Telling Lives

At some point in the course of his decade-long program, “Booknotes,” on C-SPAN, Brian Lamb noticed that about a third of the authors he interviewed were biographers. So he decided to follow the success of his first collection of interviews, “Booknotes (I)” with a second entirely devoted to “Life Stories.” The experience of reading this chatty collection of edited interviews is like eavesdropping on a group of biographers talking frankly about what it’s like to try to hunt the truth in a life and what they think of the quarry they have trapped in their sights.

Lamb’s interests are clear: “Reflecting C-SPAN’s public affairs mission, this book focuses primarily on people in political life.” He confesses to a weakness for presidential biography--and is bound to respond to the convenience of recently published books. If he has chosen a biographer to interview, it will not necessarily be the best biographer of Thomas Jefferson or Bill Clinton--only the most recent. Had this been my party rather than Lamb’s, I would have invited a greater variety of biographers, a few more whose subjects were artists and scientists, for example, or noncelebrities, or non-Americans.

But Lamb has control of the guest list, and accessing this book’s many pleasures is a hit-or-miss process. Because there is no internal organization besides ordering by birth dates from George Washington (1732) to Anita Hill (1956), we pluck an essay at random with no other guidance than our own passing curiosity about a particular life. We may reach for “Will Rogers” and be disappointed that his biographer is a rather dull fellow. Or we may pass over “John D. Rockefeller” and miss what is the best piece in the lot.

What makes Ron Chernow’s interview on Rockefeller so good is that he is willing not only to reveal his subject’s perplexing humanity, but his own as well. At first repelled by the prospect of writing about Rockefeller (“cold, wooden, mechanical, ruthless”), Chernow lets us know that writing the book was not his idea but his publisher’s (a more common practice than one would think), and that at first he rejected it out of hand. “I don’t hear the music of his mind,” he remembers saying, “so how can I write a biography of him?” In the end it was hearing the disharmonies in Rockefeller, a man both “strongly good and strongly bad,” that caught Chernow and led him to write his great biography. He had found what many good biographers search for: the central drama of a life.

And there are others in this group who understood what was interesting in their subject’s lives and figured out their own relationship to it. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ghost must rest easier now that Robert D. Richardson Jr. has rescued him from his image as a “distant saint” and showed that “volcanic outpouring” which was his creative and emotional life. Edmund Morris will deliver a remarkable biography one day of Ronald Reagan not because he is remotely like “Dutch” Reagan, but because he is aware, even comically, of the gap of style and perspective between them and makes the most of it. Albert Einstein attracted a biographer, Denis Brian, imaginative enough to devote a chapter to the fate of his brain after he died (it was stolen and sliced up “to find clues to his genius”), as a way to describe the odd passion his reputation inspired and to reclaim the humanity of a man caricatured both in life and in death.

Had this been a group of biographers writing at the end of the 19th rather than at the end of the 20th century, they would have been willing agents of the myth-building business. But most biographers have gone out of the myth-building business. At worst, this can mean a tendency “to expose, and to label, and to stereotype,” which Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, deplores. But actually very few of Lamb’s flock of biographers demonstrate this smarmy take on life-writing. The myths they want to unmake are those that imagine their subjects to be one-dimensional, to be without human needs and complications. Goodwin not only takes on Franklin Roosevelt’s affair with Lucy Mercer, but also adds his emotional dependence on his secretary, Missy LeHand, “his other wife,” and his daughter, Anna. What Goodwin sees as the task of the modern biographer is neither to deny these facts nor to expose them, but “to extend empathy, to understand why [the Roosevelts] needed all these relationships, and not to judge them harshly because of their own human needs.”

Biographers of conscience wrestle with the question of how much we need to know and tell about another person’s life. Most come down on the side of revealing the whole truth. That’s why the way they tell it matters so much. It is an issue of breathing life into marble statues with the conviction that private lives and character do have a role in the understanding of public careers. The biographer of Adlai Stevenson and his family, Jean Baker, argues that “[i]f you’re going to understand public figures, you’ve got to know what their background is, what their personality is, and what their personal turmoils are.” Taylor Branch agrees but thinks, after researching the turmoil in Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, that “it’s very complicated [to define] exactly what that relationship [between private and public] is.” He shares his hunch that King “used his private failings . . . to drive his public mission.”

But while biographers are willing to tackle these matters head-on, seeing this as their obligation to history, a number of them seem very uncomfortable with the investigative climate of modern politics. Richard Reeves, biographer of John F. Kennedy, makes the point forcefully: “I would vote for him for president today, but he would not be president today. His health problems [severe and debilitating pain, attacked by ‘every drug known to man’] would have become public.” It’s remarkable to think how many leaders our modern standards might have deprived us of. Washington would not have been immune. Richard Norton Smith tells us that his dentures kept him in agony throughout his presidency and necessitated frequent doses of “laudanum, a derivative of opium.”

At certain points in his book, Lamb groups together many biographers of the same life, four on Abraham Lincoln, two on Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, and four on Richard Nixon (including Nixon himself), which raises the question: How many biographies do we need on any one subject? What we can see, even in these small groupings, is that there is no one way to tell a life, that each biographer will bring a different perspective, a different set of questions. Of course, certain lives reward endless curiosity--there will never be too many biographies of Abraham Lincoln--and others, like that of the pre-World War II demagogue Father Charles Couglin, need be dragged back from obscurity only once (in this case by a biographer, Donald Warren, who spent an astonishing 20 years on the hunt).

Sometimes what a biographer brings to a life is a new stash of research. William Sterne Randall worked out a hunch that Thomas Jefferson’s life as a lawyer would yield new insights and discovered that his legal papers and his casebook still existed, in a private collection in California. Jefferson had argued almost 1,000 law cases by the eve of the Revolution. “That, to me, explained for the first time,” says Randall, “why such a good lawyer as John Adams would defer to him to write the Declaration of Independence.” Theodore Roosevelt’s biographer, Nathan Miller, found the letters, long thought lost, between TR and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, whose death in childbirth seared Roosevelt’s emotional life. Edmund Morris unearthed a cache of short stories written by young Ronald Reagan “in a tin trunk of junk in the basement of the Ronald Reagan Library.” Out of these he derived a self-portrait of the future president at 19, driven by a moral perspective that would recur throughout his life.

Few biographers have been less dismayed by tackling a seemingly tired subject than Robert Caro. “When I started this project,” he told Lamb, “there were already 17 biographies of Lyndon Johnson.” What he found was that virtually everything known about Johnson were extensions of “the legend he had created about his life and it wasn’t really the truth. So I had to start all over.” When his project is completed, Caro will have written four volumes.

There are other ways, of course, to enjoy “Booknotes: Life Stories.” For one, it can be used as a crib sheet to catch up on lives you’ve always heard about but may not know in any detail. You’re at the mercy, of course, of what the biographer wants to relate in a casual interview, and what Lamb has chosen to include here, but that’s part of the charm of this particular collection. You’ll get the big themes, of course, but also the quirky asides. I never knew, for example, that George Washington lost his teeth principally because of his inclination to crack Brazil nuts with them; that there were 135 unemployed major generals after the Civil War (George Armstrong Custer, age 25, was one of their frustrated number); that Theodore Roosevelt would give small press conferences while being shaved; or that Thomas Edison was so hard of hearing that in later life, when a pianist was auditioning to play for his new invention, the phonograph, he would sometimes clench his teeth on the frame of the piano in order to “hear.”

Biographers are often accused by historians of taking too much of an interest in the trivial details of life. But for biographers, it is the details that give the proof of life, that rescue individuals from the abstractions they become in history. When Richardson takes the trouble to dress Emerson in our mind’s eye in a shabby black suit and lets us know that he had twine wrapped around his wallet, he is there. Chernow makes the poignant point that in later life, John D. Rockefeller lost all his hair, scalp and body, to a condition called alopecia, and thus suddenly presented an old and ghoulish appearance consistent with the monster image his critics wanted the public to accept. In understanding the importance of these sorts of details, biographers have more in common with novelists than with historians.

Ultimately, we read--and write--biographies because we crave human connection. We want to hold onto these lives, to keep their company for generations. We can never completely cheat death, but in the work of a great biographer we come as close as we ever can.