Kid—he confines himself to intertexts mentioned in the actual novels. (On Wainewright, there is little biographical material.) Needless to say, both of these outlaws have attracted many attempts at biography as well as much myth-making: the myth-making has been linked in turn to the social conflicts of late nineteenth-century Victoria (Kelly) and the US western frontier of the same period (Billy the Kid), not to mention the investments in these by later generations. But the treatment here ignores most of this, so that, unlike in the cases of Rimbaud and Genet, we are not invited to compare bio-fiction with biography, or to take account of the effects of myth-making. This gap, as well as his choice of outlaw outsiders who are not known as writers, suggests that Magedera's expertise is primarily in French literature and biography. Figures like Byron or Oscar Wilde (insiders who became outsiders, and who are undeniably writers) might well have been more relevant subjects here than Ned Kelly or Billy the Kid.As a comparative study, Outsider Biographies is always well argued and thought provoking, and the sections on French writers are particularly valuable (especially as all the French language material is cited in both the original and in English). But it fails to exploit fully the possibilities of the topic as regards Anglophone biographical traditions. Nor, unfortunately, has the author been well served by his copy editors

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