Kinds

The short life, however, is a genuine current in the mainstream of biographical literature and is represented in many ages and cultures. Excluding early quasi-biographical materials about religious or political figures, the short biography first appeared in China at about the end of the 2nd century bce, and two centuries later it was a fully developed literary form in the Roman Empire. The Shiji (“Historical Records”), by Sima Qian (145?–c. 85 bce), include lively biographical sketches, very short and anecdotal with plentiful dialogue, grouped by character-occupation types such as “maligned statesmen,” “rash generals,” “assassins,” a method that became established tradition with the Hanshu (History of the Former Han Dynasty), by Sima Qian’s successor and imitator, Pan Gu (32–92 ce). Toward the end of the 1st century ce, in the Mediterranean world, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, which are contrasting pairs of biographies, one Greek and one Roman, appeared; there followed within a brief span of years the Lives of the Caesars, by the Roman emperor Hadrian’s librarian Suetonius. These works established a quite subtle mingling of character sketch with chronological narrative that has ever since been the dominant mark of this genre. Plutarch, from an ethical standpoint emphasizing the political virtues of man as governor, and Suetonius, from the promptings of sheer biographical curiosity, develop their subjects with telling details of speech and action; and though Plutarch, generally considered to be the superior artist, has greatly influenced other arts than biographical literature—witness Shakespeare’s Roman plays, which are based on his Lives—Suetonius created in the Life of Nero one of the supreme examples of the form. Islamic literature, from the 10th century, produced short “typed” biographies based on occupation—saints, scholars, and the like—or on arbitrarily chosen personal characteristics. The series of brief biographies has continued to the present day with such representative collections as, in the Renaissance, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England in the 17th century, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets in the 18th, and, in more recent times, the “psychographs” of the American Gamaliel Bradford (Damaged Souls, 1923), Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) and the “profiles” that have become a hallmark of the weekly magazine The New Yorker.

Further classification of biographies compiled by research can be achieved by regarding the comparative objectivity of approach. For convenience, six categories, blending one into the other in infinite gradations and stretching from the most objective to the most subjective, can be employed.

Informative biography

This, the first category, is the most objective and is sometimes called “accumulative” biography. The author of such a work, avoiding all forms of interpretation except selection—for selection, even in the most comprehensive accumulation, is inevitable—seeks to unfold a life by presenting, usually in chronological order, the paper remains, the evidences, relating to that life. This biographer takes no risks but, in turn, seldom wins much critical acclaim: his work is likely to become a prime source for biographers who follow him. During the 19th century, the Life of Milton: Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time (7 vol., 1859–94), by David Masson, and Abraham Lincoln: A History (10 vol., 1890), by John G. Nicolay and John Hay, offer representative samples. In the 20th century such works as Edward Nehls’s, D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (1957–59) and David Alec Wilson’s collection of the life records of Thomas Carlyle (1923–29), in six volumes, continue the traditions of this kind of life writing.

Critical biography

This second category, scholarly and critical, unlike the first, does offer a genuine presentation of a life. These works are very carefully researched; sources and “justifications” (as the French call them) are scrupulously set forth in notes, appendixes, bibliographies; inference and conjecture, when used, are duly labeled as such; no fictional devices or manipulations of material are permitted, and the life is generally developed in straight chronological order. Yet such biography, though not taking great risks, does employ the arts of selection and arrangement. The densest of these works, completely dominated by fact, have small appeal except to the specialist. Those written with the greatest skill and insight are in the first rank of modern life writing. In these scholarly biographies—the “life and times” or the minutely detailed life—the author is able to deploy an enormous weight of matter and yet convey the sense of a personality in action, as exemplified in Leslie Marchand’s Byron (1957), with some 1,200 pages of text and 300 pages of notes, Dumas Malone’s Jefferson and His Time (4 vol., 1948–70), Churchill’s Marlborough (1933–38), Douglas S. Freeman’s George Washington (1948–57). The critical biography aims at evaluating the works as well as unfolding the life of its subject, either by interweaving the life in its consideration of the works or else by devoting separate chapters to the works. Critical biography has had its share of failures: except in skillful hands, criticism clumsily intrudes upon the continuity of a life, or the works of the subject are made to yield doubtful interpretations of character, particularly in the case of literary figures. It has to its credit, however, such fine biographies as Arthur S. Link, Wilson (5 vol., 1947–65); Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959); Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud; Douglas S. Freeman, Lee (1934–35); and Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens (1952).

“Standard” biography

This third, and central, category of biography, balanced between the objective and the subjective, represents the mainstream of biographical literature, the practice of biography as an art. From antiquity until the present—within the limits of the psychological awareness of the particular age and the availability of materials—this kind of biographical literature has had as its objective what Sir Edmund Gosse called “the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life.” It seeks to transform, by literary methods that do not distort or falsify, the truthful record of fact into the truthful effect of a life being lived. Such biography ranges in style and method from George Cavendish’s 16th-century life of Cardinal Wolsey, Roger North’s late-17th-century lives of his three brothers, and Boswell’s life of Johnson to modern works like Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne, Garrett Mattingly’s Catherine of Aragon, Andrew Turnbull’s Scott Fitzgerald, and Leon Edel’s Henry James.

Interpretative biography

This fourth category of life writing is subjective and has no standard identity. At its best it is represented by the earlier works of Catherine Drinker Bowen, particularly her lives of Tchaikovsky, “Beloved Friend” (1937), and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Yankee from Olympus (1944). She molds her sources into a vivid narrative, worked up into dramatic scenes that always have some warranty of documentation—the dialogue, for example, is sometimes devised from the indirect discourse of letter or diary. She does not invent materials; but she quite freely manipulates them—that is to say, interprets them—according to the promptings of insight, derived from arduous research, and with the aim of unfolding her subject’s life as vividly as possible. (Mrs. Bowen, much more conservative in her later works, clearly demonstrates the essential distance between the third and fourth categories: her distinguished life of Sir Edward Coke, The Lion and the Throne [1957], foregoes manipulation and the “re-creation” of dialogue and limits interpretation to the artful deployment of biographical resources.) Very many interpretative biographies stop just short of fictionalizing in the freedom with which they exploit materials. The works of Frank Harris (Oscar Wilde, 1916) and Hesketh Pearson (Tom Paine, Friend of Mankind, 1937; Beerbohm Tree, 1956) demonstrate this kind of biographical latitude.