Biography

362 biography Vol. 3, No. 4 Bloomsbury Portraits (1976), Edel's book is a more intimate document , probing the interior life of each person with perception and skill. Edel gives to each character the vitality and drama of life. Essentially , it is the human side of their lives which Edel portrays. In giving shape to their personalities, he does not concentrate on their achievements—great as they are—but upon the essences of human spirit. Richard Shone himself has reviewed Edel's book; he found it "disappointing" and "disagreeable." Shone has said that "one is left with the impression of upholstery, of stale air, of a room perhaps where a party has been held and though the pictures and sunlight are still there, nothing can recapture its former animation." In this reviewer 's opinion, exactly the reverse is true: Edel makes us feel how it was to be amid the company of dynamic life and ideas. Daniel J. Cahill University of Northern Iowa Karl J. Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 439 pp. $24.00. In contrast to much currently fashionable writing on autobiographyelaborate textual analyses, boundless theoretical "deconstructions"— this monographic essay by Karl Weintraub stands as a spirited, if somewhat old-fashioned, salute to the grand tradition of Kulturgeschichte . The author borrows his vision from the German philosopherhistorian Wilhelm Dilthey, and many of his key figures as well as his periodization from Dilthey's son-in-law Georg Misch, whose massive Geschichte der Autobiographie traces the autobiographical impulse from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Insisting, however, that Misch's scholarly care led him to bury under detail the central import of the emergence of Western autobiography, Weintraub re-reads the record to highlight the establishment of a cultural and psychological imperative of human individuality in Western Europe and America. His book is the outcome of years of studying and teaching a significant handful of life-stories. Despite its bulk and scholarly tone, it is, the author insists, an essay, a trial run, at illuminating its epigraph: Individuum ineffabile est. Sensitive to this ineffability and to the pitfalls of selfknowledge rendered as literary self-portrait, Weintraub eschews any claim to historical or psychological completeness in his account. Freed REVIEWS 363 of the mannerisms and the manias of the specialist and the methodologist , he writes simply as a learned and thoughtful reader. Weintraub's thirteen deft, substantial chapters carry us from "Classical Antiquity" (in which, he argues, there were no autobiographies as we conceive of them) to Goethe's great self-account, Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-1832), treating such self-chroniclers as Abelard, Petrarch , Cellini, Montaigne, Teresa of Avila, John Bunyan, Franklin, Vico, Gibbon, and Rousseau. Weintraub agrees with those who see Augustine's Confessions as the first "true" autobiography and he argues that Goethe, whose self-conception seems to us so fascinatingly "liminal" in its stance between the modern and the pre-modern worlds, ushers in the modern fascination with autobiography. Ending as he does with Goethe, Weintraub gives the odd impression that the ideal of individuality was fully achieved in the old age of the German master. Yet the author notes in his brief postscript that the autobiographical impulse has burgeoned since 1800, suggesting also why he is unwilling or unprepared to enter this turbulent period. It contains too many diverse autobiographical works. Weintraub also seems to think that individuality as such becomes, after Goethe, insufficient as a heuristic device for the historian, for he notes that other conceptions of man (e.g. the "rational man" in an "age of science") must be adduced for a full picture. Further, the increasing prevalence in modern times of explicitly social concerns as opposed to merely "personal" ones, and the onslaught upon the individual of "an industrialized and intensely bureaucratic world" conspire to complicate, even to hinder, assessment of the individual's "value." One wonders, of course, if many similar (but unmentioned) historical conditions of earlier periods should not also have made Weintraub reluctant to see such a clear thread of emerging individuality running through Western history since Augustine, for the author seems to have made the pre-Romantic past over...