How To Do Biography. A Primer by Nigel Hamilton

Author:Nigel Hamilton [Nigel Hamilton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: aVe4EvA
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2008-05-10T20:00:00+00:00

TEN

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

—Martin Luther King Jr., “Facing the Challenge of a New Age” (quoting an unnamed college president)

oing justice to your subject’s personality, to his or her capacity for love, passion, desire, hatred—this requires sensitivity, the exercising of inevitable moral judgment (however objective you try to be), and deep human understanding. Simultaneously, however, you are seeking to understand the nature of your subject’s contribution to other people’s lives: to family and society, at an immediate level, then upon the larger stage, as your subject embarks on a career. Narrating and assessing that career is the challenge which every biographer since Xenophon has had to face, and it will be yours too.

Never forget as you compose your work that the biographer is not a historian, recording facts for facts’ sake. As Plutarch put it two thousand years ago, at the start of his comparative biography of Alexander and Julius Caesar:

The careers of these men embrace such a multitude of events that my preamble shall consist of nothing more than this one plea: if I do not record all their most celebrated achievements or describe any of them exhaustively, but merely summarize for the most part what they accomplished, I ask my readers not to regard this as a fault. For I am writing biography, not history, and the truth is that the most brilliant exploits often tell us nothing of the virtues or vices of the men who performed them, while on the other hand a chance remark or a joke may reveal far more of a man’s character than the mere feat of winning battles in which thousands fall, or of marshalling great armies, or laying siege to cities. When a portrait painter sets out to create a likeness, he relies above all upon the face and the expression of the eyes and pays less attention to the other parts of the body: in the same way it is my task to dwell upon those actions which illuminate the workings of the soul, and by this means to create a portrait of each man’s life.1

Plutarch was, of course, exaggerating—for his biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, written at the same time as the biblical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, exhibited enormous scholarship in the accurate retelling of near-contemporary public lives and accomplishments. With enough will and humility, you too can reconstruct the life-course and character of your subject—remembering always it is the emergent, underlying pattern of a career, and the relationship between that and the growing character of your subject, that you are attempting to discern behind the factual data.

Earlier, we asked what the right credentials for a biographer might be. Do you, for example, need to be a fellow professional in order to undertake the biography, say, of a philosopher, musician, psychologist, or politician? Being a fellow warrior—as was Xenophon when

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