`A Portrait of the Whole Man'

Like all books, biographies ought to be well written, but there are so many tempting ways to write them badly. Much noted is the recent tendency to mistake facts for insights and to indiscriminately lard biographies with trivia. I first noticed this self-indulgent trend more then 30 years ago when Joseph Blotner published his flatulent life of William Faulkner and managed to quote every obtuse review the author of Light in August ever received. I’m not prepared to conclude, however, that the art of biography is a waste of time, as the ever-contentious Dan Green at The Reading Experience appears to believe:

“…biographies of artists and writers, and especially biographies of the junk heap variety (if a scrap of information exists, throw it on), are by and large a waste of time. No `calibrating’ of life and art is necessary. The dreary reckoning of the `business of living’ is never going to equal in its interest value the `dynamic’ experience of works of art and literature, and I finally just don't understand why anyone finds it helpful to supplement the experience of art with investigations into the lives of artists. Why would I want to read about `pettiness and tedium,’ no matter how much they've been gussied up by the biographer's `insight’?”

Transcription is not biography. About this, Dan and I and most other sensible readers can agree. The best biographies are written by authors who not only know many things about their subjects but don’t allow what they know to get in the way of understanding them and writing well. Ideally, a biographer performs much reading and research and arrives at an informed, sympathetic understanding of his subject before he writes his first word. This would seem to be the method of Robert D. Richardson Jr., one of our finest literary biographers. His lives of Thoreau, Emerson and, most recently, William James, are models of economical narrative, prudent marshalling of facts, the deployment of an organizing theme, and graceful prose. Here’s a representative sample from Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

“On March 9, 1862, the Monitor and the Merrimack fought to a draw, and the age of the wooden sailing warship was over. On April 6 and 7 twenty-three thousand men died in the bloody battle of Shiloh. A month later, Concord suffered a nearer loss. Henry Thoreau died of tuberculosis; he was forty-four. Emerson wrote and delivered the eulogy for the man he would always remember as his best friend, even when his memory loss was so far advanced that he could not pull up the name. `Thoreau’ is Emerson’s last sustained major piece of writing. A great prose elegy, as good in its way as `Lycidas,’ this is Emerson’s best, most personal biographical piece and it remains the best single piece yet written on Henry Thoreau.”

This passage, 19 pages from the end of a 573-page biography, distills in miniature what Richardson accomplishes across the entire book. It places Emerson and Thoreau in a historical context, and by doing so adds poignancy to the death of the latter and the bereavement of the former. By citing Milton’s poem, Richardson performs a generous act of criticism and scholarship, placing Emerson’s elegy in the larger context of world literature. He notes the profound and sometimes mutually baffled bond of friendship, mentorship and respect that existed between the two men, while reminding us of Emerson’s own sad decline. In his preface to the Emerson biography, Richardson offers clues to his method:

“My approach to both Thoreau and Emerson has been to read what they read and then to relate their reading to their writing. The story, however -- and it is a story – of Emerson’s intellectual odyssey turned out to be incomprehensible apart from his personal and social life. The result is an intellectual biography as well as a portrait of the whole man.”

Good biographies contribute to our understanding of the men and women we admire and about whom we naturally feel curious. We wish to prolong our stay in their company. Such biographies address a humbler, less exalted but perfectly understandable question: How do mere mortals create works of genius that touch, even after centuries, the minds and emotions of other mere mortals? As Richardson notes, they also tell a story, preferably a compelling human story.

Richardson is not alone in accomplishing these things. I rank as exceptional such biographies as Jonathan Bate’s John Clare, W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson, Frederick Brown’s Flaubert, Jonathan Coe’s Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson, Richard Holmes’ lives of Shelley and Coleridge. And, of course, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.