The Trouble With Biography

I'm almost done with Peter Hart's Mick: The Real Michael Collins, and though the book has some commendable aspects to it, it also has a certain quality that keeps rubbing me the wrong way. Louis Menand's critique of the biography genre seem to perhaps overstate the case, but at least nail the problem with Hart's book:

[T]he premise of biographies is that the private can account for the public, that the subject’s accomplishments map onto his or her psychic history, and this premise is the justification for digging up the traumatic, the indefensible, and the shameful and getting it all into print. How centrally that kind of information figures in the biographical account depends on the tact and ingenuity of the biographer, but a biography that did not use events in its subject’s personal life to explain his or her renown is almost unimaginable. Still, the premise poses a few problems.

For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others. A letter discovered in a trunk, or an entry in a personal notebook, trumps the public testimony of a hundred friends and colleagues. Biographers go into a professional swoon over stories that some famous person has made a bonfire of a portion of his or her correspondence, or that notebooks in an archive are embargoed until the year 2050. That stuff must explain everything! Why should we especially credit a remark made in a diary or a personal letter, though? The penalty for exaggeration and deception in those forms is virtually nonexistent. People lie in letters all the time, and they use diaries to moan and to vent. These are rarely sites for balanced and considered reflection. They are sites for gossip, flattery, and self-deception. But diaries and letters are the materials with which biographies are built, generally in the belief that the “real” person is the private person, and the public person is mostly a performance.

As Brendan Nyhan says this seems in many ways to parallel some of the pathologies of political journalism. John Edwards' anti-poverty program should be dismissed because he has a big house. Collins was "really" driven by personal ambition rather than Irish nationalism as can be seen in his 1916 correspondence about the possibility of moving to Chicago.

Comments

"John Edwards' anti-poverty program should be dismissed because he has a big house."

I agree, just like how Al Gore's message on the environment shouldn't be invalidated because he's a complete hypocrite and like how the fight to uphold traditional marriage and families shouldn't be dismissed just because some people on that side of the argument don't live how they preach? You're right, the hypocrisy of the person espousing the message does not invalidate the message - the message has to be judged on its own terms - it just makes us cynical. But that person should be dropped like a bad habit from being the primary spokesman for that message.

Posted by Dan | August 7, 2007 9:16 AM

I can't say it's a conscious thing, but considerations along Menand's lines may be behind my visceral dislike of the genre. I hardly read any biographies, even of figures I greatly admire or am deeply interested in. In fact, I've probably read more Bob Dylan biographies than all other biographies put together. I read a lot of non-fiction - far more than fiction, these days - but I'd take a science or a history or a politics book over a biography any day.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | August 7, 2007 10:10 AM

I love Collins, and I didn't bother reading that bio -- it was not especially well received. Tim Pat Coogan's bio is the way to go, even though Coogan can be a bit of a tedious writer.

Posted by Manfred | August 7, 2007 10:14 AM

Dan, "The fight to uphold traditional marriage" - do you mean the fight to criminalize other activities and relationships?

I think that hypocrisy goes far to invalidate that fight.

Posted by putnam | August 7, 2007 10:39 AM

Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf is splendid for, among other reasons, avoiding the sins that Menand describes. A good read.

(Though I confess that her nephew Quentin Bell's delightful biography is not superseded by Lee -- one should read both. Quentin has lots of family stories to relate, like Leonard Woolf dressing down a policeman on the street, having forgotten for the moment that he and Virginia are dressed as the Carpenter and the White Rabbit from Lewis Carroll.)

Posted by Anderson | August 7, 2007 10:39 AM

Matt, why the interest in Collins? Just leisure reading or part of a larger project?

Posted by dave | August 7, 2007 10:43 AM

Dan, I have to ask, what's the hypocrisy in thinking people shouldn't be poor while... not being poor?

Posted by Adrian | August 7, 2007 10:49 AM

Seconding Manfred's recommendation of the Coogan bio, Michael Collins, the Man Who Made Ireland.

One besetting problem with Irish history is shared with the American South, where, as Faulkner famously said, the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. There's Michael Collins the man, and then there's "Michael Collins", the position, as opposed to Eamon DeValera, and then there's "Eamon DeValera", the position. I suppose in France, everyone's still a Dreyfusard, or and anti-Dreyfusard....

Coogan at least is up front about it -- Mick's his man. His DeValera bio will make you feel about Dev the way Caro's LBJ bio mande me feel about Lyndon.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | August 7, 2007 10:50 AM

Adrian, there is nothing wrong with thinking people shouldn't be poor while not being poor. But the hypocrisy comes when you get a $400 haircut paid for by campaign money - that is, small contributions that the people who agree with him but aren't as rich as him send in. Or when you build the largest house in an already fairly well off area. Or when you set up a foundation for poverty studies and spend the money on kick-starting your campaign instead. Or when you decry the America that is getting rich off of the backs of the poor America while simultaneously take a job with one of those parasitic corporations, claiming that it's research.

The list goes on. The man claims to sympathize with the poor, and then spends his (and other people's) money like a drunken sailor. He's a giant hypocrite, and the polls, which show that his support among the poor and working class is actually pretty low show that I'm not the only one who thinks so. That doesn't reflect on his message one way or the other - but it does make him a fraud.

Posted by Dan | August 7, 2007 11:22 AM

I've read both biographies of Collins (I am interested in him because he was one of the few truly successful "terrorist" leaders in history).

I think Coogan wrote with the purpose of rehabilitating Collins after years of his memory being allowed to fade at the expense of De Valera's version of history. This triggered a wave of adulation for Collins (which I tend to support).

Hart sought to present a different picture of Collins, perhaps to debunk the Coogan version of Collins, which at times does border on the saintly. One is left wondering, though, how the IRA was able to succeed in forcing the British to the negotiating table, while De Valera was out of the country, if Collins was not a supremely effective leader.

Posted by Tom S | August 7, 2007 11:37 AM

It seems rather obvious to me that the reason most biographers zoom in on evidence written by the hands of their subjects as revelatory of the subjects' true selves is because ... biographers are writers and not much else: all they do, all they have to reveal of themselves, is their writing. So they presume their subjects are the same.

Posted by The Confidence Man | August 7, 2007 12:35 PM

The man claims to sympathize with the poor, and then spends his (and other people's) money like a drunken sailor.

So it's not his being rich that's hypocritical, it's being rich and spending money.

I suppose, if your anti-poverty position was revolutionary Marxism, it might be hypocritical to live off the fruits of alienated labor. But Edwards is a presidential candidate in America; his anti-poverty position is about relieving the suckiness of poverty, not ending wealth.

It's a good thing for rich people to be anti-poverty rather than oblivious to others' suffering. This idea that the rich have some sort of consistency obligation not to care about the poor is... bizarre.

Posted by Adrian | August 7, 2007 12:36 PM

Thoughtful discussion and original post by Brendan. Hard to disagree with Menand's critique and the existence of the same bad discursive habit in the media.

In the case of biography, it is hardly indefensible to speculate on the basis of diaries, but caution is warranted whenever the author bases interpretations on a "real self" constructed from the diaries that would somehow change or invalidate the substance of public utterances. How the private effects the public may be a topic of interest but it is hardly the only topic of biography or why people are interested in biography.

In the case of journalism, we can be justified in being more critical. Journalists who write sensationalist articles about personal eccentricities that have no substantial implications really have no excuse.

Posted by Scott Kern | August 7, 2007 1:10 PM

Note on Menand's criticism: Although I agree that the personal shouldn't be priveleged over the public a priori, I would assert that our private selves are no less "performant" than our public lives. However, we feel differently about them because we associate theater and public display so readily. We can't think easily of a "theater of one".

Seems to me that private and public each participate in the theater of "me".

Posted by ralph | August 7, 2007 1:33 PM

I'm not sure what Menand is on about. It seems to me that diaries and letters are relevant because they're usually written around the time of the events they discuss, while 'public testimony' (in the form of interviews or whatever) generally takes place on a much later date.

Posted by S. Tarzan | August 7, 2007 1:33 PM

"Matt, why the interest in Collins? Just leisure reading or part of a larger project?"

Maybe, IIRC, 'cos Ben-Gurion named his machine-gun Mihail in honor of Collins. Collins was the originator of many modern insurgent tactics (he wasn't the first to use the car-bomb, but certainly was one of the earliest). Or maybe Matt's taken an interest in Northern Ireland as a case of countersurgency, and realized the need to do some background reading.

Yeah, Collins is somewhat overhyped, but fortunately his star rising in history was the counterbalance to DeValera's star falling.

I'll agree with Menand's critique of biography-as-insight-into-history.

"Collins was "really" driven by personal ambition rather than Irish nationalism as can be seen in his 1916 correspondence about the possibility of moving to Chicago."

God, Hart doesn't really make that argument? Pre-Easter rising, Irish Republicanism was at a low ebb: it looked like Home Rule was the destiny of Ireland (and Ireland and the UK as a whole might have been better off if that had been the case rather than partition and independence). Post-easter rising, it was a case, at least for a while, of Croppie Lie Down.

Also, *James Connolly*, key figure in the Easter Rising, went to the U.S. to work for the IWW and later came back to Ireland. Would the author make the same charge against Connolly?

Posted by Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | August 7, 2007 4:04 PM