Biography: A Brief History by Nigel Hamilton

Abstract

822 Reviews an admirer of 'the literatureof Sade as a dramatic talewith his historical implications pronounced by a taler', and aman who found away around a 70,000 yen finebecause 'he always arrived to the tribunal too late, and escaped the finaljudgement' (ii, 122 1 22). The Final Judgement on this encyclopaedia isnot yet in,but one can only hope foran elan of linguistic charity from scholars conscious of theirown foibles. RYERSON UNIVERSITY, TORONTO MICHAEL R. FINN Biography: A Brief History. By NIGEL HAMILTON. Cambridge, MA, London: Har vardUniversityPress. 2007. xv+345pp. kI4.95. ISBN978-o-674-02466-3. This book comes plastered with accolades: 'profound', 'insightful and provocative', 'lively', 'emphatic'. It isall these things except for, perhaps, the first.Polemical, viva ciously written, beautifully illustrated and produced, itprovokes reaction. Indeed, it is somewhat 'reactionary', a defence of biography, applauding thenotion of a unitary self, of the 'individual' as the conceptual centre ofWestern liberal democracy. Bio graphy asks why there is 'no single, accessible introduction to the subject' (p. i)-and provides one. The limitation of the term 'biography' to the respectful printed record, it isargued, has marginalized women and homosexuals in a dominant patriarchy, and the form it self as an object of study.Only one university,Nigel Hamilton points out-Hawaii takes the subject seriously and has a scholarly journal dedicated to it. 'Biography', then,must include autobiography and portraiture of any kind (painting, memorial busts, biopics, TV documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles). No distinction ismade between self-portrait and portrait, between scholarly and journalistic work, between fiction and non-fiction. It is, simply, 'life-recording' (p. iI) inwhatever medium. This noble race of life-recorders, however, has constantly been obstructed by the agencies of the state and other vested interests.The devils in thismelodrama are the opponents of free speech: theministers political and theological, theHays Office, literaryestates, the copyright and censorship laws.The pre-Boswellian heroes are Plutarch, St Augustine, Cellini, Sir Walter Raleigh ('biography's first martyr' (p. 69) afterhis imprisonment and execution forpublishing The Historie of the World (I 6 I4)), and Dryden. Then comes a culture-shift away from laundering hagiography. 'If aman is towrite A Panegyrick,' Samuel Johnson advised Boswell, 'hemay keep vices out of sight, but ifhe professes towrite A Life he must represent it really as it was' (p. 87). Hamilton's preference isclearly forthe 'warts-and-all' life: 'messy,vivid, and colourful' (p. 9 I). It ispresented as offering 'therapeutic benefit' in an 'education of the senses' (p. 89). This steady drift towards realism isexemplified by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Vic torians (I 9 I8) and Harold Nicolson's Portrait of aMarriage (I 973). The firstironized the 'two fatvolumes' (p. i I9) of 'Victorian pseudobiography' (p. ioo), the second outed Nicolson's parents as practising homosexuals. The 'subjective' biography had arrived, thebiographer as artist, validating themarginal (p. I65). Confessional auto biography developed exponentially. Freud had made all this possible with his case studies and his Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (I910). Virginia Woolf experimented with the form,writing a lifeof her dog. Picasso is cited as an othermodernist cracking thevarnished surface of portraiture, redefining itas a record of "'the artist's personal responses to the subject'" (p. I63). The resultwas that the traditional print lifecame tobe seen as 'unchallenging, [. . .] inartistic,psychologically deficient, and sexually prim [. . ]. Itwas over' (p. I90). This is the point atwhich oversimplified history begins to strain beneath its ge neralizations. After the Second World War, apparently, 'biography had finally found MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 823 a new socio-political significance in an open society. People were sick of ideology [. . .]' (p. i89) and the form 'would never again be permitted [. . .] to kowtow to respectability' (p. I9I). But if the defence of reputation is no longer an issue, why do publishers, editors, and film-makers employ lawyers?What about ghost-written autobiography? And if 'ideology' was dead, how do we explain theCold War? The new subjectivism ofmodernism and postmodernism isapparently embraced yetwith no acknowledgement of the epistemological collapse, the sense ofmultiple selves, essential to the deconstruction ofVictorian realism. Hamilton's book is, in effect,a defence of realism, his chapter on thedeath of theauthor a...