The limits of biography

I do not know why the popularity of autobiographies and biographies has mushroomed in 21st century Britain. I wish someone would tell us.

Meeting and communicating with people makes the world go round, of course, so perhaps the fact that we are now in touch with people electronically for much of our waking lives has vastly stimulated the national demand for what is another virtual form of communication with others — reading their lives?

In a 2007 homily on kenosis, the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, said ‘the more you go beyond yourself, the more you will become your true self’, and I am inclined to think that the need to follow other people’s lives through autobiography/biography is part of the very deepest need of each of us to grow our ‘existential knowledge’.

It involves an element of sheer curiosity. I think it is true that in the first instance people want facts, facts, facts about the biographee, but literati have already speculated that this could lead to the death of the traditional manageable-sized biography. The Web has massively multiplied the number of facts that a biographer can retrieve; the temptation exists to include them all; some modern biographies are consequently overweight. But all of the same facts could be put on a website that contains a page for every day of the biographee’s life, anyone could contribute, and an absolutely open-ended biography could be built up that would make a ‘written’ biography superfluous. Or would it?

People also want form in a biography, they want aesthetic pleasure from it, originality (but not too much!), and they expect these to be unique to the particular book and author. It’s undoubtedly true that every biography has to find the narrative form appropriate to the life in question. This involves personal selection, composition and approach. I don’t think, then, that the ‘Web-biography’ is going to supersede written biographies. It will surely become essentially a repository of facts — an ever-growing database. On the other hand, I am delighted that by accident my attempt last year at a day-by-day account of George and Kittie Calderon’s lives between July 1914 and July 1915, through dated posts one hundred years later, created what you might call a Web ‘blography’.

When I re-read the complete typescript of my biography of George and Kittie recently, I was reminded, with a slight shock, that not only did the form I had found for it involve playing with linear chronology, but I had written every chapter in a different way, as though they were a set of self-contained stories… They certainly don’t flow in a single biographical style, although I think and hope they form a consistent narrative that makes you wonder what the next chapter is going to bring. Worse, there are patches of pretty detailed, even ‘highfalutin’ literary criticism, so I will be just as open as Ruth Scurr in Fatal Purity to the charge that I’ve strayed from the remit of biography!

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That remit, at the end of the day, is that you concentrate on the continuum of the life of the subject, the living of this self through time, with the greatest empathy you can muster but without getting sidetracked by, say, their texts as such, their ideas as such, their love of cats, their sex life, where they spent their holidays, etc etc etc. The sense of proportion must be maintained that focuses the book on the life events.

But facts facts facts and events events events make severe demands on a writer’s style. He/she must never make them boring, let alone get bored with them him/herself. When I was writing Brief Lives: Anton Chekhov (2008) I hugely enjoyed writing parts like the beginning (about sneezes), or the poetry of Chekhov’s teenage encounter with a girl at a well in the steppe, or the chapter on Chekhov’s sojourn on Sakhalin, or paragraphs about his views on democracy, or about his marriage and death, as well as the potted accounts of individual works. But the throughline of life-events had to keep moving, and this led to one reviewer protesting that I had ‘no style at all’. Actually, when I had just to tell the facts, I simply tried to be as economical as possible and keep the reader turning the page. I was gratified, therefore, when two readers told me that they had no sooner finished reading the book (113 pages) than they read it again.

It is true, however, that the informational aspect of writing a biography can become boring if you are misguided enough to let it. For me, at least, it is potentially one of the limitations of biography, though I am sure it isn’t for the ‘professional’ biographer. After George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, I shall have written only two biographies and I don’t foresee myself writing another. I want the personal freedom back of writing poems, essays and plays — or anything that takes days or months rather than years.

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There is an aspect of the biography/autobiography question that earlier in this ‘Biography Brainstorm’ series I omitted to mention. To what extent is the biographer’s choice of subject and focus itself an autobiographical phenomenon? For instance, most people assumed that Boris Johnson’s 2014 The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History was a personal statement connected with Johnson’s political career. Having read it, I can say that it is an innovative biography that does not proceed chronologically, is not biographically exhaustive, and enthusiastically examines particular areas of Churchill’s life that could be said to have a relevance to Johnson’s own. But in that case, how do we explain that the next person he chose to write a biography of was Shakespeare?

In her long, superbly written introduction to John Aubrey: My Own Life — the best introduction to a biography that I have ever read — Ruth Scurr describes the deep roots of her personal interest in Aubrey. We can assume, then, that her creation of the book is an important fact in her personal, even emotional, life; hence there is an autobiographical dimension to it, even if that is invisible in the text. Similarly, since she is an historian of ideas, the nature of her biography of Robespierre is an autobiographical statement. Does Matthew Dennison, author of Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (2014), feel a particular bond with Vita and therefore it is autobiographically significant that he chose to write her life? I felt whilst reading it that this was the case. Was Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography (2005) just the next blockbuster he had to write, or were there particular personal reasons for him turning to Shakespeare? I think there were, and the somewhat portentous subtitle (‘The Biography’) tends to confirm that.

Of course, no reader needs to know the personal reasons why a biographer has chosen his/her particular subject. They only become significant when that biographer’s own life acquires a high public profile; if he or she subsequently has a biography written of them, the new biographer’s scrutiny ascribes biographical significance to the first biographer’s focus and this focus becomes an ‘autobiographical’ fact. An example of that would be Thomas Carlyle’s work on Frederick the Great.

It has even been claimed that all biography is disguised autobiography. I don’t accept that in an age when good biographers, such as Harman and Dennison, are manifestly committed to objectivity. A modern biographer’s take on something might be autobiographically influenced and autobiographical ‘prejudices’ might even be embedded in his/her text, but they will stick out like a sore thumb if they are not contextually motivated and transparently judicious.

For myself, I don’t think my brief life of Chekhov could be said to be a personal choice, as I never remotely wanted to write a biography of Chekhov…but when I was approached about writing one, of the perfect length for saying what I had to say about Chekhov, and I accepted, the biographiette grew directly out of my personal forty years’ engagement with Chekhov’s work and life. The reasons for that engagement were intensely to do with who I was and am, so I suppose a lot of the book is, implicitly, an autobiographical statement.

Where George Calderon is concerned, as I have said before I did not initially take a shine to him; au contraire. However, for the purposes of a study of Chekhov’s plays on the British stage commissioned from me by the Russian Academy of Sciences, in 1982 I had to set about finding his archival legacy, if there was one. I found his and Kittie’s extant papers in the proverbial attic and as I read them I realised that they and their story were exceptional. They drew me in. As a Russianist myself, who like George lived in Russia for two and a half years, and as a translator and director of Chekhov’s plays, I obviously had certain things in common with George. Many of his concerns about Russia, Russian literature, and Chekhov, were also my concerns, and I confess to having ‘settled a few scores’ of my own on these subjects — strictly within George’s own context — in my biography. Every time I re-read my typescript I slightly wince at these places and mutter ‘that’ll have to come out, it’s obviously me sounding off’. In other words, these places are too ‘autobiographical’ of me, the author. But so far I haven’t removed them…

After all the aspersions I have cast on the confusion of biography with autobiography, am I a barefaced hypocrite?

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Conducting this ‘Biography Brainstorm’ over the last ten days has been one of the most demanding parts of the full twenty-six months of Calderonia’s existence. I feel I have almost become a journalist. Time has now run out for me, however: I must make way, with deep relief and gratitude, for our guest contributor Harvey Pitcher.

I cannot at the moment think of anything more I would want to say about modern biography. I confess, however, that I would have been happy to read two very recently published biographies, which I sense from reviews would be sui generis and interesting: Artemis Cooper’s Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence, and Damian Collins’s Charmed Life: The Phenomenal Life of Philip Sassoon. Given that Howard died less than three years ago, I would be intrigued to see what form this biography takes and what light it shines on Howard’s Cazalet novels currently sweeping the country. Philip Sassoon played a creditable role in the WW1 tragedy surrounding Kittie’s friend Constance Sutton. Both new biographies might have stirred me to philosophise on modern biography further…

But I must, of course, get back to finishing finishing (sic) my own biography.