Biography: Public Fascination with the Private Lives of Individuals

Biography: public fascination with the private lives of individuals

Discussion at The Park

Wednesday 26 April 2017 7:30pm at The Park Tavern, Macclesfield

These notes are based on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time: Biography. This discussion, between Melvyn Bragg and guests Amanda Foreman, Nigel Hamilton & Richard Holmes, was broadcast 22 June 2000.

Introduction: In recent years, people in the UK have spent very well over £100million per year on well over 10million biographical books. In the US, biographies have sometime exceeded over half of all book sales. As an art form, the biography is said to stem from Boswell’s account of the life of Dr Samuel Johnson, and be “the signal British contribution to world art” (Professor Nigel Hamilton). 1885-1901 saw the publication of Dictionary of National Biography. This has recently been relaunched as The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Questions:

1. Going around the circle, those who wish are invited to suggest one or two personally favourite biographies.

2. Samuel Johnson described a biography as “exploring the human soul … including vices as well as virtues … the beautiful as well as the base …”. Comments on this from the circle?

3. Notions of what constitutes “vice” or “virtue” may change over the generations. Does this detract from the value of biography, especially when looking back over an appreciable period of time?

4. What can we suggest is the boundary between fictional (the novel) and biographical (the documentary) forms of writing?

5. Boswell wrote about Samuel Johnson’s life (1,200 pages written over 26years) out of friendship. Can biography function equally well as the prosecution, the defence or the judge?

6. What differences might we expect between a biography and an auto-biography?

7. Questions the reader asks about private lives can vary over time. Victorian biographers frequently wrote about the subject’s religious state of mind as well as their achievements. What might be the key features of a subject’s life, examined on behalf of readers in our time?

8. Is biography the “looting of privacy” (Melvyn Bragg)? In her book, “The Silent Woman: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath”, Janet Malcolm asserts that biography is habitually read in a mood of “bovine equanimity”. If that is true, what’s the point of reading biography? Alternatively, this book is so uncomfortable to read because of its revelation of deeply personal events – http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review-in-the-biographers-laboratory-the-silent-woman-janet-malcolm-picador-1499-pounds-1444339.html. Comments?

9. “We owe respect to the living. But to the dead, only truth’”, says Amanda Foreman. She describes the nature of biographical truth as being different from taking a photograph: “factual truth” versus “dramatic truth”. What is our reaction to these sentiments?

10. In conclusion, has anyone in our circle changed their choice of a favourite biography, in light of our discussions?

Further Listening or Reading

1. BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time: Biography – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00546vf

2. Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-190 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography#Oxford_Dictionary_of_National_Biography

3. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, from 1992 – http://global.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/

dpw 20 April 2017