A Master Biographer Lays Bare His Methods

‘The Biographer’s Quest’By Jeffrey Meyers Mercer University Press, 256 pagesNo biographer in the past fifty years has been as prolific or profound as the indefatigable Jeffrey Meyers. His subjects have ranged from Ernest Hemingway to Humphrey Bogart, from figures in English literature to the fine arts, as he has perfected a concise style coupled with sleuthing dexterity that has taken him to archives and interviewees around the world.Other biographers such as Richard Holmes, James Atlas, and Robert Caro have written about their methodology and quests to discover and depict literary and historical figures. But they cannot rival the candor and specificity that Mr. Meyers provides in his accounts of the nitty gritty of research and interviewing reluctant, and even hostile, friends and family members of his subjects.Mr. Meyers, like most biographers has had to practice diplomacy but also aggressiveness in getting the story. At times, he confesses exasperation with the holdouts who will not share with him intimate secrets or photographs and other crucial materials. More than once he likens himself to Henry James’s portrayal of a devious biographer in “The Aspern Papers.” In one case, Mr. Meyers admits that he wanted to tie up one of his interviewees.Although Mr. Meyers can be astringent and even acerbic, he has won to his side many important allies — like the English novelist Francis King, to whom Mr. Meyers introduced me — just one of many kindnesses he has offered to fellow biographers. Although like Richard Holmes, Mr. Meyers likes to follow in the footsteps of his subjects, he does not make a fetish of his travels, noting that in some cases he has had to rely on travel books and other documents when he could not physically visit the locations of his subjects’ pursuits.Robert Caro has been much quoted for saying “turn every page,” and that would seem like good advice since, as Mr. Meyers allows, you never know what may turn up in the most unlikely places. Nonetheless, take note: “It would be extremely boring and quite impossible to read everything in the archive. So it’s wise to be well prepared, know what you’re looking for and understand what can be safely skipped.”Mr. Meyers has had the help of his wife Valerie, acknowledged as a superb editor willing to take issue with her husband’s prose. She has also accompanied him on research trips. They have sat side by side in archives. I spotted them doing just that in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, looking for all the world like the tag team of contemporary biography.Mr. Meyers delves into the bloody details of doing biography, including a harrowing incident in which Gregory Hemingway, the master’s son, tried to run the biographer off the road. But such dangers are mitigated by many instances of generosity, including the words of an interviewee who greeted him saying she had been waiting for him all her life so she could tell her story.Mr. Meyers has had significant success with biographies of Gary Cooper, Somerset Maugham, and Katherine Mansfield, but he is not unwilling to write about subjects who have eluded him, such as Sylvia Plath. His proposal had no takers and he supposes that is because a woman was wanted to do the job. Perhaps so, although a few males have somehow gotten around that disqualification.Over five decades Mr. Meyers has built up an extraordinary network of friends and acquaintances that he has managed to cultivate in one project after another, thus developing a momentum and authority that seems self-perpetuating. Biography has changed a good deal with the coming of the internet age. Mr. Meyers reminds us of how what can be taken for granted now in an online search used to take many hours of searching for the names and addresses of sources and the location of archives and papers in private hands.Even now biographers like Robert Caro use a typewriter. Mr. Meyers, no stranger to computers, nonetheless composes his biographies writing longhand and assembling pieces of paper in a process that he rightly supposes would be hard for anyone else to replicate.You will learn a great deal about how to do biography from “The Biographer’s Quest,” and yet what Mr. Meyers has done is inimitable.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Confessions of a Serial Biographer.”

A Master Biographer Lays Bare His Methods

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