Why do we read biographies?

[dropcap letter="E"]

n immemorial times, biographies were read to learn about the greatness of which past protagonists were capable, and to turn it into a stimulus. The reader sought models of exemplarity —whether public virtue or heroic impetus— and at the same time scrutinized in the weaknesses of great men the risk of their own errors. In the Parallel Lives, successive generations of readers learned the lessons that Plutarch offered in his comparative narration of the lives of the main characters of Greece and Rome. Even the protagonists of the French Revolution continued to be inspired by the vital and moral models described by Plutarch. In our low cost era, returning to Plutarch's pages can still explain who we are.

After Freud and in the permissive society of postmodernity, why do we read biographies? It would be excessive to say that we have gone from appreciating human greatness to understanding it as the simulation of an unavoidable contradiction that relativizes classical virtues and sees them as psychic fractures, because the truth is that we still read biographies to learn something from the lives of others and because a good biography can be read like a novel, for its narrative capacity, while, through its impeccable investigation, it teaches us History. In biographies there can be no fiction but the same passion for telling lives with which Tolstoy portrays Anna Karenina. Apart from biographers specialized in accumulating garbage about their subjects, writers and historians continue to be determined to investigate the ambiguities that are at once human greatness and servitude.

That was already Plutarch's endeavor. With his sexual promiscuity and boastfulness, Mark Antony is —according to Plutarch— a hostage to his concupiscence, someone who "committed greater violence according to the greater power he had." From there, even literally, Shakespeare draws his Antony and Cleopatra. It could have been a novel but it was theater: above all, poetic energy. Unfortunately, character no longer trades on any stock exchange, nor in life itself, due to the concurrence of narcissisms ranging from the denial of the father, the shipwreck of the epic, and a solipsistic conception of freedom to its category of honor. Luckily, though less and less, we continue to read biographies, to learn something from the life of an inventor, a king, an explorer, an artist or a classy scoundrel, because we feel human curiosity for existential complexity. Thus we furtively caress the memory of battles that no one has told us about. Every generation that knows itself to be part of the waves of History longs for some unfulfilled feat.

In other times, one could start with Plutarch, read in the moth-eaten edition of some ancestral reader, or Marañón's Tiberius —for example— was more at hand, but the most frequented biographies were those of Stefan Zweig, André Maurois, or Emil Ludwig, already after the delightful summaries published by the Araluce Collection for children. Now we are between video games and series like Game of Thrones. It's either that or the deconstruction of the character. The other risk is to take for granted that monographs or doctoral theses have the art of biography, when they are more often a tiresome accumulation of data without selective order. Between deconstruction and the doctoral brick, the search for that Rosebud that —as happens in Citizen Kane — aims to encapsulate an entire life is impracticable. In reality, more than the formula of a Rosebud as destiny, great characters are usually a labyrinth that goes from chance to will. The writer of lives —says the subtle biographer Leon Edel— is allowed imagination in the way of telling and presenting but not regarding the facts. That is the frontier between biography and novel, underlined by the evidence that the novelist can be omniscient —and even daring when novelizing real characters, as Gore Vidal did with Lincoln— but not biographers. Their limit is in those cardboard boxes full of old photos, notes on a paper napkin, or letters from lovers that the art of biography must transfer from chaos to an interpretive order in which a minimal detail can represent the passions of an era.

James Boswell's 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' is often considered the best biography ever told, and it is true both that Doctor Johnson is an unlimited character and that his biographer had the great advantage of dealing with and listening to him.

To be a reliable interlocutor, the problem is that by constantly constraining one's ego, one can end up resembling a meek and somewhat unintelligent echo. Perhaps that is what happens with James Boswell when he recounts the life of Doctor Johnson or when Eckermann records his conversations with Goethe. When speaking with De Gaulle, the opposite happens to Malraux, so the greatness of the page may not correspond to what the general told him. Who knows to what extent what Malraux says Mao told him is impudent fiction.

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell is often considered the best biography ever told, and it is true both that Doctor Johnson is an unlimited character and that his biographer had the great advantage of dealing with him and listening to him, to the point that a good part of the book is a literal reflection of their conversations. Without intending to compare, something similar happens to Josep Pla with his portrait of Manolo Hugué. But neither Boswell's book nor Pla's is the archetype of the biographical genre, which generally requires analysis of exhaustive documentation, letters, private papers, testimonies from secondary characters, and the background of an entire era. Except for highwayman biographers, the ideal is to get as close as possible to the truth of the character, and although the desire to offer moral lessons no longer governs, the desire to know ourselves by reading the books of those who succeeded or failed in their chimera persists.

For biographers, the authorization of the family or literary executor of the biographee has often been a requirement that forced hagiographic performances, so authors, at the risk of not having access to the family archive, have to subtitle their book as an unauthorized biography. Consequently, Freud burned his diaries and notes to make the work difficult for his future biographers. More positive is the symbiosis between biographee and biographer, as happens today with the splendid biography of Kissinger that historian Niall Ferguson is writing — his first volume already published. The problem lies in the biographer's self-control not to identify too much with his biographee, nor to hate him to the point of getting lost in the shadows for having denied the light.

Chesterton says that it is convenient for there to be a secret continent in the character of the man about whom one writes. Two very important things are thus preserved: "modesty in the biographer and mystery in the biography." For Chesterton, the sin of biographers and the error into which they fall is wanting to find a meaning in everything. In other words: "Certainly the poetry of the poet's life is very different from his biography: it is not born of what he did, but of what he thought while doing nothing; it does not come from what he manifested when he worked or fell in love, but from what his soul allows him to manifest while writing. The poet does not sit down to write the diary of his life in verse. That is not the way to make poetry. On the other hand, it seems that this is the way to make biographies." Something of this can be seen when reading the voluminous biography of Proust written by George Painter: we come to think that the abundance of details hinders the quality of both the anecdote and the category. Contrast this with the finesse with which Ghislain de Diesbach investigates Proust's secrets.

As so many other times, resorting to André Maurois' biographies, even if he is modest in cases of ménage à trois, explains more vital intricacies than the custom of turning biographical art into a Freudian couch. There was a time when a book by André Maurois was in many homes, lying on a shelf between copies of illustrated magazines. It still sets an example for writing with moderation that seeks to clarify possible truth, decidedly in favor of prudence and without ravages of originality. With Maurois as biographer, Disraeli, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand or Napoleon were in the best hands.

In the already depleted community of readers, there are those who, in advanced maturity, prefer to read fewer novels and opt for history books, biographies, or memoirs. This well-known fact has just been an element of provocation when the novelist Philip Roth said years before dying that he no longer read fiction, giving as a reason that he had woken up. It makes sense: the older, the less fiction. What novel character can compete with a biography of Hitler or Michelangelo? Thousands of political apprentices discovered the hidden face of power in Zweig's Fouché. In contrast, in André Maurois' The Three Dumas, life pulsates with generosity and adventure.

A good biography tells us the course of a life and at the same time is a block of pages that, being duly faithful to the facts, belong to the best of literature, like the work of historians such as Tacitus, Toreno, or Macaulay. Currently, the problem tends to be the leaden solidity of those who have confused the art of biography with a compilation of unstitched data, forgetting both the power to narrate and the desire to interpret for readers the life of someone who has mattered for better or for worse.

We continue to read biographies. They inform us, provide vital stimuli, help to understand some complexities of History and the human mind. When planning a reader's life, librarian Phillip Ward —500 books for 50 years— includes Plutarch, in addition to the portraits written by Tacitus or Suetonius, the lives of artists by Giorgio Vasari, and so on to the exotic Alexiad in which Anna Comnena recounts the life of her father, the Byzantine emperor Alexios (1081-1153). Although she sanctifies her emperor father, Anna Comnena describes the hidden worlds of the Byzantine court. Something similar happened later with Voltaire's The Age of Louis XIV. Carlyle was right when he said that History is the essence of innumerable biographies.