Book Review: The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, by Scott Donaldson (2015)

Book cover of The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, by Scott Donaldson, 2015. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Literary biographer and professor Scott Donaldson, 1928-2020.

The literary biographer Scott Donaldson died last December, at the age of 92. Donaldson wrote biographies of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish, and the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, among others. Donaldson began his career as a newspaperman, then moved into academia, teaching at the College of William and Mary for 27 years.

I have a couple of personal connections to Scott Donaldson—we were both born in Minneapolis, and we attended the same high school, graduating some 53 years apart. I met Donaldson at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference in 2017, and he was a kind and generous man. I’m a great admirer of his work on Fitzgerald, as I think his biography Fool for Love is an excellent examination of Fitzgerald’s personality.

After Donaldson’s passing, I read his 2015 book The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography. I wish I had read it while he was still alive, so I could let him know how much I enjoyed it. The Impossible Craft isn’t exactly a memoir, but throughout the book the reader learns many things about Donaldson as he describes the ups and downs of writing biographies of writers.

Donaldson’s Ph.D. was in American Studies, which makes sense as you read his work. Through American Studies, Donaldson had a knowledge of many different disciplines, not just literature. His work is more vibrant and alive than what you might think of from a typical English professor. Side note: You know who else had a Ph.D. in American Studies? Tom Wolfe, of course! Like Wolfe, Donaldson often focused on class and status in his writings. As Donaldson wrote: “You could not adequately understand Fitzgerald or his fiction, for example, without an awareness of the precarious position he occupied, growing up, within the social hierarchy of St. Paul, Minnesota.” (p.21) As a Fitzgerald fan who gives walking tours of his neighborhood in St. Paul, I’m biased, but I agree with Donaldson’s assessment.

Donaldson began each of his books with an admiration of all the writers whose lives he chronicled. “It could hardly have been otherwise, after spending four or five years going to bed at night and waking up in the morning thinking about each of them in turn. The more I learned, the more I understood. The more I understood, the greater the fellow feeling.” (p.122) Donaldson shares his assessment of the authors whose lives he chronicled: “Hemingway was, I believe, the greatest of all the authors I did time with, as well as the most tortured…I felt a closer kinship with Fitzgerald than with any other subject…I even thought, at times, that I could imagine my way into his head.” (p.125-6) It makes perfect sense why Donaldson wrote 5 books about these two brilliant authors, including a fantastic book, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, about their difficult relationship.

The Impossible Craft takes us through some of the challenges the literary biographer might encounter. While you might not be that interested in the particulars of the struggle of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s literary executors to appoint an official biographer, the story is a case study of how different parties have competing interests, often to the detriment of the deceased author. As Donaldson points out, by producing a censored biography of Robinson that protected other deceased members of his family this had the unintentional effect of cooling any interest in Robinson, and his work slid into obscurity.

Donaldson also shows us how all biographies are subjective in his examination of how 14 different authors handled an incident in Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s lives. The incident is the relationship between Zelda Fitzgerald and Edouard Jozan, a French aviator, during the summer of 1924. The only fact we know for sure is that Zelda and Jozan had a flirtation of some kind while Scott was busy writing the novel that he would eventually call The Great Gatsby. Did this flirtation escalate into an affair? It depends on which biography you read. (Since Donaldson’s 2015 examination appeared, Kendall Taylor wrote an entire book about the relationship between Zelda and Jozan, 2018’s The Gatsby Affair.) Adding to the confusion about the summer of 1924 are the stories that Scott and Zelda themselves told about the relationship, and Zelda’s fictional treatment of the relationship in her novel Save Me the Waltz. Donaldson comes to no grand conclusions about what really happened, but he shows us how biographers can spin things to fit their own thesis. As Donaldson writes, “It can safely be said that the single trait all biographers share is a certain arrogance as they undertake to understand how it must have been, say, for Zelda and Scott and Edouard a long time ago.” (p.187)

The Impossible Craft concludes with a chapter aptly titled “The Cheever Misadventure.” Donaldson had long been an admirer of the short stories of John Cheever, and he succinctly summed up what made Cheever such a wonderful writer: “Cheever’s greatest gift was his capacity to bewitch quotidian existence into something magical.” (p.222)

Donaldson began his in-depth research into Cheever shortly after Cheever’s death in 1982. Donaldson informs the reader that, with the benefit of hindsight, there were red flags from the Cheever family from the very beginning. What seemed to begin as a decent relationship soon fell into acrimony. Donaldson wasn’t allowed full access to Cheever’s letters and journals, as the family feared that his biography would overshadow a forthcoming collection of Cheever’s letters. Donaldson’s biography, published in 1988, presented a portrait of Cheever as a troubled man, but ultimately Donaldson concluded the book on a positive note, as Cheever finally conquered his struggle with alcoholism.

Twenty-one years after Donaldson’s biography, Blake Bailey published his own biography of Cheever, this time with the full cooperation of the Cheever family. Bailey painted a much darker portrait of Cheever, but for whatever reason, the family was happier with Bailey’s book than Donaldson’s. Perhaps it was simply the passage of time, and perhaps the Cheevers were pleased that someone was doing something to keep their father in the public eye, as the publishing boom of books about John Cheever during the 1980’s and 1990’s had ended. (This was partially the fault of the Cheevers themselves, as they have never authorized any additional collections of Cheever’s short stories.)

The Impossible Craft is an eloquent summary of Scott Donaldson’s work as a biographer. Donaldson’s own writing ultimately draws us back to the great writing that inspired him to document the lives of those who created it.