Biography and Autobiography

Autobiography, Orwell thought, ‘is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.’

An excerpts from "The Art of Biography" by Joseph Epstein

‘To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies,” Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig in 1936. “Biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were to be had, we could not use it.” Freud wrote this, doubtless, because for him the essence of life was in those secrets he believed all people harbor owing to the distortions of their infancy and the disruptions of their early childhood, which made for the necessary deceits of their later lives. For those non-true-believers of the Freudian gospel among us, we take what we can get in the way of biographical truth, always aware that even the most superior biography cannot be complete. Biographies may be authorized; they can be even impressively authoritative; but they are never, ultimately, definitive.

One hopes a biography will include what its subject has done to be worthy of a biography, what the world thinks of him, what his close friends and family think of him, and, not least important though sometimes most elusive, what he thinks of himself. All this might, with luck, render “the figure in the carpet,” as Henry James, in a story of that title, has a character refer to the authorial secrets embedded in a literary work. The biographical assumption ought to be that every life has a pattern—sometimes clear, sometimes hidden—that, like the design in a Persian carpet, gives that life its quality and character.

Autobiographers might well be more handicapped in telling the truth about their own lives than biographers. “Autobiography,” George Orwell wrote, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying.” “Know thyself” may be the first maxim of philosophy, but telling the truth about oneself is another story. “In any case, in talking of the past,” the novelist William Maxwell wrote, “we lie with every breath we draw.” Yet one continues to read biography and autobiography because their subject is the most interesting subject there is: human nature as played out in the lives of extraordinary men and women.

A biography is an account of a man or woman from birth until death. An autobiography provides a similar account, without a proper ending, for no one, to date, has been able to record his or her own or death. Biographies of the still-living share this crucial flaw. No life can be justly judged until it is completed, for the gods have been known to enjoy a bout or two of Schadenfreude, and their favorite plot twist, as is well known, is peripeteia, or reversal of fortune.

I have been using the words “biography” and “autobiography,” but the new academic word for both and for affiliated modes of writing—memoirs, diaries, letters, blogging, instant messaging—is “life-writing.” The phrase first pops up in an extended essay by Virginia Woolf called “A Sketch of the Past,” her own scattershot attempt to produce an autobiography, which she took up when seeking relief from the pressure of writing her less than successful biography of Roger Fry. “A Sketch of the Past” is itself an extended exercise in limning the difficulties of setting out the truth of any life, far from least one’s own.