History Without Theory?
Historiography
Biography, a Brief History
Nigel Hamilton, 2010
Nigel Hamilton began his review of the genre by claiming that biography has become the “dominant form of nonfiction broadcasting and publishing,” and that “it is now one of the embattled front lines in the struggle between society’s notions of truth and imagination.” To attach some numbers to that, biography generated $431 million in 2006, which placed it in ninth place (of nineteen publishing categories). Consumers spent 6.8% of their book-buying dollars on biographies. There were 152,229 biographies in print, suggesting they have a much longer-lasting appeal than other genres. New titles were up 87% from 1995 to 2005, to nearly 7,000 new biographies published in 2005. Hamilton’s thesis was that “the pursuit of biography…is integral to the Western concept of individuality and the ideals of democracy…” Biography, he said, has played a central but largely ignored role in shaping Western ideals of human identity.
It’s interesting that the Epic of Gilgamesh is sort-of biographical. Hamilton used it to pose one of the central questions of biography. “Where does fact end and interpretation begin?” he asked. “Is biography essentially the chronicle of an individual’s life journey (and thus a branch of history, employing similar processes of research and scholarship), or is it an art of human portraiture that must, for social and psychologically constructive reasons, capture the essence and distinctiveness of a real individual to be useful both in its time and posterity?” To put it less grandly but more practically, documents and a narrative built from them are unlikely to convey the character of a biographical subject with enough strength to catch and hold the reader. What techniques, if any, can be borrowed from novels, plays, films, and other dramatic media? Is there such a thing as a docu-drama? A biographical novel? Or is the biographer forced to muddle on with inferior tools in the interest of accuracy?
Plutarch said his biographical sketches allowed him “to treat history as a mirror, with the help of which I can adorn my own life by imitating the virtues of the men whose actions I have described.” Clearly, this is far from the disinterested, value-less search for truth some historians claim to be about. On the other hand, do we really believe them anymore? Discussing this with a literature professor, while I was a grad student, I was struck by his reaction to the attitude of some professional historians. “I think,” he said, “sometimes some academics forget that the whole transaction includes the reader and the reader's sensibilities and critical faculties. Readers of good fiction are suspicious of a narrator who might or might not be reliable. That's part of the fun of active reading.” Maybe historians obsess about truth because they underestimate the faculties of regular people. Joseph Ellis remarked “When my students at Mount Holyoke went down to Monticello and the Jefferson Memorial to interview tourists the week after the DNA results were published, they reported that more than 80 percent of the interviewees claimed to have known it all along,” despite the ongoing “official” denials of Dumas Malone’s “Jefferson establishment” (Joseph J. Ellis, “Jefferson: Post-DNA,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), 128).
Hamilton rightly focused his attention on the market for biographies, which has never been solely academic. “Commemoration and human curiosity” were the two forces that led to classical biography. “To make other men’s lives accessible, and their life journeys convincing,” he said, “it became important to include ‘telling detail’,” like Caesar’s vanity over his baldness. This had at least two functions. First, it convinced people who remembered Caesar that the biographer actually knew something about him. More importantly, it provided the realistic life details that made Caesar an individual rather than an icon of particular virtues or vices. The humanity of the subject comes from particulars, not generalities. In this sense, the subject of biography isn’t that different from the protagonist of a novel.
Next, Hamilton took a detour into hagiography and the gospels. It took Sir Walter Raleigh to set biography back on the path of examining actual lives, Hamilton observed, and he was executed for it. Raleigh realized that “in speaking of the past, I point at the present, and tax the vices of those that are yet living, in their persons that are long since dead.” Raleigh, according to Hamilton, had also discovered “another intrinsic merit of courageous biographical depiction: namely, the very diversity of opinion and interpretation possible in judging an individual.” Hamilton credited Samuel Johnson with refining the “critical biography”. If the writer “professes to write A Life,” he said, “he must represent it really as it was.” Along the way, he made the interesting point that it wasn’t an altogether easy or straightforward task, for publishing to escape from religion. The secular essays of Montaigne and the atheistic Confessions of Rousseau went a long way to freeing biography (as well as history) from the grip of the Church.
The revolutions of the eighteenth century fueled the public’s interest in the individuals who had opposed the old regimes. For the first time in western history, there was a credible opposition to the old power structure, and it was literate. One of the reasons (Hamilton did not mention) that autobiography flourished at this time may be that these agents of change were no longer willing to wait for someone else to declare their stories worthy of public attention. Then, Hamilton said, the Victorians put on the brakes and biography once again became eulogistic and mostly false. I wonder if he was right about this, or if publishing fragmented and he followed only one trail? The markets for truth were still there, as were revolutionaries and republicans. That they aren’t remembered in the “literature” may say more about the literature than about the times. Hamilton makes the point that the retreat of biographers from realism and truthful depiction allowed the novelists “to write the greatest ‘biographical’ novels of all time.”
The question remains, then, how much have things changed? Could “Biography-styled fiction, together with conventional, inhibited biography” still “be seen as the combined way in which society records and interprets the lives of individuals.” Then again, many of the Victorian biographers were being paid by the page by their subjects, so they were only doing what the market demanded. Victorian burning of evidence led to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. But Strachey avoided Oscar Wilde’s fate, and stayed in the Bloomsbury closet. Robert Graves wrote about the insanity of the war, but withheld his own insanity. So on both fronts, the truer works were fictions: Thomas Mann and Ford Madox Ford. But Hamilton suggested that Michael Cunningham’s The Hours might have achieved that blending of fiction and nonfiction that Virginia Woolf said was impossible in her essay on biography.
Finally, it was Benjamin Disraeli who called biography “history without theory.” But he wrote society romances.