The lives of others

Two new books offer insight into the art of biography

How to Do Biography: A Primer
By Nigel Hamilton
Harvard University,379 pp., $22.95

Biography: A User’s Guide
By Carl Rollyson
Ivan R. Dee, 321 pp.,$27.50

I predicted years ago that the genre of biography was scheduled for major transformation — for a host of reasons, really, but mainly because it has gotten harder and harder in our information age to see the human subject as a free-standing entity. A good biography requires dramatic shape, a strong give-and-take between circumstance and initiative; the reader also longs for spotlit definition and a sense of aspects gathering to some wholeness. And personality, of course. I’m not suggesting that these givens are no longer available or possible, just that they are under pressure from the many changes in our way of living, harder to isolate. The disappearance of the written letter is one instance among many.

But possibly I was hasty in my alarms. Judging from two new books - "How to Do Biography: A Primer," by Nigel Hamilton, and "Biography: A User's Guide," by Carl Rollyson - the idea of the genre is alive and well, to the point that Hamilton posits a legion of would-be practitioners - which of course presupposes a legion of subjects.

The primer, with its matter-of-fact British inflection, is by far the more interesting and useful of the pair. Hamilton, author of biographies of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, offers a well-written, sensible, and, given its brevity, fairly encompassing assessment of what it is that a biographer does and how he goes about doing it. The premise that he is giving advice to the interested aspirant allows Hamilton to revisit the basics of the craft and also to adopt an avuncular familiarity of tone that is amenable to personal asides. We get the bad judgment calls and the jettisoned pages as well accounts of triumphs and providential breaks.

Hamilton thinks in an orderly and organic way - like a biographer. His book proceeds from issues of conception and organization to execution and follow-through. At the same time, he frames his discussion of the biographical subject around Shakespeare's well-known "Seven Ages of Man," the life that begins "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms" and concludes "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." And though he does not have much to say on the first age, Hamilton is quite eloquent and persuasive in discussing how things come around at the end, not only at death, but after, when the life meets posterity.

Though the brisk "do" of his title would belie this, Hamilton shows himself to have a literarily artistic understanding of form, the notion that each life there allows for a different - unique - structure of presentation. Citing Leon Edel, celebrated biographer of Henry James, he writes: "For Edel, biography was exciting because it enabled one to peer behind the mask of an individual's life, in order to discern the true individual." He invokes, as Edel naturally did, James's image of "the figure in the carpet," that discernible but seldom obvious pattern of psychological motivation. Interestingly, for all his traffic in innuendo, Edel proposed a similarity between the biographer's task and the sculptor's. The biographer honors the truth by letting it shape the narrative and, naturally, determine which facts are the ones that signify. "Selection," Hamilton aphorizes, "is the biographer's chisel, which he must keep sharp."

Selection brings us back to the question of information. I was surprised at how little consideration is given in this primer to the issues raised by transformed ways of living. Hamilton does not take up cyber-issues and the greatly changed status of documentation. Nor does he philosophize on what it is that will continue to make certain lives biography-worthy - an opportunity lost.

Hamilton is so attuned to questions of shapeliness - the need for expressive form in narrating a life - that it's hard not to bring that ethos to bear in considering Rollyson's "Biography." Rollyson, prolific author of biographies of Rebecca West, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag, among others, takes aspects of the subject and subjects them to the tyranny of the alphabet, offering headings like "Latin/Medieval Biography" and "Brandes, Georg (1842-1927)" (Brandes was a Danish critic and biographer). He thereby pretty much insures that no reader will follow the text start to finish. The question is how and when that reader will take this book down from the shelf. My guess is seldom, if only because issues pertaining to the writing of lives seem less categorically pressing than those relating to medical symptoms or word usage.

This would be a shame - if I am right - because Rollyson is a lively and opinionated and knowledgeable writer, with much to impart. He can explicate a thorny issue like fair use, examining the parameters of the issue with reference to multiple contemporary instances of violation and exoneration.

Like Hamilton, Rollyson will use his own experience as illustration, but less to illuminate and more with a sub-agenda of setting the record straight and doing some self-congratulation along the way. Concluding his account of allegations brought against him by Martha Gellhorn, he writes: "St. Martin's lawyers did such a good job that Gellhorn dropped her allegations of copyright infringement. . . . Very little of the text changed that time, and St. Martin's came away from the last skirmish with Gellhorn more convinced than ever of the integrity of my book."

If this were a single instance, I would overlook it, but the current of self-exculpation runs high throughout. And Rollyson takes distinct pleasure in barbing fellow practitioners. Form and content would seem to be in odd relation here. We expect organized compendia to be referentially useful - as this is, up to a point - but not to comprise quite so much incidental autobiography and settling of scores. That aspect, lively as it is, feels like it was smuggled in. I don't know that Rollyson has achieved the kind of Johnsonian stature that is its own argument for radical idiosyncrasy.

Sven Birkerts is the author of "The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again." He is director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and edits the literary journal Agni.