Biography Versus Life
Gossip-Columnists I can forgive for they make no pretences,
not Biographers who claim it’s for Scholarship’s sake.
— W. H. Auden, 1972
Surely the primary reason to read a biography of a famous writer must be that you hope this book might give you some insight into the subject’s writing process, his motives in writing, or the themes that interested him. Anytime I have read any sort of biography of an artist or thinker, this has certainly been my purpose. That is to say, I have no interest in scandalous gossip or idol worship, so I read a biography looking of information – especially firsthand information such as recorded comments or documented decisions from the writer himself, or statements from close acquaintances – that will add to my overall impression of the figure’s life context and thinking style. For example, reading well-documented details about Nietzsche’s terrible and continuous health problems adds some suggestive context to the way I read his extensive discussions of the necessity of suffering, and his ranking of humans based on their power to overcome themselves.
However, I must say that when I read even the few good modern biographies I have ever found, I always and continuously remind myself (or rather feel continuously reminded by the books themselves) that the authors of these biographies are far less serious and original than the individuals they are writing about, and therefore their own view and interpretation of the subject’s life and thought, precisely because it seeks to appear comprehensive and insightful, will inevitably be incomplete and simplifying at best, misleading and false at worst.
Furthermore, I am an extreme skeptic about any biographer’s attempts to psychologize about his subject. That is, I know that a biographer who proposes to discuss a serious artist’s or thinker’s life and work in our modern age will feel compelled to offer some sort of theory about the subject’s inner life, and especially about how that inner life colors the subject’s work – for example, how his feelings about his father or his romantic humiliation at age twenty-five “explains” why he presented this or that character or situation the way he did in his greatest book. This is the tendency of biographical writing that I always guard myself against carefully, because such fake theories — fake at least in the sense of coming from people very inexpert in the workings of the soul, and to be clear my standard of expertise on the soul is Plato — if you accept them in the least, lay an interpretive filter over the subject that gives a superficial appearance of providing a rational, or even scientific, explanation of his work, while in fact having no rational justification at all, once you reflect more seriously on the nature of art or thought, and on what it means to be a great writer. Literature is not an unconscious (let alone a direct) “result” of a writer’s emotional life and personal problems, and to portray it as such is to belittle the author’s mind, and to reveal one’s own (the biographer’s) inferiority to his subject, since he (the biographer) is demonstrating that he cannot even understand what makes a great mind different from ordinary minds.
In short, beware the biographer who presumes to imply that he understands his subject’s mind and thought, or can explain to us how his subject’s private life affected his work. Such a biographer, in an act of the worst sort of egalitarian envy, is daring to place himself on the same level as his subject, or rather trying to reduce the subject to his own level, in the process fatally distorting the real worth and appeal of the works he pretends to be describing. For serious writing, like serious art and thought in general, is great precisely to the extent that it stands somewhat detached from its time, and this includes, most importantly of all, a significant feat of detachment from the writer’s own idiosyncratic feelings and experiences, which is not to say that he ignores these, but rather that he examines and utilizes himself a private individual with the same ironic and objective distance with which he views everything else.
