The assumption that there is an organic connection between the details of novelists' lives and the content of their fiction is the stuff of contemporary critical analysis. That assumption needs to be questioned.

It is dismaying to read the leaps of logic - frequently written by scholars who have never met the author - that derive from the assumption. While occasionally the linkages between life and art as posited turn out to be true, more often they turn out to be exaggerated or just plain wrong.

There are so many attempts at linkage because there are so many members of the Literary Criticism Establishment (a loose confederation, not a cabal). They see it as their business to publish analyses of every high-profile novelist, short story writer and poet. Some of the establishment's members will publish full-length accounts about writers' lives.

The genre even has a designation - literary biography. No argument there, especially from a biographer like myself. Lives of certain writers - just like lives of certain politicians, athletes, singers, convicted felons and religious saints - can be worthwhile to share with the reading public.

But too much is enough. OK, Author X suffered sexual molestation by an uncle from ages 9 through 11. Is that an interesting fact? Yes. Is that an important piece of information for readers of Author X's fiction to know?

Maybe. Does that information persuasively explain the portrayal of a secondary character in Author X's third novels? Is it the reason that Author X seems to portray most uncles negatively on the novels' pages? That is normally beyond the knowledge of a literary critic/analyst/biographer, and ought to be. Why? Because the wonderfully impenetrable process of imagination is beyond knowing. The assumption of a linkage fails to account for artistic imagination.

Novelist Amy Tan spoke out against the assumption earlier this decade. She had just read yet another analysis of how her novels related directly to her life as a Chinese-American. Exasperated with the forays into her psyche that she considered off-base, Tan wrote an essay for the Threepenny Review. She told the misguided interpreters of her fiction that she thought of herself as a non-ethnic writer. Anticipating disbelief from those whose convictions seemed unshakable, Tan commented:

"I write stories about life as I have misunderstood it. To be sure, it is a Chinese-American life, but that is the only one I have had so far. "

The most recent books about novelists that led me, once again, into this thicket are "Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates" by Greg Johnson (Dutton, 492 pages, $34.95) and "Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac" by Ellis Amburn (St. Martin's, 435 pages, $27.95).

An avid reader of Oates' fiction, I knew nothing about her formative years, nothing about her non-writing adult pursuits except that she used to teach at a midwestern university, now teaches at Princeton University and has used the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. Nor have I ever much cared about the year-to-year details.

It seemed obvious that Oates' disciplined, quiet life spent writing at a desk and lecturing in a classroom would have almost no factual resemblance to the usually depressing, sometimes desperate and occasionally downright violent existences of her memorable characters.

Some writers have vivid imaginations - who can know why and how, what portion of that imagination derives from nature, what portion from nurture? What has mattered to me during my 30 years as a consumer of Oates' fiction is that somehow she shaped her imaginings into a made-up world that readers quite unlike herself want to explore.

When I decided to read Johnson's biography of Oates, it never occurred to me that he would dare link her real life with the lives she imagined for her characters. As noted, it seemed obvious that the linkages did not exist. Rather, I began reading the biography for another reason - an explanation of Oates' writing habits, to help me understand how she turns out high-quality fiction at a faster rate than perhaps any serious novelist in U. S. history.

Johnson, a published novelist who teaches English at a university, shattered my expectations on page three of the Introduction with these words:

"I had long been curious about the relationship between Oates' work and her life. If her fiction had a central theme, it was the riddling nature of human identity, what she called in "Wonderland' the 'phantasmagoria of personality.' Like Jesse Vogel in that novel, most of Oates' major protagonists endure transformations of being that suggested the author's obsession with the self in its struggle to achieve definition, usually in the face of inimical and even violent psychological, familial and societal forces. In what ways did this artistic preoccupation reflect Oates' own personal experiences? What biographical issues underlay her fascination with twins, for instance. ... ?"

Those words made me worry that Johnson would turn out to be a pop psychologizing overreacher as he tried to link art and life in his biography. My worries turned out to be justified. Although I finished the biography, finding much in it to admire, not once did I think Johnson makes a persuasive case about the linkage.

I worried about opening the Jack Kerouac biography for the opposite reason - based on what little I already knew, the linkage between his life and art seemed so obvious as to be boring if Amburn rode that horse. Well, I was half right. Happily, Amburn's biography is not boring - confused sexual identity, alcoholism, LSD trips and more conventional road trips rarely induce boredom. But, unhappily, the linkage between Kerouac's life and fiction seems so obvious that it calls for less space than it receives from Amburn.

Advocates of the life-art connection object to my stance, a stance that might seem anomalous, even hypocritical, for a tell-all biographer to adopt. After all, those advocates say, if the reading public is curious about the connection in this age of celebrity, why not give the public what it wants?

Another of their arguments: Some writers of fiction consciously use their art to throw light on their lives. Novelist Saul Bellow's biographer-to-be, James Atlas, has quoted Bellow's son Adam saying, "If you want to know about my father's life, read his books." That conscious linkage, my detractors say, mandates explication by biographers and other learned interpreters.

But I resist such advocacy, despite its seductiveness for a biographer. To steel my resolve, I think about William Shakespeare - whoever he may truly be. None of the candidates appears to have lived day to day in such a way that could explain the breadth and depth of his protagonists. Any sensible biographer of Shakespeare will avoid positing one-on-one correspondences between life and art.

There has to be terra firma in this debate. Granted, a biographer of Joseph Conrad would be negligent by failing to provide a factual account of the novelist's experiences in the Orient. Also granted, that same biographer would be negligent by failing to discuss significant scenes from novels set in the Orient. The third step, however, ought to be avoided: Overreaching to posit a one-on-one correspondence between the factual account and the fictional passage.

Novelists, short-story writers and poets who want readers to be certain about the linkage between their lives and their published work will offer autobiographies and memoirs. When they present their work as fiction, members of the Literary Criticism Establishment should assume that some or all of it is made up. Let fiction be fiction.

Steve Weinberg is working on a biography of Ida Tarbell for St. Martin's Press. A former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, he reviews fiction and nonfiction for numerous newspapers and magazines.

Pub Date: 10/25/98