Writing Biographies

FRANK MacSHANE

IN Dubin's Lives, Bernard .Malamud creates a fictional hero
who is a biographer. Early in the novel he shows us Dubin
sitting at his desk in his study carefully forging a paragraph
out of exquisitely chosen words and sentences. "By mid-afternoon
he had done two pages," writes iMalamud.

When I read this description, I said to myself, that's certainly
not how I do it. It may be what the novelist does, but I don't think
biographies are written that way. At least mine are not. In the
first place, the biographer, unlike the novelist, does not create a
character out of his liead or an imaginary world. Instead, his task
is to handle and manipulate the vast quantity of information he
lias gathered in the form of letters, anecdotes and interviews from
dozens of different sources. In the end, he may sit down at a desk
and write a paragraph with exquisite care. But before he readies
that point, he has to do an enormous amount of drudge work.

The first task is to choose the subject. That might seem to go
without saying, but sonic writers produce so many biographies
they cannot possibly be bothered by the scruples that trouble me
in choosing a subject. For me, it is the most difficult part of all.
Oscar Wilde said that grear men tend to have many disciples and
that Judas is the biographer. This worries me. I don't want to be
Judas and I don't enjoy destructive criticism. I think it is a waste
of my time and generally useless ro others.

Negative biographies were invented to correct an excess. The
multi-volumed Life and Letters of the nineteenth century tended
to be fulsomely eulogistic. The subject is a dutiful son, a loving
husband, a model parent and a person of transcendent accomplish¬
ment. Lytton Strachey is probably the most famous enemy of
books of this kind. He poked fun at the tradition by dismissing
three Victorian worthies in a single short volume. Strachey did