the art of biography Flashcards
biography compared with the arts of poetry and fiction, is a younger art
interests in our selves and in other people’s selves is a late development of the human mind
not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives
of private people
it is that biography is the most
restrictive of the arts
the novelist is free
the biographer is tied
here is a distinction between biography and fiction- a proof that they differ in the very stuff of which they are made.
one is made with the help of friends, of facts; the other is created without any restrictions save those the artist, for reasons which seem good to him, chooses to obey
[Lytton Strachey] for at last it was possible to tell the truth about the dead; and the victorian age was rich in remarkable figures many of whom had been grossly deformed by the effigies that had been placed over them
to recreate them to show them as they really were, was a task that called for gift analogous to the poet’s or the novelist’s, yet did not ask that inventive power in which he found himself lacking
the biographer could not invent her
because at every moment some document was at hand to check his invention
There was Queen Victoria, solid, real, palpable.
but undoubtedly she was limited. could not biography produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama
‘by what art are we to worm our way into those strange spirits? those even stranger bodies?
the more clearly we perceive it, the more remote that singular universe becomes,’ [Lytton Strachey]
nevertheless, the combination proved unworkable; fact and fiction
refused to mix
we can also be sure that it is a different life from the life of poetry and fiction- a life lived at a lower degree of tension
and for that reason its creations are not destined for the immortality which the artist now and then achieves for his creations
Micawber and Miss Bates we may be certain will survive
Lockhart’s Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria
The artist’s imagination at its most intense fires out what is perishable in fact builds with what is durable; but the biographer must accept
the perishable, build with it, imbed it in the very fabric of his work
much will perish; little will live. and thus we come to the conclusion that he is a crafts man, not an artist; and his work
is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between
yet on another level the work of the biographer is invaluable;
we cannot thank him sufficiently for what he does for us. for we are incapable of living wholly in the intense world of the imagination
the imagination is soon a faculty that soon
tires and needs rest and refreshment
but for a tired imagination the proper food is not inferior poetry
or minor fiction, indeed they blunt and debauch it, but sober fact, that ‘authentic information’ from which, as Lytton Strachey has shown us, good biography is made
when and where did the real man live; how did he look; did he wear laced boots or elastic sided
who were his aunts, and his friends; how did he blow his nose; whom did he love, and how, and when he came to die did he die in his bed as a christian or…
by telling us true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and the shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline
the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save they very greatest
for few poets and novelists are capable of that high degree
of tension which gives us reality
but almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us more than another fact
to add to our collection
he can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that
suggests and endangers
for how often, when a biography is read and tossed aside, some scan remains bright,
some figure lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a poem or a novel, to feel a start of recognition, as if we remembered something that we had known before
