Biography: the Highest Form of Cannibalism?

Biography is the dominant nonfiction of our age, as Nigel Hamilton observes in "Biography: A Brief History" (Harvard, 360 pages, $21.95). It pervades the press. So why is there "no single, accessible introduction to the subject, either for the general reader or the specialist?" Mr. Hamilton asks.

Why has it taken so long to produce this primer? Most biographers, in my experience, do not know the history of the genre. They are attracted to biography because of a given subject, not because biography per se intrigues them.

There are very few scholars of biography in large part because biography as a subject is not taught in higher education. Biographers are rarely represented in literature anthologies. Aside from a few stars such as Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann, academia does not respect or reward biographers. Where are the distinguished chairs in biography? Such honors go to postmodern studies, women's studies — virtually any sort of specialization except biography.

Biographers are bottom feeders — the lowest of the low. James Joyce called them biografiends, and Rudyard Kipling deemed the genre a "higher form of cannibalism." That biography adds a new terror to the thought of death is a statement attributed to several writers.

To read a good biography may be fun, but among the literati it is generally considered a species of slumming. Thus writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike have published dismissive pieces on this scurrilous, if titillating, subliterary entertainment. Of course, the dwellers of Parnassus allows for honorable exceptions and will even, occasionally, permit a biographer to sit at the table, or even write their biographies — provided he remains on the towline.

Mr. Hamilton acknowledges this hostility to biography, especially when he describes Janet Malcolm's brief against biographers in "The Silent Woman." But he does not, for example, even allude to the minor literary industry that has produced dozens of novels featuring biographers as villains. Stephen Millhauser's "Edwin Mullhouse" (1972), William Golding's "The Paper Men" (1984), and the classic Henry James tale "The Aspern Papers" (1888), are among a few examples.

When did biography — a rather distinguished genre in the days of Plutarch and Suetonius — lose literary rank? As soon as the first biographers tried to deal frankly with the private as well as the public lives of their subjects.

Even now libel and copyright laws are such that biographers are hemmed in and produce tepid narratives for fear of legal action. I know biographers who would like to work on contemporary figures but opt for safe, dead subjects, even though it can be just as hard to joust with literary estates as with live subjects. We who do the work of contemporary biography need to be well versed in the law — or to marry a lawyer, as I have done.

Mr. Hamilton never quite concedes that because biographers have often worked under threat of censorship, it has proven difficult for them to write with the freedom of style that any novelist takes for granted. One exception is Mr. Hamilton's own "JFK: Reckless Youth" (1992), a picaresque narrative that riled the Kennedy clan and their confederates into barring him from undertaking a second volume about his subject's later life.

One of Mr. Hamilton's missed opportunities is James Anthony Froude, who incurred the wrath of Carlyle's relatives and friends by writing frankly about the great man's troubled marriage. Froude did hold back crucial facts — such as Carlyle's impotence — but still created a penetrating narrative that should stand beside, say, George Eliot's treatment of Dorothea and Casaubon in "Middlemarch." Mr. Hamilton notes Froude's impediments, but he does not grasp the biographer's heroic triumph.

Mr. Hamilton distinguishes himself in expanding a sense of biography as not only a written narrative but also film, sculpture, painting, or any of the arts. It has been a great misfortune for biography, Mr. Hamilton points out, that "instead of becoming, like ‘history' or ‘art' or ‘literature,' a premier domain of the humanities and sciences" biography became "constrained by a focus so narrow that no student could be made sufficiently curious to learn of its history," its "integral role in the shaping of human identity, as well as its varying practice through the ages across different media."

Mr. Hamilton has begun to rectify an enormous injustice by showing that biography, in itself, is a form of knowledge, a way of apprehending the world that deserves its own departments and centers of scholarly study. Someday, perhaps, with more studies like Mr. Hamilton's, biography will finally get the respect it deserves.

crollyson@nysun.com