Indeed, I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to ‘live o’er each scene’ with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life. Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved. As it is, I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived.
–James Boswell, “The Life of Samuel Johnson”
“The Life of Samuel Johnson,” the great prototype of modern biography, was published on May 16, 1791, the anniversary of the day in 1763 on which James Boswell first met Doctor Johnson in the parlor of Thomas Davies, an actor who kept a bookshop in Covent Garden.
Apart from his irrepressible boastfulness–in this case, not unjustified–Boswell’s remarks about his life of Johnson reveal a naIvete characteristic of the Enlightenment. “Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was,” Boswell says of Johnson, “he might have been almost entirely preserved”–a strange turn of phrase, the strangeness of which Boswell doesn’t perceive. So we are to imagine a relay-team of biographers attending the great man from birth, recording not only what he did–“all the most important events . . . in their order”–but also “interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought.” And there you have it: a virtual Doctor Johnson.
In “Whose Emily Dickinson?” (in this issue), Roger Lundin tells how he began work on a biography of Dickinson with a comparably naive notion of what it would entail, and how in the course of that project he gained a new sense of the irreducible mystery at the heart of every human life. (Along the way, he also became much more charitable in his judgments of fellow biographers.)
If excessive confidence in the power of biography to fix and “preserve” its subject is one pitfall biographers must avoid, another is the pressure to distort the life according to the dictates of this or that overarching agenda. Biography, as Harry Stout remarks (in this issue), is “the most contested form of history-writing.” Famous lives become advertisements for a political philosophy, a religious faith, a sexual identity (thus we are confronted with Dickinson as lesbian poet, Schubert as gay composer). Evidence that does not fit the agenda is twisted or ignored.
Stout makes an interesting observation: that Christian historians of this generation have tended to avoid biography. His own experience as a biographer sheds light on this seeming anomaly. Stout’s life of George Whitefield, the eighteenth-century revivalist, provoked bitter criticism and controversy. He had sought to present a balanced view of Whitefield, as “simultaneously saint and sinner.” In some quarters, that smacked of impiety: “I learned that Protestants and Roman Catholics are not so far apart in the matter of saints as their theologies proclaim.”
In a letter written earlier this year, Randall Balmer came at the same problem from a different angle, and with a focus specifically on the evangelical community:
We’re beginning, I think, to see some attempts at evangelical biography and autobiography–Daniel Barth Peters, a missionary kid and a graduate student at Claremont, is coming out with “Through Isaac’s Eyes” (Zondervan), which I’ve read in manuscript–but it’s difficult and painful. Difficult because evangelical kids grow up with an authorized narrative about their lives. It’s triumphalist in nature, and it’s drummed into them over and over through sermons, testimonies, and the like. So evangelical biography and autobiography still have a long way to go, and we have precious few examples to guide us.
A look at the current crop of Christian books confirms Balmer’s assessment. Still, there are many encouraging signs. Susan Bergman’s memoir “Anonymity” (1994), for example, is an outstanding evangelical autobiography that breaks free of the prefabricated language and sentiment typical of the genre. The Eerdmans series, the “Library of Religious Biography,” which includes Stout’s “Whitefield,” Edith Blumhofer’s “Aimee Semple McPherson,” and (forthcoming) Lundin’s “Dickinson,” among others, offers strong models for the biographer. Also noteworthy is “Growing Up Fundamentalist: Journeys in Legalism and Grace” (1995), a collection of interviews by Stefan Ulstein.
Richard Holmes has described biography as “the most lovable of modern English literary forms,” adding that, “If I had to define biography in a single phrase, I would call it an art of human understanding, and a celebration of human nature.” That is very well said. I think of the splendid obituary for F. F. Bruce, by W. Ward Gasque and Laurel Gasque, which appeared in the “Reformed Journal” (October 1990). There I learned that
One key to [Bruce’s] productivity was his formidable filing system. His wife Betty said he never threw a piece of paper away; it might have a useful note written on it. . . . His system was simple. During the war he began to use discarded cereal boxes to store his notes, arranged according to the order of the Bible, from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21.
That does not add to our understanding of Paul and his circle, or make the hard sayings of Jesus any easier. But it’s one detail from a portrait that, in the span of not quite three pages, gives an impression of F. F. Bruce you are not likely to forget. It gives delight.
I’ve often been haunted by the vision of the Last Judgment in Revelation. It’s very biographical: “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the books” (Rev. 20:12). A record more complete, even, than anything dreamt of by Boswell: a biography to end all biographies.
Even when one remembers God’s mercy, that vision has considerable power to disturb. Still, if we delight in the eccentricities of Johnson and Dickinson and Bruce, in the qualities that make each daughter and son one of a kind, each friend unique, how much more will the Creator relish that biographical feast!
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 4
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