“Read no history; nothing but biography, for that is life
without theory,” said Disraeli.
The English-speaking world at least has taken this advice to
heart. It is awash with many great writers and avid readers of fine
biographies. Since the Second World War, there has been a
remarkable effusion of excellent, thoroughly researched, and
well-written portraits of numerous inspiring and repellant
personalities that embody the crooked timber of our shared
humanity.
This realization struck me as I wandered through the local book
emporium, calculating the significant sum I was contemplating
spending on just two recent, promising biographies now on the
shelves.
Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy and
William James: In the Maelstrom of American
Modernism by Robert D. Richardson had my name all over them.
But the bill, even with the ten percent discount, was a bit pricey;
and the Lenten season was upon us. I hadn’t given up book buying
this year, but the penitential spirit weighed into the decision
nonetheless.
My wife was waiting for me in the car, and I feared I could not
justify this expenditure given the stacks of books, still unread,
accumulating back at the house. She might raise the most dreaded
question that can ever be asked of an unregenerate bibliophile, the
question to which there is simply no good answer: Can’t you get
that book at the local library?
Book buying is an addiction, either positive or negative,
depending on your perspective. Remember when the paperback version
of the 9/11 Commission report hit the bookstands before the hard
copy? It was a real dilemma. Do you buy the hard copy even though
the soft copy came out first? There could be a real question as to
the authentic first edition. After conferring with a friend,
similarly afflicted, we agreed that the only solution was to buy
both!
So many books. So little time — and money. But the subject is
biography, and I digress.
AS DISRAELI CORRECTLY NOTED, studying an individual life in detail
requires an appreciation of the concrete realities of human
existence, lived in a given time and place, with unique
circumstances never to be duplicated (pace Nietzsche’s
“eternal return”). While rarely directly transferable to the
current scene, there are lessons to be learned from the lives of
our predecessors, often surprising, cautionary, or suggestive.
Robert K. Massie’s magisterial Peter the Great (1980) epitomizes the rich
learning and understanding that can be derived from a first-class
biography that is illuminating, but not dispositive, of the issues
of the day. Given our current relations with Russia, its popular
(for the Russians anyway) authoritarian leader, and its strategic
location vis-a-vis the Muslim world, Massie’s book is a masterful
portrait of an autocrat trying to modernize, through brute force
and force of will, a society uncongenial to Western mores. It also
provides the long view of Russia’s conflicts with the depredations
of the Ottoman Empire.
As a bonus Peter the Great also contains a biography
within a biography in the life of Peter’s mortal enemy, the
remarkable Charles XII of Sweden, who spent almost his entire young
life at war, ultimately destroying his army and his empire in the
process.
Massie’s excellent biography might seem an entirely arbitrary
choice, but that illustrates my point. Any dedicated reader can
select from a seemingly endless selection of outstanding
biographies available in English: Foster on Yeats, Gilbert and
Manchester on Churchill, Morris on Theodore Roosevelt, M. Jackson
Bate on Samuel Johnson, Stannard on Waugh, Weigel on John Paul II.
You can also match up biographies of past adversaries such as
Robert Blake on Disraeli and Roy Jenkins on Gladstone, two
excellent works published twenty-eight years apart. You can do the
same with Luther and Ignatius of Loyola both of whom have numerous
admiring or disparaging biographies reflecting the perspectives of
the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
You can read biographies of landscape architects, artists,
composers (Edmund Morris’s recent short volume on Beethoven is
delightful), the first Jesuit into China, and any number of knaves,
adventurers, con artists, and criminals including scores of studies
on Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
To celebrate the greatest of feast days, you can even learn the
story of the authentic St. Patrick, the Romanized Briton, who after
being kidnapped and enslaved, experienced a spiritual awakening,
escaped his captors, walked across Ireland, sailed back home, and
then returned to Christianize the Irish, God save us, without the
benefit of snakes, shamrocks, and green beer.
You can also absorb the works of wonderful serial biographers
such as Antonia Fraser who has published biographies of Mary Queen
of Scots, Cromwell, and Marie Antoinette, or Claire Tomalin who has
written on Hardy, Pepys, Austen, Mansfield, Shelly, and
Wollstonecraft. The list goes on and on as shall I.
CONSIDER THE CURRENT RUN of excellent works on the Founding
Fathers. Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and, of course,
Washington have merited the attention of multiple biographers for
decades. There is no let up on the fine biographies issuing forth
on these worthy subjects. And Abraham Lincoln has generated his own
legion of chroniclers as has Robert E. Lee and even the tormented
Jefferson Davis.
Again, while the reader might disagree with a given biographer’s
interpretation of his subject’s life, the research and writing is
usually first-rate. And you can always try another until you find
one that suits your fancy.
I have discovered a bit of tarnish on this golden age of
biography, in the nasty piece of work inflicted on the great
American novelist, Willa Cather, by the denizens of literary
theory, Freudianism, multiculturalism, feminism, and sexual
politics.
Most readers might perceive Cather as a Catholic-sympathizing
Episcopalian, realistic-even pessimistic-about human behavior but
devoted to traditional norms. However, many academics project their
postmodern prejudices on this estimable writer.
To her eternal credit, Joan Acocella of the New Yorker,
wrote an excellent essay, later a short
book, rescuing Cather from the ravages of literary critics,
left and right, who try to appropriate this great artist for their
narrow ideological agendas:
The parade of American literature goes by, float after
float: realism, naturalism, psychological novel, social novel,
political novel. Cather belongs with none of them, which means
either that she is left out or, if she is desperately needed, that
she is forced at gunpoint to put on a paper hat and join a group in
which she has no place. Hence her uneasy standing with the
feminists. She is not one of them, and they know it. That’s why
they don’t like her.
Cather deserves a first-rate, contemporary biography more in line
with Disraeli’s definition. However, James Woodress’s
Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987) is a
serviceable work on the subject.
Besides liberating the reader from the strictures of theory,
biography provides a delightful means of studying history,
accessible to the intelligent general or lay reader who may not
have the time or inclination to master the more daunting tomes of
professional, academic historians immersed in the minutiae and
jargon of their profession.
Our age has lost the art of great narrative history. Biography
has filled the void. The finest biographies provide a historical,
social, and cultural tapestry, a backdrop or context, for the
individual life which is its subject. Again, reading Massie on
Peter the Great transports the reader back to a time in which the
beauty and barbarity of an almost medieval society contrasted
sharply with Western Europe at that time.
For the inveterate reader, with the interest but not the time to
study history, there is no greater enjoyment than to immerse
himself in the life of an emblematic personage of any age.
