In Our Time - Biography

Episode Date: June 22, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss biography which sells more books now than ever before; last year people in this country spent 115 million pounds on 12 and a half million copies of biographies. And it���s not just in Britain that life stories are popular; the United States Library of Congress found recently that in the previous six months more people had read a biography than any other kind of book. But what drives this fascination in the lives of others; lives which have often long since passed. Why do the literary studies of often long dead characters make such popular books? And what is the role of the biographer who provides that account? Truthful chronicler, or inevitably biased re-inventor?With Richard Holmes, writer, biographer and the author of Sidetracks:Explorations of a Romantic Biographer; Nigel Hamilton, biographer, Director of the British Institute of Biography and Professor of Biography, De Montfort University, Leicester; Amanda Foreman, biographer of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, biography sells more books now than ever before. Last year, people in this country alone spent £150 million on 12.5 million copies of biographies. And it's not just in Britain that life stories are popular.

The United States Library of Congress found recently that in the previous six months, more people had read a biography than any other kind of book. But what drives this fascination in the lives of others, lives which have often long since past? And what's the role of the biographer who provides that account? Truthful Qualica or inevitably biased reinventer. With me to discuss biography are three fine practitioners of the art. Richard Holmes is the biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, and his hugely influential book of 1984 Footsteps was credited with changing fundamentally the way that biography is written.

He's just publishing the sequel, Side Tracks, Explorations of a Romantic Biographer. Nigel Hamilton is Britain's only professor of biography, director of the British Institute of Biography, and also the official biographer of Field Marshal Montgomery of Alamein. Amanda Foreman is the biographer of the nakedless successful Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. Richard Holmes, Samuel Johnson put biography on the map, as it were, for modern Europe, certainly for this country, with the life of Richard Savage. What makes that work so distinctive and so?

important for biography. There'd been a tradition bubbling up at the beginning of the 18th century, which is actually based on criminal biography, the Newgate calendar and so on, popular pamphlets. Of rogues and vagabonds. Rogues and vagabonds. One of the most famous being Jonathan Wilde,

the thief-taker, who was a kind of double crook, very good subject for a biography. DeFoe wrote a series of pamphlets. And Johnson... They're very rich and popular novels in that, too, isn't it? It's at a point when fiction... and biography are, you know, overlapping really. They're not really distinguished.

Savage met Johnson when he first came to London, young Samuel Johnson, 27 years old. Difficult to imagine our Boswellian image of great Johnson, the roaring club man. This is a young provincial failed playwright. And he met this extraordinary figure in London, Richard Savage, who was a poet who'd been arrested, tried and convicted of murder,

was also probably a blackmail but also a very interesting poet and for two years they knew each other in London and they walked up and down the famous they walked at night because they had nowhere to stay and out of this conversation Johnson got to know Savage very well

Savage died in a jail in Bristol and two years later Johnson published this biography it's a biographical essay which comes out of the criminal tradition but he's actually the first literary biography using poetry letters conversation And it's a black comedy, and you never know if Johnson in some way is defending Savage or in some way writing a sort of biographical satire of him.

Was it because of the low-life nature of this Nigel Hamilton, the low-life nature written by a high-life, high-class literary figure? That combination that made Savage so fresh and made people like you look back on it as somehow seminal, if indeed you do? Partly, I think probably, I agree with Richard, but I think Johnson's essay in The Rambler on biography exactly 250 years ago is even more influential because I think Johnson expressed a vision of the new kind of biography which determined how we see biography in the modern world. Can you give us a brief synopsis of that?

Well, basically he said you've got to include vices as well as virtues, the beautiful and the base. And you've got to look, or the biographer, should be looking for aspects of the story with which we can identify, onto which we can project. And he had that wonderful line about how the biographer must be able to move the man who's normally only moved by looking at the rise and fall of stocks and shares

and interest in a table. of love. So I think Johnson sees a future for biography in exploring the human soul, what's going on behind the extrinsic, as he called it. And that approach, I think, really set the new biography going in Britain. And today, I personally think it's probably the most distinctive art that Britain has contributed in terms of world art. Amanda Fom, without being specific for a moment, would you agree, would you think that you yourself, 250 years on, follow the prescriptions of Dr. Johnson,

to show the vices as well as the virtues, to get behind the outer form into the inner person? Yes, I think that's absolutely right. What is also interesting, though, is our notion of what is a vice changes with each generation. And so although most biographers, even maybe 50, 60 or 70 years ago, would say we are trying to show the inner person as well as the outer person. What they think the inner person is is very different from what we think an inner person is.

So that's the great change. But do you think that the idea of going for the inner person, again speaking generally, has perhaps taken over too much from looking at what Nigel called the extrinsic, the outside, the achievements. Well, I think you're heading towards perhaps an obsession with sex. I'm not. Okay.

Well, I think that... It hasn't crossed my mind. That comes in part three, about how past nine? For example, the Victorians were very... They were obsessed with the notion of religion. And when you read a biography written by a late Victorian, Half of it will be about the subject's religious state of minds, and then the other half will be their achievements.

And today it's not about people's religious conviction so much, it's more about their unconscious, their subconscious, their secret, sexual lives, whatever. And I think that the balance is the same, but the actual area of interest is just changed. Back to you, Richard. You call Boswell, who spent 26 years on his... life of Samuel Johnson, the godfather in both senses of biography in this country. Could you, what's this new word, unpack that for us?

That sounds, yes, a suitcase. I suppose one of the things, the central things about Boswell, that he wrote out of friendship. He admired Johnson enormously. And he thought that it was possible to write a thousand, in fact, 1,200 pages. book about one man, unpacking, if you like, his virtues and his vices. But in fact, creating really a sort of larger-than-life figure, who for the first time has an external career, a literary career, but also this inward life that we've started talking

about, so that Boswell, for instance, would not merely narrate Johnson's life in terms of dialogues and coffeehouse exchanges and tavern. exchanges and remarks made on the road from Scotland to England and so on, but also he would use the Interior Life Johnson's journals and prayers and so on, would also be built into this biography. And it's an epic of one man's life, not all panegyric, as Boswell says. And the response to it was very mixed, it's now assumed this is, in a way, the Bible of modern biography. but actually Boswell's contemporaries were very divided

about whether this should have been done, whether in some way it dishonoured Johnson, and a very modern reflex is somehow was it taking attention away from his actually literary writings. You would have thought that with Boswell's power and Johnson's authority, the idea of the proper study of man would have swept through, but in fact it hit the buffers, didn't it, in the Victorian age, Nigel Hamilton, and then we had the great sepulchres erected.

Exactly. I think the Victorians wanted models. After all, that's the period in which they created the National Portrait Gallery, and they were supposed to be sort of painted models on which people could model themselves. I think they were looking for models of rectitude in terms of behaviour. These were supposed to be educational lies, which took us back to Greek and Roman times to an extent. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that.

I'm sure that was very educational at the time. It's just that with the 20th century, a lot of artists began to feel that that was missing out the most interesting part of human beings. And some of the most interesting human beings like women. I mean, the Diction of National Biography virtually had no, which was a product of this high Victorian age, 1886, virtually had no women. But there's one thing that we've left out when we talk about biographies in the 19th century, which is that you have to remember the practicality. of the situation then, which is that first of all, you have the 19th century novel,

which really does examine the human condition in the way that biographies do today, so that the thirst for that kind of inner, out of exploration, is being sated by that. And then second of all, there's a huge, fashionable rage for people publishing their own letters and their own diaries or their survivors doing it for them. So that where somebody might do a biography,

while it's too late because, in fact, their letters and diaries, although edited, are already out in the public domain. And then finally, when you do have people writing a biography, they probably don't have access to their letters unless they're a friend of the family. So, of course, it's going to be rather laudatory because otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to do it. And it's these three practicalities

which are driving the development of biography in this century rather than just unconscious forces or the culture. And it's also interesting that one of the big drivers, in the English novel is aping a sort of biography, the history of Tom Jones and the names of Martin Charles, Louis, Oliver Twist, as if these are the histories of men. How does that figure in your reckoning of the way the 19th century is treating in biography of Brown? Just to walk around this, again, the idea of models and the crossover between fiction and documentary,

if you take right central to the period, which is Mrs. Gaskill, Elizabeth Gaskill's life of Charlotte Bronte, again, it is a biography of a woman. She did actually get access to a large number of the family papers through Patrick Bronte, the father. But she is a novelist, and in some ways the power of that biography, why it's rather exceptional, is that it has the drive of a novelist who is, again, we come back to this idea, driving towards the notion of the inner life of Charlotte Bronte.

And a very interesting point that she actually discovered that Charlotte Bronte had not. not an affair, but a tendress for a teacher in Brussels, where she went across herself to teach. And Mrs. Gaskill found the letters describing this. She had the documentary evidence, but she felt she couldn't put it into the biography, not all of it. So this is where we're on a sort of cusp there, what is acceptable and what is regarded as a kind of trespass. And I think that has changed. I think we're all saying that line has.

moved. Do we can all raid the larder as much as we want now, you think? I wouldn't use that analogy at all. I just think the questions we ask about people's lives have altered. No, I think I'll insist on it. I mean, the fact is that most modern biographers are raiding the private larder as as severely as they can. They're digging up, finding out everything that's back in there

that's been kept in there for years that they can dig out. They're looting. I mean, you're... You're much more fastidious, perhaps, but there's no doubt that the welts of biography now is to do with let's dig out as much as we can and raid it. There's a looting operation going on. I mean, he even denied, it gives it a lot of fears, and it may be the right thing to do. But Nigel Hamilton is even nodding, and he's a professor biography. Not because I'm a professor, professors are usually wrong.

But in this case, Janet Malcolm did write a wonderful book about six, seven years ago, about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes called The Silent Woman. and she did use this analogy of the burglar, rifling the drawers, I assume, a chest drawers. It actually, Henry James, who started with you publishing scoundrel, the distinction I just would write in there. I think there is a distinction between biographies which are written of virtually of contemporaries, where there is, I think, a sense of trespass.

Where you're writing back over 100, 200 years, the past is very precious, and that's, I wouldn't regard it as raiding it, I regard it as saving it, guarding it in some way, bringing it back. And I think that's a rather different operation. And you're doing an act of justice as well. It seems to be very often left out. Your justice might be someone else as injustice, Richard.

I mean, you know, your act of justice saying, look, I've discovered that this woman had a secret lover or two illegitimate children. You might think he's doing justice to her reputation, even 200 years ago. Her family or readers might think that you're not doing much of a justice. I don't know. you're judging what justice is in that case.

I mean, for instance, Amanda, did you find things about Georgiana that you thought I will suppress? No, I never found anything that I wanted to suppress for her benefits. I found things like the extent of her stealing and dishonesty because of her gambling addiction, which I didn't want to discuss because it upset me, which is an entirely difference. It's the same thing in the end.

It doesn't get in the book. No, it went into the book. A bargopher doesn't have the right to choose, but the biographer must put in the truth, it matter how painful that is. This fact thing is, personally, it's perhaps the heart of it really, rigid. I mean, as you know, admire your work very much.

In the first half of your Coleridge, for instance, do you think you were as hard on him as you could have been? And one of the things that's very interesting about you as a biographer is that you go back. I mean, you went back to your Shelley and said, look, I was hard on marriage Shelley years later and you made a rectification in a way. I got underestimated her as a person to be

influence on him. Glad I've lived long enough to get that right. And you've also said biographies changed, there's no definitive biography. But your judgment of a particular person it's not only leaving out facts and suppress, it's falling in love

with your subject, wanted to protect them, wanted to look after them. I'm just trying to get it decided of is there a particular truth that you three, self-worn, once or twice, are sole judges of and we can talk in those terms, because I don't think we can. First of all, the point about, yes, biographers need to say when they've got things wrong, and it's a continuing process, and it's absolutely right. Later on in footsteps, I wrote about Mary Shelley again, because I think I'd underestimated how important she was in that relationship with Shelley, particularly in Italy. So I think there's room for correction and I do say that I think no biography is definitive.

It's a nature of the form, it's open-ended, in some way it's passed on from hand-to-hand generation to generation. So there's that element. On the other hand, I do think one has a commitment as far as you can to tell the truth, to investigate the facts. It's great Voltairemark. We owe respect to the living,

but to the dead we owe only the truth. Now, it's also complicated What is the relationship between the biography and the subject? Was I in some way protective of co-age, particularly in volume one? I think looking back on it, and again, it's rather fascinating thing about biography, after you finished, as a book moves away from you, you get, you learn more about it. You see what you're...

It goes on working in your head. And the book almost changes in some curious way as it moves away from your immediate edge of work. And I think to some extent one sometimes does fall into the role of a defence council. Johnson is very good on this and uses the image of the trial, just to go back to Savage, the trial for murder. Are you arguing, are you the judge or are you the barrister prosecuting or are you the defender? And I think biographers move between those positions. And one of the reasons I wrote footsteps was actually to look at how this works.

It's true to say that biography is an investigative art. We're all investigators here, and the criminal case in Savage is very interesting one, symbolic, I think. But I think the thing we're missing here, and which became more and more clear to me as I began to teach the history of biography some years ago, is that if you look at the way biography has been written, I specialize in the 20th century, If you look at the way it's been written, you can see it changing almost decade by decade, i.e. to be talking in these terms about truth or definitiveness of truth and so this really, to me, to my view, wrong. I think all that is relative to the time in which the biography is written. What sort of truth do you think that you arrived at Amanda in your biography?

I mean, did you think that there you've got her now? That's the portrait. There's the Gaines report written as your portrait, and I know Besbra's written and various other people have written about her, but you think I've looked at everything that's available now. There's probably not much else going to come on the market. And that is, I've got the likeness and the depths of this particular subject. I think that with the very, very important and underlines addition

to the best of my ability, and so therefore someone else better than me could do it. a more truthful portrait, but the kind of truth we're talking about here is dramatic truth, and that biography is really literary biography as opposed to films or documentaries, and

that what the bargopher is doing is a kind of alchemy, and the alchemy is the subject, the subject's life, and then the biographer's own artistic and literary sensibilities, and the outcome is the joining together of these two things. And therefore, you cannot

apply the principles of science, unless you're going to talk about, say, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle into a biography, because it isn't that. It is, it is, at the end of the day, art, and it has artistic truth. Yeah, but it has to follow certain rules. You can't say anything about a real person unless you've got serious evidence, preferably from two independent authors, for instance. That's a sine qua non, of course. That is within it. But it also means that you, it's not like taking a photograph. It's, it's, it's not that kind of two-dimensional reality. It's a three-dimensional

reality in that at the end it's the facts Charles I lost his head and it's also his unconscious and the unconscious is something which all human beings share in it's a part of the spiritual dimension. You cannot quantify it but you can certainly try to understand it. The crucial thing here is

one is not merely researching investigating facts. You are putting them into a shape that makes a story. The biography is a story of a life. Lives do not necessarily have story shapes. We know that from day to day. We kind of walk backwards blindly into our lives, but the biographer makes it into a complete shape. What do you say to this point? Do you think that biography approaches the nature of fiction or historical fiction, particularly? I mean, there's a thin line sometimes with historical

fiction. I mean, I've written a couple of books of historical fiction. You take an awful, long time to do it. You'd take a great deal of time over the research to make sure that the facts you use are the real fact and get a lot of advice and so on and so forth. This is very close to the line. There's a lot of people are writing historical fiction now and taking every bit as much trouble as the rest of us.

So what's your views there? Well, you talk about the line, that's interesting because it was Virginia Woolf who as the daughter of the founder of the Diction of National Biography was very exercised by that line. The sort of hardness of the fact and the need for

an exposure of person and tragically in her life, she was never able to solve that problem. She wrote that brilliant pseudobiography, Orlando, but really just to expose the limits of biography and to be allowed to write about her lover, her female lover. But she never really solved that. And I think we're coming very close to solving it today. To me, that's one of the most exciting things about being in biography. Exactly. Can you spell that out again?

The problem of fact and fiction really, or the truth and invented truth. Well, I think we've become very postmodern. We're now assuming that readers and viewers and radio listeners actually are intelligent beings and are to have imagination and are actually excited about this overlap between fiction and fact. That's not new, Nigel. There's nothing post anything about that. People, writers have always assumed their readers are intelligent. I'm sorry, but I think that is very new. I think the writers have not assumed that people are intelligent until 1990.

I was a protest outside a Leicester Square Cinema against Angela's ashes. You know, I particularly relish the fact that biography has expanded. It's not only included new media, but it has also, as Amanda said, in the 19th century, there was a strict divide between fiction and nonfiction. And I think by the end of the 19th century, that became an impossible situation where people were interested in the inner lives of other people but could only read about them fictionally.

And of course that was just ridiculous. And I think thanks to a series of writers and scientists even, we haven't mentioned Sigmund Freud. I mean, that whole dividing, you used the word line, that line was bust open. By Freud on Da Vinci, you mean? Freud wrote this little biography of Leonardo da Vinci, which in terms of truth was in many ways wrong. It was quickly exposed as being wrong. It was also rather a sort of wonderful visionary attempt to, as he thought biography at the time was so,

pathetic to try and include biography in the realm of psychoanalysis. He actually wrote... Yes, he wrote to Carl Gustav Young saying, the domain of biography must become ours. And I think he sort of bust open that kind of trade union distinction between fictional novel writing and documentary nonfiction, biographical writing. And I think I do, stryphil,

very strongly that the excitement of the 20th century is how we've managed to find a way of moving between the two. Yes, if you think about Amadeus, Peter Schaeffer play. I mean, that is really, I mean, I find that play dazzling because it has tremendous historical and dramatic truth, and it's a play, and all the dialogue is completely made up, and yet you know you've seen, you have lived through an aspect of history and investigated. A lot of people think you've got Salieri completely wrong. Well, you know, some people say that, but that's great because that's the controversy and that's the debate, but there are just as many who say that he got him right.

Yeah, but you don't have a vote, do you? I mean, either if Salieri did poison him is a fact or not a fact, you don't, let's have a vote. You actually find that did he or didn't here, and then you settle for it, he did, or he didn't. So I don't think you have a vote. I think maybe this is the argument we're having. I think there are certain facts which are inimical to the sort of. fictional bending and shaping that biographers sometimes want to do. Nigel Hamden.

Well, I do object to that because I think facts are always open to interpretation. We've seen a very recent... Well, if somebody poisoned somebody, what interpretation do you have there? Well, you've got to prove that the poisoning actually took place. And as we know with the O.J. Simpson trial, that some of these things are very difficult to establish, even forensically. I think the biographer has learned a tremendous amount from fictional artists over the last few hundred years. I think the biographer, if he or she wishes, is perfectly entitled to reverse fact.

This is a dialogue with the reader, providing the reader understands what's going on. And I think you take the view that somehow there are children out there who mustn't be... I do not. I object to your... I really do object to the way you think. I regard... I think the audience that listen to this programme... I do. I think you're very old-fashioned. Malcolm in this respect. I hope in actually trying to get a sort of multiple truths, I am very old. fashion, because I think when you say reverse the truth, I don't know what you're talking

about. Well, because that opens things up to reinterpretation. And when Amanda is excited about reconsidering Mozart's life, that is the crucial point. I teach biography. I have to get students actually excited about... Well, I write fiction and historical fiction and talk to people about contemporary biography as my living. And I do think that some of the things you're saying are worrying.

They're interestingly worrying. but by calling me old-fashioned, you get absolutely nowhere in the argument. Old-fashioned, as Richard has just shown quite brilliantly, can actually be smack up today. I also think there's a sort of slight nervousness about the word sex here, because, I mean, that is the great contribution in the 20th century.

I've never had that accusation in my life today. Wait, can I just add something here? There's something else which is beyond our control. Look, in America, when I talk about Georgiana, the way they perceive her is as a woman who overcame her mental health problems to re-emerge in society as a successful individual. When I talk about her here,

people see her as a debauched aristocrat who lived a high life and then suffered for it later. Now, they're two separate truths, and I have great difficulty controlling either one. Finally, Richard, Howard House? Yes, would come in. I do. I would defend the nation... He says something about sex.

I'll make this program the complete thing. I would defend the nation of... Factual truth. I write an entire chapter about that trial of savage, did he or didn't he commit murder? But I'd say the nature of the problem we're looking at is opium, did Coleridge really take it for pleasure or for art? That's the kind of problematic truth that the biography tries to deal with. And those are the kind of problematic truths we are finished talking with. I'm very sorry. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.