The Use and Abuse of Literature (32 page)

The story is amusing, but it is also condescending, the more so because the writer is conscious of its charm. Both the description of this female reader as a “young beauty” and the fact, so casually dropped, that she had heard of the two famous heroes of antiquity only “by accident” put her firmly in her place, which is quite a different place from that of Hume. The first sentence of the essay sets the tone: “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history, as an occupation, above all others, the best suited both
to their sex and education, much more instructive than their ordinary books of amusement, and more entertaining than those serious compositions, which are usually to be found in their closets.” Hume playfully deplores the preference of “the fair sex” for fiction: “I am sorry,” he says, “to see them have such an aversion to matter of fact, and such an appetite for falsehood.” By contrast, “truth,” he insists, “is the basis of history.” Though he will later change his tone from “raillery” to something more serious (and at that point will introduce as his anticipated readers two male subjects: “a man of business” and “a philosopher”), he maintains that even a witty and well-bred woman can have nothing interesting to say to “men of sense and reflection” unless she is conversant with the history of her own country and of ancient Greece and Rome. Plutarch, for Hume, is history. And history is based on truth.

The concept of “biographical truth,” as Judith Anderson argues in a book of that title, could as easily be called “biographical fiction.” The relation between fiction and fact in the period raises questions about what is meant by truth, she suggests. Life writing “occupies a middle ground between history and art, chronicle and drama, objective truth and creative invention.”
³⁹
Biography “is a mixed form, having always a tendency to merge on the one side with fiction and on the other side with history.”
⁴⁰
Anderson’s study covers the Venerable Bede’s
Life of Saint Cuthbert
, Cavendish’s
Life of Cardinal Wolsey
, Roper’s
Life of Sir Thomas More
, More’s
History of King Richard III
, Shakespeare’s
Richard III
and
Henry VIII
(subtitled
All Is True
), and Bacon’s
History of King Henry VII
. All these texts, according to Anderson, are “peripherally or essentially literary.”
⁴¹

What do we mean by
literary
, when we are discussing works of biography? Is it an indicator of style, of archetype, of mythic quality, of the felt presence of the writer? Anderson says that each of the authors she examines “employs the techniques of fiction,” which include authorial self-consciousness, an awareness of critical interpretation, and an increasing acknowledgment of the writer’s “own creative shaping of another’s life.”
⁴²

The pleasure evinced by biographers at the founding of the Levy Center is, to a certain extent, recuperative (gaining respect, visibility,
and funding), but in another way, it is classificatory and categorical. We may recall that the authorizing body evincing a wary interest in receiving biographers into the fold was made up of historians. Biography for them, and for many present-day biographers, is a species of history writing, whether the topic is a political or historical figure or a person of literary, artistic, or cultural significance. But the conflation of author and subject that is the central trope—and the irresistible lure—of the memoir creates category confusion when it is transposed into the world of biography.

The “Statement of Purpose” of the Society of American Historians explains that its goal is “To promote literary distinction in historical writing” by awarding a number of prestigious prizes. What is gained, I wonder, by adding the word
literary
here? If the society’s goal were merely “To promote distinction in historical writing,” what element would be lost? Which is another way of asking, what does the Society of American Historians consider literary, and how is that trait importantly different from the other kinds of writing produced by historians?

A number of career paths lead to success in this field, and some of the most commercially successful practitioners are neither historians nor academics—which does not mean, of course, that they are not scholars. One of the most honored biographers in the United States is David McCullough, an English major at Yale, who then became a journalist and editor (
Sports Illustrated;
the U.S. Information Agency;
American Heritage
) before embarking on a career in which he won the Pulitzer Prize (twice) and the National Book Award (twice) for biography. Present-day British biographers like Claire Tomalin (biographies of Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Wollestonecraft, etc.) and Victoria Glendinning (biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope, Jonathan Swift, and Leonard Woolf) are writers whose other activities include journalism, broadcasting, criticism, and (in the case of Glendinning) fiction writing.

The New York Times
annual list of notable nonfiction books is always
stocked with biographies and memoirs. In 2007, for example, of the fifty books on the list, there were fifteen biographies and eight memoirs, including biographies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Pablo Picasso, Leni Riefenstahl, Henry Morton Stanley, and the cartoonist Charles Schulz. The memoirs covered topics from waiting tables at a posh Manhattan restaurant to growing up with (a) a Haitian family, (b) an orthodox Jewish family, (c) a Catholic family, (d) a minister’s family, and (e) an Iowa farm family during the Great Depression.

In 2008 the pattern was similar: biographies of Andrew Jackson, Dick Cheney, Samuel de Champlain, Condoleezza Rice, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife, not the contemporary actress); memoirs of an English childhood, an African childhood, an “appalling upbringing at the hands of … catastrophically unfit parents,”
⁴³
and a novelist’s memoir-response to the stillbirth of her first child.
⁴⁴

In short, biography today is not one thing—and never has been. The crossover between “popular” and “serious” in biographies is probably greater than in many other categories, since airport readers and other adults who choose books as a favorite entertainment option will often buy biographies—in hardcover—if they are attracted by the subject or have seen the book mentioned or blurbed in the media.

There are historian-biographers, literary biographers (which is to say, biographers of literary figures who address the author’s works as well as the life), celebrity biographers, and biographical memoirists whose personal memoirs include the narrative history of a parent, partner, or other central personage. (A classic hypothetical example is Bennett Cerf’s quip about a book that would be an automatic best seller, “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”)

Authorized
biographies give the writer access to privileged materials but often also assume that the result will be laudatory. Music stars, actors, artists, humanitarians, sports heroes, and other public figures tend to be the subject of authorized biographies, with Pat Robertson, Cecil Beaton, Pope John Paul II, Konrad Adenauer, and Helen, the queen mother of Rumania, also among those whose representatives gave permission
to their biographers, in some cases selecting them as fit repositories of information and potential praise.

A
celebrity
biographer like Donald Spoto researches and writes about the lives of film stars, movie directors, playwrights, saints, and glamorous people in the public eye: Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Diana, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Preston Sturges, Lotte Lenya, Tennessee Williams, Alan Bates, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kramer, St. Joan of Arc, St. Francis of Assisi. Others working in this genre include J. Randy Taraborrelli, chronicler of the lives of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Cher, Diana Ross, Janet Jackson,
Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot
—and Kitty Kelley, author of
Jackie Oh!
, and books on Nancy Reagan, the Bush dynasty, and Frank Sinatra. The subtitles of Kelley’s books on Sinatra and Mrs. Reagan frankly call them “unauthorized” biographies, a term that, while once presumably opprobrious, is now a guarantee of high-level gossip.

A
literary biography
, as we’ve noted, is the account of the life and work of a writer. This term seems as if it contains a misplaced modifier, since while the subject may be a poet, novelist, or playwright, this does not guarantee that the resulting book will be literary. The contrary is quite often the case, despite the idealized early examples of Samuel Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
and of the defining work in the genre, Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
.

To a certain degree, these categories are self-evident. But we could make another kind of provisional distinction based upon the presentational nature (and thus the ideology) of the printed text—between those biographies that
display
the research that has gone into them with a proliferation of marked footnotes and endnotes, and those that
hide
the research process, providing either silent footnotes or, in some cases, none at all, just a list of sources at the back of the book. The distinction would suggest something of the book’s desire and self-image (or the desire and self-image of the author, publisher, literary agent, or press). But more important, it would say something about how these various makers hope the book would be read. Is the experience to be like that of reading a novel (with the added pleasure of knowing that it is “true”)?
Or is it more like what anthropologists, before they, too, became more literary, used to call “writing up” the findings of their fieldwork?

Some twentieth- and twenty-first-century biographers utilize a kind of unmarked endnote which is intended to preserve the smooth unbroken surface of the text, making the book read more like a novel than a piece of scholarship—no intrusive superscript numbers to break the illusion. If a quotation or a fact appears in the text and the reader wants to know where it comes from, he or she can turn to the back of the book, where the page number and a brief citation from the text is followed by an indication of the source.
⁴⁵
Many skilled practitioners follow this style, including Goodwin, David McCullough, and Meryle Secrest, to name just a few.
⁴⁶

This is not a low/high distinction in terms of quality but, rather, a presentational and performative style, with consequent effects upon the reading experience and upon the sense of intimacy and connection developed between reader and biographical subject. Although the author/biographer (some websites even identify these writers as “celebrity biographers”) is often recognized as a public intellectual, what is celebrated is his or her knowledge, research, clarity, and what is often called a “magisterial” command of the material. Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes, Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison, Robert McCrum’s biography of P. G. Wodehouse, Ian Kershaw Smith’s biography of Adolf Hitler, Nigel Saul’s biography of Richard II, and Jacques Roger’s biography of Buffon all were hailed as magisterial by reviewers, and this list could be almost infinitely extended, since
magisterial
, the Latinate version of
masterly
, is the mot juste or the highest accolade for biographical writing. It seems to connote a rising above the fray. The biography is a masterwork; it brings the subject to life; it is definitive and defining; it tells at least one convincing version of the truth. As such, it seems like the opposite of the kind of hoax memoirs we began by discussing. Yet the two genres—the one magisterial, the other often, predictably, unauthorized—have some key elements in common. For one thing, both of these mainstays of the nonfiction best-seller list are, in their own ways, fictions.

Virginia Woolf used the subtitle
A Biography
for three of her own works:
Orlando
, a groundbreaking novel written in a series of historical literary styles and inspired by the life of Vita-Sackville West;
Flush
, the life story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, a brilliant device for telling Browning’s story through the eyes and mind of a cocker spaniel; and
Roger Fry
, an impressionistic biography of the art critic, a close friend. All three of these works are literary, no quotation marks needed. Whether Woolf herself felt any “anxiety of influence” with regard to biography is a fair question: she was the daughter of one celebrated biographer (Sir Leslie Stephen, the first editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography
) and a lifelong friend of another (Lytton Strachey, author of
Eminent Victorians; Queen Victoria; Elizabeth and Essex
). In an essay called “The New Biography,” Woolf wrote that the task of the biographer was, in part, to combine the “incompatible” truths of fact and of fiction. “For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life.”

The term
biography
is a fairly recent one, dating in origin to the end of the seventeenth century; the
OED
traces it back to Dryden, who applied it to Plutarch. Woolf credits the emergence of modern biography to James Boswell’s
Life of Johnson:

From this height, Woolf suggests, biography fell—becoming more prolix, more prosy, more lengthy, and more tedious: