Biography: Craft or Art?

REVIEW ARTICLE Biography: Craft or Art? What is a biographer? Is he merely a superior sort of journalist, or must he also be an artist? Is writing a life a narrow branch of history or a form of creative literature? Or may it be something in between, a strange amalgam of science and art? Unfortunately there are no simple answers. The difference between a craftsman and an artist is obvious. The one knows exactly what his product will be. He works with specific materials and uses traditional techniques. His skill comes as a result of expert teaching and long practice. The other works intuitively, evolving each move that he makes, and not certain until the end just what his work will be. Genius is more important than practice. Most people in the past have assumed that biography is largely a craft. To be sure, until recently few cared what it was. Compared to the number of books and articles devoted to every kind of problem faced by the poet, the dramatist, and the novelist, the attention paid to life-writing has been astonishingly slight. Literary critics shied away from what seemed to them the province of the historian, and the historians were more interested in broader problems. Little thought was given to the requirements of a true biographer, that is, in addition to industry and skill in composition. For the most part it was assumed that what was involved was merely finding all the available evidence and fitting it into an agreeable narrative. Boswell and Lockhart, according to this point of view, produced masterpieces because they had better subjects and more colourful material, not because they were outstanding creative artists. Then came Strachey, Andre Maurois, and the "new" biograpbers of the 1920's, and the empbasis changed. Biography is an art, they insisted, a delicate, intuitive process. A biographer is just as much a creator as a novelist or dramatist. Yet, even so, there was no sign of agreement. Virginia Woolf, the close friend of Strachey, regretfully concluded that a biographer is a "craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art but something betwixt and between." At the same time, Frank Harris in one of his characteristically flamboyant overstatements insisted that biography is the supreme art of all, giving as his reason the fact that it can do what no other art can even attempt, portray the whole spirit of a man. Happily, in critical circles today the issue is being honestly faced. If tbere is still little agreement; if the positions taken by various commentators are widely divergent, there is finally an awareness that the technique of writing a life is more involved than bad formerly been assumed. A recent check of essays and books published during the last thirty years showed over fifteen which had either the exact title ''The Art of Biography" or were concerned specifically with that topic. Two books published in 1957, John A. Garraty's The Nature of Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limitedl, 1957, pp. xiv, 290, xiv, $5.50) and Leon Ede!'s Literary Biography, the Alexander Lectures, 1955-56 (University of Toronto Press, 1957, pp. xiv, 113, $2.00), show clearly the continuing differences of opinion and the increase of interest in the major problems. Both John A. Garraty and Leon Edel are practising biographers; both are keenly aware of the complexity of the decisions which they faced. Yet in many ways their whole concepts are opposed. Garraty, a professor of history, in his The Nature 0/ Biography is chiefly concerned with the slow development of the genre and with some practical techniques of assembling materia1. Edel, a professor of literature, stresses art and style, and is more interested in over-all creative effects. Garraty provides a broad survey, and attempts to be all-inclusive. Edel limits his discussion to literary biography and concentrates on only a few topics. Taken together, they provide an admirable opportunity to examine the state of biographical criticism in our time. From the start Garraty seems not to have been quite certain of just what his book was to be. In his Foreword he explains that...