In The Biographer’s Workshop

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 4

In The Biographer’s Workshop

The Art of Biography. By Paul Murray Kendall. Allen and Unwin 158 pp. Index.

The present century has iseen an unprecedented activ- | ity in the writing of bio- : graphy, and can probably ; claim more distinguished biographers than previous I age. C. V. Wedgewood, David Cecil, Sir Winston | Churchill, Lytton Strachey, Sir Harold Nicholson. Profesj sor Kendall himself—these are some of the names which come to mind. Yet not very much has been written about biography as an art. One reason for this may be. as Professor Kendall suggests, that biography has never been taken as seriously as the other literary’ arts. A biography is often thought of as an essentially factual document, and therefore of an inferior creative order. Professor Kendall, whose own fine biography of Richard 111 has restored much of the humanity to that maligned King, demonstrates in this excellent study that biography is indeed an art, and a most difficult one, full of pitfalls for the unwary. Professor Kendall begins by defining his territory’. The term biography covers a wide range of life-writing, not all of which qualifies as true biography. At one extreme there is the fictionalised biography which dramatises a life at the expense of biographical truth, and at the other is the scholarly documentation of fact. True biography, however, according to Profesfessor Kendall's definition, is much more than the “story,” or the “record” of life; rather is it “the simulation in words of a man’s life, from all that is known about that man.” In this task of creating, from a basis of cold fact, the illusion of a life unfolding in all its human complexity, a delicate balance must be maintained between science and art: between what Professor Kendall

terms the “paper-trail” of facts which encumbers a man's life, and the need for imaginative interpretation. "The biographer.” he writes “must be a sort of bifurcated animal, digger and dreamer, for biography is an impossible amalgam: half-rainbow. : half stone. To exist at all, it must feed upon the truth of facts, and yet to exist on its ' highest level, it must pursue •the truth of' interpretation.” Professor Kendall next outlines some of the chief problems which face the serious biographer: the filling-in of gaps, the management of time, the grouping of significant themes. All must be considered in relation to preserving the sweep of human chronology as the life moves through time from birth to maturity and death. In the following four chapters, the author surveys the development of biography from Plutarch and Suetonius to the present-day, showing how in each age biography has been conditioned by the prevailing attitudes to human life. In the middle-ages, for example, the biographical impulse was reduced by religious pressures to a' dreary catalogue of Saints’ I lives, while in the nineteenth century it was confined in al

straight-jacket of respecUbllity. In the twen’leih cett>iry, on the other hand, no-one socially-imposed view of man has arisen to circumscribe the biographer's freedom. Yet Professor Kendall sees a new danger to biography in the forces of science and literature. The scientific element has provided a stimulus to more accurate research, and set new standards in the editing of source materials, but it has also produced a tendency to regard facts as ends in themselves, an attitude which could lead to the ossification of the biographical impulse. The influence of lierature is seen at its most pernicious in “super-bio-graphies” such as the four volumes of Leon Edel's bio-graphy-in-progress of Henry James which draw freely on the techniques of the novelist. In illuminating James's character, Edel freely manipulates time, thus violating that simulation of a life being lived which is an essential quality of the finest biography of any age. Professor Kendall writes with a graceful ease which conceals wide scholarship, and his book provides some fascinating glimpses into that seldom explored territory, the biographer's workshop.