Biography

Biography (1932), a comedy by S. N. Behrman. [Guild Theatre, 267 perf.] Marion Froude (Ina Claire) is a celebrated artist who has had many lovers all over the world but no husbands. One of her earliest loves, Leander Nolan (Jay Fassett), now a successful lawyer and running for Senator, comes to have his portrait painted. At the same time, Richard Kurt (Earle Larimore), a radical young editor, appears with an offer to publish Marion's autobiography. Although at first she finds Kurt “bumptious and insufferable,” she quickly develops a fondness for him and he falls in love with her. When Nolan learns that Marion has agreed to write her life history, he is furious, for he knows it will ruin his chances of election. But the behavior of his prospective father‐in‐law and his fiancée makes him wonder if he really doesn't still love Marion. Marion recognizes that she would be happy neither with Nolan, who has grown too conservative, nor with Kurt, who is hopelessly hate‐filled. She destroys her manuscript and, receiving an offer to paint some Hollywood celebrities, she tells her maid to pack. She will resume her wayfaring, wayward existence. Most critics agreed with Robert Garland of the World‐Telegram who noted, “The Theatre Guild has gotten around to a play worthy of the high position it occupies in the history of the modern American theatre . . . adult and provocative . . . an evening of rare playgoing felicity.” It remains Behrman's finest work.

Biographies are probably as numerous in France as elsewhere, but the genre has never acquired the prestige there that it possesses in Britain, and can boast few if any great classics.

Early biographies are usually brief and laudatory and were composed according to rhetorical models, as in the medieval lives of saints [see Hagiography] or kings [see Joinville], or the academic éloges which flourished in the 18th c. Beginning in the late 16th c., there are compilations of lives of artists or writers by Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, Perrault, Goujet, and others, and this sub-genre is illustrated at greater length in Baillet's Vie de Descartes (1691) or Grimarest's Vie de Molière (1705), but without great distinction.

The 19th c. saw a considerable growth of interest in the life-stories of individuals. In 1811-28 the book-seller Louis-Gabriel Michaud produced the first edition of his Biographie universelle, of which the second edition (45 vols., 1843-61) remains the basic French biographical dictionary for the period up to about 1850 (for more recent years there is a Dictionnaire de biographie française, begun in 1933 under the direction of J. Balteau, M. Barroux, and M. Prévost—it had reached the letter H by 1989). Nevertheless, even in the 19th c. great biographies are few in number; they might include Chateaubriand's very personal Vie de Rancé and—in a different vein— Renan's Vie de Jésus, or the monumental group biography in the Port-Royal of Sainte-Beuve, who established biography as an essential part of literary criticism.

In the 20th c. popular biographies have been written, for instance, by Maurois, Troyat, and Rolland, and Jean Lacouture has produced important lives of Malraux and de Gaulle, but the most remarkable biographies remain Sartre's imaginative lives of authors (Baudelaire, Genet, Flaubert), which replace the ‘l'homme et l'œuvre’ approach of the classic French doctoral thesis by an attempt to understand the central ‘project’ of the writer. Having been out of fashion during the hey-day of Structuralism and the ‘death of the author’, literary biography enjoyed a renewal of favour in the 1980s, but many lives of French writers continued to be translated from the English (notably George Painter's accounts of Proust and Chateaubriand).

[Peter France]