Made to Order Biographies

[via Andrew Sullivan]

Uses and Abuses of Political Biography

With the Democratic National Convention underway, here comes the oft-repeated question of why Lyndon B. Johnson is so frequently excluded from the pantheon of the party’s great leaders.

Two Quotes

I read Sylvie Simmons’ decent biography Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes (Da Capo Press, 2002) years ago, but these must have really stood out enough in my mind at the time for me to think them worth recording in one of my notebooks.

Quoting Jane Birkin: “Serge would go to buy the newspapers every day just to see if we were in them. We were in them constantly. He adored it. He used to say, ‘Nous sommes mythiques’ – we’re mythological – therefore  what people say about you, what they get right or wrong, doesn’t really matter as long as you’re there, and the lies are probably better than the truth half the time.” (pg 61)

“(As [Serge] once told Actuel magazine, showing the journalist around his house with its framed pictures of Marilyn Monroe on the walls, his fixation with the actress had come about ‘because she is dead’ and thus could never be corrupted or spoiled).” (pg 64)

Writing Obituaries

On final tidbit worth sharing from my research on Gordon Sinclair describes Sinclair’s youthful days on the city desk, where he’d often be called upon to investigate obituaries to try and uncover deeper human interest stories.

It reminds me a lot of my time at the New Brunswick Legislative Library when I researched and wrote biographies for every politician elected to the provincial assembly from 1784 to the present day. I took very seriously that every individual made an impact on the world (or at least the people around them) in some way, and did my best to uncover a story, anecdote, achievement–something from newspaper clippings, hansard records, local histories, or any other resource available at the library–about everyone that made them stand apart from the others.

Perhaps the practice ran the risk of over-emphasizing something that the individual themselves might not have dwelled on, but but it was a sincere effort to humanize all of them when often the majority of available information was limited to the dates of elections, appointments, or resignations. It also mirrored the practice of Sinclair and other Star reporters seeking to find an interesting nugget of biography to expand on the bare-bones of obituary. The following comes from Scott Young’s Gordon Sinclair: A Life…And Then Some (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1987):

Much that engaged Sinclair in his earliest Star days was exciting and fun, partly because it was all new to him. However, the other side of the coin was obits. Everybody had to do them, but cubs like Sinclair and people who were in the doghouse got the most. Forms were filled out by people wishing to insert notices in the Star’s daily Deaths columns, and each included a spare copy, called a flimsy, for the newsroom. An assistant city editor would distribute these, a handful here and a handful there.

Reporters were expected to fill spare time by telephoning relatives or friends of the deceased and finding out more about them: any medals, awards, interesting achievements, or crimes; why the dear departed lived such a long time or such or short time; whether he or she had any famous relatives or was a member of any clubs or lodges. Two or three paragraphs might be printed under headings such as “Fought at Vimy” or “Father of 17″. Sinclair did his share.

It was boring work, but to ditch a handfulof obit flimsies meant taking a chance that the Telegram would turn up a good story that the Star had missed.

 

 

Learning From The Worst Practices

I stumbled across this review of Joe C.W. Armstrong’s Champlain (Macmillan of Canada, 1987) while researching something completely different in the March 1989 issue of the Canadian Historical Review. The reviewer, John A. Dickinson, balances what makes a written biography good or bad. He begins by speaking broadly:

Biography is an exacting discipline which requires keen critical abilities and a solid understanding of the period in question. The author, while being necessarily sympathetic to the ‘hero,’ must remain sufficiently detached to put events in perspective and be able to evaluate opposing views. Retelling a well-known story adds the additional problem of findind new and original details that will make the exercise worthwhile.

The rest of the review is pretty scathing:

Unfortunately this latest biography of Champlain by Joe C.W. Armstrong meets none of these criteria. This book is burdened by all the faults of poor biography: too close adherence to and acceptance of one point of view, lack of perspective, ignorance of the historical period, hyperbole, inconsistencies, unsupported speculation, and errors.

Dickinson later adds ignorance of the recent scholarship to the biographer’s list of crimes.

Truth and Fiction of a Roving Reporter

This week’s Historicist column was about Toronto-born journalist and world traveller, Gordon Sinclair. As a travel-writer, his tales of adventure and intrigue in Asia and the South Pacific captured the imagination of his readers, and provided an escape from the mundane realities of the Great Depression. Andrew Cohen, writing a review of Scott Young’s brisk and workmanlike biography of Sinclair for a March 1989 issue of the Canadian Historical Review, touches on exactly what interests me most about Gordon Sinclair: his storyteller’s propensity for embellishment and self-creation. “The trouble with Sinclair’s stories is they were not always true,” Cohen writes. “His was more the journalism of the narcissist than the iconoclast. He was the product of the Age of Hyperbole, when entertainment mattered more than reportage.” I mention it in the column, but expand here on the level of truth and fiction in his stories.

Yet, perhaps Cohen and I overstated the amount of embellishment a bit. In Gordon Sinclair: A Life…And Then Some (1987), Young explains how it was Sinclair’s talent itself that made him a target:

With his career then approaching high gear, a whispering campaign began that followed him almost for life: that none of these things really happened, that he made them up as he went along. The truth is that some journalists could have travelled—some have travelled—the same route as Sinclair without possessing the instinct, the sheer curiosity about the human condition, to find what he found. He wasn’t exactly the good Samaritan type, but when something interesting presented itself, he never crossed to the other side of the road and hurried on. Some of it was fun and he wrote that as fun; when it was tragedy or something close to it, he had a very clearly sensed, open-eyed, often dispassionate way of relating precisely what happened, and what happened next, until his readers had the picture as he saw it and felt it. He often lucked in to his kind of story, large or small, wherever he went. (Young, 62)

In his 1975 autobiography, Will Gordon Sinclair Please Sit Down , Sinclair described the difficulty of defending himself against charges he’d invented his adventures:

I’d often been accused of faking stories of far-away places, and there was a simple explanation. There was no international air mail in those days, and since my stories were human interest yarns rather than hard news, I sent them home by mail, often getting back before they did! Yarns with exotic datelines (but no actual dates on them) appeared in the paper while I’d be visible on the street.

Fake! Fraud! Fiction!

I made the mistake of trying to explain it in print, by word of mouth and even by radio. Cries of fake grew louder. I showed hotel bills, letters of credit showing withdrawals as to time, place, and amount, passport entry and departure markings.

Many critics were not convinced. Even now, more than forty years after some of these events, I’m periodically accused by people who were no even born when I spied out the world’s far places, that I wrote it all in the pub or wine cellar. (Sinclair, 106)

Modus Operandi

Larry Darrell, a veteran traumatized by his wartime experiences, abandons his fiancée and hopes for a conventional career on a romantic pursuit of wisdom and fulfillment that no one but he is able to understand. The fruit of his lifelong intellectual work is a single volume, which Maugham’s narrator picks up and examines:

It was not in the least the sort of thing I expected. It was a collection of essays of about the same length as those in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, upon a number of famous persons. The choice he had made puzzled me. There was one on Sulla, the Roman dictator who, having achieved absolute power, resigned it to return to private life; there was one on Akbar, the Mogul conqueror who won and empire; there was one on Ruben, there was one on Goethe, and there was one on the Lord Chesterfield of the Letters. It was obvious that each of the essays had needed a tremendous amount of reading and I was no longer surprised that it had taken Larry so long to produce this book, but I could not see why he had thought it worthwhile to give it so much time or why he had chosen those particular men to study. Then it occurred to me that every one of them in his own way had made a supreme success of life and I guessed that this was what had interested Larry. He was curious to see what in the end it amounted to.

Assembling a compendium of diverse biographies inevitably puts the compiler’s own life into greater perspective. It raises awareness of what is remembered and what is forgotten as real lives dissolve into the caricatures on the pages of history. It reveals the impossibility of perfection, but also the inescapable whispers of past crimes.

The lives of great men do not hold all the secrets of human history; world events do not turn solely according to their whims and fancies, as Thomas Carlyle’s followers would claim. Yet, with a less grandiose scope, the lives of the famous or insignificant men reveal much about personal character, success, failure, strengths, weaknesses, personality, and masculinity. Like Darrell’s puzzling selections, what will follow on these pages may seem a disconnected assortment of biographies of and meditations on national icons, obscure politicians, athletes, criminals, movie stars, musicians, fictitious characters, and ordinary men. The only criteria for inclusion are that the subject is interesting in some way, and his experiences interrogate any number of questions. How do auto/biographies, hagiographies, and histories achieve their work of remembrance or forgetting? What is the nature of life, death, and all that? At core, how is a man’s life to be measured?