FISH 1, SILVERMAN 0:

-ESSAY: Biography and Pseudobiography (Kenneth Silverman, January 2003, Common Place)

Like wrestling with an angel, writing a biography is hard work against long odds. And the effort has lately been much under attack. A recent collection of scholarly essays calls itself The Troubled Face of Biography (Houndmills, Eng., 1988). Most of the criticism takes off from the view that biographies are constructs, fictions not essentially different from novels. On this ground it's charged that biographers prepackage their subjects' lives, or invent them, or falsify them for dramatic effect.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Minutiae Without Meaning," Stanley Fish, dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois, knocked biography as a "bad game." Fish observes that biographers obsessively collect details. Since these details "don't mean anything in particular, or can mean anything at all . . . the biographer is compelled to invent or fabricate a meaning by riding his or her favorite hobbyhorse until every inch of the subject's life is covered by some reassuring pattern of cause and effect."

To me, Fish's grumbling betrays unfamiliarity with the history of biography in the West and with how serious biographies get written. [...]

Yet the aesthetic standard for biography, while complex, is no mystery. Biography aims not merely at informing but also at moving the reader, through the spectacle of another soul's journey through existence. The art of biography consists of producing an affecting narrative while remaining utterly faithful to the documents.

I'll illustrate this by one final personal example. Cotton Mather's life as I presented it had been full of deprivation and loss, including the deaths of nine of his children. I wanted the concluding paragraph of the biography to leave the reader feeling this. At the same time, for my own satisfaction, I wanted to render Mather's pain through documents alone. The last paragraph would be an emblem of the biographical aesthetic, an homage to factuality.

I worked it all out this way. Each of the five sections of the book begins with a page of quotations by or about Mather. To introduce the final section, covering his last years, I reproduced the inventory of his estate, drawn up the year of his death, 1728. The inventory is nothing more than a list of shabby household goods—"1 pr. of Red Curtains Motheaten," [pause] "1 Old Standing Candlestick. A Cross cut Saw," [pause] "2 pr. of Iron Dogs, other broken Dogs," and so on.

Thirty pages later comes the final paragraph of the biography. The reader can see that it in effect repeats the inventory, but in a different shape. I rearranged the listed household goods to form a sort of litany, a single connected sentence whose thumping rhythm accents the decay and loss that these worn out objects represent: "However luxuriantly he lived in heaven, Mather had not lived affluently on earth, and had lost much. What he left behind, as set down in the inventory of his estate, was dingy and mean: pie plates, lumber, a crosscut saw, three old rugs, four old bedsteads, two old oval tables, two old chests of drawers, old china curtains, old quilt, old warming pan, old standing candlestick, red curtains motheaten, broken stone table, broken fireplace dogs, broken chairs, broken pewter, broken spoons." It's not for me to say how well this paragraph succeeds either as a narrative climax or an emblem, much less when thus taken out of context. But my aim was to make pure, inert documentary evidence serve dramatic ends, to marry my form to my research. That remains to me the aesthetic measure of biography, the angel with whom the biographer wrestles longest and hardest of all.

What's curious about this is that for all Mr. Silverman's protestations, he seems to have done precisely what Mr. Fish suggested biographers are prone to do. Having determined for himself that Mather's life can be defined by his pain and loss, Mr. Silverman structured his conclusion around a document that can be made to show same. Of course, it needn't show that. We might equally say that Mather had used up his full measure and was prepared to depart, leaving little material behind, but much that is spiritual. In fact, we've no way of knowing, at least from this list, if this was really all Mather had by the end. Perhaps he'd already dispersed the quality items to others. But most importantly, this list tells us nothing about how Mather viewed his own life, its quality, his accomplishments, etc. what it does, beyond doubt, show us is what Mr. Silverman thinks of that life. And wasn't that Mr. Fish's point? Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2003 3:21 PM