How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (32 page)

The first criticism is, however, more important. A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses or writers said actually did happen.

With regard to the last question, What of it?, it is possible that no kind of literature has a greater effect on the actions of men than history. Satires and pictures of philosophical utopias have little effect; we would all like the world to be better, but we are seldom inspired by the recommendations of authors who do no more than describe, often bitterly, the difference between the real and the ideal. History, which tells us of the actions of men of the past, often does lead us to make changes, to try to better our lot. In general, statesmen have been more learned in history than in other disciplines. History suggests the possible, for it describes things that have already been done. If they have been done, perhaps they can be done again -or perhaps they can be avoided.

The main answer to the question, What of it?, therefore, lies in the direction of practical, political action. For this reason it is of great importance that history be read well. Unfortunately, leaders have often acted with some knowledge of history but not enough. With the world as small and dangerous as it has become, it would be a good idea for all of us to start reading history better.

How to Read Biography and Autobiography

A biography is a story about a real person. This mixed patrimony causes it to have a mixed character.

Some biographers would object to this description. But ordinarily, at least, a biography is a narrative account of the life, the history, of a man or woman or of a group of people; thus, a biography poses many of the same problems as a history. The reader must ask the same sort of questions-what is the author's purpose? What are his criteria of truth?-as well, of course, as asking the questions we must ask of any book.

There are several kinds of biographies. The definitive biography is intended to be the final, exhaustive, scholarly work on the life of someone important enough to deserve a definitive biography. Definitive biographies cannot be written about living persons. They are seldom written until several non-definitive biographies have first appeared, all of them often somewhat inadequate. All sources are gone through, all letters read, and a great deal of contemporary history examined by the author. Since the ability to gather the materials is somewhat different from the talent for shaping them into a good book, definitive biographies are not always easy reading.

This is too bad. A scholarly book does not have to be dull. One of the greatest of all biographies is Boswell's Life of Johnson, and it is continuously fascinating. It is certainly definitive (though other biographies of Dr. Johnson have since appeared), but it is also uniquely interesting.

A definitive biography is a slice of history-the history of a man and of his times, as seen through his eyes. It should be read as history. An authorized biography is not the same thing at all. Such works are usually commissioned by the heirs or friends of some important person, and they are carefully written so that the errors the person made and the triumphs he achieved are seen in the best light possible. They can sometimes be very good indeed, because the author has the advantage-not as a rule accorded to other writers-of being allowed access to all pertinent material by those who control it. But, of course, an authorized biography cannot be trusted in the same way that a definitive biography can be. Instead of reading it simply as history, the reader should understand that it may be biased-that this is the way the reader is expected to think of the book's subject; this is the way his friends and associates want him to be known to the world.

The authorized biography is a kind of history, but it is history with a difference. We may be curious to know what interested persons want the public to know about someone's private life, but we should not expect to know what the private life really was. The reading of an authorized biography will thus often tell us much about the time in which it was written, about its customs and manners, about those actions and attitudes that were acceptable-and, by implication and with a little extrapolation, about those that were not. But we should not hope to discover the real life of a human being any more than we would hope to know the real story of a war if we read the communiques of only one side. To get at the truth we must read all the communiques, ask people who were there, and use our own minds to make sense out of the muddle. A definitive biography has already done this work; in the case of an authorized biography (and most biographies of living persons are of this sort), there is still much to do.

There remain those biographies that are neither definitive nor authorized. Perhaps we may call them ordinary biographies. In such works, we expect the author to be accurate, to know his facts. We want above all to be given the feeling that we are viewing the life of a real person in another time and place. Human beings are curious, and especially curious about other human beings.

Such books, although not trustworthy in the way definitive biographies are, are often very good reading. The world would be the poorer without Izaak Walton's Lives of his friends, the poets John Donne and George Herbert, for example (Walton is of course better known for his The Complete Angler) ; or John Tyndall's account of his friend Michael Faraday in Faraday the Discoverer.

Some biographies are didactic. They have a moral purpose. Not many of this sort are written any more, but they used to be common. (They are still written for children, of course.) Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans is such a work. Plutarch told the stories of great men of the Greek and Roman past in order to help his contemporaries to be great also, and to help them avoid the errors into which the great so often fall-or so he felt. The Lives is a marvelous book; but, although many of the accounts are the only ones we have of their subjects, we do not read it so much for its biographical information as for its view of life in general. Its subjects are interesting people, good and bad, but never indifferent.

Plutarch realized this himself. His original intention in writing had been to instruct others, he said, but in the course of the work he discovered that more and more it was he himself who was deriving profit and stimulation from "lodging these men one after the other in his house."

Incidentally, Plutarch's is another historical work that has exercised a profound influence on subsequent history. For example, just as Plutarch shows Alexander the Great modeling his own life on that of Achilles (whose life he learned about from Homer), so many later conquerors have tried to model their lives on that of Plutarch's Alexander.

Autobiographies present some different and interesting problems. First of all, it is questionable whether anyone has ever written a true autobiography. If it is difficult to know the life of anyone else, it is even more difficult to know one's own.

And, of course, all autobiographies have to be written about lives that are not yet complete.

The temptation to tell either less or more than the truth (the latter may be more common) , when there is no one to contradict you, is almost irresistible. Everybody has some secrets he cannot bear to divulge; everybody also has some illusions about himself, which it is almost impossible for him to regard as illusions. However, although it is not possible to write a wholly true autobiography, neither is it possible to write one that contains no truth at all. Just as no man can be a perfect liar, so every autobiography tells us something about its author, if only that there are things that he wants to conceal.

It is customary to say that the Confessions of Rousseau, or some other book written about the same time (about the middle of the eighteenth century), is the first real autobiography. This is to overlook Augustine's Confessions, for example, and Montaigne' s Essays; but the error is more serious than that.

In fact, much of what anyone writes on any subject is autobiographical. There is a great deal of Plato in the Republic, of Milton in Paradise Lost, of Goethe in Faust-though we may not be able to put our finger on it exactly. If we are interested in humanity, we will tend, within reasonable limits, to read any book partly with an eye to discovering the character of its author.

This should never be the primary consideration, and it leads, when it is overdone, to the so-called pathetic fallacy.

But we should remember that words do not write themselves -the ones we read have been found and written down by a living man. Plato and Aristotle said some similar, and some dissimilar, things; but even if they had agreed completely, they could not have written the same books, for they were different men. We may even discover something of St. Thomas Aquinas in such an apparently unrevealing work as the Summa Theologica.

Thus it matters very little that formal autobiography is a relatively new literary genre. No one has ever been able to keep himself entirely out of his book. "I have no more made my book," said Montaigne, "than my book has made me; a book co-substantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life." And he added, "Everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me." This is true, and not only of Montaigne. "This is no book," says Whitman of his Leaves of Grass. "Who touches this touches a man."

Are there any additional hints for reading biographies and autobiographies? Here is one that is important. Despite the fact that such books, and especially the autobiographies, reveal much about their authors, we should not spend so much time trying to discover a writer's secrets that we do not find out what he says plainly. Apart from this, given the fact that such books are often more poetical than discursive or philosophical, and that they are special kinds of history, there is perhaps little more to add. You should remember, of course, that if you wish to know the truth about a person's life, you should read as many biographies of him as you can find, including his own account of his life, if he wrote one. Read biography as history and as the cause of history; take all autobiographies with a grain of salt; and never forget that you must not argue with a book until you fully understand what it is saying. As to the question, What of it?, we would only say this : biography, like history, can be a cause of practical, moral action. A biography can be inspiring. It is the story of a life, usually a more or less successful one-and we too have lives to lead.

How to Read About Current Events

We have said that our exposition of the art of analytical reading applies to everything you have to read, not just to books. Now we want to qualify that statement a little. Analytical reading is not always necessary. There are many things that we read that do not require the kind of effort and skill that is called for at this third level of reading ability. Nevertheless, although the rules of reading do not all always have to be applied, the four questions must always be asked of anything you read. That means, of course, that they must be asked when you are faced with the kind of things to which most of us devote much of our reading time: newspapers, magazines, books about current events, and the like.

After all, history did not stop a thousand years ago, or a hundred. The world goes on, and men and women continue to write about what is happening and how things are changing.

Perhaps no modern history is as great as Thucydides' work; posterity will have to be the judge of that. But we do have an obligation, as human beings and as citizens, to try to understand the world around us.

The problem comes down to knowing what is actually happening now. We have chosen the word "actually" in the last sentence intentionally. The French word for newsreel is actualites; the whole concept of current events literature is somehow the same as that of the "news." How do we get the news, and how do we know that what we get is true?

You can see at once that we are faced with the same problem that is posed by history itself. We cannot be sure that we are getting at the facts-we cannot be sure that we know what is happening now any more than we can be sure about what happened in the past. And yet we must try to know, so far as that is possible.

If we could be everywhere at once, overhear all conversations on earth, look into the heart of every living person, we might be able to make a stab at the truth of current events.

Being human and hence limited, we must fall back on the services of reporters. Reporters are persons who are supposed to know what is happening in a small area. They report it in newspaper stories, in magazines, or in books. What we can know depends on them.

Ideally, a reporter, of whatever kind, is a clear glass in which reality is reflected-or through which it shines. But the human mind is not a clear glass. It is not a good reflector, and when reality shines through it, the mind is not a very good filter. It separates out what it considers to be unreality, untruth. That is proper, of course; a reporter should not report what he thinks is false. But he may be mistaken.

Thus the most important thing to know, when reading any report of current happenings, is who is writing the report.

What is involved here is not so much an acquaintance with the reporter himself as with the kind of mind he has. The various sorts of filter-reporters fall into groups. To understand what kind of filter our reporter's mind is, we must ask a series of questions about it. This amounts to asking a series of questions about any material dealing with current events. The questions are these:

1. What does the author want to prove?

2. Whom does he want to convince?

3. What special knowledge does he assume?

4. What special language does he use?

5. Does he really know what he is talking about?

For the most part it is safe to assume that all current events books want to prove something. Often it is easy enough to discover what this is. The blurb often states the main contention or thesis of such books. If it does not appear there, it may be stated by the author in a preface.