Lives
fascinate me; but biography is for me to read not to write. The
obsession with the chosen subject over a prolonged period would be
too much; that is the way I think one might descend into madness.
For, it must grow difficult to separate the lived from the living,
the two must, to some extent, converge. To understand the lived, the
living must try to inhabit, or at least try to visualise or imagine,
some of their world as it once existed. The old and the new travelled
between, or the modern, for a time, suspended. The subject, the life
must be breathed for the biographer to animate the words they will in
turn write. The places their subject dwelt in or frequented must be
visited; their footsteps followed. Any trace they may have left of
themselves must be read or investigated. It must an exhausting,
all-consuming search, and accompanied therefore by euphoric or
depressive moods, which may chime with the subject's own. I cannot
imagine, from my limited reading of lives, how it could be otherwise.
It requires more mental, emotional stability, I think, than the
average human, or perhaps the resilience to bounce back, to shake off
the lived, after the experience.
Perhaps
however I'm wrong and the lived subject can be divorced from
throughout the whole process. I cannot believe though that this
approach would not affect how the life was written and read. I cannot
conceive of not, as a biographer (and indeed a reader), liking and
identifying with the lived. Why then choose to write of lives lived?
(Why then read biography?) There must, there has
to be,
some affinity, some attraction, a wanting to know.
The
best biographers, the best written biographies, will always be for me
those that live and breathe their subject.
Picture credit: Englishman in the Campagna, 1845, Carl Spitzweg (source: WikiArt).
Journal entry, October 2021.
