"In practice, the biographer has to choose not between lively and dull, but more subtly and perplexingly, between candid and glib."

Biography and Pseudobiography
Kenneth Silverman

A third recent assault on biography is to me the most significant because it involves aesthetic judgment. "What biographer will admit that his subject lacks narrative shapeliness?" Joyce Carol Oates asked, in a Times review; "between an honest but dull book and a not entirely honest but lively one, how many biographers would hesitate?"

In the way Ms. Oates poses the conflict, no conflict actually exists. Biographers can and do use many of the devices of narrative shapeliness, mostly drawn from nineteenth-century realistic fiction. But they do so rhetorically, taking rhetoric in the classical sense, as the art of persuasion. To dramatize the subject's life, they describe his or her features and costume, set the scene where an event takes place, use dialogue-like quotations from letters and journals, break the narrative at moments of tension. And the best biographers experiment with fiction-like aspects of the form. Look at the imaginative third volume of Michael Reynolds's life of Ernest Hemingway, entitled Hemingway: The Thirties (New York, 1997). It is biographical narrative in overdrive, a little recalling Dos Passos's USA. Without compromising his scholarship, Reynolds jumps tense from past to future, switches typography, interjects new points of view, flashes news bulletins. The hypertext of stacked-up voices and events gives Hemingway a startling immediacy and presence.

In practice, the biographer has to choose not between lively and dull, but more subtly and perplexingly, between candid and glib. The Cambridge scholar Eamon Duffy put the case well. "Good history," he says—and the same is true for biography—"good history gives its reader a sense of the limitations as well as the scope of the evidence on which it is based . . . we need to feel the fragilities of evidence, the nature of the documents, a sense . . . of historical conviction as an outcome, a labor." In fact, the documentary record is always depressingly full of fragments and gaps. For one twenty-nine-month stretch, Poe's life is nearly a complete blank. Better in such cases to confide in the reader than to aim at the facile narrative continuity that, sad to say, makes not a few contemporary British biographies seem slick. To confide artfully is the challenge, to use the evidentiary problems to enhance the biography's feel of authenticity, even to create a certain suspense.

That such a thing as biographical technique exists, one would never know from reading reviews of biographies. Few reviewers have given any thought to or had any experience with how biographies get made, what intrinsic difficulties demand solution, what conventions can be played with or reinvented. Few reviewers are any more capable of judging biographies than of judging sword swallowing. Nine times out of ten they synopsize the subject's life without evaluating the biographer's art in treating it.

Yet the aesthetic standard for biography, while complex, is no mystery. Biography aims not merely at informing but also at moving the reader, through the spectacle of another soul's journey through existence. The art of biography consists of producing an affecting narrative while remaining utterly faithful to the documents.

I'll illustrate this by one final personal example. Cotton Mather's life as I presented it had been full of deprivation and loss, including the deaths of nine of his children. I wanted the concluding paragraph of the biography to leave the reader feeling this. At the same time, for my own satisfaction, I wanted to render Mather's pain through documents alone. The last paragraph would be an emblem of the biographical aesthetic, an homage to factuality.

I worked it all out this way. Each of the five sections of the book begins with a page of quotations by or about Mather. To introduce the final section, covering his last years, I reproduced the inventory of his estate, drawn up the year of his death, 1728. The inventory is nothing more than a list of shabby household goods—"1 pr. of Red Curtains Motheaten," [pause] "1 Old Standing Candlestick. A Cross cut Saw," [pause] "2 pr. of Iron Dogs, other broken Dogs," and so on.

Thirty pages later comes the final paragraph of the biography. The reader can see that it in effect repeats the inventory, but in a different shape. I rearranged the listed household goods to form a sort of litany, a single connected sentence whose thumping rhythm accents the decay and loss that these worn out objects represent: "However luxuriantly he lived in heaven, Mather had not lived affluently on earth, and had lost much. What he left behind, as set down in the inventory of his estate, was dingy and mean: pie plates, lumber, a crosscut saw, three old rugs, four old bedsteads, two old oval tables, two old chests of drawers, old china curtains, old quilt, old warming pan, old standing candlestick, red curtains motheaten, broken stone table, broken fireplace dogs, broken chairs, broken pewter, broken spoons." It's not for me to say how well this paragraph succeeds either as a narrative climax or an emblem, much less when thus taken out of context. But my aim was to make pure, inert documentary evidence serve dramatic ends, to marry my form to my research. That remains to me the aesthetic measure of biography, the angel with whom the biographer wrestles longest and hardest of all.

This essay was originally delivered at Kean University, April 4, 2001, as part of the school's Contemporary Writer's Series.