A paean to an art
HOW TO DO BIOGRAPHY:
A Primer
By Nigel Hamilton
400 pp. Harvard U. Press $22.95
Reviewed by Carter Jefferson
We don’t usually review “how-to” books in this publication, though some of them can be lifesavers. This one, however, is a paean to an art, a call to arms, a beautiful tale of those scholars who are dedicated to telling us about all our heroes and villains, not to rehearse once again their great or infamous deeds, but to show us who they were. They were all human, and that humanity is what the biographer must unveil. So is Nigel Hamilton, who loves his craft and knows how to make others appreciate it as they never have before.
At a book-signing for Hamilton a couple of weeks ago, the woman who introduced him called his book a “primer,” but she pronounced it “prime-er”—like the cap that makes a bullet fly. Maybe this book will live up to that definition for some people, because Hamilton’s stories about biographers and their pleasures and pains just might fire someone’s resolve to take on the huge task of writing about someone’s life. Even if you’ll never write, but only read, biographies, you may still find this book fascinating. It’s full of vignettes of writers hard at work, so we can see all their triumphs and frustrations.
Most novelists run into serious troubles they have a terrible time handling only after they’ve written their stories and done their best to make them salable. Biographers, it seems, start out having to persuade somebody—a publisher, a foundation, a family—to fund the years they must spend doing research. That means they must understand their own motivations and measure the resolve they can muster for such hard labor. Why should they write about the particular life they plan to tackle? Are they willing to spend years doing research? Would anybody want to read about that person? And then the real kicker—can it be done?
All sorts of people—survivors, friends, employers—often don’t want a biographer to write anything whatsoever about a dead person with whom they were associated, and certainly not about their own parts in that life. Live subjects can be worse. A biographer has to be sure the pile of papers he may find doesn’t have a lock on it. These days everything is copyrighted, and there are worse problems than that.
Hamilton tells the story of Ian Hamilton (no kin), who did his best to write a biography of J. D. Salinger after receiving a substantial advance from his publisher. Salinger successfully sued to prevent Hamilton from using any word that Salinger had written, even though the documents concerned were in various supposedly open archives. The writer had to give back the advance. Sometimes families co-operate, but when they see the final draft they are dismayed, and vilify the biographer. Elizabeth Hardwick, novelist and widow of the poet Robert Lowell, called biography “a scrofulous cottage industry.” Other biographers have horrified virtually entire societies by discussing the sex lives of their subjects. But intimate letters and other documents where such details are found are the essentials of biography.
Everybody knows what kings and presidents and all the famous have done publicly, but the biographer’s job is not to repeat that, nor to glorify the subject, but let us know what manner of men or women these people were, how they felt as well as how they acted. Nigel Hamilton begins with a history of biography, quoting Dr. Samuel Johnson, whom he sees as the founder of the modern genre:
The real “business of the biographer” was to “pass slightly over those performances and incidents, which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestick privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside” so as to reveal the moral center of an individual’s life.
The Victorians ignored Johnson’s words and wrote panegyrics; they avoided any mention of their subjects’ intimate lives. Virginia Woolf lamented that “love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases.” Edmund Gosse and Sigmund Freud began to change that, and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) ushered in a new age that might have shocked even Dr. Johnson.
From there Hamilton goes on to show in great detail how the job is done from start to finish, using his own experience in writing several biographies and that of numerous masters of the trade. All biographies don’t have to be alike, but Hamilton declares that there must be a contract that includes not only the author and publisher, but also the public, which must find them worth reading. They can start with a birth, or anywhere else. They must be written well; there he follows advice well known to writers of fiction and various sorts of essays. He gives beautiful examples of beginnings and endings, and shows us the dilemma of writers who start out full of respect for their subjects and somewhere along the line become disillusioned. He has set expectations high for his own forthcoming multiple biography of the twelve last presidents of the United States.
Toward the end he discusses autobiography and memoirs, which are certainly not biographies, even trying without much success to distinguish between the two. He’d have done well to avoid this part and stick to biography, I think, but like the rest it’s full of fascinating tales that might serve as examples for anyone who decides to tackle this popular genre.
If you read biographies, this book will give you a yardstick to judge them by. If you contemplate writing one, read Hamilton’s stories first. His pages may frighten you away, but they may give you courage as well. Some years ago I wrote a biography myself. Looking at it recently, just to check, I found that it’s not as bad as I feared it might have been, but I wish this book had been around for me to read first. My work surely would have been better.
Carter Jefferson, editor of The Internet Review of Books, a former journalist, professor of history and psychotherapist, has published stories and essays as well as a political biography of the French writer Anatole France.
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