In Biography, the Self Takes Center Stage

‘River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile’By Candice MillardDoubleday, 368 pages‘Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self’By Andrea Wulf, 512 pagesThe knock on conventional biography is that no life can possibly be of equal interest in all of its parts. Novelists can pick and choose incidents and invent childhoods that no biographer can rival — like that scene in Lawrence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” when the 5-year-old hero is urinating out a window and is circumcised by a falling window sash.Well, ever heard of prosopography? It’s a recondite word, Greek in origin, for group biography, in which the writer positions several colorful personalities into conflict or communion with one another. You might call it biography in slices, with various toppings that appeal to various tastes. The current prosopographical champion is Candice Millard, award-winning author of “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey” (2005), “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President” (2011), and “Hero of Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill” (2016).Doubt, darkness, destiny, madness, murder, presidents: That about covers the field. Her latest title could almost be ripped from the world of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” It would all be too much if Ms. Millard did not deploy her characters so deftly, beginning with Richard Francis Burton in 1854, in Suez, disguised as a Muslim — something “no other Englishman had ever done.”Burton took along a British Indian army officer, John Hanning Speke, and they did not get along — to put it mildly. They require the services of Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a picaresque hero in his own right: former slave, a soldier in a Sultan’s army in India, and a bold figure the Englishmen relied on to get them to the headwaters of the Nile.The quest for the Nile’s origins is ancient history (more than 3,000 years of it) that might seem quaint in the age of Google maps, but as with Arctic exploration the effort to map the world was once a heroic enterprise. Reading about it in Ms. Millard’s pullulating prose is the equivalent of signing up for an exciting archeological dig into exotic places and people.It is a tougher go when adventuring into literary history, but Andrea Wulf is an excellent expedition leader, providing at the beginning of her book “Dramatis Personae” and maps of Jena, where Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the Schlegels gathered in late 18th century Europe. So we are well equipped for an intellectual journey.Yet that is not what we get — not at first, anyway. Instead Ms. Wulf indulges in autobiography that follows hard upon an epigraph from Goethe that begins, “Attend to yourself.” In Wulfian terms, that means rejecting a university curriculum, educating herself, apprenticing to a painter and decorator, working as a museum guide, interning in the theater — a series of impulses, she says.What seems like self-absorption in a biographer suddenly opens up when she mentions researching Alexander von Humboldt for her book, “The Invention of Nature,” and realizing there is a place where her own life story and ours began: “…in the last decade of the eighteenth century . . . Humboldt joined a group of novelists, poets, literary critics, philosophers, essayists, editors, translators and playwrights who, intoxicated by the French Revolution, placed the self at the centre stage of their thinking. In Jena their ideas collided and coalesced, and the impact was seismic, spreading out across the German states and on into the world – and into our minds.”Biography, in spite of its origins in ancient history as far back as Plutarch, is for contemporary readers a Romantic enterprise, in which the self, as Ms. Wulf insists, takes center stage — notwithstanding the efforts of historians, philosophers, sociologists, and others to displace individuality in favor of movements, forces, institutions, and the like.We want to know who is telling the tale, and how it is that what we think is bound up in what our predecessors have thought and said and done. With Ms. Wulf, we are thrown back once again on Emerson: “There is properly no history; only biography.”Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Confessions of a Serial Biographer” and “Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic”Correction: Candice Millard is the spelling of the name of the author. An earlier version contained an incorrect spelling.

In Biography, the Self Takes Center Stage

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