The art of breaking and entering

IF curiosity really killed the cat, we would all have exhausted our quota of nine lives by now. Because, aspire as we might to piety and introspection, all of us are awfully interested in things that should not concern us in the slightest. Which translates, for the most part, as other peoples lives. This pleasant human failing keeps not only the gossip columnists, but also the biographers in business. Some will argue that the two classes of writer are distinguished from each other by the use they make (or refuse to make) of discretion that is, by how much they choose to tell of what they know. But the distinction often blurs, and not a week goes by without a reviewer complaining about yet another outrage of breaking-and-entering as perpetrated in the latest biography on the bookstore shelves.

And the subject of the latest biography may not always be someone close to us in time or in spirit; the thread spooling into the labyrinth of biography leads to minotaurs of every shade. Alongside the brooding, demon-haunted novelists of the 1920s, the wild, drunken poets of the 1950s and the long-haired, OD-ed entertainers of the 1970s, we will find Ataturk Kemal Pasha and Lawrence of Arabia, Picasso and Rodin, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote. While some of these studies are genuinely impelled by the need to provide a deep perspective on events and personages of epochal importance, others among them seem actuated by the unabashed desire to pander to a market of vicarious readers. And why not? Plain curiosity is a fair motive. We do, after all, expect to find out what made these extraordinary individuals tick; at a more surreptitious level, also, most of us look forward to the juicy bits about their less publicly advertised tickings.

One reason why we relate to biographies across such a range of periods and cultures is because they are almost always cast as success stories. In these narratives, to adapt a style of invocation from the Upanishads, the subject moves from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, from confusion to clarity, from tribulation to triumph. And if the hero(ine) is a failure, we still get an inside view of some exciting action on the way down.

But some questions persist. Is the compassionate biographer, perhaps, completing and idealising the unfinished and flawed projects of his subject's life? Is the critical biographer simply ripping apart and unravelling the intricately woven fabric of his subject's inner life and public achievements? Are we being told the absolute truth of events? Or is this a doctored version, or a jaundiced view, or a roseate vision? Is there any such thing as the absolute truth of events, or do all biographies embody the result of narrative surgery? One way of finding out what a biography does is to take a look at the various genres that are usually clubbed together under the head of biography. Of these, there are four principal genres:

The hagiography: the classic mode, in which the saint or hero does no wrong. He knows what he is in the world to do, from the beginning, and overcomes all odds to realise his aims; any backsliding or distraction along the way may be put down to baneful influences. Or, if the protagonist should indeed do wrong, he quickly sees the light and is redeemed by the power of God, the love of a fair maiden, Cubism, the Jedi Knights, the inspiration of satyagraha, Windows 2000, or whatever be the source of redemption in that particular age.

The authorised biography: updated version of the first point, six times out of ten. In which the personal legend is assiduously fostered and the biographer acts more or less as the publicist of the biography. The central thrust of the narrative concerns itself with the subject's voyage of self-discovery, and the readers follow in its wake, picking their way through a mass of corroborating evidence that ranges from the trivial to the crucial. Some authorised biographies show the strain, as when the biographer tires of the constraints of the project and reacts in an extreme fashion, fashioning an anti-portrait from the detritus of rumour, gossip, half-truth and runaway conjecture.

The unauthorised biography: the precise opposite of the second point above, in which the privilege of admission into another person's life is grossly misused. Assuming the unenviable persona of Mr. Gumshoe, the diligent biographer digs up so much dirt that we begin to wonder why his subject was ever taken seriously in the first place. Given the degree of statistical detail that some unauthorised biographers assemble, we ask ourselves how the subject managed to squeeze his novels, paintings, symphonies or invasions into the precious minutes that remained after the riotous binge of serial seductions, substance abuse, lunatic interludes and so forth.

The pop-psychological biography: a quintessentially American abomination, a variation on the third point above. It is founded on the thesis that all achievement has its roots in abnormal personality traits or traumas suffered in childhood (i.e.: you have got to be deranged to be a genius). This leads to absurd portraiture that misses the point of a celebrated life by miles. All we get on this account is caricature. Van Gogh is cast as a raving loony (never mind that his paintings as much the result of seismic emotion as of cool formal skill). Gandhiji is depicted as spending all his time wrestling with the dark angel of lust (it must have been a carefully chosen double who led the marches in Champaran, Dandi and Noakhali).

As these four genres demonstrate, a great deal of biographical writing is hobbled by the fallacious belief that the achievement can be reduced to the life. This is a fallacy because achievement marks a transcendent dimension of life, in which the human spirit escapes all its sources and circumstances; as such, inner events pursue an unfolding logic of their own. The biographer's duty, to moralise for a moment, should be to reveal the dialectical relationship between achievement and life, inner events and outer contexts.

The biographer's activity is best memorialised, perhaps, in Rene Magrittes 1948 painting, "Memory". Here, the wry surrealist places the marble head of a woman on a ledge, with a studio curtain drawn aside to reveal a vista of summery sea and sky behind it.

The right eye of the head is bloodied, as though by a hurled stone or a quick knife. And this is what all biographers do, whether clumsily or skilfully, cruelly or with solicitude: they draw blood from marble. The good biography is one that, while so doing, offers us a rich secret history of the self, rather than just a racy private history of the personality.

RANJIT HOSKOTE

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