“I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.”
And interesting – at least
in the hands of the appropriate writer. The default appeal of biography,
fiction and history is our interest in the lives of others. The same can be
said of gossip, which is merely a bastardized and incomplete form of biography.
Call it “imaginative projection,” if that makes you feel better. Humans are
interested in humans, for reasons good and otherwise.
Above, Dr. Johnson is
writing as a biographer – and the future subject of the greatest of all
biographies. By the time he wrote that passage, in the October 13, 1750, issue of
The Rambler, Johnson had already written his life of Richard Savage. His
biography of Sir Thomas Browne would appear in 1756, and more than twenty years
later he would produce his masterpiece, The Lives of the Most Eminent English
Poets (1779-81). In his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), Boswell
reports Johnson saying: “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to
ourselves, what we can turn to use.” Note the repeated appearance of usefulness.
By this, Johnson largely refers to moral utility. We can learn from the
examples, admirable and otherwise, of our fellows. Johnson continues, and again
cites “use”:
“Not only every man has,
in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with
himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would
be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such an uniformity in the state
of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and
disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill, but is common
to human kind.”
A newspaper editor once
told me that every story is about either a person or an idea. That
oversimplifies things but it’s a useful distinction. Ideas hold little
attraction for me as a writer. They tend to be gaseous and pretentious, and attract the wrong sort of
person. I've always liked talking to and writing about people, the more obscure and
unheralded the better. Is there anything drearier, more bullshit-ridden than “celebrity”
journalism? In the introduction to his first book, My Ears Are Bent (1938), the
great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell writes for me:
“The people in a number of
the stories are of the kind that many writers have recently got in the habit of
referring to as ‘the little people.’ I regard this phrase as patronizing and
repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are,
whoever you are.”
2 comments:
Covering high school sports years ago, I was often challenged, even castigated, for 'fixing' the quotes by football or basketball players. My response always was: "That's what I have in my notes." My belief was: why embarrass a high school kid with an incomplete command of grammar, who just walked off the field or court after doing something well or unexpected, and wasn't prepared to be interviewed? I thought of the parents who might buy extra copies of the paper to send to an uncle or a grandparent (weren't they interested in selling more papers?). I also thought of Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (in the movie certainly, I can't recall if it is in the play) saying most people don't get their name in the paper until they die. One of the greatest compliments during my brief 'journalism' career was from a local judge attending a football banquet. He walked up, told me he appreciated how I, unlike others, handled these young men, and walked away.
I've always improved quotes, and never had a subject complain. But I've never felt good about it. One of the most quotable people I ever interviewed was pre-murder O.J. Simpson. He fed me one after another quip, quote and anecdote. All usable. I thought, "What a great guy."
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