Lives Behind Lives: Biography as Autobiography

The hullabaloo that erupted not so long ago over Edmund Morris’s Dutch, a biography of Ronald Reagan that employs (among other controversial devices) an invented autobiographical narrator, brought to the fore both the writer’s and the reader’s ambivalent attitudes toward biographers stepping into the relation of their subject’s life. Like Hollywood’s fabled "fourth wall," a first-person intrusion in the illusion of omniscient history remains a source of discomfort, a reminder that we are being led not by the absolute, reconstructed truth, but by someone’s very particular point of view. At the same time, there is a fascination with the process of biography, a sense that if we are allowed in to the writer’s journey of discovery (mostly a rather plodding journey, as any biographer knows), we will somehow become closer to the life, even share in its recreation.

It is easy to understand the biographer’s desire to recount his or her journey. Who wouldn’t, after three, five, ten years spent laboring over a single project, want to complain about the thankless research, impasses, and self-questioning, or to crow about the moments of affirming insight and sheer brilliant luck? And of course, many do: often in the wake of a new biography, articles and interviews are given to any medium that will listen, detailing, sometimes excruciatingly, the triumphs and travails that occurred between concept and publication (why anyone should care to hear them is another question). But in a few cases, those occurrences are made part and parcel of the finished work itself, a parallel narrative dogging the ostensible life story like a wily predator, sometimes even yanking the biographical subject offstage to remind us that, hey, someone’s working hard here to get you all this information, and believe me, friend, it’s no cakewalk. The result is a kind of meta-biography, a tale-within-a-tale that sometimes becomes more compelling, more central than the tale itself.

There are precedents to Morris’s approach, of course, even among the earliest examples of the genre. James Boswell, in his celebrated, and in many ways still exemplary, portrait of Samuel Johnson, loses few opportunities to remind us that he is Johnson’s—well, his Boswell. A century and a half later, Gertrude Stein famously reinvented her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas, so that the latter’s supposed Autobiography might read to all the world as an “objective,” if wholly flattering, third-person portrait of Gertrude Stein.

In modern times, the ur-text for this kind of biography is no doubt Ian Hamilton’s ultimately frustrating quest In Search of J. D. Salinger. Hamilton, fresh from his success as Robert Lowell’s intrepid chronicler, decided to accord the same treatment to America’s most elusive novelist, only to find that neither his sleuthing skills nor his appeals to the writer’s presumed vainglory were able to penetrate the cloak of silence that Salinger had been weaving around himself for the previous two decades.

It was not for lack of trying: Hamilton contacted Salinger and his extended family; weathered several stingingly dissuasive replies, most notably from Salinger himself; interviewed numerous former acquaintances; visited the schools and major sites (including an attempted visit to Salinger’s walled-in home in Cornish, New Hampshire); read everything, published and unpublished, that he could get his hands on. His intention was to focus on Salinger’s life and career before the author’s self-imposed seclusion of 1965, and despite the many obstacles put in his path, he eventually sent his publisher, Random House, a manuscript that he intended to call J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life—as complete a traditional biography as could be written under the circumstances. “It was not,” he admits, “really the book I wanted it to be. It was too nervous and respectful, and in many ways disabled by my anxiety to assure Salinger that I was not a rogue. But it was workmanlike, it had far more facts about the man than you could find anywhere else, it had . . . something of his tone of voice, his presence. And in its literary-critical aspects, it did, I thought, have some useful things to say about the relationship between the author’s life and work. It was all right.” The book’s one saving grace, in its author’s eyes, the thing that kept it to this side of “all right” and that preserved the protagonist’s tone of voice, was its extensive use of Salinger’s unpublished letters, obtained by dint of extensive digging and a few lucky breaks. While not making up for the many unavoidable gaps, these quotations provided the necessary heft, authority, and above all timbre that would ensure the volume (in Hamilton’s own assessment) “a quiet, if not thoroughly reclusive, life in campus bookstores.”

But even this was not to be, for a threatened lawsuit by Salinger prompted, in Hamilton’s case, the enforced removal of virtually all his unpublished quotations, and in the larger arena, a drastic reevalution of the fair use laws. Anyone who has found himself in a similar position can sympathize with Hamilton’s lament, while slogging through the “unpleasant work” of paraphrasing Salinger’s quotations, that “in almost every instance, I was deadening his language; I was making him seem duller than he was. Whose interests did this serve?”

(As a footnote, I can add my own experience of the fallout from the Hamilton case. At around that time, as an editor for another New York publishing firm, I had signed up Lyle Leverich’s biography of Tennessee Williams, Tom, which derived much of its impact from its copious, though judicious, use of Williams’s unpublished letters and diaries. Although in this case the author had secured Williams’s own permission to quote these documents in extenso, the playwright’s death in the interim had shifted the legal copyright to his executrix, Maria St. Just, who threatened a similar lawsuit if the citations were not removed, claiming that Leverich’s work did not represent serious scholarship (I’m paraphrasing). It took several years of delays, much crusading, Lady St. Just’s own death, and, sadly, a change of publisher—corporate lawyers being what they are—before Tom was finally published, at which point it received all the critical and scholarly validation it could want. There is, admittedly, a fine line between the needs of genuine historical research and a subject’s (or a subject’s family’s) right to privacy, and sometimes a biographer will simply have to take “no” for the bitter answer. At the same time, a law that blindly and categorically sides with one master over another ends up serving none at all.)

Logical assumption would dictate that Hamilton then fell back on his only remaining option: an improvised Plan B that had him madly retrieving his research notes, plugging them in to the manuscript, and turning his intended biography into the version we now know as In Search of J. D. Salinger. The reality, however, is that Hamilton had envisioned such a book from the start, and the real Plan B was in fact the more traditional biography he initially sent in to Random House, and that the publisher eventually rejected. “I had it in mind to attempt not a conventional biography—that would have been impossible—but a kind of Quest for Corvo, with Salinger as quarry,” he tells us at the outset. “According to my outline, the rebuffs I experienced would be as much part of the action as the triumphs—indeed, it would not matter much if there were no triumphs. The idea—or one of the ideas—was to see what would happen if orthodox biographical procedures were to be applied to a subject who actively set himself to resist, and even to forestall, them . . . It would be a biography, yes, but it would also be a semispoof in which the biographer would play a leading, sometimes comic, role.” His design, in other words, was to set himself against Salinger—as hunter and prey, intrepid adventurer and guarded treasure—in a game of cat-and-mouse played out before our avid eyes.

Eschewing the biographer’s traditional goals (“it would not matter much if there were no triumphs”), Hamilton went right to the heart of what, in reality, lies beneath the skin of virtually all biographies, though generally it remains at a deeper layer: a desire to enter into a privileged, not to say exclusive, relation with the subject; to insert himself, retrospectively if need be, but lastingly, into the subject’s works and days. For Hamilton, this desire vis-à-vis Salinger quite naturally began with a reading of The Catcher in the Rye: “The Catcher was the book that taught me what I ought already to have known: that literature can speak for you, not just to you. I seemed to me ‘my book.’ It was something of a setback when I eventually found out that I was perhaps the millionth adolescent to have felt this way.” Dispossessed, the child tries to recapture his privileged relation with the parent in the only way he knows: by recreating the parent in his own image. And even better, by depicting himself in the act of recreation, like Dalí painting Dalí painting Gala.

Throughout the book, Hamilton maintains a running dialogue, even a rivalry, with his “biographizing alter ego,” his “constant companion,” the driven pro who dismisses our hero’s scruples about Salinger’s right to peaceful seclusion and who remains “merely eager to get on with the job.” To the Hamilton who places certain portions of Salinger’s life off-limits and who stops to wonder, “At what point does decent curiosity become indecent?,” the biographer responds with an impatient wave of the hand, along with a reminder that Salinger is a public figure, therefore fair game, and that their only task is to collect the facts, any facts, from any source. Even when our ambivalent narrator finds the tables turned on him, during a visit to the research center in Austin, Texas, his alter ego remains intractable:

While I was waiting for the Salinger file to be hauled up from the vaults, I thumbed through the library’s card index. Needless to say, the first name I looked up was HAMILTON, IAN (1938– ). Even Texas couldn’t be that comprehensive. But it was; to my horror, more than a dozen letters were listed under my defenseless name. Why, anyone could just walk in and . . . My companion indicated that the Salinger dossier was now sitting on desk three.

It is this ongoing dialogue with his other half that provides Hamilton with a forum for some crucial debates about the underlying nature of the biographer’s task, as well as the realization of some unpleasant home truths faced (or studiously ignored) by any serious biographer: that he is in a predatory relationship with his subject, regardless of whether the subject is living or dead; that catching the protagonist “in the act”—any act—can make one feel “rather as policemen do, or torturers, when the confession finally gets signed.” And more than this, that behind most serious biographical research—not strictly-for-the-cash commission work, but thorough, dedicated labor that sometimes takes decades—behind this research is a need that ultimately says more about the author’s biography than the subject’s.

Coming to the end of his disheartening battle against both Salinger and the copyright laws, and of his progressive disenchantment with Salinger himself, Hamilton ruefully admits, “When I really ask myself how this whole thing began, I have to confess that there was more to it than mere literary whimsy. There was more to it than mere scholarship. Although it will seem ludicrous, perhaps, to hear me say so now, I think the sharpest spur was an infatuation, an infatuation that bowled me over at the age of seventeen and which it seems I never properly outgrew. Well, I’ve outgrown it now.” I wonder how many practicing biographers can read such a statement without tasting a rather acrid tang of recognition.

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A similar sense of wistfulness pervades a 1997 book by the British writer Charles Nicholl, Somebody Else, a recreation of Arthur Rimbaud’s legendary decade in Africa as a gun runner and would-be entrepreneur. While all biography on some level involves following in the subject’s footsteps, Nicholl takes the process literally, living in and traveling through the places that Rimbaud haunted during his final trek toward “luminous ordinariness” (in the author’s nicely turned phrase). What he finds, not surprisingly, is that the road is somewhat rockier than he had anticipated.

Like Hamilton, Nicholl sets out from the beginning to recount his own journey in the wake of his protagonist. Like Hamilton as well, he recognizes that he can present at best an incomplete story, for Rimbaud’s eleven years in self-willed exile have left comparatively few traces: some letters to his family, a few published reminiscences by colleagues, a handful of photographs. What Nicholl sets about to do is recreate not only the events and circumstances of Rimbaud’s African sojurn, but its atmosphere as well. All the places Rimbaud knew, he gets to know—Charleville, London, Alexandria, Harar, Aden, Shoa—seeking to recapture a fleeting aura of this man who was absent even in presence. “I try to see him as they would have seen him,” he muses during a visit to the hotel in Aden where Rimbaud first set down his luggage. “He is really nothing special: a down-at-heel young Frenchman, a bit of a drifter. He is taciturn but seems nice enough.”

Rimbaud is by nature a difficult subject. The “man with soles of wind,” as his ex-lover Verlaine styled him, the man who wouldn’t sit still for anyone, is no more accessible to his biographer than he was to the various family members, friends, or employers who tried to hold on to him. Nicholl is honest enough to recognize that, particularly for the mysterious period he has chosen to write about, factual traces will often have to join hands with educated guesswork, even pure speculation. To describe Rimbaud’s arrival formalities on the docks of Aden, he at first dons his most self-assured tones to inform us that the poet “dislikes customs men: their pipes clenched between their teeth, their axes and knives, their dogs on the leash.” And how does he come by such assurance? The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t, and by the next page he has taken down his all-knowing front, pulled back the curtain to reveal the jumble-box of disparate bits from which he has pieced together his tableau:

My account owes something to a visit I made to Aden in 1991 . . . but mostly it derives from documentary sources. The bare facts can be gathered from one of Rimbaud’s letters, and from the memoirs of the coffee trader Alfred Bardey . . . The surroundings are based on old photographs and descriptions of Aden [etc.] . . .

It is not, of course, a definitive account: it is more like some scratchy old home-movie. The faces around him have blurred. There are jump-cuts due to lack of information. There are guesses . . .

I do not really know that Rimbaud disliked customs men. One might suppose so from his poem “Customs Men,” which according to his friend Delahaye recorded a run-in with the customs in Belgium, but a poem is not exactly an opinion, so this too is a guess.

Nor does he always accept these limitations with equanimity, for throughout Somebody Else runs a current of frustration, one no doubt familiar, though less baldly stated, to anyone attempting to recreate a lost moment in time. Walking through the boarded-up hulk of the Grand Hotel in Aden, Rimbaud’s first African address, he cannot help but reflect on the overwhelming sense of futility his mission elicits: “Perhaps this was once Rimbaud’s room. Who knows? Does it really matter if it was here, or somewhere down the corridor? Probably not. In coming to Aden I had hoped to find some clue to these ‘lost years’ of Rimbaud’s life, had hoped perhaps to find some moment of empathy . . . There are no ghosts here, no jolts of recognition, no physical traces. There may be a neatly carved ‘A.R. 1880’ on some obscured wainscot, but I doubt it. This is just an old address.”

The tone of pained regret, almost of spite, is our largest clue: Nicholl is viewing this place not like some thwarted scholar, but like an amnesiac desperately searching for pieces of his own identity. Throughout the book—and this is, at various moments, both its charm and its drawback—he shows an almost symbiotic involvement in the daily events of Rimbaud’s African existence. He minutely charts the course of every failed get-rich-quick scheme Rimbaud dreamed up; lists, as Rimbaud did, every pound of coffee or bolt of cloth shipped to a client, every unit cost and profit calculation; worries over the weight-limit a mature camel could carry (200 kilos), the going rate for renting one (five thalers), the number of drivers, guides, and porters required for a given sales trip. He names and discusses every commodity Rimbaud traded in his eleven years, however briefly. His relation of the poet’s unique stint as a gun runner—admittedly the most legendary episode of these years—alone covers six entire chapters.

There are times when he even indulges in affectionate spite, such as in this reflection on a dubious period description of Rimbaud’s stay in an Abyssinian inn: “I cannot resist this untrustworthy memoir and the images it proffers. We are in this meagre little hotel on the Red Sea, circa September 1887. Rimbaud is in the dining room tucking into ‘crab American-style’; Rimbaud is locked in his room in an aromatic cloud of Cairo hashish; Rimbaud is in the khazi with the shits from too much Abyssinian pepper.”

Not only does Nicholl lead us through the minutiae of his research, sharing along the way musings on the joys and sorrows of obtaining it, but he also inserts himself into the narrative—not into Rimbaud’s own history, of course (he leaves that to Edmund Morris), but into the backdrop against which it was played out. Naturally, most historians will visit the relevant sites; Nicholl, moreover, whose credits include several volumes of travel writing, is particularly adept at bringing Rimbaud’s various surroundings to life, even when viewing them more than a century after the fact. Sometimes, however, Rimbaud’s journey, and even Nicholl’s work on it, get pushed aside by the author’s own experience of these places. His presentation of Harar balances uneasily between necessary local color and personal reminiscence; his relation of an afternoon spent with an Amhar prostitute in Djibouti, while moving in its way, strikes one as pure self-indulgence. There is, in fact, an entire chapter on Djibouti, ostensibly prompted by Rimbaud’s having stayed there en route to Shoa, in which the poet hardly appears at all, or like a very diffuse shadow against a background wall. Nicholl, on the other hand, does: here he is walking through the streets with camera in hand, being taunted by taxi drivers; here he is chewing khat with his Amhar friend, or dealing with beggars at a hotel terrace. Yes, these glimpses all add to our larger understanding of the context in which Arthur Rimbaud moved during this time. But they are also evidence of Charles Nicholl’s desire—a desire in which he is by no means alone—to inch closer to the life of his subject, to establish, once again, that privileged relationship that acts as the motor of so many biographical endeavors.

Like Ian Hamilton, and to his credit, Nicholl comes clean about his personal reasons for undertaking this journey. In Hamilton’s case, it was the individual message he’d read in The Catcher in the Rye. For Nicholl, as he tells us in an appendix, it had to do with one of those life-changing university friendships that some people are fortunate enough to have, with a fellow student named Kevin Stratford, who brought home to him the essence of what Rimbaud was and whose death some years later might well have sparked Nicholl’s biographical quest. “He was perhaps more Rimbaldien than any of the more obvious candidates among my acquaintance at that time,” Nicholl writes in conclusion. “I still have the little Livre de Poche edition of Rimbaud he gave me, signing himself ‘Le Bateleur,’ the conjuror, a reference to the Tarot card of that ilk. It has accompanied me on my Rimbaud travels—to Charleville and Paris and Marseille, to Alexandria and Aden and Harar—and now, belatedly, I place this other book beside it in memory of Kevin and of those stringy teenage kids that we all once were. For ‘belatedly,’ of course, read ‘too late.’”

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“Too late”: that is the hidden message of both these books, perhaps of all biographical obsessions. Too late to befriend Holden Caulfield, too late to accompany Rimbaud across the desert, too late to show Kevin the fruits of his influence. Too late, even when one does get to meet one’s subject, to have known him “back then,” as a potential equal (perhaps this is why memoirs about friendships with noteworthy figures, though useful, often have a distasteful air of smugness about them). All biography carries a distinct element of wishful thinking.

We see this best in a book that is not, strictly speaking, a biography at all. In 1988, the French novelist Patrick Modiano chanced upon a personal ad from a 1941 newspaper, asking for information about a missing Jewish teenager named Dora Bruder. The ad was placed in December, by her parents. In September of the following year, the names of both Dora and her father appeared on a list of Jews deported to Auschwitz. And between these two dates was nothing, a blank, that Modiano spent the next several years of his life trying to fill in. He eventually published his findings, and the story of his quest, in a beautifully spare and melancholy book titled, simply, Dora Bruder.

To discover who Dora was, what her life was like, and most of all, what she did in those months between disappearance and arrest, Modiano did what any creditable biographer would do: he revisited important neighborhoods, petitioned the authorities (often with great patience and ingenuity) for restricted documents, tracked down and interviewed survivors, pursued and discarded hypotheses, experienced his share of victories, obstacles, and dead ends. Like Hamilton and Nicholl, he shares (apparently) every step of his quest with the reader, sifting through obscure records and period accounts to try to recreate this otherwise unremarkable life, and in particular those few months that perhaps only Dora herself had ever known about.

What was it about this young girl’s story that so absorbed him? It is true that much of Modiano’s work (the best known example being Lacombe Lucien, the film he co-authored with Louis Malle) has wrestled with the situation of French Jews under the Occupation. It is true, as well, that he has a strong autobiographical attachment to the section of Paris in which Dora and her parents lived. “I’ve been familiar with the area around Boulevard Ornano [Dora’s address] for a long time,” he writes at the beginning. “When I was a child, I would go with my mother to the Saint-Ouen flea market . . . I was in that neighborhood in the winter of 1965. I had a girlfriend who lived on Rue Championne . . . “ But most of all, Modiano’s quest for Dora is closely bound to, and soon becomes intermingled with, his unresolved search for his own father—a contemporary of Dora’s who, like her, was arrested by the Jewish Affairs squad, and who narrowly escaped a similar fate. In one scene, Modiano even imagines the two of them being carted off to police headquarters in the same paddy wagon:

I ended up convincing myself that it was in that glacial and lugubrious month of February [1942], when the special Police for Jewish Affairs set up dragnets in subway corridors, cinema entrances, and theater exits, that Dora had been caught . . . That same month of February, on the evening when the German regulations went into effect, my father had been picked up in a police raid on the Champs-Elysées. Jewish Affairs inspectors had blocked the entrances and exits to a restaurant on Rue de Marignan where he was dining with a girlfriend. They had asked all the diners for their identity papers. My father didn’t have any on him, and so they carted him off. In the paddy wagon taking him from the Champs-Elysées to Rue Greffulhe, headquarters of the Jewish Affairs Bureau, he had noticed, amid the other shadows, a girl of about eighteen. He lost sight of her when they’d been made to walk upstairs, up to that police bureau and the office of its superintendant . . .

He gave me no details about her face or clothing. I had almost forgotten about her, up until the day when I learned of Dora Bruder’s existence. Then the presence of the girl in the paddy wagon with my father and other strangers, on that February night, resurfaced in my memory, and soon I began wondering if she hadn’t been Dora Bruder, who had just been arrested as well before being sent to [the camp at] Tourelles.

But it wasn’t Dora Bruder at all, as a list of the women interned at Tourelles later proves. “Maybe I wanted them to meet, my father and she, in that winter of 1942,” Modiano finally admits, adding that if he “weren’t here to write this,” if Dora’s story and his father’s weren’t made to coincide, at least momentarily, “no trace would remain of that unknown girl’s presence, nor of my father’s, in a paddy wagon on the Champs-Elysées in February 1942.”

Nor until shortly afterward, however, does the full emotional resonance of this imagined coincidence become clear, when Modiano begins telling of another episode involving paddy wagons, and of his own arrest at the age of eighteen (the same age as Dora) some twenty years later—an episode that has “a symbolic character” for him:

My parents were separated but lived in the same building, my father with a very high-strung woman who had straw-blonde hair. And I lived with my mother. A quarrel broke out between my parents on the landing that day, over the extremely modest stipend that the courts, after a lengthy battle, forced my father to pay for my support . . . My mother decided I’d have to go knock on his door and demand the money that he still hadn’t paid. Unfortunately, we had nothing else to live on. I went very reluctantly. I rang his bell, intending to talk to him nicely, even to apologize for the whole thing. He slammed the door in my face. I heard the straw blonde screaming and calling the police, telling them a “hoodlum was causing a scene.”

Picked up soon afterward, the young Modiano finds himself sitting in a police wagon opposite his father, who has come along to press charges. “If this was the first time in my life that such a thing happened, it occurred to me, my father had already experienced it twenty years before, that night in February 1942 . . . And I wondered if he too was thinking the same thing right then. But he pretended not to see me and avoided my eyes.” At the police station, the young man is lectured by the superintendant and threatened with jail time as his father watches impassively, but finally is let off with a warning. Modiano continues:

We left the station, my father and I. I asked if it had really been necessary to call the police and “charge” me in front of those officers. He didn’t answer. I didn’t hold it against him. Since we lived in the same building, we walked our common way, side by side, in silence. I almost brought up the night of February 1942 when they had also thrown him into a paddy wagon, to ask if he’d thought about it a little while back. But perhaps it didn’t matter as much to him as it did to me.

We didn’t exchange a single word during our entire walk, nor in the stairway before parting company. I would see him two or three times more the following year, in August, when he stole my military papers in an attempt to have me drafted into the Reuilly barracks. After that I never saw him again.

Dora Bruder is a book imbued with the spirit of loss, in which every search, every inquiry comes too late. Even though Modiano saves Dora from anonymity, he comes too late to help her. He is too late to make amends with his father, or (as he notes at one point) to “respond to all these people”—officials, police, the anti-Semitic writers his father studied—”whose insults had wounded me through my father.” And when the elder Modiano lies in a hospital, years after their last contact, he is too late to find the deathbed.

In its way, Dora Bruder is perhaps the purest example of autobiographical biography. As with the two books discussed above, the story of Modiano’s subject is tightly bound to the story of his research. The book could stand as a model case study of the biographer’s craft and motivations, all the more so in that Dora herself, if the truth be told, is remarkable neither as an historical figure nor as a Jew who suffered under the Occupation. Her story is sad, tragic, but others are even more so. At bottom, Dora’s main importance for Modiano lies in the parallels that he draws between her, his lost, insufficiently lamented father, and finally himself. For him, the real tragedy lies in the fact that, however arduous his quest, his father will remain lost, and Dora will remain a mystery. Modiano’s closing paragraph harbors a lesson that any biographer, thinking to penetrate and explicate the soul of another human being, would do well to ponder:

I will never know how she spent her days, where she hid, whose company she kept during those winter months the first time she ran away, and over those few weeks in the spring when she ran away again. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that executioners, regulations, so-called Occupation authorities, the city jail, barracks, camps, History, time—everything that sullies you and destroys you—could not steal from her.

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Biography is not a process of direct identification. One does not have to be a literary figure (or actor-turned-politician) to write about one. At the same time, to undergo the years of research, rebuffs, and revisions implies something more intimate than simple curiosity, or the lure of a publisher’s advance. Can those years really be compensated by the minor fame gained in very restricted circles, or the brief shower of reviews, or the fee that often wouldn’t cover the annual salary of the editor’s assistant? Can those inducements explain entire days spent fretting over someone else’s exact height and shoe size, what she ate for lunch on a given day?

Yes, admittedly, there are plenty of dime-a-word hacks, even in the rarefied domain of literary biography, who are content with assembling the requisite factoids and moving on to the next assignment. And, to be sure, there is a legitimate value to the restoration of lived history, which is part and parcel of any biography worthy of the label. But the motives are rarely so pure as we, toilers in the groves, would like to pretend. For those whose cool objectivity is sometimes tinctured with sweat, blood, and bile, there is another, more essential component: a questing for oneself, sought in glimpses and fleeting points of contact between one’s own self-image and the actions and traits of someone who, in reality, probably has very little in common with his or her dogged interpreter.

When I set out to write the life of André Breton, I was, of course, intrigued by the great public stands, the adventure that was Surrealism, the explorations and friendships that characterized his long run on the intellectual stage. But what kept me attached for nearly ten years, what held me in that front-row seat night after night as Breton played out his operatic dramas, were the smaller details, the ones that showed me that here was a man who asked some of the same questions, held some of the same aspirations, and—alas—made some of the same mistakes as I did. The details, in other words, that can foster the insane but pervasive illusion that we have entered into a unique understanding with someone never met and perhaps long dead, an understanding that (we are convinced) even the subject’s closest friends and loved ones couldn’t share—and how dare those friends and loved ones, not to mention the subject himself (as in Ian Hamilton’s case), object when we presume to manhandle the intimate detritus of his life! And even more so when we then undertake to render our findings public, effectively bragging to all the world, with however much humility or respect, that we and we alone were granted this privileged audience. We have met the subject, and he is us.

Given half a chance, a biographer (and I do not exempt myself from this) will wax expansive about the particular hardships and satisfactions of the craft. One always wants an opportunity to tell one’s war stories. But what these efforts mask—and when the story of the writing becomes part of the writing itself, that mask can wear disturbingly thin—is a love-hate dialogue with an often unwitting interlocutor; a fascination with certain aspects of the other’s actions or character, coupled with a kind of resentment, even revulsion, against that same person for having made us feel so drawn in the first place.

We might as well be honest with ourselves: at its core, and stripped of its patina of scholarly respectability, the researcher’s m. o., his impetus, are not so very different from the stalker’s, with some of the same hungers for information and recognition, the same dark wish to enter into and subsume the other’s existence and accomplishments, the other’s notoriety. Don’t we know it, deep down; and don’t they know it, too, those widows and executors and former comrades-in-arms who spurn our earnest advances, our requests for what is at bottom a 500-page autograph. When all is said and done, the ultimate biographer might well be, not Richard Ellman or Leon Edel, but Mark David Chapman.

Mark Polizzotti

(Originally published in Biography and Source Studies, ed. Frederick R. Karl, vol. 5)

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