By Jane Darcy (auth.)
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Extra resources for Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816
Sample text
Not only is the apparent modesty intended to disarm, while implying writerly skill and knowledge, but the writer can thus suggest that the biographical portrait will be unmediated. Here Walton says his ‘faint light’ will be ‘to the advantage of the beholder, who shall here see the Authors Picture in a natural dress, which ought to beget faith in what is spoken: of he that wants skill to deceive, may safely be trusted’ (39). This image of the biographical subject ‘in a natural dress’ is one to which we will return further on.
13 Martin argues that they need 20 Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816 to be understood as part of Walton’s larger project. 14 Both the Life of Donne and the Life of Herbert are structured around each man’s acceptance of his priestly calling. ’15 In contrast, the climatic point of Walton’s Lives is, in Wendorf’s description, one which ‘inaugurates a rising action halfway through the narrative’ when the heroes ‘renounce their worldly expectations’. Wendorf further points to the significance of suffering in this journey to a higher vocation: His subject is characterized as existing in a kind of static limbo in the first half of the narrative.
The milestones of both lives, in Walton’s account, are occasions of suffering: in Donne’s case, his imprisonment at the instigation of his angry father-in-law, the illness of his wife and deaths of several of his children, culminating in the ‘dreadful Vision’, and ending with the various stages, like stations of the cross, of his final illness and death (47). Much has been made of one particular characteristic of Walton’s biographical narration: his frequent use of digression. 22 I suggest that Walton’s digressions – what Wendorf refers to as Walton’s ‘self-conscious stitching’ of structural units – work not in fact to render the narrative static, but rather create a dynamic relationship of intimacy between biographer and reader.