No one can take first being hailed for his virtues, then torn up for his vices.
While working on a juvenile biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, I began to pay closer attention to modern portrayals of famous people. I fear that I should have been alert to their dangers long ago. Biography is a popular literary form today, if you count the endless in-depth profiles in newspapers and magazines, as well as the television specials devoted to portraying recent history in terms of personalities. But most of these accounts, whether fiction disguised as fact or fact disguised as fiction, run to a formula my young son knows very well: the good guys and the bad guys. In fact, in the name of truth and the first amendment, our society likes to crucify people in the public eye. Either we lionize them or we throw them to the lions, often doing first one and then the other. It makes a better story.
Writers seem to consider it proper to approach their subjects, or victims, with the strong personal prejudices that make for juicy reading, or they relish any opportunity to turn a story into an X-rated show. Almost no human being can take first being hailed as Caesar for his virtues, then tom up in the arena for his vices, and the impression is left that the individual had no clearcut personality at all. But if a celebrity protests, it is made clear to the audience, whose appetite for blood is roused, that this is just one more case of someone who can’t stand the heat and ought to get out of the kitchen. A pattern appears in which we build a Colossus, then show he has feet of clay, which proves he could not also leave footprints on the sands of time. But in such caricatures we lose sight of the person himself and ignore the cardinal virtues of justice and temperance, not to mention the more important Christian virtue of charity. Then we beat our breasts and bewail the fact that there are no more judges in Israel.
I was driven to consider my own approach to Dorothy L. Sayers carefully, because a chief source for her life, commissioned by a publisher, was written by someone who seemed not only to dislike Sayers, but also to misunderstand her work. But I, on the other hand, had been her ardent fan since college days, when I first stumbled happily upon Busman’s Honeymoon, then shortly afterwards read Man Born to Be King. Having read her works “out of order” I had never divided Sayers like all Gaul, into three parts: mystery writer, playwright, or translator. But I still wanted to know more about what had made her able to write so many different things. I thought of her as a kind of parent who had led me engagingly to think about things I had never considered before or to see connections between different worlds and ideas. I knew the Dorothy L. Sayers I met in her books was not visible in the earlier biography, but I was also determined that I must do my best to tell the truth about her, not invent a figment of my imagination.
First, I approached the job with the assumption that her orthodox Christianity held the key to her personality and her career and that an effort to ignore the implications of her religious beliefs made for a distorted portrait of the lady. Most people assume that a Christian biography will be hagiolatry (uncritical lives of the saints). A typical contemporary biographer often writes about a Christian figure by ignoring his religious beliefs in favor of emphasizing his sex life. In a current biography of G. K. Chesterton, his marital love life is considered at greater length than either of his conversions, while epitaphs for Thornton Wilder had a field day with his peppery personality and ignored the possibility that his Christian background had influenced his themes or concerns.
Therefore, in my hunt for the right approach, I went to all the primary sources about Sayers that I could discover (not uncover). I also promised to give everyone who helped me a chance to see how I had made use of the material, not only to catch me out in error, but also to allow him to edit out anything he considered off the record. I was rewarded by great cooperation from people who seemed surprised at what I thought was simple professional courtesy. The fact is that we live in a time when we believe everyone is fair game and ought to enjoy setting himself up as a target. Finally, too, I took Sayers herself as my mentor in my job and tried to follow her own rules for writing biography, which she had stated in discussing her unfinished work on Wilkie Collins.
Sayers suggested that a biographer should start by liking her subject, but give the facts about the person without unnecessary interpretations and psychological commentary. Her approach was amusingly illustrated in a comment to Dr. Barbara Reynolds when she said that fortunately “One can’t make up fancy psychology about the unknown author of the Song of Roland.” But in her introduction to her translation of that epic, she talked at length about the author’s times, the interests of his audience, the literary background of the work, and his artistic goals. She put the emphasis in fact on the work, not the man, but she did not ignore the artist either.
Sayers also recommended that wherever possible, the subject should speak for himself, primarily from his published works, his notebooks, and the like, but not necessarily making use of quotations from interviews or gossip. She herself suffered, as most public figures do, from being misquoted so often that she rejoiced aloud in a wartime poem over the fact that a lack of newsprint had cut the number of misquotations she found and that it might end them altogether. Most important of all, in writing about Wilkie Collins she saw her job as describing his development as a writer, not his private life, though in today’s market a good titillating book could be written about Collins’s drug addiction and his mistresses. She saw that the real facts about him were his ability and strengths as a writer, together with his influences from and on other writers, and theirs on society as a whole. She made use of her own knowledge of writing to characterize his, but in everything she said she also tempered justice with mercy, because she honored him.
Clearly, biography is not a special Christian discipline. But we need to beware of its use as a secular weapon aimed at destroying our faith in our fellow men, for such a lack of faith can also affect our faith in God. In our age we are more careful about idolatry, seeing whitewashed sepulchres everywhere, but sinfulness is not the whole story. Famous men are also, as Ecclesiasticus says in chapter 44, “our fathers who begat us … Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning … wise and eloquent in their instructions” and knowing this about them, we need to honor them and make them the glory of their times.
If we allow the news media to tell us about Jacob only when he is stealing Esau’s birthright, we will never understand how Jacob also became Israel who dreamed of a ladder from earth to heaven and wrestled all night with God. We are called to honor our parents, even while, as we ourselves grow older, we are more conscious of their faults and more aware of how like them we grow ourselves. Public figures can be our parents, too. Let us beware of a constant diet of personalities instead of a real consideration of whole persons. Let us be aware that we shall be judged as we judge and try to insist that those who undertake to inform us also remember the Golden Rule, instead of assuming that they sit on Mount Olympus while their subject dwells below with Pluto, for none of us are gods.
Alzina Stone Dale is a free lance writer and editor who lives in Chicago, Illinois. Her biography on Dorothy L. Sayers, “Master and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers,” is to be published by Eerdmans this fall.
