“But something betwixt and between”: Roger Fry and the Contradictions of Biography

Summary

In March 1940, Roger Fry received its first bad review. Having read the typescript, Leonard accused Woolf of employing the “wrong method”: “Its mere anal[ysis], not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outsider. All those dead quotations” (D5 271). When the biography was published four months later, it received positive notices in the press, but Leonard's judgment has prevailed and persists in varying forms to this day. In a recent history of biography, for example, Nigel Hamilton surveys the critical tradition and concludes that Roger Fry is “not only the worst book [Woolf] ever wrote, but a complete failure as a biography” (162). This failed reputation is borne out in current publishing trends: Roger Fry remains absent from the Penguin and Oxford Classics list, and although Vintage reproduces the text as part of its Lives series, this is a facsimile reprint without a critical introduction or editorial apparatus. Scholars working on the biography must therefore depend on Diane Gillespie's excellent Shakespeare Head edition, for elsewhere it is erased from the canon of Woolf's major works.

For her part, Woolf was suspicious of Leonard's judgment. She failed to satisfy his demand for “history,” but she considered this a result of “dissympathy” (D5 271). Leonard's assessment reveals a tension between his expectations of formal biography and the methods employed in Roger Fry. He demonstrates “a lack of interest in personality” (D5 271), and here Woolf invokes the terminology employed some thirteen years earlier in her essay “The New Biography” (1927). In pursuing the “rainbow-like intangibility” of personality, Woolf suspects that for Leonard, Roger Fry lacked the “granite-like solidity” of truth (CE4 229). But subsequent critics have accused Woolf of failure on different and contradictory terms. Catherine Parke, for example, though she concedes the biography employs “unconventional digressions,” insists on a return to tradition. She accuses Woolf of reverting to practices previously rejected and satirised in Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), to “conventional narrative[s]” that “[survey] the familiar topics of Victorian biography” (77). Thus, in contrast to Leonard, Parke depicts the biography's failure as a result of too much granite and not enough rainbow.

Roger Fry, it seems, is caught in a double bind. But one further, alternative reading might help unpick such contradiction.