Current Biography: Choices and Challenges

COMMENTS ONPROCESS Current Biography: Choices and Challenges Robert A. Schanke In Practicing History, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman describes biography as a "prism of history" and as a "vehicle for exhibiting an age" (80). Yet in attempting to create such a prism, the biographer faces a host of challenges, both ethical and practical. As biographers analyze their research and contemplate what they will write, numerous questions arise: What is the role of a biographer? Why write the book? What is the story that should be told? Is there a need and/or obligation to reveal certain personal and sensitive information? What audience is the target? Who is going to read the book? Who is going to buy it? While working on Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne, I found myself grappling with issues ranging from which aspects of my subject's life to reveal to how the selection of dust jacket illustration may affect audience perceptions and thus sales. I offer the lessons I learned during that process to others facing the challenges of writing biography, with the understanding that each individual biographer must make the choices appropriate to the particular project. Ethical Choices In Practicing History, Tuchman praises Plutarch, the father of biography, for edifying "the reader while at the same time inculcating ethical principles." She argues that Plutarch used biography "for moral examples: to display the reward of duty performed, the traps of ambition, the fall of arrogance." However, Tuchman castigates the current state of biography for "penetrating private crannies" and exposing hidden secrets (Tuchman 80, 90). In his review of Joe McGinnis's The Last Brother, a book about Senator Ted Kennedy, critic Michiko Kakutani denounces "disturbing trends in biography" and accuses biographers of becoming "increasingly prurient." Joyce Carol Oates dismisses the current direction of biography as "pathography." The motifs, she argues, are dysfunction, disaster, and outrageous conduct (Kakutani C4). 127 128 Robert A. Schanke Biographers are allowed, even encouraged, to analyze emotional and sexual issues, as long as the issues are traditional, but unorthodox themes are laundered, and struggles with homosexual identity are still generally suppressed . The New York Times obituary for Aaron Copland, for instance, reduced his private life to a three-word summary: "a life-long bachelor" (Rockwell DIl). It totally censored his homosexuality and his forty-four year relationship with another man. Actress Glenn Close narrated a comprehensive television documentary called "The Divine Garbo," which newspaper ads balleyhooed with Garbo's line, "I've always wanted to live two lives, one for the movies and one for myself" ("Television December 2-8" 7). The film highlighted Garbo's sensuality, her rare beauty, and her torrid affairs with various men, yet it conveniently ignored her bisexuality and her frequent romances with women. Writing a current biography, therefore, provokes a very real question: is certain information essential to the book's thesis or is it pandering to the prurient interest of the mass market audience? The question poses a major issue: the subject's right to privacy versus the public's right to know. A biographer must avoid the sensational; and yet, in order to speak for our times, he/she must grapple with the non-hegemonic margins of acceptable behavior. Armed with volumes of information, the biographer must condense. "Selection is everything," writes Tuchman, "it is the test of the historian" (7374 ). The final manuscript consists of what the author has chosen to include— or to reject. The choices and challenges produce a struggle, so the writer must keep clearly in mind the story he/she aims to tell and what information he/she needs to tell it. The inclusion of a controversial item or incident concerning a person's private life is certainly justified if it illustrates the interplay between the subject's "public" and "private" life and how the private life informed the person's work and career. One of the lessons I learned while working on Shattered Applause is that publishers do not provide clear guidelines. I sent detailed proposals and outlines to over eighty publishers and subsequently mailed sample chapters to about a dozen that expressed interest. They ranged from major trade publishers such as Alfred...