The Biographer as Artist

An "artistic impulse toward writing" combined with the architect's search for "some underlying unity of design" led Edgar Johnson into the field of literary biography. The path which took him into English was by no means straight, however, for when he graduated from Columbia in the class of '22 he was complacently settled on becoming an architect.

Johnson spent two years studying architecture at the Columbia graduate school before deciding that his real talents lay elsewhere. "When I looked at the work of my classmates," he said, "my ideas seemed very mediocre to me. It appeared very unlikely that the four great architects of the century would come from the same class in the same small school of architecture, so I decided I might do better for myself in another field."

And Johnson's decision to become a writer was a fortunate one indeed. His two-volume biography of Charles Dickens has been widely praised as the definitive treatment of Dickens' life, and has earned Johnson a place among the most noted of literary biographers.

Johnson terms himself an "accidental scholar." His approach is that of the novelist vividness of description, ease and grace of style, and a conviction that even in biography a strong central story line must be kept well in sight. It is this last, the emphasis on an organized view of the work as a whole, that has led to Johnson's reputation as a scholar.

In the biography of Dickens the subtitle "Tragedy and Triumph" suggests the central story line around which Johnson builds his design. "Success," he said, "came to Dickens immediately with his first novel. The more successful he became, the more he grew disillusioned with life." Johnson views this conflict of success and disillusionment as the central theme of Dickens' life, and he draws on his wealth of research to substantiate it.

In order to discover the basic meaning in a man's life, Johnson feels the biographer must make himself acquainted with a large body of facts. The facts, however, have their principal value in leading to an understanding of the biography as a whole. Their worth lies not in the learning of detail for its own sake.

Johnson's interest in biography stems from one of his early works, a critical history of English biography entitled One Mighty Torrent. In this book he expounded his ideas about the principles and techniques for writing biography, and his life of Dickens arose from a feeling that he should test these beliefs to see if they could actually produce the kind of biography he was seeking.

Essentially, Johnson feels one must look for a basic meaning or motivating force in the biography just as the writer invents it in the novel. The writer must also convey a feeling of constant movement in time through dramatization of his subject. The subject should be portrayed through characters in action, speaking in their own words, instead of through masses of description and history. Dramatic unity, he feels, should apply to a biography just as much as to a play.

One of the most distinctive features about Johnson's life of Dickens is the inclusion of critical chapters about the author's greatest books, interposed into the biography at the points in his life when Dickens wrote them. These chapters are an interpretive criticism arising as a fusion of two main purposes: to show how some of the themes in Dickens' novels grew out of the author's personal experience, and to emphasize Dickens' technique and development as an author.

Johnson insists he has no quarrel with the "new critics" who assert that a literary work should require no knowledge to be understood outside of that presented in the book itself. He maintains, however, that a knowledge of the author's life can very often throw further illumination on his works. It would be a critical folly, he says, to throw this knowledge away.

The choice of Charles Dickens as the subject for Johnson's first biography reflects to a large extent the influence of some of his earlier works. Shortly after World War II he served as the editor of an anthology of satire, tracing in his introductions the development of satirical thought from ancient Greece to the present. At this time he became interested in the power of Dickens' satiric dialogue and characterizations, and returned to him as the natural choice for his first biography.

Johnson has not restricted himself to the writing of non-fiction, however. During the thirties he published two novels, Unweave a Rainbow (dealing with "the disappearance of illusion in the process of arriving at maturity") and The Praying Mantis (a murder mystery centered on the anxieties of the killer). At present he is concluding a biography of Sir Walter Scott, which he hopes to finish some time next fall.

Johnson is currently the chairman of the English Department of CCNY, where he has taught since 1927. He is the father of two children, including a son, Larry M. Johnson '61, now in Winthrop. He has spent the week as a guest of Winthrop House under the Ford Foundation Program and has given a public lecture on "Satire and the Censor," as well as an informal discussion before the Winthrop House Seminar.