What's Left out of Biography for Children

Biography is hard to write. Resurrection may be more difficult than creation. The biographer "assays the role of a God, for in his hands the dead can be brought to life and granted a measure of immortality."¹ Not only must he revive persons—and particularly one person—but he must breathe back past times—not so much a panorama of ceremonies and battles, but the trivia that are significant to most people.

Biography for children is especially difficult to write because it is supposed to re-create and at the same time provide a guide to success, to encourage the child "to make something of himself" by giving him a believable model who "made it."² Thus, the biographer is supposed to be a psychologist or a moralist or both. At the same time, he is dealing with a necessarily imperfect subject about whom the young reader wants to know as much as possible. As Richard Ellmann writes, "More than anything else we want in modern biography to see the character forming, its peculiarities taking shape. . . ."³

In the preface to Literary Biography, Leon Edel cites that difficulty besetting all biographers: keeping a perspective somewhere between sterile objectivity and shrieking subjectivity. If one interprets the facts, may not he be inventing new facts? In straining to be truthful, there is always the danger of inventing the facts beforehand out of one's own prejudices. De Voto, in 1933, attacked this "intuitive" form of biography: "Biography," he wrote, "is different from imaginative literature in that readers come to it primarily in search of information."⁴

Yet that very information, Andre Maurois believes, should in modern biography contain a moral lesson, if only to prove something about life, its difficulty, its frustrations, its end result of becoming what we did not choose. He feels that a special lesson is contained in exceptional lives. "Great lives show that, in spite of all, it is possible for a man to act with dignity and to achieve internal peace."⁵

Many of these exceptional lives, particularly as they are presented to the child, are made into heroes whom the child cannot only admire but extravagantly worship. For children, biographies are often like those for adults in Victorian times, when Carlyle pronounced that "it was in great men's actions, fully as much as in their pronouncements, that lessons of great wisdom could be read."⁶ Indeed, psychologists or child experts frequently tell us children must have ideal beings after whom to pattern their behavior.

It seems to me, however, that there is need today for more biographies of ordinary people-not the Victorian type of biography which was written to affirm middle-class values, but biographies enabling a child to identify with the figure in the biography and so endure—something of the kind of thing one finds in drama in Brecht's Mother Courage. Thus, I do not altogether agree with Harold Nicolson, who believes that "the life of a nonentity or mediocrity, however skilfully contrived, conflicts with primary biographical principles."⁷ We are no longer a compla cent Victorian audience. We find it more difficult, perhaps, to define "nonentity" or "mediocrity." Further, since ideals as absolutes can never exist, in past or present, one might suggest that hero making is ethically wrong simply as a falsehood. The effects of hero worship might also be questioned. What happens when the child finds he cannot become even close to the ideal? Does he destroy himself or the society that seemingly prevented the attainment of this end? What happens when the hero is discovered to be an ordinary man or even a fraud? Does the child become so disillusioned that he gives up the possibility of positive change, or does he decide that, after all, the dishonest way "to the top" still gets you there—or gets you there more easily? I believe that the anti-hero is a legitimate subject of the biographer who works for children, that passivity or even outright failure can be interesting, imaginative, and even inspiring.

According to children's writer, Jean Karl, one of the...