Real people
October 22nd, 2008 | by Ben Hoare |
I’m currently enjoying Body Parts, Hermione Lee’s collection of essays on life writing. Just as Mark Bostridge’s Lives for Sale did about four years ago, this book is renewing my recently waning interest in reading about biography. Here’s a quick snippet:
[M]ost biographical facts are open to interpretation. But they do exist, and lie around biographers in huge files and boxes, waiting to be turned into story. These facts have owners: they belong to the lives of the biographer’s subject and the people whom the subject knew, loved, hated, worked with or brought up, or perhaps met once in the street in passing. All these people will feel a claim over the fact that concerns them.
I’ve written a fair bit about facts, and when I studied biography at university some time ago I showed considerable disdain for them. But passages like this remind me that biography presents problems that are not merely theoretical.
I like the precariousness of life writing - I like the questions it asks about authorship, history, storytelling, reading and writing. But, while I chatter on about the illusory nature of truth in biography, I forget that it is about real people - people who did live, in spite of the challenges facing their biographers.
It’s possible to become callous about biography when I take this perspective, discussing books like The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky, Wrong Rooms or Maus as “relational narratives” whilst failing to mention that they are also, in essence, human stories about grief, love and guilt.
In her wonderful book, The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm describes (amongst many other things) her hunt for the truth about Sylvia Plath. In one memorable passage she comes close to Ted Hughes, even approaching his house. Then, realising that somebody is at home, she retreats, feeling “shame at my complicity in the chase that has made his life a torment”.
How often do we assess lives without remembering that they are the lives of real people?
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