John Updike called biographies “novels with indexes”; Lytton Strachey regarded them as “the most delicate and most humane of all the branches of the art of writing”. Whichever is the fairer description, and there is truth in both, the British have nursed a passion for biography, both reading it and writing it, for centuries. Last week, Jonathan Coe’s biography of the pioneering but little-known novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant , won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, proving that the essence of great biography lies not in celebrity but in the excellence of the biographer and the fascination of the life described. When Dr Johnson himself died, there were eight biographies on him apart from Boswell’s, and in the 18th century, when the proper study of mankind was man, the first biographical dictionaries appeared. The latest manifestation of these, OUP’s Dictionary of National Biography , has 50,000 entries.
At Hatchards in Piccadilly, biography and memoir account for nearly a fifth of sales, with titles ranging from Claire Tomalin’s Pepys to Katie Price’s Being Jordan. The sales manager Roger Katz recalls the tennis player Arthur Ashe saying that he always read biography because he was discovered one day when idly knocking a tennis ball against the wall, and he wanted to know how other people’s lives had been changed.
As a genre, it is not without its controversies: historians in particular often regard it with suspicion. Patrick O’Brien, Professor of Economic History at the LSE, recently lamented the temptation that afflicts biographers “to exaggerate the significance of people whose lives they spend years arduously reconstructing”. And the biographer’s obsession with the private, domestic and sexual life of his subjects satisfies our prurient appetites in the form of an upscale equivalent of Heat or Celebrity Big Brother.
We should remember, though, that once upon a time it was impossible to write about history without recourse to Marxist theory and the influence of socio-economic forces, and the individual was airbrushed out of the picture. Since the end of the Cold War the past has sprung to life with all sorts of odd corners of history, perhaps rather too many, receiving attention: Amanda Foreman’s biography of a long-forgotten duchess, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Antony Beevor ‘s Stalingrad and Dava Sobel’s Longitude became colossal bestsellers.
The question at the heart of all this is the one tackled by Isaiah Berlin and Carlyle on the one hand and E. H. Carr and Tolstoy on the other: the hoary GCSE question, do great men make history, or does history throw up great men for the moment? Does the individual, great or otherwise, actually signify? Both Marx and Freud, whose influence was dominant for so much of the last century, were deeply suspicious of personality as an independent thing, believing the individual to be at the mercy of external or internal forces of which it could not be conscious. But for Michael Holroyd, “the historian’s foreground is the biographer’s background.” They are part and parcel of each other.
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Biography can give rise to some of the most cogent, brilliant writing and meticulous scholarship this country produces, and explores the fascinating question of what we can know about each other and how we can write about it. Latterly there have been signs of academic recognition: the University of East Anglia has established the biographical equivalent of its famous creative writing course under the direction of Richard Holmes, the inspirational biographer of Coleridge, and Lisa Jardine, the eminent historian turned biographer, has founded the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters to teach the scholastic tools of biography at Queen Mary, University of London. Goldsmiths College also offers an MA in creative and life writing.
But generally, academia abhors the personal, and craves the objectivity of science, and biography will always be a mischievous inhabitant of its groves, caught between the desire to create narrative and the need to be dispassionately accurate; disciplined by scholarship and tempted by the structures of fiction.
Biography’s greatest successes are fuelled by a passion and obsessiveness and love in a way that must make university departments distinctly uneasy, and yet paradoxically make the texts compelling material for study. Thomas Carlyle said that to write a life should be an act of sympathy, and “to have an open loving heart” was the right beginning. Many of the great biographies have been matters of love and friendship: Boswell on Johnson, Johnson on Savage, Godwin on Wollestonecraft, Forster on Dickens; not forgetting the contemporary bestseller, Pamela Stephenson’s biography of her husband, the comedian Billy Connolly. Even when the subject is not known to the writer this applies. The author and editor Jenny Uglow says that she still feels intimately involved, “as if she were a sister or a cousin”, with Elizabeth Gaskell, nearly ten years after finishing her biography: “I always wanted to jump into the book and say ‘Don ‘t do it!’ whenever Hogarth put his foot in it.”
When Amanda Foreman finished writing Georgiana she felt “devastated; utterly bereft and lonely”, taking “at least two years” to get over the ending of her involvement with the glamorous and unfortunate duchess. Foreman sees biography as “the alchemy of emotion and art and craft”, the emotion being essential for the author’s intuitive speculations, art being the shaping of the narrative in terms of pace and voice and nuance, and craft being the careful marshalling of the biographer’s resources.
Foreman suggests that the British tend to avoid psychotherapeutic solutions to the conundrums of human existence, preferring to use real-life stories to help us understand our own lives. Certainly biography is a response to the restless search for authenticity, imparting an inbuilt narrative structure to the chaos around us. It gives us the means to shape the world, to perceive its structures as they pertain to other lives, to explain the relations between people as individuals and the forces that act upon us.
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Is biography intrusive, the higher gossip, offspring of the 18th-century coffee-house? It can be, and a lot of what gets published certainly is. But it can also be great art, worthy of academic study, and it can experiment. Richard Holmes, who modernised the idea of the biography as a pursuit, points out that his namesake, the formidable military historian, writes history from the point of view of the common man, “from the bottom up”. And Alexander Masters’s extraordinary recent biography of Stuart Shorter, a lifelong addict and drifter, shows how the genre can subvert itself, dwelling movingly not on the lives of the famous but on the utterly unknown and derelict. Brenda Maddox’s classic life of Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle was a wonderful illustration of how the figure in the shadows can emerge to illuminate history.
In the end biography is, as Holmes sagely remarks, about the knowability and unknowability of the human heart. And for that you don’t have to be famous.
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Michael Fishwick is the publishing director for nonfiction at HarperCollins. His second novel, Sacrifices, will be published by Jonathan Cape in March