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

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide