A previously uncollected poem, “Biographer,” by the wonderful Samuel Menashe (1925-2011):
“Authorized,
booked
By my
steadfast prose
The dead I
ghost write
Shed shadows
that shine
With
hindsight, hearsay—
The last
word is mine”
A familiar
figure of contempt: the duplicitous, axe-grinding biographer. Menashe’s poem reminded
me of a passage in Ford Madox Ford’s The
March of Literature (1938):
“We arrive,
then, at Johnson, the most tragic of all our major literary figures, a great
writer whose still living writings are always ignored, a great honest man who
will remain forever a figure of half fun because of the leechlike adoration of
the greatest and most ridiculous of all biographers.”
My naïveté tells
me: unless you are writing the life of Hitler (see Ian Kershaw’s two volumes),
wouldn’t you rather work on someone you admire, who has given you and others
pleasure, even someone you love? Unquestionably, Boswell could be a
manipulative, opportunistic leech, just as Johnson could be formidably
difficult. But if the Life were a hagiography, would we still read it today? Seems unlikely.
Several
weeks ago a reader asked, “Would you have any candidates for runner-up to
Boswell’s Johnson as best bio”? I
replied that if I could stretch the category a bit to include autobiographies I
would nominate St. Augustine’s, Whittaker Chambers’ and Nabokov’s. I might add The Autobiography of Henry Adams, and
there are certainly others. It helps to have a good, compelling subject. In
Chapter CIV of Moby-Dick (1851), “The Fossil-Whale,” Melville writes:
“Such, and
so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its
bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and
enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have
tried it.”
[See The Shrine Whose Shape I Am: The Collected
Poetry of Samuel Menashe, eds. Bhisham Bherwani and Nicholas Birns, Audubon
Terrace Press, 2019.]
2 comments:
To really understand anyone who rose to public prominence, an autobiography is useful if read in conjunction with a biography about the same person, and a biography about a contemporary. I have been reading biographies of the presidents in order as a way to learn more about the history of the United States (as one of the great biographers wrote: history is biographies because people make history). Reading one of Washington, Adams and Jefferson provides so much more color about each of them. Washington's biographer said Washington was great; Adams was brilliant and stubborn and Jefferson was a self-centered coward. Adams's biographer basically said the same. Jefferson's biographer was kinder to Jefferson, harsher on Adams (criticized his tremendous ego) and said Washington was great. Getting three different perspectives on Washington, all with roughly the same conclusions about him as a man and a leader, was a firm confirmation that without him as general and president for the first 8 years, the United States would not exist.
And, by the way, when publishing that comment I was reminded of a great line I recently read: Isn't it ironic that our computers have become so advanced that we have to prove to them that we're not robots!
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