The Art of Biography and A Journalist's Dismay

After reading about The Art of Biography in The Paris Review (don't be impressed, a much better educated friend suggested I Google it; so I did) I find I'm dismayed all over again with "creative" writing. 

More: http://www.theparisreview.org/about/

I admit I lack a certain artistic flair - but truly, I feel a lot of biography (and possibly all autobiography - ha!) is far more fiction than we want to believe. To be fair, I should note that Edel points out "biographers...are not allowed to imagine facts." 

An excerpt is below. (Emphasis added by a certain snarky blogger.) If you dig this, good news: it is taken from a five-part series and each piece is quite long. Enjoy.

INTERVIEWER

I want to come back to something you said earlier. Is biography really an art or is it, in fact, a structural piecing together of fragments—a form of carpentry?

EDEL

There is carpentry involved, of course, but what I was doing was finding a form to suit my materials as I went along, having from the first given myself a large design. The moment you start shaping a biography, it becomes more than a mere assemblage of facts, mere use of lumber and nails—you are creating a work of art. I think I was performing like a dramatist when I planted my pistols ahead of time, and like a novelist when I did a flashback—incorporating retrospective chapters as I moved from theme to theme, character to character, showing the hero making mistakes and correcting them, facing adversity and learning from experience, growing older and having his particular kind of artistic and intellectual adventures, writing novels applauded in England and decried in America or being attacked in England amid the cheers of his countrymen back home. I had James’s Europe as my scene, and his bold way of annexing foreign territory to his American subjects. Above all, I was working toward what would be the climax of my serialization—those five intense years of dramatic writing, when he failed miserably, and then pulled himself together to write his last novels. All this required what I like to call the biographical imagination, the imagination of form. As biographers, we are not allowed to imagine our facts.

INTERVIEWER

How would you describe the nature of the biographical art beyond the technique of narrative?

EDEL

I believe the secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip. The difference between one kind of biographer and another may be measured by the quantity of poetry infused into the narrative of life and doing—the poetry of existence, of trial and error, initiation and discovery, rites of passage and development, the inevitabilities of aging, or the truncated lives—Keats, Byron and others—who died young and yet somehow burned like bright flames. This kind of writing requires patience, assiduity, also enthusiasm, feeling, and certainly a sense of the biographer’s participation. The biographer is a presence in life-writing, in charge of handling the material, establishing order, explaining and analyzing the ambiguities and anomalies. Biography is dull if it’s just dates and facts: it has for too long ignored the entire province of psychology and the emotions. Ultimately, there must be a sense of the inwardness of human beings as well as outwardness: the ways in which we make dreams into realities, the way fantasies become plays and novels and poems—or the general who fights a great battle, Nelson and Trafalgar, Wellington and Waterloo, Washington and Valley Forge, the defeated Napoleon and his Waterloo—the strivings and the failings. It involves finding the links between the body and the spirit or soul in which human beings seem to rise above weakness and struggle.
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Do Edel's comments cause you to reconsider any biographies you've read and loved over the years? I haven't given it a great deal of thought yet, but so far, at least, it has given me new appreciation for great historical fiction, much of which could pass for fictionalized biographies. I'm sure I will give this some more thought in the future. In the meantime, if you'd like to share your thoughts, please do! Guest bloggers are always welcome here!