'A Judicious and Faithful Narrative'

“I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.” 

A newspaper editor long ago shared with me a theory that made a lot of sense: every story is either about a person or an idea. I recognized I was a person guy. Ideas are best expressed, if at all, through human beings. The work of the better fiction writers, biographers and reporters is rooted in this premise. Idea-centric stories risk abstraction, dryness and schoolmarm tedium. Another editor, mocking the same paper’s latest indulgence in self-congratulatory seriousness, once mock-moaned: “Another three-part series on the economy of Bulgaria!”

 

Dr. Johnson was a gifted biographer – see his Lives of the Poets -- and the subject of the greatest biography in the language. The sentence above is from The Rambler essay published on this date, October 13, in 1750. This follows:

 

“For, 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.”

 

Johnson assumes the ubiquity of human nature. Reading about the lives of others becomes, at least occasionally, reading about ourselves. As a reporter I most enjoyed writing about nonentities, unheralded people who would never be celebrities. Bigshots – politicians, captains of industry, “activists” and other busybodies – are boring and have already received too much attention. When asked why she didn’t vote, Catholic Workers co-founder Dorothy Day explained: “It only encourages them.” I’ve never wanted to encourage those who already seek attention and take themselves seriously. As Johnson puts it:

 

“We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.”

 

When I interviewed a guy who played the saw at street fairs, the woman who collected sand from around the world and the tattoo artist named “Critter” (long before tattoos became ubiquitous), I was writing about interesting people who had never before told their stories. They seemed flattered, yes, but also relieved. Someone recognized them. The unlikeliest people can be artful talkers, which is not the same as being bullshit artists, though the latter too can possess a certain charm. Everyone, I’m convinced, has a story to tell. Too many writers are blind to the other people around them. Sometimes ideas can obscure their vision. In the introduction to his first book, My Ears Are Bent (1938), the great New Yorker reporter Joseph Mitchell writes:

    

“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.”

As to fuller, more formal biographies, I would love to read good, rich, imaginatively sympathetic lives of A.J. Liebling (Raymond Sokolov’s doesn’t count), Don Rickles, Miguel de Unamuno, Nat and Cannonball Adderley, Yvor Winters (and others in the Stanford School of Poets), Murray Kempton, Zbigniew Herbert (let’s hope Andrzej Franaszek’s life of the poet is translated soon from the Polish), Thomas Berger and Michael Oakeshott, among others.