One night, the author,
Henry James, lit a gigantic bonfire fueled by his letters and diaries. The
idea was to foil any grave-robbing biographer who sought to pillage his life
after death. Henry’s "utter and absolute abhorrence" of the
biographer is well founded [1]. The
biographer is at once a butcher and healer. He selects which information
is useful, and which is not. He labours in a messy workshop filled with
forgotten objects, precious relics, tweets, testimonies, alibis, emails, and
the unverifiable. All of this is bolted and welded together to build a
monstrous semblance of someone's delicately formed life. Under the shadow of
this abomination, the biographer feels the mighty impotence of the written
word. He tries to tell a tale with some sort of momentum using the spare parts
of anecdote, rumour and popular myth. What does biography do with facts that
are lost or can’t be fixed? How do you write about the life of a man who avoids
private questions, who stood up a New York Times reporter and an
entire PBS crew, and walked out on a Wall Street Journal interview after
the first question? [2]
Biographer, Hermione Lee, says biography
is a process of "making up or making over", giving the life story a
"bit of shape", collapsing two days into one [3].
Sometimes he shuffles around the time-line, not unlike the tracks on an iPod.
This is the challenge set before the biographer. He only wants to know how the
giants around him grew into what they are.
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