BIOGRAPHY: A Brief History by Nigel Hamilton
WHY IS IT THAT OTHER people’s lives are a source of apparently endless
fascination to us? Show us a figure who has achieved fame or notoriety in
the public domain, and it won’t be long before we are itching to know more
about the private life behind the public façade.
The very term façade makes it clear that we assume that whatever the
individual’s achievements – be they a great operatic soprano, Nobel
prizewinner, politician, mafia boss, tennis champion, chess master or master
chef – there are hidden secrets whose revelation will help to explain how
they got where they are. Only uncover the “truth” about a great man’s or
woman’s progress from childhood to maturity, and the secret of how to attain
an equivalent level of success will be ours.
“Ah, but”, I hear you murmur. Let us not confuse our prurient interest in what
a celebrity supermodel such as Kate Moss and her bad-boy popstar boyfriend
Pete Doherty get up to in her Gloucestershire home with the serious business
of excavating the early experiences, growth and intellectual development of,
say, a man brilliantly able to decipher the secrets of the universe, such as
Albert Einstein, or a virtuoso wordsmith such as Virginia Woolf. Confuse
them, however, we do.
Anyone who has tried turning their hand to biography-writing quickly discovers
that no matter how hard they try to offer a rich account of a rewarding
life, based on the widest possible range of types of surviving historical or
contemporary evidence, readers want evidence and information of something
else – something decidedly saucier. They want the sordid details, the
dalliance, the extramarital affairs.
I was rebuked, a couple of years ago, for not including in my biography of Sir
Christopher Wren more about his private life, especially his relationship
with his two wives. The fact was that there were no surviving documents,
only tantalising, insubstantial clues, nothing more than a few fragments of
the great architect’s homelife for me to build upon.
Those who review the many weighty biographical tomes published every year may
insist that our interest in a new biography of Einstein arises out of our
desire to understand how a mathematical talent is nurtured, and how he
arrived at his Special Theory of Relativity. Those who select biographies
for a nonfiction award such as the Samuel Johnson prize, whose winners have
included hefty volumes on Pushkin and Berlioz, may do likewise.
The fact is, though, what captures the public attention will be the
biographer’s revelation that Einstein fathered a daughter, Lieserl, before
he married his fellow mathematician, Mileva Mari, and that the child
mysteriously disappears from the record.
The critic may explain that the reason why we want to explore Woolf’s
complicated family life, and her growing up with the first editor of The
Dictionary of National Biography for a father, is the better to
understand how she came to write so eloquently and perceptively (is Mrs
Dalloway a figure to be found somewhere in the author’s own experience?).
Readers, however, will prefer an exhaustive exploration of her nervous
breakdowns and her long-running affair with Harold Nicolson’s wife, Vita
Sackville-West.
So there is, surely, an element of deliberate naivety in Nigel Hamilton’s
synthetic approach to life-writing in Biography: A Brief History. His
witty, readable account embraces the scholarly and the salacious,
integrating them into a seamlessly coherent account, beginning with tales
recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets in Ancient Sumer, and culminating in
today’s film and television “biopics”. He proposes a clear, chronological
development from the hagiography of saints’ lives in the first millennium to
semi-fictional 20th-century film lives such as Orson Welles’s Citizen
Kane – a thinly-veiled “life” of William Randolph Hearst.
Hamilton makes pretty grand claims for the importance of biography as a
literary form: “The pursuit of biography, controversial in its challenge to
received ideas of privacy and reputation since ancient times, is integral to
the Western concept of individuality and the ideals of democracy, as opposed
to dictatorship or tyranny.”
No wonder he is astonished that, with such a steady interest in biography
throughout history, there should be no systematic study of it as a form – no
“Institute of Biography” to spearhead scholarly investigation into so
significant a genre.
As it happens, I direct a research centre for “Editing Lives and Letters” at
the University of London, and there is a masters degree in life-writing at
the University of East Anglia, so things are not quite as bad as Hamilton
believes.
Personally, though, I must confess that the biographies I return to play
pretty fast and loose with the always inevitably limited data available on
any historical personage, giving us a bold, fanciful, imaginative portrait
of a life.
Woolf’s Orlando remains one of my all-time favourites. Hamilton
calls it a “spoof biography” of Vita Sackville-West. But that is not to do
justice to the extraordinary reach of her inspired portrayal of an
unrepentantly bisexual heroine, with a consuming passion for her family’s
long history, obsessed by the constraints upon her participation in it,
because she had been born a woman.
Woolf’s “fiction” gives her licence to go where the traditional biographer
would not dare to tread while her subject was still alive. As she wrote to
Vita in 1927: “It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and The
shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction is announced on
Thursday Harvard, £14.95; 360pp £13.45 (free p&p) 0870
1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst the lure of your mind.” Or, as she
wrote in her diary, it is “a biography beginning in the year 1500 and
continuing to the present day, [about] Vita; only with a change-about from
one sex to the other”.
And yet, isn’t there something annoyingly unsurprising about life-writing?
Despite the biographer’s best efforts, it is almost bound to have a
predictable shape – birth and childhood, career, death.
A young scholar friend of mine came close to having his first book for a
general readership withdrawn and his career ruined, when a senior colleague
who had written a biography of the same figure threatened legal action for
plagiarism.
The borrowings were, she claimed, glaringly obvious: his book had 12 chapters
(just like hers), the first of which covered the family and early beginnings
of its subject, while in the last, misfortune overtook our hero, who was
wounded on the battlefield, languished and died. Needless to say, the
threatened lawsuit never materialised.
The shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction is announced on
Thursday
Harvard, £14.95; 360pp; £13.45 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
