Category Archives: biographical method

Capturing life: interview with a biographer part 1

30 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by in biographers, biographical method, biographies of writers, artists and musicians, structure of biographies

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At the Perth Writers’ Festival in February, I discovered John Burbidge’s Dare Me! The Life and Work of Gerald Glaskin,  the biography of a significant Perth writer often overlooked in his home country. I had the chance to introduce myself to John at the book-signing and he has generously agreed to answer my questions about literary biography to share on this blog. John’s answers – a series of four over the next four days – are splendid reflections on the theory and praxis of writing a biography. You can find more about Dare Me! on John’s website about Glaskin; find out about John’s other work as an editor and writer at http://www.wordswallah.com, including a page on his memoir, The Boatman, to be published in Australia later this year.

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Biographer-in-Perth: I was struck by the way you opened with a thematic treatment of the beach in Glaskin’s life as a way of introducing him – a good choice, I believe. (Did you mention you borrowed the technique from Nicholas Shakespeare?) I think it an approach with much to commend it, but obviously has its challenges, too, in separating events in the subject’s life which were actually close together. In my reading of your book, there is a loose chronology, but each chapter covers a theme across the whole of his life. What persuaded you to make the choice of this over a more conventional chronology?

John Burbidge: A life is such a sprawling, complicated, messy thing to try to capture in the few pages of a book that I felt it would be helpful if I could find something that could be a metaphor or sustaining symbol around which I could weave the narrative, to give the reader something to hold onto and return to. My model for this was Nicholas Shakespeare in his magnificent biography of Bruce Chatwin, in which he chose a cabinet in Chatwin’s grandmother’s house to play this kind of role in his book, as it did in Chatwin’s life. I found this a useful technique and when I tried to emulate it for Glaskin, I came up with his love of the beach, and one particular beach, Cottesloe, that played such a pivotal part in his life. I decided to start my biography there and return to it at the end, to give the story a sense of completion.

Regarding my approach, it is a blend of the chronological and thematic. I’m not sure how conscious a decision this when I started writing, but it emerged as I went along. With a biography, readers like to know how a person grows, absorbs from those influences around him, and responds to life’s challenges as they present themselves, which calls for a certain degree of chronology. In addition, with a writer, there will no doubt be a progression from his early works to his later ones, so this feeds that approach. But as I did my research (over a number of years), I found certain themes began to emerge and demand attention, so I decided to focus my chapters around those, while maintaining a basic chronological progression. It was a balancing and weaving act, with a few changes and false starts along the way.

Perhaps what cemented my choice to use this two-pronged approach was the fact that as I researched Glaskin’s life, I began to see threads that ran through it and I wanted to see if I could connect the dots over time. For example, his encounters with Aboriginal Australians and Asians from an very early age laid the groundwork for his later experiences with them as an adult and the inclusion of them as characters (usually heroes) in his novels. Or his knee-jerk reaction to threats, which exhibited themselves in his early run-ins with authority at Catholic schools and reappeared throughout his life in his aggressive behaviour whenever he felt poorly done by.

Finally, a biography is a story and needs to hold the reader’s interest like any good tale. Highly chronological biographies run the risk of becoming tedious. I decided to focus primarily on those aspects of Glaskin’s life that really grabbed me, and to mine those, on the assumption that readers, too, would be similarly affected by them.

Part 2 tomorrow – ‘Dealing with Glaskinitis’

Bold or careless?

01 Tuesday Jul 2014

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There is a deep resemblance always between a writer and his work, but it has nothing to do with his expressed opinions or sentiments; it is rather that the form of his work embodies the form of his personality.

– Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, 232.

It’s sentences like this that got Ackroyd in trouble with some reviewers when his monumental biography of Dickens appeared in 1990. It takes a boldness or carelessness to make pronouncements and generalisations like this one. I can think of possible ways in which he’s wrong about particular authors, but it also has a feel of truth; in this case, he is talking of the ‘variegated mixture’ of ‘humour; poetry; declamation; melodrama’ in not just Oliver Twist but all of Dickens’ novels. To extend the idea: Borges is enigmatic, brief, timeless. Auster is playful yet intense, full of life’s strangeness. Oh, this is getting very subjective. Counter-argument: we mainly know authors through their work; the ‘resemblance’ is inevitable and misleading. But maybe Ackroyd has a right to his judgement, given the preface tells us that he’s read every extant letter etc of Dickens.

‘Might have been’: speculation in the biography; also, reading fiction autobiographically

19 Thursday Jun 2014

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In the first chapter of his biography of Charles Dickens (1990), Peter Ackroyd describes the death of Dickens’ infant brother and comments:

If the infant Charles had harboured resentful or even murderous longings against the supplanter, how effectively they had come home to roost! And how strong the guilt might have been. Might have been – that is necessarily the phrase. And yet when the adulthood of Dickens is considered, with all its evidences that Dickens did indeed suffer from an insiduous pressure of irrational guilt, and when all the images of dead infants are picked out of his fiction, it is hard to believe that this six-month episode in the infancy of the novelist did not have some permanent effect upon him. (18)

What are we to make of this technique, ‘might have been’? Probably, the ‘might have been’ will not be justified again (‘that is necessarily the phrase’) throughout the long tome of a biography. ‘Might have beens’ make for interesting reading – what is a biography without speculation? But ‘might have beens’ need to be made by a biographer who is fair and insightful and knowledgeable. (And I suspect Ackroyd has those qualities.)

Note also the appeal to Dickens’ fiction; every literary biographer does this; Adam Begley overdoes it in his new biography of John Updike, every scene from Updike’s life explained by a story or novel he wrote. It’s a dangerous business; so far Ackroyd does it in a suggestive and interesting way. But we’re all meant to know Dickens’ work, and he can refer ahead to characters like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, etc – what of the writer people are not so familiar with – like KSP?

The temptations of autobiography and biography: a quote

12 Thursday Jun 2014

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This is the temptation of the autobiographer: to put the past into the shape it should have taken; to make yourself cut the figure you should have cut. Likewise, the biographer, in relation to his subject, may behave as avenging angel, remorselessly straighening the record, or as a scourge, reducing the subject to insignificance or mediocrity. But it is less likely that the truth will lie so conveniently at one or other of those extremes than that it will be intricately ramified through the whole spectrum.

– Brian Matthews, Louisa, p. 103

Writing beautifully, wearing research lightly: Rebecca Skloot’s achievements in her book on Henrietta Lacks

22 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in biographical method, biographical quests, book review, creative nonfiction, role of the biographer within the biography, structure of biographies

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Henrietta_Lacks_(1920-1951)

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Macmillan, 2010) is an exemplar of creative non-fiction, an intriguing combination of biographical quest and popular science. It was ten years in the writing, as Skloot lived off student loans and credit cards on her quest to follow the story of Henrietta Lacks, the black woman whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and seem to be immortal, multiplying and living on for decades, and used in thousands of medical breakthroughs.

In her long acknowledgements, Skloot writes that one of her friends ‘taught me to care deeply about story structure’ (Loc 5157), and Immortal Life is indeed a brilliantly structured story. Through much of the book, Skloot alternates chapters retelling the life and afterlife of Henrietta and her cells with chapters recounting Skloot’s own quest through the late 1990s and 2000s to uncover the story. A simple but invaluable orienting device is a timeline indicator at the start of each chapter. Other biographies and histories should consider using it. While Skloot is in the action and gives a couple of biographical clues about herself in the prologue (‘I grew up white and agnostic’; she mentions a marriage and divorce during the writing of the book), for the rest of the book she remains restrainedly silent about her own life, except to the extent it directly affects the quest.

chapter-guide

From Chapter 29, it is Skloot herself who is at the centre of the afterlife of Henrietta and for the final eight chapters, the quest is recounted chronologically, with the focus on Skloot’s relationship with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who has been deeply affected by the legacy of what happened to her mother, and the way her contribution to science has been long unacknowledged. She mentions in passing that an editor who “insisted I take the Lacks family out of the book was injured in a mysterious accident” (loc 217). While the troubles of the disadvantaged Lacks family and their attempts to deal with Henrietta’s legacy are so important to Skloot’s purpose and the achievements of the book, the editor may have been onto something, however misguided and extreme her remedy. Those final eight chapters almost feel they could be from a different book. The beautiful, understated writing of the rest of the book is overwhelmed by long sections of dialogue from Deborah and the others. It’s captured well, and it’s a story worth telling; I wonder, though, if it needed condensing and balancing.

One of the accomplishments of this book is the way Skloot wears a decade of research so lightly. There are no footnotes through the book, but notes on the sources for each chapter at the end. The book reads more like a novel than most biographies; Skloot has managed to find enough detail to show as much as she tells. Here is the opening paragraph of chapter one:

On January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his old Buick, watching the rain fall. He was parked under a towering oak tree outside Johns Hopkins Hospital with three of his children— two still in diapers—waiting for their mother, Henrietta. A few minutes earlier she’d jumped out of the car, pulled her jacket over her head, and scurried into the hospital, past the “colored” bathroom, the only one she was allowed to use. In the next building, under an elegant domed copper roof, a ten-and-a-half-foot marble statue of Jesus stood, arms spread wide, holding court over what was once the main entrance of Hopkins. No one in Henrietta’s family ever saw a Hopkins doctor without visiting the Jesus statue, laying flowers at his feet, saying a prayer , and rubbing his big toe for good luck. But that day Henrietta didn’t stop. (loc 239-245)

She interviewed David Lacks while he still alive, so some of the detail must come from him; she also references the research she did on segregation, and she visited the hospital, observing the Jesus statue and presumably the oak tree. But did she know he parked under it on that day? If she couldn’t be sure, was it an acceptable guess? I’m not sure, but I am in awe of the way her book manages to read as one that is simultaneously meticulously researched and beautifully written.

Benumbed by facts?

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in biographical method, biographies of writers, artists and musicians, book review, daily life

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Reviewing Stella, Jill Roe’s massive biography of Miles Franklin (Fourth Estate, 2008), Sylvia Martin sums up a fascinating debate between two other reviewers:

A writer who has left some sort of a record of almost every day of her adult life would seem to be the perfect subject for a biographer, but it can prove to be a mixed blessing and I think it has here. In her mostly positive review, Goldsworthy argues that the ‘empiricist historian’ approach leads to a wealth of detail that can cause the reader to become ‘benumbed by facts’, an opinion to which Hergenhan takes exception, claiming that ‘[r]eaders will deeply feel the density of the representation of the living out of the life’…
(History Australia, 89.1, 2009)

Where there’s a scarcity of information on a subject, the biographer is forced to read the fragments deeply and make much of them. Where there’s the glut of information, as in this case, it’s harder to get to what really matters.

The full passage from Goldsworthy’s review is:

Roe’s approach to the art of biography is traditional and straightforward:  she  is  an  empiricist  historian  and  that  is her methodology. The book is a magnificent feat of exhaustive research, but that in itself has one major disadvantage: the reader must plough through lists of meetings that Franklin  went  to,  friends  she  visited, relatives  with  whom  she  corresponded  and  even,  at  one  point, the  specifications  of the  ship  on which  she  sailed  to  America. While these  catalogues go  some way towards conveying the dense texture of Franklin’s life, there is too  little  summary  and  pulling-together of the details; every now and then  the reader must simply stop,  benumbed  by  facts. (ABR, February 2009)

Sylvia Martin goes on to write:

Goldsworthy  wishes  the  biographer  had  delved  more  into  the  realm  of  speculation  and opinion; Hergenhan claims she ‘calculatingly stands back, leaving readers free to “speculate”’. Roe herself wrote in an earlier publication that ‘[a] strictly historical approach should go a long way to resolving the paradoxes’ of Miles Franklin’s life. But can such an approach, even if the ‘life’ is contextualised as thoroughly as this one is, make for a satisfying biography? Biography is a hybrid genre and the narrative strategies employed to shape the life in question as well as the biographer’s own interpretation of elements of that life are surely as important as accurate and meticulous historical research. To quote English biographer Hermione Lee: ‘[w]hether we think of biography as more like history or more like fiction, what we want from it is a vivid sense of the person’. Like the ABR reviewer, I longed for more breaking away from the chronology, more extended drawing together of patterns and connections, more sense of the peaks and troughs of Franklin’s life that tend to be flattened out in the daily record, more risk-taking from the biographer.

This idea of ‘breaking away from chronology’ is a key one for the biographer. The biographer has to see patterns that aren’t clear in the day to day detail, and know when to tie together events separated by time but linked by theme. The review also raises the issue of spending the right amount of time on the ‘peaks and troughs’, as against ‘ordinary time’, the less remarkable phases of someone’s life.

A lot of this, though, comes down to what readers are looking for in a biography – and for many, many readers, Jill Roe’s account was exactly what they were looking for.

Stella #1: The prologue

01 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by in biographical method, prologues and introductions, reading report

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[First in a series of reading reports, tracing my progress through Jill Roe’s Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography (Pan McMillan, 2008)]

Jill Roe opens her massive biography of Stella Miles Franklin with a simple two page prologue which manages to carry much information lightly. She tells the story of Stella’s mother riding by horse to her own mother’s house to give birth in 1879. In doing so, she maps out the territory of southern NSW which one senses will be essential as the backdrop of Stella’s life. She gives a brief account of Stella’s ancestry by unpacking her name, covering details which could go on for boring pages in a less well crafted biography.

Surely acknowledging the limits of the archives well is a key part of a good biography, and in the prologue the gaps are noted: she took a different route ‘for reasons unknown, possibly to do with the weather’ and ‘it is not recorded whether she was accompanied’. Perhaps these signals can provoke the reader to imagining the scene better and to assuming some responsibility as co-re-creators of the life of the subject as they read.

Giving a sense of everyday life

25 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by in biographical method, Katharine Susannah Prichard, quotes

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I think biography should attempt to give a sense of how the subject has lived their everyday life. Not in exhaustive detail, but well chosen sketches. Most of the attention of the biography, of course, needs to be taken up by the more dramatic moments, but a sense of the everyday gives some context for the dramatic.

As in a novel, a key way to convey such a picture is in long sentences summing up a long period of time by observing the patterns. In his biography of his mother, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Ric Throssell does it well at this point:

…and somehow contrived to write among the distractions of the city and the realities of the present: the war, the pot-boiling chores still necessary to earn her living; the political commitments she had accepted; friends who called unendingly to talk of art and literature, of world affairs and industry, and the personal problems of love, marriage, children and the state of their health — friends among the men of power in industry and radical politics; those whose names were to fade into obscurity; young writers who later achieved recognition; the known and once-famous, who drifted with the years and disappeared; the unimportant, insignificant, unaccomplished men and women who earned Katharine’s affection by simply being what they were.

Ric Throssell,  (2012-05-23). Wild Weeds and Windflowers: The life and letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard (p. 120). Allen and Unwin. Kindle Edition.