Referenced in an earlier post, our group had a heated discussion about Carole Angier’s conclusion that a reason (explanation, interpretation, final cause, or however you prefer to characterize it) for the personality and circumstances of Rhys’s life was Borderline Personality Disorder. If the facetiousness does not make it clear, Angier’s conclusion did not receive unanimous agreement. Some may even take a minor level of offense at a biographer seeking to diagnose a subject’s mental health issues, especially posthumously. While a biographers tally of Rhys’ character might line up well with a very generalized list of symptoms, seeking to diagnose in biography can be disrespectful both to the humanity of the subject, and the dignity of the mentally ill.
The negative reaction to this tendency to either diagnose behaviour or in a lesser sense judgmentally otherize it was not quite as explicit reading James’ biography -which incidentally was the first formal biography of Rhys and narrowly the only one written contemporaneously. Despite not being as egregious, James’ effort leaves a similar impression to Angier’s. A team member, Laura, noted both in the original conversation and in her own post that Pizzichini, in her account, seemed to have the precise aim of portraying the events of Rhys’s life so as the reader could have some sense of sympathy with her. It would be unfair to accuse James of the lack of respect for the human component of his biography to the same degree as allegedly Angier. Further, the issue at hand is not one of unqualified pop psychology but more one of a disagreement of the purpose and best practice of the art of biography. In The Blue Hour, Pizzichini, when acknowledging the intense research commitment of Angier in the author’s note, follows the point of Angier’s diagnosis with her own input, saying ‘Rhys laid herself bare in her writing, and it is clear that she was an unconventional woman tormented by her inability to conform’ (2009, pp. 307). This contrast sums up the feelings of critics of Angier’s biographical style perfectly, we do not need a diagnosis or a label to attach to Rhys, in reading a biography we seek understanding, relation and an appreciation for the humanity of the subject.
The origin of this feeling within James’ mercifully short biography was that there seemed to be an ongoing motivated theme of denationalization. He would rhyme off facts about Rhys’ life only for them to be referenced again as justification for why he thinks it led to her being or writing the way she did, with little to no intent of creating a feeling of empathy with the subject. Mapping the facts of his account to his intent over the course of the biography is tricky, so consider some of his other essays on Rhys. At the risk of perhaps falling victim to confirmation bias in seeking to diagnose James’ agenda. In James’ essay ‘The Lady is not a Photograph’ in the same fashion Angier’s attempted diagnostic analysis Rhys feelings, this sentence stood out
At the time, as we have seen, writing of her involvement with Dominica was a source of anxiety to her, and she wrote, “I’m a bit torn in two about the West Indies and indeed about the book that I was hoping to write.” Smile Please, heavily edited, did get published, but it was a fragmentary work, bearing the tension of attempting to reconcile passionate attraction to her childhood experience (2003, pp.179)
I contrast this to an excerpt from ‘The Blue Hour’
There was one man she met to whom she was attracted – a bad lot whom she calls Harry Benson in her first novel, which was never published, the one Ford Madox Ford would call Triple Sec. Harry had been an officer and a gentleman; he was trim, had a muscular build[…] (2009, pp.122)
The first, it seems, is the most descriptive of the emotional content of someone’s situation someone could be, while totally sanitizing it of any invitation of sympathy. The facts of her emotional experience, her anxiety, her pain are reduced to nothing but context to her career, the real topic. In Pizzichini’s, one feels the reverse is true, the fact of her being an author is accessory to the fact of her life, as it could be argued it should be in a biography. Perhaps anger at Angier and disappointment in James are a mere disagreement over the nature and responsibility of biography. This investigation will be continued.