As I get caught up in laying out the chronology of events and discovering details of Luther Henderson’s life, I must continually remind myself to pause and consider the big picture. Readers of biography want to get to know the subject — “okay,” I can hear the readers say, “so he wrote great music, worked with Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. But what was he like?
I recently read “Virginia Woolf’s Nose — Essays on biography” by Hermione Lee, and came across this quote:
“biographies appeal to readers is inseparable from the dream of possession of, and union with, the subject.” [Sutherland, Recreating Jane Austen, p. 17]
My job is to create a sense of the person through the sharing of revealing anecdotes and moments of intimacy. Finding such information requires voluminous research, and, of course, nothing can be accepted at face value. Here’s what Lee had to say:
Following the trail of the story and clearing away the rubbish that’s accrued to it through gossip and rumor, using written evidence to prove a point, drawing on whatever sources of information you can get, building up a “representation” of the character: these are the biographer’s jobs. These scenes invoke, too, the moral reservations so often attached to biography — dislike of gossip, distrust of “low” sources of information, squeamishness about reading private correspondence, suspecting witnesses of having a private agenda.
As I introduce other participants in the story, supporting characters, if you will, I must also examine their role in light of their own perceptions and motivations. Lee also suggests that literary biographers must “find a way of understanding the work’s relation to the life” — for some people, their work is their life, the very essence of who they are, or were; this seems most often to be the case with people in the arts.
Virginia Woolf’s Nose is collection of essays that suggests there can be no such thing as a definitive version of a life, and Lee’s last chapter, about endings, leaves us with more questions than answers.
There is also tricky questions for the biographer about tone of voice at the moment of the subject’s death. If you are coming to the end of the life you’ve spent a lot of time with, you will tend to be moved — if only by relief. Do you let these emotions for the page, hoping they will flood the reader, too? Do you restrain your emotions and give the death clinically Russian mark. If you are writing the life of a writer, do you allow yourself to describe their death as they might have done it in their fictions are poetry? Did you, in the tone you choose, and also in matters of structure and interpretation, tried to give the death meaning and derive from that some sense of a resolution of the life?
So much to think about when you’re holding someone’s life in your hands.