Insofar as I have used biography in my work, it has been less for the sake of the individual subject than as a vehicle for exhibiting an age, as in the case of Coucy in A Distant Mirror; or a country and its state of mind, as in the case of Speaker Reed and Richard Strauss in The Proud Tower; or a historic situation, as in the case of Stilwell and the American Experience in China. You might say that this somewhat roundabout approach does not qualify me for the title of biographer and you would be right. I do not think of myself as a biographer; biography is just a form I have used once or twice to encapsulate history.
I believe it to be a valid method for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it has distinguished precedents. The National Portrait Gallery uses portraiture to exhibit history. Plutarch, the father of biography, used it for moral examples: to display the reward of duty performed, the traps of ambition, the fall of arrogance. His biographical facts and anecdotes, artistically arranged in Parallel Lives, were designed to delight and edify the reader while at the same time inculcating ethical principles. Every creative artist—among whom I include Plutarch and, if it is not too pretentious, myself—has the same two objects: to express his own vision and to communicate it to the reader, viewer, listener, or other consumer. (I should add that as regards the practice of history and biography, “creative” does not mean, as some think, to invent; it means to give the product artistic shape.)
A writer will normally wish to communicate in such a way as to please and interest, if not necessarily edify, the reader. I do not think of edifying because in our epoch we tend to shy away from moral overtones, and yet I suppose I believe, if you were to pin me down, that aesthetic pleasure in good writing or in any of the arts, and increased knowledge of human conduct, that is to say of history, both have the power to edify.
As a prism of history, biography attracts and holds the reader’s interest in the larger subject. People are interested in other people, in the fortunes of the individual. If I seem to stress the reader’s interest rather more than the pure urge of the writer, it is because, for me, the reader is the essential other half of the writer. Between them is an indissoluble connection. If it takes two to make love or war or tennis, it likewise takes two to complete the function of the written word. I never feel my writing is born or has an independent existence until it is read. It is like a cake whose only raison d’être is to be eaten. Ergo, first catch your reader.
Secondly, biography is useful because it encompasses the universal in the particular. It is a focus that allows both the writer to narrow his field to manageable dimensions and the reader to more easily comprehend the subject. Given too wide a scope, the central theme wanders, becomes diffuse, and loses shape. One does not try for the whole but for what is truthfully representative.
Coucy, as I began to take notice of him in my early research on the fourteenth century, offered more and more facets of the needed prism. From the time his mother died in the Black Death to his own marvelously appropriate death in the culminating fiasco of knighthood that closed the century, his life was as if designed for the historian. He suppressed the peasant revolt called the Jacquerie; he married the King of England’s eldest daughter, acquiring a double allegiance of great historical interest; he freed his serfs in return for due payment (in a charter that survives); he campaigned three times in Italy, conveniently at Milan, Florence, and Genoa; he commanded an army of brigand mercenaries, the worst scourge of the age, in a vain venture in Switzerland, his only failure; he picked the right year to revisit England, 1376, the year of John Wycliffe’s trial, the Good Parliament, and the deathbed of the Black Prince, at which he was present; he was escort for the Emperor at all the stage plays, pageantry, and festivities during the imperial visit to Paris; he was chosen for his eloquence and tact to negotiate with the urban rebels of Paris in 1382, and at a truce parley with the English at which a member of the opposite team just happened to be Geoffrey Chaucer; he was agent or envoy to the Pope, the Duke of Brittany, and other difficult characters in delicate situations; he was a patron and friend of Froissart and owned the oldest surviving copy of the Chronicle; his castle was celebrated in a poem by Deschamps; he assisted at the literary competition for the Cent Ballades, of which his cousin, the Bastard of Coucy, was one of the authors; on the death of his father-in-law, King Edward, he returned his wife and the Order of the Garter to England; his daughter was “divorced at Rome by means of false witnesses” by her dissolute husband; he commanded an overseas expedition to Tunisia; he founded a monastery at Soissons; he testified at the canonization process of Pierre de Luxembourg; at age fifty he was challenged to a joust (in a letter that survives), by the Earl of Nottingham, Earl Marshal of England, twenty-three years old, as the person most fitting to confer “honor, valor, chivalry and great renown” on a young knight (though, from what I can gather, Coucy was too busy to bother with him); he was of course in the King’s company at the sensational mad scene when Charles VI went out of his mind, and at the macabre “dance of the savages” afterward; it was his physician who attended the King and who later ordered his own tomb effigy as a skeleton, the first of its kind in the cult of death; finally, as “the most experienced and skillful of all the knights of France,” he was a leader of the last Crusade, and on the way to death met the only medieval experience so far missing from his record—an attested miracle. In short, he supplies leads to every subject—marriage and divorce, religion, insurrection, literature, Italy, England, war, politics, and a wonderful range of the most interesting people of his time, from Pope to peasant. Among them, I may have rather reached for Catherine of Siena, but almost everyone else in the book actually at some point crossed paths with Coucy.
Once having decided upon him, the more I found out while pursuing his traces through the chronicles and genealogies, the more he offered. The study of his tempestuous dynasty dating back to the tenth century, with the adventures in law, war, and love of his ungovernable, not to say ferocious, forebears, made in itself a perfect prism of the earlier Middle Ages, which I needed for background. When I came upon the strange and marvelous ceremony of the Rissoles performed each year in the courtyard of Coucy-le-château, with its strands reaching back into a tangle of pagan, barbarian, feudal, and Christian sources, I knew that there in front of me was medieval society in microcosm and, as I wrote in the book, the many-layered elements of Western man.
As Coucy was a find, so for America at the turn of the twentieth century was Speaker Reed, or Czar Reed as he was called. As soon as I discovered this independent and uncompromising monument of a man, I knew I had what I wanted for the American chapter inThe Proud Tower, a book about the forces at work in society in the last years before 1914. He was so obviously “writable”—if I may invent a word, which is against my principles—that I could not believe that, except for a routine political biography published in 1914 and an uninspired academic study in 1930, nothing had been written about him since his death in 1902. I now felt he was my personal property and became seized by the fear that someone else would surely see his possibilities and publish something in the years before my book—of which he formed only one part in eight—could appear. Novelists, I suppose, are free of this fear, but it haunts the rest of us from the moment we have found an exciting and hitherto untreated subject. Unbelievably, as it seemed to me, Reed remained invisible to others, and as soon as I had written the chapter I took the precaution of arranging with American Heritage to publish it separately a year before the book as a whole was completed.
Reed was an ideal focus, not least because, as an anti-Imperialist, he represented the losers of that era in our history. Usually it is the winners who capture the history books. We all know about Manifest Destiny and McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt and Admiral Mahan, but it is astonishing how much more dramatic an issue becomes if the opponents’—in this case the anti-Imperialists’—views are given equal play and the contest is told as if the outcome were still in the balance.
Though the events of the chapter are confined to less than a decade, I learned more about the ideas that formed our country than I had in all my years since first grade. Reed led, through the anti-Imperialist cause, to Samuel Gompers, E. L. Godkin, Charles Eliot Norton, William James, Charles William Eliot (and what a writable character he was!), Carl Schurz, Andrew Carnegie, Moorfield Storey, and to their attitudes and beliefs about America. All America’s traditions were reflected there. Our development up to that time, and indeed since, was caught in the prism of the struggle over expansion.
In form, the piece on Reed is a biographical sketch, which is a distinct form of its own with a long literary history. As a rule such sketches are grouped in a collective volume, often by the dozen, like eggs: The Twelve Caesars, Twelve Against the Gods, Twelve Bad Men, and others. The advantage of the form is that one can extract the essence—the charm or drama, the historical or philosophical or other meaning—of the subject’s life without having to follow him through all the callow years, the wrong turnings, and the periods in every life of no particular significance. Reed was an excellent choice for many reasons: because of his outsize and memorable appearance—he was a physical giant six foot three inches tall, weighing three hundred pounds, always dressed completely in black, with a huge clean-shaven face like a casaba melon; and, because of his quotable wit, his imposing character, his moral passion, and the tragic irony linking the two great contests of his life—one over the Silent Quorum and the other over the treaty assuming sovereignty over the Philippines. The first in its mad action was a writer’s dream, and the second brought into focus the struggle of ideas at the turn of the century that marked the change from the old America to the new.
The Silent Quorum was a custom by which minority members of the House could defeat any legislation they did not like by refusing to answer “present” when called to establish a quorum for the vote. As Republican Speaker of the House, Reed had made up his mind to end once and for all the device that made a mockery of the congressional process. He succeeded in scenes, as a reporter wrote, “of such wild excitement, burning indignation, scathing denunciation and really dangerous conditions” as had never before been witnessed on the floor. Pandemonium reigned, the Democrats foamed with rage, a hundred of them were on their feet at once howling for recognition. One Representative, a diminutive former Confederate cavalry general, unable to reach the front because of the crowded aisles, came down from the rear, “leaping from desk to desk as an ibex leaps from crag to crag.” The only Democrat not on his feet at this point was a huge Representative from Texas who sat in his seat significantly whetting a bowie knife on his boot.
Recalling that scene here is for me simply self-indulgence: I had such fun writing it. In the end, after five days of furious battle, Reed triumphed and succeeded in imposing a new set of voting rules that ensured that the will of the majority would thereafter govern. It was a long stride, as he said, in the direction of responsible government. Five years later, when it came to a vote on the annexation of Hawaii, and subsequently, on the treaty taking over the Philippines (which Reed as an anti-Imperialist bitterly opposed), the purpose of the Quorum battle came to a test with inescapable moral fate, against himself. Still Speaker, he might—by summoning all his authority and manipulating every parliamentary wile of which he was the master—have stifled the vote, but if he did he would nullify the reform he had earlier won. He had to choose between his hatred of foreign conquest and his own rules. Knowing too well the value of what he had accomplished, he could make only one choice. His victory over the Silent Quorum gave the victory to the expansionist sentiment he despised.
To me it seemed a drama of classic shape and I have always thought it would make a good play if only some perceptive playwright would come forward to write it. None has, I suspect because the playwrights of our era prefer to find tragedy in the lives of little people, in pale Laura and her glass menagerie, in the death of a salesman, in loneliness crying for little Sheba to come back. Something about our time does not like the great—though doubtless pathos and frustration are as true for humanity as the theme of The Trojan Women.
Another find for The Proud Tower was Richard Strauss, who served as a prism for a view of Imperial Germany on the eve of 1914. I did not want to do the usual portrayal of Wilhelmine Germany in terms of Wilhelm II and the militarists and the Agadir Crisis and all that. The business of rewriting what is already well known holds no charm for me. I would find no stimulus to write unless I were learning something new and telling the reader something new, in content or in form. I have never understood how the English manage to interest themselves in turning out all those lives of Queen Victoria, Wellington, Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots—the large and the hackneyed. For the writer, plowing through the material for such a book must be like sitting down every day to a meal of Cream of Wheat: no surprises.
The choice of Strauss, which meant writing familiarly of music, of which I have no special knowledge, seemed almost too challenging. The reason for it was that, since I knew myself to be frankly prejudiced against Germans, I thought that both for me and the reader it would be fresh and interesting to approach them through the best they had to offer rather than the worst; through the arts, rather than through militarism, and through the one art in which they excelled—music. The result was that I enjoyed myself. Strauss proved satisfactorily Teutonic, and his wife, with her fanatic housekeeping and screams of wrath, even more so. Like Coucy, Strauss led everywhere: through his Zarathustra to Nietzsche, a key to the period; through his Salome to fin-de-siècledecadence; through conductorship of the Berlin Opera to Berlin and the beer gardens and German society and the Sieges Allee with its glittering marble rows of helmeted Hohenzollerns in triumphant attitudes; to Wilhelm II in his fancy as “an art-loving prince”; to Vienna through Strauss’s collaborator Von Hofmannsthal; to the brilliant explosion, as the new century opened, of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet, of the Fauves led by Matisse, the dance of Isadora Duncan, the sculpture of Rodin, the Rite of Spring of Stravinsky, the scandal of Nijinsky’s performance as Debussy’s Faun, and to all the frenzy and fecundity of that feverish eleventh hour that was seeking to express itself in emotion and art. I did not have to labor Strauss to carry out the theme; it was all in Romain Rolland’s uncanny prophecy after hearing Strauss conduct Zarathustra: “Aha! Germany as the All-Powerful will not keep her balance for long. Nietzsche, Strauss, the Kaiser—Neroism is in the air!” Equally perceptive, the Austrian critic Hermann Bahr heard in Strauss’sElektra “a pride born of limitless power,” a defiance of order “lured back toward chaos.” Thus is biography welded to history.
The life of “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was the nearest I have come to a formal biography, although I conceived of it from the start as a vehicle to carry the larger subject of the American experience in China. Stilwell was not a lucky find like Coucy; he was the natural and obvious choice. His career had been connected with China throughout the period of the modern Sino-American relationship from 1911, the year of the Chinese Revolution, to the penultimate year of World War II, when he was the commanding American in the China Theater. He represented, as I believe, the best that America has tried to do in Asia, and he was in himself a representative American, yet sufficiently non-typical to be a distinct and memorable individual. The peculiar thing about him is that he left a different impression on different readers; some came away from the book admiring and others rather disliking him, which only proves what every writer knows: that a certain number of readers will always find in one’s book not what one has written, but what they bring to it.
Or it may be that I failed with Stilwell to achieve a firm characterization, which may reflect a certain ambivalence. I certainly admired him, and critics have said that I was, indeed, too energetically his champion. Yet I was never sure that I would have actually liked him in real life, or that he, to put it mildly, would have approved of me. Perhaps it is fortunate that, although I passed through Peking in 1935 when he was there as military attaché, we never met.
This raises the question: Who is the ideal biographer? One who has known his subject or one who has not? Boswell, I suppose, is generally credited with the most perfect biography ever written (or, rather, personal memoir, for it was not really a biography), and the other biographies that stand out over the ages are mostly those written by friends, relatives, or colleagues of the subject: Joinville’s Memoir of Saint Louis; Comines’ Memoirs of Louis XI; the three monuments by sons-in-law—Tacitus’ Life of Agricola, William Roper’s Sir Thomas More, John Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott; Lincoln by his two secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay; Gladstone by his colleague Lord Morley.
Such biographers have a unique intimacy, and if in addition they are reasonably honest and perceptive, they can construct a life that those of us not acquainted with, or not contemporary with, our subject can never match. If the contemporary biographer is blessed with Boswell’s genius as reporter and writer, the result may be supreme. On the other hand, he may distort, consciously or unconsciously, through access to too much information, and produce a warehouse instead of a portrait. Lockhart’s work fills four thousand pages in nine volumes; Nicolay and Hay’s about the same in ten volumes. Unfortunately, in the matter of superabundance, the secondary biographer of today is not far behind.
The most immediate life is, of course, autobiography or diaries, letters and autobiographical memoirs. These are the primary stuff of history: the Confessions of St. Augustine and of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Pepys’s Diary; Ben Franklin’s Autobiography; theMemoirs of Saint-Simon; the letters of the Marquise de Sévigné; the journals of John Evelyn, Charles Greville, and the Goncourt brothers; the Apologia of Cardinal Newman; and, I suppose I must add, that acme of self-conscious enterprise, the Education of Henry Adams. Even when tendentious or lying, these works are invaluable, but they are in a different category than biography in the sense that concerns us here.
When one tries to think of who the great secondary biographers are, no peaks stand out like the primaries. There are, of course, the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who closely followed but were not acquainted with their subject. Although they tell us what we know of the life of Jesus, their motive was not so much biographical as propagandistic—a spreading of the gospel (which means good news) that the Messiah had come. Since then one may pick one’s own choice: Carlyle’s Cromwell, perhaps, Amy Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, Sam Morison’s Christopher Columbus, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale, Leon Edel’s Henry James, Justin Kaplan’s Mark Twain and Steffens. With apologies to them, however, I think the primary biographers still have the edge.
I shall never be among them because it seems to me that the historian—whether or not the biographer—needs distance. It has once or twice been proposed to me that I write a biography of my grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a man of great charm and accomplishment, but though I loved and revered him, I shrink from the very idea. Love and reverence are not the proper mood for a historian. I have written one short piece on a particular aspect of his life,* but I could never do more.
In the subjects I have used I am not personally involved. The nearest I came was in the course of working on the Stilwell papers, then housed in Mrs. Stilwell’s home in Carmel, when I became friendly with members of the family, who were, and are, very nice people and, I am happy to say, have remained my friends even after publication. Friendly relations, I have to acknowledge, inevitably exerted a certain unspoken restraint on writing anything nasty about the deceased General, had I been so inclined. However, I cannot think of anything I really toned down, except possibly the foul language to be found in Stilwell’s diary. Restraint in that case, however, was less concerned with the family’s sensibilities than with my own. Not having been brought up with four-letter words and explicit scatological images, I found it impossible to bring myself to repeat them, and yet to omit what I then took to be an indication of character violated my conscience as a historian. I eventually worked around that problem by a generalized, if non-specific, reference to Stilwell’s vocabulary. Exposed as we have all been since to the polite and delicate language of the last decade, I think now that I took the problem too seriously. I had no idea then how common and banal these words were in male conversation.
More difficult was Stilwell’s horrid reference to Roosevelt as “Rubberlegs,” which truly shocked me. That he was a normal Roosevelt-hater of the kind in Peter Arno’s famous cartoon, “Let’s go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt,” and that he had a talent for inventing wicked nicknames, I knew, but to make fun of a physical infirmity seemed to me unforgivable. In a real agony over whether to include this usage or not, I conducted considerable research among people of Stilwell’s vintage into the phenomenon of Roosevelt-hating, and even found an entire book on the subject. It showed that, compared to many things said in those circles, Stilwell’s usage was run-of-the mill, so I put it in, though it felt like picking up a cockroach. Though minor, this episode shows how a biographer can become emotionally involved with her subject.
Whether in biography or straight history, the writer’s object is—or should be—to hold the reader’s attention. Scheherazade only survived because she managed to keep the sultan absorbed in her tales and wondering what would happen next. While I am not under quite such exigent pressure, I nevertheless want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research whether significant or not.
Unhappily, biography has lately been overtaken by a school that has abandoned the selective in favor of the all-inclusive. I think this development is part of the anti-excellence spirit of our time that insists on the equality of everything and is thus reduced to the theory that all facts are of equal value and that the biographer or historian should not presume to exercise judgment. To that I can only say, if he cannot exercise judgment, he should not be in the business. A portraitist does not achieve a likeness by giving sleeve buttons and shoelaces equal value to mouth and eyes.
Today in biography we are presented with the subject’s life reconstructed day by day from birth to death, including every new dress or pair of pants, every juvenile poem, every journey, every letter, every loan, every accepted or rejected invitation, every telephone message, every drink at every bar. Lytton Strachey, the father of modern biography at its most readable, if not most reliable, and an artist to the last pen-stroke, would have been horrified to find himself today the subject of one of these laundry-list biographies in two very large volumes. His own motto was “The exclusion of everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant.” If that advice is now ignored, Strachey’s influence on psychological interpretation, on the other hand, has been followed to excess. In pre-Strachey biographies the inner life, like the two-thirds of an iceberg that is underwater, went largely unseen and uninvestigated. Since Strachey, and of course since Freud, the hidden secrets, especially if they are shady, are the biographer’s goal and the reader’s delight. It is argued—though I am not sure on what ground—that the public has a right to know the underside, and the biographer busies himself in penetrating private crannies and uncovering the failures and delinquencies his subject strove to conceal. Where once biography was devoted to setting up marble statues, it is now devoted, in Andre Maurois’ words, to “pulling dead lions by the beard.”
Having a strong instinctive sense of privacy myself, I feel no great obligation to pry into a subject’s private life and reveal—unless it is clearly relevant—what he would have wanted to keep private. “What business has the public to know of Byron’s wildnesses?” asked Tennyson. “He has given them fine work and they ought to be satisfied.” Tennyson had a point. Do we really have to know of some famous person that he wet his pants at age six and practiced oral sex at sixty? I suppose it is quite possible that Shakespeare might have indulged in one or both of these habits. If evidence to that effect were suddenly to be found today, what then would be the truth of Shakespeare—the new finding or King Lear? Would the plays interest us more because we had knowledge of the author’s excretory or amatory digressions?
No doubt many would unhesitatingly answer yes to that question. It seems to me, however, that insofar as biography is used to illumine history, voyeurism has no place. Happily, in the case of the greatest English writer, we know and are likely to know close to nothing about his private life. I like this vacuum, this miracle, this great floating monument of work that has no explanation at all.
Address, Symposium on the Art of Biography, National Portrait Gallery, November 14, 1978. Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1979).
* See “The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” this page.