Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the British Academy, Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia (2001-2007), has honorary doctorates from UEA, Kingston and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992. His first book, Shelley: The Pursuit, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and Dr Johnson & Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer in 1985, and Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer in 2000.The Romantic Poets and their Circle was published by the National Portrait Gallery in 2005 and his most recent book, The Age of Wonder, was published in October 2008. He lives in London and Norfolk with the novelist Rose Tremain. Part I
Does nationality play a part in shaping a biography?
It has always been characteristic of the British tradition to approach the genre of biography with a certain goodhumoured scepticism. As long ago as the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s learned friend Dr Arbuthnot observed: ‘Biography has added a New Terror to death.’
One could compile an anthology of such gentle witticisms, which, in the English manner, often disguise serious reflections. ‘Every great man has his disciples,’ observed Oscar Wilde, ‘and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.’ ‘There are only three rules for writing biography,’ remarked Somerset Maugham, ‘and fortunately no one knows what these are.’
What is certainly true is that in Britain today we are immersed, not to say drowning, in a sea of biography, autobiography and memoir. According to figures recently produced by British BookScan, no fewer than 4000 new biographical titles are published per annum. The earnest student of the form would need to read ten biographies a day to keep abreast of developments.
Mind you, this figure includes the personal memoir, which has become immensely fashionable in recent years. Distinguished British authors who have followed this trend, moving significantly from biography to autobiography, include Michael Holroyd (Basil Street Blues, 1999); Lorna Sage (Bad Blood, 2000); and even my old teacher George Steiner, in My Unwritten Books (2008).
Memoirs of the more populist kind lay great emphasis on unhappy or dysfunctional childhood experiences. Huge sales figures have also been achieved by disguised or ghosted ‘Misery Memoirs’. One example is Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story - In Her Own Words, secretly compiled from taped interviews with the princess and originally published in 1992. Sales of Morton’s book now run to more than two million copies.
British television now has a dedicated biography channel. Biographical series such as Secret Lives, Reputations and Who Do You Think You Are? have proven popular. The National Portrait Gallery in London runs frequent exhibitions featuring contemporary celebrities, and publishes series of books on biographical subjects. The British Library recently launched a kit known as The Family History Box, which offers biographical entertainment. It is just like the old chemistry sets we used to have as children.
Meanwhile, the internet hosts numerous sites for genealogy, family history, surnames and clans. And we all now know what it means to ‘Google’ someone. Biographical films are all the rage, having cleverly usurped the British love of costume drama, especially when a heroine is at the centre. Recent examples include biopics of Elizabeth I and the current monarch, Beatrix Potter, Jane Austen and the glamorous eighteenth-century Duchess of Devonshire, based on Amanda Foreman’s outstandingly successful life of Georgiana, an avatar of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Perhaps the most significant recent biographical development in Britain was the publication of The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). The new DNB expands the original number of individual lives from 38,000 to 50,000. It is no longer written by a small team of scholars. Rather, it has become a communal project, gathering contributions from no fewer than 12,000 biographers.
Although all of the old entries have been retained (if briskly rewritten), DNB’s principles of selection have radically changed. In essence, the notion of ‘achievement’ has been greatly widened and democratised. There are fewer clergymen, aristocrats and bureaucrats; more women, workmen and rogues. Or as one critic remarked, ‘less bishops and more actresses’.
How strong is the connection between Biography and storytelling?
People often suggest that the future of biography lies in a radical change of form, in the development of fractured or postmodern narrative modes. Brian Matthews’s experimental and award-winning biography Louisa (1987), a Po-Mo biography of Henry Lawson’s heroic mother, is one example. It used multiple biographic voices and dramatised self questionings. Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990), with its flamboyant insertions of fictional interludes, is another example of this technique. Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) used a fictional biographer – Geoffrey Braithwaite – to explore factual, or counterfactual, questions about Flaubert (e.g. what colour were Emma Bovary’s eyes?).
My own book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), in which the biographer continually steps in and out of four different Romantic ‘frame’ narratives (the lives of Stevenson, Wollstonecraft, Shelley and Nerval), might claim to be a fourth.
It is interesting that all these experimental works appeared in the mid-1980s, a period when we all wanted to ‘shake the cage’ of conventional biographical form and see what happened. The traditional art of storytelling will always be central to biography and its power. What we may need more is a change of subjects or a development in our ideas of the kind of materials that biography can deal with. It is new biographical subjects which will redefine the narrative form, not vice versa.
Even if it is not presented chronologically, biography always takes the form of a human story, a narrative action, an agon. When I suggest that biography is non-fiction storytelling, I mean the following. It has a protagonist, a time sequence, a plot and a dramatic pattern of human cause and effect. Its essential discipline is secular; it resists supernatural explanations. The rhythm of biographical narrative is that of suspense/mystery followed by resolution/explanation. The basic unit is the anecdote, strung along the narrative like beads on a string.
But there are numerous epistemological problems in storytelling. How reliable or selective are our sources? What are the vagaries of human memory? In what sense can one write he or she ‘thought’ or ‘felt’ something? How far can we ‘know the other’, philosophically speaking?
On a more practical, writerly level, I would suggest that nearly all biographical problems can be answered by finding appropriate forms of narrative. A good example of this is one of the earliest breakthroughs in popular biography, Daniel Defoe’s Life of Jack Sheppard (1724, now available as Defoe on Sheppard and Wild, 2004). Here, a master storyteller brought traditional forms of narrative to bear on a new and subversive subject, and, in the process, completely transformed the genre. Defoe’s treatment of Jack Sheppard (1702–24) was revolutionary. In an age accustomed to biographical eulogies of the good and great, how could Defoe create a significant biography of a petty thief? Defoe was writing in an early and much neglected biographical tradition, known to scholars as the Prison Confessions. From the period 1720–60, twelve hundred male and fifty-eight female ‘confessions’ have survived. These were usually brief, homiletic biographies written by the Newgate Ordinary (the prison chaplain) and sold as cheap pamphlets. Mostly, they were lives of the failed, the lost, the forgotten, the condemned. With brilliant originality, Defoe (himself a former inmate at Newgate) stood the genre on its head. He reversed the reader’s expectation. Before his execution, Jack Sheppard had escaped not once but three times from his death cell. Defoe presented Sheppard not as miserable petty thief but as an heroic and resourceful escape artist. Defoe set out to show his pluck, his humour, his incorrigible determination – and his terrible cockney jokes.
Defoe’s short biography ran to eight editions in six weeks. In a touching gesture, he handed a copy to Sheppard on the gallows. In death, Jack had been given another Life. It turned him into a legend, and one could see how easily his story could transfer into other media. It did so: John Gay’s hugely popular eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera (1728), numerous Victorian music halls, a thriller by William Harrison Ainsworth (1839), Bertolt Brecht’s Three-penny Opera (1928), a Hollywood film and, most recently, a television dramatisation.
It also reaffirmed the value of the Lost Life – and launched a tradition which can be traced back to Samuel Johnson’s Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), and which includes Alexander Masters’s highly original Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005) and Ben Macintyre’s comic-thriller biography, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal (2007).
One could compile an anthology of such gentle witticisms, which, in the English manner, often disguise serious reflections. ‘Every great man has his disciples,’ observed Oscar Wilde, ‘and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.’ ‘There are only three rules for writing biography,’ remarked Somerset Maugham, ‘and fortunately no one knows what these are.’
What is certainly true is that in Britain today we are immersed, not to say drowning, in a sea of biography, autobiography and memoir. According to figures recently produced by British BookScan, no fewer than 4000 new biographical titles are published per annum. The earnest student of the form would need to read ten biographies a day to keep abreast of developments.
Mind you, this figure includes the personal memoir, which has become immensely fashionable in recent years. Distinguished British authors who have followed this trend, moving significantly from biography to autobiography, include Michael Holroyd (Basil Street Blues, 1999); Lorna Sage (Bad Blood, 2000); and even my old teacher George Steiner, in My Unwritten Books (2008).
Memoirs of the more populist kind lay great emphasis on unhappy or dysfunctional childhood experiences. Huge sales figures have also been achieved by disguised or ghosted ‘Misery Memoirs’. One example is Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story - In Her Own Words, secretly compiled from taped interviews with the princess and originally published in 1992. Sales of Morton’s book now run to more than two million copies.
British television now has a dedicated biography channel. Biographical series such as Secret Lives, Reputations and Who Do You Think You Are? have proven popular. The National Portrait Gallery in London runs frequent exhibitions featuring contemporary celebrities, and publishes series of books on biographical subjects. The British Library recently launched a kit known as The Family History Box, which offers biographical entertainment. It is just like the old chemistry sets we used to have as children.
Meanwhile, the internet hosts numerous sites for genealogy, family history, surnames and clans. And we all now know what it means to ‘Google’ someone. Biographical films are all the rage, having cleverly usurped the British love of costume drama, especially when a heroine is at the centre. Recent examples include biopics of Elizabeth I and the current monarch, Beatrix Potter, Jane Austen and the glamorous eighteenth-century Duchess of Devonshire, based on Amanda Foreman’s outstandingly successful life of Georgiana, an avatar of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Perhaps the most significant recent biographical development in Britain was the publication of The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). The new DNB expands the original number of individual lives from 38,000 to 50,000. It is no longer written by a small team of scholars. Rather, it has become a communal project, gathering contributions from no fewer than 12,000 biographers.
Although all of the old entries have been retained (if briskly rewritten), DNB’s principles of selection have radically changed. In essence, the notion of ‘achievement’ has been greatly widened and democratised. There are fewer clergymen, aristocrats and bureaucrats; more women, workmen and rogues. Or as one critic remarked, ‘less bishops and more actresses’.
How strong is the connection between Biography and storytelling?
People often suggest that the future of biography lies in a radical change of form, in the development of fractured or postmodern narrative modes. Brian Matthews’s experimental and award-winning biography Louisa (1987), a Po-Mo biography of Henry Lawson’s heroic mother, is one example. It used multiple biographic voices and dramatised self questionings. Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990), with its flamboyant insertions of fictional interludes, is another example of this technique. Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) used a fictional biographer – Geoffrey Braithwaite – to explore factual, or counterfactual, questions about Flaubert (e.g. what colour were Emma Bovary’s eyes?).
My own book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), in which the biographer continually steps in and out of four different Romantic ‘frame’ narratives (the lives of Stevenson, Wollstonecraft, Shelley and Nerval), might claim to be a fourth.
It is interesting that all these experimental works appeared in the mid-1980s, a period when we all wanted to ‘shake the cage’ of conventional biographical form and see what happened. The traditional art of storytelling will always be central to biography and its power. What we may need more is a change of subjects or a development in our ideas of the kind of materials that biography can deal with. It is new biographical subjects which will redefine the narrative form, not vice versa.
Even if it is not presented chronologically, biography always takes the form of a human story, a narrative action, an agon. When I suggest that biography is non-fiction storytelling, I mean the following. It has a protagonist, a time sequence, a plot and a dramatic pattern of human cause and effect. Its essential discipline is secular; it resists supernatural explanations. The rhythm of biographical narrative is that of suspense/mystery followed by resolution/explanation. The basic unit is the anecdote, strung along the narrative like beads on a string.
But there are numerous epistemological problems in storytelling. How reliable or selective are our sources? What are the vagaries of human memory? In what sense can one write he or she ‘thought’ or ‘felt’ something? How far can we ‘know the other’, philosophically speaking?
On a more practical, writerly level, I would suggest that nearly all biographical problems can be answered by finding appropriate forms of narrative. A good example of this is one of the earliest breakthroughs in popular biography, Daniel Defoe’s Life of Jack Sheppard (1724, now available as Defoe on Sheppard and Wild, 2004). Here, a master storyteller brought traditional forms of narrative to bear on a new and subversive subject, and, in the process, completely transformed the genre. Defoe’s treatment of Jack Sheppard (1702–24) was revolutionary. In an age accustomed to biographical eulogies of the good and great, how could Defoe create a significant biography of a petty thief? Defoe was writing in an early and much neglected biographical tradition, known to scholars as the Prison Confessions. From the period 1720–60, twelve hundred male and fifty-eight female ‘confessions’ have survived. These were usually brief, homiletic biographies written by the Newgate Ordinary (the prison chaplain) and sold as cheap pamphlets. Mostly, they were lives of the failed, the lost, the forgotten, the condemned. With brilliant originality, Defoe (himself a former inmate at Newgate) stood the genre on its head. He reversed the reader’s expectation. Before his execution, Jack Sheppard had escaped not once but three times from his death cell. Defoe presented Sheppard not as miserable petty thief but as an heroic and resourceful escape artist. Defoe set out to show his pluck, his humour, his incorrigible determination – and his terrible cockney jokes.
Defoe’s short biography ran to eight editions in six weeks. In a touching gesture, he handed a copy to Sheppard on the gallows. In death, Jack had been given another Life. It turned him into a legend, and one could see how easily his story could transfer into other media. It did so: John Gay’s hugely popular eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera (1728), numerous Victorian music halls, a thriller by William Harrison Ainsworth (1839), Bertolt Brecht’s Three-penny Opera (1928), a Hollywood film and, most recently, a television dramatisation.
It also reaffirmed the value of the Lost Life – and launched a tradition which can be traced back to Samuel Johnson’s Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), and which includes Alexander Masters’s highly original Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005) and Ben Macintyre’s comic-thriller biography, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal (2007).
(part II follows tomorrow:the future of biography, science and biography, and biography and the emerging nations)
2 comments:
Fascinating. I love Defoe's work, and it seems there has always been a link between the novel and the biography, indeed the novel as we know it today grew in large part from the tradition of confessionals and so on.
I look forward to reading more of these Masterclasses!
I feel that it would be impossible to entirely disguise upbringing, education and cultural identity - especially in the genre of autobiographyI havent read anyone who has done that - have you?
Will you be carrying on with the Master classes - am looking forward to the next one.
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