Finally, in part II of this advice sheet, let me turn to the broadest panorama: the future of biography; or rather, its futures, for biography has always been destined to have separate roles in different cultures. The tasks to be carried out look subtly different between a post-imperial England and, say, a pre-republican Australia. They are certainly very different in France and the United States.
As far as Britain is concerned, many biographers now sense what Jonathan Bate (a leading Shakespeare scholar who has now turned Romantic biographer of ‘John Clare’) has recently called ‘the approach of a paradigm shift’. It is true that the traditional form of major Life and Times biographies, often in two volumes, are still being written, often magnificently: Claire Tomalin on Samuel Pepys (2002); Hilary Spurling on Henri Matisse (1998, 2005) Hermione Lee on Edith Wharton (2007); and, most recently, Michael Holroyd returning to mighty form with his massive study: A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (2008).
Yet clearly, something is happening at the cutting edge. There is a widespread questioning of the traditional forms and chronology, and a fascination with briefer and more experimental work. There is renewed interest in marginal and subversive subject matter. The ‘monolithic’ single Life is giving way to biographies of groups, of friendships, of love affairs, of ‘spots of time’ (microbiographies), or of collective movements in art, literature or science. Many concern what Virginia Woolf called ‘neglected lives’, or collective lives, those held together for an historic moment by a common endeavour, place or ideal, and therefore not dependent on the ‘single life’ or traditional womb-to-tomb story. In consequence, because of the unusual nature of their subjects, they tend to develop unusual narrative forms.
Let me suggest nine popular and highly influential biographies that indicate this new pattern. Some of these titles are frequently proposed as harbingers of a ‘paradigm’ change in biographical forms, but they really mark a rediscovery of different kinds of subject matter. They are
Michael Holroyd’s Basil Street Blues (1999)
Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999)
Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2001)
Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (2002)
Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005)
William St Clair’s The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade (2006)
Anne Wroe’s Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (2007)
Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2007)
Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008).
The narrative form of each of these books is highly unusual: for instance, the meta-biographical layerings of Miller’s Brontë book (exploring the phenomenon of the ‘Brontë industry’), and the tragic, reversed chronology of Masters’s life of his down-and-out subject. But Lives may be ‘experimental’ in a different sense: not because they concern obscure or marginal or ethnically undervalued subjects, but simply because they appear difficult, specialised or remote from common concerns or culture.
Is Science (and the scientist) a sympathetic subject for biography?
Johnson is famously reported by Boswell as saying that ‘he could write the Life of Broomstick’. But could he write the life of a particle physicist or a pure mathematician or indeed a Newton?
The writing of scientific Lives represents perhaps the most significant new field in British biography, and it has already challenged many assumptions. For years, biographies of individual scientists have been traditionally regarded as a form of children’s literature. Their narratives have taken the form of simplified ‘eureka stories’: Isaac Newton and the fall of the apple and the instant discovery of universal gravity.
It has also been the convention of science biography to ignore or at least be nervous of the mistakes and dead-ends of scientific research. The messy process of actual research and experiment is ironed out as the Whig history of endless progress. Men and women of science are assumed not to have inner or emotional lives at all, but to be icy blocks of cheery rationalism, ‘men in white coats’. For nearly the whole of the twentieth century, it was assumed there were Two Cultures, and that arts-educated people could never speak to, let alone understand, the scientist, and vice versa.
The intensity of our concern about the planet, about global and environmental issues, has put the biographical element back into science with a vengeance. We realise that science does not – cannot – exist in a human vacuum. We want to know what drives individual scientists to make their discoveries (and especially their mistakes); and how they feel about non-scientific things: love, religion and politics, for example.
Renewed interest in the ethical dilemmas posed by scientific discovery requires a humanist response which the enquiring spirit of biography is ideally placed to provide. All this has lead to an explosion of biographical interest in the creativity of scientists, and the historic context of their work.
Here are some of the striking new works this has produced:
Dava Sobel’s Longitude (1996)
Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo’s Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography
Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits: Building the 17th Century Scientific Revolution (1999)
Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002)
Patricia Fara’s Newton: The Making of Genius (2002)
Anne Thwaite’s Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810–1888 (2002)
Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men (2002)
Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007)
Science biography confronts a central question of our age: how far can we trust scientists as guides to survival on our planet; whether science is a source of hope or dread.
My book, The Age of Wonder, is an attempt to grapple with these challenges in the form of a collective biography, or what I have called, rather sportingly, ‘a relay race of scientific stories’. The book covers the fields of astronomy, chemistry, geographical exploration, ballooning and experimental surgery at the turn of the nineteenth century. It re-examines such classic scientific tales as how Davy invented the Miner’s Lamp, how William Herschel discovered the new planet Uranus, how Joseph Banks went in search of Paradise in Tahiti, and how Mary Shelley invented the most famous scientist of all time – Dr Frankenstein.
Right from the beginning, science has held out both promise and menace, both progress and destruction, precisely the dilemmas we face right now. I argue that it was the Romantics who first faced them two centuries ago, and that biography is the way of finding how we got here. The past has a great future, indeed.
What is the future task of biography in emerging countries...such as China, India, Russia, Iran and South America?
It should not be forgotten that each of these has a fabulously rich tradition in fiction and poetry, and even film: yet biographically they are largely an unknown quantity, except for ideologically motivated Lives of the Great Leaders: Mao, Stalin, Ghandi, Genghis Khan, the Moguls – many in fact written by Western biographers.
Here again we can see the old historic tension emerging between the traditional ‘Great Men’ school of biography, and the modern impulse to recover ‘Neglected Lives’. From that point of view one might say that the finest Russian biography of recent years, though cast as a fiction, has been Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).
In these countries, notions of not only human rights but of genealogy, privacy and individual identity itself may still be radically different from ours. It is a fascinating question how far biography as a form may in fact depend on the existence of liberal democratic institutions and the freedoms that go with them: relative freedom of expression, largely uncensored publishing, generally unrestricted libraries and open archives, and a secular culture of self-expression and self-development.
Can biography flourish in radical Muslim states? Can true biography flourish in any kind of one-party, authoritarian state? (The answers are not simple: after all, it could flourish under the Roman emperors and the enlightened despots of eighteenth-century Europe.)
One might hazard the guess that biography will do better in modern India than in China because of the prosperous professional and middle classes in India, its multicultural diversity, and its strong popular grassroots tradition of folksong, stories, poetry and now film. It is true that oral history has growing significance for China, exemplified by Xinran Xue’s China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation (2008), an attempt to tell the true story of Mao’s Cultural Revolution
through scores of personal interviews. Yet even this book was written in London, and is not being published in Beijing.
These are large questions, and they will reverberate in coming years. But as one who has believed passionately in the wonderful form of biography, its unique combination of the critical and imaginative spirit, and who continues to struggle with it after nearly forty years in the field, I offer them to you here and leave them confidently in your keeping.
Can you offer some advice for those working on biography at authonomy and elsewhere?
My Ten Commandments for Biographers:
1. Thou shalt honour Biography in all its Living forms and Experiments.
2. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s Novel.
3. Thou shalt recognise that Biography is a celebration of Human nature in all its glorious Contradictions.
4. Thou shalt demand that it be greater than Gossip, because it is concerned with Justice.
5. Thou shalt require that though it chronicles an outward career (the Facts) it reveals an inward life (a Comprehensive Truth).
6. Thou shalt see that this Truth can be told again and again, unto each generation.
7. Thou shalt greet it as a Life-giving form, as it is concerned with Human struggle and the Creative spirit, which we all share.
8. Thou shalt relish it as a Holiday for the human Imagination – for it takes us away to another Place, another Time, and another Identity – from which we can come back refreshed.
9. Thou shalt be immodestly Proud of it, as it is something that the English have given to the world, like cricket, and parliament, and the Full Cooked Breakfast …
10. And lastly, thou shalt be Humble about it, for it demonstrates that none of us can ever know, or write, the last Word about the human Heart.
(This is an adapted version of the 2008 HRC Seymour Lecture in Biography, which Richard Holmes delivered in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in September. This lecture, which is endowed by Dr John Seymour and Dr Heather Munro AO, is presented by the Biography Institute at the Australian National University.)
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