Life Within Lives

I have myself written scores of biographical essays, but never a full-blown biography. I once took a publisher’s advance to write a biography of the American novelist John Dos Passos, a figure now slowly slipping into the vast limbo inhabited by the once-famous but now nearly forgotten. I was 32, Dos Passos was then 73, and would die a year later. After I had signed my contract, I wrote to inform him that I hoped to write his life and sent him some samples of my own published writing. He wrote back to say that he would be pleased to help me in any way he could, though he would prefer I put my liberal politics in mothballs and promise never again to use the word “explicate.”

Three great facts, or so I thought, dominated John Dos Passos’s life. The first is that he was born a bastard, but— an interesting twist here—an upper-class bastard, the son of a man who was a successful American lawyer and of a mother who was a Virginian of high social standing. He, John Dos Passos, went to Choate under the name John Madison, and thence to Harvard. The second fact is that he wrote a, if not the, Great American Novel, U.S.A. by title, a work using modernist techniques to explore the pressures that society puts on men and women of all social classes. It is a book that, when I first read it at the age of 19, greatly moved me. The third fact is that Dos Passos underwent a strong political conversion, from a man who in 1932 voted for William Z. Foster, the Communist candidate for president, to a man of deeply conservative principles and views. The work of the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War, prepared to kill the innocent to gain their ends, not only changed Dos Passos’s politics forever but turned such old friends as Ernest Hemingway against him.

A splendid biography of John Dos Passos was there to be written—but, alas, I never wrote it. Life, in the form of demands too elaborate and dull to go into here, intervened, and I was forced to that most odious act known to the professional writer: having to return my publisher’s advance. Others have since written biographies of John Dos Passos, but none, to my mind, altogether successfully. Dos Passos’s own fame is perhaps now too far faded for anyone of high literary power to take on the task of writing a first-class biography of him. Not that, let me add, at 32 I was myself likely to have been up to the job. I have come to believe that at the heart of any fully realized literary work, apart perhaps from satire and parody and lyrical poetry, is honoring the complexity of the subject; and in the case of John Dos Passos, I am fairly certain that I could not have done so at that relatively early age.

A successful biography is, at a minimum, one that conveys what the world thinks of its subject, what his closest family and friends think of him, and finally, crucially, and sometimes most difficult to obtain, what he thinks of himself. I have lately read two excellent biographies of Cicero (106-43 b.c.), one by the German classicist Manfred Fuhrmann, the other by the 19th-century French classicist Gaston Boissier, and what makes both biographies especially good is the large cache of 900 or so of Cicero’s letters that have survived along with another 100 or so letters from his correspondents. These letters reveal Cicero in all the pride, fear, hope, disappointment, vanity, and grandeur of a man engaged in Roman politics at the highest level. Written more than two millennia ago, Cicero’s letters, marshaled into pertinent order by brilliant biographers, bring him to life in a far more intimate way than any other figure in classical antiquity.

I read these biographies of Cicero (along with some among his voluminous writings) because Cicero is one of the hundred or so key figures in Western history and my ignorance of the details of his life is one of the many thousand gaps in my own knowledge of that history. I read them because one of the pleasures of biography is reading about men and women who played the game of life for higher and more dramatic stakes than one has oneself or is ever likely to do. I read them also because they reveal Cicero to be perhaps the first example of the intellectual in politics—he is the political intellectual par excellence—a subject of long fascination to me, an intellectual not in politics.

Cicero was a human type of the greatest interest: the man riven by the division between his ideals and his personal ambition. He felt himself drawn to the Roman aristocracy yet put off by its insolence; he felt the natural conflict between the temperament of the man of letters and the politician (for he was both). He was alternately fascinated and disgusted by politics, regularly retreating from them to his library at his villa at Tusculum, then drawn back to the fray at Rome. He was a man who knew disappointment in a mistaken marriage and tragedy in the loss of a beloved daughter when she was 30. He left a bibulous son, in whom the family line petered out. Attempting always to avoid extremes, longing for a return to the glories of the Roman Republic, about which he may have been guilty of fantasizing, Cicero ended up being killed by Marcus Antonius’ men, who nailed his severed head and the hands that wrote attacks upon Antonius up in the Forum for all to see.

In Gaston Boissier’s brilliant biography, Cicero and His Friends (1897), one is offered dazzling portraits of such figures as the financier Pomponius Atticus, of whom Boissier writes: “he was the most adroit man of that time, but we know that there are other forms of praise which are of more value than this.” Of Cicero’s protégé Marcus Caelius Rufus, Boissier writes: “Those cautious and clear-sighted persons, who are entirely taken up with the fear of being dupes, and who always see the faults of others so plainly, are never anything but lukewarm friends and useless allies.” Boissier describes Cicero’s brother Quintus playing the “ungrateful and difficult part of younger brother of a great man.” He provides portraits of leading female figures of the day, including Clodia, the Lesbia of Catullus’ love poems, of whom it was said that “she danced better than it was proper for an honest woman to do.” These observations on women are capped off by the remark of Cato “that the day they [women] become your equals they will be your superiors.”

I hope you find some of these remarks about Cicero’s friends and contemporaries as interesting as I do. If you do, I trust the reason is that you share my interest in human character and in that still, that probably perpetually, mysterious force behind it, human nature. “The proper study of mankind,” as Alexander Pope had it, “is man.” If there is a more interesting subject than human character, I do not know it. Part of its interest derives from its bottomlessness, its inexhaustible variety. Why does one person, despite all the disadvantages dealt him by the lottery of birth, survive, surmount, and go on to achieve greatness, while another, with every advantage allotted to him, stumbles, falls, goes down? Biography is the most promising place to seek out the answers.

Some people read biography to compare the subject’s life to their own. In the cant term, they “identify.” One wonders, though, if this isn’t a crude way of reading biography. I read Peter Green’s biography of Alexander the Great, I promise you, without once thinking of weeping because I had no more worlds to conquer. Nor did I identify when I read E.F. Benson’s Life of Alcibiades; instead, I marveled at the hijinks of a man who may have been the world’s greatest seducer and con artist. I should have to be a fantast of the first water to imagine myself as even in any way comparable to such men.

Identifying with historical figures is reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s remarking on the coarseness of identifying with characters in fiction. The best readers, he felt, identified with the artist. By this I take it Nabokov meant that when a character in fiction gets in a tight spot, don’t worry about that character, worry instead about how the artist will get him out of it. One ought to read biographies in roughly the same spirit, with a certain sophisticated detachment; if worrying, then expending that worry not on the life of the subject but on the skill of his chronicler, the biographer, whose task it is to take the measure of the person he is writing about with reasonable exactitude and penetrating judgment, all going to form a persuasive portrait.

Many years ago I read through the five volumes of Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James. As a writer, I cannot say that I identified with James, a man infinitely more subtle than I. But I did, I like to think, take a few lessons from Henry James. James wrote a story called “The Lesson of the Master,” in which a famous novelist advises a young writer not to marry because it will impede his art. When the wife of the famous novelist dies, he turns round and marries the woman the young writer loves. Might the lesson here be that the best advice is not to take advice, at least in matters of the heart?

Edel’s biography provides the best account I know of the quotidian life of the professional writer. The biographer recounts James’s dealings with editors and publishers, his hopes for popularity and commercial success (“I can stand a great deal of gold,” James once remarked, though little enough of it came his way through his writing); above all, his loneliness and the almost certain loneliness of anyone who chooses, as James did, the spectatorial, as opposed to the active, life.

Henry James was both fascinated and repelled by biography. He himself wrote a biography of the American sculptor William Wetmore Story. The biographical question plays out in many of James’s own stories, and in none more than in the story called “The Figure in the Carpet.” The narrator of that story seeks to discover the animating force behind the work of an older novelist he admires named Hugh Vereker. Vereker allows that there is such a force—”It’s the very string that my pearls are strung on,” he tells the narrator—but he isn’t about to reveal what it is. Another literary critic, a man named George Corvick, claims after long effort to have discovered it, this repeated theme that turns up ever so subtly in Vereker’s work, “something like the figure in a Persian carpet.” Before revealing it in a book he is writing, Corvick dies in a carriage accident. He had revealed the great secret to his wife, but she, too, is not telling. Vereker himself dies, and the great underlying force propelling his work is never discovered—which, one senses, is fine with Henry James.

The metaphor of the figure in the carpet is wonderfully suggestive, causing us to look into our own lives to discover if there is some repeated pattern or theme that has guided our destiny, made us succeed or fail, brought us contentment or depression. Galen Strawson, the English philosopher, in a chapter of a recent book called Life-Writing, thinks otherwise, holding that life is what we make of it, free fall, essentially patternless, leaving us all in the condition not of Persian but of shag rugs. Is this so? If it is, does this not leave us little more than mere bugs in a vast rug of a design beyond all possible fathoming?

About Henry James’s strange story one thing is clear: James sides not with his narrator but with his invented novelist Hugh Vereker. In another, more widely known, story, “The Aspern Papers,” James writes with contempt about the prying biographer ready to do anything to acquire the letters of a long-dead famous poet—by some thought to be Lord Byron—from his now-elderly lover. Such is the want of scrupulosity on the part of the biographer that James has the elderly lover in the story call him a “publishing scoundrel.”

Late in life, Henry James burned a vast quantity of his letters, an act meant to discourage any possible biographers of his own life. An empty gesture, as it turned out, for so charming were James’s letters that everyone else saved those he sent to them, with the result that the University of Nebraska, which is publishing all his extant letters, recently brough out its tenth volume of Henry James letters, and this volume goes up only to 1880. James lived on to 1916.

Leon Edel, who much admired Henry James, nonetheless could not resist Freudianizing him. Edel’s rather orthodox Freudianism mars but does not destroy his five-volume work. He does not lock James into an Oedipus complex. But he does make great hay out of what he takes to be the sibling rivalry between James and his equally brilliant if utterly different older brother William, even hinting at homoerotic feeling for William on Henry’s part. Was the rivalry truly there? My own view is that the two brothers were so different in their mental makeup—the intellectual note sounding most strikingly in William, the aesthetic in Henry—that rivalry wasn’t really at issue. They competed, so to say, at different games: philosophy for William, literature for Henry. Comparing the two is rather like asking who was the better athlete, Michael Jordan or Roger Federer.

Leon Edel does show remarkable restraint—for a Freudian, that is—in not prying into Henry James’s sex life. So far as is known, James never had physical relations with anyone, male or female. Anticipating those later biographers and critics who would write in a less decorous time, Edel, considering the possibility that James was homosexual, noted that there is no firm evidence to suggest that Henry James ever engaged in acts of homosexuality and lets it go at that.

Biographers who came after Leon Edel, alas, have not. For some among them, James’s homosexuality is presumed; his active pursuit of his true sexual nature is assumed to have been restrained only by his timidity. (“The art of the biographer,” James wrote, “that devilish art, is somehow practically thinning: It simplifies while seeking to enrich.”) The Master, a biographical novel by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, portrays homosexuality as at the center of James’s life and has him ogling handsome male servants. The problem here is not just a case of mistaken identification, but the effect this figures to have on skewing the interpretation of James’s novels and stories in a homosexual direction. Henry James, were he alive, would have been appalled.

Biography is, of course, subject to other skewings, in our time the political not least among them. The politics of the biographer, if he allows them into his work, can have fatal effect. I first noted this some years ago in Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin. Humorlessly picking his way through the Larkin-Kingsley Amis correspondence and other of Larkin’s letters, Motion, with a great display of self-virtue, convicts Larkin of misogyny, racism, and the other standard charges leveled in the court of political correctness. This has since been set right by a recent biography of Larkin by a man named James Booth, who has shown Philip Larkin to be a more than decent man in his relations with women, the people who worked for him at Hull University Library, and everyone else who ever encountered him.

Years before this, something similar befell H. L. Mencken, who was also brought in by the political correctness police, Anti-Defamation League division. In Mencken’s case, to the usual complaints of racism and sexism, antisemitism was added. These charges, too, turned out to be unjust. Mencken, such was the largeness of his heart, married a woman knowing she was dying; he did so principally to bring comfort to her. Mencken’s best friends were, in fact, Jews. Dim-witted biographers seem unable to decipher the difference, as in the cases of Larkin and Mencken both, between comically expressed reactionary opinions and lives marked by gracious actions.

A flagrant case of politics ruining biography is that of a Stanford professor named Arnold Rampersad in his biography of Ralph Ellison. I came to the Rampersad biography, published in 2007, with a special interest, hoping he might solve a minor but genuine mystery for me. Many years ago, Ralph Ellison invited me to join him for lunch at the Century Association in New York. I met him there on a sunny winter’s day at noon, and departed in the dusk at 4:30 p.m. with the same happy glow as a boy I departed movie matinées. We talked about serious things, gossiped, told each other jokes, laughed a great deal. I enjoyed myself hugely, believed Ellison did too, and departed the Century confident I had made a new friend of a writer I much admired.

Soon afterward I wrote to Ralph (as he now was to me) to thank him for the lunch and an immensely enjoyable afternoon. No answer. A week or so later, I wrote to him again, inviting him to write for The American Scholar, of which I was then the editor. No answer. After an interval of another three or four weeks, I wrote yet again to inquire if he had received my earlier letters. Nothing. Puzzled, I wrote to him no more. Had I so misperceived what I thought the reciprocal pleasure of that lunch at the Century Association?

A few years after this, I had a letter from a reader of mine asking if I knew Ralph Ellison. He went on to say that he and his wife had met Ellison and his wife at the Newport Jazz Festival, and the four of them spent a most pleasing weekend together. Afterwards, though, Ellison had answered none of his letters. What, he wondered, as I earlier had wondered, might have gone wrong?

On the strangeness of Ralph Ellison’s behavior in these instances, Professor Rampersad, his biographer, sheds no light. Instead, much of his attention is taken up by finding Ellison nowhere near so virtuous a man as he, Arnold Rampersad, apparently is. Rampersad’s charge against Ellison, adding on to his being a bad brother and a poor husband, is that (in Rampersad’s words) Ellison’s life is “a cautionary tale to be told against the dangers of elitism and alienation, and especially alienation from other blacks.”

What Ralph Ellison turns out to have been guilty of is not having, so to say, got on the bus. He was and remained an integrationist and thought the Black Power movement a grave mistake. He insisted on the complexity of black experience in America, and refused to play the victimhood game, refraining from the rhetoric of public rage and demagoguery. He was an artist before he was a politician and, in the realm of art, was an unapologetic elitist, believing in pursuing the best in Western high culture and African-American folk culture to the exclusion of all else. He did not line up to praise young black writers simply because they were black. Art, he held, was color-blind. Nor did he praise established black writers (James Baldwin, Toni Morrison) if he did not think them truly praiseworthy. Rampersad’s charge finally comes down to what he takes to be Ellison’s pernicious opinions, and the way one knows they are pernicious is that they do not comport with his biographer’s opinions.

Left to speculate upon what was behind Ralph Ellison’s odd behavior toward me and (I gather) others he had charmed, I have concluded that Ellison was a gracious and gregarious man who later came to regret his own natural sociability. In 1952, at the age of 39, he wrote Invisible Man, a novel that won all the prizes and worthy acclaim of its day. Although he lived on for another 42 years and produced two excellent collections of essays, Ralph Ellison never wrote another novel. How this must have worn on him psychologically one cannot hope fully to know. He would go out into the world, his natural charm easily making him friends, and afterwards return to his desk, the scene of decades-long defeat, determined not to waste further time on these newly made friends. Or so I have conjectured.

In his biography of Ralph Ellison, Professor Rampersad not merely wrongly degraded a good man, but in his biography’s pretense to definitiveness (the work runs to 672 pages), the book is likely to scare away other Ellison biographers for decades, which is a sadness and an injustice. To be definitive has increasingly become the goal for contemporary biographers. A definitive biography, by current standards, leaves nothing out. Straightaway one sees the impossibility of the goal—unless one does a day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute account of a life, definitiveness, defined as utter thoroughness, cannot be achieved.

The greatest biography ever written, James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which I reread within the past year, is not definitive. For one thing, the book largely shirks Samuel Johnson’s early life and concentrates on the 21 years during which Boswell knew Johnson, roughly from 1763 to 1784, beginning when he was 22 and Johnson 54. Nor has any biographer ever intruded himself, in a biography, so completely as Boswell did in his book about Johnson. So much is this the case that some have claimed that the Life of Johnson is two for the price of one here, both a biography and an autobiography.

The making of the Life of Johnson is, of course, Boswell’s emphases on Samuel Johnson’s habits, his “inflexible dignity of character,” his ponderous physical presence—above all, his brilliant conversation, into which Boswell often all but goaded him. Johnson was an extraordinary writer. The essays from the Rambler are among the finest we have. As a biographer, his Life of Mr. Richard Savage and The Lives of the Poets hold up splendidly. In “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” he composed a poem that still lives. His Dictionary is one of the most impressive one-man intellectual performances of all time. Along with Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, Samuel Johnson is one of the three indispensable literary critics in all of English literature.

Yet it took James Boswell to bring him to life. Boswell held that, in his biography, Johnson “will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write, not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect.” Boswell claimed that, in his book, Johnson was seen “more completely than any man who has ever yet lived”—and he made good, I believe, on the claim. With all his gruffness, his blunderbuss conversation in which he often “talked for victory,” his intellectual bullying, his acts of extraordinary Christian charity, Johnson emerges in Boswell’s Life, flaws and all, a moral hero. Without Boswell, Johnson would perhaps not have found his prominent place in the pantheon of English literature. No biographer has ever rendered his subject a greater service than James Boswell did Samuel Johnson.

The tendency of modern biographies, under the tyranny of the definitude, has been for them to grow longer and longer. This may have begun with Mark Schorer’s 867-page biography of Sinclair Lewis, published in 1961. A recent biography of Bob Hope runs to 576 pages, the first volume of Gary Giddins’s biography of Bing Crosby to 736 pages, James Kaplan’s recent biography of Frank Sinatra to 992 pages, J. Michael Lennon’s biography of Norman Mailer to 960 pages, and the first volume of Zachary Leader’s biography of Saul Bellow to 832 pages. Why are these biographies so lengthy? They are so because of their authors’ mistaken ambition for biographical definitiveness. They not only want every word redeemable about but the last word on their respective subjects.

Along with being longer, contemporary biographies are less interested in moral heroism (Samuel Johnson) or simple greatness (Alexander of Macedon, Thomas Edison) of the kind that aroused the interests of earlier readers. Modern biographers labor in search of secrets, often ones linked to sexual behavior. Owing to Lytton Strachey’s biographical essays in Eminent Victorians (1918), modern biographers are as frequently eager to demean as to exalt their subjects. Strachey undertook to deflate the Victorians, who, with such figures among them as John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Disraeli, and George Eliot, constitute perhaps the greatest intellectual efflorescence of any period in history. The book made great waves at the time of its appearance and had a strong if not necessarily salubrious influence in changing the nature of biographical writing toward the iconoclastic.

Perhaps the best vantage for a biographer is to admire his subject without being chary of recounting his weaknesses. A model of such a book, in my own recent reading, is the Russian-born Henri Troyat’s Turgenev. Troyat, who also wrote biographies of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov, brought his Turgenev in at a mere 184 pages. The biography conveys a literary artist’s life and character in a lucid and illuminating way. When one has come to its end, one feels that one knows Ivan Turgenev well and has a clearer view of his novels than formerly. If anything is left out, one feels it cannot have been essential.

“The history of the world,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “is but the biography of great men.” Not everyone would agree. Sir Ronald Syme, who wrote impressive biographies of Sallust and Tacitus, is among those who would not. “At its worst,” wrote Syme in The Roman Revolution, “biography is flat and schematic; at the best it is often baffled by the hidden discords of human nature. Moreover, undue insistence upon the character and exploits of a single person invests history with dramatic unity at the expense of truth.”

Biography and history are of course not the same, and yet biography is what many among us find most enticing in history: as when Tacitus writes about Poppaea, Nero’s second wife, that she possessed “every womanly asset except goodness. .  .  . To her married or bachelor bedfellows were alike. She was indifferent to her reputation—insensible to men’s love and unloving herself. Advantage dictated the bestowal of her favors.” Or as when Edward Gibbon writes of the emperor Gordian the younger: “Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.” Ronald Syme himself enlivens his history of The Roman Revolution with dab biographical touches, as when of a secondary figure named L. Munatius Plancus he writes: “A nice calculation of his own interests and an assiduous care for his own safety carried him through well-timed treacheries to a peaceful old age.”

In the end, biography is one of the best safeguards against the conceptualizing of history—”Create a concept,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset, “and reality leaves the room”—and the belief that human beings are invariably defeated by the overwhelming forces of history. Biography counters determinism, the notion of history being made chiefly, or even exclusively, by irresistible tendencies, trends, and movements. It reinforces the idea that fortune, accident, above all strong character can rise above the impersonal forces of politics, economics, and even culture to forge human destiny and change the flow of history itself. For this reason, and many more, I say, long live biography.

Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor, is the author most recently of the forthcoming Frozen in Time: Twenty Stories. This is adapted from a lecture given at a recent conference on biography at Hillsdale College.