T O D A Y THE STORIES OF A LIFETIME: Lives 'R' us By Joyce Millman A&E's "Biography" is the People magazine of famous lives The Art of Life By Jay Parini A renowned biographer discusses the biographies that have inspired, enthralled and moved him most Parini's list The best literary biographies of the century The Salon List Our favorite bios of the year - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E+T A L K Sir Isaiah Berlin is dead. How much poorer are we without him? Discuss it in the Books section of Table Talk. R E V I E W S LOVE IN A BLUE TIME By Hanif Kureishi (11/19/97) R E C E N T L Y By Scott McLemee (11/12/97) The Salon interview: Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) The man who took sex out of the closet By Scott McLemee (11/05/97) Reckless genius By Galway Kinnell (11/03/97) Cents & sensibility By Gary Kamiya (10/31/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the BOOKS ARCHIVE		THE ART OF LIFE +| + PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Instead of allowing each day to lapse back into the fold of vague memory, Joyce was perpetually reinforcing and reshaping his experience, making art out of life. Ellmann is able to trace this process in vivid, almost three-dimensional detail, taking us back to Dublin, introducing us to the characters who would emerge in "Dubliners," Joyce's first volume of fiction. We also meet the prototype of Stephen Dedalus, the hero of "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man." Indeed, you can hardly read that great novel in any deep sense without having a huge amount of biographical knowledge, and therefore Ellmann becomes a necessary adjunct to the serious reader. Ellmann's narrative moves slowly forward, letting the details accumulate as Joyce abandons Ireland for the Continent, marries, becomes a father, supporting his family through various ill-paid jobs in Italy, France and Switzerland throughout the years when he was writing "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake." As Ellmann puts it: "In whatever he did, Joyce's two profound interests -- his family and his writings -- kept their place. These passions never dwindled. The intensity of the first gave his work its sympathy and humanity; the intensity of the second raised his life to dignity and high dedication." Ellmann is dedicated to the idea of the artist, and so is Leon Edel, whose "Henry James" is a model of the biographical art. Edel devoted himself to James for several decades, immersing himself in the novelist's unpublished notebooks and letters, in the rough drafts of his novellas and novels, his stories and essays. Edel published this biographical series over a period of two decades, somehow managing to sustain the narrative tension from the first volume to the last. I've read Edel's five substantial volumes three times, word for word, slowly. I don't know how many people can say this, but I suspect they are few and far between. I expect to read them again soon, my fourth journey through this extraordinary life, which begins in the nest of an intellectually gifted, wealthy family who spent a good deal of time in elegant European hotels. James was immensely sophisticated, by background and education. His brother, William, became a famous philosopher, and his sister, Alice, was also a brilliant writer. James became the quintessential expatriot, and Edel is artful in the way he evokes a sense of place as James arrives in Florence, Paris, Rome or London. Edel's biography provides, for me, the satisfactions of the old Victorian three-decker novel. The details of daily life are here in profusion. Although James' life was never dull, I'm especially drawn to the young Henry --- the ambitious writer who takes London by storm in the second volume, which is subtitled: "The Conquest of London, 1870 to 1881." Readers are more familiar with the magisterial James who spent the last 15 years of his life in Rye and Chelsea, a Johnsonian figure whose legendary reserve and imperial manners frightened away casual visitors. The younger James was "more ardent and less circumspect," Edel observes. "He met life eagerly and often with exuberance. He was in the fullest sense an 'addicted artist,' but one who was guided at every turn by his intellect. And he was a man of action and a man of the world as well. No novelist of his time addressed himself more assiduously to wooing fame and fortune." This makes a breathtakingly good tale -- and a wonderful introduction to Victorian life, which James encountered in all its complexity and color. It certainly does matter whether or not the subject of a biography actually "did" something in his or her life in addition to writing books. I like it when people in books go places and do things, when they mingle and compete in the great world. Financial and marital crises also make for good reading. All tragedies are useful, from a narrative viewpoint. Ill health can help, too. Fortunately (for the biographer), most lives are full of problems and crises, so there is plenty of available suspense to create a compelling narrative. Charles Dickens has always been a favorite subject for biographers, since his life was easily as large and entertaining as his novels. It is a marvelous rags-to-riches tale, with suspense at every turn as the author's fame and fortune zig and zag, if always on an upward curve. The first Dickens biography was by his closest friend, John Forester, whose book appeared in 1874. Dozens of biographies have been written since then, but one of the best is the most recent: "Dickens" (1990) by Peter Ackroyd. Ackroyd is himself a talented novelist, the author of many novels, including "Chatterton," "The Trial of Elizabeth Cree" and "Milton in America" -- all works of fiction with a distinctly biographical bent. But "Dickens" remains his masterpiece: a vast, 1,195 page book, as capacious and varied as its subject. Ackroyd has a novelist's gift for pacing, and this biography rips along, with lurid descriptions of slum life in London and Paris and colorful portraits of major Victorian figures from William Makepeace Thackeray and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (two rival novelists) to Queen Victoria herself, who invited Dickens to Buckingham Palace for tea. I can think of no biography that provides a better sense of an author's working life. Ackroyd invokes the smell of paper and ink, the frenzy of writing novels in installments, the effort of having to meet each looming deadline, the confusion created by an endless stream of proofs in need of correcting. He gives us the numbers: how many pages Dickens wrote per day as well as how many pounds per page he earned. From the beginning of his career, Dickens was a fluent writer, Ackroyd tells us. With "Pickwick Papers," his first major production, he "was writing quickly but such is the sureness of his invention that the manuscript in his strong and confident hand is remarkably free of corrections. He numbers each page at the top as he goes along with his flowing pen -- there are two or three small deletions on each page which look as if they were made at the actual time of writing, and there are others which were clearly made when he looked over the manuscript after he had completed it," the biographer explains. One puts down "Dickens" with a rich, complete sense of the writer's life and mind, and with some feeling for how he might have written so many astonishing books. Two other, more recent, biographies that strike me as extraordinary works are "Anthony Trollope" (1992) by Victoria Glendinning and "Emerson: The Mind on Fire" (1995) by Robert D. Richardson Jr. The life of Trollope, of course, rivals that of Dickens for worldliness and productivity. He wrote more than 40 novels and kept company with most of the important people of his day: statesmen, authors, industrialists, actors and aristocrats. Glendinning tells the whole story in vivid detail, examining the strange separation between the robust, outgoing man-about-town who was often seen in the fashionable clubs of London and the vulnerable artist who suffered from extreme self-doubt, a man haunted by a sometimes painful childhood during which he was dominated by a flamboyant mother and an aggressive older brother. His rise to national, then international, prominence as an artist is beautifully told. Glendinning ingeniously uses ample quotations from Trollope's work to suggest what the author himself might have been thinking about aspects of his own life. Similarly, Richardson offers an entirely fresh sense of Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's premier thinker, essayist and archetypal man of letters in the 19th century. "Emerson is the great American champion of self-reliance," says Richardson, "of the adequacy of the individual, and of the importance of active soul or spirit." More than any recent biography I have read, Richardson's "Emerson" challenges the reader to live at the level of spiritual intensity that was Emerson's natural gift. It was Matthew Arnold who called Emerson "the aid and abettor of all who live in the spirit." Richardson brings this Emerson to life, and makes him available to our overwhelmingly materialistic age in a miraculous fashion, creating a vivid sense of the "vanishing volatile froth of the present," as Emerson called his life. This book is, in itself, a work of art. It may be some years before critics, who are always behind the times, quite realize what is before them: the Age of Biography. In the meantime, readers who understand as much can still thrill to the spectacle. SALON | Nov. 19, 1997  Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. His novels include "The Last Station" and "Benjamin's Crossing." He has written a life of John Steinbeck and is just completing a life of Robert Frost. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Parini's list The best literary biographies of the century Got a favorite biography that's inspired or moved you? Share your recommendations with other Salon readers in Table Talk.