Writing Lives – Franz
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Writing Lives
Paul Emerson Franz
March, 2010
Biography and Life Writing
Final Paper
Professor Carol Shloss
Writing Lives – Franz
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Introduction
What is biography, and what does it try to accomplish? Recording the events of a life is
hardly sufficient to describe the work of the biographer, who must not only chronicle, but must
also explicate and strive to understand. For the reader, however, the project comes across
differently; for the reader, there is an effort to come to terms with the lives of others, removed in
time and space, but still somehow essentially human. There is, then, some relationship between
history and biography, which tries also to bring to the present some semblance of understanding
of the past, but there is also a profound difference. In this paper, I will begin by discussing the
division of history and biography that began with Plutarch. This division will help to elucidate
what I see as the essential questions of the biographical process, which will in turn be addressed
by looking through the lens of Richard Holmes's Footsteps.
Finally, I'll address Diane
Middlebrook's Anne Sexton in order to evaluate the process that Holmes suggests. Throughout
the paper, I hope to raise questions and provide, if not answers, at least a rough sketch of the
direction in which a dialogue about biography might proceed.
The Project of Biography – Plutarch
The writing of histories was not uncommon in the ancient world. Among others, Livy,
Herodotus, Tacitus, and Thucydides each tried to describe in broad terms the motions of nations
and people, alternately capturing the origin and downfall of the Roman Empire, or the incredible
wars of the Greek City-States. These stories have no shortage of heroes – no dearth of individual
anecdotes to humanize the effort – and yet they remain histories, complete with the hierarchical
understanding that humans make up a society, and that societies, after all, are what make up the
narrative of the world.
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What is the interest of biography, then? What can the individual life tell us that a history
cannot? Of course, the individual is easier to comprehend, his or her travails and successes more
obviously apply to our own lives. Is that alone enough to warrant biography?
Plutarch was the first known biographer.
His humbly, but aptly, titled Lives were
something of an experiment in the writing of history. He is at least partially responsible for the
troubling “Great Man” theory of history with which we are all familiar. His project, however,
does not seem to be the elevation of individuals into historical prominence, but rather something
quite the opposite. At a time when histories were written which excused the sometimes awful
shortcomings of societies because of the actions of the men who led them, Plutarch instead
turned his eye upon those men, uncovering their weaknesses as well as their strengths,
humanizing them for an audience that theretofore had simply worshiped.
The difficulty of his undertaking Plutarch recognized, and nowhere does he better express
his philosophy of biography than in the opening of his Life of Alexander. “It being my purpose
to write the lives of Alexander the king, and of Caesar, by whom Pompey was destroyed,” he
writes (in John Dryden's translation):
the multitude of their great actions affords so large a field that I were to
blame if I should not by way of apology forewarn my reader that I have
chosen rather to epitomise the most celebrated parts of their story, than to
insist at large on every particular circumstance of it. It must be borne in
mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most
glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of
virtue and vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression
of jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most
famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.
Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the
face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I
must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and
indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavour by these to portray
their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be
treated by others. (Plutarch, 139)
Writing Lives – Franz
Plutarch's project is not a simple one, however tempting it is to regard this statement as
straightforward. Often the subjects of his Lives are not only dead, but have been for hundreds of
years. At a time when record keeping was even more tenuous than it is now, it is impossible to
imagine that the very “matters of less moment” and “expression[s] of jest” that Plutarch is after
were well preserved. Evidence was not paramount; the story was. The beauty and meaning of
the well-painted portrait won the day.
Despite the troublesome issue of accuracy in Plutarch's accounts of Caesar, Antony, Cato,
Alexander, Solon, and the countless other ancient luminaries towards whom he turned his gaze,
few ancient works feel so timely today as the Lives. The foreignness of Greek and Roman
culture and the gap of some two millennia are not enough to rob Plutarch's efforts of their
relevance. Perhaps that is because we do not and cannot know the accuracy of his accounts, and
therefore are free to understand his stories as complex and archetypal parables, somewhat like
the myths that provided the content of Greek tragedies. That Alexander, for example, was real,
and that the events described in Plutarch's account were more or less accurate merely sets the
stage for a human drama all the more poignant for its unassuming, undramatic presentation.
Alexander, in Plutarch, is human, regardless of whether Plutarch portrays the kind of human he
was in reality.
I'm not convinced that Plutarch's fictionalized “humanization” provides a satisfying
account of the purpose of biography. That biography is somehow different from history is
certain, but that difference in genre raises more questions than it answers. The status of truth in
even the writing of history is complicated, even though there is little question that, for that genre,
truth is desirable. What of biography? Is truth desirable? What does truth look like? How can a
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Writing Lives – Franz
lived life be translated from its sometimes spiritual, sometimes mundane essences into words?
How can those words – like those Plutarch wrote about Alexander in the Lives – reach across
generations and nations to reform into a meaningful, or at least entertaining, story?
Throughout this quarter, the project of biography has been an ever-present question in
both our class discussions and in my own thinking. What is that project, after all? There are a
great many things which biography can and does do, but it seems to me that Plutarch asks a
fundamental question by separating himself from history: what are “the marks and indications of
the souls of men?” This is the spirit of biography, to discover not what happened to a person or
even why, but rather who that person was to whom such things happened. And why do we care
so much? That, I cannot answer, except to say that empathy – even and especially for those long
dead – connects us to our past more strongly than facts and dates ever can. History by itself may
be interesting enough, but it finds its true relevance in biography.
A Coherent Framework – Holmes
Richard Holmes's Footsteps is not a biography or even an autobiography, but rather a
story about what biography might mean. It is Plutarch's meta-biographical comment writ-large
and expanded over the course of a series of stories about his own efforts to write biographies. I
suspect Plutarch never would have thought there was an audience for writing about writing
biographies, but there it is.
In the process of becoming a biographer, Holmes explores not only what biography is,
but provides an opinion as to how the project of biography ought to be accomplished (or at least
how he chooses to accomplish it). From his journeys, following the footsteps of his subjects, he
creates a coherent framework, both for his own writing process, and out of the swirling chaos of
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the lives of his subjects.
There are two passages from Holmes that I wish to discuss, one from his 1964: Travels
chapter, the other from his 1972: Exiles.
The quotations are both complementary and
contradictory, and thereby offer a kind of verbal frame for a discussion of what the project of
biography is, whether that project is, indeed, possible, and why we readers invest so much of
ourselves into lives long past.
The first passage runs contrary, but also (perhaps unwittingly) pays tribute, to Plutarch:
The single subject of biography is in this sense a chimera, almost as much
as the Noble Savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, living in splendid isolation.
The truth is almost the reverse: that Stevenson existed very largely in, and
through, his contact with other people: his books are written for his public;
his letters for his friends; even his private journal is a way of giving social
expression – externalising – his otherwise inarticulated thoughts. It is in
this sense that all real biographical evidence is “third party” evidence;
evidence that is witnessed. Just as the biographer cannot make up dialogue,
if he is to avoid fiction; so he cannot really say that his subject “thought or
“felt” a particular thing. (Holmes, 68)
This recognition that even the best remembered individuals existed in a social world is
paramount to even Plutarch's Lives. What differs here is Holmes's conviction to “avoid fiction”
by avoiding both dialogue and loaded words like “thought” and “felt.”
The “third party
evidence” upon which biography rests may allow for inference, but it hardly allows the writer to
reconstruct and reanimate a subject in full. The modern biographer does not write lives.
Holmes does chase lives, however, and though he can never capture his subject, he can at
least begin to recreate the world in which Robert Louis Stevenson or Percy Shelley lived. He is
perhaps constrained to trace, in large part, “the most glorious exploits” that Plutarch avoided, but
his efforts to follow Stevenson betray a deeper desire to capture, instead, the less monumental –
or at least less visible – aspects of Stevenson's life. He seeks a romance, the feeling of a journey
Writing Lives – Franz
through France, and the gentle companionship of a mule for evidence about which he cannot
write in good faith except in his own story. Why, then, pursue Stevenson? Why pursue Shelley?
Why tear through France and Italy, seeking forgotten homes, crossing destroyed bridges, staring
out at changed streets, and overlooking a different (so similar, but so essentially different) sea?
In such moments one feels that time retreats, that Holmes somehow does accomplish his goal,
finding a more intimate 'evidence.' What does this evidence amount to, the evidence of looking
out from where Shelley's front door would have been, trying to imagine what he would have seen
and thought and felt? In Plutarch's analogy of the biographer as a painter, I wonder whether
Holmes details his subject's faces with his pursuits, or if instead he merely uses them to better
shade the backgrounds. Is he a writer of fiction, a writer of history, or both?
The second of our passages from Footsteps speaks to the purpose of biography:
The great appeal of biography seems to lie, in part, in its claim to a coherent
and integral view of human affairs. It is based on the profoundly hopeful
assumption that people really are responsible for their actions, and that there
is a moral continuity between the inner and the outer man. The public and
the private life do, in the end, make sense of each other; and the one is
meaningless without the other. Its view of life is Greek: character expresses
itself in action: and can be understood, if not necessarily justified. (Holmes,
175)
Contrary to the first passage, in which Holmes speaks to the essential impossibility of writing
about the individual subject in a biography, instead preferring a socially and culturally situated
portrait, this passage recognizes that the “appeal” of biography is somewhat different than the
process. While the biographer may be constrained by the inferences and speculations afforded
by third-hand evidence, the reader seeks something more coherent. The biographer's task is, in
part, to turn a chaotic selection of cultural and personal artifacts into a narrative, to create order
out of a collection of ideas, opinions, stories, and manuscripts ravaged by time and space, which
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may or may not suggest an order in themselves. Holmes's wanderings are not merely random
attempts to paint a clearer picture, it seems, but rather a search for narrative. He claims to forge
a fictionalized relationship with his subjects (Holmes, 66), suspending disbelief enough to buy
into the reader's hopes and expectations for coherence.
“Character expresses itself in action.” What better hope for order is there than such a
notion? Plutarch could not have gotten started without this prejudice. Indeed, he believed it so
much that action gave way to the occasional embellished or fictionalized dialogue. If the
character is correct, what does it matter if the speeches and conversations are recorded with
fidelity? The actions are the same, the man or woman still present in even the most fictionalized
account. The trouble, however, is that the “great appeal of biography” and the task of the
biographer do not always work in concert. Holmes may be a romantic, but all the while he is
beholden to some semblance of reason, to some sense that order cannot merely be constructed
out of thin air to meet the needs of his own romantic whims. What is more chaotic, after all, than
abandoning all hope of a true coherent narrative and adopting instead an unquestionably false
one?
In Holmes, as in Plutarch, there is no clear line between what is the right and what is the
wrong approach to biography. We may imagine extremes, wherein the writer presents only
evidence, or only fabrication, but neither of those makes for compelling writing. “The great
appeal of biography seems to lie,” but it doesn't necessarily lie, it merely “seems to.” Sometimes
biography tells the truth, even when it offers “a coherent and integral view of human affairs.”
Is human life coherent and orderly? Is the universe? Those may be unsophisticated
questions, too essential for scholarly work in an age of science, but biography was born out of
such questions. To create order out of chaos is not so difficult for the playwright, who need only
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apply imagination when things get sticky. Likewise the philosopher, who, in taking order for
granted, is free to manage his assumptions such that chaos is continually denied entry to the
conversation. The biographer's job is trickier, creating order out of something far less antithetical
and abstract, and thus far harder to combat, than pure chaos. The biographer, we might say, has
gazed not only into the Platonic form of chaos, but into its living manifestation. The biographer
has seen what happens when a human is reduced to a name and attendant actions: Alexander the
Great, Anne Sexton, Robert Louis Stevenson. In staring into the abyss of those names and
actions (the 'history' of the subject), in collecting what journals and letters and second-hand (and
third-hand and fourth-hand and n-hand) accounts exist, the biographer becomes a chronicler of
impossible questions about both the life of an individual and life in general, questions which,
impossible though they be, demand a coherent answer if any writing is to be done.
This is no tragic task. Holmes, for his twinge of romantic melancholy, comes across as a
fundamentally joyful fellow, gallivanting about with Le Brun. Perhaps his mad and slightly tardy
pursuits across European countrysides and cityscapes help him to retain a healthy perspective.
Perhaps his fictionalized relationships – which undoubtedly find their way into his portraits in
one way or another – are a way to humanize for himself the mass of evidence upon which he
depends, before he tries to humanize and situate that evidence for his readers. If we want to
know who the person was – and not just the name or the oeuvre – to whom the events of a life
happened, it might first be necessary to fictionalize, to humanize, to spin a fine silken string of
order in a universe of chaos. Then, having spun the silk, we hold on, gaze back into the chaos,
and hope that a tapestry might emerge.
The Life of Anne Sexton – Middlebrook
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What does that tapestry look like, should it emerge? After all, not all biographers are
blessed (or cursed) with the same amount of information, or with the same proximity to (or
distance from) the subject. I suspect that Diane Middlebrook's Anne Sexton will not answer my
questions, so much as raise more. Nevertheless, I wonder if a life as comparatively recent as
Sexton's might give us a different perspective on the nature of biography. Surely Middlebrook,
with her incredible wealth of evidence and a culture not far-removed from the one Sexton herself
lived in, had more at her disposal than a fictionalized relationship. Surely it was not so hard for
her to construct a “coherent and integral view of human affairs.”
Middlebrook's is a more systematic project than Holmes's.
Armed with endless
correspondence and several years worth of therapy tapes, the work of writing the story of Anne
Sexton must have seemed more an effort of organization than an effort of creation. Plutarch's
ideal of locating and situating telltale jests that inform the reader more than momentous
occasions is realized throughout Middlebrook's biography. For example, Middlebrook highlights
this quotation (which we have not quite first hand, but close) from Anne herself to Dr. Orne
about her therapy: “I had been with you only a week when I got all the books on psychiatry. I
read them to try to find out what kind of patient to be” (Middlebrook, 53). While there are a
great many moments as intimate as this in the biography – and a great many intimate things
about which we actually know very little, despite the overwhelming amount of material at
Middlebrook's disposal – perhaps none speaks more directly to the complications of writing
about a character like Anne Sexton. “I read them to try to find out what kind of patient to be”
suggests an actress, not willing or able to be herself. If biography is to uncover the person to
whom the events of a life happen, how can it succeed in uncovering a person so complicated as
Sexton?
Writing Lives – Franz
That Sexton had in mind her own legacy while she lived certainly complicates the task of
writing and reading her biography, but it strikes me that any sufficiently famous figure – a figure
about whom a biography is likely to be written – is unlikely to be oblivious to questions of selfpresentation. Sexton may be a singularly extreme case of self-consciousness turned into selfdisintegration, or at least self-dramatization, but is it not the case that the biographer is
constrained to deal primarily with the dramatic self instead of the essential self? The appearance
will always take precedence over the soul in an art where overt fiction is verboten. And for good
reason, because else we venture into Plutarchian waters, where perhaps stories are well-told, but
the lessons of personal history are also corrupted by blatant untruths.
Of course the issue is not so simple, but the point here is not to rehash the tenuous line
between invention and reporting that goes on in biography (and history, and even journalism).
Rather, the point is that abundance of evidence – even evidence which points to the kinds of
subtle but profound moments that Plutarch held in such esteem – is no guarantee of a biography
which can penetrate to the heart and soul of a man or woman. Middlebrook dissects Sexton's
poems with skill, and organizes an enthralling narrative, and even gives the reader a sense of
what Sexton was like, if not who she was. Indeed, hers is an exceptionally skillful biography,
attaining as much as Holmes or Plutarch might hope to attain, even though she did not follow – a
la Holmes – in Sexton's disturbed footsteps. Even so, Sexton remains a mystery, perhaps
because that is what she sought to be. 'Enigmatic' is a difficult quality to create a coherent
narrative around, 'insane' a difficult one to make orderly. The picture that arises of Sexton almost
allows the reader to find her comprehensible, if it weren't for those moments – like her sexual
abuse of her daughter – which unravel the entire sympathetic fabric.
On the edges of even this virtuoso performance in biographical writing lies the chaotic
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tongue of confused meanings and impossible-to-reconcile disagreements about who Sexton was,
what she meant, and why she did what she did. “I have been her kind,” Sexton writes, as an
ostensible way to let her audiences know who she was. But do we ever, can we ever know
another human being, except by kind? Perhaps Sexton was right to paint herself in comparative
hues, to clothe herself in Language instead of trying to be someone. Middlebrook, then, is stuck
with the approximation of Sexton's Language, just as Holmes is stuck with approximation of
place and Plutarch with an approximation of character. And yet, for Sexton, perhaps that is as
telling a line in the face of the portrait as any.
Conclusion
“Language has nothing to do with rational thought,” (Middlebrook, 226) said Anne
Sexton of her mysterious interaction with words. Though she appreciated the formalism of
poetry – as opposed to journaling, for example – she was no beacon of reason and order. Where
does she stand, then, where her biography in the constellation of biographies that make up our
knowledge of lives gone past? Human beings are a species that loves order, and yet seems to
suspect that this is a cruel, unrequited love. Plutarch's heroic efforts on behalf of Greek and
Roman heroes amounts to an account – a logos – that compels a sense of ancient virtue, but also
shows how thin, unto transparency, the veil between fiction and our sense of history are.
Holmes, too, fights the battle of biography, winning a more romantic, but less heroic victory with
words, constructing a narrative of beauty and humor.
Middlebrook's more modern, more
immediate, more honest picture lives somewhere more paradox. Her logos knows that language
is rational thought, even if – and indeed because – language has nothing to do with rational
thought.
Writing Lives – Franz
References
Clough, A.H. (2001). Plutarch's Lives, (Ed., J. Dryden, Trans.). New York: The Modern Library.
(Translation published 1683, original work published ca. 100 AD).
Holmes, R. (1985). Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. New York: Vintage Books.
Middlebrook, D.W. (1991). Anne Sexton: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books.
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