Biographies take hands-on work

By James L. W. West III

Biography is a mongrel genre, a messy pursuit. It’s a mixture of scholarship and invention, exposition and narration, fact and imagination. Biographers emerge from many fields: from history and literature, obviously, but also from art, sociology, finance, entertainment, sports, science, architecture, diplomacy, medicine, business and law.

“How to Do Biography: A Primer” by Nigel Hamilton; Harvard University Press; 2008.

View larger

Biographies are written of political leaders, captains of industry, military commanders, authors, designers, movie stars, criminals, rogues, composers, con men, rebels, reformers — anyone, really, whose life story is compelling. The only requirement is that there be some evidence on which to base the life — papers, archives, published sources and friends (or enemies) who will talk.

It also helps if the life has lessons to teach, but most lives do, providing the biographer is clever enough to tease them out.

Nigel Hamilton, the prize-winning biographer of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, has published a guide for would-be practitioners called “How to Do Biography.” Hamilton tells us that the choice of “do” in the title, as opposed to “write,” is deliberate. Inspiration and desire are not enough; biography is gritty, hands-on work. It requires brains and talent, but it also demands focus, stamina and doggedness.

Anyone who proposes to practice the form must learn how to gather testimony and evidence, how to weigh and evaluate it, and how to shape the results into a plausible narrative. Biographers must also learn how to blend together multiple voices, calling in turn on this witness and that one, mediating among the conflicting accounts of the subject’s life. And biographers must discover how to fill out the blank periods in which no one is quite sure what the subject was doing.

“How to Do Biography” is not a prescriptive, do-it-by-the-numbers volume. It’s more a vade mecum, a guidebook filled with general advice on issues that face all biographers. Among these are the availability of sources and access to them; permission to print unpublished documents, not just to consult them; and cooperation from heirs and family members — and from the subject, if he or she is alive.

Writing a biography of a living person can be a tricky business. The biographer is poking about in a life that is still in progress; the object of this scrutiny is bound to be a bit nervous — but also, one hopes, flattered and cooperative.

There are disadvantages: letters and other private papers are still in trunks and attics rather than in libraries, for example, but it’s fun to track down these documents and to interview the people who possess them. The biographer of a living figure also has the enormous advantage of being able to observe and speak with the person and of being the first one on the scene. Other biographies might follow, but they will be secondary to the work of the initial biographer.

Would there be an affinity between the biographer and the biographee? Must the biographer admire the subject? The history of biography is full of cases in which the biographer begins with great respect for the subject but, along the way, becomes disenchanted. This often produces a scolding, finger-wagging book. Examples in literary biography include Lawrance Thompson writing on Robert Frost, Carlos Baker on Ernest Hemingway, and James Atlas on Saul Bellow.

And there’s the opposite problem: the overly sympathetic approach that produces a windy panegyric. One must try for balance. One must also guard against overly close identification with the subject, which undermines authority and credibility.

Hamilton’s advice to the fledgling biographer is sound. Be sure you have a publisher lined up, be certain that the heirs are on board, be energetic in the pursuit of information and don’t wait too long before you begin to write.

Commit some paragraphs to paper early in the game to see whether you actually like writing about this person in whose company you propose to spend four or five years. If you do, then press ahead. Don’t forget to tell a good story and, above all, keep the narrative moving.

James L. W. West III is Edwin Erle Sparks professor of English at Penn State. His books include “William Styron: A Life” and “The Perfect Hour: The Romance of Ginevra King and F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Have the CDT delivered to your home. Click here to subscribe.

Get the TV Book delivered to your home. Click here to subscribe.