Executing Biography

by Allen C. Guelzo

Some of the greatest historical writing we have ever encountered is cast in the form of biography. In fact, biography is very nearly as old a form as history-writing itself. Plutarch (a Romanized Hellene who wrote his great series of parallel Lives in Greek) and Suetonius (whose De vita Caesarum were literally penned from a spot directly inside the Roman imperial household) are only the most well-known examples from ancient times. In my own lifetime, I remember being bowled over as an adolescent by Robert Blake’s Disraeli (1966), and bowled over even flatter as an undergraduate by Perry Miller’s Jonathan Edwards (1949). Augustine’s Confessions offer us a highly personalized version of biography in the form of autobiography, and two of the most famous representatives of yet another related genre, the collective or group biography, can be found in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (or, to give it its extended title from 1563, Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church) and Lytton Strachey’s far less heroic Eminent Victorians (1918).

And yet, imposing as its stature has been down the centuries, biography is often seen as the poor relation of history (and I know of at least one scandalous tenure-denial at a major university in the 1980s because the candidate had ‘only’ written a biography). Biography wears this collar of embarrassment because it involves a narrowing of focus (and of tools) to single individuals, rather than describing large-scale developments or conflicts. Historians have ever liked to see themselves as the spinners of great abstract narratives – even when their subjects were comparatively minuscule – whereas biographers are bound by the Procrustean bed of a single person’s lifespan. Biographers, too, are often seen as captives of their subjects, so that, stylistically, biography often lags far, far behind history in its literary ambitions.

Yet there is also a great exhilaration in biography. Biography offers a kind of secular resurrection power – of bringing to recognizable life a person long dead. It also offers another kind of exhilaration, and that is judgment. Historians are always in the business of judgment, and have been since Herodotus. But a historian’s act of judgment can be indirect and muted, since the historian’s principal objects are usually larger event-driven and data-driven shifts in the pattern of human life. Biographers, however, are compelled to appear as judges, and not just chair umpires, because they deal with a single person (or, at best, a group of persons, which hardly ever softens the blow). The biographer’s judgment is almost face-to-face, like a prisoner in the dock confronted by the magistrate at the desk.

---

I’ve used the word exhilaration deliberately, because it carries the warning connotation that biography can also be intoxicating in the worst sense of that word. The long toil of research and writing about a single individual can produce a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, in which the biographer slowly, almost without noticing it, assumes the role of advocate. After all, why put into a biography the time and research needed to chronicle a life in detail if, at the end, one faces the prospect of having to explain why this life was inadequate, miserable, or even satanic. “We all want to draw perfect ideals,” remarked Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1878, yet “all the coin that comes from Nature’s mint is more-or-less clipped, filed, sweated, or bruised, or bent and worn, even if it was pure metal when stamped.”¹ So, an almost-unnoticed temptation to make excuse builds as a biography is written. As Ian Kershaw admitted at the beginning of his two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, “any biographical approach” has the “inbuilt danger” of requiring “a level of empathy with the subject which can easily slide over into sympathy, perhaps even hidden or partial admiration.”² Mercifully, there are occasions when passing judgment is made substantially easier – imagine a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance – but not every subject is a saint, and the opportunities for entrapment are real.

Biography also can involve the production of an illusion. The biographies we write are based on scattered evidence of various sorts, and we are often in the position of archaeologists trying to piece together the broken shards of some long-lost amphora, with no guarantees that we’re getting the relationships right. Love and grief are not elements that people express easily in any recordable form; yet, they are the high moments of biographies, and so biographers are tempted to gin them up in ways the subject might not have recognized. In fact, one of the great problems of a biography is how much it often has to conceal, in terms of the connections or estimates it knows it lacks evidence for; biographies depend on inexact and incomplete materials, yet they want to speak about their subject with a seamless, unbroken voice.

It is an interesting question, in that regard, whether biographers are guilty of a kind of violation. Few people will ever be the subjects of biography; fewer still actually desire it, which places the biographer in something of the position of a burglar, breaking-and-entering and tearing things apart in search of gold, or of a Peeping Tom who disguises what amounts to voyeurism as scholarship by handing around business cards. At their worst, biographers can be a species of stalker, and they invite their readers to join them in the guilty pleasure of doxxing the person they wish to harass. “The biographer at work,” admitted Janet Malcolm, “is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and the money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”³ Biography has this great danger: it can dehumanize, profane, and appropriate, and then claim that it has done something noble and useful for the rest of us.

But even at its best, biographies have this disappointment – they end in funerals. We would like to think, as Paul Murray Kendall wrote, that “the biographer’s mission is to perpetuate a man as he was in the days he lived – a spring task of bringing to life again, constantly threatened by unseasonable freezes.”⁴ Except, of course, that every biography concludes with a burial (or, in some noteworthy cases like Oliver Cromwell and Sir Henry Percy, an exhumation and posthumous execution). Art should be a play for life against death and dissolution. But that raises the question of whether biography is really an art or merely a reluctant ally of death.

---

Besides in this newsletter (and in some sub-chapters of our book, The Golden Thread) I have written some biography. From that, there are a few lessons which seem worth learning.

• Good biography should never lose hold of a lively sense of mistrust, if not in your subjects, then at least in what you can know about them. A thorough biographer will be alert for concealment, for what is absent, like Sherlock Holmes noticing the dog that didn’t bark in the night (in The Adventure of Silver Blaze). But lest that induce a slow poisoning of energy, that same biographer should be willing to be surprised by virtue. The biographer, then, declines to make any easy leaps. The biographer does not need to consider a biography a failure if it cannot fill in every corner; the biographer cannot be more artful than the cunning of a subject who simply didn’t want some things known.

• Are there some subjects whose lives are, well, simply irredeemable yet who impacted too many events or nations to surrender to an untouchable ignorance? Before you answer that, notice that the question itself is a problem, since it assumes that redemption actually is a goal of biography. Occasionally it is, but I find most such redemptions full of special pleading. Check the impulse for pomposity. At the same time, biography should not sneer, whimper or giggle, because that reduces the subject to the contemptible and demands that the reader validate what amounts to an author’s self-pity.

• Oddly, there is just as much, if not more, danger for a biographer when a subject is actually likeable. That’s when the empathy required to enter into a subject’s motivations can slide ineluctably into sympathy, or worse, generate an anxious need to display a phony distaste in order to appear above temptation. The worst temptation of bad biography is to let a subject put out the light of judgment because of their own presumed radiance.

• The biographer faces a special roadblock when your subject starts to disappoint you (or to engage in disappointing behavior), and especially if the subject is otherwise likable. Some biographers step away from their subject in order to disapprove; some try to cling to the subject and confect excuses. But whatever you do, don’t then wallow in despair over the subject’s failure. Take their side when they are right; when they are wrong, weep over the tragedy of their inconsistency, hypocrisy or disobedience. I made the acquaintance four decades ago of the essays of a great literary critic, John Gardner, and though what he offered as directives concerned the construction of fictional characters, much the same of what he said is true when writing biography. The worst of what people are taught about writing, Gardner warned, is “the idea that all men are clowns and tramps, that is, witless and valueless creatures of sensation.” Hence, do not snivel, do not swoon, do not back out.⁵

• Beware of seeking out only the likeable subject. Likeable is a fine quality in a subject, so long as that’s not a sly word for convenient. The likeable subject may be only likeable – which is to say that you don’t have to hold your nose, and you don’t have to worry all the time about what readers will think of you for having written about an unlikeable person. At the same time, beware of hunting up a subject merely so that you can gasconade about how everything concerning a subject is offensive. It may make you, as Gardner warned again, feel good about your own inadequacies, but that is not the purpose of biography. I would prefer the reader understand the subject, rather than like the subject. But biographers are routinely plagued by the fear that people read biographies only to get either a glimpse of King Arthur or a peep through the bedroom key-hole, and thus unfolds the temptation to do the likeable.

These few recommendations may not make you a great biographer, but they may help guard against being a bad or lazy one; they may also make you a better reader of biography, which is a different thing (but not that much different a thing) than being a reader of history. Above all, it may give you some sense of what worth there is in biography, and why, at the end of the day, what Plutarch and Suetonius, Foxe and Strachey, Miller and Blake wrote is so fiercely readable, so eminently satisfying, and so able to convince the rest of us that heroism is not beyond the human grasp.

1. Holmes to John O. Sargent (February 3, 1878), in J.T. Morse, Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston, 1896), 2:54.

2. Kershaw, “Reflecting on Hitler,” in Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New York, 1998), xxi-xxiii.

3. Malcolm, in Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2009), 95.

4. Kendall, The Art of Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 100.

5. Gardner, “More Smoke from the Dark Satanic Mills,” in On Writers and Writing (Reading, MA, 1994), 41.