The Biographical Turn

Lives in history

Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, Jonne Harmsma, Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, Jonne Harmsma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315469553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Biographical Turn showcases the latest research through which the field of biography is being explored. Fifteen leading scholars in the field present the biographical perspective as a scholarly research methodology, investigating the consequences of this bottom-up approach and illuminating its value for different disciplines.

While biography has been on the rise in academia since the 1980s, this volume highlights the theoretical implications of the biographical turn that is changing the humanities. Chapters cover subjects such as gender, religion, race, new media and microhistory, presenting biography as as a research methodology suited not only for historians but also for explorations in areas including literature studies, sociology, economics and politics. By emphasizing agency, the use of primary sources and the critical analysis of context and historiography, this book demonstrates how biography can function as a scholarly methodology for a wide range of topics and fields of research.

International in scope, The Biographical Turn emphasizes that the individual can have a lasting impact on the past and that lives that are now forgotten can be as important for the historical narrative as the biographies of kings and presidents. It is a valuable resource for all students of biography, history and historical theory.

SECTION 1

The biographical turn in the humanities

2

BIOGRAPHY AS CORRECTIVE

Nigel Hamilton

Twenty-seven years ago the distinguished English biographer Robert Skidelsky (author of Keynes, in three volumes) rued the continuing lack of theorising in the study of biography and, as a consequence, its poor status in the academy.¹ As Skidelsky put it in a sort of status report on biography in 1988, The Troubled Face of Biography (a book of essays resulting from an international conference on the subject): ‘Scholars are far from convinced that biography has any important light to throw on art or,’ he added, ‘history’. ‘Biography’, he summarised, ‘is still not taken entirely seriously as literature, as history, or as a cogent intellectual exercise’.²

This sorry situation, in the view of the novelist and professor of American literature Malcolm Bradbury in the same work, had not changed very much since Wellek and Warren had published, in 1949, their ‘famous and influential’ book, Theory of Literature.³ In that seminal account, biography had been dismissed as of no ‘real critical importance. No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation’, Wellek and Warren had asserted.⁴

Bradbury’s scorn for the ravages wreaked not only by post-war critical minds but then by deconstruction was even more pronounced – the 1980s having become ‘the age of the author denied and eliminated, airbrushed from the world of writing with a theoretical efficiency that would be the envy of any totalitarian regime trying to remove its discredited past leaders from the record of history’.⁵

Skidelsky thought biographers, to some degree, had brought this upon themselves – not only by the lack of theorists, but by biographers’ helter-skelter retreat from their earlier, Victorian responsibility to produce exemplary lives, and their growing surrender to public voyeurism. In his view, exemplary lives were coming back again, following Lytton Strachey’s great ‘debunking’ bonanza after World War I – which had at least given biography a serious and central justification – but with the exemplariness transferred to the subject’s private life – life that was not necessarily exemplary, at least in the Victorian sense, but certainly so in the Roman Colosseum sense. By the late 1980s, he lamented, biography had sunk in intellectual esteem, for ‘the example is the life itself, not what the life enabled a person to achieve. Or, more precisely, the life is the achievement’. As he added, in what is now a famous epigram, ‘what used to be called achievement is now only one accompaniment, possibly a minor one, of a style of living’ – from lesbianism to sexual arrangements.⁶

It would be no exaggeration to say that biography’s role and standing in society and in the academy has radically changed since The Troubled Face of Biography was published. The book’s editors, Eric Homberger and John Charmley – one a professor of literature, the other a professor of history – had claimed that ‘everywhere in academic life the subtle, the not-so-subtle denigration of biography grows apace’, and reported with profound concern that ‘the procedures of biography’ were ‘under direct attack in the humanities’.⁷

Twenty-seven years later the reverse could probably be averred: traditional history, rather than biography, having come under academic and public fire, while biography’s status both in academia and outside may be said to have skyrocketed. The snobbery, superficiality, and lack of credibility of historians, where their work touches on real individuals, caused history in that period to become suspect not only in the academy but outside, as the work of biographers served increasingly to place in question their accounts and interpretations of important historical events, personalities and developments.

This is a change or turn that in time will repay deeper study, I believe. However, since it has gone more or less unobserved in current studies of biography, let me briefly explore what might be termed ‘the biographical corrective’, as I have observed and experienced it, both as an author and as a teacher of the craft since the 1970s.⁸

Historians turning to biography

Robert Skidelsky, in his 1988 essay, did acknowledge the rise of more professional (i.e. well-researched) approaches to modern biography, fueled by American academics. He cast the products, though, as ‘works of scholarship rather than imagination’. More detailed and painstaking than in the past, biographies were, he maintained, still turgid. ‘Nearly all biographies still start with ancestors, most move on to birth, and then through birth to leading events, and so on to death, in music the same way as of old, and’ – pace Eminent Victorians – ‘at about as funereal a pace’. Current biography was not notable, he observed, for being innovative or critical. It was not ‘experimental in style or arrangement’, and it could not be said that ‘it seriously challenges accepted judgements’.⁹

Skidelsky clearly never foresaw the explosion of narrative literary techniques in biography that changed its supposedly troubled face in subsequent decades. For one thing, biographers abruptly ceased opening their lives with the birth of their subject – so much so that, by 2007, Hermione Lee, a biographer and professor of English literature at Oxford, could formally announce the demise of such starting points.¹⁰ Biographies also began to use flashback, foreshadowing, invented narrators, multiple points of view and more.¹¹ Where Edmund Morris, for example, had embarked on his new life of Theodore Roosevelt in traditional multi-volume, traditional style in 1979, he abandoned all semblance of such in Dutch, his authorised biography of President Ronald Reagan in 1999, inventing himself, the author, as a fictional participant-observer, and even inserting his own filmscript.¹² (No film, unfortunately, was forthcoming. Not only did this outrage Reagan’s widow, but it scandalised the reading public, who had come to expect, nay demand, an old-fashioned formal, official biography – an example, as in many of the arts, of the market being well behind the creative curve.)

Another example of radical reorientation of the biographer as author may be seen in the work of Stacy Schiff. Schiff had published a well-regarded biography of Saint-Exupéry in 1995, but in 2010 she subjected Queen Cleopatra to a scintillating, firework-style re-examination in Cleopatra. This time there was no widow to object; in The New York Times Michiko Kakutani hailed the work as ‘a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation’.¹³

These were not aberrations; the sheer literary standard of biographical writing often eclipsed that of fiction authors in readability, control of structure, intelligence, humor and narrative skill. Literary innovation, in other words, transformed the genre. It did not necessarily displace more journeyman, traditional biographies – any more than post-modern novels displaced traditional detective novels or spy thrillers – but it added to biography’s arsenal a display of inventiveness in form and approach that professors Homberger and Charmley had only nervously (and far from eagerly) hoped for when in 1988 they wrote: ‘The suspicion of traditional biography is so intense in the social sciences, history and in the vexatious kingdom of high literary theory, that wild heresies, tremendous flights of the persecuted biographical imagination, loom on the horizon’.¹⁴

Together with this innovative turn, though, went a new, more challenging approach by the biographer to his or her purpose in writing the life of another, real human being: the question ‘why’? And ‘what am I trying to do in this book’?

In steering, shaping and above all, in editing out non-germane content from their work, the new approach to biography saw biographers taking upon themselves a more challenging aspiration, namely to do what Lord Skidelsky had failed to find in biography in the 1980s – a stronger critical, authorial mission, unafraid to contest the achievement or failure of the subject. Biographers began not only to contest the way in which the genre had previously been pursued in biography, but the way in which the biographee had hitherto been portrayed and evaluated by historians – much as the microhistory school was doing.¹⁵

Whether this burgeoning critical confidence was occasioned by the gradual whittling away of libel and copyright laws in America and ultimately in Britain – a factor that had made many a biographer cringe before tackling reputations, as Ian Hamilton, author of In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988) and Keepers of the Flame (1992) had discovered, to his dismay – or to the growing professional confidence of biographers in their right to judge directly, given the strength of their research and biographical skills, or to other factors in social and cultural history, will doubtless be a fruitful aspect to consider as we continue to study the business of biography and biographers’ motives.¹⁶ Here I wish just to briefly identify and offer some insight into this trend towards a more assertive, challenging, critical and contesting spirit in biography, at least with regard to history.

This corrective trend – and its consequences – will, I believe, be seen as culturally significant, indeed as a defining quality of the ‘Biography as Corrective’ in years to come. That it is new, however, we can state with certainty, for it was nowhere on the radar of David Novarr when writing The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880–1970 (1986), nor on that of Homberger and Charmley’s essayists’ in 1988.¹⁷ At a time when many novelists, according to Tom Perotta, have ‘experienced a sudden and alarming loss of faith in their chosen literary form’ – even to the point of claiming that ‘fictional writing has no value’ – it is interesting to note not only the increase in faith experienced by biographers as non-fiction writers, but to analyse why.¹⁸ Here I can only offer some preliminary ideas, based on exterior and interior observations, that point to a fresh theoretical justification for the genre or craft we call biography.

Biographical mission

Beginning with the outside, let us take, as a possible starting point, the study of World War II and the question of the agency of Adolf Hitler in the genesis and development of a conflict that may well turn out – in deaths, destruction, global reach and consequences – to be the most violent war in human history: in other words, a hugely important historical subject. Not an easy subject for historians, it must be said, to address, though. However well theorised historians may be in their field, they are invariably compel...