Evaluating Contemporary Children's Biography: Imaginative Reconstruction and Its Discontents

In a recent article in the Virginia Quarterly Review Francelia Butler, the editor of Children's Literature, reflects on the fledgling state of the field: its detractors fail to make a necessary distinction between "books" and literature; there is much good writing, but it is obscured by the bad; the academic world has given it only begrudging acknowledgement; only a meagre criticism has thus far developed.¹ Thus, trying to evaluate children's literature provides us with a difficult task. Although we must be wary not to claim a complete identity between the two, it does seem logical, as well as expedient, to seek guidance about reading children's literature from mainstream literature and its criticism. Yet, when we turn to biography, we face a problematic situation equal to that of the state of children's literature itself.

Biography itself is only now being recognized as a distinct form and genre worthy of rules, criteria, and controversy. There seems to be some uncertainty as to whether biography is essentially literature or history. Should the biographer pay attention only to the facts or should he invent, reconstruct, and recreate the life according to poetic license normally taken by the writer of fiction? Three recent considerations of the art by D. J. Enright, Anthony Alpers, and Michael Holroyd suggest the scope of the problem, and give us a point of departure from which to develop a way of regarding biographies written for children.

Enright's view may be termed reactionary. He begins by saying:

We continue to hear that biography is the most esteemed, indeed the most popular of literary forms nowadays. If this is true, then, first of all. it is sad, since the novel—the form of literature which has or can have the widest and strongest influence—ought to occupy that position. . . . Dissatisfaction with the pious memorial class of biography. Great Sexless Lives and so forth, led to all sorts of imaginative reconstructions or imitations which in no way got to "the truth". . . . The biographer is a historian, and we still expect historians to get things right, orat least aspire to; the real deserves a special respect. No doubt this is difficult to contrive—the historian wasn't there, whereas the novelist is there, in the middle of his creation—but difficulty is no reason for confusing genres.²

Enright further maintains that we should resist inventing a life that is opposed to the surface facts of an individual's life and that only satisfies "our own notions of what we would like him to have been."

Anthony Alpers is not as openly opposed to imaginative recreations, but his own standards for writing biography suggest a similar conservatism. The biographer is first and lastly concerned with the collection and arrangement of facts. "Biographies fall roughly into three kinds (and many more I'm sure), depending on the author's distance from his human subject in space and time. . . ."³ "Personal" biography is based on the writer's firsthand knowledge of his subject. In writing "proximate or reported biography," the writer doesn't know his subject, "but he either possesses or is equipped to acquire a thorough understanding of the human subject's background and activities perhaps in public action, or in science, or in one of the arts." In "historical biography . . . the biographer works from books and documents unburdened by the drudgeries (and wasted journeys for fruitless interviews) endured by the two other kinds, untainted also by that touch of the low detective." For Alpers "the uses of irony and 'brilliance' in biography are a topic apart. They can displace for a time, but not replace, what the craft demands."

Compared to that of Enright and Alpers, Holroyd's biography is a highly daring and creative occupation; as such it seems to allow for the kind of writing that can make biographies palatable and useful to children. In Holroyd's view, biography is only now coming into its own. "It seems to be the product of a strange coupling between old-fashioned history and the old-fashioned novel. . . ."⁴ Holroyd acknowledges one critic...