Notes on Biography

Most of you do not write biography, but probably all of you read it, and many of you consider the form as teachers, librarians, critics. My remarks come from my reading on the art of biography and from my experience as a writer of biography for both young people and adults. These are scattered notes on what goes into the craft of biography, and some comments on reviewers of biography.

Who knows what time, the fourth dimension, is? How to define it, how to explain it? Yet those of us who write biography or history deal with it daily at our desk. Like everyone else in a world of clocks we live in this dimension, conscious of it in greatly varying degree, at varying times. When we are at work, however, we are always intensely concerned with the passage of time in the life of our subject. The duration of that life, its particular moment in the immense span of historical time, the years, months, weeks, days, even minutes, which may have been decisive in shaping the outcome of our subject's personal history—all these must be taken into account.

Perhaps the toughest tactical problem to solve is the handling of time. The critic A. O. J. Cockshut puts it neatly:

A narrative, a mass of letters, a series of conversations do not in themselves give the sensation of time passing; still less do they convey the complex way in which time is experienced—that strange mixture of continuity, memory, anticipation, routine and surprise. Everybody knows that time seems to run fast or slow according to the nature of the experience; and everybody has moments when the past seems to be relived. Everybody dreams, broods and hopes. But mediocre biographies never capture this aspect of life. As a rule, they start their subject out on his steady progress through the years; they may skip and they may concentrate attention on events of special importance. But they do not show his memories and regret. The great biographies—and it is one of their most obvious distinguishing marks—show "A lifetime burning in every moment."

What does the biographer work with? He hunts for all the facts he can dig out concerning his subject's life. The facts can be as elementary, but vital, as the date of birth. And by no means always easy to determine. Several sources may give the same date, and then you discover that one after another they perpetuated the original error. Not even the subject may have known when he was born. "I think it was a few days before Yom Kippur," he told someone," and in the year of that terrible pogrom." But Yom Kippur is a moveable date, and which of the many pogroms was it? No official record was made of that birth, and even if it had been, it might have been incorrect, or burned in a fire, or destroyed in a war. Not only the date of birth, but even the name on a birth certificate could be wrong, as well as the names of the parents and their ages.

In any case, you look in every possible place for documents attesting to the facts of the life: Parents, childhood, schooling, jobs or career, income, marriage, family life, illnesses, injuries, religion, morality, philosophy, politics, friends, enemies, habits, attitudes, moods, tastes, pleasures, disappointments . . . .

By documents I mean not only the written or printed word, but the artifacts of that life—houses or apartments, furniture, land, clothing, possessions like pets, books, magazines, art, recordings, and now, of course, videodiscs. It may often be impossible to trace these personal effects, so you look to the testimony of others who were close enough to your subject to observe these things and their place in that life.

And then there is the social life to investigate. Not only the intimate side of it I've already referred to, but the larger sphere of the society, the world your subject lived in. The community, the nation, the historical currents that set the limits and the possibilities of one man's life.

Those two sides—the personal and the...