BIOGRAPHY – THE LIVES OF OTHERS (and poking into their drawers) By Nicholas Meyer

I like reading biographies. You learn about someone’s life and you learn about the times in which they lived, so a biography delivers history as well as biography, a kind of double feature.

Over the years, I’ve formed some ideas about biography as a literary form. Some of my ideas, I confess, were inspired by examples of biographical practice cited by my father in the introduction to his own biography of Joseph Conrad.

As a shrink, my father was first of all interested in the motives – conscious or otherwise – at play in the biographer’s choice of subject. Why did someone chose a particular person to write about? Was it a person they venerated or denigrated that merited their attention? And if there was a bias, yea or nay, to what degree was the biographer aware of it? Was the result idolatry or idol smashing?

As examples, my dad pointed to Beethoven’s first biographer, Anton Schindler, who seems to have destroyed upwards of two hundred of Beethoven’s four hundred priceless “conversation books” that the deaf composer used to communicate, because they interfered with the portrait of the man Schindler chose to refer to throughout as “our hero”.

Conversely, the Freud-Bullitt study of Woodrow Wilson missed no opportunity to express the authors’ disdain for the president, peppering their account with such pejorative phrases, as “he crept back to the White House.”

The more I’ve thought about biography, the more I’ve pondered the questions posed by the form. We want to know what someone did – or didn’t - do; we’d like to know how they did it. And perhaps most of all, we want to know WHY they did it.

The question of WHY in biography is a distinctly 20^th century addition to the subject, perhaps inevitably a post-Freudian consideration. It is no longer sufficient to say, “The guy did this and then he did that.”

Freud defended the application of psychoanalytic theory to biographical subjects in his 1910 essay, Leonardo and a Memory of his Childhood, explaining such an application should not be misconstrued as an effort to judge or “diminish” the subject, (in this case, Da Vinci), but rather an attempt to understand something about the person in question. The why.

(That Freud’s essay is based on the mistranslation of an Italian word – the bird in Da Vinci’s notebook was a kite, not a vulture - scarcely detracts from the essay’s brilliance).

It seems to me a serious biography must be an act of sympathetic imagination that seeks to paint a three dimensional and ideally non-judgmental portrait of its protagonist, trying to balance the virtues and vices, accomplishments and shortcomings of its subject. If the subject is Adolph Hitler, this is obviously impossible. But barring such extreme examples, I think a good biography should at least seek to understand the person being written about, not just what they did or how they did it. When Oliver Cromwell sat for his portrait, he instructed the painter to paint him, “warts and all”. Not every subject is prepared to go so far. Winston Churchill was upset with a painting that made his hands look flabby. Hands were the least of it. Many biographies have argued about Churchill’s actions and character. Was he the defiant, wartime hero who saved England from the Nazis, or the white supremacist, who experienced Gandhi as “a little brown fakir” and fanatically deplored and fought against the independence of India?

Possibly – probably – Churchill was both. “Do I contradict myself?” wondered Walt Whitman. “Very well, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”

Most people are many things, another difficulty for the biographer.

It’s fun to follow the lives of great men and women, to witness their triumphs as well as their failures; even more gratifying if one senses the degree of conscientious research, the thought and leaps of intuition that have gone into the finished portrait. Great men and women are not often or necessarily good men and women. Talent, intelligence and virtue don’t always go hand in hand. To what degree does neurosis play into a person’s behavior or excuse any of it? How does one account for genius? (Hint: you can’t).

And while we’re at it, let’s nail down neurosis, the word everyone throws around but rarely defines. A neurosis is an obsolete fear.

It’s hard to overstate the satisfactions of reading a great biography. Chances are you’re learning a great many things besides the life and times of its ostensible subject. You are inevitably learning something about the character and personality of the biographer, as well, their intellect, erudition and possible prejudices. Reading Chasing Beauty, Natalie Dykstra’s absorbing life of Isabella Stewart Gardner or Josh Ireland’s Churchill and Son (the unfortunate Randolph, for whom Winston, his father, reposed such high hopes), one experiences something akin to the vicarious (and arguably illicit) thrill of reading other people’s mail, peering into the lives of others and experiencing their experiences and their secrets. Rummaging around in other peoples’ drawers (sic).

But in addition to learning about the biographer’s subject as well as the biographer, chances are you are also learning about yourself in relation to the foregoing. What insights and feelings are prompted by what you’ve read?

It seems almost inevitable that we measure our own achievements against the subjects in biographies. How old was Mozart when he wrote his first symphony? Three?? I think I’ll kill myself. On the other hand, trying to plow through Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, I came across a passage where Freud says he needs a lot of sleep. Immediately I felt great. Hey, I need a lotta sleep too! I’m just like Freud!!

In the presence of a truly great biography, your very understanding of the world and how things work – or worked at an earlier time – enhances your understanding and possibly appreciation of the present in which you dwell. With hindsight, how this inevitably led to that.

As Shakespeare noted, “the past is prologue”.

And there is always the maddening question at the end of a biography: whom would you rather meet, the biographer or his subject? The old beggar woman, or Rembrandt’s picture of her? When one finishes reading Richard Ellman’s masterful life of Oscar Wilde, whom do you wish to sit down with, Wilde or his astonishing biographer, who possibly extracted more meaning from Wilde’s life than I daresay Wilde ever put into it. In the case of Ellman vs Wilde, I’d argue it’s a tossup.

And I’ve not touched on autobiography, which, as Luke Skywalker might say, is “a whole nother” subject. My short notion is that all autobiography is a species of forgery. Despite our best efforts at candor and honesty, we present ourselves as we wish to be seen. This is my good profile. For purposes of brevity, let’s leave it at that.

Which biographies do you recommend? And why?