SILENCES, CONTRADICTIONS, AND THE URGE TO FICTION: REFLECTIONS ON WRITING ABOUT MARY DAVYS1

Since one can have no idea what really went on in the lives of those now resident in cemeteries, the novel was invented. Back of graveyard pieties there are vivid realities.

- Gore Vidai, Palimpsest, A Memoir

Gore Vidal's admonition at the beginning of his memoirs both serves to put his readers on notice and aptly describes the temptations of all life-writers. In a small way, I experienced the tug that all biographers feel, between what they know and what their imaginations tell them, when I edited three novels by Mary Davys for the University Press of Kentucky. Part of the endeavor required me to write a short account of her life for the introduction; indeed, a short account is all it is possible to write. In the two years before I sat down to compose the biographical essay, I attempted to expand the pitifully small knowledge we have of Davys into something more solidly resembling a life, always bearing in mind the limitations of such knowledge-the impossibility of knowing what went on in the minds of the people involved, the exact conversations, the true motivations. Even for authors about whom a fuller record exists there are important characteristics that remain unknowable. After spending years in the archives researching Laurence Sterne, Arthur Cash delineates the limitations of his studies:

Though a biographer may amass more factual knowledge than he has of his nearest neighbour, he cannot know his man in another way as well as he can know a stranger after two minutes of casual conversation in the street. I am familiar with Sterne's face, but have never seen its changing expressions, have taken the measure of his form, but never observed his gestures, have read his words, but never heard his intonations. (Early and Middle Years xi)

What is missing here, of course, is the life itself, the animation of the record. But I had even less to go on than Cash had for Sterne; for example, I do not know Davys's face or form. In the absence of concrete evidence, 1 found myself speculating about the meaning to Davys of events such as the death of her children, which is the kind of speculation that all biographers face; indeed, that they ought to face.

In the years since I completed the edition, which was published in 1999, I have continued to ponder what I describe as the urge to fiction: the impulse to fill in the blanks, connect the dots, construct in my imagination the scenes that are now lost to us, should they ever have existed. Margaret Ezell reminds us of the need to historicize, to consider our subjects' points of view within their own historical contexts, and to focus our interpretations within those contexts:

In order to create a coherent narrative, any type of history must necessarily be selective in its choice of materials, and in its presentation.... The question about the writing of women's literary history then becomes, what are the principles of selection and exclusion in the current women's literary history, and to what extent are they manifestations of unquestioned assumptions about women's texts, about historical periods, and about the nature of authorship? (2)

If we do not pay attention to the historical period, we will make selections and assumptions that reflect our own experience and not those of the writers whose lives we are examining. We must be especially careful when dealing with women's lives, lest we make anachronistic judgments about the roles of publication, about women's friendships, about women's choices. But the writing of professional biographers, particularly when they are reflecting on their own work, also reveals the extent to which the imagination can and must participate in our writing. The writers to whom I refer in this essay-Richard Holmes, Hermione Lee, and Park Honan, in particular-are always dealing with far more information than I had. Even so, it is never enough, and there is a place for the sympathetic imagination to extend itself, once it is properly imbued with the historic context. Their reflective writing reveals both the ways in which they immersed themselves in their subjects' lives and the extent to which they felt both justified and required to use their imaginations.

In the case of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee found that she had both too much information and not enough. The group of friends and relations commonly called the Bloomsbury group left thousands of pages of records, but Woolf's feeling that her soul disappeared under the scrutiny of journal writing makes those documents problematic: "So that the sense we get from Virginia Woolf's diaries of knowing everything about her is, perhaps, illusory" (5). This most self-conscious of writers knew better than anyone else that there is no transparent writing, and that every time we construct a sentence about ourselves, we are constructing that self with it: "Her diary, like her essays and stories and novels, blurs the lines between history, biography and fiction" (8). Lee's task is made both more interesting and profoundly intimidating because in Woolf she has a subject who was herself endlessly interested in the matter of life-writing of all kinds, both formal (biographies, memoirs, autobiographies) and informal (letters, journals, fragmented stories), and who believed that "the idea of biography is-to use a word she liked-poppycock" (4). She begins her book with Woolf's own question, expressed in a letter to Vita Sackville-West: "My God, how does one write a Biography?" (qtd. in Lee 3). Of course, Woolf resolved the problem with respect to Sackville-West by writing a novel, the great Orlando, and elsewhere described an adequate biography as one that contains both fact and fiction: