Biography as an art

Biography is a complicated art form. There is, for example, the simple decision of where to start -- it is rare for a biography's first pages to describe the place and time of the protagonist's birth, for example -- and neither that nor any other starting point presents itself as an obvious choice. Separately, there are unique difficulties of point-of-view for any writer who wants to avoid presenting endless laundry lists, on the one hand, or hagiography on the other. Yet even before we get past the cover we face the question, especially pressing for the biography of someone of an distant time or place, of how much context will be required.

How common is our day is that word "context"! Some biographies make the issue of context more pressing for themselves than they have to, calling themselves not just the "life of X" but the "life and times of X." Suppose we pick up a book entitled "The Life and Times of Henry Hudson." Just looking at the cover, feeling the heft of the book, how much material will we expect to find on the politics of Queen Elizabeth's court? or the history of sailing vessels and methods of navigation up to that time? or on the growth of a European market for beaver pelts? We'll probably expect some asides on each of those subjects and on more, though in each case the aside should fall well short of being a chapter in itself, and the author must keep bringing us around the central story of Hudson's life.

But assume we let "the times" drop away from title and ambition: suppose this is just the "Life of Henry Hudson." What matters and what doesn't? If everything he does and says and puts on for clothing matters, then we'll have an endless and unreadable compendium. We'll expect that the author will have in mind some central purpose: why is Hudson important enough to justify a book? Because he has a river and a bay named after him? Because he represents curiosity, daring, entrepreneurship, or other qualities we value? Because we feel nostalgic for the bygone era of tall and wind-driven ships? These different motives will give rise to different books.

We're still left, still, with the beginning: we know very little about Hudson's childhood, and it would probably be silly to begin our book with that little, padded out with guesswork. Hudson first enters history as a sailor on John Davys' ship exploring the coast of Greenland in 1587. We might start there. Or we might do something more imaginative, and write about the Viking settlements on those coasts centuries before, and about how the Vikings died out, leaving scholars to speculate about why. Then we could flash forward and have our readers imagine ships much taller than the old Norse longboats appearing off that same shore. It is an aesthetic decision.

As Virginia Woolf wrote, "The novelist is free; the biographer is tied." Yet Woolf was writing those words largely to celebrate Lytton Strachey, and his sketches of eminent Victorians, which (Woolf tells us) made "Manning, Florence Nightingale, Gordon, and the rest live as they had not lived since they were actually in the flesh." The "ties" that bind the biographer are a challenge, and should be joyfully accepted as such -- every genre has set challenges and conditions. Biography has fidelity to fact.