Biography and Scholarship: A Reply to Professor Young

In his latest response Professor Young has provided an account of how certain words and structures that occurred in a biography by Curtis Cate reappeared in his own book. His basic explanation—that he read Cate's book five years before starting to write and forgot the provenance of materials—is more specific and to that extent more plausible than the one he offered earlier. Unfortunately, he hedges this admission with questionable claims and covert attacks. Professor Anderson, their principal target, responds to those. I would like to address certain puzzling notions Young entertains regarding biography.

I would also like to shift the focus from earlier interchanges. In his original article Mark Anderson rightly drew attention to the artistic element in biography and in particular to the way an author tells a story. Here I highlight the other side of the genre, the ways biography is not just an aesthetic artifact but a work of scholarship, and subject to the same constraints as any other presentation of researched and codified knowledge.

We might begin with Young's rueful statement that "I tended to assume— wrongly—that the manner of reporting humdrum historical facts no more counts as intellectual property than the manner of reporting a bus timetable." This remark, although humble enough and no doubt humorously intended ("a bus timetable"), nonetheless suggests that Young still somewhat underestimates the genre's requirements. For the biographer there are no "humdrum historical facts" because every truth, once unequivocally established, represents an accomplishment made by some individual scholar. Facts from the past are not immediately given, nor can they be inferred; they are contingencies and have to be hunted down and verified, one by one, often laboriously and sometimes through the grace of luck. Only when definitively established can they form a reliable basis for the superstructures of interpretation and further research.

To give an example, we might consider the date of Friedrich Nietzsche's enrollment at the University of Leipzig. On the surface this might seem a mundane and easily specified piece of information, a fact as "humdrum" as one could wish. It has nonetheless enjoyed a contested history. Most biographers mention this event, for Nietzsche records that the rector welcomed the new students by informing them that they were arriving on the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's own matriculation.¹ Few biographers could resist such symbolism, and Nietzsche himself was pleased and inspired by what he hoped would prove a good omen. Yet if one compares accounts, one finds chaos. Some biographers apparently thought that rather than search the archives, they could take the date of Goethe's enrollment and add a hundred years. Yet inexplicably, they seem not to be united on the Goethe date. Cate gives it as October 18, 1765, Ulf Heise as October 19, and Werner Ross as October 20.² (An afternoon in a library yields October 19.)³ As the reader might imagine, these biographers date Nietzsche's matriculation accordingly: Cate as the October 18 (which Young follows) and Ross as October 20.⁴ Ronald Hayman also cites the October 18 in his biography, and Curt Paul Janz bridges the gap, giving "the 18th or 19th of October, 1865."⁵ As it turns out, Ross, who checked the archives, is correct, at least with regard to Nietzsche. When Ulf Heise examined the university records, he too confirmed Nietzsche's enrollment as occurring October 20, 1865, and he published a copy of the document to settle the matter finally.⁶ The putative coincidence with Goethe's admission, which seems decisively to be October 19, turns out to be inexact and a red herring.⁷

As errors go, these may seem negligible. They demonstrate, however, the care one must exercise when dealing with sources. In biography as in history, little can be taken for granted, and one should maintain a margin of skepticism even when reading the most revered masters (Janz).

Young augments his basis in Cate with readings in memoirs, including several found excerpted in Friedrich Nietzsche: Chronik in Bildern und Texten.⁸ None of these reminiscences, however, were written...