In his autobiography, All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life†Loren Eiseley wrote:
“A biography is always constructed from ruins, but, as any archeologist will tell you, there is never the means to unearth all the rooms, or follow the buried roads, or dig into every cistern for treasure. You try to see what the ruin meant to whoever inhabited it and, if you are lucky, you see a little way backward into time.â€
I am currently in the process of reconstructing the scaffolding of Luther Henderson’s life, trying to discover which were the turning points and pivotal moments, what were the experiences that shaped him, and which were those by which he left his imprint on history.
Biographical writing can range from the finely crafted literary profiles such as those published in The New Yorker magazine (Whitney Balliett’s being among my favorites), to short books (a fine and highly recommended example being All In The Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine by Terry Teachout), to lengthy books heavy with annotations and citations (Laurence Bergreen’s works come to mind), to multi-volume oeuvres (such as Edmund Morris’s projected three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt), or even the artful collaboration of biography with photography in a coffee-table sized tome (Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond by Doug Ramsey, also highly recommended, of course – I’m on page 264).
Assuming one is not writing the definitive and most comprehensive account that would necessitate including everything one took, say, ten-plus years to find, one must choose the best approach for the subject and select just the right moments to suit the plan. Take the above-mentioned Balanchine bio, for example. Teachout says up front:
“This is a short book about a great man who lived a long life. It is not a full-scale biography and makes no pretense of thoroughness or originality….â€
He goes on to explain who his intended reader is:
“I had in mind a reader who has just seen his first ballet by Balanchine, or is about to do so, and wants to know something about Balanchine’s life and work and how they fit into the larger story of art in the twentieth century.â€
He then chose the personal and performance events that best told the story for his audience with his goals in mind. One must take care to include enough so that the portrait is “true” and not lopsided, but I am not prone to embrace the mega biography a là Bergreen who writes long and uses a chronological, annotated format as seen in Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, James Agee: A Life, and Capone: The Man and the Era. As I wrote in 1997 for a “Brief†review of the Armstrong bio for The New York Times Book Review section:
The exhaustive research that characterizes Mr. Bergreen’s work does, however, have its occasional downside. The thread of Mr. Armstrong’s story gets lost from time to time amid the lengthy excursions into the history of New Orleans and voodoo beliefs, the geographical evolution of jazz, the Harlem renaissance of the mis-1920s, and the mini profiles of the many people who populated his life. While these portraits are vivid, pages go by in which Mr. Armstrong plays no part whatsoever. Furthermore, readers might wonder whether the fact that Mr. Bergreen is not a member of the musical scene was of help or hindrance in interpreting his findings, and to what extent the biases and experiences of his sources may have colored what he learned.
(Note of Admission: That review was accepted and paid for, but was pulled when my editor discovered that another editor had commissioned a full feature-length review by another writer, one of greater stature to be sure. That writer later become a dear friend….it was none other than Terry Teachout. Anyway, I digress.)
One of the IAJE panels next week is about biographies. Titled “Jazz Lives in Print,†the blurb reads:
The last decade has seen a torrent of new jazz biographies, some comprehensive and thorough, others mere hearsay and hagiography. What makes a good jazz biography? What are readers, fans and musicians looking for in a good bio? Personal anecdotes? Musical analysis? Social Context? A little of all three? Four prominent authors of recent jazz biographies discuss how they did their research and made their decisions about what to include (and not to include). Moderator: Paul de Barros, Seattle Times. Panelists: Gary Giddins, JazzTimes; Ashley Kahn, Wall Street Journal; Peter Levinson, Peter Levinson Communications; Stephanie Stein Crease.
De Barros (Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle) and Levinson (bios on Tommy Dorsey, Nelson Riddle, and Harry James) are friends of mine, Giddins (Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams) a longtime acquaintance, so I hope to attend. I sure can use their input!