The Paper Garden: an 18th century artist, and a biographer who gets in the way

The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010) is a biography of the 18th century English artist Mary Delany by the American poet Molly Peacock.  Delany’s form was paper collages of flowers, portrayed with a botanist’s attention to detail.  Botanists would send exotic specimens to Delany to “sit” for a portrait.  It was almost a relief to learn that she would at times use a little bit of paint, but every shape and almost every shade of color is cut from paper.  The book is printed on thick, creamy paper designed to show off the numerous images, but nothing can duplicate the texture of the originals.  I would stare at the prints.  Just paper – impossible!

The collages, now owned by the British Museum, would be extraordinary objects under any circumstances.  The book’s subtitle tells the rest of the story.  Delany invented the form at the age of 72, and over the next decade, before her eyesight dimmed, she made 985 flower portraits, individual, innovative, and strangely personal.  Glue, scissors, black ink for the background, and a portfolio of colored paper, and of course a subject, say the winter cherry on the left, which to add to my amazement also incorporates, in the lower right, an actual seed pod skeleton.

Mary Delany’s biography would be of high interest even if she had never made the collages, but the sudden emergence of Delany as a fine and innovative artist puts a frame around her entire life.  How, I want to know, did she get there?

Just the question Molly Peacock asked when she discovered the flowers and conceived of this book.  The biography is organized chronologically, with one of the flowers made to imaginatively connect to the stage of Delany’s life.

Winter Cherry is an analogous name for Mrs. D.’s whole enterprise…  a self-portrait of the artist as a single stalk of a plant, showing her at four of life’s stages: the green lantern of childhood; the fully dressed, bright orange one with slight hip hoops – young womanhood; the lower lantern with part of the dress removed to show the interior of the plant – increasing maturity; and the last lantern, the heart of the aged woman.  The fine ribs of the plant material make the skeleton of the former lantern into something like a rib cage, with the cherry beating inside.  (318-9)

Note the clothing theme; it runs through the whole book.  Some, perhaps much of this is fanciful.  The author is a poet.  She takes some wild leaps.

The wildest is the inclusion at the end of each chapter of her own memoir.  Awkward teen, parents, divorce, first poetry (late, but nowhere as late as 72), happy second marriage.  Some of these episodes have a parallel with her subject’s 18th century life, but obviously not all of them.  Yet Peacock often creates links between her own life and the flower portrait that heads the chapter, sometimes different, even unrelated links.

But artworks let us leap centuries.  Artwork to artwork, hand to hand, time falls away in the presence of the marvelous.  (229)

Well, sometimes.  The metaphor elides the effort, or strain, required.  There is some strain.  The memoiristic parts are always at the end of the chapter, and have their own heading.  They could easily be skipped or skimmed.  Why does the biographer weave her own life in with that of her fascinating subject?

I found the answer in Chapter 11, which is not about Mary Delany but about her great-great-great-great-great-great niece Ruth Hayden, author of Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Flowers (1980), the book that brought Delany’s life and work back to public attention.  Hayden was 58 when she completed the book.  Her formal education had ended when she was twelve.  Here, then, is another woman finding her “life’s work” at a late age.  Her story is not as remarkable as that of her distant aunt’s, but whose is?

How we have three women who took up significant creative and intellectual work at an unusually late age.  By pursuing a poetical conceit, Peacock is making an argument about the nature of creativity.  Some kinds of creativity, at least; her own, Hayden’s, and Delany’s. 

Who doesn’t hold out the hope of starting a memorable project at a grand old age?  A life’s work is always unfinished and requires creativity till the day a person dies.  (5)

Peacock describes her book as “a narrative collage in response to her visual collages” and makes clear that she did not set out to make a particular argument but rather discovered it along the way – “unconsciously Mrs. Delany’s invention of collage would seep into my own writing process.”  I am quoting from a letter Peacock sent to the book blog Alison’s Book Marks.  Is that not cool?

The Paper Garden  is a terrific book.  If Peacock’s autobiography were absent, I would not miss it, but I likely would, then, miss some of the larger meaning that can be taken from Mary Delany’s story.

The book has a website, with lots of links, including to the British Museum collection.

Also, see Rohan Maitzen’s review of the book, the kind of personal response for which the book is made.  Maitzen used the winter cherry, too.  It is irresistible.

His biography is simply, “He did this, nor will ever another do its like again.” - on literary biography

Perhaps, writing about “The Aspern Papers,” I downplayed its attack against that malicious species known as the literary biographer.  If so, I had two good reasons: first, upon paying attention to the text of the story rather than my received idea of it, I quickly saw that James’s target was more complex and more interesting; second, James himself was a literary biographer.  He had written and published Hawthorne (1879) only nine years earlier.

Granted, James did not attempt to steal, or at least avoids the inference that he had stolen, any love letters from Hawthorne’s early paramours or illegitimate daughters, and in the book’s first sentence he claims “to give this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography” (Ch I), in part because Hawthorne’s life was unutterably tedious (“almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the dramatic quality”), but largely because James’s concerns are more with the art than the man, none of which prevents him from writing several chapters of what appears to be ordinary biography, mostly a summary and commentary on the more conventional 1876 Hawthorne biography written by George Parsons Lathrop, or from delivering aggravating judgments like “[t]his sketch of the Custom-house is, as simple writing, one of the most perfect of Hawthorne's compositions, and one of the most gracefully and humorously autobiographic,” even though the “Custom-house” section is a blatant fiction as a critic as sophisticated as the author of "The Art of Fiction" surely knows.

I’m abandoning James now, so I thought I would treat myself to a nice, twisty sentence.

On the one hand, I am not much of a reader of literary biography.  On the other hand, I love it and read it all the time, mostly in the form of magazine reviews of gigantic definitive biographies that I would never think of reading, the big bruisers that go into so much detail about what the writer has for breakfast.

Actually I do not remember any of the big biographies I have read (Nicolas Boyle on Goethe, Brian Boyd on Nabokov, Richard Holmes on Shelley) having a word to say about breakfast (Boswell’s Life of Johnson may well contain a morsel of breakfast).  When Jane Austen in Mansfield Park tells me “that the remaining cold pork bones and mustard in William's plate might but divide her feelings with the broken egg-shells in Mr. Crawford's” I take that as an example of exquisite artistry.  I wonder where the anti-breakfast cliché came from.  More biographical breakfast, I say!

By chance I came across John Ruskin expressing my true feelings, or what I would like them to be, in his peculiar book The Queen of the Air (1869).  Artistic biographies are in no obvious way the subject of the book, but that never stops Ruskin:

Of Turner’s life, and of its good and evil, both great, but the good immeasurably the greater, his work is in all things a perfect and transparent evidence.  His biography is simply, “He did this, nor will ever another do its like again.”  (III.113)

Give me a list of works and their chronology and I will understand the artist’s biography.  The rest – the breakfasts, the love letters – is just literature.  Meaning: a biography is well-written, or not; clever or dull; meaningful or trite; a good book or a dud.  Literature, or not.

One of the sweeter satisfactions of literary biography - I should try to write a less rambling post sometime

When I lived in Chicago it was common enough to see news stories about people stranded at O’Hare airport, sleeping on cots or slumped against their bags.  Gee, that must be rough, I would think.  It turns out it is rough, and certainly an excuse for the scattered and exhausted writing of this blog post.  Then again, the cab driver who picked us up from Willie Mae’s Scotch House yesterday spent eight days – “see that bridge up there” – on a highway overpass with his wife and ten kids, looking down on the flood waters, before a helicopter rescued them.  So one bad travel day is hardly a good excuse for bad writing.

I want to consider a line from a review of the newly translated Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff.  The review is by Michael Scammell and is in the June 7 The New Republic; I am on page 35:

In the earlier chapter [the critical commentaries on Brodsky’s poems] attain a narrative tension of their own, offering one of the sweeter satisfactions of literary biography, which consists in reading about the early creative struggles and artistic successes of a major writer on the way up.

I just want to ask:  is that true?  Because, although I had never expressed it so well, this is exactly why I enjoy biographies of writers.  The discovery and exploration of genius is always an exciting story, much like the exploration of an unknown mountain range.  What is in there?  Anything could be in there.

Once an artist becomes famous, once his biography turns into a list of prizes, teaching positions, and honorary degrees, nothing is left for the biographer except gossip about the writer’s sex life and feuds. The mystique of the poet who dies young, of Keats and Shelley, is that we never see the end of the story.  Much of the pleasure of Nabokov’s creative biography is certainly that the story repeats.  Just as he achieved a unique mastery of the Russian language he fled to America and started over with English, so I get to enjoy two struggles, two successes. The Francis Steegmuller book on Flaubert that I am reading, Flaubert and Madame Bovary, is almost entirely devoted to this one stage, with just a few pages for his childhood and family and a few for his later career.

No, that is hardly true, that business about the later life of the poet and the mystique and so on.  Wordsworth can be one of the dullest poets imaginable – I know exactly how the creative story ends – yet his early life, his grasping for the breakthrough of Lyrical Ballads (1798), is an exciting story.  The mystery of that moment of creation is what matters.  Yeats only becomes more interesting – artistically interesting – as he ages.   Samuel Johnson’s creative instrument is fully developed by the time he meets James Boswell, yet the extensive treatment of Johnson’s later years, often pulled directly from Boswell’s journals, is extraordinary.  But Johnson’s biography, as Boswell discovers, mostly consists of Johnson’s own words (intermixed with those of his appreciative biographer).  For some artists the creative struggles never end.  Perhaps that is the definition of an artist.  Except now I have another list of unfair exclusions.

And so in summary: it depends.

There is nothing absurd, nothing obscure, nothing impious in this book, except to mules and asses - Ingrid Rowland's Giordano Bruno

In response to Bibliographing Nicole's cruel mockery, this week it's nothing but proper book reviews. Today, Giordano Bruno (2008) by Ingrid Rowland.

OK. How to start one of these things? Joan Acocella, in a New Yorker review, begins with juicy details of Bruno's death, burned at the stake as a heretic on Ash Wednesday, 1600. He rode a mule from the Inquisition prison; he wore a leather gag. Then a bit on the book, then three pages summarizing it, then back to the book itself for a few paragraphs. She has a lot of room and can sprawl a bit. Anthony Gottlieb, in a more compressed New York Times piece, also has to tell us who Bruno was before he can get to the book.

I don't want to do all that. If you're reading this and don't know who Giordano Bruno was, ya got the internet, right? Unless someone printed this out for you, I guess. Or maybe it's being read to you over the phone. Doesn't seem very likely. But that's not my point.

Acocella's summary of Bruno's life is excellent. If it's only worth ten minutes to you, read that, and not Ingrid Rowland's book. The book is first-rate, though. There cannot be many other scholars who have such a comprehensive view of the artistic and intellectual times. Her imaginative conception of Naples and Venice is thorough, completely convincing, but I think she's just as good crossing the Alps with Bruno to Geneva, Paris, London and all over Germany. She never pushes the evidence, and acknowledges the huge gaps in what we know of Bruno's life and travels. Both reviewers seem to find this irritating.

They also both criticize Rowland for "too little examination of [Bruno's] ideas." Can they be serious? They want more space devoted to neo-Platonist conceptions of the celestial spheres, or the influence of the Kabbalah and scholasticism on Bruno's idea of the infinite? Really? Isn't that what the bibliography is for? Rowland's greatest conceptual success is treating Bruno more like an imaginative writer than as a philosopher or proto-scientist. For example, when Rowland discusses, extensively, the metaphor of the forest in neo-Platonist writings, she is talking about ideas. The metaphor is itself an idea.

I can attest that Giordano Bruno is readable. Quite good, actually. I read The Expulsion of the Triumphal Beast (1584) several years ago. It's plenty difficult, but also funny, in the spirit of Lucian. Rowland has convinced me to read The Heroic Frenzies, at least, forthcoming, translated by Ingrid Rowland. Just a taste of Triumphal Beast, also translated by Rowland (although the old Imerti translation I read seems just as good), a bit of earthy satire of omnipotence:

"MERCURY: [Jove has] ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Father Franzino's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat... That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung whenever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random." (Dialogue I, Part 3)

And it continues on, with Jove deciding on the number of hairs singed by a curling iron, when a woman loses a tooth, which food will be converted into the semen that impregnates Ambrogio's wife (leeks in millet and wine sauce). In the title of the post, I put a quotation by a student of Bruno's which Rowland found in the margins of a copy of Paracelsus, now in the amazing Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel. Well, when it comes to Paracelsus, I'm a mule and/or an ass, but for at least a few of Bruno's books, he's closer to correct. A few. Closer - still lot's that's absurd and obscure. I think I'll skip On the Scrutiny of Species and the Combinatory Lamp of Ramon Llull, and One Hundred and Twenty Articles Against Mathematicians and Philosophers, and, let's see, much, much more. If you read them, come on back and let me know all about it.

One criticism of my own: the publisher should have sprung for illustrations. I am sure Rowland wanted them, and I blame the publisher. On the other hand, whoever insisted on the extra-short chapters was correct; Rowland uses them with artist's sense of momentum, building up to the single long chapter, when Bruno finds himself in an Inquisition prison. He spent ten years, the rest of his life, in one prison or another.

I have actually, full disclosure, seen Rowland once, from a distance, walking across the University of Pittsburgh campus. This was several years ago.

I'm not so sure that this was really a book review. Tomorrow, a real one.

By the way, a medieval and/or early modern literature blog along the lines of Wuthering Expectations - call it Gargantua Furioso, maybe, or how about Orlando Quixote - would be something I would very much enjoy reading.

Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol - my favorite biography - "I said there were students and students."

- "Well." - said my publisher, - "I like it - but I do think the student ought to be told what it is all about."

I said...

- "No," - he said, - "I don't mean that. I mean the student ought to be told more about Gogol's books. I mean the plots. He would want to know what those books are about."

I said...

"No, you have not," - he said. - "I have gone through it carefully and so has my wife, and we have not found the plots. There should also be some kind of bibliography or chronology at the end. The student ought to be able to find his way, otherwise he would be puzzled and would not bother to read any further."

I said that an intelligent person could always look up dates and things in a good encyclopedia or in any manual of Russian literature. He said that a student would not be necessarily an intelligent person and anyway would resent the trouble of having to look up things. I said there were students and students. He said that from a publisher's point of view there was only one sort.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, pp. 151-2.

The above is how Nabokov more or less ends his dazzling short biography of Nikolai Gogol, dashes and ellipses included. I'll let the (fictional, presumably) excerpt speak for itself. I can recommend this book to anyone interested in, let's say, reading. Not just reading Gogol - reading books.

Once you've read it, you will perhaps see the struggles - anxiety, even - I have had this week, trying to write something about Gogol that is not just a series of quotations from Nabokov.

When I said short, I mean short: 175 pages, including the chronology and index (which will not, in this case, help you find the Crown Jewels). More biographies should be this long. I don't want to exaggerate - I have read the 1,400 pages of the first two volumes of Nicholas Boyle's biography of Goethe, and will dive into volume 3 as soon as it's published - but most of those big brick-like literary biographies are not for me.

So many of the short (less than 200 pages) biographies seem to be in series now - Penguin Lives, Ackroyd's Brief Lives, Overlook Illustrated Lives. Edmund White's little Proust bio is a pleasure, as is Joseph Epstein on Tocqueville. Madison Smartt Bell on Lavoisier. Nigel Nicholson on Virginia Woolf.

None of these hit quite the same perfect combination as Nabokov of fine prose, organization, and focus on the writer's work. But all are worth the two hours or so they'll take you.

Does anyone have any favorite short biographies they would like to recommend - not just of writers, but of anyone? Who do you think gets it right?