Review: 'Wainewright' a successful biographical experiment

"Wainewright the Poisoner: The Memoir of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright"
By Andrew Motion
Alfred A. Knopf
Biography
276 pages

By Joshua Kuritzky
Special to CNN.com

"I saw that the name of Wainewright, which had been uttered by assorted geniuses, which had drawn admiring sighs from crowds in the Academy, which had meant kindness and entertainment in company, would now suddenly be a prey to rumour, and mean no more than 'forger' ... "

(CNN) -- Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the subject of Andrew Motion's "Wainewright the Poisoner" and acquaintance of such literary greats as Byron, Blake, and Coleridge, is known not for his famous friends or his own artistic talents, but because his story has a hook. In addition to being a writer and artist, Wainewright was a convicted forger and suspected murderer.

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Excerpt: 'Wainewright the Poisoner: The Memoir of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright'

Wainewright is a biographer's dream subject, a man whose life, with its famous players (even Dickens has a walk-on part), familiar settings, and haunting outcome would seem to provide a new way to approach the Romantic era -- not through the life of one its greats, but rather through the life of one of its failures. He's someone whose name, when mentioned, is not used in the same context as Byron or Keats, but rather as a means to ponder the evil among us and the desperation and hopelessness that will lead a man to kill for money or pleasure. Motion, the current Poet Laureate of Great Britain and the author of several highly regarded biographies, couldn't ask for a richer person to profile.

Unfortunately for the biographer, although Wainewright was convicted of forgery, there is no proof that the murders he is said to have committed are any more than old rumor. Add to this the fact that very little of Wainewright's work survives, and the biographer is left with a great story to tell but no way to tell it. What's a biographer to do?

Leave it to Motion to find a way.

What is needed to connect the few facts available is a narrative -- some account of Wainewright's life that will help us appreciate and understand what it is to be an artist surrounded by greatness, and how it must feel to "fall" and find oneself a convicted criminal.

So Motion has written this narrative as Wainewright's Confession, a first-person account of Wainewright's life from his childhood, schooling, and apprenticeship as a portraitist, to his marriage, friendships, and downfall (the only crime Wainewright acknowledges is forgery). The Confession is, as Motion writes in his foreword, made up of actual quotes and events combined with imagined scenes, all written in a style similar to Wainewright's own prose -- and all as "reliably unreliable as Wainewright himself." Each chapter of the Confession includes many notes that not only detail the dates and chronological sequence of the events described, but that also discuss any controversy surrounding these facts.

"Wainewright the Poisoner" is, as Motion describes it, an experiment. It is not quite biography, but it is much more than historical fiction. That may pose a problem, and not only for libraries and bookstores wondering where to shelve the work. How should it be read? Is it fiction, a novel in which Wainewright is a character? Can we set aside the biographical questions of truth -- what really happened, and is he a murderer? -- for the more literary questions of feeling and motivation?

Or should we read it as straight biography, approaching the Confession with a wink and a smile, knowing that we'll know the truth (what there is of it) once we read the notes at the end of the chapter?

The answers to these questions lie somewhere in the middle. The notes and Confession support each other like a biographical double helix, and it's this connection that makes Motion's experiment a success.

And perhaps another factor in this success is the quality, in a literary sense, of the Confession. Throughout the book, Motion displays a natural poet's talent and skill. The latter third of the Confession, in which Wainewright describes his initial incarceration and his voyage to Tasmania, perfectly captures in stunning prose not only what it must be like to contemplate a life sentence, but also what it must be like for a man such as Wainewright, the subject of those "amusing sighs," to find himself treated as a common criminal.

Proving itself a successful experiment, "Wainewright the Poisoner" occupies the mind long after one has finished reading. Wainewright himself begins to fade away, leaving us with what may be the true subject of Motion's book: not the particulars of Wainewright's life, but, in an odd circular way, the particulars of Wainewright's biography. Although his talents could never elevate him to the status of his more famous contemporaries, Wainewright is still remembered, only not as an artist, but as a forger and murderer.

In his afterword, Motion documents how what was once only speculation about Wainewright's crimes has become, as rumors often do, accepted as fact. What more fitting way could there be to end this successful experiment in biography than by questioning the very nature of biography itself?

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