Recently the Times Literary Supplement featured a piece by a biographer named Craig Brown entitled "Nothing is real: The slippery art of biography." In it, he argues that works of the genre written in a classic mode, following the subject from cradle to grave, guided by the facts, through a coherent narrative, can't be trusted. His reasons:
Biography can't illuminate the nature of creativity through information. For writers and painters (he doesn't mention musicians but I think he means any artist), facts about them, where they were, who they saw, what they did, won't reveal how the art is made. Brown presumes the reader of biography is in search of the master key to unlocking an artist's work. Actually, my aim is more modest: to get to know the artist better.
Too many details. In constructing a story out of the materials of someone's life, the biographer (or memoirist) has to choose what to include and what to omit. Brown presents examples of writers who chose badly that nevertheless fail to prove definitively that no writer is capable of choosing well, to give insight into the subject without harming narrative flow. Not that it matters, according to his logic, since no one could ever tell the story of a life and get to the start. After all, a truly conscientious biographer would have to begin with an account of family history so far into the past and so microscopically thorough, the biographer would die before completing it. And if such a book were somehow completed, the reader would probably abandon it long before reaching the page on which the subject is born.
Biography can't grant complete access to any life. He stresses:
While no life can be recaptured in its entirety, not even one single minute of any life could ever be recaptured as a whole, as there is not a minute in the life of the brain that can be isolated from the rest of its life. We live in the present, but we think in the past and in the present and in the future, and often all at the same time.
Anything short of being William Faulkner, in other words, makes the very idea of biography a fraudulent enterprise. His ideal doesn't lie on the page, with mere language and structures and imagination, but is a kind of mindhacking.
"Biography as a form is necessarily artificial. In the end, all biography is a form of fiction." Labeling a biographical portrait as fiction doesn't indemnify it against inaccuracy.
"The real life of anyone takes place largely in the mind, yet it is only the secondary, external stuff – people met, places visited, opinions expressed, and so forth – that is accessible to the biographer." A criticism related to the first, only more sweeping. Not only is the creation of the art inaccessible, the true essence of a life is inaccessible too.
The blank spaces of any life tempt a biographer to fill them in with speculation. Again: Brown presents examples of biographers who've written groundlessly and absurdly as if transcribing the subject's thoughts and feelings. This is something to hold against those biographies (though it might not be held against a fictional biography). But in my experience reading them and reading opinions about them, the practice isn't so common that the genre may as well be thrown out entirely. Further, one can make an educated guess while informing the reader that it is a guess and, in general, be open in letting readers know the method undertaken to write the book, leaving it to them to judge whether the writer has done the subject justice.
Firsthand accounts can't be trusted. Personal accounts can't be trusted, either.
Memory is slippery. Biographers, too, are slippery.
"Another shortcoming of biography lies in its bias towards coherence. In their drive to create a seamless narrative, biographers are forced to conceal the randomness of life, the contrived nature of 'character' and the unpredictability of human beings." Our lives are chaos. That is precisely why writers search for a form: to give chaos order. This would be true even if biography is fiction. And if imposing order on any work that sets out to contain a life is false, his judgment would extend to any story, invented or not.
Finally, Brown contrasts it with the mode he deems superior, the subjective, to the point of promoting the value of gossip and hearsay. In defense of one writer's free use of anecdotes of dubious veracity, he says: "He may have swapped fairness for laughter, but he always got a terrific exchange rate." Exaggerations and lies are fit to print so long as they entertain - he certainly sounds slippery here, and cheerfully so. One way to guarantee a loss of credibility is blithe disregard for fairness.
"Nothing is real" - provocative title except, after reading Brown's piece, I'm not sure he even believes that. But his position does seem to be that writing "true" biography is impossible so fuck it. His argument for discrediting the classic mode itself is so unyielding, so halfbaked, for a moment I wondered whether the piece was burlesque. Anyway, some of what he says is worth bearing in mind, if not to suddenly incite everyone to fill dumpsters with biographies, then to prompt consideration of what makes for a better biography. Also, he reminds the reader not to be an innocent certain of discovering the last word (or every word) on a whole life. The biographer is no omniscient deity.
But what really stuns and amuses me about the piece is that Brown leads the reader to an unexpected question that lies beyond what originally drew my click: Who's trustworthy?
Skepticism is a virtue. Limiting the scope of the question to literature and sources of information for now, I have warranted suspicions about the scrupulousness of writers and publishers, including those that enjoy a veneer of respectability. (I wouldn't recommend reading anything as a total innocent.) I've even written elsewhere about my caution around reading biography and memoir. Yet I've always held on to a hope, I realize, that there is someone out there I can trust to give it to me straight, without relying on tricks and deceit. Isn't that true of anyone who reads, though? Well, maybe not. Brown goes a step further, implying that no one, under any circumstances, can be trusted - not shady biographers, not the subject of biography, not the people around the subject. Facts are dry, all surface, hardly count. His objections can just as easily be hurled at the broader category of history. And if the past can't be brought to the page, our present can't be either. That sounds a lot like the door opening to misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy theory that is among the most infernal problems of our time. If nothing is real, any version of reality is as legitimate as the next, any version of reality can be sold, any version of reality can be decreed the official, lawful version.
Let's place ourselves on stable ground and mention a couple of things that are in fact real and relevant to our lives today: (1) The ongoing pandemic (2) Trump's ongoing coup attempt. In the face of rightwing propaganda that says spreading a potentially fatal illness is a personal choice and Trump should be in the White House based on no evidence but his word, maintaining a firm grip on what's real is a matter of survival.
The writer I'm looking for, at a minimum, knows this.
