Meryle Secrest recently wrote a book called Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (Knopf, 2007). The title is darkly humorous. Secrest does not literally plan homicide. But, like many biographers, she resents the widows (and widowers) who block access to documents that would reveal the foibles and accomplishments of the subjects under scrutiny.
Secrest — author of nine biographies, including studies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Leonard Bernstein — was trained as a journalist, most notably at The Washington Post. If she had been trained in academe, if she had begun her career by writing a doctoral dissertation about an individual’s life, she almost surely would have approached her biographies, and her book title, more gingerly.
Secrest not only battles widows and widowers for access to information but also must choose whether to disclose previously secret heterosexual and homosexual love affairs, fend off threats of litigation, decide whether to follow or violate life-story chronology, and discern what factors have served as primary motivations for her famous, complex subjects.
Sadly, her risqué — and educational — revelations are quite unlikely to permeate university classrooms. Biography is rarely studied as a literary genre, despite its practice going back thousands of years, despite its prevalence on library shelves, despite its obvious fascination for readers.
We can theorize why biography has failed to gain traction in academe. But whatever the reasons, it is time to anoint biography — both its history and its composition — as a genre just as worthy of university courses as are novels, short stories, poetry, and essays.
An informal survey suggests that stand-alone courses about biography exist on, at most, a handful of American campuses. It appears that only one, the University of Hawaii, has made the craft of biography a major part of the curriculum.
Robert D. Habich, an English professor who teaches a graduate course in American literary biography at Ball State University, notes that “the entire drift of academic criticism and theory since the 1920s has tended to dismiss biography as a viable interpretive tool. From the ‘New Critical’ focus on independent texts in the 1930s to the fears of the ‘intentional fallacy’ in the 1940s to Roland Barthes’s often-quoted death of the author in the 1970s, the theoretical emphasis has been to question where the authority for textual interpretation lies and to remove authorial intentions from the equation.”
At Ball State, his colleagues and administrators “are quite supportive of my research and teaching in literary biography, and my students seem to find the approach refreshing,” Habich says. “We examine both the theoretical perspectives that shape biography and interpretation and the practical, pedagogical uses of author biography in the classroom.”
He says with confidence that “authors’ lives still fascinate us, and we are seeing more solid biographical work than ever, certainly on American writers.”
A clarion call for teaching biography on lots of campuses has been issued in a book by Nigel Hamilton, a biographer of Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, and Field Marshal Montgomery; a former director of the British Institute of Biography; and a former professor of biography at De Montfort University, in England. (I can think of only half a dozen professors of biography in the United States.)
Biography has received little respect and much disdain within academe, Hamilton documents in Biography: A Brief History (Harvard University Press, 2007). “Instead of becoming, like history or art or literature, a premier domain of the humanities and sciences, biography seemed insufficiently substantial or scientific to merit study or teaching, a fate that became self-perpetuating,” he writes. “Lacking scholars to examine it, and constrained by a focus so narrow that no student could be made sufficiently curious to learn of its history, biography’s integral role in the shaping of human identity, as well as its varying practice through the ages across different media, went uncharted and largely ignored.”
Stephen B. Oates, a former professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, explained in Biography as High Adventure: Life Writers Speak on Their Art (University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), which he edited, the contrast between journalists-turned-biographers and Ph.D. biographers who reside in academe. He was discussing his experience studying the then still-fresh life and death of Martin Luther King Jr.
After finding sources reluctant to talk and documents off limits, Oates wrote: “The trouble was, my parents had raised me to be a gentleman. I took ‘no’ to mean ‘no.’ Now, I had to impersonate an investigative reporter — I had to be aggressive, devoid of shame, and rude if necessary, and I had never to take no for an answer. Nothing in graduate school had ever prepared me for this. I was terrible at it. I hated to intrude on other people’s privacy, to ask them to remember things that could be painful. Who gave me the right to do that?”
In the Oates book, the biographer Paul Murray Kendall, then an English professor at Ohio University, noted that the craft “lies between historical writing and belles-lettres, somewhat disdainfully claimed by both.” During his four decades in academe, Kendall said, he felt as if he were always “walking the boundaries” because of his insistence on writing biographies.
David S. Reynolds, a biographer and professor at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York, has noted the phenomenon of second-class citizenship. He traces the animus against biographers within academe to the New Critics of the 1930s, who “emphasized close reading of literary works to the exclusion of biographical and social considerations.” Biography also received criticism from the deconstructionists, who “believed that human life, like everything else, was no more than a ‘text.’” Outside of English departments, the New Social History movement “emphasized quantitative data and social and economic processes,” to the detriment of biography.
That was a far cry from the previous century, when what Scott E. Casper calls “biographical mania” yielded life after life to the reading public: “When it succeeded, it did so by influencing people’s lives, not just stimulating their imaginations literary or otherwise. Biography had constructive, cultural purposes.” Casper, a history professor at the University of Nevada at Reno, explains the 19th-century enthusiasm in Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a biographer of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, taught a course on biography at Wesleyan University. She came to believe that the complexities and rewards of writing and reading biography should be better appreciated on campuses.
Young-Bruehl said her students entered the course taking the genre for granted, “as though the re-creation of a life simply appeared from nowhere, fully formed.” At the completion of the course, they could analyze the form with insight.
At Auburn University, Paula R. Back-scheider teaches a biography course occasionally from her position in the English department, where her primary specialty is 18th-century literature. In 1999 she published Reflections on Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999). She hoped it would catch on as a textbook for biography courses around the nation, but it has not been widely adopted.
Backscheider says spreading the word about a canon of biography is difficult because so many publishers “just don’t believe there is a market for accessible theoretical books about biography for general and classroom use.” She adds that professors who want to teach biography courses share the blame. “We aren’t publicizing our needs and how exciting these courses are, aren’t editing anthologies, aren’t holding conferences on the extended canon of biography.”
It’s time for biography to bust out. Using Secrest’s decidedly unacademic book in university courses would be a fine way to start building interest in, and understanding of, biography.
Carl Rollyson, a prolific biographer who is a professor at Baruch College, is one of the few academics working mightily to popularize the art of biography. Every Wednesday his column about biography appears in the New York Sun. But the newspaper’s paid readership is minuscule in New York and almost nonexistent outside the five boroughs.
A few professors have figured out a way to teach a biography course regularly, mined the literature, and captivated classroom audiences. At the University of Missouri at Columbia, a recently retired English professor, Catherine Parke, taught a course titled “Writing Nonfiction Prose: Biography.” Parke is not primarily a biographer, despite having written two books about biography. Rather, she is a polymath, as reflected in her syllabus, which notes that biographers “must know everything about everything — history, sociology, politics, economics, psychology, religion, popular culture, etc. Biography is a profoundly social form, which examines subjects in their social settings large and small. Hence the need to know just about everything about human culture and history.”
But the major breakthrough has occurred at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly began publication in the university’s Center for Biographical Research in 1978. From the start, the scholars of biography at Hawaii hoped to break down the barriers among academic disciplines, says George Simson, first director of the center. “All the disciplines are useful for studying people if we can integrate them,” he writes. “Literary scholars contribute sensitivity to symbol and language. Psychologists put a face on history. Historians serve as journalists getting the facts straight.”
Today at Hawaii, a course in biography is supplemented by five other courses in what is called “life writing.” Craig Howes, current director of the Center for Biographical Research, says 15 faculty members teach courses in life writing.
This year the Leon Levy Center for Biography opened at the Graduate Center of CUNY. The new program, according to its Web site, “exists to encourage the connection between university-based and independent biographers working in print, film, visual arts and other media. Through public programs, the center also intends to stimulate public conversation about the role of biography in our time.” The program awards fellowships with $60,000 stipends to “established and emerging biographers with or without university affliation.”
My dream course in biography would include a few sessions of historical and theoretical context to satisfy faculty members and administrators who believe the genre lacks academic weight. The primary focus, however, would be on how the best biographers conduct their research and write their narratives. The course would serve as an appreciation of the genre for those who approach it solely as readers, and as a how-to by example for those who want to approach it as writers.
The reading list might look like this:
Dubin’s Lives, a novel by Bernard Malamud (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979). Reading well-written, relevant fiction is entertaining as well as instructive. Malamud, an accomplished novelist probably most famous today among students for his novel The Natural, which became the vehicle for a Robert Redford movie, brilliantly captures the practice and theory of biography. His protagonist is William Dubin, scholar, teacher, and tortured middle-aged biographer.
Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage Publications, 1997). Because magazine profiles are less daunting than lengthy biographies, I would start the students off with the profiles. Harrington is a former Washington Post Magazine writer who now teaches journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His explanations of how to capture a person in print are compelling and brilliant. The magazine features he includes, written by himself and others, are gems.
Writing a Woman’s Life, by Carolyn G. Heilbrun (W.W. Norton, 1988; reader’s-guide edition, Ballantine, 2002). This slim book serves as an excellent how-to for would-be authors and a thought-provoking volume for spectators.
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, by Sarah Churchwell (Metropolitan Books/Holt, 2005). An American who teaches her native culture to British students at the University of East Anglia, Churchwell compares every biography ever written of the dead actress. She shows persuasively, and with flair, that not every biography of Monroe can be true in all the details, because they contradict each other profoundly. Her book will burn into students’ minds the lesson that biographical truth should never be taken for granted.
Steve Weinberg’s books include Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller (W.W. Norton, 2008). He teaches journalism at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 31, Page B15