#today they would be on the your fav is problematic lists
The author’s biography doesn’t always tell you anything terribly significant about a literary work, but when I think about the fact that Sir Thomas Malory, the compiler of the most well known English-language literary interpretation of the Arthurian myth cycle, was a double-dealing knight who fought on both sides of the War of the Roses, was repeatedly charged with horse thievery, escaped from prison or skipped bail at least five times, and evidently made himself so obnoxious to those in power that he was specifically excluded by name from a general pardon of prisoners on two separate occasions – an accomplishment in which he is, to the best of my knowledge, unequalled – well, that tends to suggest a certain interpretive lens, is what I mean to say.
I had to look up lots and lots of things in Moby Dick. I was pretty skeptical of all the “whale facts” in that book after an early chapter where he lists the various types of whales and includes about forty that sound totally made up (“quog whale”, “grampus whale,” “sulphur-bottom whale”, “junk whale”, “thrasher whale”, “pudding-headed whale”, “scragg whale” etc), and also included dolphins.
How-some-ever, everything else I looked up turned out to be totally true, to the point where I decided Melville MUST have gone on a whaling ship as part of his research. So I looked up his biography!
My dude Herman was born in aristocratic wealth until his father blew it all and they became impoverished, and he did indeed go off to sea on a whaling ship. Then he deserted in Polynesia and lived with the natives for a year before signing up on another whaling ship, where he promptly joined the crew in a mutiny and got thrown in jail for it. He escaped and lived as a beachcomber and “island rover” while personally battling God/having an intense spiritual crisis. Then he went home to New England, became a celebrated author and dinner party guest on the strength of thinly fictionalized retellings of his adventures, and fell shatteringly in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
So uh yeah sometimes an author’s biography canreally illuminate the work.
What I love most about Sir Malory is that he is so un-chivalric that some interpreters have spent a great deal of time trying to convince the world that this must be the wrong Thomas Malory!*
*See William Matthews The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Enquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory or Richard R. Griffith’s essay ‘The Authorship Question Reconsidered: A Case for Sir Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire’
I’m not sure what my favourite part of that whole discourse is: the tortured efforts to explain away the Winchester manuscript literally saying “yeah, the author wrote this in prison” as metaphorical or something, or the fact that there’s a reasonable case to be made that the most popular alternative candidate for the Le Morte’s authorship was also into brigandage of some description.
