The Use and Abuse of Literature

by Marjorie Garber

  Questions about the truth value of Bringing Down the House resurfaced with the opening of the movie and the concurrent revelation of several less than fully truthful memoirs. The public was now on the alert for falsification and in a mood to equate it with deception rather than with the art of fiction. Mezrich had conflated some characters, fabricated others, and invented some significant details in the story. “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable,” he told an interviewer. “The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.”26 But Mezrich’s book was published with a disclaimer explaining that the names, locations, and other details had been changed and that some characters were composites. As the Boston Globe reporter noted, though, the disclaimer was “in fine print, on the copyright page” and might readily have been missed by readers. Other editors and nonfiction authors, when consulted, expressed skepticism about Mezrich’s techniques: “It’s lying,” said Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm. “Nonfiction is reporting the world as it is, and when you combine characters and change chronology, that’s not the world as it is.”27 Gay Talese, often regarded as one of the inventors of the modern nonfiction genre, was similarly emphatic: taking liberties of this kind is “unacceptable” and “dishonest.”28 Mezrich, when asked, invoked the word literary to describe the choices he made: “I took literary license to make it readable.”29

  What does literary mean in this connection? Is it a version of the more familiar phrase poetic license? License in such a context has more to do with giving, or taking, permission than with legal sanction.

  A few years later, Mezrich was back with a new book, The Accidental Billionaires, subtitled The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, in which the boundaries of fact and fiction were unapologetically, indeed triumphantly, blurred. As with James Frey, who transformed himself from faux memoirist to fiction writer (and profited by the exchange), so Ben Mezrich declared that he would capitalize on what had been perceived as a transgression of the rules: “I see myself as attempting to break ground. I definitely am trying to create my own genre here,” he told an interviewer. “I’m attempting to tell stories in a very new and entertaining way. I see myself as an entertainer.”30 A bookstore owner noted that copies originally piled on a table for new nonfiction, would later be relocated to the business section. Mezrich’s book included imagined and re-created scenes, some in the “he might have” mode that has become popular in certain kinds of biography. One review, dryly adopting the book’s style of unabashed psychological guesswork, began, “Though we cannot know exactly what went through Ben Mezrich’s mind as he wrote The Accidental Billionaires, his nonfictionish book about the creation of Facebook, we can perhaps speculate hypothetically about what it possibly might have been like.”31 The film version, called The Social Network, told the story of Facebook’s founding through the accounts of several characters, never indicating which of them was “true.”

  Biofeedback

  If memoirs often tend to veer in the direction of self-fictionalizing, the venerable practice of biography, literally “life writing,” would seem to depend to a certain extent on telling the truth. Thus, biography is often poised somewhere between the categories of literature and history. While in many ways this would seem to increase the prestige of biography as a genre, since these days history is a less suspect, more rational and evidence-based category than literature, it has made for a slightly anomalous role for the modern practitioner of this ancient craft.

  Biography, it seems, has been suffering from an inferiority complex of sorts even as its practitioners triumph in the bookstores. The founding of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York was described by its faculty director, David Nasaw, himself a distinguished biographer (Andrew Carnegie; William Randolph Hearst), as a way of changing the perception of biography as “the stepchild of the academy.”32 The editor of The American Historical Review commented that “increasingly historians are turning to biography,” even though in the past they “haven’t considered it a kind of legitimate scholarship in some respects.”33 The new center supports biographers working in a wide range of modes, including film, television, and graphic novels, and the executive director, Nancy Milford, author of biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay, told a reporter that she “insisted that at least half the fellows come from outside the academy.”34 So on the one hand, biographers are seeking credibility and standing within the academy (as non-academicians call the world of universities and colleges). On the other hand, they stand proudly outside it. Where does the readership come from? According to the head of the Leon Levy Foundation, Levy’s widow Shelby White, her enthusiasm for the project came from “a love of biography and history and reading about other people’s lives. I guess I’m a snoop.”35

  The gratification of snooping, or even of a more seemly curiosity, was not the stated goal for biographers from ancient times through the Victorian period. Once upon a time, biography was supposed to model character and the conduct of life. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans placed, side by side, biographies of famous men from these two periods. Plutarch announced in the opening sentences of his Life of Alexander that his objective was to depict the character of his subjects rather than every detail of their daily existence. “It must be borne in mind,” he wrote (in the celebrated translation by John Dryden), “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 or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges …” Plutarch compared his art to that of the portrait painter, who focuses attention on the lines and features of the face, rather than on other parts of the body, as the most indicative signs of character.36 This comparison between the biographer and the portrait painter or sculptor would become a favorite in later biographies, and calls attention, tacitly but importantly, to the degree of artifice involved in making something “true to life.”37

  The historian Jill Lepore cites a story told by David Hume in his 1741 essay “Of the Study of History.” Having been asked by a “young beauty, for whom I had some passion,” to send her some novels and romances to read while she was in the country, Hume sent her, instead, Plutarch’s Lives, “assuring her, at the same time, that there was not a word of truth in them.” She read them with pleasure, apparently, until she came to the lives of Alexander and Caesar, “whose names she had heard of by accident,” then indignantly sent the book back to Hume “with many reproaches for deceiving her.”38

  The story is amusing, but it is also condescending, the more so because the writer is conscious of its charm. Both the description of this female reader as a “young beauty” and the fact, so casually dropped, that she had heard of the two famous heroes of antiquity only “by accident” put her firmly in her place, which is quite a different place from that of Hume. The first sentence of the essay sets the tone: “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history, as an occupation, above all others, the best suited both to their sex and education, much more instructive than their ordinary books of amusement, and more entertaining than those serious compositions, which are usually to be found in their closets.” Hume playfully deplores the preference of “the fair sex” for fiction: “I am sorry,” he says, “to see them have such an aversion to matter of fact, and such an appetite for falsehood.” By contrast, “truth,” he insists, “is the basis of history.” Though he will later change his tone from “raillery” to something more serious (and at that point will introduce as his anticipated readers two male subjects: “a man of business” and “a philosopher”), he maintains that even a witty and well-bred woman can have nothing interesting to say to “men of sense and reflection” unless she is conversant with the history of her own country and of an
cient Greece and Rome. Plutarch, for Hume, is history. And history is based on truth.

  The concept of “biographical truth,” as Judith Anderson argues in a book of that title, could as easily be called “biographical fiction.” The relation between fiction and fact in the period raises questions about what is meant by truth, she suggests. Life writing “occupies a middle ground between history and art, chronicle and drama, objective truth and creative invention.”39 Biography “is a mixed form, having always a tendency to merge on the one side with fiction and on the other side with history.”40 Anderson’s study covers the Venerable Bede’s Life of Saint Cuthbert, Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey, Roper’s Life of Sir Thomas More, More’s History of King Richard III, Shakespeare’s Richard III and Henry VIII (subtitled All Is True), and Bacon’s History of King Henry VII. All these texts, according to Anderson, are “peripherally or essentially literary.”41

  What do we mean by literary, when we are discussing works of biography? Is it an indicator of style, of archetype, of mythic quality, of the felt presence of the writer? Anderson says that each of the authors she examines “employs the techniques of fiction,” which include authorial self-consciousness, an awareness of critical interpretation, and an increasing acknowledgment of the writer’s “own creative shaping of another’s life.”42

  The pleasure evinced by biographers at the founding of the Levy Center is, to a certain extent, recuperative (gaining respect, visibility, and funding), but in another way, it is classificatory and categorical. We may recall that the authorizing body evincing a wary interest in receiving biographers into the fold was made up of historians. Biography for them, and for many present-day biographers, is a species of history writing, whether the topic is a political or historical figure or a person of literary, artistic, or cultural significance. But the conflation of author and subject that is the central trope—and the irresistible lure—of the memoir creates category confusion when it is transposed into the world of biography.

  The “Statement of Purpose” of the Society of American Historians explains that its goal is “To promote literary distinction in historical writing” by awarding a number of prestigious prizes. What is gained, I wonder, by adding the word literary here? If the society’s goal were merely “To promote distinction in historical writing,” what element would be lost? Which is another way of asking, what does the Society of American Historians consider literary, and how is that trait importantly different from the other kinds of writing produced by historians?

  A number of career paths lead to success in this field, and some of the most commercially successful practitioners are neither historians nor academics—which does not mean, of course, that they are not scholars. One of the most honored biographers in the United States is David McCullough, an English major at Yale, who then became a journalist and editor (Sports Illustrated; the U.S. Information Agency; American Heritage) before embarking on a career in which he won the Pulitzer Prize (twice) and the National Book Award (twice) for biography. Present-day British biographers like Claire Tomalin (biographies of Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Wollestonecraft, etc.) and Victoria Glendinning (biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope, Jonathan Swift, and Leonard Woolf) are writers whose other activities include journalism, broadcasting, criticism, and (in the case of Glendinning) fiction writing.

  The New York Times annual list of notable nonfiction books is always stocked with biographies and memoirs. In 2007, for example, of the fifty books on the list, there were fifteen biographies and eight memoirs, including biographies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Pablo Picasso, Leni Riefenstahl, Henry Morton Stanley, and the cartoonist Charles Schulz. The memoirs covered topics from waiting tables at a posh Manhattan restaurant to growing up with (a) a Haitian family, (b) an orthodox Jewish family, (c) a Catholic family, (d) a minister’s family, and (e) an Iowa farm family during the Great Depression.

  In 2008 the pattern was similar: biographies of Andrew Jackson, Dick Cheney, Samuel de Champlain, Condoleezza Rice, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife, not the contemporary actress); memoirs of an English childhood, an African childhood, an “appalling upbringing at the hands of … catastrophically unfit parents,”43 and a novelist’s memoir-response to the stillbirth of her first child.44

  In short, biography today is not one thing—and never has been. The crossover between “popular” and “serious” in biographies is probably greater than in many other categories, since airport readers and other adults who choose books as a favorite entertainment option will often buy biographies—in hardcover—if they are attracted by the subject or have seen the book mentioned or blurbed in the media.

  There are historian-biographers, literary biographers (which is to say, biographers of literary figures who address the author’s works as well as the life), celebrity biographers, and biographical memoirists whose personal memoirs include the narrative history of a parent, partner, or other central personage. (A classic hypothetical example is Bennett Cerf’s quip about a book that would be an automatic best seller, “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”)

  Authorized biographies give the writer access to privileged materials but often also assume that the result will be laudatory. Music stars, actors, artists, humanitarians, sports heroes, and other public figures tend to be the subject of authorized biographies, with Pat Robertson, Cecil Beaton, Pope John Paul II, Konrad Adenauer, and Helen, the queen mother of Rumania, also among those whose representatives gave permission to their biographers, in some cases selecting them as fit repositories of information and potential praise.

  A celebrity biographer like Donald Spoto researches and writes about the lives of film stars, movie directors, playwrights, saints, and glamorous people in the public eye: Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Diana, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Preston Sturges, Lotte Lenya, Tennessee Williams, Alan Bates, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kramer, St. Joan of Arc, St. Francis of Assisi. Others working in this genre include J. Randy Taraborrelli, chronicler of the lives of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Cher, Diana Ross, Janet Jackson, Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot—and Kitty Kelley, author of Jackie Oh!, and books on Nancy Reagan, the Bush dynasty, and Frank Sinatra. The subtitles of Kelley’s books on Sinatra and Mrs. Reagan frankly call them “unauthorized” biographies, a term that, while once presumably opprobrious, is now a guarantee of high-level gossip.

  A literary biography, as we’ve noted, is the account of the life and work of a writer. This term seems as if it contains a misplaced modifier, since while the subject may be a poet, novelist, or playwright, this does not guarantee that the resulting book will be literary. The contrary is quite often the case, despite the idealized early examples of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and of the defining work in the genre, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

  To a certain degree, these categories are self-evident. But we could make another kind of provisional distinction based upon the presentational nature (and thus the ideology) of the printed text—between those biographies that display the research that has gone into them with a proliferation of marked footnotes and endnotes, and those that hide the research process, providing either silent footnotes or, in some cases, none at all, just a list of sources at the back of the book. The distinction would suggest something of the book’s desire and self-image (or the desire and self-image of the author, publisher, literary agent, or press). But more important, it would say something about how these various makers hope the book would be read. Is the experience to be like that of reading a novel (with the added pleasure of knowing that it is “true”)? Or is it more like what anthropologists, before they, too, became more literary, used to call “writing up” the findings of their fieldwork?

  Some twentieth- and twenty-first-century biographers utilize a kind of unmarked endnote whic
h is intended to preserve the smooth unbroken surface of the text, making the book read more like a novel than a piece of scholarship—no intrusive superscript numbers to break the illusion. If a quotation or a fact appears in the text and the reader wants to know where it comes from, he or she can turn to the back of the book, where the page number and a brief citation from the text is followed by an indication of the source.45 Many skilled practitioners follow this style, including Goodwin, David McCullough, and Meryle Secrest, to name just a few.46

  This is not a low/high distinction in terms of quality but, rather, a presentational and performative style, with consequent effects upon the reading experience and upon the sense of intimacy and connection developed between reader and biographical subject. Although the author/biographer (some websites even identify these writers as “celebrity biographers”) is often recognized as a public intellectual, what is celebrated is his or her knowledge, research, clarity, and what is often called a “magisterial” command of the material. Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes, Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison, Robert McCrum’s biography of P. G. Wodehouse, Ian Kershaw Smith’s biography of Adolf Hitler, Nigel Saul’s biography of Richard II, and Jacques Roger’s biography of Buffon all were hailed as magisterial by reviewers, and this list could be almost infinitely extended, since magisterial, the Latinate version of masterly, is the mot juste or the highest accolade for biographical writing. It seems to connote a rising above the fray. The biography is a masterwork; it brings the subject to life; it is definitive and defining; it tells at least one convincing version of the truth. As such, it seems like the opposite of the kind of hoax memoirs we began by discussing. Yet the two genres—the one magisterial, the other often, predictably, unauthorized—have some key elements in common. For one thing, both of these mainstays of the nonfiction best-seller list are, in their own ways, fictions.