Writing About Lives

I have been thinking a great deal about biography recently: how to write about lives. The most immediate reason is an essay I published last week about my mother, Pearl Kazin Bell. It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever written, and one of the hardest things as well. But writing about someone who was such a huge part of my own life also made me more acutely aware than ever of what I’m tempted to call the impossibility of biography. How can a life, in all its astonishing complexity, with all its years and years of actions and thoughts and feelings, ever be captured in a document, however long and nuanced? (The average human heart, it is said, beats 2.5 billion times). Of course, this is a problem of history itself. Historians can never capture anything but an infinitesimal fraction of what has been said and done in this world, hardly any of which was ever recorded in the first place. But life-writing adds an ethical dimension to this empirical problem. The limitations of the sources, and then the need for the writer to select among the sources available, mean that any life portrait, however thorough and well-intentioned, will always be partial, incomplete, lopsided, and misleading in many respects. It won’t do justice to the whole person. But, then again, could anything? And faced with the choice between an imperfect, incomplete portrait and oblivion, who would choose the latter?

These questions have been at the heart of a very different project that I have been working on. Colin Jones and I are editing a volume, to be published next year by Palgrave Macmillan, entitled French Revolutionary Lives, based on a conference we ran together at Princeton a couple of years ago. In inviting contributors, we deliberately tried to include as wide a variety of revolutionary lives as possible. Some of the subjects are among the best known of the revolutionary era. Others are entirely unknown. There are radical revolutionaries, titled counterrevolutionaries, a girl born into slavery, and an Asian traveler who came to France for reasons entirely unrelated to politics. Some of them left extensive written evidence about their lives, both in published documents and manuscript, including diaries and correspondence (what are sometimes called “ego documents”). Others were written about at length. And for some, our authors had to turn to other sorts of sources entirely. In doing so, they looked for inspiration to classics of microhistory, including the wonderful The Life of an Unknown—about a nineteenth-century French clog maker whose life Alain Corbin began to reconstruct after literally walking into the archives blindfolded and choosing his file at random.

My own contribution to the volume addresses the problem of biography directly. It is a new version of an essay I published a couple of years ago about how Alexis de Tocqueville viewed Napoleon Bonaparte. Tocqueville himself, in Democracy in America, offered some wonderful reflections on life-writing. He argued that in aristocratic ages—ages of hierarchy and hero-worship—writers naturally see individual leaders as the principal actors on the historical stage, driving change through the expression of their own powerful wills. In democratic, egalitarian ages, by contrast, writers more often see the great, collective mass of people, and impersonal forces, as the true motors of change. I suggested that Tocqueville, who viewed himself as an aristocrat writing in a democratic age, consciously tried to strike a balance between these two poles when writing about the most consequential figure of his own lifetime, Napoleon Bonaparte. In the end, however, he could not escape his own precepts, and ended up portraying Napoleon principally as a product and instrument of impersonal forces—as a product and instrument of the French Revolution.

Napoleon, of course, led a life that I have thought a great deal about, since he is the only person whose biography I have written – although a deliberately abbreviated one (it was originally commissioned by Oxford University Press’s “Very Short Introductions” series, in which its paperback version appears). Unlike some other major historical figures, about whose lives we know very little for sure (Shakespeare comes to mind), we possess masses of evidence about Napoleon—far too much for any single biography to digest entirely. Among other things, this plethora of evidence makes it possible for virtually every successive biography to appear with the promise that it is based on “previously neglected sources.” Napoleon also remains among the most hotly debated historical personages, even today at least something of a hero to some writers (including his leading French biographer, Patrice Gueniffey), and a villain to many others (including former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, author of an book entitled Le mal napoléonien). And however difficult it might be to compress Napoleon’s life into a written biography, even a very long one, how much harder to capture it in a film? As I wrote recently: very hard. “Biopics” can never hope to do much more than give an impressionistic sense of what their subject was like.

At least with Napoleon, I never felt much of an ethical dilemma writing about him, or worried about whether I was doing justice to his memory. With my mother, of course, things were very different—paralyzingly so, at times. In some ways, it seemed almost indecent to treat her as I might treat a historical subject, chasing down material in archives and trying to put together a coherent story from scattered sources. What made me decide to do it, in the end, was above all the fact that other people were already doing it. I wanted my own vision of her out there as well. But writing about her in a neutral and detached way was utterly impossible, and in the end I didn’t even try.