In our age of distraction, the arts appear to be responding in kind, shrinking and streamlining themselves to capture what they can of our withering attention spans. . Pop songs are down a full minute from the 1990s. Television seasons are getting shorter. Children’s books, which averaged 190 pages in the 1930s, tap out at 60 pages today. Adult best sellers have lopped off about 50 pages in the last decade alone, and novels, in particular, seem ever sleeker and more straightforward, more dialogue-driven and less cognitively demanding, with smaller casts, a single story strand, a single point of view.
In the midst of such minimalism, at least one form bucks the trend. Biography continues to cut a billowing 19th-century profile, trailing its footnotes and family trees, tipping the scales at nearly 1,000 pages — fat, splendid and wholly implacable in the face of our diminishing stamina. Biography feels perennially robust and continues to sell steadily — this year’s offerings include fresh assessments of the well-worn lives of Mark Twain, Paul Gauguin and Gertrude Stein, and even a biography of a biography: “Ellmann’s Joyce,” by Zachary Leader, an account of Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce from 1959, long held to be the genre’s gold standard. It was biography, according to Gertrude Stein, that truly fulfilled the novel’s zeal for showing the full sweep of a life, and the genre has stayed faithful to its obsessive interest in character and its formation, the labyrinth of human motive, all those the crooked paths through which experience yields insight, insight shapes psychology and psychology ripens into fate.
But biography’s stolid facade conceals a sensitive, turbulent history. Biography alters as we do, as our conceptions of motive evolve, as theories of personality float into fashion or fade away. It offers a snapshot of our working notions of selfhood, of what we hunger to assert and what we are not yet prepared to know.
What lay at the root of D.H. Lawrence’s rages? His harsh upbringing? His scorn for inhibition? That little stowaway, Mycobacterium tuberculosis? Over the years, Lawrence’s biographers have made cases for all three. Why did Sylvia Plath kill herself? Was it an act of despair, revenge or desperate agency? Every age seems to need, and produce, its own biographies — we reportedly have 15,000 books about Lincoln alone — not just as certain archives become available but as certain questions and approaches become possible.
Take the case of James Baldwin. The writer’s estate has been fiercely protective of his correspondence, forbidding biographers from quoting even a word of it. In 2017, the archive was acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library, and the bulk of his letters, along with rarely viewed notes and manuscripts, were made public. In due time, new biographies have arrived, drawing from this material. Two will be published this year,: “Baldwin: A Love Story,” by Nicholas Boggs, and “James Baldwin: The Life Album,” by Magdalena J. Zaborowska. Both books stitch the story of his private life, long relegated to footnotes if not outright omitted. Both books capture Baldwin at unseen angles; neither concerns itself with offering a definitive portrait. “I excavate the parts of your life that have been obscured by some readers, scholars, even your family,” Zaborowska writes, addressing Baldwin. “I center your erotic and sexual love for men (and some women), your domestic life, and your authorship as forms of imaginative activism.”
The biography of today recoils from stuffing its subject into a straitjacket of interpretation, with all contradictions smoothly reconciled into a unified self. Instead we find an emphasis on the fragility and provisionality of identity, on performance, on motive being mysterious and many-tentacled. “Baldwin seemed to be composed of carefully crafted personae, woven like armor,” Zaborowska writes. (Such tact in that “seemed.”) The veteran biographer Hermione Lee has said that she admires how her subjects, like Tom Stoppard, preserve their privacy, how they elude her. In “The Power of Adrienne Rich” (2020), Hilary Holladay considers how Rich was elusive to herself — “the absence of a fully knowable self was her deepest wound and great prod.” In Katherine Bucknell’s biography, “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out” (2024), we learn Isherwood was also consumed by this search “for a singular self.” Candy Darling, one of the stars of Andy Warhol’s Factory, was “always acting,” Cynthia Carr reports in “Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar” (2024). “I don’t know which role to play,” she once wrote in an unsent letter, which trails off. “I would like to live with someone whom I could. …”
Recent lives of Sylvia Plath, Lorne Michaels, Johnny Carson and Frantz Fanon, among others, revel in various perspectives and conflicting accounts. “The celebration of Fanon as prophet fixes him in an essence as surely as his race does,” Adam Shatz writes in “The Rebel’s Clinic.” “It treats him as a man of answers, rather than questions, locked in a project of being, rather than becoming.”
How does one depict this business of “becoming”? It is a preoccupying formal concern of these biographies, an effort to allow subjects more spaciousness, to acknowledge that their lives and selves were as improvised as our own, that their choices were not ordained but made in a kind of innocence, in the precarious cradle of their own present tense.
Biography is always trying to sidle closer to how the self understands itself, to wedge its way into where our real lives unfurl — insisting, sometimes unfashionably, on the importance of personality, of choice. Out of the dry heaps of letters and records, it wants to conjure the actual person, to send him striding upon the page. Here is Samuel Pepys, resurrected in the middle of the Great Fire of London, tearing out of his house to bury his precious Parmesan cheese in the backyard for safekeeping. Here is Baldwin, reading at twilight in his mother’s kitchen, the newest baby on his hip.
“By recreating the past we are calling on the same magic as our forebears did with stories of their ancestors round the fires under the night skies,” the biographer Michael Holroyd has written. “The need to do this, to keep death in its place, lies deep in human nature, and the art of biography arises from that need.” If history sends us scattering like billiard balls, making a mockery of notions of free will, along comes the biographer to dust us off, one by one, and to take grave interest in our individual trajectories — staunchly, stubbornly hung up on the human.
To be fair, biography resists narrative straitjackets of its own. The health of the genre owes much to its indifference to stated aims, set practices, established rules or professionalization of any kind. Too motley to be a discipline, biography simply swallows every style and school in its path: history, psychology, literary criticism, detective fiction, self-help. Paradox is its essence. We categorize it as nonfiction, but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation. It elicits strong approbation, even moral horror, but its sternest critics (Sigmund Freud, Elizabeth Hardwick, Janet Malcolm) count among its most interesting practitioners.
Biography, the impossible genre. It elevates and enshrines; it may mock and expose. Plutarch and Suetonius, among the progenitors of the form, wrote to praise famous men, if gently undermining them all the while — taking note of their comb-overs and questionable taste in robes. “A chance remark or joke,” Plutarch wrote, “may reveal far more of a man’s character than the mere feat of winning battles.” From the Romans to the Victorians, life writing generally consigned itself to the public life and social self. Character was regarded as inborn not made; childhood held little narrative interest. The biographer’s obligation was to register the vividness of personality, not muck about backstage. Samuel Johnson, for example, as observed by James Boswell in his famously obsessive “Life of Samuel Johnson” (1791), holding forth at the tavern, sloshing around in his brilliance and beer, wandering off, “shrivelled” wig askew.
Where are you going, Dr. Johnson? In 1909, Freud wrote to Carl Jung: “The domain of biography, too, must become ours.” Biography discovered the nursery and the riot of adolescence, the lives and drives we conceal from one another and ourselves. “A secret, at least tacit, life underlies the one we are thought to live,” Ellmann could now write — and the biographer’s job became to call it forth. (We could now acknowledge that Johnson might have been en route to enjoy the attentions of Mrs. Hester Thrale and her elegant assortment of whips.) Biography was contracted to produce the man behind the eminence — no more monuments!
Greatness was no longer a prerequisite for the biography; ordinary lives — of the sisters and wives of genius, for example — began to be told with sympathy and admiration. And in the lives of genius, there was an attention to the routine, to the life of the body as well as mind. For Ellmann, it was crucial to tell the story of Joyce with the same warm, coarse candor Joyce brought to “Ulysses,” which enshrined the commonplace — of head lice, and menstruation, marital boredom and pleasure. Ellmann skimps on theory in favor of scenes, showing Joyce lolling in bed till 11 a.m., taking visits and gossiping with his tailor, rising only to practice the piano and put off his creditors.
For Ellmann, all biographies give “incomplete satisfaction,” because no life will yield all its secrets; what we respond to is the approach of the biographer — the detective work, the imaginative sympathy, the peculiar and obsessive preoccupation with the life of another. (A moment to honor the zealots of years past: the biographers who bought and lived in the same homes as their subjects, grew beards to match them or wore their jewelry, had affairs with their mistresses — such diligence! — or, in the case of one Norman Sherry, who followed Graham Greene’s path to Mexico and fell ill with dysentery in the same mountain village.)
“The effort to come close,” Ellmann puts it, “to make out of apparently haphazard circumstances a plotted circle, to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves, is not frivolous. It may even be, for reader as for writer, an essential part of experience.”
Why is that? Why is watching someone else work in the dark, with incomplete information such an integral part of our experience? The subterranean drama of the biography, as the critic and practitioner Janet Malcolm has written, is provided by the biographer’s own motives and masks — the choices the biographer might make when confronted invariably with the gaps in the archives, the burned letters and lost diaries. How the biographer moves into the silences — filling them with speculation or outright claims, with their own desires, or, as we increasingly see, choosing to note and marvel at them. A biography is less a portrait than a record of an encounter. This “effort to come close,” to apprehend, is what we track, what gives the life its pulse. Biography may be built on facts, but a fact, as Saul Bellow wrote, “is a wire through which one sends a current.”
Let us return, for a moment, to Zaborowska’s account of Baldwin, ias he pretended to sleep one day, daydreaming and watching his mother. He sees her lean out of the tenement window to gossip with a neighbor, who passes her something — a piece of black velvet covered with stars. “That is a good idea,” he recalled his mother saying, thanking the woman. “For years,” Baldwin later wrote, “I thought that an ‘idea’ was a piece of black velvet.”
The “plotted circle” that Ellmann envisions contains much more than mere data; it must make room for mishearing and contingency, for the fact that we reportedly spend 50 percent of our waking hours, like Baldwin as he watched his mother, daydreaming. A biography cannot satisfy without conveying some flavor of the subject’s most secret life, of his own private idiom. “What did his imagination look like when he was young, and how was it battered and burnished as he grew older?” Katherine Rundell asks in her biography of John Donne, “Super-Infinite.” “Did it protect him from sorrow and fury and resentment? (To spoil the suspense: it did not.) Did it allow him to write out the human problem in a way that we, following on four hundred years later, can still find urgent truth in it?”
Today that “human problem” is complicated by the arrival of nonhuman communication, nonhuman interlocutors, the algorithmic self. Where biography is a form built on the vagaries of human experience, artificial intelligence offers a form of knowledge stripped of experience. Trained on text, large language models like Gemini and ChatGPT are a kind of knowledge predicated only on the nuances of language. Even the boosters of A.I. readily concede its poor grasp of character or human motive, which is notoriously coiled, cloudy, contradictory. To understand motive requires some sense of the raw matter of experience, of its quiddity, of the body’s way of knowing and remembering. The bots scrape up those aspects of motive that make it into language, and big, blunt language at that: I hate, I want. A.I. knows only to enter through the front door; it cannot yet observe the true story happening elsewhere, always in a back room somewhere, between two women leaning out of their windows, passing between their hands a good idea.
Biography, that strange transmission, has been a good, durable idea of its own. A.I. will teach us how to “prompt” with increasing precision, but never to yearn with patient attention, never to relish the dark or adorn it with research and guesswork and gossip, to let our minds gallop after one another, the living and the dead.
Parul Sehgal is a critic at large for The New York Times. She was previously a columnist and senior editor at the Book Review. She is the recipient of the Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle for her criticism.
The post Is Biography the One A.I.-Proof Genre? appeared first on New York Times.
