The Biographical Turn: Lives in History 2016032750, 9781138939707, 9781138939714, 9781315469577

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Introduction
Chapter 1: The biographical turn: Biography as critical method in the humanities and in society
Setting the stage: theoretical implications of a biographical approach
Elaborating the biographical turn
Biography as a critical methodology in the humanities
Notes
Section 1: The biographical turn in the humanities
Chapter 2: Biography as corrective
Historians turning to biography
Biographical mission
Challenging misrepresentations
Higher status
Notes
Chapter 3: The plurality of the past: Historical time and the rediscovery of biography
Historical and individual time
Historical plurality
Biography and social interstices
Notes
Chapter 4: The life is never over: Biography as a microhistorical approach
The methods of microhistory
Is small beautiful?
The individual as a research target
The gap in the narrative
Contextualisation
The singularisation of history
Biography as microhistorical approach
Notes
Chapter 5: Personalised history: On biofiction, source criticism and the critical value of biography
Biography Studies and the subjective element in historiography
History as ongoing process
Overcoming limited access to sources
The tragedy of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction
Source criticism and the historian as source
Notes
Chapter 6: The life effect: Literature studies and the biographical perspective
Notes
Chapter 7: Biography as a concept of thought: On the premises of biographical research and narrative
Biography Studies as a web of problems
Biography as storytelling
Biography as a concept of thought
Notes
Section 2: The biographical turn in fields of knowledge
Chapter 8: Biographies as multipliers: The First World War as turning point in the lives of modernist artists
Turning points
Becoming an art theorist
Unique or representative
History in the head
Notes
Chapter 9: ‘Honest politics’: A biographical perspective on economic expertise as a political style
Value-free economics in the post-war world
Expertise politics in the Netherlands: reflections on style and substance
Economic expertise and the end of ideology
Economics and biography
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 10: Rediscovering agency in the Atlantic: A biographical approach linking entrepreneurial spirit and overseas companies
Biography and microhistory in the Atlantic
Social capital and the entrepreneurial spirit in the Atlantic world
Agency in the Atlantic world
Notes
Chapter 11: Building bridges to past centuries: Religion and empathy in early modern biography
Empathy and historical understanding
Interpretation: interaction between perspectives
Reyner van Dorth: text in context
Agency: the connection between mentality and behaviour
Notes
Chapter 12: Palatable and unpalatable leaders: Apartheid and post-Apartheid Afrikaner biography
A nation adrift
A narrative of nationalist heroes
History and biography
New heroes, new histories
The biographical turn
Notes
Section 3: The biographical turn in academia and society
Chapter 13: Biography is not a selfie: Authorisation as the creeping transition from autobiography to biography
Notes
Chapter 14: What are we turning from? Research and ideology in biography and life writing
The voice of the public – what Life Writing and biography researchers actually read
Life Writing and biography: the theoretical echo boom
Notes
Chapter 15: Liberation from low dark space: Biography beside and beyond the academy
Notes
Chapter 16: From academic historian to popular biographer: Musings on the practical poetics of biography
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE BIOGRAPHICAL TURN

The Biographical Turn showcases the latest research through which the field of biography is being explored. Fifteen leading scholars in the field present the biographical perspective as a scholarly research methodology, investigating the consequences of this bottom-up approach and illuminating its value for different disciplines. While biography has been on the rise in academia since the 1980s, this volume highlights the theoretical implications of the biographical turn that is changing the humanities. Chapters cover subjects such as gender, religion, race, new media and microhistory, presenting biography as a research methodology suited not only for historians but also for explorations in areas including literature studies, sociology, economics and politics. By emphasising agency, the use of primary sources and the critical analysis of context and historiography, this book demonstrates how biography can function as a scholarly methodology for a wide range of topics and fields of research. International in scope, The Biographical Turn emphasises that the individual can have a lasting impact on the past and that lives that are now forgotten can be as important for the historical narrative as the biographies of kings and presidents. It is a valuable resource for all students of biography, history and historical theory. Hans Renders is Professor of History and the Director of the Biography Institute at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His publications include Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (2014). He is the cofounder of Biographers International Organization (BIO), the Vice-President of the Biography Society/la Société de Biographie and a jury member for the Plutarch Award for best American biography. Binne de Haan is a research staff member of the Biography Institute at the University of Groningen. His publications include Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (2014), and an English translation of his PhD thesis Van Kroon tot Bastaard (From Prince to Pauper: Biography and the Individual Perspective in Historiography) is forthcoming. Jonne Harmsma is a PhD researcher in the Biography Institute at the University of Groningen and is working on a biography of the Dutch Prime Minister and Central Bank President Jelle Zijlstra.

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THE BIOGRAPHICAL TURN Lives in history

Edited by Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Renders, Hans, editor. | Haan, Binne de, editor. | Harmsma, Jonne Title: The biographical turn : lives in history / edited by Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016032750| ISBN 9781138939707 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138939714 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315469577 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Biography. | Biography as a literary form. | History—Methodology. Classification: LCC CT21 .B4625 2016 | DDC 809/.93592—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032750 ISBN: 978-1-138-93970-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-93971-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-46957-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by diacriTech, Chennai

CONtENtS

Acknowledgementsix List of contributors xi INtRODUCtION1

1 The biographical turn: Biography as critical method in the humanities and in society Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma

3

SECtION 1

The biographical turn in the humanities

13

2 Biography as corrective Nigel Hamilton

15

3 The plurality of the past: Historical time and the rediscovery of biography31 Sabina Loriga 4 The life is never over: Biography as a microhistorical approach Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon

42

5 Personalised history: On biofiction, source criticism and the critical value of biography 53 Binne de Haan

vi  Table of contents

6 The life effect: Literature studies and the biographical perspective68 Joanny Moulin 7 Biography as a concept of thought: On the premises of biographical research and narrative Christian Klein

79

SECtION 2

The biographical turn in fields of knowledge

89

8 Biographies as multipliers: The First World War as turning point in the lives of modernist artists Hans Renders and Sjoerd van Faassen

91

9 ‘Honest politics’: A biographical perspective on economic expertise as a political style Jonne Harmsma

104

10 Rediscovering agency in the Atlantic: A biographical approach linking entrepreneurial spirit and overseas companies Kaarle Wirta

118

11 Building bridges to past centuries: Religion and empathy in early modern biography Enny de Bruijn

129

12 Palatable and unpalatable leaders: Apartheid and post-Apartheid Afrikaner biography Lindie Koorts

141

SECtION 3

The biographical turn in academia and society

157

13 Biography is not a selfie: Authorisation as the creeping transition from autobiography to biography Hans Renders

159

14 What are we turning from? Research and ideology in biography and life writing Craig Howes

165

Table of contents  vii

15 Liberation from low dark space: Biography beside and beyond the academy Carl Rollyson

176

16 From academic historian to popular biographer: Musings on the practical poetics of biography Debby Applegate

186

Bibliography194 Index214

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENtS

The editors would like to thank the Nicolaas Muleriusfonds Foundation for their generous support of this publication. Chapter 3, ‘The Plurality of the Past: Historical Time and the Rediscovery of Biography’, by Sabina Loriga, was translated by Chloe Morgan. Chapter 8, ‘Biographies as Multipliers: The First World War as Turning Point in the Lives of Modernist Artists’, by Hans Renders and Sjoerd van Faassen and Chapter 11, ‘Building Bridges to Past Centuries: Religion and Empathy in Early Modern Biography’, by Enny de Bruijn, were translated by Wichard Sam Boersma. Chapter 13, ‘Biography Is Not a Selfie: Authorisation as the Creeping Transition from Autobiography to Biography’, by Hans Renders, was translated by Sybren Bonnema. The author of Chapter 4,‘The Life Is Never Over: Biography as a Microhistorical Approach’, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, expresses his gratitude for the support he has enjoyed from the Icelandic Research Fund (IRF, nr. 141237-051) during his research. Parts of Chapter 16, ‘From Academic Historian to Popular Biographer: Musings on the Practical Poetics of Biography’, by Debby Applegate, have been published before in: Leigh Eric Schmidt, Catherine Brekus, Nick Salvatore, Matthew Avery Sutton and Debby Applegate, ‘Forum’, Religion & American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 24, 2014, 1–35.

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LISt OF CONtRIbUtORS

Debby Applegate was a Sterling Fellow at Yale University where she earned her

PhD in American Studies and has taught at Wesleyan and Yale Universities. Her first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday 2006), won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. She is currently working on Madam: The Notorious Life and Times of Polly Adler (forthcoming from Doubleday). Enny de Bruijn studied Dutch language and literature at Utrecht University,

the Netherlands, and is currently working as journalist and author in the field of literature and history. She earned her PhD in 2012 with a biography of the ­seventeenth-century poet and theologian Jacob Revius. She is currently working on a popular history book about seventeenth century farmers’ mentalities and country life in the Guelders River area in the Netherlands. Sjoerd van Faassen studied Dutch language and literature at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and was at great length Head of Collections at the Museum of Dutch Literature. He is currently a affiliated researcher at RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. He published studies on Dutch literary history, especially on the history of cultural periodicals and publishers of the Interbellum. He is c­ urrently working on a biography about the Dutch artist, architect and theorist Theo van Doesburg (together with Hans Renders). Binne de Haan is a research staff member of the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He earned his PhD in 2015 with the ­dissertation Van kroon tot bastaard. Biografie en het individuele perspectief in de geschiedschrijving (From Prince to Pauper: Biography and the Individual Perspective in Historiography), in which he analysed the relationship between biography and historiography. He has edited

xii  List of contributors

the volumes Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (with Hans Renders, 2014) and Microhistory and the Picaresque Novel: A First Exploration into Commensurable Perspectives (with Konstantin Mierau, 2014). He was a member of the founding committee of the Biography Society/la Société de Biographie and serves as a board member. He is editor of Tijdschrift voor Biografie and biography critic for Geschiedenis Magazine. Nigel Hamilton is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of

Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, and first president of Biographers International Organization (BIO). He is honorary president of the Biography Society/la Société de Biographie. He was Visiting Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, founded the British Institute of Biography and was Professor of Biography at De Montfort University, Leicester (United Kingdom). He has published several widely acclaimed biographies, among them Monty (1981-1986, three volumes; winner of the Whitbread Award and Templer Medal for Military History), JFK: Reckless Youth (1992), Bill Clinton (2003-2007, two volumes), American Caesars: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (2010) and The Mantle of Command: FDR at War 1941-1942 (2014). His latest book is Commander in Chief: FDR’s Battle with Churchill, 1943 (2016), with which he earned his PhD at the University of Groningen. He has written extensively on the topic of biography in Biography: A Brief History (2007) and How To Do Biography: A Primer (2008). Hamilton also is a critic for the Boston Sunday Globe and the London Review of Books, and has published in the New York Times, the London Independent, and the Times Higher Education. In the field of publishing and media, Hamilton co-founded the Biography Bookshop in London and participated in numerous television documentaries. Jonne Harmsma is PhD candidate at the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. In 2013, after finishing his history study at the University of Groningen and the University of Pisa, Italy, he began his PhD project at the Biography Institute, studying the life and work of Jelle Zijlstra, former prime minister of the Netherlands and president of both the Dutch Central Bank and the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. This biographical research is situated in the fields of Dutch and European political history, the history of ­economic thinking and post-1945 economic and monetary history. Craig Howes has been the Director of the Center for Biographical Research since

1997, a co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly since 1994, and a faculty member of the English Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa since 1980. He serves as general editor for the Biography Monograph Series, published by University of Hawai‘i Press, and as an executive producer and the series scholar for the documentary series Biography Hawai‘i. With Miriam Fuchs, he edited the MLA collection Teaching Life Narratives (2007), and he has been the list manager

List of contributors  xiii

of IABA-L, the listserv for scholars, students and practitioners of life writing, since 1999. His book Voices of the Vietnam POWS: Witnesses to Their Fight (1993) was a Choice Notable Book. He is also the author of many articles on life writing theory, literary theory and nineteenth century British and American Literature. Christian Klein is a Senior Lecturer (Akademischer Rat and Privatdozent) for German Literature at the Bergische University Wuppertal, Germany. He was DAAD-­ Visiting Professor in German Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, and received a fellowship at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. In 2016 and 2017 he is Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor at Michigan State University. His PhD dissertation at the Free University Berlin was a biography about the German author and playwright, painter and sculptor Ernst Penzoldt (2006). In this context he started to focus on the theory of biography and edited some fundamental volumes in German about theoretical questions concerning biographical research: Grundlagen der Biographik (2002), Handbuch Biographie (2009) and Legitimationsmechanismen des Biographischen with Falko Schnicke, 2016. Lindie Koorts received her PhD in History from the University of Stellenbosch in 2010, after previous studies at the University of Johannesburg and the University of Groningen’s Biography Institute. Her biography of D.F. Malan, the first of the apartheid premiers, was published in both English and Afrikaans as D.F. Malan and the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism (2014) and DF Malan en die opkoms van Afrikanernasionalisme (2014). The two books were shortlisted for the Alan Paton Prize for Non-Fiction and the KykNET-Rapport Prize for Non-Fiction, South Africa’s highest awards for non-fiction in English and Afrikaans respectively. She currently works at the University of the Free State’s International Studies Group. Sabina Loriga is Professor in History at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences

Sociales in Paris and is the Director of the Atelier international de recherches sur les usages publics du passé. Her research focuses on the relationship between history and biography, constructions of historical time and public uses of the past. Her chief works are La juste mémoire. Lectures autour de Paul Ricœur (in c­ ollaboration with Olivier Abel et al., 2006); Soldats: Un laboratoire disciplinaire: l’armée piémontaise au XVIIIe siècle (2007); Le Petit x: De la biographie à l’histoire (2010) and L’expérience historiographique (in collaboration with Antoine Lilti, Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani, 2016). Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon is Professor of Cultural History at the University of

Iceland and senior researcher at the National Museum of Iceland. He is chair of the Center for Microhistorical Research (www.microhistory.org) at the University of Iceland and member of the founding committee of the Biography Society/la Société de Biographie. He is one of three editors of the book series The Anthology of Icelandic Popular Culture on egodocuments and everyday life history. He has written What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (with István M. Szijártó, 2013) and

xiv  List of contributors

numerous other books and articles published in Iceland and abroad. He is also co-editor with István M. Szijártó of a new international book series, Microhistories, ­published by Routledge. Joanny Moulin is Professor of English Literature at Aix-Marseille University,

France, elected member of the Conseil National des Universités, head of the English Department and of a Biography Practice and Theory programme in Laboratory LERMA (EA 853) and Federation CRISIS, and founder and president of the Biography Society/la Société de Biographie a scholarly society and international network for the development of biography theory. He serves on the Board of Directors of Biographers International Organization (BIO) and is a member of IABA-Europe. He has written five biographies, on Ted Hughes, Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. He has edited journal issues and published articles on the theory of biography, writing for journals like Études anglaises, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, The European Journal of English Studies, Cercles: revue;interdisciplinaire du monde anglophone, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, and various magazines. Hans Renders is Professor in History and Theory of Biography and is director of the

Biography Institute, both at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He was a member of the founding committee of Biographers International Organization (BIO). He wrote two biographies, about the Dutch poet Jan Hanlo (1998) and the Dutch journalist and author Jan Campert (2004). He is editor of the Biographical Studies series and the editor in chief of a series of edited reprints of Dutch and foreign biographies. He has published studies on the theme of biography in various international journals, among them Journal of Historical Biography, Le Temps des Médias and Storia della Storiografia, and is member of the board of Quaerendo: A Journal Devoted to Manuscripts and Printed Books. He published the edited volume Theoretical Discussions of Biography Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (with Binne de Haan: 2014). He is cofounder and vice president of the Biography Society/la Société de Biographie. Carl Rollyson, Professor of Journalism at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), is author of A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan and A Private Life of Michael Foot. His other books include To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie, Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography, American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews, Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend, Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic, Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, and three studies of biography, A Higher Form of Cannibalism: Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography, Biography: A User’s Guide, and Confessions of a Serial Biographer. He has collected his reviews of biography in Reading Biography, American Biography, Lives of the Novelists and Essays in Biography. He is currently at work on This Alarming Paradox: A Life of William Faulkner.

List of contributors  xv

Kaarle Wirta is PhD candidate at the Institute for History of Leiden University,

the Netherlands. His current research is a part of the ERC granted project ‘Fighting Monopolies, Defying Empires 1500–1750: A Comparative Overview of Free Agents and Informal Empires in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire’. His research is dedicated to Scandinavian maritime history, social and early modern history, African history and transnational entrepreneurialism in global history.

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Introduction

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1 THE BIOGRAPHICAL tURN Biography as critical method in the humanities and in society Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma

‘On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité’. (‘We owe respect to the living, but to the dead we only owe the truth’.) Voltaire, letter to his friend Mathurin de Grenonville, 1719 We have had the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, the spatial turn and in recent years even the affective turn. This volume elaborates on the concept of the biographical turn: the emergence of biographical research as an accepted critical scholarly method of investigation since 1980. This is perhaps not one of those concepts that harbours great and innovative theoretical ambitions to create a fundamental change in our way of viewing the world, but is nonetheless a development that indicates a significant evolution in humanities research over the last three decades. We are not the first to point to a biographical turn in recent years. The German historian Simone Lässig signalled this development retrospectively in 2008. ‘The first signs of this “biographical turn” were visible as early as the 1980s, it was only in the 1990s that it reached a truly new level of quality’, Lässig declared. ‘Scholarly biography is once again enjoying a broader scholarly acceptance, not only in the more biography-friendly environment of Anglo-American universities, but also in France and Germany. The demand to bring “the human actors back on stage” is hardly controversial at the moment; in fact, it enjoys a broad consensus and is widely accepted’.1 However, as we claim in this volume, the theoretical and methodological consequences of this biographical turn have never been addressed in a systematic and comprehensive way. While the steady increase in the use of biographical research since roughly 1980 is interesting in itself, it is at least equally important that the biographical turn has initiated a methodological and theoretical turn. Biography is to be regarded as a research perspective that can be applied across the full spectrum of historical research and, as such, is relevant to many fields of study.

4  Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma

The scholarly application of biography as a method of historical research has important implications for the makeup and outcomes of analyses. The participant’s or agency perspective, in other words, is a specific way of looking at the past that leads to a distinctive framework of historical interpretation. Presenting the biographical perspective as a scholarly research methodology, investigating the theoretical consequences of this bottom-up perspective and illuminating its uses for different fields of study are the main goals of this volume.

Setting the stage: theoretical implications of a biographical approach In recent years, biographical research has become widely accepted as a useful method of scholarly investigation, even though biographies are still often presented as non-scholarly publications. The increased institutional acceptance of biography within the academy seems like a promising development, but obstacles remain. For example, defending a biography as a doctoral thesis remains, in many countries, a troublesome issue.2 The lack of theory forms a point of contention in this regard especially. Therefore, it is of vital importance for the field of Biography Studies to present a more consistent and broadly based research methodology and theoretical framework. Elaborating on the biographical turn gives this ambition legitimacy since much biographical research has been theoretically uninformed and frequently when such efforts were undertaken, no attempt was made to appreciate the theoretical value of biographical research in a broader scholarly context.3 What does the biographical perspective specifically add to our knowledge about the past? And to what theoretical tradition does it belong and should it contribute? As this volume shows, the biographical method, as a research perspective, potentially represents an important academic innovation. The worn-out question whether biography is an art or a science has been supplanted by a more profound inquiry into its position within the academic landscape. ‘Biography confirms a farewell to theory; the biographer thus escapes the socio-historical, political, and politico-economic analysis, on which in earlier times his awareness of method was founded’, claimed the writer Hannelore Schlaffer in 2013 in an article on the ‘biographical trend’.4 We are convinced that the contrary is true.Theoretical awareness always advanced the development of biography in past centuries. Such awareness is crucial to finding the locus of individual biographies and of the genre as a whole within academia. Moreover, with biographies no longer aimed primarily at reconstruction and the retrieval of facts – why would you do so with the internet at hand? – biographical research has now even entered a distinctly new phase. As we move towards biographies in which facts figure within a broader framework of historical interpretation and analysis, solid theoretical reflection will stimulate an even greater flourishing of the genre and contribute to its scholarly underpinnings. Theoretical awareness, we therefore argue, is indeed crucial to the hybrid genre of biography.

The biographical turn   5

In this volume, therefore, observations on the increased use of biography as a scholarly research methodology are integrated with reflections on its theoretical consequences. Central to this development is the shift from the abstract and structural approaches of the past to the situating of human experience as the starting point of historical interpretation. This broader development came about without the loss to scholarship that many presumed would occur.The cultural and linguistic turn and the rise of microhistory have been important catalysts and formed the backdrop of the emerging field of Biographical Studies. Microhistory and biography share the vantage of scrutinizing, challenging and possibly correcting established interpretations of human history in a scholarly way. Biographical research complies with the research procedures of the microhistorian, which are based on the study of source materials and the principle of verifiability. In fact, the biographical turn has contributed to the inauguration of the ‘third phase’ of microhistory, highlighting the parallels between microhistorical and biographical studies in attempting to assess, evaluate and possibly correct macrohistorical interpretations of past events.5 But biography is more than that. Biography is a form of publication and a specific research methodology in its own right.What questions can we address to the sources about an individual and how wide should the circles around a person be drawn? For which fields of knowledge can research on a biographical subject be regarded as distinct or representative? But we should also look at these matters the other way round: what should we expect in a theoretical sense from a biography? For this volume, we have not asked biographers to provide a recipe for sound biographical research; rather, we were looking for researchers in particular disciplines who could explain what biographies have contributed or could contribute to their fields of knowledge. In other words, when does a study of a particular subject become a biography, and what does the knowledge of an individual life teach us with regard to a particular discipline? Writing recently on the biographical turn in the field of early modern Atlantic history, the historian Joseph Miller stressed that historians ‘do not “prove” anything but rather explain, in the sense of rendering others’ actions plausible, even convincing, to readers or audiences also positioned in swirling flows of time. The place of abstract “causation” in a historical epistemology, as distinct from ascertainable or plausibly inferable motivations, is rhetorical, at best’.6 Abstract notions like ‘economic thought’, ‘political culture’ and ‘religious experience’ are created and developed through human action. Roles are ‘made’, not ‘taken’, as was stated by the biographer Richard Holmes.7 The study of individual lives explores the divergent roles taken and made throughout a life, laying bare the correspondences, overlaps, oppositions and conflicts among them. Lives are complex and take place in different contexts. The biographical perspective has to take into account the interaction between different spheres of knowledge and being. Putting the deterministic and reductionist tendency of writing history into perspective, the biographical approach therefore calls attention to the complexity and dynamics of human history. Using the individual life as a lens or microscope, the research methodology of biography functions as a counterweight to abstract causation and

6  Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma

‘conceptual’ history, using primary sources and the personal perspective to explore, relativise, confirm or correct existing understandings and interpretations of the past. As a scholarly methodology, the biographical perspective offers research possibilities for numerous disciplines. This makes a theoretical justification of Biography Studies even more important, as this collection of essays illustrates. The writings gathered here show why the biographical turn is relevant not only for history but also for fields such as literature studies, sociology, religious studies, economics, gender and politics.The authors present current evaluations of biography as an academic genre, along with evidence-based methodological reflections making use of results from the widespread practice of biography.The contributions to this volume can be regarded as attempts to renew the previously often repetitive and customary theoretical observations on biography in the field of Biography Studies. A growing number of academic studies devoted to biography in recent years has already brought about a fuller appreciation of biography as a scholarly valuable method.8 Now the challenge arises of providing the field of Biography Studies with a more coherent, fully developed and substantive research programme. Notwithstanding its traditional but problematic ties with the disciplines of history and literature studies, and with its connections to microhistory and Life Writing, biographies traditionally fall somewhere in the no-man’s-land between academia and the broader public. In society at large, biographies contribute to the construction of a critical and historically informed constellation of public opinion. In a way, like investigative journalism, biographies are a tool of vital importance in a transparent and democratic society. Investigating both the proverbial ‘dead white males’ and the marginal figures of the past, building on solid academic research into verifiable sources, biographical research performs a dynamic and significant role in understanding the past and shaping both current public and historical debates. It is Voltaire’s maxim that we therefore endorse wholeheartedly as the basic principle of Biography Studies: ‘We owe respect to the living, but to the dead we only owe the truth’.

Elaborating the biographical turn The contributions in this volume are divided into three sections.The first section deals with the implications of the biographical turn for the field of historiography, the discipline from which biography derives its main basic principles for research and of which biography can be considered to be part of, albeit with a special status and unique research methodology.The second section deals with biographical research as scholarly ‘praxis’ and explores its methodology for various fields of knowledge and in different national traditions. By presenting examples of biographical research, these contributions show how the biographical method serves as a supplier of new interpretations. Thus the biographical turn is detected in the fields of art history, economics, politics, religious studies and early modern Atlantic history as well as in South Africa’s dealing with the legacy of Apartheid. In conclusion, the third section contains contributions that discuss the changing position of biography within academia and its role as a bridge to the broader public.

The biographical turn   7

The eminently ‘corrective’ value of biographies is central to the opening ­chapter of this book by Nigel Hamilton. The importance of biographical research lies, according to Hamilton, in its critical historical assessment of the narratives taken for granted in historiography. Building on in-depth archival research, the biographical perspective is vital in evaluating, exploring and persuasively ‘correcting’ our knowledge of the past. Indeed, Hamilton’s observations highlight essential characteristics of the biographical turn. Sabina Loriga explores in her chapter the variety of actual experiences of time and reasoning and their implications for individual and collective levels in the writ  ilhelm Dilthey and Paul Ricœur. In this way, ing of history, based on the work of W she addresses the relationship between historical representations and the rediscovery of biography. Biography provides paths to infiltrate social interstices, adding to a heterogeneous view on the past. The Icelandic microhistorian Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon in his chapter explores the overlap between the biographical approach to history and the theory and practice of microhistory. Furthermore, Magnússon defends the stance that vicissitudes of an individual need not be related to a wider perspective of historical understanding. This specific position in the debate on representativeness and uniqueness is not necessarily shared by every contributor to this volume. Magnússon finds ample support for his view, however, in the contribution by Loriga, who writes: ‘It is not necessary that the individual is seen as representative or typical for something wider. On the contrary, lives that deviate from the average seem to offer a better way of thinking about the balance between the specificity of personal destiny and the society as a whole.Variety is more significant than typicality. Only a multitude of experiences make it possible to address two fundamental aspects of history: conflicts and possibilities’. Binne de Haan elaborates on the theoretical position of biography within historical scholarship, taking ‘personalised history’ and historical source criticism as his guiding concepts. Since 1980 collective historical experience has assumed new configurations through individual historical perspectives, but how are we to relate this way of writing history to other genres of biographical and historical representations, like biofiction and the historical novel, and the public function of historiography? Source representation and criticism appear to be crucial to the understanding of biography as a critical and public genre. Joanny Moulin argues from a different tradition. Coming from the field of literary theory, he reasons that ‘the biographical turn in literature and literary studies revolves around the notion of a life effect, that interrogates the articulation between fiction and non-fiction’. Whoever speaks about the biographical turn cannot ignore the ‘linguistic turn’, which has been of major importance for the humanities. Building on the accomplishments of this other ‘turn’, Moulin suggests that biography may be defined as ‘the simulation, in words, of a man’s life, from all that is known about that man’. His interpretation fits perfectly with the reasoning of German literary theorist Christian Klein, who, in the final chapter of this first section, writes about the developments in the reception of biography in academia and society at large, and deals with biography as a narrative that proposes

8  Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma

a specific mode of communication and interpretation. Moreover, Klein presents the biographical turn as an evolution: biography, no longer a ‘suspect’ scholarly approach, is now regarded as a serious academic research methodology and a ‘concept of thought’ in understanding and interpreting the past. In the second section, the practical methodology of biographical research is reflected on from different areas of expertise and principally from a theoretical point of view.That the biographical turn can be related as well to the concept of ‘turning points’ is discussed in the chapter of Hans Renders and Sjoerd van Faassen, which could moreover function as a distinctive argument for possible ‘partial biographies’. In their chapter on avant-garde artists and the influence of World War I on their lives and work, Renders and Van Faassen go beyond traditional cradle-to-grave biographies (which nonetheless form a vital backbone to the field of Biography Studies) and relate the experiences of the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg during the First World War to those of other avant-garde artists of the era. In doing so, they aim to explore various biographies in a partial and comparative manner to detect the uniqueness or representativeness of an individual in relation to a particular theme. In his chapter Jonne Harmsma, dealing with economic expertise, explores how economic reasoning and thinking can influence both the style and substance of political actors. Harmsma argues that by choosing the biographical perspective, zooming in on the micro-perspective of the individual, abstract notions like schools of thinking dissolve into myriad and unique constellations of worldview and vision. Economic expertise took a distinctive position in the political landscape of the 1950s and 1960s, and its mystique of scientific objectivity and impartiality performs a complex political role to this day. Coming from the field of early modern history, the Finnish historian Kaarle Wirta shows how the biographical perspective can shape microhistorical research in his area of expertise. Building on the biographical turn in his field,Wirta presents the transnational career of Atlantic entrepreneur Henrich Carloff and shows how such research can contribute to current debates and shape or adjust our interpretations of early modern Atlantic and trading company histories. From a different angle, and researching a different epoch, religious historian Enny de Bruijn argues that the biographical method is ideally suited to try to make elusive things visible and palpable. De Bruijn focuses on the case of the sixteenth-century nobleman Reyner van Dorth and the changing significance of concepts like honour, love and faith: ‘Values unable to turn into hard facts, but without which his life is hard to understand’. The South African context features prominently in the final chapter of Section 2. In her contribution, Lindie Koorts sets out to uncover the roots of the Afrikaner biographical tradition and shows that, in recent years, and roughly two decades after the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid era, a very distinct biographical turn can be perceived in South African historiography. Going beyond both Afrikaner and African nationalist stereotypes, a new generation of historians now revisits the past and makes increasing use of biography as a method to reflect critically on both apartheid and anti-apartheid agency.

The biographical turn   9

The final section of this volume investigates the boundaries between society at large and academia, a frontier in which biography has always taken a dual and sometimes problematic and ambiguous position. Do these difficult times now belong to the past? Hans Renders emphasises the fundamental distinction between autobiography and critical, academic biographies based on serious historical research and theoretical reasoning. ‘Biography is not a selfie’, Renders argues, and identifies this distinction as an especially important aspect of the ‘biographical turn’ for biographies of celebrities, a genre in which biographies are, in fact, becoming a more distinguished form of autobiography. Emphasising the necessity of critical distance between biographer and the biographical subject is of vital importance in maintaining and enlarging the sound reputation and functioning of biography as a genre. Even though this volume does not focus specifically on the complex relationship between biography and Life Writing, as was the case in various chapters of the volume Theoretical Discussions of Biography edited by two of the editors of the current volume, the contribution of Craig Howes does take up this issue.9 The editors hold the view that the field of Life Writing and the theories associated with it have not always advanced the scholarly investigation of biography. In a chapter titled ‘What Are We Turning From? Research and Ideology in Biography and Life Writing’, Howes reacts to this view and enters into an argument with it. Such a form of theoretical ‘conversation’ and difference of opinion will prove crucial to finding clear demarcations and boundaries for biography scholarship.The field of Biography Studies, indeed, should not lapse into exclusivity and a ‘reactionary “anti-theory” backlash’, and debates like these should lead to observations of both fundamental differences and promising parallels between biography and Life Writing.10 Biography scholar of the first order Carl Rollyson investigates in his chapter why biography has long been distrusted by academics, and how this situation has changed over recent decades. Building on his own experiences, Rollyson makes a plea for more institutional academic attention to the research and writing behind biographies. Academia should go beyond its traditional distrust towards biography and embrace the biographical approach; it should value biography’s role at the crossroads between the ivory tower of the university and the broader public. Pulitzer Prize winner Debby Applegate is one of the best persons to show how scholarly valid biographical research and writing for a broad readership can successfully go hand in hand. Taking the inside view on the research process of her award-winning biography The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (2007), Applegate explores both the possibilities and the limitations of biographical research. Applegate highlights the way in which a biographer crafts a representation of a historical life and stresses the importance of drawing a sharp and well-defined image of the biographical subject, which includes emphasising instability, friction and incoherence in character and personality.

10  Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma

Biography as a critical methodology in the humanities The phrase ‘biography as corrective’, as coined by Nigel Hamilton in his chapter in this volume, grasps an essential feature of biography as a critical method in the humanities. In scholarly terms, the biographical perspective embodies the viewpoint of individual agency and human experience as a methodological tool. By detecting individuals in the past, understanding the dynamic roles they ‘took’ and ‘made’ and putting the grand narratives of structures, institutions and abstractions into perspective, biographical research can perform the scholarly task of testing and validating the accuracy of the stories and images that have been accepted in historiography. In his essay ‘A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn’, Joseph Miller accurately describes the value of biography as a research methodology:‘Historians distinctively explain by focusing on […] people rather than abstractions, institutions, or structures of any kind – mental or social or economic or otherwise […]. Thus for historians, abstractions do not act. Christianity, or civilisation, or modernity does not “spread”; rather people may adopt and adapt elements of these logical constructions for their own immediate purposes; civilisations do not “endure,” but rather people may preserve them, and necessarily change them in the course of making the efforts necessary to maintain elements in them against the inevitably erosive flow of time; ideas cannot “influence,” but people may manipulate them ideologically to attempt to influence others’.11 The aim of this volume is certainly not to present the reader with a manual explaining how to write a biography. Our goal is to uncover the theoretical framework behind biographical research. As Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey postulated in the introduction to their Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts, theory forms the complex of ‘underlying principles’ that ‘unify a range of apparently disparate, unconnected phenomena by postulating an underlying principle that these phenomena putatively have in common and that can explain their nature or behaviour’. Moreover, these underlying principles remain, at least initially, ‘hidden from view’.12 Seeking to shed light on the theoretical notions that form the largely concealed backbone of biographical research, we hope this volume will contribute to the understanding of biography as a distinct historical methodology, useful not only for scholars of history, but by nature interdisciplinary and integrative towards various fields of knowledge. The biographical perspective is therefore relevant as a research method for the study of a vast array of periods, themes and disciplines. Besides the quantitative rise of biographies in terms of output, the biographical turn especially calls attention to the fact that the biographical perspective can function as a highly critical methodology in the humanities. Taking a biographical turn leads not only to new data and factual knowledge about our past, but contributes to our evaluating, assessing and plausibly also correcting and reshaping the established narratives and interpretations of the past. Biography, therefore, can be regarded as an indispensable and important critical activity for the humanities and for society at large.

The biographical turn   11

Notes 1 Simone Lässig, ‘Introduction: Biography in modern history – modern historiography in biography’, in Volker Berghahn and Simone Lässig (eds.), Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, New York/London: Berghahn, 2008, pp. 1–26. 2 Birgitte Possing, ‘Biography: An unloved, but much pursued courtesan?’, in Anders Perlinge and Hans Sjögren (eds.), Biographies of the Financial World, Hedemora: Gidlunds, 2012, pp. 15–34 and Binne de Haan, Van kroon tot bastaard: Biografie en het individuele perspectief in de geschiedschrijving, Groningen: Groningen University Press, 2015, pp. 40–1. 3 In this respect, the start in 1991 of the series ‘The Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism’, edited by William H. Epstein, was promising. Unfortunately, only one volume in this series was published: William H. Epstein (ed.), Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, West Lafayette, IA: Purdue University Press, 1991. 4 ‘Die Biografie besiegelt den Abschied von der Theorie; der Biograf entkommt den sozialgeschichtlichen, politischen, politökonomischen Analysen, auf die ihn früher sein Methodenbewusstsein verpflichtete’: Hannelore Schlaffer, ‘Sehnsucht nach Echtheit: Die Mode des Biografismus’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung 17 April, 2013. 5 Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, ‘Introduction: The challenges of biography studies’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 1–8 and from the same volume, Hans Renders, ‘The limits of representativeness: Biography, Life Writing, and microhistory’, pp. 129–38. 6 Joseph C. Miller, ‘A historical appreciation of the biographical turn’, in Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (eds.), Biography and the Black Atlantic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, pp. 19–47. 7 Richard Holmes,‘The proper study?’, in Peter France and William St Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives:The Uses of Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 7–18. 8 To name a few: Eric Homberger and John Charmley (eds.), The Troubled Face of Biography, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1988; Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; France and St Clair, Mapping Lives; Bernhard Fetz and Wilhelm Hemecker (eds.), Theorie der Biographie: Grundlagentexte und Kommentar, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2011; Wilhelm Hemecker (ed.), Die Biographie: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009; Christian Klein (ed.), Handbuch Biographie: Methoden,Traditionen,Theorien, Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2009; Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of NineteenthCentury ‘Hidden’ Lives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 and Sabina Loriga, Le Petit x: De la biographie à l’histoire, Paris: Seuil, 2010. 9 Renders and de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography. 10 Joanny Moulin, ‘Introduction:Towards biography theory’, Cercles: revue pluridisciplinaire du monde Anglophone 15, 2015, 1–11. 11 Miller, ‘A historical appreciation of the biographical turn’, p. 29. 12 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 3rd printing, 1967 [1953], p. 27 (section 109); Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.), Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts, London: Routledge, 2001; cited by R. Monk,‘Life without theory: Biography as an exemplar of philosophical ­understanding’, Poetics Today 28, 2007, 528–70.

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SECTION 1

The biographical turn in the humanities

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2 BIOGRAPHY AS CORRECTIVE Nigel Hamilton

Twenty-seven years ago the distinguished English biographer Robert Skidelsky (author of Keynes, in three volumes) rued the continuing lack of theorising in the study of biography and, as a consequence, its poor status in the academy.1 As Skidelsky put it in a sort of status report on biography in 1988, The Troubled Face of Biography (a book of essays resulting from an international conference on the subject): ‘Scholars are far from convinced that biography has any important light to throw on art or,’ he added, ‘history’. ‘Biography’, he summarised, ‘is still not taken entirely seriously as literature, as history, or as a cogent intellectual exercise’.2 This sorry situation, in the view of the novelist and professor of American literature Malcolm Bradbury in the same work, had not changed very much since Wellek and Warren had published, in 1949, their ‘famous and influential’ book, Theory of Literature.3 In that seminal account, biography had been dismissed as of no ‘real critical importance. No biographical evidence can change or influence critical evaluation’, Wellek and Warren had asserted.4 Bradbury’s scorn for the ravages wreaked not only by post-war critical minds but then by deconstruction was even more pronounced – the 1980s having become ‘the age of the author denied and eliminated, airbrushed from the world of writing with a theoretical efficiency that would be the envy of any totalitarian regime trying to remove its discredited past leaders from the record of history’.5 Skidelsky thought biographers, to some degree, had brought this upon themselves – not only by the lack of theorists, but by biographers’ helter-skelter retreat from their earlier, Victorian responsibility to produce exemplary lives, and their growing surrender to public voyeurism. In his view, exemplary lives were coming back again, following Lytton Strachey’s great ‘debunking’ bonanza after World War I – which had at least given biography a serious and central justification – but with the exemplariness transferred to the subject’s private life – life that was not necessarily exemplary, at least in the Victorian sense, but certainly so in the

16  Nigel Hamilton

Roman Colosseum sense. By the late 1980s, he lamented, biography had sunk in ­intellectual esteem, for ‘the example is the life itself, not what the life enabled a person to achieve. Or, more precisely, the life is the achievement’. As he added, in what is now a famous epigram, ‘what used to be called achievement is now only one accompaniment, possibly a minor one, of a style of living’ – from lesbianism to sexual arrangements.6 It would be no exaggeration to say that biography’s role and standing in society and in the academy has radically changed since The Troubled Face of Biography was published. The book’s editors, Eric Homberger and John Charmley – one a professor of literature, the other a professor of history – had claimed that ‘everywhere in academic life the subtle, the not-so-subtle denigration of biography grows apace’, and reported with profound concern that ‘the procedures of biography’ were ‘under direct attack in the humanities’.7 Twenty-seven years later the reverse could probably be averred: traditional history, rather than biography, having come under academic and public fire, while biography’s status both in academia and outside may be said to have skyrocketed. The snobbery, superficiality, and lack of credibility of historians, where their work touches on real individuals, caused history in that period to become suspect not only in the academy but outside, as the work of biographers served increasingly to place in question their accounts and interpretations of important historical events, personalities and developments. This is a change or turn that in time will repay deeper study, I believe. However, since it has gone more or less unobserved in current studies of biography, let me briefly explore what might be termed ‘the biographical corrective’, as I have observed and experienced it, both as an author and as a teacher of the craft since the 1970s.8

Historians turning to biography Robert Skidelsky, in his 1988 essay, did acknowledge the rise of more ­professional (i.e. well-researched) approaches to modern biography, fueled by American ­academics. He cast the products, though, as ‘works of scholarship rather than imagination’. More detailed and painstaking than in the past, biographies were, he maintained, still turgid. ‘Nearly all biographies still start with ancestors, most move on to birth, and then through birth to leading events, and so on to death, in music the same way as of old, and’ – pace Eminent Victorians – ‘at about as funereal a pace’. Current biography was not notable, he observed, for being innovative or critical. It was not ‘experimental in style or arrangement’, and it could not be said that ‘it seriously challenges accepted judgements’.9 Skidelsky clearly never foresaw the explosion of narrative literary techniques in biography that changed its supposedly troubled face in subsequent decades. For one thing, biographers abruptly ceased opening their lives with the birth of their subject – so much so that, by 2007, Hermione Lee, a biographer and professor of English literature at Oxford, could formally announce the demise of such starting

Biography as corrective  17

points.10 Biographies also began to use flashback, foreshadowing, invented n ­ arrators, multiple points of view and more.11 Where Edmund Morris, for example, had embarked on his new life of Theodore Roosevelt in traditional multi-volume, traditional style in 1979, he abandoned all semblance of such in Dutch, his authorised biography of President Ronald Reagan in 1999, inventing himself, the author, as a fictional ­participant-observer, and even inserting his own filmscript.12 (No film, unfortunately, was forthcoming. Not only did this outrage Reagan’s widow, but it scandalised the reading public, who had come to expect, nay demand, an old-­ fashioned formal, official biography – an example, as in many of the arts, of the market being well behind the creative curve.) Another example of radical reorientation of the biographer as author may be seen in the work of Stacy Schiff. Schiff had published a well-regarded biography of Saint-Exupéry in 1995, but in 2010 she subjected Queen Cleopatra to a scintillating, firework-style re-examination in Cleopatra. This time there was no widow to object; in The New York Times Michiko Kakutani hailed the work as ‘a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation’.13 These were not aberrations; the sheer literary standard of biographical writing often eclipsed that of fiction authors in readability, control of structure, intelligence, humor and narrative skill. Literary innovation, in other words, transformed the genre. It did not necessarily displace more journeyman, traditional biographies – any more than post-modern novels displaced traditional detective novels or spy thrillers – but it added to biography’s arsenal a display of inventiveness in form and approach that professors Homberger and Charmley had only nervously (and far from eagerly) hoped for when in 1988 they wrote: ‘The suspicion of traditional biography is so intense in the social sciences, history and in the vexatious kingdom of high literary theory, that wild heresies, tremendous flights of the persecuted biographical imagination, loom on the horizon’.14 Together with this innovative turn, though, went a new, more challenging approach by the biographer to his or her purpose in writing the life of another, real human being: the question ‘why’? And ‘what am I trying to do in this book’? In steering, shaping and above all, in editing out non-germane content from their work, the new approach to biography saw biographers taking upon themselves a more challenging aspiration, namely to do what Lord Skidelsky had failed to find in biography in the 1980s – a stronger critical, authorial mission, unafraid to contest the achievement or failure of the subject. Biographers began not only to contest the way in which the genre had previously been pursued in biography, but the way in which the biographee had hitherto been portrayed and evaluated by historians – much as the microhistory school was doing.15 Whether this burgeoning critical confidence was occasioned by the gradual whittling away of libel and copyright laws in America and ultimately in Britain – a factor that had made many a biographer cringe before tackling reputations, as Ian Hamilton, author of In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988) and Keepers of the Flame (1992) had discovered, to his dismay – or to the growing professional confidence of

18  Nigel Hamilton

biographers in their right to judge directly, given the strength of their research and biographical skills, or to other factors in social and cultural history, will doubtless be a fruitful aspect to consider as we continue to study the business of biography and biographers’ motives.16 Here I wish just to briefly identify and offer some insight into this trend towards a more assertive, challenging, critical and contesting spirit in biography, at least with regard to history. This corrective trend – and its consequences – will, I believe, be seen as culturally significant, indeed as a defining quality of the ‘Biography as Corrective’ in years to come. That it is new, however, we can state with certainty, for it was nowhere on the radar of David Novarr when writing The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880–1970 (1986), nor on that of Homberger and Charmley’s essayists’ in 1988.17 At a time when many novelists, according to Tom Perotta, have ‘experienced a sudden and alarming loss of faith in their chosen literary form’ – even to the point of claiming that ‘fictional writing has no value’ – it is interesting to note not only the increase in faith experienced by biographers as non-fiction writers, but to analyse why.18 Here I can only offer some preliminary ideas, based on exterior and interior observations, that point to a fresh theoretical justification for the genre or craft we call biography.

Biographical mission Beginning with the outside, let us take, as a possible starting point, the study of World War II and the question of the agency of Adolf Hitler in the genesis and development of a conflict that may well turn out – in deaths, destruction, global reach and consequences – to be the most violent war in human history: in other words, a hugely important historical subject. Not an easy subject for historians, it must be said, to address, though. However well theorised historians may be in their field, they are invariably compelled to address the agency of the leader, or Führer, who not only ordered and directed war on Europe and on Russia, but on America – and upon the Jews. One such historian, an English scholar named David Irving, had by the 1970s achieved a considerable reputation for his provocative histories of certain wartime events, such as the Allied Lend-Lease convoys to Murmansk, and the bombing of Dresden. But his biggest claim to controversial fame as an historian was his major account of World War II, Hitler’s War, in 1977. In this he claimed that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust. Because Irving was an indefatigable historian, building up his own substantial archive of documents, he had garnered notoriety, but also considerable respect from fellow military historians, such as A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper.19 Certainly the distinguished Oxford historian of World War II, Sir Richard Evans, later explained his initial view of Irving as being ‘influenced by the respect in which he was held by some colleagues in the field’.20 The military historian Sir John Keegan had openly claimed Hitler’s War was ‘head and shoulders above the rest’ of World War II histories.21 Irving continued to broadcast his historical account of Hitler’s innocence, upsetting many survivors and others, and was

Biography as corrective  19

eventually accused of being a Holocaust denier in Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.22 Not only had he absolved Hitler of responsibility for the extermination of the Jews, but he was refusing to believe cyanide gas had been used to liquidate Jews at Auschwitz, and had opposed federal German reparations to Israel for a Holocaust that he denied had taken place. In 1996 Irving struck back, however, as a historian, and in London sued Professor Lipstadt and the publisher of her book for committing libel. The stakes were high, in terms of history in the public eye – indeed The Guardian newspaper referred to the courtroom drama that ensued as ‘history on trial’.23 Richard Evans was brought in to the case to produce a special investigative report on David Irving’s career, with access to Irving’s research papers as an historian, under British legal rules of discovery. Evans was stunned by what he found. Working with a team of two PhD. students he told Professor Lipstadt, the courtroom defendant: ‘Deborah, you were far too kind to him [in your book]. The historical wrongdoings we have found are more extreme than anything I ever imagined’.24 Irving’s reputation as an historian was duly trashed in the trial proceedings; he was bankrupted by bringing such a wanton lawsuit and lost the case in 2000. But the trial became celebrated for more than the failure of a Holocaust-denying historian to use draconian British libel laws to his advantage as an historian. (He was subsequently tried in Austria in 2006 on criminal charges for denying the Holocaust and Hitler’s knowledge of it, and sentenced to three years in prison.) One thing had stood out very clearly from Professor Evans’s report and ‘history on trial’ in London: namely that historians have agendas, and these agendas can trump facts, evidence, scholarship and reasonable reasoning. Moreover, that to truly be able to address history where its patterns and themes concern real individuals, historians would have to turn to professional biographers rather than each other. And in fact this was already happening, at least with regard to Adolf Hitler. The vexed question of Hitler’s role in the extermination of the Jews had produced such mayhem of conflicting interpretations and assertions – the so-called Historikerstreit of 1986–1989 – that the Liverpool historian Professor Ian Kershaw had already decided, in the late 1980s, he must change profession and become a biographer. For the following two decades Kershaw devoted himself to writing a monumental new biography of Hitler to correct the works of Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Joachim Fest and Klaus Hildebrand – historians who had, in Kershaw’s view, whitewashed Hitler’s role and modus operandi as Führer. Kershaw’s massive, two-volume biography, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis won him the Wolfson History Prize in 2000, and a British knighthood for ‘Services to History’.25 Biography had clearly won over history. Kershaw was not alone among historians turning to biography, moreover. Younger historians also turned to biography.26 Among older historians the ‘turn’ was easier to identify. Doris Kearns Goodwin, for example, had been a tenured professor teaching government at Harvard, for example: she deeply objected to the Vietnam War and attempted to address President Lyndon Johnson’s character

20  Nigel Hamilton

as a contributing factor in a biography she published as Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream in 1977. Soon after, she left Harvard to pursue the biographical enterprise, first seeking to explain the rise of the liberal Kennedys through a biography, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, and then the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt through a marital biography, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II in 1995; then the cabinet administration of Abraham Lincoln in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln in 2005, and finally the role of the media in the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, in The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism in 2013 – prompting New York magazine to call her ‘America’s historian-in-chief ’.27 Whether or not readers agreed with Goodwin’s interpretation of events or their significance, my point here is this: a former professional historian had turned biographer and by the new century was widely acknowledged as having challenged and made major contributions to history in America – her books eclipsing the work of academic historians. This was something not seen since Eminent Victorians upset Edwardian historiography. But since Lytton Strachey had not been trained as an historian, indeed had scoffed at scholarship rather than wide reading, as Skidelsky noted, Strachey’s contesting, debunking example had curveballed the practice of biography, but not historiography.28 His literary style was much admired, even emulated – but his motivating passion, namely to contest the Victorian complacencies that had led to World War I, did not prove fertile. His example was simply not immediately followed by subsequent biographers in terms of serious biographical mission or purpose. Half a century later, however, in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Strachey’s missionary zeal did finally find fertile ground. This time, biographers had better weaponry, too: depths of research and scholarship that had eluded the Edwardian litterateur. Almost overnight a more overtly critical, contesting, even revisionist-history movement could be seen emerging in biography – biographers researching and writing with a kind of scholarly vengeance: Clayton James and William Manchester on General MacArthur, Richard Reeves on Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, Professor Robert Dallek on Nixon and Kissinger, David McCullough on Harry Truman and John Adams, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin on Robert Oppenheimer, Scott Anderson on Lawrence of Arabia, and many more. Nor, it should be noted, was the new and more deliberately challenging role of the biographer confined to historians-turned-biographers. Serious journalists, too, felt compelled to correct history and the work of historians. What was clear and impressive was that they were doing so in part by the use of biographical tools that historians had long eschewed as infra dignitatem: interviews. Thus Robert Caro, a trained reporter who had worked for years at Newsday, suddenly turned biographer with The Power Broker, a crusading biography of Robert Moses, the New York city planner, and his role in the history of that city.29 Feeling that the acquisition and use of power in American politics and government was misunderstood by superficial historians, Caro then applied his groundbreaking biographical skills

Biography as corrective  21

of research and interview to the career of Lyndon B. Johnson – producing four volumes of ­biography between 1982 and 2012, with a final fifth still to be written. Not only were Caro’s books – The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, Master of the Senate and The Passage of Power – written with pace and style at complete variance with the funereal quality Skidelsky had thought irremediably tied to scholarly biography, but they changed the way historians saw the use of power in American history.30 Walter Isaacson – who studied history at Harvard and philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford – was also a professional journalist who became a major biographer. After university he worked for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Time magazine. However he too switched to biography, beginning with a challenging life study, Kissinger: A Biography in 1992, then following it with Benjamin Franklin: An American Life in 2003, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe in 2007, Steve Jobs in 2011, and The Innovators: How a Group of Inventers, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution in 2014.31 Scott Anderson – a veteran war correspondent – turned major new biographer of Lawrence with Lawrence in Arabia, subtitling his work War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2013).32 The work of such historians-turned-biographers and journalists-turned-­ biographers thus went a great way towards transforming the way biographers were seen in the decades following the 1980s. In addition, their work produced chain reactions within the biographical arena. By contesting the shallow accounts and myths paraded by many historians, and by employing their forensic skills as modern, scholarly biographers, they encouraged other biographers to follow suit and, in a dialectical development, to produce competing works of challenging biography. Thus Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler spurred more challenging lives of the dictator by biographers such as A.N. Wilson, while Isaacson’s Kissinger spurred the historian Niall Ferguson to abandon history and write a counter-­biography, Kissinger, Volume I: The Idealist (2015), while Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was quickly countered by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s Becoming Steve Jobs in 2015.33 It will, I think, be interesting in terms of biographical research to make a survey of this corrective movement, or turn in biography, not only by statistically analysing data of biographers’ progressions from their professional training in history and journalism into biography over the past three decades, but a qualitative study to examine the extent to which such biographers were aware of what they were doing: i.e. to what extent the mission of deliberately contesting received opinion, history, myth and public understanding (or misunderstanding) of real individuals became the conscious new intent or mission of such practitioners – something certainly suggested by the use made of explanatory subtitles, even titles themselves, chosen by biographers for their works. In this context I would like to offer, from the inside, some self-analysis as an author who began his career as a biographer prior to Professor Skidelsky’s judgement on the craft, and who has pursued it through the subsequent decades. In this way I’d like to attempt to seek to answer the question: what was my motive or intent behind biography over the period we are looking at – the 1980s to the

22  Nigel Hamilton

present day? Did my purpose, or sense of purpose, change in that period? What led to the change? And to what extent was I aware of it, as a biographer? In other words, the interior, rather than exterior side of the biographical turn, is what interests me here.

Challenging misrepresentations My first biography, The Brothers Mann, may be indicative.34 Begun in 1971 its ­outward originality lay in the fact that I was setting out to make a study of creative sibling rivalry. I had been trained as an historian, however – and wanted to engage with what I saw as a bigger question that was being ignored by literary critics and historians: namely how Heinrich and Thomas Mann, two of the most prominent writers of their time, came to oppose Adolf Hitler and what had happened to them as a result. As the biography grew in manuscript it thus became a record of differing twentieth century German literary responses to nationalism, before World War I, during World War I, then in the interwar, Weimar years, and finally during World War II and its aftermath – using two of Germany’s most famous literary exiles. (Both men moved to America during World War II.) In 1973 the book was considered, however, too early, too ambitious and too long; the manuscript was rejected and it was only finally published transatlantically in 1978 and 1979, under protest, when I was appointed official biographer of Field Marshal Montgomery. That work, too, was overlong – it became a trilogy, each volume almost a thousand pages. However, by then – 1981, 1984 and 1986 – the book market and the field of biography were changing radically, in conformity with social and cultural trends, and the publisher did not reject it; in fact, it became a bestseller in Britain, where it won not only the Whitbread Award for Biography but the Templer Medal for Best Contribution to Military History, and was brought out by a major publisher in the US despite its huge length. Not all reviewers agreed with the views of the author, but they did appreciate it was standing history – that is to say, what historians write – on its head, by presenting a completely fresh portrait of the obnoxious but brilliant British Field Marshal and his time. A large part of this appreciation, I think, was in response to the use of interviews, or ‘oral history’ – a term that achieved a new status in that period. ‘Oral history’ had been an aspect of historianship completely neglected or dismissed by most university teachers for decades, long after the invention of the tape recorder. Fortunately, however, I had trained as a journalist in the US, and I saw the need to interview as many relevant surviving veterans of World War II as a sine qua non in undertaking the Montgomery project. This transformed my approach, for it added a depth of insight – or insights – into both the prickly Field Marshal, the hidebound British army, and the conduct of World War II that had never been possible before – just as would prove the case with, say, Robert Caro’s multi-volume life of LBJ, or Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr.35 Oral depth-of-field, then, together with deeply-applied forensic archival research, characterised my undertaking.This did not in itself explain the immediate

Biography as corrective  23

reception of my biography, looking back, however – for there was certainly no ­reason to assume a market for thousand-page biographies at the time, let alone three successive such works of biography.36 There were other factors at work, which are only clear to me in retrospect. They are interesting to highlight, I believe, for they only slowly emerged from the undertaking after I began it, in the same way that had been true of my work on the Mann brothers. These factors – not the new, more ‘imaginative’ style and heavily-oral-historied substance – became the biography’s profounder justification, rather than the other way around. In other words, the very justification shifted – organically, one might say. Let me explain. Stacy Schiff has neatly described the double-life or existential mind of the biographer. ‘The biographer has two lives’, she wrote. ‘The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. The first is a muddle of misgivings and misapprehensions, hesitations and half-chances, devoted to the baggage carousel or the Netflix queue or wherever the empty calories of existence are served.The second – the life the biographer pins to the page – has themes’.37 In that second existence, she stated, the biographer exists to extract substance, such as cause and effect, in charting a life and its context. In my case, as I worked for ten years on my Montgomery opus, I found themes emerging that I had not expected – and which ran counter to the received historical view of my subject, both as a man and as a professional military commander. First during what might be called (to borrow a legal term) the ‘discovery’ process, when selecting the wheat of life from the chaff in terms of research work, but then in the iterative process, as the themes of the work began to emerge more strongly, I found myself taking more and more issue (as did Stacy Schiff in her own work) with the way historians had hitherto recounted and assessed Montgomery’s role in the astonishing transformation of British military performance in World War II, especially in North Africa in 1942. Somehow Montgomery’s assumption of command of the British Eighth Army had, over the years, become questioned by a series of historians who had no idea of Montgomery’s previous career, or his years in the wilderness of interwar military doldrums. Led by a Cambridge historian, Correlli Barnett, not only was Field Marshal Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika pictured to be on its last legs when Montgomery arrived to command the British Eighth Army at Alamein, but it was claimed Montgomery’s battle plans had been stolen from his predecessor general, and that victory over German forces would in any case have been inevitable.38 Barnett, in the Cambridge tradition, had avoided interviews for the most part, seeking to back his agenda with only selective documentary materials, or in Victorian-style correspondence with other historians. By contrast I made it my business to interview in person as many veterans as possible who had actually served under Montgomery’s predecessor, General Auchinleck, as well as subsequently under Montgomery, recording their comparative experiences, insights and judgements on both commanders. I was deeply disturbed by what I saw as a kind of historian’s denial – motivated I concluded, by personal animosity and a strange military historian’s agenda: to rehabilitate at all costs the reputation of General

24  Nigel Hamilton

Sir Claude Auchinleck, the predecessor-general fired by Churchill, and his chief of the staff, Brigadier Dorman-Smith, and to trash the achievement of their successor in the desert. A highly regarded historian, in short, seemed to me to be operating from decidedly questionable – certainly not objective – biographical motives, ­without being a biographer; and was not only producing bad history but, since Barnett was teaching history at Cambridge, was influencing, in my view, a whole younger generation of historians with his blinkered approach to World War II in the desert – an infection, moreover, that was crossing the Atlantic (where Montgomery’s reputation had never been very high) and making its way into yet more works of military history.39 I therefore began quite consciously to see my research and my biography as a chance not simply to retell one individual’s life and career, but to correct bad, highly influential historianship. In order to do so convincingly, however, I felt I needed – like Caro, later – to do more interviewing, and more forensic archival research than I had originally envisioned – and that I would require more space to present it. It was for that reason my biography thus grew to three volumes, in other words – not from the desire to include more fresh material, as Skidelsky felt was a main reason for biographies growing in size in the 1970s and 80s, namely ‘“first use” of original material’.40 In short, the physical growth and depth of serious biography – as well as in that of many other biographies written in that period – derived, I would argue, from a new polemical intent, not the need to flaunt or flesh out fresh data, which Lytton Strachey (and Virginia Woolf, in Orlando) had rightly scorned. Just as Kershaw required two huge volumes of biography to refute misrepresentations of the key demonic figure of WWII, so I devoted ten years to resolving a similar kind of Historikerstreit in Britain in the 1980s. I was working on the remains, so to speak, of a dead individual, yet I would now argue I was participating in a larger cultural pattern: the switch of ‘deep’ scholarship from history to biography – and with a mission. Looking back at my subsequent biographies I recognise a familiar polemical substrate emerging from the task, once undertaken: a determination to rethink, re-explore, and, where warranted, correct the way we, in current times, see certain historical figures. Not only the person as personality, in other words, but the historical context and – equally open to debate – the subject’s historical importance in our understanding of the past, and even the present. Thus, for example, the biography I next embarked on, a fresh life of President John F. Kennedy, began with curiosity, but soon became a story encased within another story: challenging the misrepresentation, as I saw it, of the early years of JFK and the genesis of his Democratic political trajectory. American historians had rested content with the myth or notion that JFK was never expected by his vastly ambitious father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., to amount to anything, politically; that the role of politician among the Kennedys had been reserved for JFK’s older brother Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., and that only the ‘accident’ of the older brother’s heroic death in World War II had enabled his playboy younger brother to take up his brother’s mantle and step into his shoes.

Biography as corrective  25

This myth, I found through many hundreds of interviews and archival research, simply covered up the truth: namely that JFK’s brother was a mere mouthpiece of his conservative, isolationist, anti-Semitic and right-wing father, the US Ambassador to Britain in World War II. In other words, it did not explain how JFK ­single-handedly managed to change what was promising to become a right-wing isolationist dynasty into a political family with an inspiring liberal political agenda – a development that took JFK to the presidency at the age of only 43. Given that the family became so equated in American political history with liberal political policies from the 1960s to the 1990s when I was writing (and later to Senator Ted Kennedy’s death in 2010), the matter of JFK’s actual political origins in the history of American politics acquired considerable historical significance as my research took me deeper into his story. After 900 pages the biography had not reached JFK’s 29th birthday as a first volume – but it had explored a most fascinating father-son dynamic: one that established exactly how a second son actually turned his family into modern Democrats. 41 In a country where politics and political history are so central to national discourse and identity, this was a revolutionary text – and though it deeply offended family members loyal to the memory of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., it became not only a New York Times bestseller but was dramatised for television and translated into languages from French to Chinese. Again, my point here is that when I began JFK: Reckless Youth I had no a priori agenda, only a biographer’s intense curiosity. What propelled the book, in terms of the depth of research and its size, was a growing desire to challenge received historical wisdom, spread by historians and ‘Keepers of the Flame’, as the poet Ian Hamilton classified them.42 The keepers, in my case, became so outraged, and were so powerful in cutting off my access to interviewees and to archival documents, that it became impossible to write a second volume. I realised for the first time just how contentious the business of modern biography can be, and how personally it can affect the biographer – as Janet Malcolm would show in the case of Sylvia Plath biographers.43 My JFK opus was followed by a multi-volume biography of President Clinton, which was equally polemical – and with such hostile reactions in certain quarters that I simply dared not complete the trilogy, but instead moved on to what I thought, innocently, would be an easier task, namely an examination, for the very first time, of the role of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as commander-in-chief in World War II.44 This too began as a single-volume undertaking – namely to fill in a gap in the biographical record, since despite the many hundreds of works on FDR there had never been a study of the President in his constitutional role as commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States in World War II.45 Hitherto historians had considered FDR to have been a chief executive who left the military running of the war to his joint chiefs of staff – and the strategy of the war to Winston Churchill, the British prime minister. The more I researched the subject, however, the more I found this to be a complete myth, resulting from FDR’s death a few weeks before the war ended.

26  Nigel Hamilton

This had allowed his chiefs of staff to cover up their mistakes and to downplay the President’s role in their memoirs – and for Winston Churchill to do the same in his immensely influential six-volume account The Second World War, which helped Churchill win the Nobel Prize for Literature. As I pursued my interviews with surviving witnesses and conducted research on the President’s actual direction of his subordinates and allies in the war I recognised my task as biographer would be to change the way historians and the public think about FDR as war leader – and that this could not be done in single volume if it was to be credible. One volume is becoming, in the end, three. In other words, my biography, as my project has developed, has nothing to do with presenting ‘fresh material’ as a mere biographical ingredient, pace Skidelsky, let alone with presenting more of his ‘life’ rather than his achievement. Rather it is a direct challenge to the way the general public has hitherto come to conceive and understand arguably the most important individual in the most violent war in human history. Moreover, such an ambitious mission has consequences. The first volume was nominated for the National Book Award as one of the ten best non-fiction works in 2014 – but the British publisher rejected the work, given its revised portrait of Churchill, and the trilogy will most probably not be published in the UK or former British territories.46 Such a response is what, in my experience, a modern biographer has to learn to expect. Not only has the biographer to accept he or she has no monopoly on truth, but that contesting other people’s views, especially in the area of reputations, will likely have repercussions that are often uncomfortable. The quality of research and presentation skills must therefore be deeper and more convincing than that of most historians if the work is to achieve its polemical intent – and the biographer must see the negative fallout as, to some extent, a measure of the work’s significance in challenging and correcting society’s myths.

Higher status Extrapolating from my personal experience, then, I see in retrospect a continuing line of authorial intent since the 1970s, one that goes way beyond fresh styles or innovations of narrative. Moreover, it is not to be confused with invasion of privacy – an aspect of biography that Janet Malcolm famously likened to literary ‘burglary’. In her view the biographer was ‘breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured’, she memorably remarked, ‘by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of bank-like blandness and solidity’, whereas in truth she claimed, biography was nothing other than ‘simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged’, she declared in 1994, ‘but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre’.47

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Similarly attacked by the Kennedy family (and Malcolm-like reviewers) for my transgressive portrayal of the young John F. Kennedy back in 1992, I could only shake my biographer’s head when in 1998 Malcolm found she had been hoodwinked by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes – who was able to use intermediaries as well as copyright and libel law to keep Malcolm and other biographers at personal, legal and printed bay for decades. 48 Hughes had thus avoided any challenge to the myth of his deceased wife and his own part in her work and suicide – reserving until the very eve of his own death his right to exclusive authentic biographical truth, which he published as Birthday Letters.49 What Malcolm – a talented essayist, but poor biographer – never understood as Hughes’s defender (though she was never allowed to meet him) was that biography was becoming, in her own time, a profounder and more serious challenge to popular and to historians’ myths than she, as a well-known literary critic and essayist, could appreciate. My tentative conclusion, then, both from outside observation and from the inside, is that in the three decades since publication of The Troubled Face of Biography there have been major, demonstrable changes in the way biographers have approached the literary challenges of their genre, in innovation, intimacy of depiction and readable scholarship.Yet one of the biggest – and least studied – changes of all has been in the biographer’s intent: his or her sense of purpose. As I see it, this sense is not an a priori justification or agenda but grows organically, as a modern biographer surveys the historiography of the subject and field of achievement. It emerges only gradually as the biographer, after due process, goes through serial iteration to refine the outcome, and finally ‘pins to the page’ an account of the chosen life, or partial life – often after many years of research and reflection. And at heart what serves to sustain and propel the biographer forward through those years, on the basis of research, ‘due process’ and reflection, is a growing willingness to challenge current myth, even at the cost of hostility and possible legal maneuver protecting it. I believe this willingness has become one of the ‘central justifications’ of biography – a justification that was true of the great Roman biographers Suetonius and Plutarch, who came to see their mission as contesting the popular myths and received opinions of their time, and subjecting them to diligent biographical examination. It is a purpose which Lytton Strachey exemplified in his Eminent Victorians in 1918, and which has returned to the business of biography over recent decades. Mining the latest developments in research skills and sources, as well as being unafraid to confront intimate aspects of the subject’s private life, the professional biographer moves from open-minded curiosity to become more familiar and more expert in the chosen subject under the biographical lens – and more determined, ultimately, to challenge and correct popular current views and misunderstandings. That switch deserves to be studied, for it is upon this recent turn that biography has in large part achieved the higher status – especially in comparison with history and areas such as the history of science – which Professor Skidelsky and others so despaired of, 27 years ago.50

28  Nigel Hamilton

Notes 1 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. Vol. 1. Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920, New York: Viking, 1983; Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. Vol. 2. The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937, New York: Penguin Books, 1995; Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. Vol. 3. Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946, London: Macmillan, 2000; Robert Skidelsky, ‘Only connect: Biography and truth’, in Eric Homberger and John Charmley (eds.), The Troubled Face of Biography, New York: St. Martin’s, 1988, p. 14; Paula Backscheider later lamented the same in her Reflections on Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. xiv. 2 Skidelsky, ‘Only connect: Biography and truth’, pp. 1–2. 3 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, New York: Harcourt, 1946. 4 Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The telling life’, in Homberger and Charmley, The Troubled Face, pp. 134–36. 5 Bradbury, ‘The telling life’, pp. 134–35. 6 Skidelsky, ‘Only connect: Biography and truth’, p. 13. 7 Eric Homberger and John Charmley, ‘Introduction’, in Homberger and Charmley, The Troubled Face, pp. ix, xii. 8 In Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff ’s edited work The Seductions of Biography, London: Routledge, 1996, based on a one-year program of ‘discussion and research on ­biography’, there was an excellent first attempt to move beyond The Troubled Face of Biography from both literary and historical-cultural perspectives. Three years later, in Reflections on Biography, Paula Backscheider did include a short chapter, ‘Pushing the envelope’, on biography’s ‘directions and challenges’ – though only in relation to innovative form. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan’s edited volume Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, has, finally, challenged Wellek and Warren’s structuralist dismissal of biography – see Section 1, ‘Historiography of biography studies’, pp. 11-58, and Section 2, ‘Biography and history’, pp. 61–101. 9 Skidelsky, ‘Only connect: Biography and truth’, p. 8. 10 Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 1. 11 Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History, Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 222–41. 12 Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, New York: Random House, 1999. 13 Michiko Kakutani, ‘The woman who had the world enthralled’, The New York Times, 1 November, 2010. 14 Homberger and Charmley, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. 15 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory:Two or three things that I know about it’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 139–66 16 Ian Hamilton, In Search of J.D. Salinger, London: Heinemann, 1988 and Ian Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and The Rise of Biography, London: Hutchinson, 1992. 17 David Novarr, The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880–1970, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1986. 18 Tom Perrotta, ‘Fall from grace’, The New York Times Book Review, 10 May, 2015. 19 Deborah Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, New York: Ecco, 2005, p. 22. 20 Lipstadt, History on Trial, p. 199. 21 Lipstadt, History on Trial, p. 187. 22 Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, New York: Plume, 1993.

Biography as corrective  29

23 Jonathan Freedland, ‘Court 73 – Where history is on trial’, The Guardian, 5 February, 2000. 24 Lipstadt, History on Trial, p. 200. 25 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, London: Allen Lane, 1998 and Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis, London: Allen Lane, 2000. 26 E.g. Lindie Koorts, D.F. Malan and the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2014 and Andrew Lownie, Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess, London: Hodder & Stoughton 2015. 27 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977; Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys:An American Saga, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt:The Home Front in World War II, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals:The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005 and Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit:Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. 28 Skidelsky, ‘Only connect: Biography and truth’. 29 Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, New York: Vintage, 1974. 30 Robert Caro, The Path to Power; New York: Vintage, 1982; Robert Caro, Means of Ascent, New York: Vintage, 1990; Robert Caro, Master of the Senate, New York: Vintage, 2002 and Robert Caro, The Passage of Power, New York:Vintage, 2012. 31 Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992; Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003; Walter Isaacson, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007; Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011; Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventers, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 32 Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia:War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, New York: Doubleday, 2013. 33 Niall Ferguson, Kissinger. Volume I, 1923–1968: The Idealist, New York: Penguin Books, 2015 and Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, Becoming Steve Jobs:The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart and a Visionary Leader, New York: Crown, 2015. 34 Nigel Hamilton, The Brothers Mann:The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871–1950 and 1875–1955, London: Secker and Warburg, 1978 and New Haven:Yale University Press, 1989. 35 Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988; Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998 and Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. 36 Nigel Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General, 1887–1942, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981; Nigel Hamilton, Monty: Master of the Battlefield, 1942–1944, New York: McGrawHill, 1984 and Nigel Hamilton, Monty: Final Years of the Field-Marshal, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986. 37 Stacy Schiff, ‘The dual lives of the biographer’, The New York Times, 26 November, 2012. 38 Correlli Barnett, The Desert Generals, London: William Kimber, 1960. 39 Viz, inter alia: Roger Parkinson, The Auk: Victor at Alamein, London: HartDavis MacGibbon, 1977; Donald Brownlow, Checkmate at Ruweisat: Auchinleck’s Finest Hour, North Quincy, MA: Christopher Publishing House, 1977 and Philip Warner, Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier, London: Buchan & Enright, 1981. More were to follow, such as: John Ellis, Brute Force - Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War, London: André Deutsch, 1990 and Robert Clarkson-Leach, Massacre at Alamein? Were Generals Wavell and Auchinleck Treated Unjustly and Was Montgomery Over-rated During the Desert Wars?, Upton upon Severn: Square One, 1996.

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40 Skidelsky, ‘Only connect: Biography and truth’, p. 8. 41 Nigel Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, New York: Random House, 1992. 42 Ian Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, New York: Random House, 1992. 43 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, New York: Knopf, 1994. 44 See for the hostile reactions e.g. Michiko Kakutani, ‘Portrait of a president, warts and . . . more warts’, The New York Times, 23 September, 2003. 45 Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 46 Since the writing of this chapter, a British publisher, Biteback, has contracted to publish the trilogy, beginning in 2016. 47 Malcolm, The Silent Woman, p. 9. 48 E.g. Michiko Kakutani, ‘Books of the times: A daunting father, a brother’s shadow’, The  New York Times, 27 November, 1992 and Jean Kennedy Smith, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Patricia Kennedy Lawford and Edward M. Kennedy, ‘Reckless biography: A grotesque portrait of our parents’, The New York Times, 3 December, 1992. 49 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, London: Faber & Faber, 1998 and Nigel Hamilton, How To Do Biography, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 324–30. 50 See for example Steven Shapin, ‘The life of the mind: Can biographies really help us understand the scientific ideas that shape our world?’, Wall Street Journal 9–10 May, 2015.

3 THE PLURALITY OF THE PAST Historical time and the rediscovery of biography Sabina Loriga

During the first half of the twentieth century, many historians were seduced by the idea of constructing an impersonal history.The campaign against a biographical and chronological approach, launched by Karl Lamprecht and François Simiand at the end of the preceding century, was quickly taken up by numerous social historians, traditionally more attentive to the collective dimension of the historical experience.1 There is no doubt that the work of Fernand Braudel played a major role in this depersonalisation of the past. In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, he argued for the superiority of the history of structures and the history of spaces, both founded on what is the most anonymously human, over biographical history.2 Thus, according to Braudel, Charles V was simply the product of an impersonal historical trend (an accident calculated, prepared and desired by Spain), and not the author of an imperial project: ‘Europe was moving of its own accord towards the construction of a vast state’.3 This passage was criticised by Derek Beales in an inaugural lecture given at Cambridge on November 20, 1980, where he observed that Charles V cannot be understood as a product of Spain given that ‘there was no such thing in the late ­fifteenth century as Spanish collective will’. In this respect, he emphasises the impossibility of basing a historical argument on a collective entity (what, in fact, is meant by the ‘will’ of Spain?), as well as the risk of anachronism implicit in the reduction of the collective to the national (can one even talk of ‘Spain’ in an era when the national configuration did not yet exist?).4 For Braudel, however, the sacrifice of the individual dimension was closely linked to a new architecture of historical time. His book is structured around three different scales of time (temps), operating at unequal speeds: that of geo-history, ­quasi-immobile, existing almost outside time and often consisting of constant repetitions and endlessly recurring cycles; that of the history of society, its slow cadences regulated by the groundswells of economic conditions; and finally, the traditional,

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event-based history of the individual, with its rapid, nervous ­ fluctuations.5 The ­relationships between these three timescales (long, medium and short) remain ambiguous. Do they represent separate realities or do they intermingle? Are they spans of time (durées) or rather different rhythms? Is there a hierarchy between them? Sometimes Braudel depicts them in a mobile and shifting interaction, where all the planes are significant and each timescale represents a layer in his explanation. On other occasions, his preference for the first and his suspicion of the last – which he describes as ‘surface disturbances’ – are clear.6 This chapter will focus on three points. First, it will draw on Paul Ricœur’s critical reading of Braudel’s The Mediterranean in order to demonstrate the limits of the project to depersonalise the past. Then it will go on to show that Braudel’s point of view is not necessarily shared by all historians. Without wishing to understate the important ways in which the natural sciences and the new social sciences have enriched history as a discipline, it is nevertheless interesting to analyse the way that historiography addressed the question of time prior to Braudel. Finally, the impact of the rediscovery of biography by Italian microhistory will be revisited.

Historical and individual time In fact, potentially effacing individuals from historical narrative is not a simple operation. From this point of view, the reading of Braudel’s The Mediterranean proposed in Paul Ricœur’s Time and Narrative remains exemplary. We can draw out three fundamental elements. In the first place, Ricœur points out that the notion of the longue durée risks wresting historical time away from the dynamic dialectic between the past, the present and the future and thus losing sight of human timescales: ‘Whereas in the traditional or mythical narrative, and also in the chronicle that precedes history, action is imputed to agents who can be identified […] history as a science refers to objects of a new type appropriate to its form of explanation. […] This new history thus seems to lack characters’.7 Secondly, he outlines the limits of the claims made by the history proposed by Braudel. Despite its protestations, it does not manage to efface the individual and event-based narrative: ‘Humans are everywhere present and with them a swarm of symptomatic events. The mountains appear as a shelter and refuge for free people. As for the coastal plains, they are not mentioned without a reference to colonization, to the work of draining them, of improving the soil, the dissemination of populations […]. The great conflicts between the Spanish and Turkish empires already cast their shadows over the seascape. And with these power struggles, events are already taking shape’.8 Action, far from being cast aside, remains essential throughout the entirety of the three sections of The Mediterranean (‘the work is placed as a whole under the heading of the mimesis of action’) and the very notion of a history of the longue durée is a product of the dramatic event, that is, of the event organised into a plot (l’événement-mis-en-intrigue or ‘emplotment’).9 Through this critical position, Ricœur divests the event of its impetuous nature (‘the event is not necessarily

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brief and nervous, like some sort of explosion’), in order to accord it the status of a symptom or a testimony.10 Finally, Ricœur compares Braudel’s work with three ‘tales about time’, written during the first two decades of the twentieth century: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, Der Zauberberg (1924) by Thomas Mann, and À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) by Marcel Proust. A comparison between the pages devoted to Virginia Woolf ’s novel and those dedicated to The Mediterranean is, it seems to me, particularly revealing. In his analysis of Mrs. Dalloway, Ricœur evokes the extraordinary difference that exists between chronological time, represented by the striking of Big Ben and the other chimes and clocks that ring out the hours, and individual time. The official time with which the characters are confronted with is not simply the time of the clocks but also that of everything connected with it: it is monumental time, the voice of authority (in other words, the spirit of the British Empire). In the same way, individual time corresponds to the experience of time, where the threat and the theme of death are constant. The different protagonists nonetheless establish individual relations with these markers of time and create their own time-spans.11 As Ricœur explains: ‘The hour, irrevocable? And yet in this June morning, the irrevocable is not burdensome; it gives new impetus to the joy of being alive […]. Thus passes internal time, pulled back by memory and thrust ahead by expectation’.12 For Ricœur, it is not simply a question of opposing clock time and internal time, but of trying to understand the variety of the actual temporal experiences of different character: ‘The chimes struck by Big Ben by no means punctuate a neutral and common time but, in each case, possess a different meaning’.13 In this way, Ricœur introduces a dimension of conflict. It is the same time for everyone externally, but not in their intimate worlds. What is more, public time is shot through with irreconcilable visions: it does not unify, it divides. On the basis of these reflections, Ricœur seeks to demonstrate that fictional narrative is a richer source of information about time than historical narrative. As he explains: ‘It is not that the historical narrative is completely impoverished in this regard. […] Nevertheless, other constraints […] result in the fact that the various time-spans considered by historians obey laws relating to their placement within ever vaster currents, which despite undeniable qualitative differences relating to the rhythm, the tempo of events, make these time-spans and their corresponding speeds extremely homogeneous’.14 Far from playing on temporal variations, history develops a third time, a specifically historical time, at the intersection between lived time and cosmic time. It is founded on ‘procedures of connection’ that ensure the reinscription of lived time in cosmic time: the calendar, the succession of generations, archives (both the document and the trace). From this point of view, historical time has no direct connection with the time of memory or of that of anticipation:‘These “times of history” […] seem to be without any apparent relation to the time of action’.15 Since History and Truth, Ricœur had always addressed the question of historical truth in terms of its double dimension: truth in the knowledge of history and truth in historical action.16 Why does he appear to uncouple or disconnect these two dimensions here? Does he intend to renounce the truth of action of biographical time?

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Historical plurality While these questions are not easy to answer, the idea that history must shine a ‘single, white light’ on the past has not always been shared by historians. Over the course of the long debate on the nature of history, which began in the eighteenth century and traversed the whole of the nineteenth, certain authors highlighted the plurality, both spatial and temporal, of the historical world. In 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder expressed his irritation with all excessively synthetic visions, pointing out the weaknesses of general characterisations and observing that to ‘paint’ a people, a period or a country simply by grouping these ensembles under a ‘general word’ with no real significance, encompassing individuals who thought and felt in different ways, was far from satisfactory.17 Twenty years later, he again insisted on the limits of historical generalisations: ‘How I am struck with fear when I hear an entire nation or age characterised by a few words: for what tremendous differences are contained in the word nation, or in Middle Ages, or in ancient and modern times’!18 The heterogeneity of time is emphasised throughout the entirety of his thinking, which was essentially founded on national differences. As he wrote in 1799, no two things existing in the world follow exactly the same measure of time. Each phenomenon, whether social, cultural or aesthetic, has its own center of gravity, contains its own measure within itself, and should be evaluated on its own terms rather than those of some absolute system: ‘In reality, every mutable thing has within itself the measure of its time; this persists even in the absence of any other; no two worldly things have the same measure of time […] There are therefore (to be precise and audacious) at any one time in the Universe infinitely many times’.19 A century later, it was the turn of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose theoretical s­ystem emphasised the degree to which the historical world cannot be understood through totalising concepts. An individual cannot explain a group, a community or an institution, and conversely a group, a community or an institution do not make it possible to explain an individual. There is always a disparity between these two poles, and this disparity is inexhaustible. The creations of collective life are suffered, lived and realised by each individual, but transcend their control and encompass a human space that is larger than a purely biographical one. Their existence precedes our own and they will continue when we are gone: ‘They exert power over the specific life-experience and conduct of individuals through custom, tradition and public opinion. Because the community has the weight of numbers behind it and outlasts the individual life-will, its power usually proves superior’.20 Moreover, the individual is always a hybrid being, at the intersection (Kreuzungspunkt) of different historical groups. Although formed right to the core by social experiences, he or she can never be reduced to just one of them: one is never entirely devoted to a single thing, not even to the family, the matrix of all other forms of social life. This is true, for instance, of a judge, who can simultaneously belong to a family, a political party, a church and so on: ‘Besides his function in the legal system, a judge also takes part in other productive systems. He

The plurality of the past  35

works for the interest of his family, he performs an economic role, he serves his ­political ­functions, he may even write verses. Thus the fullness of individuals is not captured by any productive system (Wirkungszusammenhang). Rather, amidst the various kinds of productive relations, only those processes or operations are called upon that are needed by a specific system. An individual is interwoven into various productive systems’.21 Even in extreme situations, when it is no longer possible to inhabit several spaces simultaneously, we are fortunate enough to be able to draw on resources that lie behind us and before us, that is, in other times: ‘[…] there is also a consciousness of freedom that is rooted in the many possibilities of life inherent in memory and in willing the future. Because of this […] our imagination is able to surpass whatever we can experience and actualise by ourselves’.22 This means that the present is never simply present, an isolated and independent temporal state. Instead, it is inherently flexible and never stops reaching out to the past and to the future: ‘The present never is; what we experience as the present always contains the memory of what has just been present.’23 Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Dilthey considered man to be a creature of time, inescapably linked to the chain of past events. It is this that sparks his need to express himself in a lasting way: ‘The animal lives fully in the ­present […]. It knows nothing either of birth or of death. Therefore, it suffers so much less than man. Although we perceive ferocity and painful mutilation, struggle and death everywhere in the animal kingdom, human life is exposed to much greater and more lasting suffering’. Life extends backwards into the past through memory and stretches before us through the anticipation of the future, whether this is filled with hope or with fear: ‘On both sides it dissipates into obscurity’.24 In contrast to what numerous sociologists (notably certain advocates of symbolic interactionism) would claim over the course of the following decades, for Dilthey the self is not a product hic et nunc, determined by the contingency of situations: its actions are founded on time-spans and draw on images of the past and expectations of the future.25 Ultimately, even the relationship that exists between a community or an institution and an era or a civilisation cannot be defined in terms of belonging. There is no doubt that every era expresses a dominant image. This is unilateral, and at certain moments the harmony between the different spheres of life is particularly strong: the rational and mechanistic spirit of the seventeenth century, for instance, influenced poetry, political policy and military strategy. But these moments are exceptions, for the different spheres all enjoy a degree of autonomy and there are always fragments of history that are reluctant or even refuse to conform to the general movement, as Dilthey argued: ‘[…] the historical world [can be understood] as a productive nexus centered in itself, at the same time containing other productive systems within it, which by positing values and realizing purposes also have their center within themselves’.26 This gives rise to irregularities, to differences, to discordances: ‘This [historical] meaning-content is presented as a unity. Accordingly it might seem that the historical continuum could be developed in terms of logical

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relations between univocal positions. In this way, the Hegelians have ruined our understanding of modern philosophy with their fiction of the logical unfolding of one standpoint from another. In reality, a historical situation contains, first of all, a multiplicity of particular facts.They stand next to one another indifferently and cannot be traced back to one another’.27 A civilisation is not a solid unit, nor is it formed from a single substance that can be reduced to an essential principle. Rather, it must be understood as an interlacing or unstable mixture of different aspirations and contradictory activities. It incorporates a variety of different ‘productive systems’ in perpetual movement (economy, religion, law, education, politics, unions, the family) ‘and because the organisation of the state includes within it various communities ranging down to the family, the great sphere of national life similarly encompasses smaller systems and communities that possess their own impetus […] Each of these productive systems is centered on itself in a specific way, and the inner rule of its development is derived from this’.28 Profoundly unmoved by the magic of chronology, Dilthey also used this temporal dimension to conceptualise the fundamental plurality of the historical world. Following in the footsteps of Herder, who proclaimed that every phenomenon is its own measure of time, in 1910, Dilthey stated that historical time moved neither in a straight line nor as a homogeneous flow. The eighteenth century, for example, could be inhabited simultaneously by Enlightenment thinkers, by Bach and by Pietism: ‘The general way in which the dominant direction of the German Enlightenment is expressed in the most diverse areas of life does not, however, determine everyone that belongs to this age, and even where it exerts an influence there are often other forces at work as well. Opposed tendencies from the previous age assert themselves. Those forces that ally themselves with these older tendencies and ideas, but attempt to give them a new form, become particularly powerful’.29 Dilthey thus depicted the historical unit as a malleable and conflicted entity, within which discordant forces coexist and rebel against the enforced unity of the Zeitgeist: ‘[it] is not a unity that could be expressed by any basic idea, but rather something more like a nexus or link that establishes itself among the tendencies of life as they develop’.30 Ultimately, Dilthey’s account of the heterogeneous and discontinuous nature of historical time suggests a way of envisaging the relationships between the parts and the whole that is drawn from music: an infinite and unpredictable interplay of harmonies and dissonances. There is no single core that simultaneously provides both melody and accompaniment (that is, the Enlightenment), but rather alternating themes that follow on from and interweave with one another.31 In the second half of the twentieth century, these intuitions were elaborated by Siegfried Kracauer in History: The Last Things Before the Last. For Kracauer, as for Dilthey, the historical world cannot be understood in terms of belonging, and even less in terms of ownership or assimilation, for it is a fragile mixture of changing and contrasting forces rather than a coherent or self-sufficient unit: ‘To the extent that an individual “belongs,” much of him drops out of the picture’.32 Kracauer also dismissed the notion of temporal belonging. Far from considering ‘calendric time’ as a homogeneous medium characterised by an irreversible impetus, he saw it

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as an empty and indifferent vessel, carrying along with it a mass of unconnected events. In other words, every era is simply a precarious conglomerate of t­ endencies, ambitions and activities which are independent from one another, a procession of ­incoherent and disparate events. Some are oblivious to existence of others, some are in direct contrast with one another, and still others seem to be relatively ­unaffected by the Zeitgeist: the overstuffed domestic interiors of the second half of the ­nineteenth century do not at all reflect the predominant thinking of the period. For this reason, if a period can be understood as a unified entity at all, it is one made up of interconnected parts, fluid and fundamentally indefinable: ‘From a meaningful ­spatio-temporal unit, it turns into a meeting place for chance encounters – ­something like the waiting room of a railway station’.33 It abounds with anachronisms, exceptions to the law of chronology and temporal overflows. And these are precisely what enables the individual to escape the tyranny of the situation: ‘There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in’.34

Biography and social interstices During the last decades of the twentieth century, the question of the plurality of the past nourished the rediscovery of biography by historians working on the scale of microhistory. In 1976, Carlo Ginzburg – who had devoted an article to Kracauer’s posthumous volume – used Bertolt Brecht’s famous question (‘Who built Thebes of the seven gates’?) to give a voice to a miller from sixteenth-century Friuli. The introduction to his The Cheese and the Worms drew on diverse sources of inspiration (Walter Benjamin, Céline, Antonio Gramsci, Delio Cantimori) to criticise both the history of mentalities, which Ginzburg considered too impersonal and too ‘classless’, and serial history, which he believed dissolved the unique into the uniformity of the collective. Ginzburg proposed broadening the notion of the individual to include lower social strata and abandoning the notion of the statistical representativeness: even if Menocchio is not a typical or average case, focusing on him makes it possible to test the ‘horizon of latent possibilities’ of popular culture.35 As he later put it: ‘Didn’t the extreme singularity of the individual in question cast doubt on his representativeness? Should Menocchio’s cosmogony, based on a comparison between the world and a rotting cheese riddled with worms “who were angels”, be discarded as an insignificant oddity simply because it is unrepresentative on a statistical level’? The answer was absolutely not, for historical representativeness is not in the least historically representative: ‘A case that cannot be generalised because it is unusual and marginal (and perhaps precisely because it is unusual and marginal) could in fact be viewed as typical’.36 This idea was subsequently taken up by Edoardo Grendi, who forged the notion of the ‘normal exception’ to show that it is in the most unique experiences that collective history expresses itself with the greatest intensity.37 Nine years later, it was the turn of Giovanni Levi. In Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist, Levi studied ‘a minuscule fragment of the Piedmont of the sixteenth century, using an intensive technique to reconstruct the biographical

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events of all the inhabitants of the village of Santena that have left some ­documentary trace’. The parallel biographies of Giulio Cesare Chiesa, podestà of Chieri, and his son, the priest Giovan Battista, later summoned before the court of the Archbishop of Turin for performing exorcisms, revealed the dynamics of a village under the Old Regime (the property market, the strategies employed by families, the role of local notables and so on) in a period that was not only key to the construction of the modern state but also particularly turbulent due to the war between Piedmont and France. These biographies reinvigorated the challenge posed by Ginzburg. While a few signs of ‘heroism’ can still be discerned in Menocchio, the Chiesa family are genuinely ‘ordinary’ individuals. They are fragile, hesitant and fundamentally dependent in their relationships with other human beings as well as with institutions. They are not in control of their own situation, let alone the signification and direction of history. Yet they are not nobodies: they speak and they act, and now and then they are in a position to exert some influence. In short, they are figures that escape the false choice between glorification and the humiliation of subjectivity, reflecting the definition of individuality given by Ricœur in his Oneself as Another.38 From this perspective, biography provides a way for the historian to infiltrate the interstices or cracks in social institutions, Levi writes:‘Normative systems, both long established and in process of formation, left gaps, interstices in which both groups and individuals brought into play consequential strategies of their own. Such strategies marked political reality with a lasting imprint. They could not prevent forms of domination, but they did condition and modify them’.39 By probing these interstices, Levi demonstrates that there is no single norm capable of encompassing social experience in its entirety, but rather different rules that sometimes contradict one another. Central government, the market, state institutions or village communities cannot be understood as entities closed off and isolated from one another. But neither can they be seen as musical instruments all playing in unison. This idea shows how historical context rather resembles a connective tissue traversed by electric fields of variable intensity than a compact and coherent whole. Moreover, it is thanks to these different electric fields that individuals are able to express themselves, to act, to exert influence. From this point of view, the historian’s task is not to create unity from heterogeneous material, nor to construct a single discourse about the past, but rather to enrich the orchestral score of multiple discourses. Within such a perspective, it is not necessary that the individual is seen as representative or typical for something wider. On the contrary, lives which deviate from the average seem to offer a better way of thinking about the balance between the specificity of personal destiny and the society as a whole. Variety is more significant than typicality. Only a multitude of experiences makes it possible to address two fundamental aspects of history: conflicts and possibilities. Heroic biography establishes a harmony between the individual and the general (one might even see it as a simple extension or a sort of synecdoche). Biography that focuses on

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a whole chorus or cast of characters (biographie chorale in French), on the other hand, conceives of the individual as an element of tension. The individual’s role is not to reveal the essence of humanity; on the contrary, it must remain particular and fragmented. It is only by considering different, individual movements that the historian can bring to light the way that individuals shape and modify power relations, whether they ‘make’ history or not.40 In the years since the publication of Inheriting Power, other historians have extended this perspective further, showing that biography not only forms part of history but also offers a different perspective on it, a revealing discordance or discontinuity. In Soldats: Un laboratoire disciplinaire a reconstruction of institutional reality is made on the basis of different individual versions, thus creating a sort of ‘Rashomon effect’, the phenomenon that the same event can be interpreted contradictorily by different people. Or rather, to remain in the domain of literature, the eighteenth-century Piedmont army has been approached like the crowded autobus of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, where stylistic variations are sensory phenomena that create expectations and projections, memories and cross-references.41 As a result, it is necessary to set aside all logics of submission or domination (of history over biography or vice versa) and to preserve the tension, the ambiguity, between them. The individual must be envisioned simultaneously as a unique case and as a totality. The metaphor of the interstice has enjoyed enormous success, but has perhaps also given rise to certain misunderstandings. One of its main ambiguities relates to power relationships. The desire to highlight the capacity of historical actors for personal initiative has sometimes led historians to imagine that everything is possible, everything is negotiable, everything is strategic. And yet the interstice is still a slender empty space that separates two solid bodies. It is a sort of corridor. And, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, corridors are narrow, winding and ambiguous. They presuppose the existence of walls, and walls, in general, are made of stone, of concrete, or of plaster – materials that are heavy and unyielding, capable of causing a great deal of pain.

Notes 1 Sabina Loriga, ‘The role of the individual in history: Biographical and historical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth century’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 75–93. 2 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris: Armand Colin, 1990; trans. Siân Reynolds, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 1238–44. 3 Braudel, The Mediterranean, vol. 2, pp. 672–73. 4 See Derek Beales, ‘History and biography: An inaugural lecture’, in Tim C.W. Blanning and David Cannadine (eds.), History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 266–83.

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5 English-language discussions of similar themes have treated the French vocabulary ­relating to time in a variety of ways, notably the key terms temps, durée and temporalité. To avoid confusion, this article follows the practice of the major translations of Braudel and Ricœur cited in the text: temps is thus rendered as ‘timescale’ or ‘scale of time’, durée as ‘time-span’ or ‘span of time’, and temporalité as temporality. The only exception is the term longue durée, which has acquired an important resonance in English-language ­historiography and is thus left in French.—Trans. 6 Braudel, The Mediterranean, vol. 1, p. 21. See also John Hall, ‘The time of history and the history of times’, History and Theory 19, 1980, 113–31. 7 Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, 3 vols., Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983–85; trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Time and Narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988, vol. 1, p. 177. 8 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 209. 9 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 215. 10 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 213. 11 Virginia Woolf would return to the opposition between chronological time (‘time on the clock’) and the time of the individual conscience (‘time in the mind’) in her 1928 novel Orlando. 12 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, p. 105. 13 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 130. 14 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, pp. 158–159. 15 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 177. 16 Paul Ricœur, Histoire et verité, Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1964; trans. Charles A. Kelbley, History and Truth, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965. 17 Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit’ [1773], in Bernard Suphan (ed.), Sämmtliche Werke, Berlin:Weidmann, 1877– 1913, vol. 5; trans. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin, ‘Another philosophy of history for the education of mankind’, in Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004, pp. 3–98. 18 Johann Gottfried Herder, Humanitätsbriefe [1794], cited in Friedrich Meinecke, Die Enstehung des Historismus, Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1965, pp. 441–42; trans. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin, ‘On the characters of nations and ages [1796]: Herder’s 88th letter towards the advancement of humanity’, in Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, pp. 118–20. 19 Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Verstand und Erfahrung. Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft’ [part 1, 1799], in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 21, p. 59. Cited in Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt: Verlag Suhrkamp, 1979; trans. Keith Tribe, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 20 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften’ [1910], in Gesammelte Schriften, Stuttgart/Göttingen: Teubner/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914-ongoing, vol. 7; trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and John Scanlon, ‘The formation of the historical world in the human sciences’, in Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, vol. 3, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 101–212. 21 Dilthey, ‘Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt’, p. 188. 22 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Plan der Fortsetzung zum Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geistwissenschaften’ [1907-10], in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7; trans. Rudolf. A. Makkreel and William H. Oman, ‘Plan for the continuation of the formation of the historical world in the human sciences’, in Selected Works, vol. 3, pp. 213–314.

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23 Dilthey, ‘Plan der Fortsetzung’, p. 216. 24 Dilthey, ‘Leben und Erkennen. Ein Entwurf zur erkenntnistheoretischen Logik und Kategorienlehre’ [c. 1892–1893], in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19; trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Jacob Owensby, ‘Life and cognition’, in Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, vol. 2, Understanding the Human World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 58–114. 25 Herbert Blumer, ‘Society as symbolic interaction’, in Arnold M. Rose (ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962, pp. 179–92. 26 Dilthey, ‘Formation of the historical world’, p. 160. 27 Dilthey, ‘Die Einbildungskraft des Dichters: Bausteine für eine Poetik’ (1887), in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6; trans. Louis Agosta and Rudolf. A. Makkreel, ‘The imagination of a poet: elements for a poetics,’ in Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, vol. 5, Poetry and Experience Selected Works, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 29–174. 28 Dilthey, ‘Formation of the historical world’, pp. 192, 194. 29 Dilthey, ‘Formation of the historical world’, p. 204. 30 Dilthey, ‘Formation of the historical world’, p. 206. One year later, he would return to this point in ‘Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen systemen,’ Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, pp. 89–90. 31 Jorge Luis Borges would later wonder how one could possibly imagine that Cervantes was a contemporary of the Spanish Inquisition. See Norman Thomas di Giovanni (ed.), In Memory of Borges, London: Constable, 1988, which brings together texts by Borges, Graham Greene, Mario Vargas Llosa and others. Compare the protests of Alberto Savinio against the indifference of Chronos, who thrust Gioacchino Rossini into a century that was foreign to him: Savinio, ‘Fine dei modelli’ [1947], in Opere. Scritti dispersi tra guerra e dopoguerra (1943–1952), Bompiani: Milan, 1989, pp. 475–509. On the value of anachronism, see Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Zickzack: Aufsätze, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997; trans. Linda Haverty Rugg, Zig-Zag: The Politics of Culture and Vice-Versa, New York: New Press, 1997. 32 Siegfried Kracauer, History. The Last Things Before the Last, completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; repr. 1995, p. 22. 33 Kracauer, History, p. 150. 34 Kracauer, History, p. 8. 35 Carlo Ginzburg, Originally published as Il Formaggio e i vermi: il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500, Turin: Einaudi, 1976; trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. xxi. 36 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘L’œil de l’étranger’, L’Homme 187–88, 2008, 33–9. 37 Edoardo Grendi, ‘Microanalisi e storia sociale’, Quaderni Storici 35, 1977, 506–20. 38 See Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990; trans. Kathleen Blamey, Oneself as Another, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 39 Giovanni Levi, L’eredità immateriale: carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985; trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Inheriting Power:The Story of an Exorcist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. xv. 40 Sabina Loriga, Le petit x: De la biographie à l’histoire, Paris: Seuil, 2010. 41 Sabina Loriga, Soldats: Un laboratoire disciplinaire: l’armée piémontaise au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Belles Lettres, 2007.

4 THE LIFE IS NEVER OVER Biography as a microhistorical approach Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon

For much of the twentieth century, historians in the western world were in full flight from biography as a tool of historical analysis. Students were rarely permitted to write doctoral theses which could be classified as biographical; progressive scholarly journals refused to accept papers based on the life stories of individuals and were reluctant to review biographies; academics who wrote biographies could not count them as research that could help them advance within the university system; and academic historians who made use of this form were eager to distance themselves from the biographical tradition. If tempted – as happened not infrequently – into writing biographical material, they would not admit that they knew anything of the tradition, nor that they belonged to it in any direct way.1 But we must ultimately concede that the ‘biographical approach’ (a concept ­distinct from ‘biography’) is an important analytical tool for historians, regardless of how it is applied. Hence the biographical approach, in various forms, has established itself within the humanities and social sciences in recent years, often giving rise to creative and interesting analyses of phenomena which beforehand had been little discussed. This development can be designated the ‘biographical turn’. At the same time, ‘traditional’ biography has maintained its position, primarily due to its popularity among the reading public. Authors are well aware that biography is the way to the hearts of many readers with an interest in the past. The popularity of biography is undisputed. One of the reasons why the biographical approach has gained increasing acceptance among historians is the emphasis placed by microhistorians on the individual as a historical phenomenon. Hence this chapter will address some fundamental aspects of microhistory, in order to explain why these two approaches – microhistory and biography (or more precisely the biographical approach) – have come together in recent years. The primary emphasis will be, however, on the methods of microhistory, since many new experiments within the genre of biography come from the microhistorical camp. My intention is to shed light on significant elements

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of microhistory which will reveal how these two approaches have been mutually beneficial.

The methods of microhistory Microhistory began in Italy in the 1970s as microstoria. Its scholarly ideas were in the melting pot for two decades before their influence began to be felt internationally in the 1990s. Microhistory was one manifestation of the ‘cultural turn’ in history, which ‘turned’ historians’ orientation from a quantitative approach to one that was qualitative.2 Considering the principal characteristics of microhistory, several aspects require our attention. Some are concerned with the exploration of ‘history from below’ in the English-speaking academic world and ‘everyday life history’ (Alltagsgeschichte) in the German.The intention here is not to trace in detail the reasons why the pioneers of microhistory such as Carlo Ginzburg began to undertake historical research of this nature. But it should be pointed out that one of the principal reasons they did so was that they believed it was necessary to respond to the French Annales school and its tradition of history-writing. For Ginzburg and others, the Annalistes’ emphasis on long time-spans, grand historical narratives and extensive geographical areas, utterly failed to provide any insights into how individuals lived their day-to-day lives.3 The Annales approach neglected to address the diverse contradictions in the lives of individuals, or their struggles with themselves and their surroundings, both formal and informal. The early microhistorians concluded that an exploration of such matters could best be achieved by posing new research questions and applying new and unconventional methods to answer them. It is thus not surprising that these two scholarly traditions – microhistory and biography – have been working together in recent years, as individuals in all their variety are the basis for both schools of research. As American historian Guido Ruggiero points out, the methods of microhistory have mainly focused on studying the individual in order to identify major formal changes within society: ‘At its best, this approach seems to promise a method that will help overcome the depersonalisation and abstractness of social history without losing its insights on the broader structural factors that condition events. At the least, by portraying how individuals respond to and make decisions in the face of such factors as they perceive them in a concrete historical situation, this perspective provides an important caution on the too easy spinning of the web of modern theory back into the past’.4 Here I will emphasise the individual as a historical phenomenon via the concept of ‘agency’. I use ‘agency’ in the sense that William H. Sewell, Jr., employs the term: one’s ability to have some control over the social settings that people are part of, and thus affect the development of social ties. Such ties manifest themselves within a specific structure which affects people’s actions in different ways.5 Although I will focus on the methods of microhistory, I will also discuss historians’ conventional approaches in their research and how they have related to individuals and their attitudes towards life. In a related vein, I will also consider the resources which are the primary candidates for use in the application of microhistorical and biographical methods in historical research.

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Is small beautiful? Microhistorians adopt an approach that is diametrically opposed to the methods of most other social and cultural historians, i.e. the units which draw their attention are almost invariably small: individuals or a certain event, but rarely one which would be classified as major; a small community; and so on.6 The Italian historian Giovanni Levi has explained this characteristic of microhistory and the entities it studies: ‘Microhistory as a practice is essentially based on the reduction of the scale of observation, on a microscopic analysis and an intensive study of the documentary material. This definition already gives rise to possible ambiguities: it is not simply a question of addressing the causes and effects of the fact that different dimensions coexist in every social system, in other words, the problem of describing vast complex social structures without losing sight of the scale of each individual’s social space and hence, of people and their situation in life. […] For microhistory the reduction of scale is an analytical procedure, which may be applied anywhere independently of the dimensions of the object analysed’.7 The focus of historical explanation and analysis is transferred – in a process of ‘systematic decentring’ – from what may be termed the functional structural ­society, which is always central to people’s lives, and which is accepted by historians as the determining factor in everyday life, to a personal experience of one’s own surroundings. German historian Alf Lüdtke remarks: ‘At issue now is a reorientation in which theory deals with more than just the level of “conception” (Begriff  ): it encompasses the very act of “conceptualising, idea formation” (Vorstellen) as well. Theory aims at making data comprehensible but includes the act of “conceptualising” (or “imagining”) the synchronism of individual elements or development, even if they should prove to be contradictory, or perhaps unrelated’.8 In this way it is possible to allow for a connection between predictable events and conditions where the result is a surprise to all, and incalculable in advance. By reducing the field of study, the opportunity arises to analyse aspects of the lives of individuals and communities which would otherwise be overlooked. An example is a study of the circumstances of Halldór Jónsson of Miðdalsgröf in Strandasýsla, Iceland, which is described inter alia in the book Wasteland with Words.9 Exploring the course of Halldór’s life in detail over a 24-year period – the timespan during which he kept a diary – uncovered a far more complex society than had previously been envisioned, a social order that had more in common with a proto-industrial condition than with the subsistence farming (autarky) that historians have generally regarded as characteristic of nineteenth-century Icelandic society.10 This finding gives rise to many questions about the nature of Icelandic agrarian society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. What scope of action was available to the individual within the bounds of that society? The focus on a specific individual, Halldór Jónsson of Miðdalsgröf, and his life revealed how complex and various the life of a man in his position could be. There was a greater scope of action and specialisation within the formal framework of the social structure than the methods of social history had been able to discern.

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The exploration of detailed personal testimony, such as that contained in many diaries, thus altered the received image of nineteenth-century Icelandic rural society. Such an approach can easily be incorporated into the biographical tradition, in which biographers look for signs in the lives of their individual subjects which may point to unexpected perspectives and conclusions. Instead of aiming to assemble a consistent picture, as the biographical tradition tends to do – forming something orderly and complete out of the chaos of any individual life – here it is proposed that we actively seek out the contradictions and gaps in our knowledge about one person, and make these tensions and lacunae essential subjects of inquiry. ‘Contradictions’ generally conflict with the grand narratives on which historians base their ideas and research. With all grand narratives – modernisation, socialism, capitalism or Christianity, to name a few – contradictions rise to the surface as soon as the focus is placed on the individual. Regarding a similar sort of study, Levi wrote: ‘Phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation. It is then possible to use these results to draw far wider generalisations although the initial observations were made within relatively narrow dimensions and as experiments rather than examples’.11

The individual as a research target One of the defining characteristics of the microhistorical approach is the ­central place of individuals in research projects: the relationship, to be more precise, between the external conditions of individuals’ lives and their interior lives. In all societies individuals live under certain laws and rules.They are also expected to comply with predetermined standards of conduct which have been shaped by traditions, generation after generation. But within every individual are conflicts that express diverse desires; and all individuals perceive their personal potential in their own ways, often in opposition to accepted tradition and the laws and rules of society. The structure of the society evokes, in other words, a personal response within each individual, and that means that the paths people choose are often utterly at odds with those that have been mapped out for them. In research it is important to pay attention to this conflict – and here it is irrelevant whether microhistorical methods are applied, or those of biographical research – because it is the key to all changes that take place in any society. Without it, society would remain in a condition of stasis or perpetual status quo. Once again, it may be important to look to the work of Lüdtke, who in his research explains the position of the individual better than anyone else. He uses the German word Eigensinn, which generally refers disparagingly to a child’s awkwardness or waywardness. Lüdtke applies the word to individuals’ personal understanding of all conceivable details of life, and their interpretations of things.12 The better-off in society often complained that the common people lacked discipline, did whatever they wanted regardless of what anyone else felt or said, and never obeyed orders.13

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Geoff Eley provides an excellent definition of the concept and its use: ‘The key to Lüdtke’s argument is the concept of Eigensinn – an almost untranslatable ­combination of self-reliance, self-will and self-respect or the act of reappropriating alienated social relations, particularly at work but also at school, in the street, and in any other contexts externally determined by structures and processes beyond workers’ own immediate control’.14 The important point here is that Eigensinn rarely denotes a conscious action in time and space; instead it represents an unconscious form of behaviour, almost always unrelated to the formal institutions of society. Hence the concept embraces that type of human conduct which is generally regarded as irrational, i.e. at odds with dominant values or received custom. This explanation of the concept and Lüdtke’s use of it is vastly important, as scholars are always making progress in understanding that the inexplicable factors in people’s conduct play a much greater role than has hitherto been assumed. Microhistorians are likely to be on the lookout for such qualities in people’s characters – to expect behaviours which cannot be foreseen. This ‘instability’ in human conduct – the inexplicable behavioural quirks which are utterly familiar in daily life – can throw a highly significant light upon how ordinary people lived their lives in the past. Lüdtke’s use of the concept may thus have a crucial impact on how scholars who apply the ‘biographical approach’ address their subjects – something which has not been done systematically by traditional biographical researchers. But what does it mean that there are certain limits to rationality? Shouldn’t we expect that a mode of history that is not premised on the importance of the rational in human society will end up either as a chaotic, post-modern descriptive approach, or as an interminable list of examples? The answer is unequivocal: history should seek out and study the structure of the society it is examining, while also demonstrating the scope the individual has within it. The microhistorian generally emphasises that it is not only the individual who enjoys a certain freedom within the social structure. The structure itself is in a constant state of evolution and is full of paradoxes, which means that it is ‘open at both ends’. Levi concludes: ‘This is truly a reversal of perspective in that it accentuates the most minute and localised actions to demonstrate the gaps and spaces which the complex inconsistencies of all systems leave open’.15 But the first step is the presumption that the deeds and desires of individuals do not follow some fixed path: in a constant state of flux, they are unpredictable – a condition which the biographical approach can and should fully recognise. Here historical processes are interpreted as a continuous process of change, with the implication that this process – regardless of what fields it embraces – is what historical research is properly concerned with.16 One cannot ignore the fact that this scholarly approach undermines the traditional research agenda followed by most historians, including biographers. If we assume that biographies aim to draw up a consistent picture of their given subjects, most microhistorians have made that task impossible. For that reason, the gap between microhistory and traditional biography has grown wider in recent years.

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The gap in the narrative The ‘problem of narrative’ is one of the issues microhistorians must regularly grapple with. The microhistorian’s task is to demonstrate the connections among informal aspects of society, which together form the overall environment in which individuals live their lives. It is also concerned with the individual’s freedom to act within that setting, and finally with the conflicts involving the innumerable minor factors (events, phenomena) which play some part in their lives. In this way, the uncertainty the individual deals with in life becomes part of ‘normative systems’, and is an integral part of the microhistorian’s work. The narrative mode of the microhistorian differs from that of the conventional historian in that the choices and challenges of the research strategy are often made part of the narrative. There is candid discussion of the sources, the technique used in making a particular argument, and what it comprises. The historian’s contention with the events themselves and their interpretation is part of the text presented to the reader.17 Gaps in knowledge are no less important than sources which describe a certain course of events. It may be pointed out yet again that such an approach may give the ‘biographical approach’ greater depth than what one finds in a conventional biography, where the reader is given the impression that biographers and historians know exactly what they are doing. Such works presume that their authors have comprehensive knowledge of the subject and have shaped the narrative from a position of complete control over the argument, the storyline and everything that could possibly matter; the work thus stands as ‘objective reality’. Many microhistorians have pointed out that they adopt a different approach to the presentation of historical material. The researcher’s point of view becomes an unavoidable part of the account.The research process, explicitly described, is no longer hidden from the eyes of the uninitiated. This development can even be seen in an increasing tendency by conventional historians to write their autobiographies, so as to ‘rebel’ against the current orthodoxy of traditional history writing by stepping into the text and dealing with their subject matter openly from their own points of view.18 But the reader of a microhistorical monograph is involved in a more ambitious effort, becoming part of a dialogue and participating in the whole process of constructing the historical argument.19 This methodology is almost compulsory for the microhistorian, as the nature of most of the material is such that the sources must be recreated (reinterpreted) by means of a new and rigorous source criticism. Hence it is essential that the reader be made aware of the methods used in the recreation.

Contextualisation One of the major features of microhistory is contextualisation, the placement of the object of study into a broader context. In every microhistory study, the scope is scaled down to the smallest units – and only such downscaling can bring to light phenomena which cannot be discerned on the large scale of macrohistory. The key to such a mode of study is to connect its subject with a larger context.This is done in two ways.

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First, the event or individual (or group) must be related to a larger entity within the framework of the study. If the subject is a lower-class person in a certain village, it is important to include others who are involved, directly or indirectly, in that person’s life: representatives of the upper class such as landowners, for example, or the pastor responsible for the villagers’ spiritual guidance. These individuals are no less important than the subject’s relatives and friends. In other words, the multifarious bonds between people must be intertwined, along with all the uncertain factors such an approach entails. Second, the vast majority of microhistorians take the view that they must place the picture which emerges from such a study into a far larger context: the findings must be taken outside the village and put on a long journey, so to speak, in order to show how the study throws light on larger entities, or what American social scientist and social historian Charles Tilly terms ‘Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons’.20 How this is done is naturally contingent upon the subject and its scope. Those microhistorians who maintain that it is necessary to connect every study with larger entities are of the opinion that most human actions are closely related, in all parts of the world, and that, while the connections are generally unclear, they are of huge importance for the process of general contextualisation. Suffice it to mention here the capitalist market system and how it works, which plays an enormous role as overall context. Lüdtke discusses the interaction between individuals and larger entities as follows: ‘Increased attention among historians to individual situations – and the ambivalences and multiple meanings in those situations – has its implications for the nature of representation. If ambivalences can be laid bare only by linking together a multitude of individual observations, or drawing on disparate sources and historical residua, then it is imperative to examine individual cases and their history. They provide far more than just local color, highlighting history as a process, as a plaiting of strands, a mosaic of (inter)actions’.21 The interaction between the two spheres will always be, in the minds of many microhistorians, one of the key aspects of their research. Otherwise their studies would only be descriptive accounts of circumscribed phenomena or events, which cannot transcend a very limited potential for extrapolation within the constraints of isolated events viewed without context.

The singularisation of history But is it true that contextualisation is indispensable for historians? Advocating the concept of the singularisation of history, I argue that it is important for historians to place a strong emphasis on the internal context of the entity being researched, and to avoid grand narratives. By focusing on the internal context, as is the rule in biographical research, the historian acquires a stake in material which would not otherwise be noticed. The American historian Jill Lepore has maintained with regard to microhistory and biography that ‘however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness, in how that individual’s life

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serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole’.22 Against the view of Lepore, this chapter argues that the value of microhistory lies precisely in the opportunities it opens up by bringing out the unique aspects of the person, and by studying them in the subject’s own immediate environment.The dialogue between the subject and the environment makes evident, exactly, how society really works in the course of people’s daily lives. The same principle applies to the biographical approach, which by regarding the subject as something or someone unique can open the way to a new understanding of how the society, to which each and every person belongs, works. But this is not possible unless scholars reject grand narratives, or strive to avoid them as far as it is possible to do so – and do not have their minds focused on the big picture. Once scholars keep this fundamental principle in mind, the question of ‘representativeness’ becomes irrelevant since the conceptual framework has been tilted. The scientific adjustment prompted by this research strategy creates a new dimension in the mindset of the historian. The methodological boundaries are no longer defined by grand narratives, whatever we choose to name them. To approach the subject in the way explained above, it is possible to apply a research model called the ‘singularisation of history’.The general idea of the ‘singularisation of history’ is based on the following principle: the historian looks inwards and studies all aspects of the given events and phenomena in close detail, bringing out their nuances.23 The focus will always be fixed on the matter at hand, and on that alone. The historian must investigate with great precision each and every fragment connected to the matter at hand for which there are sources, and consider all possible means of interpretation that bear directly upon the material. The main point here is both to study as thoroughly as possible the material directly relating to the subject – to examine every detail exhaustively – and to strive to bring into the study as much material as possible from the immediate environment that relates to the subject. Such efforts often open doors to unexpected connections and ‘voices’, which may offer competing explanations of specific aspects of the study. One may argue that there are, in fact, two ways to approach any subject: to work outwards, looking for connections to other issues so as to create a larger synthesis, or to work inwards, surveying all corners – leaving no stone unturned – to fill out the ‘space’ that the material at hand takes up. The latter way of doing research is not the most common approach among historians, who tend to be preoccupied with the larger context and sacrifice the gains that a detailed analysis might bring to their research. Even if the scale is reduced in the way envisioned here, one must still expect some structural orientation within the frame of reference. But these structures must always be subject to laws other than those imposed by traditional metanarratives and, because of their scope, must be more malleable – i.e. the frames must be more limited and more easily controlled. I propose here that we take literally the essential idea behind microhistory: that scholars place the main emphasis on the small research unit, and confine themselves largely to such units. In this way we can offer the full range of voices within a given society a place in historical research.

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The singularisation of history in this sense provides the researcher with a means to bring out the contradictions that exist among the different ‘discourses’ of individual groups, which is a precondition for our being able to approach ideas and points of view that, in the general run of events, would not come to the fore.

Biography as microhistorical approach In the final decades of the twentieth century, biography as a historical method underwent a renaissance in many western countries, especially in the hands of the qualified cultural and social historians who took a microhistorical approach.24 The principal feature of these writings was twofold. First, the increasing recognition of the fragmented nature of historical scholarship has made traditional research, including conventional biographical study, outdated and out of step with current academic thinking. The response has been clear: most scholars who work with individuals as their main subject now do this in a new manner. In other words, the scholarly trend has worked against the way that traditional biographers went about doing their business. Second, microhistorians introduced biographical subjects of a new kind – specifically, members of the working classes, who were often studied in highly original and interesting ways. The poets and statesmen – the ‘greats’ – who used to be the primary subjects of biography had to make room for other sorts of figures. Many ordinary people who had never done anything extraordinary had, nonetheless, left traces behind them. This tended to be because these people had been in trouble with the law, or alternatively because they themselves had written about their ideas and views on life. Material of this nature often proved useful in historical research which took account of the ‘biographical approach’, while also benefiting from the new cultural and social history. Eventually scholars even started to work on lives of people about whom little or no evidence was extant.25 What characterises this material is precisely its fragmented nature – sources are few and often difficult to deal with – and this demands that the scholar apply a new approach. Biography thus developed into something quite different from the conventional life story.26 It is safe to say that the biographical approach evolved towards scholarly experiments which focused on study of the ‘self ’: how the self has changed and been shaped by diverse factors which are part of people’s lives and work – gender, nationality, social class, education level and so on. Research on the ‘self ’ sought to achieve an understanding of the ways people dealt with how they were shaped, within the context of their time. At the same time, the ‘objective’ perspective in historical scholarship, which had predominated throughout the twentieth century – the historian’s sine qua non – was increasingly being challenged, and was no longer seen as a desirable or even a possible perspective. Thus the ‘subjective’ principle gained currency: scholars sought in their works to bring out the individual’s experience of life, and of the phenomena being studied.27 Historians also unhesitatingly stepped into their own texts and took their places next to their subjects.

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This research method has sometimes been termed the ‘actor-centred p­ erspective’, and it has been maintained that this approach may offer a compromise between conventional methods of social history and that branch of history which has adopted the ideas of the cultural and the linguistic turn – something both sides have wished for in recent years. But what characterises the ‘biographical approach’, above all, is that in many cases only part of the life-course has been under investigation – generally in the context of specific issues relating to the period of the subject’s life in each case. In these works, the methods of microhistory have proved useful. It should thus be regarded as probable that biography will once again be reborn in the form of the ‘biographical approach’, and that scholars in this field will develop methods and will study subjects which would have been inconceivable at an earlier time.

Notes 1 This is discussed by David Nasaw in a short essay introducing a discussion of ­biographies and their significance for historians: David Nasaw, ‘Introduction: AHR roundtable: Historians and biography’, American Historical Review 114, 2009, 573–78. 2 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What Is Microhistory?: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge, 2013. 3 Sabina Loriga, ‘The role of the individual in history: biographical and historical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth century’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 75–93. 4 Guido Ruggiero, ‘Introduction’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds.), Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective: Selections from Quaderni Storici, trans. Margaret A. Gallucci, Mary M. Gallucci and Carole C. Gallucci, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, p. xii. 5 William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 143–45. 6 Giovanni Levi, ‘On microhistory’ in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, University Park, PA: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 95–8. 7 Levi, ‘On microhistory’, p. 95. 8 Alf Lüdtke, ‘Introduction: What is the history of everyday life and who are its practitioners?’, in Alf Lüdtke (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 16. 9 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland, London: Reaktion, 2010, pp. 123–33. 10 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘“Jeg er 479 dögum ýngri en Nilli”: Dagbækur og daglegt líf Halldórs Jónssonar frá Miðdalsgröf ’, Skírnir 169, 1995, 309–47. 11 Levi, ‘On microhistory’, p. 98. 12 This concept is a recurring theme throughout all Lüdtke’s research. See his introduction to The History of Everyday Life in its entirety and his essay in the same volume: ‘What happened to the “fiery red glow”? Workers’ experiences and German fascism’, pp. 198–251. See also his ‘Organizational order or Eigensinn? Workers’ privacy and workers’ politics in imperial Germany’, in Sean Wilentz (ed.), Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, pp. 303–33.

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13 The material from the Inquisition is a case in point, as Carlo Ginzburg shows in his book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 14 Geoff Eley, ‘Labor history, social history, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, culture, and the politics of the everyday – a new direction for German social history?’, Journal of Modern History 61, 1989, p. 323. 15 Levi, ‘On microhistory’, p. 107. 16 This is discussed by Eve Rosenhaft in a review paper: ‘History, anthropology, and the study of everyday life’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, 1987, 99–105. 17 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory:Two or three things that I know about it’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 139–166. For a debate among eight historians on the subject in Rethinking History 13, 2009, 1–108. 18 A very interesting article on the role of the autobiography in the development of historical ideas: Jaume Aurell, ‘Making history by contextualizing oneself: Autobiography as historiographical intervention’, History and Theory 54, 2015, 244–68. 19 Levi, ‘On microhistory’, p. 106. 20 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984. 21 Lüdtke, ‘Introduction’, p. 21. 22 Jill Lepore, ‘Historians who love too much: Reflections on microhistory and biography’, Journal of American History 88, 2001, p. 133. 23 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘The singularization of history: Social history and microhistory within the postmodern state of knowledge’, Journal of Social History 36, 2003, 701–35; Magnússon and Szijártó, What Is Microhistory?, pp. 121–23. 24 Much has been written about biography in recent years. Suffice it here to refer to the enlightening roundtable in American Historical Review cited above. 25 Kristján Mímisson and Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘Singularizing the past: The history and archaeology of the small and ordinary’, Journal of Social Archaeology 14, 2014, 131-156; Robin Fleming, ‘Writing biography at the edge of history’, American Historical Review 114, 2009, 606–14, discusses biography where sources are few or non-existent; Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in NineteenthCentury France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 26 See for example comments by Nigel Hamilton, ‘Foreword’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. ix–xi. 27 Loriga, ‘The role of the individual in history’. * This article is part of the research project ‘Emotions, Material Culture and Everyday Life in the Long 19th century’, supported by the Icelandic Research Fund (ID: 141237–051).

5 PERSONALISED HISTORY On biofiction, source criticism and the critical value of biography Binne de Haan

‘What exactly is it that offends the historians’? asked the French historian Lucien Febvre in 1938, when he discussed the rise of ‘novelistic biographies’ in the 1930s in an essay on history and psychology. ‘In all the novelistic biographies which have appeared in such profusion in recent years, and whose appearance has been a source of satisfaction to editors rather than to educated readers, is it the repeated blunders, mix-ups and gaffes committed by ill-qualified and ill-prepared authors’?1 Febvre concluded that the major problem of these novelistic biographies for ­historians boiled down to a ‘constant, irritating anachronism’ displayed in these works. Authors projected their own feelings, ideas and intellectual and moral prejudices onto their protagonists, like Rameses II and Philip II.They therefore effaced one of historiography’s essential qualities: its embodiment of the historian’s ambition to genuinely and truthfully grasp and transmit history and historical actors based on a connective understanding derived from extensive archival research and presented with narrative audacity. In short, following Febvre, these novelistic biographies gave offence to the intuitive and narrative experience of historians, through which historians are able to produce historical works that contribute to a continuation and critical revision of existing historical knowledge. Febvre was not the only historian to condemn what we would now call works of ‘biofiction’. In the Netherlands, historian Johan Huizinga levelled a similarly harsh judgement.2 This debate, which essentially addresses the status of biofiction, biography and neighbouring genres as historical, academic and public genres, has reared its head from time to time and, indeed, has never really disappeared. But the discussion still seems not to have been conducted sufficiently or satisfactorily. The debate’s deficiencies have indirectly had a major impact on the study of biography, which is not yet fully recognised. In the emergent field of Life Writing studies, seen from the perspective of biography scholars, biography as a subject of investigation plays the role of elephant in the room.3 I think the main problem here is our losing

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sight of biography’s and biofiction’s value when seen from a perspective regarding their historiographical position and legitimation: this resides in its essentially critical and topical value. Indeed, this neglect in estimating biography and biofiction as potentially critical genres – critical in the sense of Nietzsche’s famous definition of critical history – can be regarded as one of the main reasons for the relative neglect of biography in academia as a subject and methodology.4 This chapter discusses the importance and necessity of recognising biography’s essential historical and critical qualities as a research methodology and narrative form, qualities on which biofiction ultimately also relies, a discussion in which the umbrella term ‘personalised history’ will serve as an organising concept.

Biography Studies and the subjective element in historiography A general lack of theoretical reflection on the genre of biography and biographical writing has often been pointed out. However, over the course of the twentieth ­century, a considerable corpus of texts devoted to biography has been built up, mostly written by literary scholars and biographers with academic backgrounds; what was lacking was a clear academic infrastructure, and the debates that would transpire within such an infrastructure. It remains remarkable that philosophers of history have paid scant attention to biography. The neglect can perhaps be explained by the fact that the philosophy of history itself is a relatively young and underrepresented discipline within the historical sciences. The lack of historical reflection on the genre of biography from the field of history studies surely accounts for the not-uncommon view that reflection and research on biography – including biographical research and biographical writing, but also the reception of the genre – has been flawed.5 Within academia, then, biography has been the uncomfortable plaything of different disciplines, especially history and literature studies. Nigel Hamilton has aptly called biography a ‘volleyball’ in the academic realm.6 Thus there exists no unified research language nor uniform terminology for biography researchers. In this so-called era of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies, however, humanities scholars have come to regard biography’s hybridity as an appealing aspect as an academic subject and genre. Since the 2000s, biography has increasingly gotten a foothold institutionally and academically. A more coherent and substantive research field devoted to biography is currently in the making.7 The fact that the word ‘biography’ evokes varying reactions in both the public sphere and academia indicates that it provides a potentially rich breeding ground for discussion and research. In academic forums the reflections, however, often seem to relapse into trench warfare about what biography actually is – one can posit that this is a result from disciplinary (self-)interests.The challenge for the emerging field of Biography Studies is to leave the trenches and to provide biography the theoretical context it deserves – a context that would be historically informed and based on a survey of the rich corpus of biographies and biographical writings written in the far away and not so for away past, including present-day biographies.

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This chapter starts from the assumption that the biographical method, though it may cover many diverse disciplines and themes, is basically a historical activity. For a biography or biographical writing always refers to an actual, lived life. From an epistemological perspective, biography fruitfully serves as a point of issue in debates about historical fiction and non-fiction, in its relationship to historical source criticism and with regard to the activity of the biographer-historian, and hence indirectly on the position of biography vis-à-vis the ‘structural’, macrohistorical approaches and ‘individual’ microhistorical approaches of the past. Does an indeed historical focus on biography put unnecessary restrictions on a further exploration of the field of Biography Studies? No: this chapter argues on the contrary, that this emphasis provides a clarification of our view on biography, thus making possible the emergence of issues that have hitherto been overlooked, such as the role biographies can play in illuminating the modern ‘tragedy’ of historical narrative and their essentially public efficacy through their critical approach, which suggests a way out of the ‘tragic’ problem. ‘Personalised history’ points at the, in some way, unavoidably personal or ­personalised perspective that is attached to the study of the past in several dimensions, a realisation that has become more prominent and more fully elaborated in the field of historical studies in recent decades. Consideration of personalised history will lead to the conclusion that despite or rather due to this ‘subjective’ perspective, critical-historical source retrieval and the presentation of these sources are of fundamental importance in valuating the critical value of both biography and other biographical writings; that it is desirable to stress the importance of the topicality and critical-societal impact of studying the past and its protagonists, and ways to investigate this effectiveness; that one of the foremost ways to explore this topic seems to consider the position of the historian or biographer/biographical writer as a mediator in variable ways based on a specific ‘personalised’ approach of historical sources; and that all these aspects deserve more attention from biography scholars.

History as ongoing process The debate on the supposed objectivity or subjectivity of historiography, or its non-fictional or fictional character, is an old one and has taken many forms. In the second half of the twentieth century, post-modernism and especially the work of Hayden White have led the philosophy of history to emphasise the ‘subjective’ element in the work of historians specifically in their use of language and in the ‘fictionality’ of the historical narratives they apply.8 In the 1970s, a certain part of the professional group of historians felt ­uncomfortable with the approaches that came to the fore in these theoretical reflection upon history, but also in certain approaches in dominant historical schools like the Annales school, which were directed to discovering macrohistorical explanations. These historians had the feeling that somehow the usefulness of the ambition to critically reconstruct a more concrete ‘historical reality’, however questionable this concept might be, disappeared out of view. New approaches indeed emerged in

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the Annales school, but the feeling remained that historians in some way had lost an external legitimation for their work.This feeling even led an audience of historians to give a supporting applause to microhistorian Giovanni Levi at a historic conference, when he declared that historians ‘at least know something’ of the past and that this knowledge should not be downplayed – a direct response to the idea that the writing of history was mainly a construction and a matter of language games.9 That there is a ‘subjective element’ in writing history, however, is not something that microhistorians or historians in general would deny. In recent years, in the field of the philosophy of history, a discussion of the ‘subjectivity’ of historians has been relocated to the topic of ‘historical experience’.10 This fits in with developments that took place in the last decades, when c­ ollective and abstract historical explanations have increasingly been complemented by new historical configurations in which personal and individual experience play prominent roles, in concert with the rise of cultural history in general within the field of historical studies. Biography has been fostered too by these developments in academic historiography since roughly the 1980s, which can be regarded as responses to the abovementioned uneasiness. Within this perspective, some authors have pointed to the similarities between biography and microhistory, a historical approach that was articulated in the 1970s and 1980s.11 The growing use of biographical or agency research within historiography can be seen as an expression of a ‘biographical turn’. This entailed a revival of the recognition that an essential part or even the sum of history’s efficacy, ‘history’ in the sense both of the past itself and of writing about the past, consists of actions by individuals – that can be best understood when studied in a ‘broad’ biographical context – and ‘non-structural’ events. Recognition of the importance of these events and actions, and of personal-biographical frames of action that shape them and at the same time are influenced by them, led to a development among professional historians in which an approach of sources from the personal perspective gradually came on the same footing again as a so-called institutional approach of sources. Huizinga already spoke of ‘personengeschiedenis’, a ‘history of persons’, but programmatically the fate of the individual in nineteenth and twentieth century historiography has been a difficult one.12 What does the revival of the personal, biographical perspective and the increased focus on individual lives in historical culture in general reveal about how we relate to the past? ‘Personalised history’ not only sheds light on our relationship to historical sources and the presentation and evaluation of these sources, but also on the tragedy that ensued from the conceptual distinction between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-­fiction’, and also from the distinction between ‘individuals’ and ‘structures’. Eventually, personalised history also points at the intrinsic topicality and the duty of a critical investigation and study of the past. In the philosophy of history, post-modern theory, or ‘theory’ in general as it has emerged strongly in the humanities since the 1970s, has had quite some impact. In the reflection on biography, however, this has not been the case.13 There have been some attempts to interpret biography via a post-modern perspective, but a

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more salient trend was represented by scholars, mainly from the field of literature studies, ­focusing on autobiography and other autobiographical expressions. This leaded to studies focusing on cultural theories about identity in a variety of ways, that resulted in the current research field of Life Writing.14 Biography mostly has not been part of the analyses leading to these theories. My suggestion would be that a post-modern, or perhaps post-postmodern, approach to biography leads to a perspective that situates the legitimacy of biography in its public critical value, not in spite of, but rather thanks to, the personalised vantage point that is inherent in biographical practices. For this aim, the field of Biography Studies can derive inspiration from the ­philosophy of history. In this field deconstruction and the linguistic turn asserted themselves, but their heydays are now past.Today, history is first and foremost understood as an ‘ongoing process’ that is beyond the phase of ‘theory’, and in which the relationship between the present and the past and the societal and p­ ersonal ­relationships with past, present and future are key.15 Biography, also often associated with journalism, is renown for its sometimes explosive power in current public debates. The personal perspective applied in biographical narratives, may raise questions not only about the ethical boundaries of biographical research (with regard to, say, whether one should choose only a deceased person to be the subject of a biography, thus addressing the question to what extent a biographer/biography may track out and reveal all aspects of a life). A way out of questioning the legitimacy of biographical writing could be to posit that biography eventually has to be about identifying personal shares and involvements in past and current societal and collective issues, thus also overcoming the supposed micro/macro- and individual/structure-distinction and definitively ­characterising them as improper contradictions. Good biographies, thus, can ­fulfil a corrective function in the public sphere, specifically in contributing to the ­formation of critical public opinion(s), starting from its intrinsical personalised ­perspective, in which a specific strength resides.

Overcoming limited access to sources Battlefields traditionally have been some of the main scenes of action in the writing of history, but the writing of history itself can well be viewed as a heterogeneous messy battlefield of its own. Interpretations of events, long-term developments, and collective and personal shares and responsibilities are continually at stake.They give the writing of history its intrinsic topicality and critical value. In some cases, the battle is more urgent than in others, and the concept of ‘historical culture’ allows for border areas to include historical representations that are variable in their ambitions to critically analyse historical outcomes and their relationships with the past. But for the sake of history writing as a whole, and certainly as an academic practice, it is necessary to be aware that the writing of history is not some innocent game. To enhance our critical understanding of political and social situations of today, adequate research into their origins is required – and the range of the (historical)

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research and reflection that can contribute to this understanding is very broad. Biographies and other biographical writings form part of this research. Naturally, the area of international politics provides concrete and pertinent examples for this case. Take the life of former US diplomat Henry Kissinger. He has been involved in major decisions concerning foreign US policy in international affairs over the past 65 years, and even today, through his various positions. His actions have been evaluated in a variety of ways, to say the least. Kissinger himself wrote an autobiography to justify his deeds. But to develop an external viewpoint, in which the information backlog concerning his actions in comparison with what Kissinger himself and other insiders know about it can be overcome in order to be able to critically and adequately analyse his actions, extensive biographical research serves as a useful and suitable method. Recently two biographical studies on Kissinger were published, and each received a mixed reception. Greg Gandin holds a predominantly negative view of Kissinger’s actions and decisions, while the other biographer, Niall Ferguson, justifies them extensively.16 In his famously apodictic style, Nietzsche wrote in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ that ‘if he is to live, man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past: he does this by bringing it before the tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it’. Nietzsche even connected his ‘untimely’ view on history with a stance concerning the most useful type of biography. ‘And if you want biographies, do not desire those which bear the legend “Herr So-and-So and his age”, but those upon whose title-page there would stand “a fighter against his age”’.17 The aim of biography scholars and critics may not in the first place be to offer a judgement of Solomon on the life of Kissinger, following Nietzsche’s critical adage, but they can, however, judge the working methods of the biographer. Potentially influencing many lives, biographical research into politicians’ actions is important, because it can reveal the actual functioning of political systems and mechanisms, as well as its boundaries from an insider perspective. Not every biographical subject carries the historical tension of a Kissinger or a prominent politician on the national or world stage – though every life can provide a cause to critical investigation, which is a rather familiar observation that also has been elaborated by twentieth century historiography, among others, by microhistorians. Regardless from its object, in any case the topical and critical value of the genre of biography and neighbouring biographical genres must lead to the conclusion that all biographers should abide by a minimum of obligations concerning the representation of research and source criticism, precisely because biographical writing deals with people from the actual past and finds its critical and pertinent legitimation in this referentiality. A biographer or biographical writer can provide a competent critical interpretation only when the account accords in some way with this referentiality and when it is established that historiographically essentially this referential quality is accurate – otherwise the critical and interpretative value of the narrative risks to be diminished significantly, due to being off target.

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The Dutch historian H.W. von der Dunk has highlighted the value of ­ istoriography as a way of overcoming the limited horizon of the ‘contemporary’.18 h This horizon is limited mainly because there are thresholds of access to information or certain sources. Now we can argue that this problem exists in a similar way in the acquisition of knowledge about the past, but the point is that even in-depth knowledge of the contemporary world can come into existence only by investing efforts in gathering, consuming and assessing a broad range of sources, and therefore by investing time. This is what historical research essentially is, while this research empathically also can adopt journalistic methods for the purposes of acquiring information, and, in theoretical terms, can be sociological, psychological, political, etc. in nature. As Febvre wrote: ‘Being a historian means never resigning oneself. It implies trying everything, testing out anything that might possibly fill in the gaps in our information’.19 The inventive collection and critical evaluation of sources in historical exposés serve to complement and improve previous historical interpretations, aimed at providing critical frames for the world of today. But how far can or should this inventiveness reach?

The tragedy of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction To approach the issue of the status of biography and biographical research and writing in academia and society, discussing the genre of biofiction (which includes biographical fiction and fictional biography) poses important questions concerning the critical significance of so-called ‘realist’ and ‘non-fictional’ biography, and biofiction itself. The use of historical individuals in a novelistic fashion in fictional narratives is a phenomenon with a considerable history, and the practice flourished especially in the twentieth century.20 As has been already made clear, novels with historical characters as their main protagonists were popular in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, and such novels continued to be published. In addition, in the cinematic realm the ‘biopic’ genre arose of movies representing historical lives, a genre that also belongs to the realm of biofiction. One of the pertinent questions raised by the genre of biofiction is the way and extent to which we must regard the position of the biographer-historian as the biography’s director or critical author. Where resides the critical value of biography, of biofiction or biographical writing in ­general? And what is the role of the biographer-historian in creating this value? A first general question could be to ask in what way historical fiction contributes to a critical understanding of the past.21 How do the works of for example Tolstoy or Proust add to better and more powerful historical knowledge? That historical and biographical fiction can represent certain ‘truths’ is an intuitive feeling that many of us share.22 Additionally, historical fiction, biofiction and biographical writings attract considerable audiences, certainly beyond academic circles. No one can object against prospering the intellectual toolbox of citizens consuming these narratives that present certain, however indeterminate, historical ‘truths’. Nevertheless, an uneasiness directly emerges because of a literally unverifiable factor. This can be boiled down to one central question: Is there indeed a way to establish a relationship

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between the fictional narrative at hand and the critical ­historical interpretations that have been assembled by historical scholars and other critical individuals? Historical and biographical fiction point to an inconvenience in establishing this relationship caused by the absence of an aspect in the representation of the past or of past lives that these genres often – unavoidably – entail, namely the presentation of and reference to historically sound source research and criticism. Indeed, due to generic conventions, historical novels and biopics often do not go beyond the obligatory statement ‘based on a true story’. But there is a possible public price to not revealing the research that has possibly been conducted and may have led to the work’s contents and its critical value. We must have confidence that the critical reader and viewer will be aware of the possible discrepancies and interpretational differences between historical and biographical ‘fiction’ and historical, biographical and ‘non-fictional’ state-of-the-art knowledge, whether its critical contents are ‘high’ or ‘low’. But this is a thicketed path. One of the main tasks of historians and biographers is to unravel political, cultural and societal myths on the basis of sound historical interpretation. Neglecting the possible critical value of the presented representation of the past has consequences for the public legitimation of historical representations. Not every citizen has the time or possibilities to act as critical investigator, and therefore collective critical infrastructures and debates since long are important parts of our large-scale societal and political arrangements. Connected to this, is the issue of how historical narratives work. The French historian Michel de Certeau described history as a complex activity that amounts to creating a story with objectivity claims. Historiography is performative, even as it reflects the reality of the past.23 ‘Performativity’ means that the past comes back to life in and through the text itself. In the historical narrative the past reappears. The central question is how this performativity can be connected with ‘objectivity claims’, and with a critical-interpretational approach. One may ask whether history’s performative aspect entails ‘fictional’ elements, because the historical narrative, in case of a historical study, involves a textual structure with a certain plot in which a historian makes use of literary devices, as White emphasised programmatically in his Metahistory. However, the attention for the supposed ‘fictionality’ of historiography essentially is a detour that leads to an inquiry about the critical task of the historian. The applause for Levi’s statement at the conference noted above can be interpreted as an applause in favour of the critical aims of historians, less then ­denying that historical narratives are partly rhetoric. The philosopher of history F.R. Ankersmit, following Huizinga, has emphasised that history is an accumulation of ‘representations’ of the past.24 Ankersmit also stated that the relationship between ‘literary truth’ and ‘historical truth’ could be called ‘chiastic’.25 This entanglement is an entanglement ‘for better of for worse’, because it seems that both the historical narrative and historical fiction/novels need each other to ‘make itself complete’. The divergence between historiography and literature therefore is a ‘tragic development’, according to Ankersmit. This development has its origins in the nineteenth century, when with the principles of Ranke, the founding father of ‘objective’ academic historiography, the poetic component

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of historiography faded away. In this process, interestingly, historians poeticised the past itself. Historical truth is more poetic than fiction, Ranke thus discovered. In short, this ill-fated disintegration had to do with changed conceptions with regard to the relationship between language and reality, in which language could create independent worlds (novels), but also critical, commenting perspectives on the ‘real’, actual world (historiography). In this perspective, it is not a coincidence that in the same nineteenth century the modern novel emerged. In literary theory authors have tried to demonstrate that there is a fundamental difference between texts that refer to the actual world and texts that refer to a fictional world. The Czech literary theorist Lubomír Doležel has distinguished ‘constructive’ and ‘descriptive’ texts: the latter is a representation of an actual world that existed before the text was produced.26 The ‘constructive’ text produces a world that exists only in the text, a possible world. This latter conception applies, for example, to all novels. Historiography is not a construction of a possible world but aims to be a reconstruction of an actual world, and is thus ‘descriptive’. To let this last assumption not be again a refuge to ‘historical naïveté’, ‘descriptive’ should not be understood as the assumption that a historian can possibly ‘objectively’ reconstruct (the whole of  ) historical reality. In fact, we can propose that ‘descriptive’ includes both the performative element and critical commentary. The objection that both historical ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ try to straddle the ‘possible’ and ‘actual’ worlds, is only problematic when we would like to establish strict generic boundaries with regard to reception and research practices. One can speak for example of the implied ‘contract’ between author and reader inherent in the choice of picking between genres, from novels to traditional history books to biographies. A reader then expects that a historical work will follow the rules of the historian’s trade and will be descriptive, even if the historian can apply different narrative techniques. Research traditions additionally maintain generic boundaries too, in order to sustain own professional practices. ‘Whatever rhetorical devices the historian deploys, tenets of the craft forbid deliberate invention or concealment’.27 The crucial question here is whether strict positions like these help to overcome the ‘chiastic’ deadlock. The solution, however suggestive, probably can be found rather in the assessment of the critical value of narratives, aimed at present and future acts. That historians may or aim not to ‘deliberately invent or conceal’ according to their professional and established code of conduct, then is obvious and beyond discussion. In a biography, the intrinsically metonymic and metaphoric qualities of ­historical texts are concretised in a personal way.28 Most historians focus on changes in history – for example, on wars, revolutions, new ideas – by assembling different sources and perspectives, from ‘structural’ institutional levels to historical interpretations passed on via academic debates. Biographers are assemblers too, but in fruitful cases, home in on turning points that are specific for an individual life. The interrelationship between larger changes in history and the turning points in individual lives produces an effect that can be called the microhistorical effect, in which both the smallest details of a life and the largest historical events and developments can be included.

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The great appeal of historical novels, films and television series can be explained by the realisation that they seem to evoke a ‘lost world’ as vividly as possible, using numerous elements that are perceived as being historically accurate. The suggested direct historical action itself can, by definition, be no more than a re-enactment or indeed a fictional story, in which historical data are often ‘adjusted’ to make the story more dramatic. This is exactly the kind of performativity historians have to refrain from when they narrate in academic contexts. In Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, two of three US congressmen from Connecticut are shown voting against the Thirteenth Amendment, which authorised the abolition of slavery, though in fact all four Connecticut representatives (not just three) had voted for it. Critical commentary was needed to redress this misrepresentation of the past for a wide audience, an interpretation that could have had impact on current debates ­regarding this subject.29 Fictional devices may, however, on the contrary give shape to accurate historical research. For his novel Lutetia, French writer Pierre Assouline invented a fictional ‘hotel detective’ whose stories about the Hotel Lutetia in Paris are historically accurate.30 Assouline called his book a novel. Assouline shows that by introducing a fictional character, justice, counterintuitively, can be done to the multiple forms of accurate information that can be extracted from a historical situation. Everything is accounted for in his footnotes, even the introduction of the hotel’s fictional detective. In the United States, the work of biographers and non-fiction authors is often called ‘narrative nonfiction’. This term designates a genre that brings together historical or journalistic research and the craft of storytelling. There is a twilight zone in which ‘fictional’ and ‘non-fictional’ narrative can engage in a dance with each other. Biography indeed seems to be one of the genres able to move around in the twilight zones between non-fiction and fiction. But as we have seen, the performative aspect of historiography provides room for this phenomenon, and eventually there is only one ‘hard’ question that should be asked: In what way is the narrative critically valuable? Take, for example, the opening pages of Marc Dierikx’s biography of the Dutch aviation pioneer Anthony Fokker. At the beginning of the book, Dierikx describes how Fokker takes a car ride from New Jersey to Manhattan, in which he passes several sites that have played a role in his life.31 The car ride really took place, but Dierikx also describes how Fokker looks at the sites and reflects on them – ­writing in the present tense. Dierikx engages in an almost cinematic evocation, which, strictly speaking, can only be known to be ‘true’ if there were witnesses to confirm that Fokker had looked at those personally meaningful sites during the ride, or if Fokker himself had told someone or wrote about this happening – no such thing is indicated in the source references. Is this then unallowable? As always, style and its generic appropriateness is crucial here. In the context of a historical text, the reader would have acquired more faith in the biographer when these observations had been presented as hypotheses, written in the past tense. The most important question in the end however should be: does this narrative mode, this use of ­repertoire,

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contribute to a legitimate and an improved critical understanding of the past? Overall, one can judge that a different style would have been more appropriate here.

Source criticism and the historian as source Leon Edel once wrote that ‘a critical biography is a contradiction in terms’. He argued that a biographer needs to have a great sense of empathy to understand his protagonist.32 But are empathy or understanding and a critical approach mutually exclusive? I would argue on the contrary. With understanding the possibility and value of a critical interpretation in biography increases. The essential distinction between history and biography on the one hand, and historical fiction and biofiction on the other, therefore resides in its visible use of sources and the style that indirectly results from this use, in this case directly related to the referentiality to and presentation of sources and the (im)possibility to check the critical value of the narrative based on a transparent – i.e. peer reviewable – detection and interpretation of sources. Non-fiction is always accompanied by an annotative apparatus, and a referential, critical plea, however variable the degree to which these element has been worked out. For an effective biography, what some have called ‘high biography’, sources are intensively and inventively investigated, whereby an external point of view provides a comprehensive and critical picture of a person’s life.33 Writers of ‘fiction’ could pursue the same aim, and also in some formats are able to arrive at it, but the absence of a bibliographic apparatus means that a ‘critical’ detour is always unavoidable to assess their public value. The genre of ‘metabiography’, as recently discussed by Edward Saunders, raises the same kind of issues precisely because source research is frequently absent. In a metabiography, according to Saunders’s definition, an author or biographer employs all kinds of narrative techniques, including those of fiction, to explore in a self-conscious way the ‘biomyths’ associated with the biographized subject.34 This, indeed, is valuable as a way to reflect on the genre of biography and its complexities, but metabiographies’ tendency ‘not to engage in substantial primary research’ ultimately request a critical and indeed source-based evaluation to determine the critical effectiveness of their contents. This kind of publication pursues a different objective, but their contents do stem from the specific effects of a ‘personalised’ approach to sources, which entails the critical biographical method. Historians are aware that their studies ultimately cause a Rashomon effect: the heterogeneous past can be narrated and interpreted in many ways. Ankersmit points out that the power of historiography lies precisely in this subjective aspect. The attempt to capture and portray the past’s complex reality brings an aesthetic element into the historian’s process and method.35 Desmond MacCarthy’s characterisation of the biographer as an ‘artist under oath’ then also is applicable for historians. To adhere to the idea of a ‘historical reality’ should not, therefore, be understood as an expression of naive realism, but as an antidote to the potential abandonment of critical source research, and to excessive scepticism about what can be said of the past and about its relevance.

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A last element that remains is the ‘personal’ role of the biographical author/ historian. Obviously, in researching the past, historians are influenced by the stories and the conceptual framework of their own social settings and by current political or ideological issues; insights into the conceptual frameworks from which historians have written their histories deepen our understanding of the historical interpretations that they have produced.36 In a certain way this also is a microhistorical perspective. In recent years, historians’ autobiographies have attracted increasing attention. Systematic attention to this genre was initiated when the French historian Pierre Nora started the ‘égo-histoire’ project in France in the 1980s. In addition, experts in the field of historical memory advocate the more extensive study of historians’ self-reflections in their work.37 Even if the historian considers himself to be a ‘source’, he remains a historian and thus revises interpretations of the past.38 One could consider this a specific and potent form of personalized history.39 In the Netherlands, for example, the historical image created of the two decades after that of World War II, the 1950s and 1960s, was adjusted by authoritative historians in their autobiographical writings, albeit in a fairly casual and ironic way.40 Here an important yet often unnoticed element for historical interpretation comes to the surface, that is the distinction between insiders and outsiders, those who were ‘there’, whose information is valuable because they were eyewitnesses and contemporaries, and those who are informed secondhand. The historian often can be considered a correspondent, informed second-­ handedly, not unlike a journalist. He stages the voices of the past, of those who were on the scene, and places their accounts within an interpretative framework. It has been stated that biography has journalistic roots.41 The historian, too, must cultivate journalistic qualities. The historian can also be seen as a kind of editor and correspondent, a messenger delivering word of the past, and in a sense, a translator of the strange past to the present – spending a great deal of attention and effort in understanding and interpreting the topic at hand. To understand the historian’s translation from the past to the present, and vice versa, Carlo Ginzburg has borrowed from anthropology the concepts ‘emic’ and ‘etic’.42 A historian lets the sources speak, but also questions those sources from the perspective of the present. Anachronism is a key concept here. ‘Emic historiography’ is historiography in which the peculiarities of the investigated past are passed on quasi-directly. The historian is a spokesperson for this strange past in an antiquarian way. ‘Etic historiography’, however, takes as vantage points essentially topical, anachronistic questions asked to the alien past. Ginzburg suggested as best practice a microhistorical approach to sources based on ‘clues’, which emerge from a ‘firsthand analysis of a limited series of texts’.43 Investigation of these clues yield the formulation of legitimate historical syntheses and topical questions. In this way, Ginzburg tries to combine emic and etic historiography as effectively as possible: particular answers generate topical questions, and vice versa.44 Thus, in this same etic/emic vain, the writing of ‘personalised history’ and of biography, paradoxically, when performed well, always remains in essence a ­collective activity in the public sphere contributing to its critical mass. As a ­corollary, biography also has an expiration date, just as a newspaper quickly loses its

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topicality. Therefore, not only historiography, but also the writing of biographies, is a ­discussion without end.45 In finding the legitimation of all historical writing, including biography and all sorts of biographical writing, in this critical contact with the past, a frame is provided for approaching and studying different modes of personalized history too, namely in an assessment of their contribution to past and prospective creative ‘lively’ history.

Notes 1 Lucien Febvre, ‘History and psychology’, in Lucien Febvre, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, Peter Burke (ed)., trans. K. Folca, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 [1938], pp. 1–11. 2 The French term for this genre, vie romancées, used internationally, ultimately acquired pejorative connotations in literary and publishing circles, at least in the Netherlands: Johan Huizinga, ‘De taak der cultuurgeschiedenis’, in Verzamelde Werken VII, Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1948–1953, pp. 35–94. 3 Binne de Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 177–94. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’, in: Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 57–124. 5 Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, ‘Introduction: The challenges of biography studies’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 1–8. 6 Nigel Hamilton, ‘Foreword’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. ix–xi. 7 Renders and De Haan, ‘Introduction’; Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (eds,), Die Biographie: Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009; Joanny Moulin, ‘Introduction:Towards biography theory’, Cercles: revue ­pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone 15, 2015, 1–11. 8 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, Hannover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. 9 Marjatta Rahikainen and Suzanna Fellman, ‘On historical writing and evidence’, in Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (eds.), Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 5–44. 10 F.R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005; David Carr, Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 11 Michel Vovelle, ‘Du quantitatif à l’étude de cas:Théodore Desorgues’, in François-Olivier Touati and Michel Trebitsch (eds.), Problèmes et méthodes de la biographie, Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, [1985], pp. 191–98; Peter Burke, ‘The Invention of Micro-history’, Rivista di Storia Economica: Nuova 24, 2008, 259–74; the historian Sabina Loriga also has elaborated on this theme in her work, and it is one of the vantage points of the research program of the Biography Institute in the Netherlands. 12 Johan Huizinga, ‘Het esthetische bestanddeel van geschiedkundige voorstellingen’, in Johan Huizinga, De taak der cultuurgeschiedenis, Wessel Krul (ed.), Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1995, pp. 7–34; Sabina Loriga, ‘The role of the individual in history: Biographical and historical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth century’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 75–93.

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13 The most important efforts advocating a postmodern interpretation of biography were: William H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987; William H. Epstein (ed.), Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, West Lafayette, Iowa: Purdue University Press, 1991; Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, London/Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1984; De Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography’. 14 Marlene Kadar, ‘Coming to terms: Life Writing – from genre to critical practice’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 195–205. 15 For the observation that the philosophy of history increasingly focuses on academic and non-academic ‘relations to the past’, see: Herman Paul, ‘Relations to the past: A research agenda for historical theorists’, Rethinking History 19, 2015, 450–8. See also ‘The next 50 years’, themed issue of History and Theory, 49, no. 4 (December 2010), in which Aviezer Tucker points to the institutional neglect of the philosophy of history in general, and Eelco Runia points to ‘agency’ as central theme in this field for ‘the next 50 years’: Aviezer Tucker, ‘Where do we go from here? Jubilee report on History and Theory’, 64–84; Eelco Runia, ‘Crossing the wires in the pleasure machine: Lenin and the emergence of historical discontinuity’, 47-63. Runia also suggested ‘presence’ as a key concept: of the past in the present: Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’, History and Theory 45, 2006, 1–29. 16 Greg Gandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2015; and Niall Ferguson, Kissinger. Volume I, 1923–1968: The Idealist, New York: Penguin, 2015. A seminal work remains Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, New York: Summit, 1983. 17 Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history’, p. 75-76, 95. 18 H.W. von der Dunk, ‘Persoonlijke herinnering en geschiedschrijving’, in Paul Klep, Carla Hoetink, and Thijs Emons (eds.), Persoonlijk verleden: Over geschiedenis, individu en identiteit, Amsterdam: Aksant, 2005, pp. 76–93. 19 Lucien Febvre, ‘A new kind of history’, in Febvre, A New Kind of History, p. 34. 20 See for some elaborations of this theme inter alia: Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016; John F. Keener, Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel, Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2001; Martine Boyer-Weinmann, La Relation Biographique: Enjeux Contemporains, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005; Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; see also the special issue on biofiction of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, 2016. 21 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, esp. the chapter ‘History, fiction and faction’, pp. 367–78; David Harlan, ‘Historical fiction and the future of academic history’, in Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow (eds.), Manifestos for History, New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 108–30; Hayden White, ‘Introduction: Historical fiction, fictional history, and historical reality’, Rethinking History 9, 2005, 147–57; Richard Slotkin, ‘Fiction for the purposes of history’, Rethinking History 9, 2005, 221–36; Beverley Southgate, History Meets Fiction, Harlow [etc.]: Longman, 2009; Eelco Runia, De pathologie van de veldslag: geschiedenis en geschiedschrijving in Tolstoj’s Oorlog en vrede, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1995. 22 F.R. Ankersmit, ‘De chiastische verhouding tussen literatuur en geschiedenis’, in: F.R. Ankersmit, De navel van de geschiedenis: Over interpretatie, representatie en historische realiteit, Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij Groningen, 1990, pp. 182–200; Giovanni Levi, ‘Microhistory and Picaresque’, in Binne de Haan and Konstantin Mierau (eds.), Microhistory and the Picaresque Novel: A First Exploration into Commensurable Perspectives, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 19–29.

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23 Michel de Certeau, ‘L’histoire, une passion nouvelle’, La Magazine littéraire, 1977, no. 123, 19–20; discussed by François Dosse, Le pari biographique: Écrire une vie, Paris: La Découverte, 2005, pp. 451–2. 24 F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 25 Ankersmit, ‘De chiastische verhouding’. 195. 26 Lubomír Doležel, ‘Mimesis and possible worlds’, Poetics Today 9, 1988, 475–96. 27 Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, p. 374. 28 For the metaphorical and metonymic functioning of historiography, see Runia,‘Presence’. 29 Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, p. 377. 30 Hans Renders, ‘Roots of biography: From journalism to pulp to scholarly based ­non-­fiction’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 24–42. 31 Marc Dierikx, Anthony Fokker: Een vervlogen leven, Amsterdam: Boom, 2014, p. 8. 32 Leon Edel, ‘The poetics of biography’, in Hilda Schiff (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to English Studies, London, Heinemann, 1977, p. 56; Martine Boyer-Weinmann, ‘Entre véridiction et invention: vers un poétique de la biographie non fictionnelle’, in ­Boyer-Weinmann, La Relation Biographique, p. 425. 33 See, for high and low biography: Carl Rollyson, A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005; Renders, ‘Roots of biography’. 34 Edward Saunders, ‘Defining metabiography in historical perspective: Between biomyths and documentary’, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38, 2015, 325–42. 35 F.R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. 36 For example, see, for a book on two centuries of ‘ideologically’ colored historiography of the French Revolution: Bart Verheijen, Geschiedenis onder de guillotine: Twee ­eeuwen ­geschiedschrijving van de Franse Revolutie, Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2013; Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography. 37 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997 [1950]; Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992. Recently, this third wave has been framed theoretically in Gregor Feindt, Félix Krawatzek, Daniela Mehler, Friedemann Pestel, and Rieke Trimçev, ‘Entangled memory:Toward a third wave in memory studies’, History and Theory 53, 2014, 24–44. 38 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Revising the past/revisiting the present: How change happens in historiography’, History and Theory 46, 2007, 1–19. 39 Jaume Aurell, ‘Making history by contextualizing oneself: Autobiography as historiographical intervention’, in History and Theory 54, 2015, 244–68. 40 H.L. Wesseling, Zoon en vader – Vader en zoon, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008; H.W. von der Dunk, Voordat de voegen kraakten: Student in de jaren vijftig, Amsterdam: Prometheus/ Bert Bakker, 2013. 41 Steve Weinberg, Telling the Untold Story: How Investigative Reporters Are Changing the Craft of Biography, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1992; Rollyson, A Higher Form of Cannibalism?; Renders, ‘Roots of biography’. 42 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Our words, and theirs: A reflection on the historian’s craft, today’, in Fellman and Rahikainen, Historical Knowledge, pp. 97–119. 43 Ginzburg, ‘Our words, and theirs’, p. 113. 44 Ginzburg, ‘Our words, and theirs’, p. 116. 45 Renders,‘Roots of biography’;The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl stated, in a book in which he discussed various biographies of Napoleon, that history is ‘a discussion without end’: Pieter Geyl, Napoleon, voor en tegen in de Franse geschiedschrijving, Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1946.

6 THE LIFE EFFECT Literature studies and the biographical perspective Joanny Moulin

In literature and literary studies, the ‘biographical turn’ takes the form of a return of the biographical in many ways, which can be analysed as a predictable sequel to the ‘linguistic turn’, in so far as this phrase encapsulates the dominant discourse of an epoch in the history of literary science, from American New Criticism to French post-structuralism, which focused on the text ‘qua text’, thus applying to literature a radically linguistic paradigm. The first stirrings of the biographical turn, as well as some exemplary productions of its inchoative stage, can be traced in the theoretical works of some of the most remarkable luminaries of that period. The biographical turn in literature and literary studies revolves around the notion of a life effect, that interrogates the articulation between fiction and non-fiction. Contemporary literature is manifestly characterised by a strong biographical tropism, which means not only that biographies retain the attention of the public as they have always done, and perhaps even more so, but also that in general literature the novel leans towards biography, and fiction mates with non-fiction, in a movement that has all the aspects of a hybridisation. We witness the rise of ‘fictional biographies,’ or ‘biographical fictions,’ which Alain Buisine has conceptualised by coining the word ‘biofiction’.1 In his 1941 essay ‘Epic and the Novel’, Mikhail Bakhtin described what he called the phenomenon of ‘novelisation’ of other literary genres: ‘The utter inadequacy of literary theory is exposed when it is forced to deal with the novel. In the case of other genres literary theory works confidently and precisely, since there is a finished and already formed object, definite and clear’.2 Today, as if by some quirk of literary history the wheel had finally come full circle, the novel is arguably undergoing a ‘biographisation’, and literary science, now extremely well armed – and perhaps over-armed – to analyse the novel as the fictional genre par excellence, finds itself searching for adequate methodological tools, in the absence of a fully-fledged theory of biography. The situation is no doubt further complicated because literary theory,

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in the second half of the twentieth century, has developed along the lines of an anti-­ biographical paradigm dominated by the dogmas of American New Criticism and French (post-)structuralism, which today it is difficult not to see as an ideological discourse of sorts, defining itself in radical opposition to the historical cum biographical approach, considered in short as ‘bourgeois’. ‘France remains the country of the “death of the author”, of the anonymous scriptor,’ wrote Frédéric Regard, in a transparent allusion to the proclamations of Roland Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’ and Michel Foucault’s necrology of the subject in Herméneutique du sujet.3 However, Regard was writing some 15 years ago, still under the shadow of a text published by Barthes ‘57 years since’, as far away from us now as the Jacobite Rising of 1745 was to the Walter Scott of Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, or the Brittany Wars of the French Revolution to the Balzac of Les Chouans, ou la Bretagne il y a trente ans. Sooner or later, critical statements, like the productions of all other literary genres, must be appreciated in relation to their historical contexts, including those that make the most peremptory claims to the contrary. ‘The history of philosophy is punctuated by revolts against the practices of previous philosophers and by attempts to transform philosophy into a science’, wrote Richard Rorty at the beginning of The Linguistic Turn.4 The first part of that statement applies equally to literary theory, and the second is certainly true of the so-called ‘French theory’ of which Barthes was a paragon. The ‘linguistic turn’ of which Rorty spoke in the field of philosophy applies just as well to this movement in literary theory, from American New Criticism to French ‘Nouvelle critique’, to (post-)structuralism and the philosophy of deconstruction. By giving absolute priority to the text by ‘close reading’, cut off from its contexts of production and reception, these ‘new critics’ endorsed T.S. Eliot’s and Mallarmé’s dogma of ‘impersonality’, thus defining themselves in radical opposition to the historical and biographical approaches to literature that had characterised the previous generations, pushing to the limit Proust’s already uncompromising polemic against Sainte-Beuve – Proust maintaining that ‘a book is the product of another me than the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our lives’.5 At the same time, this decontextualisation of literature, by placing all readers and all students on an equal footing in relation to the text, whatever the cultural capital they had – or had not – inherited from their social milieu, no doubt found a strong echo in the democratic ideal of the ‘Sister Republics’ of America and France, and its tabula rasa ethos rebounded strongly in other countries around the world where it surfed on the strong swell of cultural revolution from the late 1960s on. Rorty’s ‘linguistic turn’ designates an academic doxa that has reigned supreme over the humanities from the 1960s to the 1990s, for which another name is Marxist ‘anti-humanism’. These citations from Althusser and Foucault enunciate an opinion that has become the dominant discourse in the humanities over the last decades of the twentieth century.Whatever the ‘resistance to theory’ that the Austrian literary scholar Bernhard Fetz considers inherent to biography and the biographical: we have to admit that this Theorieresistenz has so far been first and foremost a resistance of ‘theory’ to biography.6 For a long time, any attempt to adopt a biographical methodology in literary studies was necessarily caught in an ­ideological bind, browbeaten by the taboos

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of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’, and any kind of individual methodologism in the humanities would at best ‘threaten to lead [it] into blind alleys’, and exposed itself to being suspected of relapsing into ‘the old values of bourgeois liberalism’.7 Dynamics of change in this respect had begun to appear within the academic world in the 1980s, coming from schools of literary theory originally developed in America and Germany: New Historicism, with Stephen Greenblatt and, among others Jerome McGann, reintroduced the context of production in the study of literary texts; reception theory, as well as reader-oriented criticism, with Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss on the one hand, and Stanley Fish on the other, reasserted the importance of the readers’ cultural background and life experience in the interpretation of literature.8 In a comparable way, genetic editing, taking into account the manuscript states and other events that precede the publication of texts, thus viewing them as living organisms of sorts, or an object of which a ‘biography’ could possibly be written, also contributed a reassertion of the importance of the author as producer. Concomitantly, in the field of history, Italian microhistorians like Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, together with others who turned away from the long duration doctrine of the Annales school, started writing history on a human scale again, by concentrating on individual life stories. While in sociology and the social sciences ‘life writing’ (or récits de vie) offered promising new developments, by revisiting the methods of the Chicago School and Mass Observation, Hayden White’s philosophy of history pointed to the similarities between historiography and literature.9 Hypothetically, these developments amounted to a practical questioning of scientism in the human sciences, and Rorty’s Linguistic Turn, in its study of the quest for an ‘ideal language’ of philosophy considered with Ayer as ‘a department of logic’ revived the old question of the borderline between science and literature.10 As a sign that times were changing, in 1975, nine years before his death, Barthes published his autobiography, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, beginning with these words: ‘Here are, to begin with, a few pictures: they are the share of pleasure that the author gratifies himself with as he finishes his book’.11 The inclusion of photographs, although they were not gathered in a central leaflet, but interspersed in the text in a manner reminiscent of the graphic novel, were an obvious concession to a well established tradition in biography. By its method of composition, the book was innovative, as it put into practice a crucial conceptual contribution that Barthes had made to the art of biography several years before: the ‘biographeme’. In a long, Proustian sentence, he had written in Sade, Fourier, Loyola: ‘Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: “biographemes” whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion’. 12 By a form of collage, a kind of literary cubism, this text eschews the continuous narrative and its concomitant construction of a character. ‘As soon as I produce, as soon as I write, it is the Text itself that dispossesses me (fortunately) of my narrative duration’.13 By a literary iteration – a procedure in which repetition of a sequence

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of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result – Barthes strives to ‘see the fissure of the subject (precisely that which nothing can be said about)’.14 His (auto-)biographical writing is a quest, albeit reluctant, for that ‘other me’ that Proust spoke about in Contre Sainte-Beuve, when he said that ‘a book is the product of another me than the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our lives’.15 Two years later, in 1977, Foucault published ‘La vie des hommes infâmes’, an anthology of life narratives documented by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century archives of the mental hospitals of Charenton and Bicêtre and of the Bastille. ‘Singular lives that, by what chance I know not, have become strange poems, that is what I have wanted to gather in a kind of herbal’. Foucault protests that ‘this is not a book of history’.16 However, and remarkably, Foucault felt obliged to state that he had ‘banished anything like imagination or literature’, and the reason he gave for it was that he wanted that these ‘be always real existences’, and that ‘behind these names that are no longer meaningful, behind these rapid words, which may well have been most of the time false, lying, unjust, preposterous, there have been men who have lived and died’.17 Anti-humanism, where is thy sting? To all intents and purposes, Foucault was inaugurating the practice of récits de vie or Life Writing in the humanities, and that he should have first chosen to do so in the relatively specialised Cahiers du ­chemin may give the measure of his uncertainties as to the generic status of the work. He was in fact picking up an ancient torch in the history of biography, looking back to the Newgate Novel (or Old Bailey Novel) of early nineteenth-century English literature, when authors like Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Gaspey or William Harrison Ainsworth drew their inspiration from the Newgate Calendar, or later on to Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Cameos from English History, although Foucault would have categorically rejected the association with that kind of sensationalist or anecdotal ‘literature’. His style, as his choice of the word ‘herbal’ indicates, was much closer to the biographical vignettes of seventeenth-century writers like Izaak Walton and John Aubrey, revisited in early twentieth-century modernist fashion by Lytton Stratchey’s Portraits in Miniature or Edmund Gosse’s Portraits and Studies. For all his protestation that his ‘lives’ are neither history nor literature, Foucault says he is rather inclined to call them nouvelles – a French word that means both ‘news’ and ‘short stories’. ‘La vie des hommes infâmes’ and Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes have in common an attachment to the brevity and the fragmentation of form, as well as a protestation not to be literature – ‘if I was a writer’, says Barthes – as if the length of the narrative would unavoidably pave the way to an author’s discourse, that is to say an imaginary or ideological construction, necessarily detrimental to the pursuit of authenticity. However, in both cases, this authenticity is perceived to emanate from the text, its ruptures, fissures and iterations, and whether they are illustrated by pictures or not, one has to admit that they are literary texts, and that they are the arenas of an aesthetic pursuit for a non-discursive truth, which is a literary truth, as distinct from a literal or a scientific truth. More exactly, what these innovative forms of writing are cultivating is a development of what Barthes had once

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called ‘the reality effect’ (‘l’effet de réel’): the life effect, which Dominique Viart calls ‘effet de vécu’.18 Viart explains: ‘The “biographical” would be an “effet de vécu”, much as we speak elsewhere of an “effet de réel”. The historical reality of the material or of the anecdote is not an issue any more; the only thing that matters is the way in which the text presents this material. Hence this ambiguity where the ­“biographical” ­designates both a content and a form, an enunciated matter and an enunciative manner’.19 In ‘The Biographical Illusion’, Bourdieu wrote that ‘trying to understand a life as a unique and self-sufficient series of events’ is ‘nearly as absurd as trying to account for a trip on the underground without taking into account the structure of the network’.20 The necessity to ‘take into account the structure of the network’, which Bourdieu also calls ‘the space of possibles’, or the ‘social surface, as a scrupulous description of the personality’, that is to say ‘all the simultaneous positions occupied at a given moment in time by a biologically constituted individual acting as the support of an ensemble of attributes and attribution that enable him to interfere as an efficient agent in different fields’ is what justifies the generally bulky length of most serious biographical writings.21 Again, summing up the same point in more simple terms, Bourdieu writes in The Rules of the Art: ‘One understands why the constructed biography can only be the last step in the scientific approach: in effect, the social trajectory is defined as the series of positions successively occupied by the same agent or the same group of agents in successive spaces’.22 In other words, the metaphor of a ‘trip on the underground’, evoking a mechanically predetermined journey, is ill adapted, unless as a caricature, to evoke the trajectory of a life, which is literally a diachronic inscription – a ‘writing’ or a ‘trace’, to borrow from Derrida’s terms, or rather, to derive a term from neuropsychology, an engram – in a social field which is a text in the making, continually modified by the life under scrutiny as well as by all the other lives with which it perforce interacts. Therefore, the life effect which biographical writing aims at is not a mimetic representation of a life, but much rather what Paul Murray Kendall called the ‘simulation’ of a life: ‘But if biography is not the history or the record or the story of a man’s life, what of a man’s life is it? Considering that biography represents imagination limited by truth, facts raised to the power of revelation, I suggest that it may be defined as ‘the simulation, in words, of a man’s life, from all that is known about that man’.23 In so far as life may be viewed as a form of writing, biographical writing is first and foremost a reading, a lectio, and the life effect it strives to create is the result of a heuristic process, which may be called literary because it exists nowhere outside the text, but can only be created by it. That is why Viart can say that ‘the historical reality of the material or of the anecdote is not an issue’, since whether we are dealing with a real or an imaginary character, whether this character is predetermined by a historical or a fictional context, the life writer is ‘inventing’ the personage, both in the modern sense (imagining) and the archaic acceptation (finding, discovering) of the word. In a sense, one might also say that this life effect is close to the eponymous concept of Sabina Loriga’s Le Petit x, a concept which she borrows from

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Johann Gustav Droysen: ‘Although infinitely small, the “x” is fundamental because it is what gives history its movement – if we call “A” the individual genius (what somebody is, owns and does), then we can say that A is the sum of a+x, where “a” stands for what comes from external circumstances (country, epoch, etc.), “x” results from personal talent, a work of free will’.24 However, Loriga’s ‘small x’ concept, such as she defines it as resulting from ­‘personal talent’ and ‘free will’, gives the impression that the individual has complete mastery over it, and that it ends with his biological life. Conversely, the life effect, often unknown of the very person that has been its subject, goes on being produced by each new biography, and by each new reading. A life, whether it is being lived, written or read, is not entirely determined by its milieu and the intentions and choices of the subjects who conduct it, but is characterised by an effective front, in continual evolution, in which serendipity plays a crucial part. Therefore, the life effect is best understood from the point of view of what Carlo Ginzburg has called an ‘indiciary paradigm’, whose prototype is the lore of the hunter and the mètis of the ancient Greeks, akin to empirical methods of clinical diagnosis, and different from the ‘Galilean’ paradigm in that it refuses to sacrifice the idiosyncrasies of the individual element to a ‘generalising’, ‘mathematical’ modelisation: ‘an indiciary or divinatory paradigm applied, depending on the forms of knowledge, to the past, the present or the future’.25 Biographical writing – just as any life considered as an effective engram or writing – can also have an ‘effect on reality’, as Anne-Marie Monluçon and Agathe Salha remark in their introduction to Fictions biographiques: ‘The life of Elizabethan playwright Cyril Tourneur, placed in seventeenth position in M. Schwob’s anthology, first served to document “serious” biographies, and later saw some of its elements confirmed by scientific researches’.26 From these considerations a deduction imposed itself, which should be taken into account in the ongoing academic debate on the theory of biography: hypothetically, there is no apparent reason why the poetics of biography should be different from the poetics of fiction. For, as Antoine Compagnon remarks in Le Démon de la théorie: ‘Thus, in fiction, the same language acts happen as in the world […]. Literature exploits the referential properties of language, its language acts are fictive, but as soon as we enter literature, as soon as we settle in it, fictive language acts work exactly in the same way as real language acts outside literature. […] Literature constantly mixes the real world with the possible world: it interests itself in real events (the French Revolution is very present in Le Père Goriot) and the character of fiction is an individual who could have existed, in another state of things. […] Texts of fiction use the same referential mechanisms as the non-fictional uses of language, to refer to fictional worlds considered as possible worlds’.27 An essential theoretical contribution in this respect is Gérard Genette’s Fiction and Diction, where he makes the distinction between two ‘regimes of l­iterariness’: ‘the constitutive regime, which is underwritten by a complex of intentions, generic conventions and cultural traditions of all sorts; and the conditional regime, which arises from a subjective and always revocable aesthetic appreciation’.28 The ‘­constitutive regime’ governs three ‘types’ of literary practice: ‘fiction’, ‘poetry’, and

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‘diction’ that he defines thus: ‘Since no language, to my knowledge, provides us with a convenient positive word (that is, apart from the very awkward term non-­ fiction) to designate the third type, and because this terminological gap is a constant problem, I propose to christen this third type diction’.29 However, in a ‘post-­ scriptum’ to a second French edition, Genette writes that ‘a narrative or dramatic fiction can be at the same time constitutively recognised as a work of fiction […] and conditionally appreciated as a work of diction’.30 This is how he justifies the ‘(very relative) incompatibility’ he thinks to be perceptible between the two modes of reading: ‘The reason for this difference could be explained (as a matter of fact?) thus: in a work of fiction, the fictional action is part of, and Aristotle (who, I repeat, calls mimesis what we call fiction) thinks it is the essential part, of the creative act: to invent a plot and its actors is obviously an art. On the contrary, for journalists, historians, memorialists, autobiographers, the material (the raw event, the individuals, the time, the places, etc.) is in principle given (received) in advance, and does not proceed from their creative activity’.31 With all due respect to such a venerable elder as the author of Narrative Discourse, one has the feeling here that we might just as well be debating whether the block of marble is materially part of the sculptor’s work, or if César owned copyright for the very automobiles he used for his compressions. All the more so because, except if one professes a very Coleridgean belief in Imagination, one has to concede that every author of fiction also works with ‘given (received)’ material; that his characters, dialogues, plots, settings, etc. are always more or less drawn or derived from real life, even in the case of science-fiction or fantasy writers. Hard-boiled though his poetics may be, Genette does write with a pinch of salt, sometimes, as when he quips: ‘Supposing that the feeling I am expressing here be anything else than a mere idiosyncrasy, a pathological incapacity to perceive at the same time two (or more) levels of a text – like mythic President Ford, incapable of reading his newspaper while chewing his chewing-gum’.32 However, the literary field has changed much since Genette published the first edition of Fiction and Diction, and it is a very different landscape today, in what Daniel Madelénat calls the ‘ambient panbiographism’.33 Modern biographical mania has blurred the apparent former distinction between fiction and diction, to the point where the novelisation of biography and the converging ‘biographisation’ of the novel have erased generic boundaries that may well never have had any great relevance.34 As Viart says: ‘If it is nowadays very obvious that the generic borders have been exceeded by the biographical (in the larger sense, including the auto-), that there is in the (auto-) biographical chanson de geste, a non-negligible part of fiction, that to write a/one’s life means to “fictionalise” it, that any representation of a “life” is, first of all and already, fictive (Lacan) even before it is written, so the very edifice of generic categories is obsolete. Except as long as we maintain the enlightening fiction – useful for epistemological or pedagogical reasons – by propounding the idea of a “genre effect”’.35 Nevertheless, Genette’s Fiction and Diction remains a seminal theoretical work, perhaps essentially for three main reasons: the modest voicing of his

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philosophical misgivings in the ‘post-scriptum’, the reflection he initiates on the ‘modes of ­reading’, that is to say the reception of biographical works, and the intuition he voices that something crucial is at stake with the question of what ‘belongs’ or ‘does not belong’ to a writer’s work in the artistic sense. This implicitly tends to add relevance to Ira Bruce Nadel’s suggestion that the theory of biography should look rather to sociology for further advancement.36 It should be read in parallel with Bourdieu’s study, in The Rules of the Art, of what he calls ‘the charismatic ideology of “creation”, which is the visible expression of this tacit belief and constitutes the principal obstacle to a rigorous science of the production of the value of cultural goods’.37 Bourdieu goes on to say: ‘The producer of the value of the work of art is not the artist, but the field of production as a universe of belief which produces the value of the work of art as a fetish by producing the belief in the creative power of the artist’.38 On this head, there is at least one common point between SainteBeuve and his detractors of the generation of the ‘death of the author’, it is the belief in the transcendence of ‘great literature’, as distinct from what Sainte-Beuve called ­‘industrial literature’, as if literature had ever been anything else than an industry, that is to say a systematic labour for the creation of something of value.39 ‘At one pole’, says Bourdieu, ‘there is the anti-economic economy of pure art, founded on […] the denegation of the “economy” (of the “commercial”) and of  “economic” profit (in the short term) […]. At the other pole, there is the ­“economic” logic of the literary and artistic industries which […] are content to adjust themselves to the pre-­existing demand of a clientele’.40 The dichotomy also rests on the difference between cultural or symbolic capital and financial capital, and the mysterious transformation of the one into the other. In this respect, a diction writer (a biographer for instance) is clearly exploiting an already accumulated capital, whereas a fiction writer (a novelist) may seem to be creating it ex nihilo, although for Bourdieu this is precisely the ‘illusio’ that characterises the literary field.41 When it comes to reflecting on how this applies to biographical writing, it is worth mentioning a book by William Epstein, Recognizing Biography, whose essential contribution to biography theory has not quite received all the attention it deserved, perhaps because when it was published, in 1987, the academic field was not yet in the most favourable of dispositions to ‘recognise’ it. Starting from the now better documented fact that there has been, so to speak, a ‘rise of biography’, concomitant to the so-called ‘rise of the novel’ in the course of the eighteenth century, Epstein remarks that during this period of literary history ‘the biographical subject moves out of the client economy of the elite and into the mass consumer market’.42 Epstein concentrates on British literature, but more recently the political rise of biography in France since the Revolution has been remarkably analysed by Jean-Luc Chappey in Ordres et Désordres Biographiques, and by Olivier Ferret and Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre in Biographie et Politique.43 By contrast, Epstein’s approach remains resolutely socio-economic, and the gist of his short book consists in concentrating on James Boswell’s work as biographer of Samuel Johnson, to demonstrate how Boswell contributed in a decisive way to ‘make’ Johnson: ‘The way in which the Life has made “Johnson” Boswell’s literary

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property in cultural history suggests that Boswell somehow managed to possess and retain Johnson’s incorporeal property (his copyright) in his own life’.44 Most importantly, Epstein defines biography as ‘commerce’: ‘as an exchange of goods and services invoking (as the word commerce once did) various modes of physical intimacy’.45 He shows how Boswell, having lived with Johnson as his secretary, accumulating notes of everything he said and did, went on to accumulate both labour and credit onto his name, devising strategies quite comparable to those of Matthew Boulton, London manufacturer and captain of industry, before the word.This allows us, says Epstein, ‘to think of Boswell metaphorically as a capitalist, although one who is (in Marxist terms) uncharacteristically also a laborer’.46 It is not certain that ‘metaphorically’ is an indispensable qualifier, unless it means that Boswell the biographer was dealing in symbolic or cultural capital. His labour indeed consisted in building up an added value to ‘Johnson’ the author, and the publication of the Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791 increased the value of Johnson’s already existing ­reputation – that is to say ‘Johnson’ the name, ‘Johnson’ the trademark – on the literary market, while it created Boswell’s own, not ex nihilo, but as that of an agent who had made the ‘Johnson’ cultural capital fructify. The case is all the more interesting because Johnson, the author of Lives of the Poets, had, to begin with, proceeded in quite a comparable way. ‘Artificially interwoven with the relation, the biographer loses the status of client and becomes (or is revealed to have always been) both a parasite and a supplement – the augmentation that lives off others, and yet is necessary to their survival and even their completion’.47 To give a name to the current biographical vogue, Martine Boyer-Weinmann says: ‘The “libido biographica” stimulates the reflexion as well as the imagination, and if a work can arouse curiosity for a life, the reverse must equally be true’. 48 To evoke the same thing in more derogatory terms, Madelénat uses the phrase ‘libido vivendi’.49 Whether or not that is a lapsus, it is certainly revelatory of a deeper truth, for why should anyone read at all, either fiction or diction, if not with a desire to live more intensely?

Notes 1 Alain Buisine, ‘Biofictions’, Revue des sciences humaines: Le Biographique 4, 1991, 7–13. 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist (ed.), Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 8. 3 Frédéric Regard, La biographie littéraire en Angleterre (XVIIe–XXe siècles), Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1999, p. 11; Roland Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, Mantéia 5, 1968, 12–7. Le bruissement de la langue. Essais critiques IV. Paris: Seuil, 1984, pp. 63–70. Michel Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France, 1981–1982, Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 2001. 4 Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, 1992, p. 1. 5 Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (1908), Paris: Gallimard, 1954, p. 127. 6 Bernhard Fetz, ‘Die vielen Leben der Biographie’, in Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (eds.), Die Biographie: Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 3–66.

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7 William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. 8 Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972 and Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982; Sergei Tretyakov, ‘The biography of object’, Soviet Factography 118, 2006, 57–62. 9 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, pp. 7, 13, 26. 10 Rorty, The Linguistic Turn, pp. 5, 9. 11 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Paris: Seuil, 1975, p. 9 [italics added - JM]. 12 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, [1971] trans. R. Miller, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989. 13 Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 10. 14 Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 9. 15 Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 127. 16 Michel Foucault, ‘La vie des hommes infâmes’, Les Cahiers du chemin 29, 1977, 12–29, reprinted in Dits et Écrits 1954 –1988, vol. 3 1976–1979, Daniel Lefert and F. Ewald (eds.), Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 237–53. 17 Foucault. ‘La vie des hommes infâmes’, p. 239. 18 Roland Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, in: Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 141–48, first published in French as ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications 11, 1968, 84–9, reprinted in Roland Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue, Paris: Seuil, 1984, pp. 167–74. 19 Dominique Viart, ‘Dis-moi qui te hante: paradoxes du biographique’, Revue des Sciences Humaines 263, 2001, 7–33. 20 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’illusion biographique’, Actes RSS 62-63, 1986, p. 71 [italics added]. 21 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The space of possibles’, in Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of the Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel, Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 234–39, first published in French as Les règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, Paris: Seuil, 1992. 22 Bourdieu, The Rules of the Art, p. 258. 23 Paul Murray Kendall, The Art of Biography, New York: Norton, 1985, p. 15 [italics added]. See also: ‘Une simulation de la vie, par les mots, jaillit d’un rapport vital simulé’, in Daniel Madelénat, La Biographie, Paris: PUF, 1984, p. 65 and Philippe Lejeune, L’Autobiographie en France, Paris: Armand Colin, 2003, pp. 30–2. 24 Sabina Loriga, Le Petit x: De la biographie à l’histoire, Paris: Seuil, 2010, pp. 112–3 and Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik. Die Vorlesung von 1857, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977, pp. 13–14. 25 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of a scientific paradigm’, Theory and Society 7, 1979, 273–88. 26 Anne-Marie Monluçon and Agathe Salha, ‘Introduction. Fictions biographiques XIXeXXIe siècles: un jeu serieux?’, in Anne-Marie Monluçon and Agathe Salha (eds.), Fictions biographiques XIXe–XXIe siècles, Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2007, pp. 7–32. 27 Antoine Compagnon, Le Démon de la théorie, Paris: Seuil, 1998, pp. 158–60. 28 Gérard Genette, Fiction and Diction, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. vii, first published in French as Fiction et Diction, Paris: Seuil, 1979. 29 Genette, Fiction and Diction, p. 21.

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30 Gérard Genette, Fiction et Diction, Paris: Seuil, 2004, e-book, l.12242. 31 Genette, Fiction et Diction, 2004, l. 2307. 32 Genette, Fiction et Diction, 2004, l. 2265. 33 Daniel Madelénat, ‘L’auteur! L’auteur! Biographie l’as-tu vu?’, in Robert Dion and Frédéric Regard (eds.), Les nouvelles écritures biographiques, Paris: ENS Éditions, 2013, pp. 5–72. 34 Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 35 Viart, ‘Dis-moi qui te hante’, p. 25. 36 Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, London/Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1984. 37 Bourdieu, The Rules of the Art, p. 167. 38 Bourdieu, The Rules of the Art, p. 229. 39 Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, ‘De la littérature industrielle’, in José-Luis Diaz and Annie Prassoloff (eds.), Pour la critique, Paris: Gallimard, 1992, pp. 197–222. 40 Bourdieu, The Rules of the Art, p. 142. 41 Bourdieu, The Rules of the Art, p. 167. 42 William H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, p. 66. 43 Jean-Luc Chappey, Ordres et Désordres Biographiques: Dictionnaires, listes de noms, réputations des Lumières à Wikipedia, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2013; Olivier Ferret and Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre (eds.), Biographie et Politique: Vie publique, vie privée, de l’Ancien Régime à la Restauration, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2014. See also Ann Jefferson, Biography and the Question of Literature in France, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; Hans Renders, ‘Did Pearl Harbor change everything?: The deadly sins of biographers’, Journal of Historical Biography 3, 2008, 98–123. 44 Epstein, Recognizing Biography, pp. 112–3. 45 Epstein, Recognizing Biography, p. 74. 46 Epstein, Recognizing Biography, p. 91. 47 Epstein, Recognizing Biography, p. 74. 48 Martine Boyer-Weinmann, La relation biographique: Enjeux contemporains, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005, p. 441. 49 Madelénat, ‘L’auteur! L’auteur!’, p. 64.

7 BIOGRAPHY AS A CONCEPT OF THOUGHT On the premises of biographical research and narrative Christian Klein

To assert that the past years have seen a ‘biographical turn’ would both be correct and incorrect. It would be incorrect to imagine the ‘biographical turn’ as the (re) emergence of a genre from the darkest corner of the literary market; biographies have always enjoyed an active readership. They have never led a marginalised existence – in fact, biographies are not seldomly bestsellers.1 Outside of the bookshop, we encounter biographical stories wherever we wander. Whether biographical feature films, TV shows, comics or websites, biographical portraits and obituaries in newspapers – mediated representations based on the experiences of a famous person (or, less frequently, of an everyman or everywoman) are everywhere.We engage with these stories about the lives of another real person because they have things to tell us: about the preconditions and implications of attaining whichever special achievement the particular person is known for, or about a historical period that is reflected in – or seemingly represented by – the protagonist’s life. Interpersonal relationships aside, we are often interested in the lives of others when they promise to reveal what it means to have a ‘good life’: what it looks like, how to get there or how not to get there. Last but not least, a good biography tells exciting stories that satisfy our curiosity about the details of other peoples’ lives. It was Blaise Pascal who commented that ‘people are most interested in people’ – and it seems that biographical writing serves our ‘human’ interests in a particularly sustained and consistent manner. Though biography and autobiography share the same ‘life material’, the autobiography recounts the experiences of an incomplete story from the ‘I’ perspective in a necessarily fragmented form and, as is widely claimed, will often smooth over events due to the author’s personal involvement. Biography, on the other hand, usually deals with a completed chain of events, errors and setbacks included, which can be (more or less) bluntly recounted and judged from a distance – a necessary prerequisite for presenting the ‘moral of the story’. The fact that biographies

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derive this ‘moral’ not from made-up stories but from seemingly authentic material increases their attractiveness as well as their legitimacy. It is sometimes claimed that the supposed disadvantage of autobiographies, that their authors only ever have an incomplete perspective on the events described, is actually an advantage. According to this line of argument, the autobiographical perspective per se is generated in a fragmentary and process-based manner and is thus in line with contemporary theories about identity.Yet even autobiographies do not detract from the popularity of biographical stories amongst the public. By contextualising information and revealing causality, biographies enable an improved understanding of human behaviour.2 The biography is suspended between the poles of objective knowledge and subjective perception, a position that has both positive and negative implications. Reflective biographies can help to bridge these poles and create reciprocal understanding, as well to productively close the gap between theory and living practice or everyday perceptions.Yet a considerable amount of biographies tend to promote an uncritical (and compliant) subjective reading experience – a common reason for criticism of the genre. This brings us to where claims of a ‘biographical turn’ are undoubtedly true: concerning the reputation of the biography in academic discourse. For a long time, the biography was not deemed a worthy object of study in academic circles, especially in the German-language context. There are a number of reasons for this. Situated between several different disciplines (history, literature and social sciences), biographies are different to other kinds of scientific texts in that they cannot easily be tackled on a secondary level – on account of the narrative component, they tend to be based on the primary level, which is generally the realm of the original artwork.3 No wonder, then, that the genre continues to arouse distrust and that there is a lack of interdisciplinary and systematic interest in this kind of ‘suspect’ scholarly approach. In Germany, especially between the 1970s and the 1990s, the biography genre was considered an old-fashioned relic of an obsolete disciplinary tradition, that supposedly pseudo-scientific methods could be challenged in different ways. One could either ignore biographical works, talking down their meaning and interpreting them as a popular exercise, or one could discredit them using heavy theoretical artillery. By the new millennium at the latest, however, the various disciplines began to openly accept biographical methods. This new openness was not due to the persistent stubbornness of the genre as described above, but more to a changing self-perception within the humanities as a response to new, increasingly existential challenges caused by the natural sciences. Increased public awareness of research disciplines such as genetic technology or cognitive sciences has dealt the natural sciences a hand of trump cards. Thus, in a new turn, current attempts to reframe sections of the humanities as ‘cultural studies’ respond to the challenges faced by humanities by pulling together – using interdisciplinary networking and cross-­ disciplinary approaches. Against this background, it seems that Germany has also seen a gradual recognition of the relevance of the biography as an academic text; the previously stigmatised lack of a disciplinary ‘home’ is being seized as an opportunity.

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This is a further reason why academic circles are becoming more w ­ elcoming towards the biographical genre. In attempts to emphasise the significance of a ­discipline, special attention is increasingly given to projects that are compatible with the interests of a larger audience. Whilst biographies were never entirely struck from the programme of the academic opera, up until recently they were only included under certain preconditions. For the most part, only established figures were permitted to don the robe of biographer. It seems that only if one had proven oneself in a serious discipline could one, for the sake of change (and because a large readership could be ensured) make a foray into the operetta-esque milieu without losing prestige. On the other hand, to begin one’s career with a biography was not considered proof of academic seriousness; the (well-known yet dramatic) notion of biographical writing as ‘academic suicide’ was commonplace.4 It seems that these times are behind us. A conference entitled ‘Toward a Biographical Turn’ took place at the German Historical Institute in Washington in 2004, at which participants exchanged widely varying opinions about the biographical – yet everyone was in agreement about one thing: ‘Biography is “back” in serious historiography, even in Germany’.5 Whilst German scholars working on biographical works have faced courteous scepticism, in the past decades biography seems to have received comparatively more recognition as an object of study in the Anglo-American context.6

Biography Studies as a web of problems Up to now, our discussions about ‘the’ biography were implicitly extremely restricted. From a wide variety of mediated representations of other people’s lives, we would focus on one very specific kind: the story of a life in the form of a text-based book-length publication. If we attempt to describe the phenomenon of biography using analytical indicators, however, we quickly realise that a complex web of problems is at play, which can be considered from a range of very different perspectives. On the one hand, biography as a method or instrument is one approach. Here, the examination of the life of another person in the framework of a biography is used as a tool for gaining knowledge. On the other hand, biography itself can be an object of analysis – in this case, knowledge is produced through the examination of the descriptions of the life of another person.These perspectives are interconnected, meaning that those observations that are made by analysing descriptions of a person’s life can influence biographical methodologies – and vice versa. If we place the biographical works at the centre of our analysis, we might ask, for example, which meanings, functions and values have been attributed to biographies in any given period. Given that biographies are always produced in relation to dominant conceptions of subjectivity, individuality and society, how they position themselves accordingly is a significant part of what makes them popular. If biographies are prescriptive and intended to urge readers to imitate a life that is considered exemplary or particularly successful, then they also function as ‘social

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regulatory frameworks that locate the subject in social space’.7 The biography thus becomes established as a ‘normative category for structuring meaning’.8 By always showing the individual in the process of being human and becoming human, the biography also has an anthropological dimension: ‘Biography studies emphasise the preconditions (idea of what it means to be human) and living practices of the individual person’.9 The description of another life encourages the reader to make comparisons with his or her own life. At the same time, the special nature of the life must also be recognisable. It then follows that even the selection of the biographical object is subject to discursive rules and specific exclusion mechanisms that develop in the context of social desires.10 By researching biographies as source texts, we can learn about these different discourses. It is also evident that biographies influence discourses and regulatory frameworks.Whether someone is ‘worthy’ of an biography is not an ontological question, but the result of specific attributions and canonisation processes. In light of this, biographical writing has been increasingly practised as a kind of countermovement over the past decades, with the specific aim of bringing attention to marginalised groups. Michel Foucault paved the way with his Lives of Infamous Men (1977). The text is the introduction to a never-realised collection of portraits of people who slipped through the net as biographical subjects because, according to Foucault, ‘nothing would have prepared them for any notoriety; […] they would not have been endowed with any of the established and recognized nobilities – those of birth, fortune, saintliness, heroism, or genius; […] they would have belonged to those billions of existences destined to pass away without a trace’.11 According to this perspective, then, biographies do not serve merely to shape particular concepts of subjectivity, but to strengthen, expand, diversify, perpetuate and to pass on specific historical or social conditions, developments and social regulatory parametres. The biography thus also plays a critical role in questions relating to identity politics – it offers a means of building national heroes or establishing enemies. For this reason, biographies have continued to be entangled in political and ideological debates and are often viewed with suspicion. An example of this can be found in Siegfried Kracauer’s well-known essay from 1930 in which he discusses the interlinking of biographies and identity construction in relation to social transformation processes, notably biography as deceitful foothold for the bourgeoisie in times of shifting values.12 Through Kracauer’s writing on a particular kind of biography – namely, the literary biography studies of his time, so-called historical fiction (Historische Belletristik) – we arrive at another perspective on the phenomenon of the biography: the narrative.13

Biography as storytelling It is well known that the term ‘biography’ functions as an umbrella term for all mediated representations of the life of another person. It includes a wide variation of forms in different discourses. From short biographical texts to large academic projects based on years of research work, which, with a critical distance, stick as

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closely to the facts as possible; as well as literary approaches that create a narrative panorama based on historic facts, but which leave room for fiction and imagination. We also find highly reflective biographies that recount the story of a person’s life whilst commenting on the genre on a meta-level, and which discuss the conditions determining the process of writing about a life – so-called ‘fictional meta-­ biographies’.14 There are also those hastily written popular publications that present the life of a celebrity, which often have been produced in close collaboration with this person and serve primarily to perpetuate his or her self-presentation. Not to mention the wide range of biographical representations in other media such as film, opera or comics. Therefore, an additional way of engaging analytically with the biography is to consider it as a textual construct. This allows us to interrogate the historical and cultural conditions in which it was created. It is evident that different rules apply depending on the discursive context in which a biography is positioned, and different modes of representation are available to ensure that the text is perceived and accepted as a mode of communication for understanding another person’s life – that is, as a biography. How can we identify when a text is presenting a ‘biographical offer of communication’? It is of course the actual biographical material at the core of the books in a bookshop’s ‘biography’ section; however, this ‘core text’ is never presented to its (potential) readers in a vacuum. Rather, it is framed and accompanied by elements that first make it a book, put it on show, and which control its perception. Together, these reception-based elements surrounding the ‘actual’ text are described by Gérard Genette as ‘paratexts’ in his groundbreaking study.15 Paratextual elements include format, cover, author name, title and subtitle, title page, blurb, dedication, slogan, foreword and comments. Most of the time, the first indications that we are being presented with a ‘biographical offer of communication’ are provided by paratextual elements. By furnishing his or her text with the ‘biography’ label, we are to understand that the biographer wants the text to be understood as factual and that the text is intended to describe how it (in this case: the life of the biographical subject) really was. In addition, paratexts often offer the first clues as to which readership a particular biography is aimed at and which personality traits of the biographical character are particularly valued – through the choice of a subheading such as ‘a scholarly biography’, for example, or a blurb like ‘entertaining portraits of famous people’. If a number of biographies about the particular person already exist, the paratexts often will include information about the main line of argument or the thesis of the book, for example in subheadings like ‘life as art’, or ‘the eternal son’.16 Due in large part to the work of Hayden White, the significance of certain plot structures and models has also been acknowledged for fact-based narratives.17 If we reframe White’s arguments about historiographical narratives in the context of Biography Studies, we might conclude that the biographer discovers his material in the form of events, which are then (usually) arranged by date, or, in White’s terminology, compiled as a ‘chronicle’. The biographer then gives this chronicle a

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structure (beginning, middle, end): White refers to this level of integration as the ‘story’. The biographer then goes a step further and questions the meaning of the narrative. According to White, the meaning of historical narratives can only be grasped if one takes the explanation of events into account. In this process, the embedding of the events into an overriding plot is especially important. Some historians emphasise that there is a ‘huge cultural trove of narrative templates that are expressed in mythology, fables, religion and literature predominantly, and which can be updated in historical representations’.18 Authors may also base their stories on plot formulae based on heroic journeys or stories of conversion, sacrifice, chicanery, corruption or success. It is evident that culturally established narratives flow into biographical representations, whereby the narrative is closely linked with the prevailing ideological conditions. It is interesting to note how the ‘Bildungsroman’ label was often employed as a foil for biographical representations. In terms of order and structure, however, the biography as a story remains subject to the referentiality required of biographical writing. Even if the biography is based on a particular narrative formula, this does not mean that it tells tall tales, but rather that its events are embedded in a culturally established narrative; the biographer may not have consciously chosen this formula – they are so firmly rooted in everyday thinking that they define our perspectives, whether this is a conscious process or not.

Biography as a concept of thought When considering the biography as a textual construct, we might also think about the status of biographical writing itself. For it is worth asking what lies ‘beyond’ the biographical text that could usefully described as an autonomous entity. Does a biography describe a ‘reality’? In this understanding, the biography alone yields what it purports to describe. This is a criticism that became popular through Pierre Bourdieu’s statements on the ‘biographical illusion’ at the latest. With his 1986 essay ‘The biographical illusion’, Bourdieu sparked widespread debate, not least due to a radical impetus driving his ideas that was not entirely new, for Kracauer’s criticism went in a similar direction.19 Bourdieu first criticises the implications of the term ‘life history’, as this leads to an understanding of a life as a succession of different interdependent occurrences that can be told in a coherent, successive form. He then addresses the central problem: ‘To produce a life history or to consider life as a history, that is, as a coherent narrative of a significant and directed sequence of events, is perhaps to conform to a rhetorical illusion, to the common representation of existence that a whole literary tradition has always and still continues to reinforce’.20 Bourdieu eventually arrives at his well-known, devastating judgement: ‘Trying to understand a life as a unique and self-sufficient series of successive events (sufficient unto itself), and without ties other than the association to a “subject” whose constancy is probably just that of a proper name, is nearly as absurd as trying to make sense out of a subway route without taking into account the

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network structure, that is the matrix of objective relations between the different stations’.21 Yet in this critical contribution to his engagement with existential processes, Bourdieu points towards ways out of the dilemma in his theories on habitus and field. It was not necessary for Bourdieu to direct his criticism at more advanced biographies, since these had already rejected coherence-forming representational principles and had already taken systematic structural principles as a basis, without calling the biographical genre into question. It seems hardly productive to debate whether or not there is such a thing as a ‘life (story)’ that can be particularly well told in a biographical format, or whether biographies were instrumental in defining the very concept and perceptual category of a life story. It is more interesting to consider these as interconnected elements, and to read the biography as a concept of thought that develops in the exchange between – and mutual influence of – lived lives and mediated representation. The biography (as a mediated representation) is nourished by real life and, in turn, has an influence on our perception of our own life and that of others. We cannot help but to create a narrative structure from particular fragments of life in a way that follows specific patterns and formulae. That there is such a thing as a life beyond the text is likely the everyday experience of most people. On the other hand, numerous studies have shown how influential biographical narratives can be. Ever since the publication of Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, the power of specific formulae for individual development in a specific social field has been evident.22 An artist must align his life to popular biographical narratives to become ‘a real’ artist. The same applies to the academic, politician and so on. The extent to which this process of alignment takes place, consciously or unconsciously, is no longer important if we consider how, over time, these narratives independently take root in our own consciousness. Biographies do not simply reflect life stories, but rather define a narrative context that evokes a specific kind of response in the reader.They are perceived as a mode of understanding, which in turn affects our ideas about life stories and their dissemination. If biography is understood as a concept of thought, we assume that mediated representation and life practices are interconnected; this makes the sustained and increased dissemination of biographies across various disciplines hardly surprising. Biography studies do not merely provide an academic methodology, a set of instruments for generating knowledge. Rather, they are also part of this knowledge and offer a fundamental way of understanding the world. Through biographical stories, we learn about the attitudes and behaviour of others whilst organising our own experiences accordingly. At a time when we are witnessing a ‘biographical turn’ – the growing, increasingly accepted presence of biographical works across different disciplines – the idea of the biography as a concept of thought is gaining significance, together with an understanding of the importance of biographical storytelling as a culturally universal phenomenon. A functionalist-instrumentalist approach to Biography Studies tells only one half of the story.

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Notes 1 Christian Klein, ‘Einleitung: Biographik zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme’, in Christian Klein (ed.), Grundlagen der Biographik: Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, Stuttgart/Weimar:  J.B. Metzler, 2002, pp. 1–22. 2 Susan Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves.The Dangerous Art of Biography, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004 and Christian von Zimmermann, ‘Biographie und Anthropologie’, in Christian Klein (ed.), Handbuch Biographie: Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien, Stuttgart/Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2009, pp. 61–70. 3 See also Paul Murray Kendall, The Art of Biography, New York/London: Norton, 1985, pp. 3–28; Helmut Scheuer, Biographie: Überlegungen zu einer Gattungsbeschreibung, in Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (eds.), Vom Anderen und vom Selbst: Beiträge zu Fragen der Biographie und der Autobiographie, Königstein/Taunus: Athenäum, 1982, pp. 9–29 and Ray Monk, ‘Life without theory: Biography as an exemplar of philosophical understanding’, Poetics Today 28, 2007, 528–70. 4 Deirdre Bair, ‘Die Biografie ist akademischer Selbstmord’, Literaturen 7-8, 2001, 38–9. 5 Simone Lässig, ‘Toward a biographical turn? Biography in modern historiography – modern historiography in biography’, GHI Bulletin 35, 2004, 147–55. 6 This is demonstrated by the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai‘i, for example, which has published the scholarly journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly since 1978. A stimulus for international research on biography was the founding of the Biografie Instituut (University of Groningen) in the Netherlands in 2004. A ­comparable institution in the German-speaking region is the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie in Vienna; this institute was founded in 2005. 7 Carsten Kretschmann,‘Biographie und Wissen’, in Klein (ed.), Handbuch Biographie, pp. 71–8. 8 Kretschmann, ‘Biographie und Wissen’, p. 75. 9 Christian von Zimmermann, ‘Biographie und Anthropologie’, in Klein (ed.), Handbuch Biographie, pp. 61–70. 10 Hannes Schweiger, ‘Biographiewürdigkeit’, in Klein (ed.), Handbuch Biographie, pp. 32–6. 11 Michel Foucault, ‘Lives of infamous men’, in Michel Foucault, Power, trans. Robert Hurley et al., New York: The New Press, 2000, pp. 157–75. 12 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Die Biographie als neubürgerliche Kunstform’ [1930], in Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse: Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, pp. 75–80. 13 Christian Klein and Falko Schnicke, ‘20. Jahrhundert’, in Klein (ed.), Handbuch Biographie, pp. 251–64. 14 Ansgar Nünning, ‘Fiktionale Metabiographien’, in Klein (ed.), Handbuch Biographie, pp. 132–36. 15 Gérard Genette, Seuils, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987. 16 Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk, München: C.H. Beck, 1999 and Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: Der ewige Sohn, München: C.H. Beck, 2005. 17 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. 18 Jan Eckel, ‘Der Sinn der Erzählung. Die narratologische Diskussion in der Geschichtswissenschaft und das Beispiel der Weimargeschichtsschreibung’, in Jan Eckel and Thomas Etzemüller (eds.), Neue Zugänge zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007, pp. 201–30.

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19 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The biographical illusion’, trans. Y. Winkin and W. Leeds-Hurwitz, Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies, 14, Chicago: The Center, 1987, pp. 1–7. 20 Bourdieu, ‘The biographical illusion’, p. 2. 21 Bourdieu, ‘The biographical illusion’, p. 5. 22 Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch [1934], Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995.

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SECTION 2

The biographical turn in fields of knowledge

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8 BIOGRAPHIES AS MULTIPLIERS The First World War as turning point in the lives of modernist artists Hans Renders and Sjoerd van Faassen

It is readily assumed that just before the outbreak of the First World War, ­intellectuals and artists were pacifists.1 Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, for instance, published many articles which conveyed his pacifist convictions. However, comparative biographical research has shown that Van Doesburg’s views were not representative of those of his peers. This chapter will show how a modernist artist’s seemingly representative view turns out to be rather unique, thanks to biographical research.The concept of a ‘turning point’ as an argument for partial biography – a moment or an event in a person’s life that influences that person’s subsequent public deeds or actions – serves here as an important biographical-methodological aid. How have biographers of modern artists dealt with their subjects’ reactions to the Great War? How did artists react and respond to the violence and brutality of war, and to the vigorous nationalism of this period? These are not simple questions to answer, particularly because the opinions of artists did not remain stable over the war’s four-year span. For biographers it is fruitful to investigate whether the First World War was a turning point in their subjects’ lives – and, if so, to explore whether such a transformation was representative of the reactions of other artists towards the war. Yet, regretfully, most biographers of modernist artists have not attempted to investigate the representativeness or uniqueness of their subjects’ beliefs. To substantiate the proposition that the turning point is a fruitful theoretical focus for a biography, this chapter investigates how the opinions of a select group of modernist artists evolved during the war, and how their biographers wrote about these changes and put them in perspective. We will compare the lives and views of the Dutch art theorist, architect, painter and poet Theo van Doesburg; the Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara; the German playwright and co-founder of the Dadaist movement Hugo Ball; the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich; the Italian founder of Futurism Filippo Marinetti; and other modernist artists.2 At the centre of this chapter lies a research question concerning artists’ reflections on the war and

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what their biographers have said about this. Do their interpretations confirm what has been said in the literature about the relation between modernist art and the First World War, or do they put this relation into a different perspective? When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, many influential members of the community of European writers and artists could not wait to go to war. Concerned about the rapid industrialisation of cities and the degradation of their societies, they were enthusiastic about the prospect of national reconciliation and rejuvenation in a time of crisis. The Austrian playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal experienced the mobilisation of 28 July with a joy that he had ‘never experienced before, and never thought possible’.3 Even after serving at the front for a month, Hofmannsthal remained enraptured: ‘One has the uplifting knowledge that this Country and Nation stands at the beginning of a great development and must and will obtain hegemony over Europe’.4 Across Europe, artists were enthralled with the idea of a rebirth and a liberation from the spirit of materialism and rationalism. The French libertin and writer André Gide wrote how he and his friends had been hoping for months that the war would start. On 1 August 1914, the day before France mobilised its army, he impatiently wrote in his journal: ‘A day of painful waiting. Why don’t we mobilise? Every moment we delay is that much more advantage for Germany. Perhaps we owe it to the Socialist Party to let ourselves be attacked. This morning’s paper tells about the absurd assassination of Jaurès’.5 In Italy the Futurists, led by Marinetti, had issued a manifesto that glorified the violence that would bring forth a new world. ‘We want to glorify the war – only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive deeds of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas people die for, and the contempt for women […] Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!’6 These fevered sentiments, first broadcast in 1909, were echoed six weeks after the war broke out, when Marinetti published a rapturous call for the destruction of the old culture. Quoting from the manifesto, ‘We glorify war, which for us is the only hygiene of the world’, he now pleaded for the right of Futurists ‘to destroy works of art’.7 Marinetti welcomed the outbreak of the Great War as a heavenly gift.8 Futurists did not like the past, and – their name says it all – longed for the future. War for them was a proven means to finish with the past. Even Gabriele d’Annunzio, the decadent Italian poet, dreamed of becoming a war hero; his war rhetoric was impassioned, and he fought with equal zeal at the front.9 In general, it was not specifically political views that made European minds ready for a war, but rather an almost religious fervor to replace the old with something new. Or, as the painter Franz Marc said at the end of 1914: soldiers were dying for a new, chastened Europe, just as Jesus had died on the cross to make possible a better world. He was convinced that ‘the people first had to go through the Great War before they could form a new life and new ideals’.10 And this was a wish that had a direct relation to the arts. ‘Through this Great War, with so many other things that have so unjustly managed to survive in our twentieth century, the pseudo-art with which the German good-naturedly contented himself will finally

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come to an end’.11 Marc’s statements feed discussions to this day. How should they be interpreted? The art historian Annegret Hoberg pleads that these statements be read in conjunction with the letters Marc sent his wife from the front: biographical information will put the pompous pronouncements of this war volunteer in a different perspective. Marc, for example, was put on the ‘Liste der bedeutendsten Künstler Deutschlands’ (List of Germany’s Most Important Artists) by the German government, and as a result was to be called home. But on the last day of his military career, because he was supposed to be discharged, on 4 March 1916, at the battle of Verdun, he was killed by a grenade.12 At the beginning of the twentieth century, in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London and other places, the minds of people were preparing for war. So much so that even the conservative Thomas Mann could write with relief, a few months after the First World War finally broke out, that the war ‘puts an end to the old rotten world, with which we were fed up’. And he declared with an almost religious fanaticism: ‘Krieg! Es war Reinigung, Befreiung, was wir empfanden, und eine ungeheure Hoffnung’.13 Despite all these enthusiastic words, not one party or institution officially wished for the war to begin. Socialism prescribed international solidarity among workers ‘of all countries’ and rejected a bloody war in which worker-comrades would shoot each other from the trenches. War was a matter of the ruling classes: working men were always used as cannon fodder. Yet almost all socialist parties in Europe changed their minds in the summer of 1914 by divesting themselves of their pacifist principles. However, in France, the socialist leader Jean Jaurès remained true to his ideals of international brotherhood and pacifism and, as Gide notes in the journal entry cited above, was shot dead on the eve of the war’s outbreak by a nationalist. His death spurred tens of thousands of socialists to protest against any participation in the imminent war. Strangely enough, this burst of solidarity was transformed into a feeling that France was in danger and therefore had to be defended. Standing in front of the coffin of France’s greatest pacifist, a wellknown trade union leader called for his supporters to go to battle.14 The British were initially not very keen to take part in a large war in Europe. Great Britain was the only great power that did not have obligatory military service and was therefore dependent on men voluntarily joining its army. But in only a few days’ time public opinion reversed itself, again with an appeal to solidarity; in this case, volunteers amassed to support Belgium against an invasion by German forces. On 4 August 1914, Germany was handed an ultimatum to retreat, which expired at eleven o’clock at night (midnight in Berlin).15 A great excitement took hold of the British people, and when Big Ben struck eleven there was a level of enthusiasm for war that no one had ever thought possible. According to the then-chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, 95 per cent of the British on 1 August 1914 would have opposed their country’s involvement in the war; three days later, 99 per cent would have supported it.16 Just as an event can serve as a turning point for a civilization, a specific moment, occurrence, or episode can change the course of an individual’s life.

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Turning points Consciously or subconsciously, every good biographer looks for turning points. But what is a turning point? Considering the life of Adolf Hitler, one can regard as a turning point his appointment as Reichskanzler in January 1933, or his decision to start a world war on the first of September 1939. For Marcel Proust the decisive moment came when he ate a madeleine and was inspired to begin writing À la recherche du temps perdu. It seems simple; nevertheless, we have already mentioned three different kinds of turning points. Historians identify what they regard as the turning points of Hitler’s public life, even as one might pinpoint different moments through the close investigation of his personal life. Take, for instance, his rejection by the art academy in Vienna. Was this the source of his lifelong dislike of modern art? That is quite plausible, because when he took the entrance exam in 1907, the Viennese art world was engulfed in the emerging modernist painting. And no matter how great or small Hitler’s talents as a painter might have been, he wanted nothing to do with modernist painting. And Proust’s consumption of the madeleine? Is that a turning point? It was a very small personal experience and did not, obviously, directly lead to Proust’s writing of À la recherche du temps perdu. To put it briefly: the turning point is a problematic concept for biographers. Biographers, therefore, have to search for what Flaubert called ‘the hidden wound’.17 In this respect, the tradition of biographies of writers differs from those written about entrepreneurs, politicians or artists. Writers have frequently commented on their hidden wounds in their poems, novels and diaries. Often turning points are even the subject of their work. For other biographical subjects, this is not the case. To detect a turning point in the life of a politician or artist, a biographer should proceed differently than when approaching a writer’s life. Occasionally, the biographer is lucky enough to have access to such an abundance of personal documents – letters, unpublished notes and the like – that turning points that hitherto have not been noticed present themselves. In 1907 Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso began painting in a new style, which revealed a new way of representing the world. By approaching reality in a conceptual manner as a reaction against the spirit of Impressionism, this new style, which would later be known as Cubism, led them to pave the way to abstract art.18 All across Europe in 1913, art was moving in the direction of abstraction. Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Robert Delaunay and František Kupka in Paris, Kazimir Malevich in Russia, and Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands were increasingly trying, each in his own way, to abandon any reference to the actual world. One can find this way of thinking about their art in the biographies written about these artists. Yet, as in the case of Malevich, there was also a very different story, which related to and was focused on ‘the actual world’. Malevich, in fact, was at the beginning of the Great War an outright warmonger. ‘Gigantic wars, great inventions, the conquest of the air […]. The new life of iron and the machine, the roar of motor vehicles, the glare of electric lights, snarling propellers, they have made the soul awake, which was started to choke in the catacombs of old rationality’.19

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Theo van Doesburg’s views were diametrically opposed to those of Malevich, Marinetti and others who believed the new techniques of modernism ran parallel with bellicose ambitions. Initially,Van Doesburg saw Futurism not as a movement of the future but as ‘backward’, because ‘the mimetic expression of velocity (whatever its form may be: the aeroplane, the automobile, and so on) is diametrically opposed to the character of painting, the supreme origin of which is to be found in inner life’.20 He thought that Futurism would influence only technological advancement; but art, Van Doesburg believed, was about the individual’s inner experience of reality. Was the First World War a turning point for Theo van Doesburg?21 The biography by Joost Baljeu does not say anything about it and the First World War gets mentioned for a grand total of half a page.22 Although biographers recognise turning points, they are hardly ever employed as an instrument to construct a question-driven, problem-based, thesis-producing perspective.This is striking because the relevance of detailed historical investigations for interpretative frameworks has been recognised in historiography since the rise of microhistory in the 1970s. Microhistory has since yielded substantial results based on research that investigates specific occasions, themes, episodes, clues and persons.23 Integrating the microhistorical approach into biographies, by focusing on the turning points in the lives under scrutiny, could add a new dimension to the concept of the critical ‘interpretative biography’. By presenting turning points, decisive episodes, or events in a life as points of departure, one is able to interpret grand narratives in new ways. The interpretation of an individual life can then serve to improve the understanding of a history that goes beyond the limits of that life story. In this way, biography functions not merely as an illustration of a well-known story but as a means to multiply the interpretations of historical events and structures.24

Becoming an art theorist This approach can be illustrated by an interpretation of the life of Van Doesburg. Born Christian Emil Marie Küpper in 1883, he decided to become a painter after a short period of training in acting and singing. His first exhibition was in 1908. From 1912 onwards, he supported his career financially by writing essays for periodicals. Although he considered himself to be a modern painter at that time, his early work was in line with the traditional views of the Amsterdam Impressionists and was influenced by Vincent van Gogh. According to Van Doesburg, his approach suddenly changed in 1913, when he read Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912) and his album Rückblick: Kandinsky 1901–1913 (1913), in which, as the title suggests, Kandinsky looks back at his life as a painter from 1903 until 1913.25 These works made Van Doesburg ‘realize there was a higher, more spiritual level in painting that originates from the mind rather than from everyday life, and that abstraction is the only logical outcome of this primary truth’.26 Van Doesburg’s reading of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige and Rückblick could perhaps be called a turning point in the Dutch artist’s life. But a first reason to doubt

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this interpretation is the fact that Van Doesburg himself mentioned this event as such a turning point.27 Moreover, we should not trust this purported turning point since this event is too good to be true. Kandinsky wrote on the Geistige (spiritual) and abstract aspects of the arts, and Van Doesburg later founded in 1917 the journal De Stijl, through which he demanded and received wide international attention for his constructivist ideas regarding art.Taking these doubts as a point of departure, the biographer can turn to Van Doesburg’s private life to evaluate his own claim, and to look for alternative moments or developments that are better regarded as turning points than Van Doesburg’s encounter with the work and ideas of Kandinsky. With Germany’s declaration of war against Russia on 1 August 1914, the First World War broke out. Serving in the Dutch army,Van Doesburg was mobilised and stationed close to the border with Belgium, where he was billeted in the house of the Milius family in Tilburg. There he met Lena Milius. He was 31 years old, Lena almost six years younger.When Van Doesburg met Lena, he was married to the poet Agnita Feis, who had published a volume of poetry that had been acclaimed within a narrow literary circle. After his demobilisation in February 1916, Van Doesburg, by then divorced from Feis, married Milius.28 Although Van Doesburg divorced Lena and was married for a third time in 1920 (to Nelly van Moorsel), there is every reason to believe that the turning point in Van Doesburg’s life was his encounter with Lena Milius and others – railway officer and poet Antony Kok, as well as fellow soldier and shoemaker Evert Rinsema – during his stay in Tilburg during World War I.These contacts seem more important than Van Doesburg’s reading of Kandinsky’s Rückblick. What leads one to think so? First, one can observe from Van Doesburg’s manuscripts that in this period he went from being a traditional to a visionary art theorist. Then, around 1915, we see him shedding the influence of Kandinsky or Piet Mondrian, who had been such strong models; rather, he begins to influence friends, for example Kok and Rinsema. At the same time, these friendships were a huge source of inspiration for his development as an artist, providing fruitful cross-fertilisation among them. And one can observe during the initial phase of his relationship with Lena the incubation of ideas that ultimately would lead to his establishment of the journal De Stijl a few years later. In his letters to Lena, Van Doesburg was constantly trying to explain what his artistic goals were. A propagandist was born. Lena stimulated him, but there are no indications that she questioned his views. If we also take into consideration the many letters written between Van Doesburg and his friends Kok, Evert Rinsema and Rinsema’s younger brother Thijs, all of whom were simple craftsmen, then a pattern emerges.These contacts provided an opportunity for Van Doesburg to construct his own universe completely outside the existing hierarchy of the art world, so that he could theorise and propagandise about art. His correspondents absorbed his views like a sponge absorbing water.Their eager reception of his ideas must have encouraged Van Doesburg more than the discussions published in art magazines. As an art editor for newspapers and magazines, he was an art critic and also a follower of contemporary art. But within the inner circle of Lena, the Rinsema brothers and

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Kok, Van Doesburg assumed the role of a visionary, already practicing the role he would play with style a couple of years later: being an art theorist and propagandist. Therefore, for Van Doesburg, the modern-artist-to-be, the time of his friendships with Lena Milius, Kok and the Rinsema brothers was a decisive turning point. When he met them,Van Doesburg was still painting traditional pictures, but in his head the ideas for a New Art of the inner life were fast developing.

Unique or representative During World War I many avant-garde artists fought at the front. Some of them applauded the war, others became disillusioned with the struggle and with life and art in general. Van Doesburg mobilised as a soldier for the neutral Netherlands, was one of these disillusioned artists; but he became so for a rather different reason than figures like D’Annunzio. ‘I had a lot of confidence in higher things and the rich spirit of men’, he wrote. ‘There I suddenly faced harsh reality. No art, no love, no wisdom but grenades, grenades, grenades’.29 This existential cry showed how ­radically and implacably the war intervened in the life of Van Doesburg. In the final installment of a series of articles published in 1915 under the title ‘Meditations at the Borders’, the soldier Van Doesburg comes to a grim conclusion: ‘The European war is only the beginning of a series of wars which will be more extensive and more intense, as violent physical progress keeps pace with spiritual progress’.30 Only when spiritual life controls the physical will the battle be conducted with spiritual means. ‘The future redemption of man lies in the mind’. In this last sentence a shift in his worldview can be detected. We know that until the middle of 1914, Van Doesburg was a religious man who was fully convinced that war and other violence did not fit into God’s world. After one year of war, however, Van Doesburg no longer expected the ‘salvation of man’ by intervention from above, from the divine, but rather through the earthly endeavors of human ‘thought’, the spirit and reasoning of man himself. It is important to notice that it was not so much that his views on war changed, but rather that these views were no longer assigned to a religious authority, nor to an ideology like socialism or pacifism, but to himself as a rational person, a man no longer influenced by his extremely pious wife Agnita Feis. Van Doesburg remained a declared opponent of war before, during and after the war. What nonetheless changed was the fact that not only had religion failed him, but also the socialism and pacifism that had sanctioned the war. ‘The war is nothing else than the visible reflex of the defeat of the spirit of civilisation’. And as he had already written in 1908: ‘War is the religion of death. Cannon fire is prayer’.31 Not every artist of the period agreed with him. Some, as we have already seen, were filled with enthusiasm. Everywhere in Europe, artists were being called in to join the war effort, and not always in the role of mere soldier. In France, LucienVictor Guirand headed the camouflage unit that also enlisted artists such as Roger de la Fresnaye, Jacques Villon, André Fraye and André Dunoyer de Ségonzac. In

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England, artists like Edward Wadsworth and Norman Wilkinson created all kinds of special geometric shapes and dazzling camouflage for the ships of the Royal Navy, based on their own enthusiasm for war and victory.The German expressionist Emil Nolde had his own, more aesthetic reasons for being against the war. In his colorful, expressionist paintings he protested against the uniformity of the soldiers, their uniform dress and the accompanying destruction of their individuality.32 An excellent example of how political, military and artistic background is mapped in a biography to detect a turning point and to do justice to the biographical subject can be found in the latest biography of Tristan Tzara.33 The author, Marius Henta, describes very well how the 17-year-old Tzara in 1912 and 1913 was affected by the Balkan wars and the romance of military life. During his philosophy studies in Bucharest, Tzara became enthralled with a teacher who saw the war as a contradiction between the masses and individuality. But when Romania declared itself neutral at the outbreak of the Great War, a turning point in Tzara’s reasoning occurred. In 1915 he wrote the poem ‘Song of  War’, which was not a song of praise to higher goals such as nationalism nor the lament for the damage inflicted on one’s own culture by the enemy, but rather a recounting of a sad personal experience of a soldier who loses his individuality and of a ravishingly beautiful girl whom the war transformed into a pile of bones and guts. Tzara would remain a committed opponent of the war, just like many of his later fellow Dadaists. So the turning point for Tzara and many of the avant-garde artists was not the eruption of the Great War, which they initially glorified, but their confrontation, through their own experiences or through the testimony of others, with the raw reality of the trenches, the machine gun fire, mustard gas and other terrors on the front. The transition from peacetime to war had a profound effect on everybody, including modern artists. The sky was suddenly crowded with ‘not just birds, but also airplanes’, which could be excellent subjects for art, according to one of the contributors to the Dadaist magazine to which Tzara contributed as well.34 Art should not only focus on beauty, but function as a mirror of the new age. Technology and the machinery of warfare were excellent symbols of this new age. Moreover, in its essence technology was alienated from nature, the landscape and the country as a political unit as well. Modernism therefore warranted ‘the elimination of nationalism’.35 Rather than a political desire for the Romanian modernists to eliminate nationalism, their plea for war came forth from a deeply felt conviction that a new technological era had begun. It was not because of conservative political arguments that artists pleaded for war; it was just as much a progressive view that technology would eliminate musty nationalism, a conviction that miraculously ran parallel to the ideas of a socialist like Jean Jaurès. But proto-fascists like Marinetti and D’Annunzio were also inspired by technology and its possibilities. Modernism and nationalism is an important pair in understanding the shattering of the international avant-garde in 1914. But most important was the eagerness of artists and other people who were longing to enter a new era. Witness the enthusiasm with which the British waited beneath Big Ben for the sign that war would be declared against Germany, a sign that finally things

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were about to change. In biographies, very little attention has been given to this sort of phenomena. Going or not going along with the enthusiasm of a compelling social and national environment can, in the first place, provide information about the character of a person and, second, illustrate that individual’s artistic or political views. In a biography it is not very useful to describe the run-up to and course of the First World War in general. More useful is finding out whether the biographical subject’s experience of and reaction to the war concurred with the commonly held narrative or if the individual’s reaction was rather exceptional. In the latter case, our knowledge of that period can be enriched, complemented and corrected. For that reason, the context has to be contemplated. Classical historians first consulted handbooks and then did supplementary archival research to fill in the historical picture. The biographer works the other way round: he first collects and studies material and research materials associated with an individual, then proceeds to investigate how unique or representative that individual was in the context of his time.36 Just as Van Doesburg, without being noticeably influenced by the context of his time, was against the war before anybody even thought a world war might erupt, Guillaume Apollinaire, in 1914, was enthused about the coming war, because he was convinced that the world could become a better place if the ideas that he had fostered for a long time exerted an influence on the real world. As a child of a Polish mother and an Italian father, Apollinaire voluntarily enlisted as a soldier, an eager attempt to show his loyalty to France, as his biographer Francis Steegmuller convincingly explains.37 But traces of his enthusiasm for war and violence can also be found in his work. The poem ‘Zône’ from his collection of poems Alcools, published in 1914, contains a more plausible explanation of his embrace of war, namely his praise of speed, technology and action. In a similar way, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau and the Paris-based Italian artist Gino Severini were captivated by the war.38 Interestingly, these were the exact reasons that made Van Doesburg choose to oppose war already in 1912. Later in the war, when the horrors of the front became known in the cafés of Paris, an anti-war mood emerged there.This mood has been strongly emphasised in biographies of the Dadaists, and of those who became Dadaists later on.39 It was not difficult to make a selection of militant statements by Dadaists opposing the politics of the bourgeoisie and various forms of state power, as they rallied around the subversiveness and the anarchistic sentiments of Dadaism. ‘The movement revolted against power of all sorts, in favor of liberties of all sorts’, wrote the French Dadaist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes in Déjà jadis.40 Politics cannot escape the reach of subversion. But are we talking here about politics as it is practiced in bourgeois societies or of other forms of action seeking to transform our collective life? ‘The struggle against all forms of power may be conceived merely on the level of a revolt, but surely the conquest of liberty demands that revolt be transformed into revolutionary action. Refusing as they did to consider a vision of history, were the Dadaists even capable of imagining this sort of action’? They were opposed, in fact, to everything, but especially set themselves against the war, traditional art, the bourgeoisie and its culture, as can be found in many studies of Dada.41

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Many of the Dadaists escaped military service by travelling to neutral Switzerland with false passports. Famous Dadaists like Tzara and Hugo Ball, as well as Hans Arp and Marcel Janco, moved to Zurich to develop their anti-art. Richard Huelsenbeck was a conscientious objector. Thus, these artists are often lumped together in historiography. ‘Dada believed that the Great War was an unprecedented process of converting Europeans into animals’, writes Josepha Laroche in the online Dadaencyclopedia.42 But in the case of Ball, the great initiator of Dada, a different story can be told, namely about the glorification of war. This has been related in the biography of Hugo Ball in very masked terms. ‘The focus of this book is Ball the poet and artist’ and not his experiences in the war, writes his biographer Erdmute Wenzel White.43 A peculiar remark because of what he says on the same page: ‘To gain deeper appreciation of his creativity, certain poems are given greater weight. An entire chapter is devoted to a close reading of “Totentanz 1916”, his first real success at the Cabaret Voltaire’.The poem ‘Totentanz 1916’ was placed prominently on the title page of the first issue of the socialist magazine Der Revoluzzer II, in January 1916, as an anti-war poem. Wenzel White calls it a Zeitgedicht, written in July and August 1915 and composed as a parody of the Prussian military march ‘Dessauer’, and indeed there were ironic and cynical texts being written about dying during the war.44 But at the same time the poem ends with a longing for the Last Judgement and the Day of Reckoning. So could it be interpreted not as an anti-war poem, but as an ideological inspired text of a politically conscious poet hoping for a revolution that leads to a communist utopia?

History in the head Wiebke-Marie Stock has provided a more insightful turning point for Ball in her 2012 biography. Ball saw his activities for the Cabaret Voltaire as ‘Kriegskritik’, but Stock makes clear that Ball was glorifying ‘Gewalt und Kraft’ shortly before this.45 To his sister Maria Hildebrand, for instance, he wrote that war could even end the tension between art and life: ‘der Krieg sei das große futuristische Gesamtkunstwerk’. In another letter to his sister, dated 7 August 1914, he announces that he has just volunteered to fight in the war, and writes: ‘Kunst? Das is nun alles aus und lächerlich geworden’.46 In every biographical work about figures in the Dada movement the claim is made that, disillusioned by the First World War, Ball fled to neutral Switzerland with his future wife, the artist Emmy Hennings, to open the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. And, moreover, that even before the outbreak of the war, ‘Ball arrived at a comprehensive theory of progressive theater’. 47 Reality, however, is quite less progressive. A week after the declaration of war, Ball volunteered for the German army (as he told his sister above), but he was in fact rejected (he applied three times in vain) because of his weak heart. Eager to participate in the war, he went to the Belgian front on his own, as a citizen. He was not inspired by political considerations, but made the journey because of an enthusiastic desire to finally experience something real. Only after he was confronted with the horrors of the war did he move to Switzerland in May 1915, to take on the role of the anti-war artist. His anti-bellicose

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identity that his biographers write about was not as clear and convincing as has been suggested. After his experience at the Belgian front, Ball was still very bellicose. Instead of wanting to continue to fight for the Germans, he hoped that his homeland would lose the war so that the Russian Revolution would erupt and bring the international proletariat to power.48 So Ball made a political turn during the first year of the war.This change in paradigm was a turning point in his life and represented a radically different perspective on participation in world events.49 In the case of Theo van Doesburg, the First World War had no major influence on his thought, but the circumstances in which he ended up as a mobilised soldier dramatically changed his personal life. In other words, thinking more generally, a responsible mix of personal life and history does not always mean more historical context, rather the biographer needs to make informed choices to assess how and where historical developments exerted a major impact on the biographical subject’s personal life. Returning to the questions asked at the beginning of this essay, it is not too risky to conclude that in many biographies of modern artists and Dadaists, the First World War is described in terms too general to reflect the complexity and importance of this period. If we would mainly explore the first months of this international conflict as it affected individual lives, it would become clear that the general narrative of early-war Dadaism is in need of correction. By using turning points instead of the grand narrative to look into the personal lives of Dadaists, we gain a myriad of possibilities to complete and enrich our knowledge of the First World War and the beginnings of the Dadaist movement.

Notes 1 Although Philipp Blom adverted in his The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West 1900–1914, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009, to the less obvious combination of modern art, the origins of modernism and pacifism as consequence of the confusion of reality and doubts of the language and the many perspectives of the human experience. 2 Joost Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, London: Studio Vista, Cassell & Collier MacMillan Publishers Limited, 1974; Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada:The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014; Erdmute Wenzel White, The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1998; Andrei B. Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 4 vols, Farnham: Ashgate/Lund Humphries, 2010 and Ernest Ialongo, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and Politics, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015. 3 Ewoud Kieft, Oorlogsenthousiasme: Europa 1900–1918, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2015, p. 58 and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ottonie Grafin Degenfeld, Briefwechsel, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1986, pp. 304–05. 4 Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Gerty von Hofmannsthal, d.d. 22 August 1914, in Willi Schud (ed.), Richard Strauss – Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Briefwechsel, Zürich/Freiburg i. Br.: Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag, 1952 (5th ed. 1978), p. 288. Original quote:‘Man hat das erhebende Bewußtsein, daß dies Land und Volk erst am Anfang einer großen Entwicklung steht und die Hegemonie über Europa unbedingt bekommen muß und wird’. 5 Journal d’André Gide 1889–1939, Paris: Gallimard, 1948, journal entry, 18 Sept. 1916, p. 559; Journal d’André Gide 1889–1939, journal entry 1 August 1914, p. 450; Journals, Volume 2: 1914–1927, trans. Justin O’Brien, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000, p. 50.

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6 Filippo Marinetti,‘Manifesto of Futurism’, published in January 1909 in Italy, in February in the French newspaper Le Figaro, and quoted here from: R.W. Flint (ed.), Marinetti: Selected Writings, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972, p. 41–4. 7 Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, and Filippo Marinetti, ‘Futurist Synthesis of the War’, in Flint (ed.), Marinetti: Selected Writings, pp. 41-44, pp. 62–3. 8 Sacha Bru, Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes:Writing in the State of Exception, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 16. 9 Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War, New York: Knopf, 2013, pp. 299–378. 10 Franz Marc, ‘Das Geheime Europa’ (November 1914), in Franz Marc, Schriften, Cologne: Dumont, 1978, pp. 163–64. 11 Franz Marc: ‘Im Fegefeuer des Krieges. “Im Anfang war die That”’(Autumn 1914), in Marc, Schriften, pp. 158–62. Original quote: ‘Durch diesen großen Krieg wird mit vielen anderen, das sich zu Unrecht in unser zwanzigstes Jahrhundert hinübergerettet hat, auch die Pseudokunst ihr Ende finden, mit der sich der Deutsche bislang gut mütig zufrieden gegeben hat’. 12 Annegret Hoberg, August Macke, Franz Marc: Der Krieg, Ihre Schiksale, Ihre Frauen, Köln: Wienand Verlag GmbH, 2015, p. 10. 13 Thomas Mann, ‘Gedanken im Kriege’, in Thomas Mann, Friedrich und die große Koalition, Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1915, pp. 7–31. 14 Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès: A Biography of the Great French Socialist and Intellectual, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968, pp. 261–62. 15 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 13–4. 16 Ewoud Kieft, Oorlogsenthousiasme, p. 73. 17 Original: ‘la plaie profonde toujours cachée’: letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 6 October 1864, in Jean Bruneau (ed.), Correspondance Flaubert; iii: Janvier 1859 – Décembre 1868, Paris: Gallimard, 1991. 18 Douglas Cooper and Gary Tinterow, The Essential Cubism: Braque, Picasso & Their Friends 1907–1920, London: The Tate Gallery, 1983, pp. 10–4. 19 Kazimir Malevitsj, ‘From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism’, in John E. Bowlt (ed. and trans.): Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, New York: Viking, 1976, pp. 125–6. 20 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Futurisme’, Eenheid, 9 November 1912. 21 Hans Renders and Sjoerd van Faassen, ‘Ik zocht den dood en vond het leven: een keerpunt in Tilburg: Theo van Doesburg in de jaren 1914–1915’, in Zacht Lawijd; literair-­ historisch tijdschrift 13, 2014, 124–59. 22 Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p. 20. 23 Hans Renders,‘The limits of representativeness: Biography, life writing and microhistory’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussion of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 129–38. 24 Renders, ‘The limits of representativeness’, pp. 129–38. 25 Carel Blotkamp, ‘Van Doesburg und Kandinsky’, in Jo-Anne-Birnie Danzker (ed.), Theo van Doesburg: Maler – Arcitekt, Munich: Prestel, 2000, pp. 13–28; Alied Ottevanger (ed.), ‘De Stijl overal absolute leiding’: De briefwisseling tussen Theo van Doesburg en Antony Kok, Bussum: Thoth, 2008, pp. 27–8. 26 As stated on his Wikipedia page (accessed 23 October 2015). 27 Theo van Doesburg,‘De ontwikkeling der moderne schilderkunst’, Eenheid, 15 July 1916. In his own words, originally as a lecture in Utrecht on 30 October 1915.

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28 Evert van Straaten, Theo van Doesburg 1883–1971: Een documentaire op basis van materiaal uit de schenking Van Moorsel, The Hague: Sdu Uitgevers, 1983, p. 183. 29 ‘Brieven aan Bertha: Derde brief ’, 18 November 1914. The Hague, RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, call nr. NL-HaRKD.0408, inv.nrs. 522–24. 30 Theo van Doesburg, ‘Meditaties aan de grenzen’, six-piece series, De Avondpost 16 March–3 July 1915. 31 ‘Amersfoortse indrukken’, 1–25 September 1908. VDA, inv.nr. 480. Both Hubert van den Berg (Avantgarde und Anarchismus: Dada in Zürich und Berlin, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1999) and Michael White (Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2013) cover the anti-war stance of Dada, after accounting for the initial war enthusiasm of some of the later Dadaists. See also Uwe M. Sneede, 1914:The Avant-Gardes at War, Cologne: Snoeck, 2013. 32 Hans Fehr, Emil Nolde: Ein Buch der Freundschaft, Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1957. 33 Hentea, TaTa Dada, pp. 32–52. 34 Emil Isac, ‘Modernismul pe toate liniile’, in Viet¸a nounã 13–20, 1913, pp. 301–2. Cited in Hentea, Tata Dada, p. 36. 35 Hentea, Tata Dada, p. 36. 36 Hans Renders, ‘Biography in academia and the critical frontier in life writing: Where biography shifts into life writing’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussion of Biography, pp. 169–76. 37 Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet among the Painters, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973 [first edition 1963], pp. 234–50. 38 More examples of war fervor: Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War, New Haven:Yale University Press (in association with Barbican Art Gallery), 1994, pp. 68–70. 39 Henri Béhar and Michel Carassou, Dada, histoire d’une subversion, Paris: Fayard, 1990, pp. 45–6. More quotes concerning this subject in: Henri Béhar,‘Dada in Context’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 23 October 2015). 40 Béhar, ‘Dada in context’. 41 Josepha Laroche, ‘Dada ou la guerre à la guerre’, in Josepha Laroche and Yves Poirmeur (eds.), Gouverner les violences: le processus civilisationnel en question: mélanges Amelle Le BrasChopard, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. 42 Josepha Laroche, ‘Dada’, in International Encyclopedia of the First World War, online 1914– 1918. Online. Available HTTP: < http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10206> (accessed 23 October 2015). 43 White, The Magic Bishop, p. 5 and Alfred Sobel, ‘Gute Ehen werden in der Hölle geschlossen’: Das wilde Leben des Künstlerpaares Hugo Ball und Emmy Hennings zwischen Dadaismus und Glauben, Kißlegg: Femedienverlag, 2015. 44 White, The Magic Bishop, pp. 49–60. 45 Wiebeke-Marie Stock, Denkumsturz: Hugo Ball: Eine intellektuelle Biographie, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012, p. 25. 46 Hugo Ball, Briefe 1904–1927. Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Gerhard Schaub und Ernst Teubner. Band I 1904–1923, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003, p. 62. 47 White, The Magic Bishop, p. 5. 48 Hugo Ball, Briefe 1904–1923, letter to Maria Hildebrand, d.d. 13 March 1915, pp. 73–5. 49 Renders, ‘The limits of representativeness’, pp. 129–38.

9 ‘HONEST POLITICS’ A biographical perspective on economic expertise as a political style Jonne Harmsma

Economics reigns supreme in politics. Predictions of economic growth seem to be proportionally related nowadays to public confidence and government approval rates.1 Nonetheless, the political omnipresence of economics is far from new. The discipline that came of age during the first half of the twentieth century managed increasingly to hold sway over public affairs. This development has been described as a ‘global story’, with economists and their vocabulary increasingly dominating media, bureaucracy and politics.2 With the Depression of the 1930s setting the stage for extensive government intervention, the period after the Second World War were years of economic expertise par excellence: the ‘Stunde der Ökonomen’, the hour of the economists, in which ‘all industrialised post-war states managed their economies by drawing on technical economic expertise’.3 What remains unclear, however, is the historical interpretation and significance of the rise of expertise. How to understand and interpret its form, function, substance and development in relation to politics? While the sociological approach of Marion Fourcade and others tracks the development of expertise in tandem with changes in the social sciences, a biographical perspective offers the distinct advantage of studying the expert from the micro-perspective of an individual. By necessity, the biographical method addresses the interplay of different ‘spheres’, roles and domains that play a role in the life of one particular individual. In doing so, economic expertise in politics is investigated not only from the scholarly perspective of disciplines and abstract thinking.4 Whether the biographical subject be a politician proficient in economics, an academic economic advisor or a government official, investigating in depth the individual’s background, and taking into account more than function and career, puts flesh on the bones of economic expertise. By highlighting an individual’s academic training, social network and personal life, the biographical perspective sheds light on the interaction, consistency and friction between these different spheres.5 In doing so, the individual – in the context of this

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chapter, the economic expert – is understood as more than just a representative of a certain political party, scientific discipline, government agenda or worldview.6 Robert Skidelsky’s three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes gives an excellent example of the many-sidedness of an economic thinker. Academic debates are interwoven with accounts of Keynes’ involvement in journalism, politics and policymaking, with the avant-garde Bloomsbury circle providing an energetic cultural background. ‘There was no single Keynes,’ Skidelsky concludes eloquently, ‘no identity in solitude’.7 This example shows that individual economists cannot be understood by focusing solely on abstract economic thinking and academic debates. Politics, religion, culture and historical context are entangled, and being an economist or ­performing expertise can properly be understood only by appreciating this human many-­sidedness and complex interplay of factors. Reflecting on the biographical approach, this chapter hopes to shed light on the ‘hour of the economists’ and aims to interpret economic expertise as a political style. How did the rise of expertise influence politics in the decades after World War II, and how can the interaction between economic ideas, on the one hand, and political worldviews and policy ideas on the other be understood from the singular perspective of the economic expert in politics?

Value-free economics in the post-war world The background for understanding the neutral and objective status of economic expertise is the value-free standing of the discipline. After a revival of the Werturteilstreit (value-judgement controversy) in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in which the detached positivist foundation of economics was called into question, this short-lived normative challenge gave way to a complete triumph of positivism. Following the lead of Paul Samuelson, economics was modeled thereafter on the natural sciences and its rigorous scientific methodology. The Netherlands can serve as an interesting example of this development. There, the positivist outlook of the Rotterdam School of Economics was briefly challenged by a movement towards normative science, championed, for instance, by the confessional universities where the longing arose to apprehend economics within a larger philosophical and theological frame of knowledge. Nonetheless, led by its prime advocates F. de Vries, future Nobel Prize winner Jan Tinbergen and their students, positivism in the late 1940s swiftly regained the upper hand throughout the country.8 Besides this value-free standing, the development or invention of macroeconomics was a main force behind the rise of economic expertise. Only fairly recently, in the mid-twentieth century, did the concept of the economy as a whole appear, based on the aggregates of production, consumption, investment and savings.9 Keynesian macroeconomics created a new perspective, formulated the variables to reason with and invented new tools and instruments for management and control.10 With the economic disasters of the Depression in mind and its horrible

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political spin-off only recently overcome, the idea that capitalist economies needed some sort of management found wide acceptance. Standing ready to meet this demand, and eager to live up to the new responsibilities, were a generation of confident young economists who, armed with a brand-new vocabulary and toolbox, could understand and act upon the economy as a whole.11 The Dutch economist and future politician Jelle Zijlstra articulated this self-confidence and sense of vocational mission in 1952: ‘We as economists have to interfere in – even provide leadership to – the highly complex economic and political controversies of the day: that is our very special responsibility’.12 The value-free foundation of the discipline formed the background for economic experts taking ‘responsibility’ and providing ‘leadership’. As George Stigler, future Nobel Prize winner in economics, wrote in a 1960 article: ‘Economics as a positive science is ethically – and therefore politically – neutral’.13 Arising in these post-war years, economic expertise was suited to overcome political differences. Insights from economics were deemed neutral, value-free and objectively ‘true’ and served as a tertium comparationis, a bridge ‘by which everything can be meaningfully compared to everything else and in terms of which one can safely reason from one to the other’.14

Expertise politics in the Netherlands: reflections on style and substance In the decades after the Second World War new expert organizations arose, like the US Council of Economic Advisors, which were widely recognised as being politically neutral.15 Moreover, within the Dutch Social Economic Council (SER) – a top-level advisory body consisting of employers’ and labor unions’ representatives – social scientists literally formed the third, neutral tertium comparationis bridging the socio-political differences among these factions. Institutionalised as independent ‘Kroonleden’ (Crown members), these experts took a third of the seats and performed a mediatory role as interpreters of scientific knowledge. Presuming to be unaffected by ordinary political and partisan interests, the presence of neutral experts within an advisory body like the SER brought ‘discipline to the discussions’ by urging the social partners ‘to base their arguments on solid scientific insights’.16 In this ‘disciplined’ discussion experts held a privileged position as honest brokers, owing their authority to their aura of scientific impartiality and truth.17 An interesting biographical example of expertise in politics in the Netherlands is the life and career of the aforementioned Zijlstra, who can illustrate how economic expertise became a political style and how economic thinking influenced p­ olitics. After a four-year professorship in economics at Amsterdam’s Free University, Zijlstra was 34 when he became minister of economic affairs in the late summer of 1952. Full of confidence and a sense of responsibility, as shown by his previous citation for providing leadership in ‘the highly complex economic and political controversies’, the young economist made his entry into the political arena. Looking at his maiden speech, which was deemed a ‘parliamentary event’ of note,

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the young economist emphasised his political and parliamentary ‘inexperience’, admitting that his speech could unfortunately not be ‘of an academic nature only’.18 An inaugural speech can be recognised as a significant moment of self-­ representation, having ‘credentialism’ and ‘affiliation’ as its key components.19 Offering a learned and skillful exposition, Zijlstra presented himself as a scholar and an expert in economics. In doing so, he followed the lead of his predecessor, the Catholic economist Jan van den Brink. As with Van den Brink, all political parties (except the Communists) welcomed Zijlstra more as an economist than a politician and embraced his intellectual vigor.20 Even though Zijlstra would spend a great deal of his life in politics, this image of him being first and foremost an economist would remain intact. Despite 11 consecutive years as a minister of economic affairs and finance, almost 15 years as president of the Dutch Central Bank and terms as senator and prime minister in the four years in between, Zijlstra was able to cultivate and maintain this nonpolitical status. ‘In the heart of matters, I am a homo academicus, and not a homo politicus’, Zijlstra declared when he accepted the leadership of his Antirevolutionary Party (ARP) in 1956. He asserted that he was not a ‘political man’ time and again, and he used this claim as the basis for his short-lived farewell to politics in 1963.21 Zijlstra’s status as an economist rather than a politician endured, reinforced and cultivated through the use of his academic title, his affiliation with scholars and his self-presentation in interviews, public appearances and, later, his memoirs.22 As early as his inaugural speech of 1952, Zijlstra had been able to address concerns about his alleged ideological views and had positioned himself firmly on the socio-economic common ground between socialism and liberalism. He had affirmed his right to speak as an expert, while his policy credo, ‘global intervention in strategic matters’, functioned as a comprehensive concept palatable from different points of view.23 The language of economic expertise brought conflicting parties together. Or, as the political theorist Frank Ankersmit writes: ‘The expert unites what was “broken” and in disunion; and his whole effort consists in the development of the potentially unificatory (expert) language making all (political) positions commensurable and reconcilable’.24 All in all, Zijlstra’s authority was based on his expert knowledge, which made him distinct from ordinary politicians: he represented the neutral tertium of economics more than the subjectivity of a party line. In his memoirs, reflecting on his political stance, Zijlstra confided: ‘In all fairness I must admit that I was convinced then that there were clear and sound solutions for the great economic and financial problems of the time. (Young economists had and still have a tendency to overconfidence.) It was a matter of convincing people in and outside Parliament and then implement policy with due diligence. This somewhat apolitical vision was naturally related to my somewhat one-sided, academic preparation for office. […] Sometimes I think that this apolitical attitude never completely abandoned me’.25 Expertise can perform three fundamental tasks in the political arena: ‘speaking truth to power’, ‘clarifying the grounds of public debate’ and ‘diagnosing opportunity and injustice’.26 As Zijlstra’s remarks show, his idea of politics took on the

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character of expert clarification, convincing political opponents and the public of ‘clear and sound solutions’ provided by economic reason. Consequently, many of Zijlstra’s parliamentary appearances resembled scholarly lectures instead of political debates. His clear and captivating speeches were perceived as learned expositions, ‘schoolmaster-like’, and Zijlstra even purportedly brought a chalkboard to Parliament to explain matters.27 Based on these expert insights, deemed neutral and objective, Zijlstra was able to narrow the confines of political and parliamentary debate and impose strict limits from an economic and budgetary point of view. As minister of finance he introduced a new approach to fiscal matters. The key to his approach was a structural and multi-year government budget, based on an ex ante predetermined room for government expenditures, calculated for multiple years, and a prioritisation of expenses. The new framework, later called the ‘Zijlstra-norm’, determined the boundaries within which both government ministers and parliamentarians were to remain, shaping the ‘deliberative framework’ of politics, as Frank Fischer has formulated the choice-restrictive influence of expertise.28 Whenever Parliament rallied in a plea for additional expenses – even with rather insignificant consequences – the new model formed the ultimate argument in rejecting fiscal infringement. Zijlstra’s ‘coup’ lifted financial arguments above parliamentary discussion and created a new political reality of scientific allure.29 This, however, did not prevent frustration from arising in Parliament, with minor budget proposals becoming politically explosive issues and Zijlstra putting up unwavering resistance and repeatedly threatening to resign.30

Economic expertise and the end of ideology Within the specific Dutch post-war constellation of so-called social and p­ olitical ­pillarisation, socio-economic expertise performed a unique mediatory role. Embodying the technocratic ideals of impartiality and objectivity, the expert distinguished himself from those beholden to the traditional ideological, political and social-cultural divides. Standing ‘above the fray’ in the pluralistic landscape of confessional, socialist and liberal ‘pillars’, the expert aimed directly and without mediation to determine and serve the public good.31 Expertise therefore stood in a distinct relation to the politics of parties, Parliament and voters. In form and function it represented a new political style.32 With its claim ‘to simply see the world as it is’ and in opposition to the maxims of idealism, the expert approach to politics resembled a ‘realist’ political approach and style.33 Zijlstra’s antipathy to doctrinal thinking became apparent in his fierce opposition to the dogmatic reasoning of his own confessional Antirevolutionary Party. While Zijlstra as a modern macroeconomist deemed state intervention in the economy a pragmatic necessity, his fellow Antirevolutionaries still feared state socialism and rallied around the long-established concept of ‘souvereiniteit in eigen kring’ or sphere sovereignty. This core principle had been formulated by the founding father of the Antirevolutionary Party, Abraham Kuyper, and formed the backbone of its neo-Calvinist worldview.34 Reasoning as an economist and

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looking to modernise Christian politics, Zijlstra ruthlessly eschewed the political use of this idealistic concept and, to the dismay of party leaders and the rank and file, labelled sphere sovereignty a redundant ‘empty box’.35 Essentially along the same lines, Zijlstra criticized the neoliberal programme of economists such as Wilhelm Röpke, Walter Eucken and Friedrich von Hayek. Both the anti-statist dogmas of his own party and the laissez-faire ideals of neoliberalism were grounded in the belief in a ‘natural order’. However, for Zijlstra, a ‘natural ­economic order’ or a ‘blueprint’ for society could never exist and should even be considered dangerous.36 Instead, Zijlstra envisioned Christianity as a timeless inspiration for a ‘thoughtful’ and ‘radical’ approach to politics. Rather than expressing high-strung idealism, Christian politics was to be thoughtful in its restraint and cautious in proclaiming fixed ideals, principles and ideology, thereby remaining steadfast in withstanding the sort of revolutionary course of action that had wreaked havoc on the world. Confronted with the passing delusions of the day and faced with the peril of dangerous extremes, Christian politics for Zijlstra should be ‘radical’ in its autonomy, acting as a beacon of reason and restraint.37 In the wake of war, depression and the fierce social tensions of the nineteenth century, Zijlstra saw pragmatic realism to be the only sound approach to politics. In his economic thinking this brought about an interesting compromise between old and new, essentially connecting a more classical monetarist approach with modern Keynesian views. In the political landscape, rather than merely representing the increasing technocratic tendency of the post-war period, Zijlstra in fact advocated the end-of-ideology thesis.38 In political speeches and in Parliament Zijlstra predicted the convergence of a ‘liberal socialism’ and a ‘social liberalism’.39 With growing prosperity, differences between left and right were diminishing, leaving politics to deal only with practical issues. Transcending the abstract doctrines that had led to destruction and devastation, the end-of-ideology movement was a prime intellectual current in the 1950s and 1960s. Western democracies were thought to have entered the ‘post-political’ stage. With the idealism of left and right ‘exhausted’, the politics of tomorrow was welcomed as a politics that would become ever more pragmatic, neutral and scientific.40 While his own hard-fought battle for pragmatic Christian politics proved difficult, Zijlstra’s prediction of liberal and socialist rapprochement seemed accurate. With liberalism turning its back on laissez-faire ideology and supporting the welfare state, Dutch socialism underwent a clear shift to realism and pragmatism. The new socialism was said to be neither ‘doctrine nor ideology’.41 In the mid-1960s, however, the situation changed completely. Socialism was increasingly influenced by the ideologically vigorous New Left movement, which consisted mainly of young intellectuals dissatisfied with the party’s hands-on, moderate approach. New political styles emerged, embodying the young, progressive energy and ideological zeal of the 1960s, and political polarisation set in. Hans van Mierlo, leader of the political party D66, founded in 1966 to ‘blow up’ the existing political system, most vehemently embodied this change. Likewise, Zijlstra’s own party was increasingly split between progressive ‘radical evangelists’ and conservative and traditional forces.42

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The heyday of technocratic pragmatism and the belief in the end of ideology had lasted only briefly. Nonetheless, expertise had subtly made its mark on Dutch politics. Zijlstra’s ‘apolitical’ budgetary norm inaugurated an epoch in which financial prudence was a prime political topic and an almost sacrosanct principle. After increased public and political unrest over the soundness of its budget, the progressive Cals administration was brought down in the autumn of 1966. Interestingly, Zijlstra had been one of its fierce critics and acted as a prominent whistleblower ‘speaking truth to power’, warning of fiscal and economic havoc. It corresponded with the expert’s claim to a superior kind of being right. Again, in Zijlstra’s case, this also caused irritation and annoyance, mainly about his pedantic attitude towards his opponents. In retrospect, he reacted to this discontent by arguing: ‘What drove these people to treat someone who pursues honest politics with such distrust?’43 After the Cals government’s infamous collapse, two reliable political economists, Zijlstra and Van den Brink, were named as ideal candidates to restore public confidence and clean out the country’s financial Augean stables. But as Van den Brink, Zijlstra’s erstwhile predecessor as minister of economic affairs, was unwilling to sacrifice his career as a banker, one candidate remained. After Zijlstra’s interim government was formed, his popularity soared. Wim Kan, a highly regarded cabaret performer, famously captured the public’s overwhelming confidence in Zijlstra’s abilities in an immensely popular song: ‘Where we will go, Jelle sorts it out’. The unequivocal language of expertise appealed to the public. Zijlstra acted as the seemingly ‘impartial observer of how things simply are’, which was opposed to the blurry ‘ought to be’ of regular politicians.44 Thus, in 1966, in the midst of the public and political upheavals of the 1960s, expertise politics in the Netherlands reached its high point.

Economics and biography By focusing on the policy ideas and worldview of individual politicians, it becomes possible to trace the influence of economic thinking, either directly in the case of the economist in politicis or mediated through economic advisors and bureaucratic expertise. By ‘singularising’ the interaction between economics and politics, biographical research goes beyond the abstract and rigid idea that economic schools influence or even dominate a particular historical period and humanises and historicises the interaction.45 ‘Ideas cannot “influence” but people may manipulate them ideologically to attempt to influence others’. A ‘biographical turn’ is therefore marked by ‘the essential shift in perspective […] from structures and abstractions […] to people and their experiences’.46 Roles are ‘made’ not ‘taken’, as biographer Richard Holmes has argued, and the relation between economics and politics, singularised in the performance of expertise, is more complex, historical and normative than is often perceived.47 The interplay of economic thinking and politics becomes, from a biographical perspective, a dynamic process in which individuals truly ‘act’ by interpreting economic thinking and ideas in creative moments of formation. The individual expert

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blends abstract theory with religious, socio-cultural and political ideas and concepts in a distinctly historical instance of ‘reinvention’ or ‘translation’.48 Personal experience and historical context contribute to this ‘translation’ of abstract theory to the concrete personal visions of the (economic) world. Such ‘metaphysical’ visions are, as Mark Blaug argued in Economic Theory in Retrospect, the source ‘from which all theorising begins’.49 Opposed to the abstract ‘model’, ‘vision’ creeps upward, from the subjective context of individual life to a unique configuration of worldview and political economic thinking. Therefore, to grasp the meaning of individual economists, ‘one must understand both their vision and their model’.50 As distinct from the historico-sociological approach (or, the ‘sociology of the professions’) of Fourcade and others, the biographical approach towards expertise and the political influence of economics does just this: it reduces the scale of ­investigation to focus on the individual translations that combine economic thinking and political worldview.51 Economists tell stories, and as ‘storytellers’ they conceal themselves in purported truth. ‘Concealing the ethical burden under a cloak of science is the master move of expertise’.52 Behind the façade of scientific neutrality and abstraction lie the stories of these ‘wordly philosophers’ as profoundly normative visions of the world. Differences in worldview arise not only from school to school but among individual economists themselves. The bottom-up biographical approach challenges the idea that we should focus on rigid and abstract schools of thought, outlining instead a tableau of ‘economic styles’: more historical and dynamic conceptions of overlap and continuity in thinking between individual economists and their visions, open not only to agreement and consensus but to discrepancy and friction.53 Focusing on instances of ‘expert performance’ and tracking the career paths of scientific experts are crucial in our study of expertise, as has been argued in a recent volume on this topic.54 This turn to a singular perspective comes forward as well in the work of the economist Carol M. Connell who, in her study of the Bretton Woods international financial system in the 1960s, employs the ­‘historico-biographical approach’ to focus on Fritz Machlup, president and founder of the Bellagio Group, an international academic study group and predecessor to the G30. Connell portrays the interactions among Machlup and academics with rival views on monetary and financial matters, shedding light on the versatility and complexity of academic expertise and economic thinking.55 Along the same lines, the use of biography as a research methodology can illuminate the role of specific economic experts and their impact on politics and the policy agenda. By taking into account aspects such as education, personal experience and historical context, the biographical approach humanises economic expertise and highlights the unique configuration of particular instances of scholarly expertise. Examples of this kind include work on Jan Tinbergen and his role as director of the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy and biographical research on Jacques Rueff, the French monetary economist and advocate of the gold standard, who was a prime economic advisor to Charles de Gaulle in post-war France.56

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Biographical research on political figures such as Ludwig Erhard, West Germany’s post-war minister of economics and the famed architect of the Wirtschaftswunder, whose career possesses striking similarities to Zijlstra’s, contributes to our understanding of economic expertise as a political style of leadership. By focusing on the individual expert in politics, the complicated knot of personal experience, economic theory and political worldview is revealed in all its complexity and the interplay between economic expertise and political leadership becomes tangible. Thus, not only can the political influence of Ordoliberalism and the German social market economy be humanised and historicised, but our understanding of the role and status of economists in politics is likewise enriched.57

Conclusion Economics has time and again been portrayed as a value-neutral science, with economists being advocates of neutral insights whose role remains ‘pristine and untainted by ideology’.58 Increasingly, however, the intrinsic normativity of the young discipline has been uncovered, and economics is now even branded a ‘­religion’.59 In its political manifestation, that is, through the work and ideas of political economists and experts, the biographical approach fruitfully contributes to the singularisation of economics by highlighting the personal visions of economy and worldview that form the foundation of the interplay between economics and politics. While periods of dominant styles and modes of thinking abound – from the Keynesian ­consensus in the 1960s to the neoliberal ascendency of recent decades – it is individual economists, expert politicians and advisors, rather than schools of thinking, who act to influence science, politics and society.60 The biographical perspective makes visible their unique visions and thereby undermines ‘the “scientific” status of economics’, to show that the supposed abstract uniformity of schools does not exist.61 Acknowledging this normative and ideological underpinning of economics and expertise, psychologist John Jost has argued that ‘ideology is everywhere’ and that there was never ‘a truly nonideological era’ in politics.62 Jost’s conclusion can wholeheartedly be supported, albeit only to a certain extent. Economic thinking has indeed never been devoid of ideology, and there can be no neutral or ‘honest’ politics. Nevertheless, while we today pierce the purported neutrality and objectivity of economic expertise, and Jost declares ‘the end of the end of ideology’, we should acknowledge that the inherently normative basis of expertise has long remained unnoticed. The economic expert in fact acted as a political outsider and built a reputation for scientific impartiality. Zijlstra’s ‘honest politics’ and the objectivity of expertise are concepts, therefore, requiring further interpretation as historical instances of political style and substance. The end of ideology and the rise of expert politics were – and to a significant degree still are – a historical reality to be understood. The 1950s and 1960s were an era of technocratic expertise in which economic issues became a neutral tertium, detached from politics, Parliament and the voters, the exclusive domain of expert-politicians.

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‘Style is substance’, and as a political style, the supposed neutrality, honesty and objectivity of expertise is ‘fraught with meaning’.63 The political style of Zijlstra, for instance, was based on the pragmatism of a detached expert and his distinctly personal vision of an economic world. Finding middle ground between Keynes’s ideas and more classical economic concepts in the 1940s and 1950s, Zijlstra’s views were politically and scientifically palatable for many. From the 1960s onwards he moved away from the Keynesian ‘faith’ to become a ‘moderate monetarist’, as he contended.64 To grasp the meaning of this abstract notion, however, it is necessary to take a ‘biographical turn’ and investigate the intrinsically personal, unique constellation of his thinking. This biographical perspective makes it possible to explore the expert’s alleged objectivity and neutrality and uncover the singularity of various forms of economic thinking. The core of economic expertise lies with individual thinkers and actors who each, through their political beliefs, religious background and personal frames of reference, construct specific visions of the economic and political world. Understanding how these visions influenced politics, which tones of it remained unnoticed and how the political style of expertise was performed in the political arena remain important tasks in expanding our understanding of contemporary history. Politics has progressively been reduced to economic issues and the voter, as Ankersmit has drawn attention to the critical role expertise still plays today, ‘must now feel as if History had surrendered him to the expert as the only person still able to tell him who he actually is and what his true political interests are; not only is the expert the only one still capable of answering his political questions (as was already the case in Daniel Bell’s technocratic utopia of half a century ago), the expert now also dictates to him what are the really important questions that he should ask’.65

Notes * I would like to thank Frank Ankersmit and Jan Marc Berk for reading and commenting on draft versions of this chapter. Naturally, the responsibility for the content remains entirely and exclusively mine. 1 Paul Krugman, ‘Presidents and the economy’, The New York Times 4 January, 2015. 2 Walter W. Heller, New Dimensions of Political Economy, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1966, p. 1 and Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 1. 3 Alexander Nützenadel, Stunde der Ökonomen: Wissenschaft, Politik und Expertenkultur in der Bundesrepublik 1949–1974, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005 and Fourcade, Economists and Societies, p. 203. 4 Hans Renders, ‘The biographical method’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 222–6. 5 Birgitte Possing, ‘Portraiture and re-portraiture of the political individual in Europe: Biography as a genre and as a deconstructive technique’, in A.C.L. Knudsen and K. Gram-Skjoldager (eds.), Living Political Biography: Narrating Twentieth-Century European Lives, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012, pp. 33–52.

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6 Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, ‘Introduction: The challenges of biography studies’, in Renders and De Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 1–8. 7 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. Vol. 2. The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937, New York: Penguin Books, 1995, p. xxxiii. 8 B.D. Elzas, ‘1870–1950: Growing away from provincialism’, in Johannes van Daal and Arnold Heertje (eds.), Economic Thought in the Netherlands: 1650–1950, Aldershot: Avebury, 1992, pp. 75–98 and Jonne Harmsma, “In Rotterdamsche sfeer”: Economische wetenschap aan de Vrije Universiteit tussen Ridder en Zijlstra’, TPEdigitaal 10, 2016. 9 Timothy Mitchell, ‘The work of economics: How a discipline makes its world’, European Journal of Sociology 46, 2005, 297–320. 10 Skidelsky, The Economist as Saviour, p. 544 and Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, London: W.W. Norton, 2011, p. 121. 11 Peter Boettke and Steven Horwitz, ‘The limits of economic expertise: Prophets, ­engineers and the state in the history of development economics’, in Steven G. Medema (ed.), The Role of Government in the History of Economic Thought, Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 10–39. A similar process of professionalisation took place in businesses and firms, where the manager arose as an expert in leadership and management, a development described by James Burnham as ‘the managerial revolution’. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World, New York: Day, 1941. 12 Original quote: ‘Wij hebben ons als economisten te mengen in – zelfs leiding te geven bij – de wel zeer complexe economisch-politieke strijdvragen van de dag: dat is onze zeer bijzondere verantwoordelijkheid.’ Jelle Zijlstra, ‘De weg naar Vrijheid III’, Economisch Statistische Berichten, 20 August 1952, 636–39; Jelle Zijlstra, Per slot van ­rekening: Memoires, Amsterdam: Contact, 1992, p. 35. 13 George Stigler, ‘The politics of political economists’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 73, 1960, 522–32. 14 Frank Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy beyond Fact and Value, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 34, 64–114. 15 Willem Halffman, ‘Measuring the stakes: The Dutch planning bureaus’, in Justus Lentsch and Peter Weingart (eds.), Scientific Advice to Policy Making: International Comparison, Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2009, pp. 41–66; Gerard Alberts, Jaren van ­berekening: Toepassingsgerichte initiatieven in de Nederlandse wiskunde-beoefening 1945–1960, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998; Fourcade, Economists and Societies and Nützenadel, Stunde der Ökonomen. 16 Frank A.G. den Butter and Sjoerd A. ten Wolde, ‘The institutional economics of stakeholder consultation; how experts can contribute to reduce the costs of reaching compromise agreements’, in Carlo Martini and Marcel Boumans (eds.), Experts and Consensus in Social Science, Cham: Springer, 2014, pp. 17–48. 17 Frank Ankersmit, Political Representation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 195. 18 ‘Minister Zijlstra’s rede een parlementair evenement’, Trouw, 5 December 1952, and ‘Een nieuw en fris geluid’, De Zakenwereld, 13 December 1952; Parliamentary ­proceedings (HTK), 4 December 1952. 19 David McCooey and David Lowe, ‘Autobiography in Australian parliamentary first speeches’, Biography 33, 2010, 68–83. 20 Van den Brink and Zijlstra can be deemed the first economists in office to claim this ­apolitical status of expertise, which would endure throughout both their careers. The liberal economist Johan Witteveen, managing director of the IMF to be, followed suit in the 1950s, completing the trio of influential economic experts in Dutch politics.

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21 Speech, deputies’ meeting, 25 April, 1956. After his term as a minister of finance ended in 1963, Zijlstra took up a seat in the Senate and became prime minister of an interim government in 1966, after which he acted as president of the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) from 1967 until 1982. 22 George Puchinger, Dr. Jelle Zijlstra: Gesprekken en geschriften, Naarden: Strengholt, 1978 and Zijlstra, Per slot van rekening. 23 HTK, 4 December 1952. 24 Ankersmit, Political Representation, p. 189. 25 Original quote: ‘Eerlijkheidshalve moet ik zeggen dat ik toen nog ten onrechte dacht dat voor de grote economische en financiële problemen heldere en goede oplossingen bestonden. (Jonge economen hadden en hebben een tendens tot eigenwijsheid.) Het ging erom de mensen in en buiten het parlement daarvan te overtuigen en vervolgens een en ander met bekwame spoed uit te voeren. Deze nogal a-politieke visie hing natuurlijk samen met mijn ietwat eenzijdige, want academische voorbereiding voor het ­ministersambt. […] Soms denk ik die a-politieke instelling mij nooit geheel heeft verlaten.’ Zijlstra, Per slot van rekening, p. 35. 26 Fourcade, Economists and Societies, p. 261 and Michael Schudson, ‘The trouble with experts – and why democracies need them’, Theory and Society 35, 2006, 491–506. 27 George Puchinger, Minister Zijlstra en de A.R. Partij. Een rede van Minister Zijlstra ­besproken, Groningen: Contact, 1957, pp. 15–6 and P.J. Uitermark, Economische mededinging en algemeen belang: Een onderzoek naar de economisch-theoretische fundering van de mededingingspolitiek, Rotterdam: [s.n.], 1990, p. 223. 28 Frank Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise, London: Sage, 1990, p. 20. 29 Journalists labeled the increased power of Zijlstra’s finance department a ‘coup’. Marga Klompé, Zijlstra’s colleague in the De Quay government and the first female minister in the Netherlands, wrote in her diary about his financial ‘dictatorship’. Diary, government crisis, December 1960, NA 2.21.183.44 M. Klompé, folder 8. 30 Jan Willem Brouwer and Jan Ramakers, Regeren zonder rood: Het kabinet-De Quay, 1959–1963, Amsterdam: Boom, 2007, p. 256. 31 Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accomodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968 and Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise, p. 24. 32 ‘When a new political reality comes into being it always involves the birth of a new political style.’ Ankersmit, Political Representation, p. 159 and Henk te Velde, Stijlen van leiderschap: Persoon en politiek van Thorbecke tot Den Uyl, Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 2002. 33 Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 13–50. 34 James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, Grand Rapids (MI): Eerdmans, 2013. 35 ‘Het neo-liberalisme: Voorgeschiedenis, wezen en critiek’, De Werkgever, 3 May 1951 and Doeko Bosscher, Om de erfenis van Colijn: De ARP op de grens van twee werelden 1939–1953, Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff, 1980, pp. 377–82. 36 Jelle Zijlstra, ‘The neo-liberalism: Prehistory, nature, criticism’, Free University Quarterly 2, 1952, 37–49. 37 Jelle Zijlstra, ‘Christian economic policy’, Free University Quarterly 1, 1951, 112–32. 38 David Baneke, ‘Synthetic technocracy: Dutch scientific intellectuals in science, society and culture’, The British Journal for History of Science 44, 2011, 89–13.

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39 Jelle Zijlstra, ‘De weg naar vrijheid I’, Economisch Statische Berichten 30 July 1952, 578–83; HTK, 8 April 1954 and Andries Hoogerwerff, ‘Sociaal-politieke strijdpunten: Smeulend vuur’, Sociologische Gids 10, 1963, 249–63. 40 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Glencoe: Free Press, 1960 and Seymour Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1960. 41 Ed Jonker, De sociologische verleiding: Sociologie, sociaal-democratie en de welvaartsstaat, Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1988, pp. 235–48; Tity de Vries, Complexe ­consensus: Amerikaanse en Nederlandse intellectuelen in debat over politiek en cultuur 1945–1960, Hilversum: Verloren, 1996, pp. 214–18. 42 Jan Jaap van den Berg, Deining: Koers en karakter van de ARP ter discussie, 1956–1970, Kampen: Kok, 1999. 43 ‘Jelle Zijlstra: Heb ìk dan geen geweten?’, Trouw 8 February 1992. 44 Ankersmit, Political Representation, pp. 187–188. Zijlstra was distinct from other ­politicians, one voter argued, because he plainly argued how things must be instead of how they ought to become. ‘Z. Naber aan JZ, 20 February 1967’, HDC archive J. Zijlstra 590, box 21. 45 As Keynes famously argued in his General Theory: ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else’. Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon, ‘The singularization of history: Social history and microhistory within the postmodern state of knowledge’, Journal of Social History 36, 2003, 701–36. 46 Joseph C. Miller, ‘A historical appreciation of the biographical turn’, in Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (eds.), Biography and the Black Atlantic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, pp. 19–22. 47 Richard Holmes, ‘The proper study’, in Peter France and William St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 44. 48 Miller, ‘A historical appreciation of the biographical turn’, p. 28. As Peter Hall has written about the adoption of Keynesian views in politics and policy circles: ‘The adoption of Keynesian policy generally depended on the triumph of a broader political vision’. Moreover, Hall highlighted the ambiguity resulting from differences in interpretation (translation) from economic theory to political practice. Peter A. Hall, ‘Conclusion: The politics of Keynesian ideas’, in Peter A. Hall (ed.), The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 361–91. 49 Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 655. 50 Harry Landreth and David Colander, History of Economic Thought, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, p. 1. 51 Michael Keren, ‘Economists and economic policy making in Israel: The politics of expertise in the stabilization program’, Policy Sciences 26, 1993, 331–46. 52 Donald [Deirdre] N. McCloskey, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 32, 135. 53 J.R. Zuidema, School of stijl, een vraagstuk van indeling, Rotterdam: Erasmus University Press, 1987 and Hans Visser, ‘Austrian thinking on international economics’, Journal of Economic Studies 15, 1988, 106–22. 54 Joris Vandendriessche, Evert Peeters and Kaat Wils, ‘Introduction: Performing expertise’, in Joris Vandendriessche, Evert Peeters and Kaat Wils (eds.), Scientists’ ­

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Expertise as Performance: Between State and Society, 1860-1960, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015, pp. 1–13. 55 Carol M. Connell, Reforming the World Monetary System: Fritz Machlup and the Bellagio Group, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. 56 Albert Jolink, Jan Tinbergen: The Statistical Turn in Economics: 1903–1955, Rotterdam: Chimes, 2003; Christopher S. Chivvis, ‘Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Rueff and French international monetary policy under Bretton Woods’, Journal of Contemporary History 41, 2006, 701–20 and Christopher S. Chivvis, The Monetary Conservative: Jacques Rueff and Twentieth-century Free Market Thought, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. 57 Alfred C. Mierzejewski, Ludwig Erhard: A Biography, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004; Alfred C. Mierzejewski, ‘Water in the desert? The influence of Wilhelm Röpke on Ludwig Erhard and the social market economy’, The Review of Austrian Economics 19, 2006, 275–87 and Volker Hentschel, Ludwig Erhard: Ein Politikerleben, München: Olzog, 1996. 58 Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007, pp. 4–5. 59 Fourcade, Economists and Societies, p. 128; Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Reason, utopia and the dialectics of enlightenment’, in Richard J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1985; Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, University Park (PA): Penn State University Press, 2001 and Tomas Sedlacek, Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 60 Possibly a new period of consensus in economic thinking is currently in the making, as Paul Krugman predicts, with MIT-trained economists with shared ideas taking up ­influential positions throughout the world. Paul Krugman, ‘The M.I.T. Gang’, The New York Times, 24 July, 2015. 61 Robert Skidelsky, ‘Review Keynes’s Philosophical Development and John Maynard Keynes: A Study in the Psychology of Original Work’, The Economic Journal 106, 1996, 1070–72. 62 John T. Jost, ‘The end of the end of ideology’, American Psychologist 61, 2006, 651–70. 63 Donald [Deirdre] N. McCloskey, The Rhetorics of Economics, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p. 188 and Gaye Tuchman, ‘Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’s notions of objectivity’, American Journal of Sociology 77, 1972, 660–79. 64 Jelle Zijlstra, Gematigd monetarisme: 14 jaarverslagen van De Nederlandsche Bank N.V. 1967–1980, Leiden: Stenfert Kroese, 1985 and F. de Roos, ‘Jelle Zijlstra: A versatile economist’, De Economist 132, 1984, 1–22. 65 Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, p. 89, 365–6. Interestingly however, and in contrast to the broad consensus of the 1950s and 1960s, the economic discipline is now fundamentally divided into two major camps. Peter Hall has characterised these as the saltwater and freshwater approaches to economics. Experts of either view lend their support to different political and policy ideas. See, for example, Jan Marc Berk, ‘Monetaire economie en de crisis: Monetaire economie in crisis?’, TPEdigitaal 8, 2014, 32–47.

10 REDISCOVERING AGENCY IN THE ATLANTIC A biographical approach linking entrepreneurial spirit and overseas companies Kaarle Wirta

In the 1640s the Dutch West India Company (WIC) consolidated its presence on the western coast of Africa.1 It had managed to build up long-term trade relations with the local rulers of Accra and Cape Coast in present-day Ghana. In 1650 a new company appeared on the coast, namely the Swedish Africa Company (SAC). This company would challenge Dutch-African relations and, especially in the Cape Coast area, the Swedes managed to establish themselves alongside the Dutch. However, in 1658 a new power appeared. This time it was the Danes who were looking for a share of the lucrative trade. All three rivals aimed to firmly establish themselves as the leader in the trade in goods and slaves.2 Astonishingly, between 1640 and 1660 these competing organisations had something else in common. They all employed the same individual, a Rostock-born entrepreneur called Henrich Carloff, to manage their trade in Africa.3 A successful presence in West Africa was possible only through firmly maintained political and economic relations with the local rulers. Only such relations could allow a company to build trading stations in the African kingdoms while it competed against its European rivals for dominance in the trade markets and among commercial networks.4 Henrich Carloff was a central character for these companies due to his personal networking and entrepreneurial skills. The example of Carloff conveys the importance of individual agency both in Atlantic history and in the histories of the companies he was involved with – an aspect, moreover, that has received relatively little attention among historians.5 This chapter will therefore bring Atlantic entrepreneurial agency to the fore. By studying the career paths and lives of individuals who served as company officials and entrepreneurs, their agency is rediscovered, and can shed light on as-yet-­ unknown aspects of Atlantic history. Less prominent or marginal figures are also being discovered, and have begun to receive attention from scholars.6 Furthermore, from the company point of view, the example of Carloff shows an individual at the

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centre of events at a time when various European organizations were building their Atlantic commercial empires. This chapter will therefore highlight the relevance of studying individuals in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world and show why individual agency plays a crucial role in the wider narrative of Atlantic history.

Biography and microhistory in the Atlantic Traditional overseas expansion literature has mainly focused on the structures and institutions of the seventeenth century. In this historiography, numerous ­important contributions have been revealed that have increased our understanding of the structure, function and organization of these companies.7 Quantitative study of overseas trade and companies was a characteristic of scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s.8 However, the role of companies was also nuanced, since judging different organisations via one conceptual framework proved difficult: the structures were often heterogeneous, and their decisions were based on various circumstances and ad hoc solutions, as were other developments.9 During the last decades, overseas history has been complemented by the Atlantic approach, which involved a geographically defined network of oceanic maritime trade and offered an accessible framework to early modern historians whose study of commercial activities was not as reliant on the organisational points of view of states and companies. Among the topics included are the large flows of people, goods and information: the approach highlights a trajectory that developed both under and outside of the direct influence of states and companies.10 In doing so, the Atlantic perspective has encouraged a shift of focus away from large structures, towards human agency. ‘The essential shift in perspective is from structures and abstractions – for example “volumes and directions” – to people and their experiences’, writes historian Joseph C. Miller, characterising the biographical turn in early modern Atlantic history. This methodological and theoretical shift towards the individual perspective is characterised by Miller to be as important as the quantitative turn of the 1950s and 1960s.11 Moreover, this change in emphasis has challenged the Eurocentric focus that characterised previous accounts of overseas trade. Contributions such as Biography and the Black Atlantic and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World have shown that non-European networks, institutions and individuals played a significant role in history and fit the Atlantic perspective.12 Within this new conceptual understanding of agency in and around the Atlantic the phenomenon of diaspora, the large-scale movements of people from one side of the Atlantic to the other that resulted in various new forms of cross-cultural identity, has received scholarly attention.13 Moreover, the study of agency has led to a revision in our understanding of how European companies and state organisations functioned and Atlantic trade developed. Recently, gender history has also begun to interest Atlantic scholars. Examples of marriages between European traders and African wives have influenced the view of how local trade networks were developed and structured.14 Furthermore, attention has been given to individuals who were not originally from countries having overseas aspirations, but who

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nevertheless participated in the shaping of the Atlantic world.15 In this context, ‘circum-Atlantic’, a term coined by the historian David Armitage, proves valuable. This concept illustrates how the early modern Atlantic world was an arena of ­interchange and exchange, circulation and transmission. The ‘circum-Atlantic’, according to Armitage, ‘is the history of the people who crossed the Atlantic, who lived on its shores and who participated in the communities it made possible, of their commerce and their ideas, as well as the diseases they carried’.16 This transnational world of cross-cultural practices forms a perspective through which to focus on the agency of Atlantic entrepreneurs. These individuals moved within and outside the framework of institutionalised companies and mercantilist states; their loyalties were negotiable. Atlantic entrepreneurs moved beyond the confines of single companies and states: one could even say they moved across empires.17 These entrepreneurs played dynamic and creative roles in the ways that companies were managed in Europe, and operated and developed overseas. A biographical approach that builds on the theories of microhistory provides an accessible way to study the role of individuals in the Atlantic world.18 The perspective of microhistory aims to explore broader historical contexts and frameworks by investigating small developments and microlevel regions, institutions or individuals. The microlevel is studied not only to illuminate the way individual cases confirm or represent the larger context, but also to uncover and highlight unique particulars of the individual case. Besides confirming established historiography, m ­ icrohistorical research, often based on detailed archival research, can correct, reshape or augment our historical understanding of the case and its historical context. With a ‘microscope’, as the Finnish microhistorian Matti Peltonen has argued pointedly, one can ‘discover very big things’.19 Born in the early 1620s, Henrich Carloff embodied Armitage’s idea of the ­circum-Atlantic throughout his career. He worked for several Atlantic organisations, including the Dutch West India Company (WIC), the Swedish Africa Company, the Danish Africa Company and the French West India Company. In these organisations he occupied various positions, among them director, commander, governor, prosecutor, clerk and investor. For the European companies, Carloff was based in at least three important trading centres in West Africa, and active as well in the Caribbean. The extensive cross-cultural and cross-national trading networks he developed proved to possess a unique value and were to be a crucial asset throughout his career. Working at the crossroads of European and African institutions, Carloff mediated between these playing fields not only to benefit the companies he worked for, but also to enhance his personal wealth. In Atlantic history one should not study European expansion only from one side, focusing on either overseas events or the management of the organisations in Europe. These two facets of expansion were often bound up with each other, and thus studying the lives of individuals moving between Europe and the overseas areas, contributes to a new interpretation of Atlantic history. Historians have mostly observed these individuals’ contributions to the work of a single company in a

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single region; however, many of these men, like Carloff, served both overseas and in Europe, and were continuously open to lucrative offers from other companies. As the historians Mark and Catherine Casson have argued, it is highly important to identify and rediscover these individual entrepreneurs within early modern trading organisations, since they exercised an important influence on the decision making and the overall development of these organisations.20 This chapter will focus more on the social underpinnings of entrepreneurship than on other aspects such as daily transactions of credit, insurance and bills of exchange, which usually predominates in the literature. At the core of entrepreneurial agency in the Atlantic lie four key factors: experience and personal networks, but also trust and reputation. These four factors were crucial to these entrepreneurs’ accumulation of social capital for themselves and bring forward the fundamental contribution individual agents made to the development of the Atlantic world.

Social capital and the entrepreneurial spirit in the Atlantic world Viewed in a microhistorical perspective, the detailed reports sent by various company officials to their directors in Europe illustrate the importance of individual initiative and of personal networks for these companies. Reports from the African coast to the company directors in the Netherlands revealed that from the 1640s onwards there was a constant shortage of capable men. Many men who arrived on the coast quickly died.21 This shortage of men was of great concern to both the officials of the company and the Europeans on the coast.22 For individuals like Carloff, however, this situation also represented an opportunity. Having worked for the WIC in Brazil, Carloff was sent to Africa in the early 1640s. Initially a soldier, he quickly rose through the ranks of the company. In 1645 he became the company’s fiscal, which placed him at the centre of the African branch of the organisation. Moreover, he became a member of the council of Elmina, a position that entailed investigating and prosecuting ships suspected of carrying out illegal trade and smuggling.23 Carloff ’s rapid advancement suggests that he had proved to be a valuable asset for the company. In 1646 he was named factor of the trade at Accra, east of Elmina.24 The previous factor had died; reports state that Carloff would be taking over this position, and according to later reports he got along well with local chiefs.25 When Carloff returned to the coast in the service of both the Swedes and the Danes, these African allies, whom he had first engaged with during his Dutch service, were crucial to his gaining footholds for new powers on the coast.26 In the seventeenth century, experience was an important factor in accumulating social capital in the Atlantic world.The personal links of entrepreneurs, which were part of various personal networks extending throughout the Atlantic realm made up of both locals and of Europeans, could significantly increase the potential for organisations to penetrate areas previously unvisited and could help ensure the success of trade.

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In 1650, when Carloff returned to the Cape Coast, now serving the Swedes, he had overlapping functions. In Sweden, he was a large investor in the company, second only to its patron, the influential merchant Louis de Geer, who was active in both the Dutch Republic and Sweden. The contract between Carloff and the De Geer family stated that he was named commandant of the company in Africa, in charge of all trade.27 Moreover, a letter from the Swedish queen Christina to Fetu, the king of Cabo Corso (West Africa), indicated that Carloff represented the Swedish crown as well. Carloff was to negotiate a profitable diplomatic and economic position for the Swedes using the personal network built up earlier with the local leaders of the Fetu kingdom when he was in the service of the Dutch.28 The Fetu rulers were pleased with the offers provided by Carloff, and soon the Swedish company built a fort and several trading lodges on the coast. Frustrating both the Dutch and the English, Carloff established a Swedish position on the African coast.29 Writing about the importance of individual entrepreneurs, historian Robert Porter observed that De Geer made a particularly ‘spectacular catch’, since he was able to apprehend ‘as Director-Commandant of the Swedish Company the man who was perhaps the most energetic, enterprising and experienced of all the WIC officials on the Gold Coast – the fiscal, Henrich Carloff ’.30 His experience and knowledge of trade and local politics made it possible for a new and inexperienced organisation to successfully penetrate the African West Coast. As a Gold Coast veteran, entrepreneurs such as Carloff played important roles in the Atlantic world and were willing to offer their services to different companies.31 Aiming for personal success, these entrepreneurs were eager to negotiate for a better position, if they saw that one was or might be available. A few years after his Swedish adventure, Carloff joined the newly founded Danish Africa Company.Two decades later, he had switched his loyalty again, this time to France. A report from July 1670 by the French governor of the island of Guadeloupe, Claude François du Lion, praised Carloff and wrote of setting up a trading project with the experienced entrepreneur. Besides stressing the importance of the networks and experience that Carloff had acquired in Guinea on the Africa’s west coast, Du Lion mentioned to his directors that the Dutch and English companies had also approached Carloff, but he had rejected them.32 Moreover, Du Lion’s report provides evidence that Carloff had ventured to the other side of the Atlantic as well. Literature on early modern entrepreneurship has also addressed the importance of trust and reputation.33 Making a name for themselves was important for entrepreneurs. They actively participated in different organisations but also exerted influence and affected the way the companies operated. The information flow of the early modern period was to a large extent based on rumours and influenced by long time lags.34 Therefore, filtering the right information was a difficult and important task, especially for overseas trade. Taking high risks, companies hoped to minimise the possibility of losing money and capital and sought to employ trustworthy, ­well-informed and reputable entrepreneurs.35 Soon after becoming one of the company’s high-ranking officials, Carloff was sent on diplomatic missions, as when in 1646 he was dispatched to the island of

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São Tomé, where rebellious Portuguese sugar planters were dissatisfied with their new Dutch masters.36 Likewise, Carloff went on an inland mission to the north of Accra to mediate a peace agreement between two warring African groups, which then enabled trade routes to be reopened.37 These events, and Carloff ’s earlier professional advancement, illustrates that even though his career was just beginning, he was given tasks that required ample official trust from the company. Interestingly, when Carloff was back in Europe some years later, working as one of the directors of the Swedish company, his conduct came under scrutiny. In a dispute with the other directors, Carloff was accused of conducting illegal trade.38 While this quarrel was raging, Carloff left the company in 1657 to start the Danish Africa Company, an initiative he himself presented to the Danish king, Fredrik III.39 Illegal trade was a frequent theme in this period and also in Carloff ’s career. As the fiscal of the WIC he fought against it, but at the same time he learned the best ways to conduct illegal trade himself.40 Due to the often-blurred lines separating what was considered legal and illegal trade in the early modern Atlantic world, historians struggle to tackle phenomena illicit exchange. As in any overseas venture, legal or not, trade required a resourceful and trustworthy entourage. Throughout his career on the Gold Coast and elsewhere, Carloff surrounded himself with handpicked associates, who were not only seasoned and experienced Atlantic entrepreneurs themselves but also had a proven track record of trustworthiness.We find illustrative examples of Carloff ’s network in the persons of Samuel Smit and Isaac Coymans, two previous WIC veterans on the Gold Coast, whom we find working with Carloff during his Danish period.41 Smit was Carloff ’s assistant when Carloff was in Swedish service but also when Carloff, in Danish service, captured the fort Carolusborg from the Swedes. Carloff appointed Smit to be the acting governor when Carloff returned to Europe.42 Coymans, on the other hand, had been one of Carloff ’s business partners in the WIC, and later he would become one of the directors of the first Danish Atlantic Company. Carloff and his associates would eventually sell Fort Carolusborg to the WIC, which created a conflict among the three companies involved, but Carloff and members of his network nevertheless continued their Atlantic careers.43 Carloff ’s expedition under a Danish commission was funded by another entrepreneurial network operating from Amsterdam. The investors were influential Amsterdam merchants, including Jasper Winckel and Nicolaes Pancras.44 These entrepreneurs circumvented the monopoly of the WIC through their investment involving the experienced entrepreneur Carloff. The gold, which Carloff managed to obtain from the conquered fort, was used to pay the investors in his expedition.45 The European network in which he enjoyed considerable trust can be illustrated by Carloff ’s connection with the previously mentioned French official Du Lion, the Amsterdam merchant De Geer and the famous Dutch diplomat, ambassador and mayor of Amsterdam Coenraad van Beuningen. Of these rich merchants and high-ranking officials, the influential Van Beuningen not only served as advisor to the Danish king when Carloff switched sides in 1657, but he also recommended Carloff in 1679 to William III, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and soon to

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be King of England.46 Notwithstanding Carloff ’s eclectic career, Van Beuningen emphasised Carloff ’s exemplary service to the Dutch Republic and nominated him for the governorship of Surinam.47 Even though it could be argued that Carloff ’s trajectory was in many ways unique, he was by no means the only example of an entrepreneur operating in the Atlantic world. Another example of Atlantic entrepreneurial spirit can be found in the German Caspar Wistar, an individual who built a successful career in the proto-industrial production of glass. He has already been the subject of a scholarly study on individual Atlantic entrepreneurship.48 Wistar, like Carloff, worked in different countries and on several continents. His business ventures culminated with the extension of his activities to North America. Personal networks, experience and his garnering of reputation and trust proved instrumental to his upward trajectory.

Agency in the Atlantic world In Atlantic historiography, historians have often looked at the rivalries among Europeans in the Atlantic, but have mostly done so from the point of view of companies and via the question of monopoly trade versus free trade. Studying Atlantic entrepreneurship suggests that, at least in the seventeenth century, the chartered companies competed among themselves for manpower, knowledge and networks, which were vital in establishing and retaining local trading outposts. Agents such as Carloff played an especially significant role in European companies and were in high demand. Their Atlantic entrepreneurship was based on trust, reputation, their cultivation and maintenance of personal networks and their experience, which together accumulated into a unique cluster of social capital. The career of Henrich Carloff elucidates why entrepreneurs and the agency perspective need to be included in Atlantic history. Studying Carloff ’s Atlantic career reveals a historical narrative that company-centric studies are unable to grasp. Carloff ’s career trajectory represents an example of what Peltonen called the exceptional typical: the seemingly unique narrative of an individual career increases our understanding of the larger historical context of Atlantic trade and company history.49 The case of Carloff shows how entrepreneurs represented a middle-range form of agency in the Atlantic world. Observing Atlantic history through the lens of these individuals, who typically represented such middle-range agency, provides increased nuance to our portrait of how the early modern chartered companies operated overseas. These entrepreneurs were at once exceptional and typical because, through their invaluable experience and know-how, they carried out the everyday business of the companies. Social relations with local communities abroad were built through their personal networks and reputation. We should bear in mind that these entrepreneurs were concerned with their own profits and careers. Working for different companies, switching their loyalty and moving inside and outside of organisational structures, these individual agents pursued personal profit through private trade as well as helped to conduct trade on behalf of their employers. They were loyal to their companies insofar as they

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could gain something, but were quick to change affiliation if a better opportunity arose elsewhere. Transnational entrepreneurship played an important role in this period, even though in historiography, the actions of men such as Carloff have been considered to be obscure, adventurous, problematic and even dangerous for the companies concerned. However, regarded from a point of view that accounts for entrepreneurship, these entrepreneurs were both unique in their way of connecting networks from Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, and representative given the manner in which the circum-Atlantic functioned. The micro-study of entrepreneurs in the Atlantic macro-system complements the Atlantic literature with narratives that run alongside those of companies and institutions. Similarly, biographical studies on early modern merchant families have succeeded in discovering patterns of connections that spanned the globe. As the historian Emma Rothschild argues, (biographical) study of the economic, social and political activities of these families makes it possible to connect family activities to macrohistorical inquiries.50 While her focus is on families and this chapter highlights Atlantic entrepreneurs, the arguments proceed along similar lines. The tales of families and entrepreneurs alike represent the actions of individuals in a global story.This Atlantic world was a cross-cultural milieu, with individual actors moving across empires and through formal and informal networks that transcended the institutional framework of companies and states. The individual case can therefore, as Carlo Ginzburg stated, ‘be theoretically relevant’.51 The life of Henrich Carloff not only shows the unique particularities of his influence and career but contributes to the broader context of our understanding of the Atlantic world in which Carloff represented the entrepreneur par excellence. As Tonio Andrade has suggested, investigating early modern individuals gives historians the possibility of bringing back into focus the people who inhabited the far-flung regions of the Atlantic, and whose lives passed through the structures and institutions we remember today.52 Therefore, paraphrasing the words of Joseph C. Miller, the ultimate goal of the biographical turn for Atlantic history is rediscovering agency in the Atlantic, putting individuals and their experiences back where they belong. ‘If the social scientists, quantifiers, and particularly economists have left the people out of the story, it is our job – as historians – to put them back in’.53

Notes 1 Literature about the WIC, see, e.g. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa: Empires, Merchants and the Atlantic System, 1580–1674, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011 and Henk den Heijer, Geschiedenis van de WIC: Opkomst, bloei en ondergang, Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2013. 2 For literature on the competition between these companies, see, e.g. Johannes Brøndsted, Vore gamle tropenkolonier, vol. I, Copenhagen: Westermann, 1966; Georg Nørregård, Danish Settlements in West Africa, Boston: Boston University Press, 1966 and Robert Porter, European Activity on the Gold Coast 1620–1667, unpublished PhD thesis, Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1975.

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3 There are several variants of the spelling of his name: Caerlof, Carolof, Kaarlof, Karloff and Carloffer. In this article I will use the common spelling Henrich Carloff. 4 Kwame Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. 5 Three exceptions: Henk den Heijer, ‘Een dienaar van vele heren: De Atlantische carrière van Hendrick Carloff ’, in J.Tomas Lindblad and Alicia Schrikker (eds.), Het verre gezicht – Politieke en culturele relaties tussen Nederland en Azie, Afrika en Amerika, Franeker: Uitgeverij Van Wijnen, 2011, pp. 162–80; György Nováky, ‘Small company trade and the Gold Coast: The Swedish Africa Company 1650–1663’, Itinerario 16, 1992, 57–76 and Angela Sutton, ‘The seventeenth-century slave trade in the documents of the English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Prussian Royal slave trading companies’, Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 36, 2015, 445–59. 6 Joseph C. Miller, ‘A historical appreciation of the biographical turn’, in Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (eds.), Biography and the Black Atlantic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, pp. 19–47 and J.H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, Durham (NC): University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 7 Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra (eds.), Companies and Trade, Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981; Ole Justeseen, ‘Kolonierne i Afrika’, in Ole Felbaek and Ole Justeseen, Kolonierne i Asien og Afrika, Copenhagen: Politiken, 1980; Kenneth G. Davies, Royal African Company, London: Longmans Green, 1957 and György Nováky, Handelskompanier och kompanihandel – Svenska Afrikakompaniet 1649–1663 en studie i feodal handel, Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 1990. 8 David Eltis and David Richardson (eds.), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, New Haven:Yale University Press, 2008. 9 Ole Feldbaek, ‘The Danish trading companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth century’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 34, 1986, 204–18. 10 Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2005. 11 Miller, ‘A historical appreciation of the biographical turn’, p. 19–20. 12 Lindsay and Sweet, Biography and the Black Atlantic and J. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 13 Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi and Cátia Antunes (eds.), Religion and Trade: CrossCultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014; Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and CrossCultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, New Haven:Yale University Press, 2009 and José da Silva Horta and Peter Mark, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 14 Pernille Ipsen, Daughters of Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; Pernille Ipsen, ‘“The christened ­mulatresses”: Euro-African families in a slave-trading town’, William and Mary Quarterly 70, 2013, 371–98 and Natalie Everts, ‘Huwen met de blank:West-Afrikaanse vrouwen en interculturele relaties in prekolonial Elmina’, in J. Thomas Lindblad en Alicia Schrikker (eds.), Het verre gezicht: politieke en culturele relaties tussen Nederland en Azië, Afrika en Amerika: opstellen aangeboden aan prof.dr. Leonard Blussé, Franeker:Van Wijnen, 2011, pp. 181–97. 15 John R. Davis, Stefan Manz and Margrit Schulte Beerbühl (eds.), Transnational Networks: German Migrants in the British Empire, 1670–1914, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012.

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16 David Armitage, ‘Three concepts of Atlantic history’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World 1500–1800, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 16. 17 Cátia Antunes, ‘Free agents and formal institutions in the Portuguese empire: towards a framework of analysis’, Portuguese Studies 28, 2012, 173–85. 18 About microhistory and the theory of biography, see Matti Peltonen, ‘What is micro in microhistory?’ in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 105–18. 19 Matti Peltonen,‘Clues, margins and monads:The micro-macro link in historical research’, History and Theory 40, 2001, 347–59. 20 Mark Casson and Catherine Casson, ‘The history of entrepreneurship: Medieval origins of a modern phenomenon’, Business History 56, 2014, 1223–42. 21 Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Oude West-Indische Compagnie (OWIC), call nr. 1.05.01.01, inv.nr. 11, Henrich Carloff to Heeren XIX, 21.05.1646;The Furley Collection, the history of Gold Coast, N4 (1646–47), Balme Library, University of Ghana, p. 29. 22 Porter, European Activity on the Gold Coast 1620–1667, p. 221. 23 Ibid., p. 164. 24 NL-HaNa, OWIC, 1.05.01.01, inv.nr. 11, Henrich Carloff to Heeren XIX, 21.05.1646; Furley Collection, N4 (1646–47), p. 30. 25 NL-HaNa, OWIC, 1.05.01.01, inv.nr. 11, Jacob van der Wel, to Heeren XIX 18.03.1647; Furley Collection, N4 (1646–47), p 154. 26 Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720, p. 62 and Albert van Danzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana, Accra: Sedco Publishing Limited, 1980, p. 23. 27 Stadsarchief Amsterdam (SAA): Notarieel Archief, 875, fo. 315, 12.10.1649; about Carloff in Sweden see, Nováky, Handelskompanier och kompanihandel. 28 ‘Power of Attorney from Queen Christina of Sweden to H. Carloff ’, Riksarkivet (RA), Leufsta Arkiv (LA), vol. 82, Stockholm, Sweden. 29 Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720, p. 62; Porter, European Activity on the Gold Coast 1620–1667, p. 328 and Georg Nørregård, ‘De Danske etablissemanter paa Guineakysten’, in J. Brøndsted (ed.), Vore gamle tropenkolonier, vol. I, Copenhagen: Westermann, 1966, p. 439. 30 Porter, European Activity on the Gold Coast 1620–1667, p. 290. 31 Two illustrative examples are Arent de Groote and Willem Usselincx. Porter, European Activity on the Gold Coast 1620-1667, pp. 119–20. 32 France (FR) Archive Nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), C7A1 F 279, Correspondance à l’arrivée de la Guadeloupe (1649/1815) Claude-Francois du Lion 28.7.1670. 33 Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World – Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks, London: Boydell Press, 2010. 34 Avner Greif, ‘Reputation and coalitions in medieval trade: Evidence on the Maghribi traders’, Journal of Economic History 49, 1989, 857–82; Mark Granovetter, ‘Economic action and social structure: The problem of Embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology 91, 1985, p. 491 and Mirkka Lappalainen, Pohjolan Leijona – Kustaa II Adolf ja Suomi 1611–1632, Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Siltala, 2014, p. 155. 35 Ann M. Carlos and Stephen Nicolas, ‘Agency problems in early chartered companies: The case of the Hudson’s Bay Company’, Journal of Economic History 50, 1990, 853–75. 36 Den Heijer, ‘Een dienaar van vele heren’, p. 166. 37 Klaas Ratelband, Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel Sao Jorge da Mina aan de Goudkust 1645–1647, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1953, p. 262.

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38 Nováky, ‘Small company trade and the Gold Coast’, pp. 172–73. 39 Henrich Carloff to Fredrik III of Denmark, 27.05.1657, Rigsarkivet (RA), Tyske Kancelli Inderigske Afdelning (T.KI.A.), vol. A IX.171; Nováky, Handelskompanier och kompanihandel, p. 201. 40 Den Heijer, ‘Een dienaar van vele heren’, p. 168. 41 Nicolaas de Roever, ‘Twee concurrenten van de eerste West-Indische Compagnie’, in Oud-Holland: nieuwe bijdragen voor de geschiedenis der Nederlandsche kunst, letterkunde, nijverheid 7, 1889, 195–220. 42 Ole Justeseen (ed.), Danish Sources for the History of Ghana 1657–1754.Vol. 1: 1657–1753 Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, 2005, p. 3. 43 For Coymans and Carloff see, e.g. Isaac Coymans, Brieven, confessie; mitsgaders, advisen van verscheyden rechtsgeleerden in de saeck van Isaac Coymans gegeven; als mede de sententie daer op gevolgt, Rotterdam, 1662. 44 De Roever, ‘Twee concurrenten van de eerste West-Indische Compagnie’, pp. 208–9. 45 Porter, European Activity on the Gold Coast 1620–1667, pp. 378–9. 46 Justeseen (ed.) Danish Sources for the History of Ghana 1657–1754, p. 2. 47 NL-HaNa,Verspreide West-Indische Stukken, 1.05.06, inv.nr. 1178, 08.09.167. 48 Rosalind Beiler, Immigrant and Entrepreneur:The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar 1650–1750, College Park (PA): Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 49 Peltonen, ‘Clues, margins and monads’, p. 359. 50 Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 7. 51 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Latitude, slaves, and the Bible: An experiment in microhistory’, Critical Inquiry 31, 2005, 665–83. 52 Tonio Andrade, ‘A Chinese farmer, two African boys, and a warlord: Toward a global microhistory’, Journal of World History 21, 2010, 573–91. 53 Miller, ‘A historical appreciation of the biographical turn’, p. 20.

11 BUILDING BRIDGES TO PAST CENTURIES Religion and empathy in early modern biography Enny de Bruijn

The convictions and opinions of both the biographer and the b­ iographical ­subject form a natural part of any early modern biography; especially when an early modern individual is the subject of study.This becomes apparent when ­present-day conventions, morals and images of humankind are confronted with their ­sixteenth-century counterparts. The contrast between these differing mentalities hands t­wenty-first-century biographers an interpretational instrument to become more aware of the timebound trends and the discourse to which they themselves are subjected, and offers a framework for the interpretation of egodocuments and other primary sources. When a biographer is capable of distinguishing deviations from the contemporary pattern, more insights can be gained about the complex workings of human agency in history. A striking example is the biography of Reyner van Dorth, the late-­sixteenthcentury lord of the manor of Varik, a village in the Dutch province of Guelders. Even when Van Dorth was alive, he attracted attention because of his life choices. Although he was a member of the highest noble circles of Guelders, one of the seven provinces of the Dutch Republic, he married his maidservant Jenneke Jans. Moreover, in a time when all the lords of the surrounding villages allowed their churches to become Reformed congregations, he and his sons did not permit this to happen. Roman Catholicism remained the dominant presence in Van Dorth’s Varik. He is, therefore, an example of an atypical and remarkable individual in the context of his time and place. The time he lived in, the restless second half of the sixteenth century, was important in making his idiosyncrasies possible. The existing structures had crumbled, new ones had arisen and individuals were pressed to make choices. But Van Dorth is also interesting for other reasons. The texts he wrote make us think about how a man in early modern history regarded himself and his contemporaries, how he interpreted life and his own responsibilities therein. Consideration of these texts allows us to look for relations between mentality and individual

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behaviour – a task ideally suited to the micro perspective of biography.1 The ­contrast between the actual life history of this author and the ideals that come forth from the texts he left behind, and also the contrast between the perspective of the sixteenth-century author and the twenty-first-century reader, show how the biographical approach can enlarge historical understanding.

Empathy and historical understanding Sooner or later many biographers question the relevance of their historiographical occupation. This question springs from uneasiness with a vision of the historical process that assumes that the deeds, ideas and emotions of individual people have only anecdotal value in the grand narrative of history, since the ultimate purpose of historical research lies elsewhere: ‘To discover the invisible process of universal history, “that evolutionary movement of our genre, which should be considered as its true content, as its centre and essence”’.2 The purpose of historiography, then, lies in describing the grand narrative, not the individual life story. This explains why representativeness is such an important point of discussion for the field of biography. Should a life be described as being as ‘normal’ and ‘representative’ as possible, in order to gain access to the historical understanding of an era, a group, a tradition, a mentality and thus, ultimately, to confirm general historiography? Or is it better to be concerned with the non-representative aspects of the individual life story – with, for instance, the frictions and abnormalities in a subject’s life, so that the biographer can use them to put into perspective the ‘larger narratives’ and dominant historical visions?3 Biography, however, is not only valuable in confirming or correcting the ­existing larger narrative. Next to ‘seeing important developments and making larger connections’, writing history is also vital to ‘help understand and gain insight into the past’. The empathy and identification achieved through the biographical approach is part of a second goal: to move the historian emotionally and intellectually closer to a state of understanding.4 Researchers who focus on individuals and primary texts appear to be more sensitive to the complexity of the past.When one works on such a micro level, the thousands of threads making up the complex web of the past become visible. By studying the individual, a biographer gains a more empathic kind of historical understanding, one that differs fundamentally from that which results from studying the grand narrative of historical structures and developments. But, of course, the approaches are not mutually exclusive; here the hermeneutic process comes in. ‘To “work the collected fragments into a whole” historians must use their imagination. This does not mean that they can or should invent what happened. It only means – but the “only” is anything but simple – that they should enlarge their own humanity as much as possible so that they can let themselves be impregnated by past realities.’5 In other words: empathy is vital to the interpretation of the past, and its importance becomes most evident when studying individuals and the texts they have left us. When interpreting these texts, one needs to reflect upon the hermeneutic process and the complex relations among text,

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author, context and reader. Does the interpretation seek to discover the author’s intention, is it oriented towards what a present-day reader thinks the text means, or both? How do the contexts of the past and of the here and now affect how the text is interpreted? And ultimately: how can the difference between perspectives and contexts improve a historian’s understanding of the past? The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer provides a useful frame of reference for answering such questions, in which the prejudices and historical distinctness of the historian are incorporated into the process of interpretation. He argues that there can be no disinterested or presuppositionless understanding. The prejudices that have been established by the tradition in which a historian stands affect his interpretation in a way that is not a hindrance but forms ‘the basis of our being able to understand history at all’.6

Interpretation: interaction between perspectives The interaction between modern and historical perspectives can be illustrated by looking at the life and writings of a sixteenth-century Dutch nobleman. To fully understand his narrative within its contemporary context and social structure, one has to venture beyond one’s own conceptual framework and experience the ‘foreign’ conceptual framework of the past. This immediately presents the biographer with a choice: to what extent should a biographer work under the assumptions of a twenty-first-century worldview? To what extent would it be better to adopt the context and mentality of the period in question? Many nonacademic popular biographies ‘connect with their audiences by essentially superimposing the values, ideas, and issues of their readers onto their historical subjects’.7 In scholarly biographies, however, it is strongly preferred ‘to do justice to an agent of history in his own right, and construct a narrative that would take into account his own point of view in his own context’.8 The pendular motion between past and present is therefore important. Whether consciously or not, the questions formulated by the biographer and the reader arise from their own context. To be able to answer these questions, both have to place themselves in the historical context of the biographical subject. People who lived centuries ago not only did everything differently than we do today, they also experienced their lives differently. They had a completely different conceptual framework to address and define their experiences: how they felt, how they perceived illness, how they loved, how they worked, how they dealt with loss or other forms of adversity and even how they died.These unwritten codes or laws not only influenced their behaviour and ideas but also shaped them.9 For this reason it is beneficial to explicitly place the contexts of biographer and subject next to each other. Emphasising the contrast between these two contexts is one of the best ways to highlight that form of historical understanding for which biography especially is so useful. One example to cite is the difference between the definition of identity in present Western culture and in the early modern period. In the twenty-first century, identity is primarily defined by the way one sees oneself (or wants ­

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to see oneself), the way one is viewed by others, and the interaction between these two ­perspectives.10 For early modern people, the part concerning the ‘view of the other’ was very different from what happens today. Most sixteenth-century people were very aware of an invisible, all-seeing being that watched their every move and even judged their thoughts. The belief that somewhere and at some time an accurate, divine judgement or verdict would be passed on human lives, served as the core of their conceptual framework. There was a continuous awareness of the difference between ‘who I am’ (based on one’s own perspective), ‘what others expect from me’ (based on conventions adhered to in the family or by society at large) and ‘who I should be’ (from the divine perspective). Hence, personal identity in the early modern paradigm, heavily determined by Christian tradition, had a solid core: the God-given immortal soul. God was seen as the author and source of all change, but at the same time personal responsibility resided in every individual. Therefore, the most common philosophical points of discussions at that time circled around subjects such as destiny and free will. People’s lives were seen in the light of a theological worldview in which sin and justification played important roles and the processes of conversion and sanctification directly influenced the identity and life of a person.The belief in sin and conversion, heaven and hell, and the immortal soul made the experience of life significantly different from most twenty-first-century lives.11 Politics, economics, church, family, possession, status, class, education, social networks and tradition all played a part in people’s choices in the sixteenth ­century. What present-day biographers have to be aware of, however, is that the individual’s belief in God entailed more than just being a part of church life and structure. Because religious identity at that time was such a determining factor, and because the Reformation in combination with the Dutch Revolt made the entire country religiously reinvent itself, religion was an all-encompassing aspect of life. And it is exactly this dimension which was immensely important in the early modern period. ‘Most modern people, when they use the category of the “person”, especially in the context of the human sciences, ignore the theological dimension’.12

Reyner van Dorth: text in context The life and writings of Reyner van Dorth (1542–1601) are well suited to illustrate the importance of modern as well as historical perspectives. Van Dorth was a nobleman who lived in the Tielerwaard, the southern part of the Dutch province of Guelders. Although the literature doesn’t provide much information about him, archival research makes it possible to glimpse his life’s most important events.13 Research has uncovered a few notable documents hidden among hundreds of texts about land sales, debts, mortgages and inheritances. One document described the process in which three children of Reyner van Dorth and Jenneke Jans were acknowledged as their lawful descendants: ‘I, Dorth, have married Jenneke Jans and declare to have and hold her as my legal wife’. But these children could not claim

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the full inheritance of Reyner van Dorth and had to settle eventually for land bequeathed in his will.14 The fact that we can imagine the faraway world of the sixteenth century, walk around in it and feel amazement, alienation, recognition and compassion for the people of that past results from comparing our own time with the sixteenth century. Things in that world can be recognized from our own lives, or appear incomprehensible at first glance. Most twenty-first century people will not question the fact that Reyner van Dorth inherited most of the things he owned since in our world, too, possessions pass from parents to children. The thing that stands out for us, however, is the fact that three of Van Dorth’s sons, as nonmarital children, were not able to inherit possessions. By asking the first questions that pop into our twenty-first-century heads, the reconstruction of context begins. Who was Reyner van Dorth exactly? Who was Jenneke Jans? What kind of social connections can we ascribe to these two figures? Why did they get married after already having had three children together? Why were these children excluded – at least at first – from much of Van Dorth’s inheritance? The first thing needed is background information. The Van Dorth family was one of the most powerful families among the nobility of Guelders. In 1563 Reyner van Dorth inherited the fief of Varik. A couple of years later he married the noblewoman Johanna van Weze, and together they conceived two daughters, Maria and Johanna.15 In the following years he grew to be one of the most notable noblemen or ‘ambtsjonkers’ of the region. He also enjoyed a certain amount of fame as a genealogist, antiquarian and author of a Quartier Boeck, which he completed in 1584.16 Containing colorful drawings and adorned with family crests, it summed up the lines of descent for all the noble and knightly lineages of the region. Van Dorth’s first wife died around 1580. After her death, or possibly when she was still alive, he entered into a relationship with the household’s maid, Jenneke Jans. The couple, as noted, had three sons: Reinier, Johan and Dirck.17 The thought of marriage would not have crossed Van Dorth’s mind at that time: the social distance was too large between himself and Jenneke Jans and he would not want to jeopardise the inheritance of his lawful daughters. Such a stance was not exceptional. There were many unlawful children who lived in their fathers’ houses and carried their fathers’ names but didn’t receive formal shares of inheritances from their fathers. Even the church was not opposed to this practice; only around the end of the sixteenth century did the predominant religious view begin to change on this subject.18 For years Reyner van Dorth lived with his maid and children. He accepted that his daughters, now grown into adulthood, were to belong to another milieu than his ‘natural sons’.This was the mindset that led Van Dorth to change his will. The manor, the lordship of Varik and its associated rights went to his daughters; Jenneke and her sons received a sizable lifetime annuity which he later complemented with a partial inheritance which consisted of a couple of plots of land.19 It was quite normal for a nobleman to secure his nonmarital children’s futures this way. That Van Dorth married Jenneke Jans in 1599 in the presence of a priest from Utrecht and the aldermen from Tuil was, however, exceptional.20 Did it occur

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to Van Dorth, a genealogist, that he would henceforth be remembered as the man who had married his maid?21 Did his marriage have anything to do with the changing balance between worldly and religious honour, and was religious honour more important to him? To answer these questions, we need to learn more about Van Dorth’s opinions concerning religious topics. Being a Roman Catholic, he was not atypical of his class or region. But he did stand out when he sent a letter to the chapter of St. Mary’s Church in Utrecht, in which he requested that his friend, the humanist and historian Pieter Bockenberg, be named pastor of Varik. He wrote that he had repeatedly requested that he and his ‘subjects’ in the parish of Varik, the ‘hungry and thirsty sheep of the sheepcote of Christ’, be provided with ‘a good shepherd’ – if possible a pastor who was not, like so many others, unsuited for this position, ‘unlearned and infamous persons who are not able to control themselves, to the greatest distress and sorrow of us all’. The letter suggests that Van Dorth took religion very seriously.22 While personal and political motives could also have played their part in his request, it is quite remarkable that other Catholic noblemen were not interested in the arrival of a new pastor. In 1577 all public religious ceremonies had been postponed until further notice, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic. The government had intended the whole region to be reformed, but because of the war – battles raged for decades in the region – and the countervailing actions of Catholic noblemen, this did not happen. Many villages continued without Catholic pastors or Protestant ministers: the inhabitants complained about living as ‘heathens and Turks’.23 This made Van Dorth’s request for a pastor, against the government’s wishes, so remarkable, and a significant sign of his involvement with religion. The foreword of his Quartier Boeck shows several overlapping elements of the foundation of Van Dorth’s philosophy: ancestry, family, nobility and honour. This foreword should be approached cautiously, because the author, like most of his contemporaries, followed well-known rhetoric models.24 His choice in quotes and the way he presented them are interesting nonetheless. For instance, the title page is adorned with a selection of texts from the Bible and classical literature, most of which are given in Latin. For instance: ‘Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us, who were the glory of their times’. ‘The brave are born from the brave and good, a fierce eagle does not breed a peaceful dove’.25 The quotes almost deterministically present an image of humanity in which heredity, legality and nobility are emphasised. The noble virtues were passed on from father to son, untouchable and unchangeable. Van Dorth also showed his concern about pure blood, proper marriages and lawful offspring in the text following the title page. Many allusions were made to a clear world order, where God was the grand director and ruler whose authority trickled down to kings and emperors and eventually to the lower tiers of government and the people. That order was given beforehand and should be maintained. God provided a place and a task for everyone on earth. Some were born to lead, others to serve, according to a class-based hierarchy.

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Only then did Van Dorth emphasise the responsibility of the individual: ‘Those that have received such an honor and glory from our Lord God, ought to conduct themselves nobly, honourably and virtuously, so that they will be worthy of their title and glory and be careful and attentive to pass these things on unto their descendants’. This notion of individual responsibility received somewhat greater stress in later additions to his foreword, written in the margins and on a separate piece of paper.26 Now,Van Dorth argued that one could revel in nobility because of lineage and impressive titles, but if one did not show virtue, such things were not worth all that much. Quotes like these are found in many texts from the same period and underline the accepted way of looking at ancestry and class.The only difference is Van Dorth’s choice of emphasis, which made the later additions to his foreword so interesting: it seems as if the author was calling himself to order. He repeatedly wrote about the old lineage, the inherited characteristics and virtues, the noble blood and the exquisite nature that must be passed on from father to son. He consistently made these conceptions more nuanced by adding that each nobleman needed to fulfil his own nobility. True nobility sprung forth not from succession and offspring, but from the will to do virtuous acts. In Van Dorth’s supplements it seemed as if he wanted to emphasise the liabilities of nobility and the life choices a nobleman must make and to put the importance of blood and ancestry in perspective. This was an accent that he wanted to add, but the real weight of his additions becomes clear when viewed against the background of the events and choices in his own life.

Agency: the connection between mentality and behaviour When texts can be combined and contrasted with everything that is known about the author – in accordance with the general mentality of his era, region and class – the possible relationship, interactions and friction between (internal) mentality and (external) behaviour become visible. Those who read Van Dorth’s Quartier Boeck without knowing anything about him, would never suspect that he himself had three nonmarital children and married far below his status. Those who, on the ­contrary, only know about Van Dorth’s life without having read any of his work, would not expect him to have written with such awareness about social standing. Only those who combine life and work from a biographical perspective are able to see the complexity of this forgotten life and this man’s battles with the tensions between ideals and reality.27 The sentence that Van Dorth added to his foreword, invoking the unlawful children who could inherit the ‘blood nobility’ of their father, formed a remarkable contrast to the quote on his title page: ‘How beautiful is the chaste [Lat: casta] birth, with virtue […], but bastardly slips shall not take deep rooting, nor lay any fast foundation’.28 He probably was not married to Jenneke Jans when he wrote this and his three sons had not yet been made legitimate. Obviously Van Dorth cannot really handle the fact that his children will not carry on the nobility that is such an important part of his own identity.

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What motivated him to marry his mistress so late in his life? The Tielerwaard archives hold many documents concerning financial provisions for ‘natural’ ­children, but Van Dorth’s marriage certificate is unique.29 Marriages of men with women of a lower class occurred sporadically within the noble circles of Guelders and Overijssel, but they were certainly not common. A nobleman could explicitly opt to refuse a marriage with the mother of his nonmarital children, or he could choose to postpone it until his deathbed. On one particular occasion a nobleman agreed to marriage only after a long bout of persuasion on the part of his ­confessor.30 This shows that this was a time when traditional views were slowly shifting and the s­ixteenth-century nobleman in ‘concubinage’ was faced with a dilemma: was worldly honour more important than religious duty, or vice versa? In his writings, Reyner van Dorth appeared as a man who valued not only the honour and tradition of being a nobleman, but also humanist erudition, piety and sincerity. For him, it was not enough to be part of a certain circle, to have a certain status or to bear a certain name. Personal virtue, faith and moral responsibility were vitally important in light of the divine assignment given to every person, wherever he or she stood socially. That conviction, which seemed to grow stronger for Van Dorth over the course of his life, accorded with his late second marriage and his concern for pastoral care for his local ‘subjects’ of Varik. He showed himself to be, on the one hand, an heir to the old knightly virtues and, on the other hand, a child of a new time, in which the struggles of the Reformation and CounterReformation were defeating the old religious paradigm where one bargained with heaven and saints and bartered via indulgences for rewards in the afterlife. In this new and more personal form of spirituality that emerged during the sixteenth century, visible in Van Dorth’s life, the influences of the Reformation, the CounterReformation and humanism flowed together. People increasingly believed that faith should penetrate the individual’s personality and character, and that this spiritual process would result in love and find expression in one’s life. At the end of the sixteenth century, the definition of noble honour therefore changed. The old noble structure, with its exaltation of virile behaviour and its extramarital relations and nonmarital children, no longer suited the changing religious framework, which now mandated stricter ethical norms and an emphasis on personal devoutness. Moral notions grew to be of such importance that the status of a member of the college of knighthood was diminished if he lived in concubinage or committed adultery or manslaughter.31 More emphasis was placed on ‘religious honour’ – and Reyner van Dorth seems to be an early example of this development. And yet the consequences that Van Dorth attached to these new moral concepts of honour and responsibility remain remarkable. Even if he was starting to think of concubinage differently, he could still have chosen a second spouse of equal status and provided his maid Jenneke Jans with an annuity and the freedom to marry another man. This would have solved the problem in an honourable manner and was exactly what Van Dorth had in mind in 1585, according to his will at that time.32 Instead he chose to legitimate his sons (which could have been arranged

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without a marriage) and marry his maid in 1599. This act went against the interests of his family’s dynasty and was not in accordance with the noble codes he himself valued. It is therefore not surprising that it was explicitly recorded that Van Dorth’s inheritance would go to the children of his first, noble marriage – according to the codes of family and group: there was no other way. The mentality lying at the base of the religiously coloured concept of ‘honour’ that Van Dorth spoke of, provides the best explanation of his behaviour. It shows he accepted and took seriously the church’s new rules before most people in his part of Guelders did. If he really believed that one was obliged to marry a person with whom one has had intercourse (in accordance with church doctrine) and was convinced that God’s judgement was more important than the sum of all human judgements, these convictions would perfectly explain why he made such radical choices near the end of his life. This is the point where analysis and reconstruction are transformed into understanding and imagination. The extra dimension that biography adds to historiography lies in ‘its insight into human character, experience of life, and human emotion, as guides to our own complex self-understanding, as individuals’.33 The biographer strives to empathise with an individual by observing that person’s life and finding out how thoughts, emotions, ideas, personal convictions, willpower and character influenced the ­person’s behaviour and, thus, interaction with the historical context. The contrast between the biographer’s framework and the framework of the historical agent creates the space required for interpretation, and at the same time brings forth two different perspectives on the same events. The biographical approach is ideally suited for researching these kinds of ­contrasts because personal documents are such powerful gateways into ideas, mentalities and paradigms of ages gone by. This way, it becomes possible to gain insight into the biographee’s personal views and observing deviations from contemporary patterns.34 By studying people in relation to their context we can ‘grasp the interaction between individuals, their performances and representations, and their communities, which is one of the rewards of present-day cultural history’.35 But eventually the biographer’s task encompasses more than analysing visible ‘performances and representations’. The behaviour and actions of historical individuals can be researched and studied, their texts can be analysed and interpreted, but behind the behaviours and texts lie personal views, convictions and emotions – the most elusive and substantial categories a biographer can use. To paraphrase the words of A.S. Byatt’s from the novel Possession: there are thoughts and feelings that leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such thoughts and feelings had never been.36 The biographical method is by far the most suitable method to try and unveil these seemingly indefinable concepts, which in the case of Reyner van Dorth involved the emotions bound up with honour, love and religion.Values that one cannot turn into hard facts, but without which his life is hard to understand.

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Notes 1 Cf. Willem Frijhoff, ‘Experience and agency at the crossroads of culture, mentality and contextualization: The biography of Everhardus Bogardus (c. 1607–1647)’, in Hans E. Bödeker (ed.), Biographie schreiben, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003, pp. 65–106; Simone Lässig, ‘Introduction: Biography in modern history, modern historiography in biography’, in Volker Berghahn and Simone Lässig (eds.), Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography, New York: Berghahn, 2008, pp. 1–26 and Frits van Oostrom, Maerlants wereld, Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1996, pp. 7–16. 2 Sabina Loriga, ‘The role of the individual in history: Biographical and historical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth century’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, p. 75. 3 Hans Renders, ‘The limits of representativeness: Biography, life writing and microhistory’, in Renders and De Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 129–38; Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, ‘Introduction: The challenges of biography studies’, in Renders and De Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 7 and cf. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp 16–7. 4 Matthew Avery Sutton, ‘Forum: Religion and the biographical turn’, Religion and American Culture 24 2014, p. 27; cf. Linda S. Levstik & Keith C. Barton, Teaching History for the Common Good, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 150–65. 5 Loriga, ‘The role of the individual in history’, pp. 92–3. 6 Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press, 1969, p. 182 and HansGeorg Gadamer, Truth and Method, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 277–304. 7 Sutton, ‘Forum: Religion and the biographical turn’, p. 26. 8 Willem Frijhoff, ‘The improbable biography: Uncommon sources, a moving identity, a plural story?’, in Berghahn and Lässig, Biography between Structure and Agency, pp. 229–30. 9 Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers, ‘Introduction: On the early modernity of modern memory’, in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen (eds.), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013, pp. 15–9. For an overview of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the self from Petrarch to Descartes’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 17–28. 10 Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007, pp. 32–33; cf. Frijhoff, ‘The improbable biography’, pp. 221–2 and Levstik and Barton, Teaching History for the Common Good, p. 65: the concept of personal identity is ‘not necessarily a universal construct, and the use of the term identity in this way has been common only since about the 1950s’. 11 Enny de Bruijn, Eerst de waarheid, dan de vrede: Jacob Revius 1586–1658, Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2012, pp. 30–1; Burke, ‘Representations of the self from Petrarch to Descartes’, pp. 17–28; Levstik and Barton, Teaching History for the Common Good, p. 65; Henning Luther, ‘Der fiktive Andere: Mutmaszungen über das Religiöse an Biographie’, in Albrecht Grözinger and Henning Luther (eds.), Religion und Biographie: Perspektiven zur gelebten Religion, Munich: Kaiser, 1987, pp. 71–5 and Roger Smith, ‘Self-reflection and the self ’, in: Porter, Rewriting the Self, p. 50. 12 Smith, ‘Self-reflection and the self ’, p. 50.

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13 W.J. d’Ablaing van Giessenburg, De ridderschap van het kwartier van Nijmegen: namen en stamdeelen van de sedert 1587 verschenen edelen, The Hague: Van Stockum, 1899, vol. I, no. 29, p. 142; J.H. Hofman, ‘Het geslachtboek der heeren van Dorth’, Bijdragen en mededelingen Gelre, 1900, vol. 3, pp. 99–101 (but both genealogical overviews contain errors); B.A. Vermaseren, ‘P.C. Bockenberg (1548–1617), historieschrijver der Staten van Holland’, Bijdragen en mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 1956, vol. 70, pp. 63–81; R. Staverman et al., ‘Hungerige und dorstige schapen der coyen Christi’: geschiedenis van de parochie Varik, Varik: Parochie H.H. Petrus en Paulus, 1979, pp. 37–45 and Conrad Gietman, Republiek van adel: Eer in de Oost-Nederlandse adelscultuur 1555–1702, Utrecht:Van Gruting, 2010, pp. 23, 47, 75, 80. 14 Gelders Archief (Guelders Archive, GA), Arnhem, 0201/1245, f. 42v. I can only sketch the outlines here. A more in-depth archival research is needed in order to create a detailed portrait. 15 J.J.S. Sloet, Register op de leenaktenboeken van het Vorstendom Gelre en Graafschap Zutphen: het kwartier van Nijmegen, vol. 5, Arnhem: Gouda Quint, 1924, no. 232. 16 Reijnald [Renatus] van Dorth van Varik, Quartyr Boock ende Stam Charten der sestyn Quartyren van sommigen Keyseren, Coeninghen, Vorsten […] van Nederlandt, 1584. The original is kept in the private archive of Schloss Vornholz. The text can be seen on microfilm at the GA, 1172/304. A copy is kept in the archives of the Hoge Raad van Adel (High Council of Nobility).Thanks to Dr. Conrad Gietman I was able to look at the text of the foreword of this copy. 17 When Van Dorth secured annuity for Jenneke Jans and her children in 1585, the youngest was not born yet. GA 0201/1243, f. 102–3. Literature about the Van Dorth family does not offer information about Jenneke, only her name is mentioned as ‘Jenneke van Velp’ or (erroneously) ‘Jenne Kerstans’, which is probably a reading error for Jenneke Jans. 18 H.F.K. van Nierop, ‘Adellijke bastaarden in de zestiende eeuw’, in S. Groenveld, M. Mout and I. Schöffer (eds.), Bestuurders en geleerden, Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1985, pp. 14–5. 19 GA 0201/1243, f. 102–3. 20 GA 0201/1245, f. 42v, cf. 42–3. 21 David van Hoogstraten, Matthaeus Brouerius van Nidek and Jan Lodewyk Schuer, Groot algemeen historisch, geographisch genealogisch en oordeelkundig woorden-boek, vol. 3, Amsterdam/Utrecht/The Hague, Brunel [et al.]., 1727, p. 172. 22 The complete text of the letter in B.A. Vermaseren, ‘P.C. Bockenberg (1548–1617), historieschrijver der Staten van Holland’, Bijdragen en mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 70, 1956, 58–9. 23 F.W. van Toor, ‘De reformatie in Ophemert: Over schapen, herders en jonkers’, Mededelingen van de Historische Kring West-Betuwe, 41, 2013, 74–7 and C. Ravensbergen (ed.), Classicale Acta 1573–1620: IX: Provinciale synode Gelderland, The Hague: Huygens ING, 2000, pp. xxx–xxxii. 24 On the problem of the rhetorical structure of early modern sources: Burke, ‘Representations of the self from Petrarch to Descartes’, pp. 23–4; Jan Fontijn, ‘Vorm zonder vent: Een wetenschappelijke biografie over Vossius’, Biografie Bulletin 10, 2000, 143–4 and Van Oostrom, Maerlants wereld, pp. 14–5. 25 ‘Laudemus viros gloriosos & Parentes nostros in generatione sua [etc.] qui gloriam adepti sunt et in diebus suis [habentur in laudibus]. Cf. Sirach 44:1, 7: ‘Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis, nec imbellem feroces progenerant aquila columbam. Die dapper luyd kommen van dappern luyde her, ein duyf en kümpt van geinen adler’. Horatius, Carmina, IV, 4, pp. 29, 31–2.

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26 It is possible that the added texts were written not by Van Dorth himself but rather by his son, son-in-law or grandson. Nevertheless, the use of words, tone and style seem to be comparable to the foreword and what appears in the handwriting in the margins as well. I therefore assume that Reyner van Dorth wrote the additions. 27 See, for a conceptual elaboration of the interplay between private and public in biography, Hans Renders, ‘Roots of biography: From journalism to pulp to scholarly based non-fiction’ and Hans Renders, ‘The personal in the political biography’, in Renders and De Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 24–42, 216–221. 28 ‘O wie schoon is die kuysche geboerte mitt den clairheit […] Mer die Ehebreeckige plant wint nyet diepe Wortelen, set oick geenen vasten gront’. Reyner van Dorth’s translation differs from vernacular Bible translations (‘Better it is to have no children, and to have virtue’), but concurs with the Vulgate, cf. Liber Sapientiae Salomonis 4:1, 3: ‘O quam pulchram est casta generatio, cum claritate! immortalis est enim memoria illius, quoniam et apud Deum nota est, et apud homines […] [sed] spuria vitulamina non dabunt radices altas nec stabile firmamentum conlocabunt’. 29 In the archive of the Court of Tuil (GA 0201) I have not found a second example. 30 This relates to Lubbert Mulert tot Kranenburg: A.J. Gevers and A.J. Mensema, De havezaten in Salland en hun bewoners, Alphen aan de Rijn: Canaletto, 1983, p. 440. 31 Gietman, Republiek van adel, p. 272–3. 32 GA 0201/1243, f. 102–3. 33 Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 10. 34 Van Oostrom, Maerlants wereld, pp. 14–5. 35 Frijhoff, ‘The improbable biography’, p. 230. 36 A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance, London: Random House, 2012, p. 508. Cf. Richard Holmes, ‘The proper study?’ in Peter France and William St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 16–7.

12 PALATABLE AND UNPALATABLE LEADERS Apartheid and post-apartheid Afrikaner biography Lindie Koorts

On one of the coldest nights of the South African winter, celebrated Afrikaans poet and author, Antjie Krog, gave the keynote address at the Sunday Times Literary Awards in Johannesburg. It was June 2015, just over 18 months after Nelson Mandela’s death, and literary circles and university campuses were convulsing. A few months before, at the University of Cape Town, a student flung faeces at a statue of arch-imperialist and maverick Randlord, Cecil John Rhodes, setting off a movement which, in the age of Twitter, was quickly dubbed #RhodesMustFall. After students occupied the university’s administration building and disrupted a council meeting, the university authorities relented and removed the statue. Rhodes became the symbol of a movement that agitated for the ‘decolonisation’ of the university landscape which, 21 years after full democracy, remained dominated by white academics.1 Nearly overnight, statues of colonial figures across the country were defaced. When Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in Johannesburg was splashed with white paint, there was shock and outrage. However, angry black activists pointed out that Ghandi, who has been celebrated in South Africa for pioneering non-­ violent protest and civil disobedience during his time in the country, was also racist towards black people, and insisted that he did not deserve any honours or commemoration.2 Previously heroic icons were not being spared, but instead subjected to calls for a comprehensive revision of both the past and the present. The ‘decolonisation’ movement soon spread to other university campuses and into literary circles. At the Franschoek Literary Festival, a young black author told his white audience that they were an unnatural sight and set the headlines ablaze by announcing his own withdrawal from the ‘white literary system’.3 The debates that followed not only tore at the pervasive inequality of South Africa’s social and intellectual landscape, but also expressed hitherto unimagined anger at the negotiated settlement which ended apartheid. Nelson Mandela, it was fumed, had sold out the liberation struggle and deprived it of its victory by negotiating with the

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apartheid government. Moreover, by stressing reconciliation after 1994, he had demonstrated a preoccupation with soothing white fears, thereby robbing blacks of the ­opportunity to express their justified anger.4 The debate called South Africa’s post-1994 foundation myth, and the portrayal of its central figures, into question. It was in this context that Antjie Krog, who had previously won the Alan Paton Award, South Africa’s highest award for English non-fiction, gave her speech. As a white Afrikaner, who had assisted black activists during apartheid, thereby becoming a target herself, Krog dwelt on the failure of whites to atone for centuries of racial inequality and decades of apartheid. Referring to the years immediately after the transition, Krog said: ‘After the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] there was intense hope for a White Prince of Reconciliation: a powerful not-guilty white man to say, on behalf of all whites, I am sorry, we want to build with you a new society of sharing, tell us what to do’.5

A nation adrift Krog’s statement was intended to convey irony: there was no such thing as a ‘powerful not-guilty white man’. Yet, it also reflected a historical preoccupation with prominent individuals, and in Krog’s case, an almost instinctive urge to give Afrikaners a face by conflating them and their leaders.6 It is a notion that has echoed throughout twentieth century Afrikaner nationalist historiography and into contemporary popular discourse. In a far cry from Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s idealisation of a ‘rainbow nation’ and a state-driven ­‘nation-­building ­project’, post-1994 white Afrikaners are stereotypically depicted as sighing around their braaivleis (barbecue) fires – the last whites-only private space – that Afrikaners are rudderless, without a leader of their own in a new dispensation. This sentiment was among those investigated by the Dutch journalist, Fred de Vries, who recorded a series of interviews with prominent Afrikaners that were collated into a book with an encapsulating title: in Dutch, Afrikaners: Een Volk op Drift, which translates as ‘Afrikaners: A Nation Adrift’.7 The Afrikaans title is more difficult to translate, but even more striking: Rigtingbedonnerd: Op die spoor van die Afrikaner post-‘94. A rough translation would be ‘Damned directionless: On the trail of the Afrikaner post-‘94’ – directionless being uttered as a curse.8 At no point was this sentiment more apparent than in early 2007, when the popular Afrikaans crooner Bok van Blerk took the Afrikaans community by storm with his hit ballad ‘De La Rey’. Koos de la Rey was a Boer general, whose triumphs on the battlefield and perseverance to the bitter end of the Anglo-Boer War made him a nationalist hero, and whose three-syllable surname lent itself to a waltz-like repetition.9 Not only did this device turn the song’s rhythmic lyrics into a countrywide earworm, but it also expressed a nostalgic yearning for the return of a leader such as the heroic old fighter. Newspaper columns were flooded by opinion pieces reflecting on the disaffection of the Afrikaner youth and Afrikaners’ complicated relationship with their history in a post-1994 context.10 At the far right end of the spectrum, in particular, the discourse veered (and continues to veer) between rants

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against ‘traitors’ such as F.W. de Klerk, whose National Party (NP) government negotiated a settlement with Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), and repeated yearnings for a strong leader to come to the Afrikaners’ rescue.11 This may be a largely popular picture, but it is echoed in Afrikaner historiography and biography.While these genres may be grounded in academic research, they also reflect political currents. Afrikaner historiography and biography (which is not limited to work by Afrikaners, but rather portrayals of Afrikaners), offers a particularly interesting case study. It deals with a community that achieved the height of political power through nationalist mobilisation, which necessitated a heroic history populated by equally heroic characters. That narrative was destroyed with the surrender of political power in 1994, followed by attempts to construct a new narrative, with new heroes, under a new dispensation. While this was happening, divergent trends in the wider South African historiography, as shall be discussed later, were far from stagnant.

A narrative of nationalist heroes In the era before 1994, Afrikaners were brought up with a nationalist narrative that stretched back to 1652, when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a refreshment station at the Cape. By 1707, so the narrative went, an Afrikaner identity was born when the young Hendrik Biebouw, in defiance of the landdrost of Stellenbosch, refused to be disciplined by the authorities because, he declared, ‘I am an Afrikaner’. It was the first recorded instance of a white person using the term to claim an Afrikaner, as opposed to a European, identity. The fact that he was being disciplined for drunken behaviour and soon after deported from the Cape was conveniently ignored.12 The nationalist narrative then followed the so-called free burghers, who pursued settlement and farming outside the confines of the VOC, in the process migrating further and further away from the Cape, towards the eastern frontier. Here, they not only found themselves in internecine struggles with the Xhosa for land and cattle, but they also sought to establish their independence from the authorities at the Cape. This became increasingly difficult after the British assumed control of the Cape in 1806 and sought to establish both their administrative and cultural authority over the entire territory.This was accompanied by the much-hated policy of Anglicisation, in which all state institutions, from the courts to the civil service, had to adopt English. English-speaking teachers and clergymen were imported to Anglicise the schools and churches, one of the reasons being, so the story went, to tame the irascible frontiersmen by turning them into Englishmen. To make matters worse, so nationalist historians maintained, the British authorities, aided by English missionaries and philanthropists, chose the side of the blacks and the Khoisan against the white farmers, who were left vulnerable to Xhosa raids and a barrage of destructive frontier wars. White farmers were further impoverished when they lost their slaves after slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834 (nationalist texts focused on the losses to farmers, without dwelling

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on the practice of slavery). All of these factors converged into push factors, which gave rise to what became known as the Great Trek: the organised migration of white farmers – known as Voortrekkers – from the Cape Colony into the northern interior, away from what they deemed to be a hostile government. The Great Trek became one of the two focal points of Afrikaner nationalist mythmaking: it ranged from tales of deprivation in the untamed interior to bloody clashes with Africans. The narrative reached its zenith with the murder of the Voortrekker leader, Piet Retief, by the Zulu king, Dingane, and the attack of a Zulu regiment on a Voortrekker laager. The clash became known as the Battle of Blood River – named after the blood of thousands of Zulu corpses, which turned the waters of the Ncome River red. On this occasion, the Voortrekkers purportedly made a covenant with God that their descendants would, in exchange for a victory, honour the day in perpetuity. This story helped to cement the close relationship between Afrikaner nationalist history and religion. When, in 1979, the Afrikaner historian, F.A. van Jaarsveld, questioned the historical validity of the covenant, he was publicly humiliated by a group of right-wing fanatics, who tarred and feathered him in front of an academic audience.13 The other nationalist focal point was the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). Apart from its heroic generals, such as Koos de la Rey, Christiaan de Wet and Louis Botha, it featured noble and martyred statesmen in the form of the two Boer republics’ presidents, Paul Kruger and Marthinus Steyn. The greatest martyrs, however, were the 27,000 Boer women and children who had succumbed to disease and starvation in British concentration camps. Their tale of suffering, along with the republics’ humiliating loss of independence, would become one of the drivers of Afrikaner nationalism in the twentieth century, with the restoration of republican independence as one of its key missions.14 When South Africa became a republic in 1961, prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd and his predecessors were lauded as the heroes who had fought a decades-long battle for its achievement. Twentieth century politicians became the strongmen who, after the institution of apartheid in 1948, led their people through a desert of international hostility.The narrative came to an abrupt end when F.W. de Klerk announced the release of Nelson Mandela on 2 February 1990. What followed was a period of transition, in which this formerly powerful community had to be reintegrated (some may even say rehabilitated) into a new political order, with a new heroic narrative.

History and biography Afrikaner biography, naturally, followed the same pattern. It was pioneered in the early twentieth century by the journalist and amateur historian, Gustav Preller. Preller was responsible for popularising the Great Trek, replete with its own hero, Piet Retief, of whom he published a biography.15 As historical research became professionalised in the 1930s, the academic historians who came after him, followed suit. Many had studied in the Netherlands and Germany, and had been influenced by the methodology of the German historian, Leopold von Ranke, as

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well as the ideas of Dutch historians such as Johan Huizinga and Jan Romein.16 Their work reflected the sophistication of their training, but their subjects remained the same: the Great Trek, the Boer republics and the Anglo-Boer War remained the focal point of their research.17 This meant that the biographies published during this era focused on Voortrekker leaders and Anglo-Boer War heroes. Some of the most notable scholarly biographies to emerge were H.B. Thom’s biography of the Voortrekker leader, Gert Maritz, and D.W. Krüger’s biography of Paul Kruger, the erstwhile president of the Transvaal.18 These works were thoroughly researched and also thoroughly hagiographic, thereby demonstrating the extent to which historical skill and nuance can still be held captive by ideological admiration for one’s subject. They were written at a time when nationalist politicians were busying themselves with a nation building project, and it should be kept in mind that Afrikaner nationalism, like many other nationalisms, had its origins in a language movement, which was led by Afrikaner intellectuals: novelists, poets, lawyers, theologians – and historians. Nationalism requires a heroic history and Afrikaner historians answered the call, fleshing out the heroes of the nationalist narrative. Biographies of twentieth century nationalist politicians were especially uncomplicated. While the international community was scathing in its criticism of apartheid, they told a story of Afrikaner nationalism that sought to glorify and defend their subjects, and lauded their ‘achievements’ in setting up racialised structures that promised to ‘solve’ South Africa’s complicated race ‘problem’. This was certainly the case with J.B.M. Hertzog, who was prime minister from 1924 to 1939, and whose segregationist legislation helped to lay the groundwork for apartheid.19 An encyclopaedic two-volume biography by a team of researchers at the erstwhile Institute for Contemporary History at the University of the Free State, apart from the questionability of writing a biography through team collaboration, clearly (and I would contend deliberately) ignored material that attested to the deterioration of Hertzog’s mental state towards the end of his career. Such revelations would have dented the heroic image of the legal scholar, who became a Boer war general and then prime minister.20 G.D. Scholtz’s biography of prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1958–1966), the man who was dubbed the ‘architect of apartheid’, and who had been his editor at the Transvaler newspaper, was so hagiographic that even Scholtz’s nationalist contemporaries dismissed it as a populist exercise. It was said, with some mockery, that the book’s subtitle might as well have been ‘The man who was never wrong’.21 D.F. Malan, the first of the apartheid prime ministers (1948–1954), became the subject of two biographies, one by Bun Booyens, dealing with the first half of life, before he entered politics, and the other by Malan’s friend and admirer, H.B. Thom, who focused on his political career.22 As was typical of Afrikaner scholarship at the time, Booyens used his biography to document Malan’s early life, down to the smallest minutiae. Thom, on the other hand, tried to untangle the various components of Malan’s political career by breaking it down into a thematic structure – therein lay one of his biography’s chief failings. Most significantly, both books reflected the authors’ unquestioning and unreflective admiration for their subject, which mirrored

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the context in which these books were written. This was thrown into sharp relief as both the political and historiographical tide turned. By the 1970s, broader historiographical trends began to shift. South African historiography, as pursued by scholars based at universities, was necessarily the product of white historians, since blacks faced insurmountable obstacles to obtaining such positions.23 However, this is not to say that the scholarly landscape was an uncomplicated one. Not all Afrikaner historians were nationalists, and in 1979, the first key works appeared which complicated Afrikaner history and faced up to questions of race – which had previously been neglected by the white-centric nationalist narrative. Hermann Giliomee and the American scholar Richard Elphick published a seminal work which examined the origins of South Africa’s racial order at the early Cape and on the eastern frontier – one of the key arguments being that it was shaped, irrevocably, by the practice of slavery.24 Albert Grundlingh dented the heroic narrative of the Anglo-Boer War by studying Boer collaborators.25 Giliomee and Grundlingh were quickly shunted by the nationalist establishment, yet, even the leading representative of the establishment, F.A. van Jaarsveld, could no longer keep his creeping doubts in check, especially after police fired at protesting schoolchildren in 1976, in what became known as the Soweto Uprising. His questioning of what had become a sacralised history led to his aforementioned public humiliation three years later.26 This did not necessarily entail an immediate overhaul of the nationalist narrative. Most Afrikaner historians remained insulated within their own community – the fact that their work was published in Afrikaans also saw to it that their research remained locked up within the confines of their language group. Save for a few exceptions, it was not read by English-speaking South African historians, many of whom were unilingual, and who belonged to a community that had a historically tense relationship with Afrikaners. Afrikaner historians had no answer to the violence in the townships and the international sanctions against apartheid. Mainstream Afrikaner historiography which, decades before, had drawn on trends in the Netherlands and Germany, became isolated and stagnated. Added to this, Afrikaner historians were suspicious of the historiographical debates that rocked English academic circles in the 1970s and 1980s and remained aloof from the historiographical trends that developed as a result.27 During these decades, English-speaking historians, both in South Africa and abroad, were locked in the so-called Liberal-Marxist debates. These debates were led by expatriate historians who had left South Africa’s ever more isolated shores for the United Kingdom, where they were stimulated by wider intellectual trends. They drew on the French Annales school, as well as Eugene Genovese’s framework for studying slavery. Their most significant inspiration came from the work of socialist British historians such as E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, who had shifted the lens to the history of the working class, as well as ‘history from below’. English-speaking historians sought to determine whether South Africa’s deeply divided and unequal society was the result of entrenched racial prejudice on the one hand, or the forces of capital, class and labour on the other. Both groups

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were driven by an underlying current of anti-apartheid activism and a quest to determine where South Africa had ‘gone wrong’. The liberals deemed apartheid an affront to every individual’s intrinsic value, while the Marxists (also dubbed Radicals or Revisionists) railed against capitalist exploitation of cheap African labour, which they believed was the driving force behind apartheid. The Marxists, with their focus on class as opposed to individual agency, were particularly hostile to the ‘elitist’ study of political history and the biography of ‘great men’.28 When they did turn to biographical studies, they emphasised the importance of context and structural analysis over ‘the whims and fancies of individuals’.29 By the 1990s, it would be the Marxists and their academic descendants which held the greatest sway over South African historical scholarship, with far-reaching implications for the practice of biography. Interestingly (and maybe ironically) enough, one of the most significant works to emerge from this school was a biography – one which challenged many of the prevailing notions of the genre and its methodology. Historian Charles van Onselen produced a 649-page biography of a sharecropper named Kas Maine, a man who would otherwise have been forgotten, since there is only a single documentary trace of him in the South African state archives: a fine for failing to produce a dog license. Van Onselen built Maine’s story from countless hours of interviews, while documentary research was used to construct the wider context in which Maine lived and worked.30 The result was an impressive feat of microhistory, in which Kas Maine’s story encapsulated a history of dispossession in the South African countryside. It was echoed in his words, from which the book’s title was drawn: ‘The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is theirs’.31 The book was hailed as an instant classic – it not only won the Alan Paton Award, along with a slew of other prizes, but it was also voted one of the 100 best books to emerge from Africa in the twentieth century. In a country such as South Africa, and a continent such as Africa, where knowledge is often transferred through oral tradition, and documentary evidence is often produced by Westerners – which, it is argued, inevitably reflects Western prejudice – the book was interpreted as a counter to biography’s preoccupation with the written record which, it was alleged, lent itself to a preoccupation with paper-producing elites, leaving the marginalised voiceless.32 This belief certainly diverted much of South Africa’s historical talent away from political history and biography. Yet, in a country where political forces were thought to be headed towards revolution, it was impossible to ignore the political leaders whose decisions affected millions. Neither was it possible to discount the use of competing nationalist narratives, which were built around individuals who were thought to embody society’s ideal values. An incident that took place in 1987 became a precursor to what followed.

New heroes, new histories By 1987, South Africa was in a state of emergency and the apartheid edifice was crumbling. It was in this context that the founders of the newly established

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think tank IDASA (Institute for Democracy in the South Africa), Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine, as well as Slabbert’s close friend, the poet Breyten Breytenbach, led a group of 61 South African intellectuals – half of them Afrikaners – to Dakar, Senegal, to meet directly with the exiled ANC, much to the chagrin of the National Party government.33 Such a meeting would have been impossible on South African soil, since the ANC was a banned organisation. Among the Afrikaner delegates was the historian, Hermann Giliomee. While in Dakar, Giliomee participated in a television debate with the future state president, Thabo Mbeki. During the course of the debate, Mbeki insisted that, once in power, the majority would appoint a committee, which would decide who South Africa’s historical heroes would be. It would also commission the rewriting of South Africa’s history – a history which would also include white Afrikaner heroes: in particular those who fought against apartheid, such as Bram Fischer and Beyers Naudé.34 Bram Fischer was the grandson of Abraham Fischer, the former president of the Orange River Colony, as the Orange Free State was known directly after the AngloBoer War. He was considered Afrikaner political royalty and, with his glittering legal career, poised to become a prominent member of the Afrikaner political elite – had he so wanted. Instead, he turned to communism and led Nelson Mandela and his co-accused’s defence at the Rivonia treason trial – the defendants narrowly escaped the death sentence and were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island instead. Fischer was subsequently persecuted by the apartheid government for his underground communist activities, and finally served a life sentence himself.35 Beyers Naudé came from an equally impressive family of theologians. A talented theologian himself, Naudé defied the Dutch Reformed Church’s slavish support for the National Party, as well as the church’s attempts at providing a theological justification for apartheid. As a result, he was hounded out of the church, but continued to campaign against apartheid, in spite of constant government harassment and persecution.36 Afrikaners such as Fischer and Naudé, who defied the nationalist establishment and who suffered as a result, were the kind of Afrikaners who would fit into the history of a new South Africa. Within three years of the Dakar meeting, apartheid collapsed. Nelson Mandela’s release from prison was followed by protracted negotiations, the 1994 election and the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The liberation struggle became the foundation myth of a new state, and as Mbeki had suggested, there was a shift towards the stories of Afrikaners who had resisted apartheid. By far the most notable was, indeed, Bram Fischer, followed by Beyers Naudé. This shift was demonstrated by the way they were commemorated in the public sphere – both had public spaces, as well as streets and buildings named after them. In Randburg, one of the large suburbs of Johannesburg, H.F. Verwoerd Drive was renamed Bram Fischer Drive, and D.F. Malan Drive became Beyers Naudé Drive. In both instances, it signalled the replacement of an unpalatable apartheid leader with a new, ­uncontaminated and heroic counterpart.The case of D.F. Malan Drive was especially poignant, as Malan began his career in the church and used theology to justify racial separation. He was replaced by a fellow cleric, who had argued the exact opposite.

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The collapse of Afrikaner nationalism had enormous implications for Afrikaner historiography. By the early 1990s, there were new shifts, which would set the tone for the next two decades. Among the trends to emerge was a concerted move away from formal political history. Some of the first developments were noted in the realm of gender history: research on the much idealised Volksmoeder (mother of the nation) not only challenged gender and nationalist stereotypes, but it also excavated Afrikaner working class history.37 This was accompanied by a new interest in social and cultural history, which deconstructed Afrikaner nationalist symbols.38 New histories of Afrikaner protest music and consumption joined in a wider drive to tell the stories of anti-establishment Afrikaners and marginalised poor whites.39 After years of isolation and academic boycotts, which were compounded by the effects of living under the political and intellectual siege of a repressive state, Afrikaner historians now joined in wider, international trends in historical research, especially the cultural turn, which challenged the erstwhile Afrikaner nationalist narrative by widening the variety and scope of Afrikaner history. As the end of the century heralded the centenary of the Anglo-Boer War, which now became the South African War, war historians wrote broader histories that incorporated the role of black participants and the deprivations of black concentration camps, which had been ignored by nationalist historians.40 Other events which were key to the nationalist narrative, such as the 1914 Rebellion, in which disaffected Afrikaners rose in an armed rebellion against the government’s decision to enter the First World War, were demythologised and its heroes – most notable among them, Koos de la Rey – not only became fallible human beings, but also to some extent questionable characters.41 Afrikaner historians seemed liberated from the confines of the nationalist framework.42 However, apart from a few notable exceptions, especially books on the South African War – which are as popular in South Africa as books on the Civil War are in the United States – very little of this work reached beyond academic circles.43 That most accessible of genres, biography – and in particular political biography – was notably absent from the new, post-1994 body of work. This was not surprising, as Afrikaner politics was so thoroughly tainted. Publishers also gave it a wide berth. As one scholar noted, there was a common sentiment that ‘Afrikaners [had] no desire to read about conservative and racist pre1990 politicians whose lives have the potential of being a source of embarrassment and discomfort in the new South Africa’.44 This was not the case with Life Writing related to the struggle, however, which exploded onto the scene – mostly in the form of memoirs. Non-fiction quickly outstripped fiction – and continues to dominate the South African market.45 The book which set the trend was Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, which won the Alan Paton Award.46 As one commentator noted wryly, soon everyone wanted their own Long Walk to Freedom – and the result was uneven at times.47 The Alan Paton Award for non-fiction became dominated by titles that were either memoirs or biographies related to South Africa’s liberation struggle.

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The most significant biography of an Afrikaner to emerge during this time was not written by an Afrikaner, but by an author who described himself as an outsider: an English-speaking South African of Jewish extraction, brought up in a liberal environment with only some inflection of new-left leanings.48 Steven Clingman’s 1998 biography Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary was an artfully crafted and deeply researched work, which shared the Alan Paton Award with Antjie Krog’s memoir of the TRC, Country of My Skull.49 The biography placed Fischer firmly among the pantheon of liberation leaders, in an almost prophetic echo of Thabo Mbeki’s historiographical ambitions. Yet, the other party to that aforementioned TV-debate in Dakar bucked this trend. In 2003, Hermann Giliomee published his magnum opus: The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, which had been more than ten years in the making.50 The book arguably made the most influential contribution to post-1994 Afrikaner historiography, and also reflected the nature of post-1994 Afrikaner biography, even though it was not a biography at all. In tracing the history of the Afrikaners, it highlighted a number of prominent individuals who represented the many dimensions of this group.The selection of these individuals was significant. It did not latch onto the new regime’s choice of Afrikaner heroes, as outlined by Thabo Mbeki at Dakar, but instead reflected the American political theorist, Michael Walzer’s, model of the connected critic: individuals whom Walzer described as being bound to their community, yet remaining close enough to its periphery to be critical of its injustices.51 ‘Criticism’, Walzer had argued, ‘is most properly the work of “insiders”, men and women mindful of and committed to the society whose policies and practices they call into question – who care about what happens to it’. Walzer considered Breyten Breytenbach as an example of such a connected critic, and devoted a chapter of his book The Company of Critics to the Afrikaner poet.52 The politicians among Giliomee’s group of connected critics were few and far between. Instead, the intellectual and poet, N.P. van Wyk Louw, the newspaper editors Piet Cillié and Schalk Pienaar, and the journalist and author Maria Elizabeth Rothman, individuals who were loyal Afrikaners, but critical of nationalist excesses, came to represent the Afrikaners’ conscience. The one notable politician in this new pantheon was Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. He was, like Bram Fischer, a golden boy: an academic, handsome and charismatic, and a talented player of that most holy of Afrikaner sports – rugby. Slabbert could have become the crown prince of the Nationalist establishment if he had wanted, but chose to defy it. Slabbert joined the liberal Opposition in 1974 and, by 1979, became its leader. However, he resigned from politics in 1986, calling the institution of Parliament irrelevant, and entered civil society to form a think tank instead. While it was a blow to the Nationalist government to be opposed by one of their own, Slabbert never wandered as far as the communist Fischer, thus being more of a connected critic than an Afrikaner revolutionary.53 What emerged were two sets of Afrikaners: the Bram Fischers who fitted neatly into the struggle narrative, and who could be celebrated through public commemoration, and the connected critics, who remained ensconced in their community, but who acted as its conscience. This new pantheon of Afrikaner critics was also

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recognised by the new regime. The ANC government bestowed its national order for achievement in arts and journalism, the Order of Ikhamanga, on, among others, the poets N.P. van Wyk Louw and Ingrid Jonker; the novelists André Brink, Elsa Joubert and Marlene van Niekerk; the philosopher Johan Degenaar; and Schalk Pienaar: all intellectuals who had criticised nationalism and apartheid from within their community.54 These individuals and their associates became the focus of post-1994 Afrikaner biography. Since they were novelists, poets and newspaper editors, it meant that the proverbial pantheon of Afrikaner leaders – and by implication, Afrikaner b­ iography – shifted away from politicians, to intellectuals. The field was dominated by two ­biographers: literary scholars John Kannemeyer and Jaap Steyn. Kannemeyer wrote, among others, biographies of the authors Jan Rabie and Etienne Leroux who, like André Brink and Ingrid Jonker, formed part of the Sestigers (the ‘Sixties Movement’): a group of novelists and poets who challenged Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid through their work. Jaap Steyn wrote biographies of N.P. van Wyk Louw, Maria Elizabeth Rothman and Piet Cillié.55 Historian Alex Mouton joined this movement by writing a biography of Schalk Pienaar.56 These biographies, which ranged from extremely brief (Mouton) to encyclopaedic (Kannemeyer and Steyn), tended towards description, rather than narration, which bore the methodological traces of twentieth century Afrikaner scholarship. It was their choice of subject which differentiated them from the biographies of a bygone era.

The biographical turn This new cast of characters represented a safer and more acceptable narrative for Afrikaners, one that could establish Afrikaners as a people with a conscience, who had a place in a new dispensation. It was also critically important in defying the narrowness of the nationalist narrative, by widening the Afrikaner experience and highlighting a multiplicity of voices and the heterogeneity of a community that has been subject to simplistic and stereotypical portrayals – not least by its ‘own’ historians. Instead of apartheid denialism or a sanitisation of Afrikaner history, it signified a shift towards Afrikaners’ own discomfort with apartheid. This uncomfortable relationship with the past presented an opportunity to grapple with the even greater discomfort of the more unpalatable Afrikaner figures, but it took nearly two decades before such a space opened up. Hermann Giliomee led the way in 2012 with a collective biography entitled The Last Afrikaner Leaders.57 The book investigated how apartheid had sown the seeds of its own destruction, and traced its collapse through the prism of Afrikaner leaders: prime ministers H.F. Verwoerd and B.J. Vorster, state presidents P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk – and the odd one out: Opposition leader, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. My biography of D.F. Malan, the first of the apartheid leaders, appeared in 2014 – 20 years after democracy, and the first comprehensive biography of an apartheid leader to be published after 1994. In a country such as South Africa, where history is a contested and politicised space, the particular challenge was to

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write a ‘conventional’ biography about a figure whose memory still evokes strong emotions. In its introduction, I made the claim that ‘twenty years after apartheid ended, a space has opened up for a new generation of historians to explore the past in its own right, and to challenge both Afrikaner and African nationalist stereotypes, without the constraints of yesteryear’.58 The biography had a number of strands which not only traced Malan’s role in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the development of the apartheid policy, but also drew on the literary nature of biography to write a warts and all narrative that humanised a character who otherwise stirs up hatred and discomfort. By forcing the reader to stare Malan’s humanity in the face, I sought to drill deeper into South Africans’ uncomfortable, yet increasingly nuanced relationship with the past by, among other things, demonstrating that apartheid was instituted and upheld by human beings with whom we share a common humanity – and inhumanity. This forms part of a turn in Afrikaner biography, as well as the wider South African narrative. In the same year that I, a white Afrikaner, published a biography about a man Afrikaners would prefer to forget, the African historian Jacob Dlamini published a biographical (and autobiographical) reflection on Glory Sedibe, a member of the ANC’s military wing, who was turned and collaborated with the apartheid government’s secret police in hunting down his former comrades. By grappling with the story of a turncoat, whose actions had led to the incarceration and death of anti-apartheid activists, Dlamini dented the uncomplicated heroism of the African nationalist narrative. It was the first such biography in post-apartheid South Africa, and it evoked strong reactions from those who had suffered such betrayal. This brave piece of work earned Dlamini the Alan Paton Award.59 Biography acts as a barometre of the society in which it is written. In a country such as South Africa, where the political climate can veer in unpredictable directions, we have yet to understand the wider implications of Afrikaners who have elevated their dissenters and are beginning to face up to their villains, while black intellectuals are demanding a revision of their heroes and grappling with their traitors. The use of biography to reflect critically on a complicated and uncomfortable history, may well herald a new development in South African historiography.

Notes 1 Douglas Foster, ‘After Rhodes fell: The new movement to Africanize South Africa’, The Atlantic. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 July 2015). 2 Ilanit Chernick and Sihle Manda, ‘Was Gandhi a racist’?, IOL News. Online. Available HTTP:

(accessed 21 July 2015). 3 Jennifer Malec, ‘Look at yourselves – it is very abnormal: Thando Mgqolozana quits South Africa’s “White Literary System”’, BOOKS LIVE. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 July 2015).

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4 Malec, ‘Look at yourselves – it is very abnormal’ and Colin Bundy, ‘Mandela was no ­superhero and his legacy has its critics’, Business Day. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 July 2015). 5 Antjie Krog, ‘An inappropriate text for an appropriate evening – read Antjie Krog’s keynote address from the 2015 Sunday Times Literary Awards’, BOOKS LIVE. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 July 2015). 6 The concept ‘Afrikaner’ is itself a complicated one, and is the subject of continuous and heated debate. The term denotes speakers of the Afrikaans language: a language derived from Dutch, which was born out of multiracial interaction at the Cape and which became formalised in the early twentieth century. During the apartheid-era, it was imbued with an exclusive nationalist identity and denoted a white person whose mother-tongue was Afrikaans. In a post-apartheid context, it has been acknowledged that the majority of Afrikaans-speakers are, in fact, brown – or in South African racial jargon, ‘coloured’: the mixed-race descendants of white colonists, imported slaves and the indigenous Khoisan peoples. The term ‘Afrikaner’ is therefore contentious. There are those who choose to broaden it to encompass a multiracial language group – bearing in mind that its brown speakers suffered discrimination at the hands of ­ its white ­speakers, and the fact that South Africa’s long history of racial inequality has endowed each group with a different historical experience. Others argue that it remains tainted by nationalism, and therefore the preserve of conservative white ­speakers of the language. For this reason, they prefer the term ‘Afrikaans-speakers’. Since this chapter focuses on apartheid-era Afrikaner nationalism and its aftermath, the terms ‘white Afrikaner’ and ‘Afrikaner’ will be employed interchangeably as historical terms to denote white speakers of the language. 7 Fred de Vries, Afrikaners: Een Volk op Drift, Amsterdam: Nijgh and Van Ditmar, 2012. 8 Fred de Vries, Rigtingbedonnerd: Op die spoor van die Afrikaner post-‘94, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012. 9 For a music video with English subtitles, see . 10 Chris McGreal, ‘Afrikaans singer stirs up controversy with war song’, The Guardian. Online. Available HTTP: ; Yolandi Groenewald, ‘The De La Rey uprising’, Mail & Guardian. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 July 2015). 11 De Vries, Rigtingbedonnerd, pp. 65–8, 100–11. 12 Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2003, pp. 22–3. 13 Geoff Allen, ‘The case of the volkscustodian and the professor: Heritage versus history’, Historia 47, 2002, 399–420. 14 For an example of the nationalist narrative, see C.F.J. Muller (ed.), 500 Jaar Suid-Afrikaanse Geskiedenis, Pretoria: Academica, 1975. For a discussion of Afrikaner nationalist historiography, see Ken Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing, Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1988. 15 Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Popularizing history:The case of Gustav Preller’, Journal of African History 29, 1988, 521–35. 16 Pieter Kapp, ‘Kontinentale kontak en invloed op die Afrikaanse geskiedbeoefening’, Historia 45, 2000, 411–37. 17 Smith, The Changing Past, pp. 69–70.

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18 Hendrik Bernardus Thom, Die lewe van Gert Maritz, Cape Town: Nasionale Pers, 1947 and D.W. Krüger, Paul Kruger, Johannesburg: Dagbreek-Boekhandel, 1961–1963. 19 See for example Christiaan Maurits van den Heever, Generaal J.B.M. Hertzog, Johannesburg: A.P. Boekhandel, 1943. This pattern of lauding racial legislation as an achievement is especially prevalent in the five-volume South African Biographical Dictionary, published in installments between 1968 and 1987. 20 J.H. Le Roux, P.W. Coetzer and A.H. Marais (eds.), Generaal J.B.M. Hertzog: Sy Strewe en Stryd, Johannesburg: Perskor, 1987. 21 Alex Mouton, ‘The good, the bad and the ugly: Professional historians and political biography of South African parliamentary politics, 1910–1990’, Journal for Contemporary History 36, 2011, p. 66. 22 Bun Booyens, Die lewe van D.F. Malan: Die eerste veertig jaar, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1969 and H.B. Thom, D.F. Malan, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1980. 23 Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class, Cape Town: David Phillip, 1988, pp. 2–4. 24 Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1820, Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1979. 25 A.M. Grundlingh, Die ‘Hendsoppers’ en ‘Joiners’: die rasionaal en verskynsel van verraad, Pretoria: HAUM, 1979. 26 Alex Mouton,‘Professor F.A. van Jaarsveld (1922–1995):A flawed genius?’ in Alex Mouton (ed.), History, Historians and Afrikaner Nationalism: Essays on the History Department of the University of Pretoria, 1909–1985,Vanderbijlpark: Kleio, 2007, pp. 233–42.This should also be seen in the context of Van Jaarsveld’s own complicated personality and his ideological flip-flops. As one of the most prolific Afrikaner historians, who positioned himself at one point as the ‘nation’s’ historian, and whose school textbooks inculcated an entire generation of Afrikaner youth with the nationalist narrative, Van Jaarsveld himself deserves to be the subject of a biography. 27 Henning van Aswegen and Pieter Kapp, Verandering en vernuwing in geskiedbeskouing: ’n Gesprek oor die ervaring van twee tydgenote,Vanderbijlpark: Kleio, 2006, pp. 35–40, 46–8. 28 Smith, The changing past, pp. 164–72. For a detailed study of the Liberal-Marxist debate, see Saunders, The Making of the South African Past. 29 Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, ‘Lord Milner and the South African state’, History Workshop 8, 1979, 54. 30 Charles van Onselen, The Seed is Mine: The life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894–1985, New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. 31 For a more detailed theoretical exploration of the relationship between of microhistory and biography, see Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014. 32 The University of the Witwatersrand’s Oral History Project sought to counter the ­archival, Western-biased historical record by building an oral archive of taped interviews. Smith, The Changing Past, pp. 166–7. 33 Hermann Giliomee, ‘True confessions, end papers and the Dakar Conference: A review of political arguments’, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 47, 2009, 32–3. 34 Hermann Giliomee, ‘Rediscovering and re-imagining the Afrikaners in a new South Africa: Autobiographical notes on writing an uncommon biography’, Itinerario 27, 2003, 9–48. 35 See Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, Cape Town: David Phillip, 1998. 36 Beyers Naudé, My land van hoop: Die lewe van Beyers Naudé, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1995.

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37 See, for example Elsabe Brink ‘“Maar net ’n klomp factory meide”: Afrikaner family and community on the Witwatersrand’ in Belinda Bozzoli (ed.) Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987; Louise Vincent, ‘The power behind the scenes:The Afrikaner nationalist women’s parties, 1915 to 1931’, South African Historical Journal 40, 1999, 51–73; Marijke du Toit, ‘The domesticity of Afrikaner nationalism: Volksmoeders and the ACVV, 1904–1929’, Journal of Southern African Studies 29, 2003, 155–76. 38 Albert Grundlingh and Hilary Sapire, ‘From feverish festival to repetitive ritual? The changing fortunes of Great Trek mythology in an industrialising South Africa, 1938– 1988’, South African Historical Journal 21, 1989, 19–38. 39 See for example Robert Morrel (ed.), White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1992; Albert Grundlingh and Siegfried Huigen (eds.), Van Volksmoeder tot Fokofpolisiekar: Kritiese opstelle oor Afrikaanse herinneringsplekke, Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2008; Albert Grundlingh, ‘“Rocking the boat in South Africa?”Voëlvry music and Afrikaans anti-apartheid social protest in the 1980s’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 37, 2004, 483–514 and Albert Grundlingh, ‘“Are we Afrikaners getting too rich?” Cornucopia and change in Afrikanerdom in the 1960s’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 21, 2008, 143–65. 40 Greg Cuthbertson, Albert Grundlingh and Mary-Lynn Suttie (eds.), Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race and Identity in the South African War, 1899–1902, Cape Town: David Phillip, 2002. 41 Albert Grundlingh and Sandra Swart, Radelose rebellie? Dinamika van die 1914–1915 Afrikanerrebellie, Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis, 2009. 42 Albert Grundlingh, ‘Herhistorisering en herposisionering: Perspektiewe op aspekte van geskiedsbeoefening in hedendaagse Suid-Afrika’, Historia 46 (2), 2001, p. 320. 43 A small, antiquarian market also continued to thrive, and to buy and publish memoirs and biographies of the South African War, which was considered (somewhat naively) to be untainted by apartheid. Much of it consisted of the republications of early twentieth century books that were out of print. Among the new works that were written for this market, very little was based on fresh research, and even less so on fresh interpretations – it took little notice of the new, more racially inclusive approach to the South African War. It tapped into a popular and nostalgic market, with little influence on the field of academic history – or vice versa. 44 Mouton, ‘The good, the bad and the ugly’, p. 66. 45 Leon de Kock, ‘An era in which fact is more desired than fiction’, Mail & Guardian. Online. Available HTTP: (Accessed 27 July 2015). 46 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Randburg: Macdonald Purnell, 1994. 47 Shaun de Waal, ‘Pearls in an oyster of ferment’, Mail & Guardian. Online. Available HTTP:  (Accessed 27 July 2015). 48 Clingman, Bram Fischer, p. xi. 49 Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull, Johannesburg: Random House, 1998. 50 Giliomee, The Afrikaners. 51 Giliomee, ‘Rediscovering and reimagining the Afrikaners in a new South Africa’, p. 22. 52 Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century, New York: Basic Books, 2002, p. xi. 53 Giliomee, The Afrikaners.

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54 The Order of Ikhamanga is one of the South African government’s National Orders, which is awarded to South African citizens for exceptional achievement in the fields of arts, culture, literature, music, journalism or sport. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed online, 29 July 2015). 55 J.C. Kannemeyer, Jan Rabie: Prosapionier en politieke wegwyser, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2004; J.C. Kannemeyer, Leroux: ’n Lewe, Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis, 2008; J.C. Steyn, Van Wyk Louw: ’n Lewensverhaal, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1998; J.C. Steyn, Penvegter: Piet Cillié van “Die Burger”, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2002 and J.C. Steyn, Die 100 jaar van MER, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2004. 56 Alex Mouton, Voorloper: Die lewe van Schalk Pienaar, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2002. 57 Hermann Giliomee, The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012. 58 Lindie Koorts, D.F. Malan and the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2014, p. xii. 59 Jacob Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle, Johannesburg: Jacana, 2014.

SECTION 3

The biographical turn in academia and society

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13 BIOGRAPHY IS NOT A SELFIE Authorisation as the creeping transition from autobiography to biography Hans Renders

‘Authorisation’ appears to have become a mark of quality for the modern ­biography. This assumption rests upon the prevailing belief that the subjects of biographies are surely in a superior position to determine which were the defining moments of their lives. Everyone has their own story to tell, this goes without saying, so why should the same not be true for the biographer? This is a plea for the unauthorised biography. What is a biography, and what does it mean for it to be ‘authorised’? Simply put: a biography is a book written by a biographer about a specific individual. The biography is considered ‘authorised’ if the subject of the biography has read the text and declared the facts revealed therein to be correct. This same practice exists in journalism, where it is considered customary to allow interviewees to read passages in which they are quoted prior to publication. The final responsibility for the interview, however, lies with the interviewer, who creates the interview. Sometimes an interviewed individual attempts to stop publication or broadcast of an interview after it has been concluded. Is this possible? To help illustrate the answer to this question we turn to a well-known British television programme: Traffic Abuse. Without exception, every episode of this reality programme shows at least one individual who becomes terribly irate after being stopped by the police. The fines and tickets are not the cause of all this anger: it is that the cameras are rolling. Nine out of ten times the people in question offer the same defence: ‘You can’t film me’. This, however, is a misunderstanding. Anyone who is out in public can be seen, filmed and commented on, whether we like it or not. Of course there are standards regarding good taste and relevance to society or other such concerns. Regrettably, this has led to some cringe-worthy outcomes as a result of our right to freely gather news. This is simply the price we pay for this core value: the right to be able to comment on and criticise what we encounter in public life.

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Art, science and political expression can thrive only in an environment where dissent is ­tolerated. Criticism sharpens the mind. Anyone who has ever read police reports will immediately have noticed how the suspects’ confessions are all remarkably similar. The illiterate petty thief uses the same language as can be found in the formulations of the highly educated fraudster. This is not really the case, of course, but this is what happens once confessions are put into writing. A confession is the outcome of a negotiation. The suspect speaks, but what the officer writes down uses official phrasing and terminology that can later be linked to legal texts known to the officer, but often not to the suspect. Should the petty thief sign the confession, it becomes canonical, so to speak, even though it is in the words of someone else. This phenomenon also occurs with biographies, and with a certain type of biography things are stranger still. Biographer and biographical subject speak to each other, sometimes only four times, sometimes regularly over a period of years, and in the end the subjects declare with their imprimatur that they have not been misquoted or misunderstood. This is authorisation. However, something else nearly always creeps into these authorization agreements, namely the belief of the subject that their imprimatur serves to indicate that they agree with what the biographer has written. Things become more complicated still when the subject of a biography demands in advance that the biography can be published only if the entire text has been authorised. This is ludicrous: a serious biography is not based solely on interviews, but here we see the subject apparently wishing to have the right to ‘authorise’ all the existing documents, letters and diaries, even if they have been written by others. Perhaps not everyone is clear about what a biography is. We live in a time of self-representation, and set ourselves the goal of gathering as many ‘likes’ as possible. One can ‘endorse’ others on LinkedIn for their fabulous qualities and skills, with the hope that the gesture is reciprocated. This is not a terrible thing: I believe everyone understands that something has to be sold on Facebook and other social-media sites, and that something is yourself. This brings us to what a biography most certainly is not. A good biography is not a book of praise, even though this misconception is constantly perpetuated by the unending stream of so-called biographies of athletes, chefs of prestigious restaurants and other famous people. Always authorised. In reality we are dealing with texts by ghostwriters hired by famous people. This ­phenomenon appears to be more widespread in Europe than it is in the United States.1 Perhaps a more precise hypothesis for this situation could be that autobiography is held in higher esteem in the US than in Europe, where the genre has a less-than-stellar reputation. In both the Netherlands and England, for example, there appears to be an endless deluge of these books. There are a lot of autobiogra­ phies published in England, where they are often called memoirs. A recent example from early 2015, also published in the US, is American actor’s Jon Cryer’s So That Happened: A Memoir. This is a book full of tall tales about sex and drugs he is said to have experienced during his time in the film industry.

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The unabashed masquerading of an autobiography as a biography is evident in the ‘authorised biography’ of Game of Thrones actress Carice van Houten. When the first copy of this book was presented to her, she used the occasion to reveal that she had given permission to journalist Ab Zagt to write her authorised biography. It has also been announced that Telegraaf journalist Maarten Bax, who earlier wrote the authorised biography of famed football siblings Frank and Ronald de Boer, will be writing the authorised biography of infamous kickboxer Badr Hari. The press release announcing this book contained a revealing quote: ‘This is the only authorised biography about me, Badr Hari. All others tell untruths, fairy tales. It is time to tell my story, and set the record straight. I have granted sports journalist Maarten Bax an insight into my life’. Louis van Gaal, when famous Manchester United football coach, announced in a press release that his biography ‘is the only biography written by himself’. There has been a transition in Europe, namely that of the transition from the autobiography to autobiography disguised as a biography. Should biographers have the courage to independently write biographies of certain athletes or other celebrities, they run the risk of being raked over the coals by the public. Kitty Kelley, Oprah Winfrey’s biographer, experienced this firsthand a few years ago.2 Kelley had also written an unauthorised biography of Frank Sinatra. Would we still have known that Sinatra most certainly had ties with the mafia had his biography been authorised? When Kelley received withering criticism and some cold shoulders for showing that Oprah had embellished the story of her successful career and even outright lied about who her father was, she published an article in The American Scholar, a quarterly magazine on literature, art and science that every biographer should read. Kelley’s essay ‘Unauthorised, but Not Untrue’ is very revealing. She mentions how Oprah’s management labeled the biography ‘unauthorised’ as if this were almost a crime. The famed television celebrity had not been involved with the book, nor had given it her blessing: this was grounds for a boycott. Potential readers felt that they would be betraying their beloved Oprah if they read the book. Well-known interviewer Larry King kept his door closed to Kelley so as to not endanger his good relationship with Oprah. American talk-show host Barbara Walters proclaimed on the popular Today show that unauthorized biographies were only written ‘to dig dirt’. She held up the biography of Oprah Winfrey, which shows how Oprah had lied extensively about her life. ‘Who do you think knows best’? exclaimed Walters into her microphone like a demagogue. ‘Oprah herself or Kitty Kelley, the biographer?’ You can guess the answer. None of the stations that carried The Oprah Winfrey Show invited Kelley on any of their news or entertainment programmes to come talk about her biography. A fascinating case study rife with misunderstandings concerns the biography of the world-famous Dutch composer Reinbert de Leeuw. Newspaper articles revealed how biographer Thea Derks and De Leeuw had discussed how the biography would turn out. De Leeuw was even the one to get in touch with the publisher. Given access to De Leeuw’s archives, Derks got to work. Along the way there was friction, since Derks did not stick to De Leeuw’s vision. He complained the biographer was writing too little about this and too much about that.

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Derks overemphasized his youth and she made glaring omissions by barely writing about De Leeuw’s friendship with both the author Harry Mulisch as well as a certain Piet Veenstra. From remarks made by both Derks and De Leeuw regarding this whole affair, it becomes clear that both fell victim to the misconception that is authorization. De Leeuw had promised, in a written agreement with the publisher, that he would not refuse authorisation for ‘unreasonable’ reasons. This clause effectively limited any criticism of De Leeuw in the biography to criticism that the composer found to be reasonable. It is incomprehensible that De Leeuw, the biographer and the publisher all conformed to this. To add to this, the agreement which stipulated authorisation as a condition for publication was written after Derks began noticing that De Leeuw was not giving her any freedom to do her job. However, in a conflict in which the interests of all three parties were involved, they did have one thing in common: they authorised the perfect recipe for trouble. Derks stated in an interview how she constantly went to De Leeuw with questionnaires, not to interview him but to ‘review’ whether or not her questions were appropriate for third parties to answer. De Leeuw was bothered by the fact that the biographer had approached all sorts of people. There is plenty to be astonished about here. All of this attempted control precludes the possibility of creating a coherent impression of the person being written about. One could plainly see that trouble was inevitable when the agreement for authorisation was reached in such an atmosphere of discord. Derks felt censored, even though she had signed that silly agreement. De Leeuw, of course, withheld authorisation from the final product, but he could not fully explain the reasons why – understandably, because he obviously did not want to risk bringing even more attention to the things he did not wish to disclose in his biography by revealing them in interviews. ‘With an authorised biography such a thing is unthinkable’, De Leeuw said in an interview. The conclusion of this affair was not satisfactory for everyone. Derks published her book with a different publisher than the one which had drawn up the agreement, while critics called it ‘a wonderful monument’ with ‘fitting praise and hallelujahs’ as well as ‘room for real humanity, thank god’. In defence of Oprah, one could argue that she clearly did not ask for that particular biography, but can the same be argued for Reinbert de Leeuw, who had invested so much time in the project? Why not simply write an autobiography? Probably because he knew a biography has more status precisely because it is not a selfie. The most wonderful thing, as De Leeuw must have realised, would be an autobiography disguised as a biography. A biography has to be independent, free from outside influences and devoid of ideology. A biography does not exist to express the established view that the subject has of himself or herself: that is what autobiography is for. An independent biography can interpret or reinterpret someone’s life, depending on the era in which the book is written. Prudent biographers will certainly make use of the views these subjects have of themselves, but should do so only as one of many different facets that make up the final result. Self-representation should indeed be studied, albeit with a necessary dose of scepticism.3 Everyone will realize that an autobiography is

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written for the purpose of self-justification. Angenies Brandenburg, the biographer of Marxist historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, realized this when she read her two-volume memoirs, Omzien in verwondering (Looking Back in Amazement). The book was so full of allegations and pertinent untruths that Brandenburg decided to put it aside as a source for her biography. In her later years Romein-Verschoor seemed to have decided to settle a number of old scores. She despised her mother and her children were more or less taken out of the picture. In fact, so many old scores were settled that former communist Karel van het Reve’s discussion of the book was fittingly titled ‘Annie, Get Your Gun’. Nearly every day we can open the newspaper and read how independent study and research are threatened by numerous vested interests. The advertorial, sold as if it were independent journalism, is one such example. Such things are not always intended with malice, but vested interests of any kind have a way of quickly shutting down a critical mind. Of course it is wonderful that there are so many well-written autobiographies and other self-praising texts, Annie Romein-Verschoor among them. Even more wonderful is how biographers defend their genre and dare to assert themselves as independent from vested interests, especially with regards to the interests of those they write about. To be independent and free from outside pressures, a biographer would do well not to leap into action until the object of their studies has died. In American bookstores it is – r­egrettably – ­common to see biographies wrapped in a ribbon with the word ‘authorised’ printed on it in big letters. What was introduced as a warning, meant to inform readers they were dealing with untrustworthy trash, has in these past few years been turned into a mark of quality. In the United States biographers are even taken to court for unjustly creating the impression that their work has been ‘authorised’. This happened when the son of Audrey Hepburn and the executor of her estate filed a lawsuit against Diana Maychick because of her biography, published as Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait.4 According to the legal proceedings it was not only the title that was at issue, but rather the use of the phrase ‘full cooperation’ in promotional materials as well as with much of the language used in the jacket copy of the original hardcover. The publishers claimed that Maychick had spent ‘countless hours’ with Hepburn. While Maychick was creating the impression that her work was authorised, this could hurt the sales of Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit: A Son Remembers. Sean Hepburn Ferrer's book appeared ten years after Maychick’s but the court found in his favour and Maychick was ordered to state, on the cover of a reprint of her biography, that the book was ‘unauthorised’. Half of world literature has been written because parents and children simply did not want to understand each other, but in this instance it was decided by law that Audrey Hepburn’s son was allowed to claim that his book was authorised even though the book’s subject had died before the idea for Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit: A Son Remembers was even born. The benefit of all this marketing around the idea of ‘authorisation’ is that a reader should know clearly what not to buy. Furthermore, no biographer should enter into an authorisation agreement lightly. Such an agreement always involves

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giving up independence, while the only responsibility a true biographer has lies with his or her own sense of professionalism. Is this biography asking the right questions? Are the sources justified, and is the book well written? Whether or not all of this was accomplished, people can judge for themselves. To those who do not trust the professionalism of biographers, I recommend to write their own autobiography. The biography will come after your death.

Notes 1 Thanks to Carl Rollyson (who as biography theorist, biographer, editor of a biography series and biography critic for, among others, The Wall Street Journal, is an authoritative source) for this suggestion, e-mail 15 October 2015. 2 Kitty Kelley, Oprah: A Biography, New York: Crown, 2010. 3 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 4 For more examples, see the Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema Prize for Biography Lecture by Hans Renders, ‘Een biografie is geen selfie: Autorisatie als keurmerk van rommel’, Vrij Nederland 10 May 2014.

14 WHAT ARE WE TURNING FROM? Research and ideology in biography and Life Writing Craig Howes

I am honoured to contribute an essay to this collection, especially since I have been described elsewhere by two of this volume’s editors as one of the reasons we need to take a biographical turn. This will not, however, be a self-defense, because in terms of the charges lodged against me, I would have to plead guilty.What might be more useful for this collection, if only to supply up-to-date information about biographical scholarship and theory’s relative prominence within the ever-­expanding field of Life Writing, would be data from Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, the journal I have co-edited for 22 years, that show what researchers and critics actually download. I will then look at a recent movement by biographers to create a forum for discussion and professional development through the Biographers International Organization, or BIO. What I hope will emerge is not only a sense of current trends in Life Writing from a consumer perspective, but also some suggestions for how apparent divisions might be bridged in mutually beneficial ways for Life Writing and biography researchers, scholars and practitioners.

The voice of the public – what Life Writing and biography researchers actually read In Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, co-editors Hans Renders and Binne de Haan sharply distinguish between the theory of biography and the ‘ideology’ of Life Writing. In ‘Biography in academia and the critical frontier in Life Writing: Where biography shifts into Life Writing’, Renders argues that Life Writing is the child of comparative literature and gender and cultural studies, practiced ‘with the ultimate aim to show that the authors of these autobiographical documents were victimised by social context’.1 The goal is not an increase of knowledge, but what Michael Holroyd refers to as ‘retrospective justice’, and Renders finds the strongest evidence for his argument

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on IABA-L, the e-mail list of The International Auto/Biography Association that I have been moderating for more than 18 years.2 ‘These calls and publications focus on battered and raped women, “patriographies” on fathers, “Mothering Narratives”, “Jewish women and Comics”, homosexuals, and people who suffer from climate change, from the traumas of racism, war and social exclusion, and so on’, Renders notes. In short, ‘the biographical tradition, based on individuals like Hitler or Einstein, but also less famous persons, has thus been replaced by a research tradition that focuses on misunderstood individuals’.3 A collapse in discipline and balance has followed. Life Writing’s ‘ideological academic position stands in direct opposition to the scholarly imperative to analyse the world (including the past) as objectively as possible with the aim to understand it better and without assigning to the researcher the responsibility to correct injustice’.4 In ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, Binne de Haan concurs that Life Writing has flourished ‘at the expense of historiographic and journalistic traditions in biographical Life Writing genres’.5 He asks,‘How is it, precisely, that biography, in an academic context, has been overtaken and pushed to the side by research carried out by Life Writing scholars’?, and he finds his answer in the publishing history of Biography, which ‘in an ironic twist of fate […] no longer focused on biography as a genre’.6 As the person who actually puts the announcements about conferences and publishing opportunities on the IABA e-mail list, I can perhaps claim that I have only been the messenger, reposting Life Writing-dominant news. As the editor of Biography, however, De Haan argues that I am the perpetrator: ‘The transition from the Simson era’ – George Simson, Biography’s editor from 1978 until 1994 – ‘to the Howes era coincided, after some delay, with a thematic change. After having been dominant for two decades, the study of biography faded into the background and Life Writing came to the foreground’.7 Statistics back up this claim. Following a substantial decline beginning in 1997, of ‘the total of 67 articles in the period 2006–2011, 20 articles dealt with biography (approximately 30 per cent)’.8 Given this retreat, ‘it is probably time for a new journal, one that would take up the responsibility for stimulating research on biography in an interdisciplinary mode. Suggested title: Biography Studies’.9 Perhaps somewhat perversely, I will now provide further statistical support for Renders’ and De Haan’s charges. But first, some background. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly appeared in 1978; in the spring of 2015 the 150th issue was published. In 2000, each winter installment became a special issue. Often guest-­ edited, they are generally much larger than our regular issues. In 1997, we greatly expanded our annual annotated bibliography of Life Writing criticism and theory, which appears in the fall issue. It now contains between 1,400 and 1,500 entries. We have also been publishing clusters – three to six or more linked essays – in some spring and summer issues. In most years now, we print between 20 to 30 essays, and 20 to 25 reviews of critical and theoretical work on Life Writing. For many years, a feature called ‘reviewed elsewhere’ appeared in each issue, providing extracts from reviews of biographies, autobiographies and theoretical works on Life Writing from all over the world.

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With the rise of online journal distribution in the late 1990s, our print s­ubscriptions dropped substantially. But thanks to the digital repositories Project Muse and Ebsco, we now have somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 institutional subscribers. On Project Muse we average about 60,000 full downloads of articles a year. Since our entire run appears on this server, it provides the most detailed data on subscriber use, and I will assume that its numbers are representative. We will focus on the top 100 articles downloaded between January 2014 and May 2015. Eight are the annual annotated bibliographies, with six in the top 50, suggesting that this feature is highly valued. Special issues account for 55 of the remaining 92 articles, with 27 in the top 50, and seven in the top ten. Due to the presence of the annotated bibliographies, our fall issues have fewer essays, but they tend to be substantial, and account for 11 of the top 100. Five book reviews appear – although one of them is Carl Rollyson’s of Renders’ and De Haan’s Theoretical Discussions of Biography! Significantly, no ‘reviewed elsewhere’ installments made the top 100.This labor-intensive feature required coordinating eight to 15 contributing editors every 90 days, so even though De Haan calls it ‘a potential goldmine for researchers on biography’, these usage statistics and other considerations led us to end this feature recently.10 As for the Howes versus the Simson eras, if we place the divide at volume 20, issue 1 (Winter 1997), the first issue containing essays submitted after I became editor, ten of the top 100 essays for 2014–15 came from the first 19 volumes. Five are about Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, a foundational text for autobiography studies. The most downloaded article, at number 16, is about memoirist and poet Maya Angelou. Another discusses Alfred Hitchcock as film auteur, and two essays discuss autobiography as a genre. Only one essay focuses on biography: Lord Noel Annan’s remarks on the cult of homosexuality in England between 1850 and 1950. So in 2014 and part of 2015, the ten most consulted Simson era articles are six essays on memoirs by American women of color, two on autobiography theory, one on film and one on homosexuality – definitely in accord with Renders’ description of the preoccupations of Life Writing, though hardly representative of what De Haan describes as the Simson era’s biographical focus. Our most popular essay was downloaded 1,236 times – over twice a day – the 50th was more than 250, and even the 100th was over 150. The top 100’s contents are a ringing confirmation of Renders’ and De Haan’s assessments. Here are the themes for our most consulted special issues, followed by how many of their essays appear in the top 100: ‘(Post)Human Lives’ (2012) with eight; ‘Life Writing and Intimate Publics’ (2011) with seven; ‘Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing’ (2004) and ‘Autobiography and Changing Identities’ (2001), both with six; ‘The Biopic’ (2000), ‘Online Lives’ (2003), ‘Self-Projection and Autobiography in Film’ (2006), and ‘Baleful Postcoloniality’ 36:1 (2013), all with four; and ‘Personal Narrative and Political Discourse’ (2010), ‘Autographics’ (2009), and ‘Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/Biography in an (Anti-)Global Age’ (2005), each with three. It could be argued that because our special issues so dominate the top 100, their subjects will predictably dominate the overall list of topics.You reap what you sew.

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Nevertheless, an overview of reader activity offers even more support for Renders and De Haan. Take for example the medium. Eight essays and reviews deal with graphic narratives, including the top two downloads, and five of the top 25. Articles on online or zine culture make up nine more, and there are seven film articles. Science fiction, reality TV, and art account for two essays each. When we turn to critical, and yes, ideological concerns, the numbers are even more compelling. Well over a quarter (27) of the top 100 pieces deal with race, gay and transgender representation, or human rights, testimonio or cultural studies – and this number does not include the essays about graphic memoirs, movies and online texts that foreground race and sexual orientation, which I’ve listed under medium. Nearly a fifth of the essays (19) deal with autobiography theory and criticism – either through readings of texts, or discussion of a particular characteristic of written self-­ representation. The authors most often examined also confirm Biography’s Life Writing tenor. Taken together, Malcolm X, Oscar Wilde and Maxine Hong Kingston are the subjects of 13 of the top 100 essays. Anyone familiar with Life Writing criticism and theory knows that feminism has had a profound and pervasive influence. Instead of counting up how many essays deal with questions of gender – well over half of the top 100 – I will simply note that 61 are written by women, and 33 by men; that 13 of the 14 authors of the seven co-written pieces are women; and that for our 18 already-published or planned special issues, five are edited by individual men and four by individual women, but five are edited jointly by two women, one jointly by two men, one by one woman and one man, one by two women and one man, and one by three women and one man.The total? Twenty women, ten men. And who has more than one article in the top 100? Perhaps the best known and most cited theorists and historians of Life Writing, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, appear individually and together: Smith five times – twice with Watson, once with Kay Schaffer and twice by herself – and Watson three times, including once by herself. Gillian Whitlock appears five times – four times on her own, and once with Anna Poletti, who also has a single-authored essay. Leigh Gilmore has three essays, and Laurie McNeill, Laura Lyons and Margaretta Jolly all have two. Twenty-one of the top 100 downloads were therefore produced by eight prominent feminist scholars. The top 20 downloads offer a familiar portrait of what people have valued most in Biography during the past 17 months. The top two essays are about graphic memoirs:Victoria Elmwood on trauma in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Julia Watson on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Laurie McNeill’s article on social networks and post-human auto/biography is Number 3, and an essay on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is 4 – I suspect that interest in science fiction and the novel, rather than Life Writing, is the draw here. Number 5 deals with Korean representations of transnational adoption, largely on television. Number 6 is a Smith and Schaffer essay about life narratives and human rights. Seven is Julie Rak’s article on weblogs and the digital queer; eight is about film representations of Oscar Wilde’s court trials. Nine is a review of a graphic historical narrative, and ten is an interview of Lauren Berlant. Eleven is a Smith and Watson essay on false witness in first-person

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testimony. Twelve discusses the films of Maya Deren, 13 deals with witnessing and the trauma-aesthetic, and 14 focuses on drag in the Life Writing of RuPaul and Kate Bornstein. Fifteen deals with the concealed impact of black women radicals on Malcolm X, and 16 studies representations of rape in Maya Angelou’s memoirs. Seventeen is the Whitlock and Poletti introduction to our ‘Autographics’ special issue, and 18 examines autobiographies emerging from the 1953 coup in Iran. A Wendy Hesford essay on witnessing is 19, and 20 is the 2009–2010 installment of our annotated critical bibliography. This overview would seem to confirm Renders’ and De Haan’s argument that research on biography has been eclipsed by the ideology of Life Writing. Four of the top 20, and three of the top ten, deal with graphic narratives. Five are about witnessing and testimony. Two focus on weblogs and social media. Three discuss movies or television documentaries, and one is about a novel that presents itself as an autobiography.Three assess memoirs by individuals marginalized by race or gender. One is an interview with the preeminent theorist of intimate publics, and one is our own critical bibliography. Or put another way, our current readers show little or no interest in the many critical and theoretical essays about biography Biography has published over the years. What conclusions can we draw from this state of affairs that might offer some hope for a biographical turn? I will suggest three – one about the relationship between readers and journals in the online environment; one about genre; and one about the Venn diagram as an enabling metaphor. First, a sizable number, if not the majority of readers, are not downloading our essays because they self-identify as scholars of any form of Life Writing. Their search terms arose from their interest in graphic narratives, or in the internet, or in popular media culture – film, television, and so forth – or in cultural studies, often with a focus on post-colonial, indigenous, ethnic, and gender or queer studies. Other than as part of a necessary citation, that the article appeared in Biography is largely irrelevant. This harkens back to George Simson’s founding vision of an Interdisciplinary quarterly. Biography has always been a forum journal. In its first year, it published essays by legal and cultural historians, literary scholars, psychologists, sociologists and librarians. It also announced its capaciousness by publishing the initial installment of a ‘Glossary of Terms in Life Writing’ in its very first issue. The compiler Donald Winslow remarked that ‘there has long been a need for a reference list of terms that are used in connection with biography, autobiography and other branches of Life Writing’ (61). So De Haan’s eclipse was anticipated from the start. Simson had a strong preference for biography scholarship, but the tent he raised was a large one, and ultimately, what was submitted determined how Biography reflected the growth of the field. As De Haan notes, this policy took us far beyond any commitment to keeping the journal exclusively, or even primarily, about biography as such, although this perception influenced the creation of the American journal A/B: Autobiography Studies. In more recent years, Biography’s contents have gone well beyond where many people would assume the boundaries of the field lie. For instance, De Haan writes that ‘yet it seems only reasonable to limit the subject

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matter of Life Writing and biography to the lives of human beings’.11 Oh dear. Our 2012 issue on ‘(Post)Human Lives’, winner of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for best special issue, contained essays on dogs, viruses, visual prosthetics, avatars and ‘Semi-Living Worry Dolls’. And although Mitt Romney and the United States Supreme Court might approve, our 2014 special issue on ‘Life Writing and Corporate Personhood’ would not pass the De Haan test. Perhaps the problem ultimately lies in the metaphor. De Haan’s ‘eclipse’ suggests that a coherent field has been obscured by something larger and different, and for Renders, this has been a very bad thing. But what if we shift the metaphor from astronomy to geography? For Renders and De Haan, Biography Studies should deal with ‘Lives in History’. The biographer and biography scholar should evaluate historical evidence objectively to construct a life narrative, or a theory about the genre. This is a coherent vision, with definite assumptions and boundaries. De Haan for instance praises The Journal of Historical Biography for being ‘exclusively oriented toward biography as a form of history’, but argues that biography ‘is more than solely a branch of historiography’.12 All well and good. But I do not understand how the wide-ranging work in Life Writing that has flourished over the past 30 years has delegitimised or prevented the kind of research that Renders and De Haan champion. The real argument here seems to be about pre-eminence. Life Writing refuses to practice or acknowledge the superior scholarly rigor and focus of Biography Studies – a field that at some earlier time received its proper due, but that is now ignored or disrespected by this other ideological claimant to the throne. Rather than accepting that one mode of study has been eclipsed or crowded out by another, I would suggest thinking of the Biography Studies that Renders and De Haan describe as a country or region within a much larger, geographically varied world. On second thought, though, let’s avoid the colonial or imperial implications that such a geographical metaphor might suggest, and shift instead to geometry, and the Venn diagram. For all their differences in terms of appropriate subjects, or political or cultural advocacy, Biography Studies and Life Writing share a fundamental interest in life narratives and the analysis of voice. From this perspective, De Haan’s eclipse looks like a partial, rather than total one. In the final section I will point to possible benefits of this conceptual shift in relation to Biography Studies.

Life Writing and biography: the theoretical echo boom Many writers have noted that a memoir boom has been reverberating for the past 20 years, and its theorist is Julie Rak, who published Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market in 2013. Of greater potential impact on biography scholars, however, is what I call an echo boom: a simultaneous increase in critical studies of Life Writing, and of journals, centers, organisations, conferences, offered degrees and academic programs throughout the world. After a brief account of this phenomenon, I’ll focus on two prominent echo boom organisations – The International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) and the Biographers International Organization (BIO) – to suggest that while they differ fundamentally in some ways,

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they share a concern that can take us back to Julie Rak, and to issues of markets, consumers and production. Although critics and theorists have written about Life Writing for centuries, the last 40 years have witnessed an explosion of research, and of supporting institutions. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly appeared in 1978, and A/B: Autobiography Studies in 1985.The British Sociological Association Auto/Biography Study Group has been holding conferences since 1991, and publishing Auto/Biography, now Auto/Biography Yearbook. Philippe Lejeune’s La faute a Rousseau: Revue de l’association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique (APA) began in 1992. 1994 saw Biography and Source Studies, which later became Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies. Curtin University of Technology initiated Life Writing in 2004, and in 2007 came the Journal of Historical Biography, from the Canadian University of the Fraser Valley. The European Journal of Life Writing, founded by IABA Europe, appeared in 2012, and there’s also the Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies, published by the Center for Life Writing at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa was established in 1987.The Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY in New York joined us in 2010. In Europe, Philippe Lejeune’s APA began in 1992, the Biography Institute of the Netherlands in 2004, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna in 2005. You will hear the biggest echoes, however, in the UK Centers, programs, degrees or research units have emerged in Edinburgh, East Anglia, Sussex, Oxford, Southampton, East London, Kingston and King’s College London. As for conferences, IABA began in 1999 in Beijing. A news e-mail list and an agreement to hold further meetings were the first fruits; a website and three regional branches – Europe, Americas and Asia Pacific – have followed. Publications have also codified Life Writing. Anthologies of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson; overviews of biography by Nigel Hamilton, Hermione Lee, Catherine N. Parke, and Hans Renders and Binne de Haan; and memoir studies by Ben Yagoda and G. Thomas Couser are only part of this picture.13 As for reference works, Margaretta Jolly’s Encyclopedia of Life Writing is currently the most ambitious and weighty, and Teaching Life Writing was edited by Miriam Fuchs and myself.14 Within many of the academic programs, production is as important as research. East Anglia, Kingston, King’s and Oxford are committed to producing biographers or memoirists, and creative non-fiction is featured prominently in many writing programs.There’s also been a boom in non-academic organisations devoted to personal Life Writing or biography. Many support groups and workshops have sprung up in bookstores, community centers, libraries, senior citizens’ homes and even craft centers to help people produce biographies and autobiographies. For my purposes, however, I will turn to an organisation specifically devoted to biography that proclaims its differences from, and antipathy towards, Life Writing in ways that echo the Renders and De Haan critique. ‘If you write biographies, or are thinking of writing one; if you make biopics, or are thinking of making one; if you produce radio documentaries on people’s

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lives, or are thinking of producing one; or, if you simply are a devoted reader of ­biographies, Biographers International Organization is the place for you’. So reads the welcoming statement to BIO.15 Established in 2010 largely through the efforts of James McGrath Morris, who had started the online newsletter The Biographer’s Craft two years before, BIO has been holding annual conferences ever since. In ways now very familiar, it is an enthusiastic and resolutely defensive organisation. ‘Biography faces many challenges today’, writes Nigel Hamilton, its first president, including ‘a reduced attention span and ever-growing celebrity worship’, and an ‘obsession with self rather than others’.16 As the champion of the third person, BIO sees the memoir boom as the enemy, but ‘by confronting these challenges together, rather than singly, we can ensure the survival of biography as seriously researched, articulately composed and well-produced work chronicling the lives of real individuals: a craft that has been in existence since Greek and Roman times’. Despite references to biopics or radio, BIO members are largely devoted ‘to the writing, researching, and selling of biography’.17 Or put another way, while IABA members generally want to study Life Writing, BIO members want to produce it. Typical IABA conference panels deal with Theorising Human Rights; Representing Islam;Animals, Ethics, and Representation; Life Writing and/as Activism; Neoliberal Stories; and Documenting Migration. BIO sessions include On Getting It Right: From Proposal to the Last Word; Getting the Family on Board; Writing for Young Adults; Dealing with Your Agent … or Choosing Not to Have One; Market Trends for Biography; and The Book Tour: Real and Virtual. There are overlapping interests. Many younger scholars are integrating the production of Life Writing into their critical projects, and two of BIO’S most prominent members – Nigel Hamilton and Carl Rollyson – have written extensively on the history and theory of biography. For the most part, though, IABA and BIO are largely separate spheres, as the following personal anecdote suggests. In February of 2008, I wrote Morris concerning an article in The Biographer’s Craft about the Leon Levy Center of Biography.18 While noting that there was a Center for Biographical Research in Hawai‘i, the article claimed that it was not ‘backed by substantial funding’, and lacked ‘the ambitious goals of the CUNY effort’. It also said the Leon Levy Center founders felt that ‘academicians undervalued this genre of non-fiction’, which was why ‘the best biography is being written outside of the academy’. The new center therefore intended ‘to create or help foster a dialogue, a conversation, a forum among biographers who have an academic affiliation and those who don’t’. Very good. But I felt I had to respond to the sketch of our center as lightly funded and lacking ambition – and by implication, accomplishments. In my e-mail, I noted that Biography had been appearing for 30 years; that we published an annual bibliography of critical work on Life Writing; that our university supported us with editorial positions, course reductions, and physical space; that we had held over 400 talks featuring critics, theorists and practitioners of biography, autobiography and Life Writing; and that we also held conferences, produced television documentaries and published books.

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Morris responded with a gracious apology, and published a brief article about the center in The Biographer’s Craft.19 But his questions were revealing. He asked if our readers and conference attendees ‘are academics’, ‘interested in biography in a studious fashion, the way, say, a department of literature might look at its craft’. For him, this was clearly a sub-category: he wanted to know if we worked with ‘fulltime biographers’. As a champion of Life Writing, I suggested that in the US we were probably the larger vessel, because ‘virtually all of the trade and university press full-time biographers I know of are academics, or wrote their way out of academia, since all the biographer’s tools come from that environment’. I also remarked that ‘the current state of [Anglo-American] mainstream biography publication is far more restricted and “academic” than the texts and issues many biographers around the world are producing and grappling with. If you look at the biographies generally featured in American public discussion, for instance, as Leon Edel pointed out many years ago, they are almost all about politicians, businessmen or artists, and usually emerge from a union of academic, archival, and belle-lettristic impulses.’ I listed some questions that Life Writing scholars were asking: ‘What are we doing when we’re reading and writing biographies? Are they sustaining certain notions of who’s important, and who’s not? Are they comfort food? Is the publishing market in fact dictating a very small stream of potential subjects for someone who wants to be “full-time”?’ While granting that we were ‘highly “academic” in ways often dismissed by writers as tied to “theory” or “criticism”’, from another perspective, ‘we’re far less “academic” than the roster of “distinguished” biographers and biographies would seem to be’. Morris didn’t appreciate this. ‘I have also been severely rebuked by a member of an institution for a seemingly negative tone in our news coverage of its work’, he wrote in The Biographer’s Craft. I think that would be me. But his account of what the newsletter, and by extension, BIO, stood for is illuminating: ‘We seek to provide impartial coverage of news of interest to writers and readers of biography, to present practical and useful information about the craft, and to foster community’.20 Advocacy, and even boosterism, for biography is the goal – not a critic in sight. BIO wants the reputation that Biography had been trying to escape: an organisation devoted to the third person, with little interest in autobiography, let alone cultural critique, historicism, identity politics and so forth. Given the obvious gap between our center and BIO, it might seem strange that I would turn to Julie Rak to suggest common interests. Her questions display that ideological propensity towards Life Writing that Hans Renders resists: ‘What does it mean to want to enter into imagined relations with others at this time? Does it signify an emergent interest in community? Is it the latest development in neoliberalism that emphasises the cult of the individual apart from the community?’21 Her argument, however, points to at least one possible convergence between Life Writing theory and biographical practice. ‘I want to change the way that we have understood memoirs so that we can see them as part of a production cycle’, she writes, arguing for a ‘shift from thinking about books as mere textual vehicles for an

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author’s thoughts to thinking about books as commodities that are manufactured for a market by an industry’.22 I would suggest that BIO – and I’m a dues-paying member – can provide biography scholars with useful information for making that shift, because it is so interested in how these commodities are produced, and shares what it learns so publicly and constantly. Here the Venn diagram proves useful in suggesting that despite diametrically opposed emphases in terms of Life Writing, there can still be productive, if limited, points of convergence. At its annual conferences, BIO asks publishers, editors, agents and successful authors to offer advice to experienced and would-be biographers. Such sessions might critique certain ‘facts’ of the business, but view it as the means to an end – the delivery of biographies to readers. Though also interested in publishing, IABA scholars and critics are more likely to look at the industry as an ideological apparatus with gatekeepers that produces narratives of lived experiences as commodities for known literary markets. I would argue that BIO members and Life Writing scholars could mutually benefit from the attention each group pays to this process. For instance, Rak’s account of how publishers and booksellers place texts within life writing genres for marketing and sales purposes should greatly interest those biographers hoping to place their works with this system of exchange. Conversely, the savvy marketing advice that BIO conferences and The Biographer’s Craft offer is often highly illuminating about the cultural and political assumptions that accompany biographies.What for instance are the differences between pitching a manuscript as a cautionary tale about the costs of ambition, or the chronicle of a technological revolution, or celebrity gossip or a manual for business entrepreneurs? Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs has been read as all of these, and understanding what different biographical genres tell us about the history and ideologies of the world we live in is of great theoretical interest. What ties all of these approaches to biography together is an interest in what life narratives offer readers and writers. Inevitably, we will regard and even dismiss each other’s preoccupations and passions as trivial, or esoteric, or ideologically suspect or misguided. But I think we can also benefit from the detailed information that such contesting methods of scrutiny can provide. A turn to the biographical need not require the embrace, or the total rejection, of fellow travelers.

Notes 1 Hans Renders, ‘Biography in academia and the critical frontier in Life Writing: Where biography shifts into Life Writing’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2014, p. 169. 2 Michael Holroyd, ‘Changing fashions in biography’, The Guardian, 6 November 2009; quoted by Renders, ‘Biography in academia and the critical frontier in Life Writing’, pp. 171–72. 3 Renders, ‘Biography in academia and the critical frontier in Life Writing’, p. 172. 4 Renders, ‘Biography in academia and the critical frontier in Life Writing’, p. 172.

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5 Binne de Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, in Renders and De Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, pp. 177–94. 6 De Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, p. 178, 191. 7 De Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, p. 190. 8 De Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, p. 192. 9 De Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, p. 193. 10 De Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, p. 192. 11 De Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, p. 180. 12 De Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, p. 193. 13 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998; Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History, Cambridge (MA)/ London: Harvard University Press, 2007; Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; Catherine N. Parke, Biography:Writing Lives, New York: Twayne, 1996; Renders and De Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography; Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History, New York: Riverhead Books, 2009 and G.Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 14 Margaretta Jolly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, 2 vols, London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001; Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes (eds.), Teaching Life Writing Texts. Options for Teaching, New York: Modern Language Association, 2007. 15 James McGrath Morris. ‘About’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 July 2015). 16 Nigel Hamilton. ‘About’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 July 2015). 17 ‘Conference’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 July 2015). 18 James McGrath Morris, ‘CUNY opens multi-million dollar biography center’, The Biographer’s Craft 1(12), 2008. 19 James McGrath Morris, ‘Center for biographical research to host international conference this summer’, The Biographer’s Craft 2(2), 2008. 20 James McGrath Morris, ‘From the editor’s desk’, The Biographer’s Craft 3(2), 2009. 21 Julie Rak, Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir For the Popular Market, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013, p. 4. 22 Rak, Boom!, p. 4.

15 LIBERATION FROM LOW DARK SPACE Biography beside and beyond the academy Carl Rollyson

With a few significant exceptions, biography has never secured a place in the ­academy. The discipline driven engine of higher education is not equipped to departmentalize biography. So biographers wander from department to department, occasionally finding a position in English, history or journalism, or in an interdisciplinary program.1 The idea of devoting a department to the genre has been implemented, albeit briefly, in only two instances so far as I know. Ambrose White Vernon established departments of biography at Carleton College (1920–1924) and at Dartmouth (1924–1967). His curriculum emphasised rigorous attention to archival research as a kind of antidote to the nineteenth-century emphasis on laudatory accounts of great men of history.2 Vernon distinguished between historical and humanistic biography, arguing that the former concentrated on events and the latter on the character of an individual life. Usually, such efforts to situate biography into the structure of colleges and universities languish as soon as their proponents move on. In the late 1990s, New York University offered a master’s degree course in biography, developed by Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Kenneth Silverman, but the course was no longer offered after he retired.3 The aversion to biography is deeply ingrained in academic life and as long as such hostility and contempt prevail, the possibility that biography might have a significant role in higher education is doomed – if one is thinking in terms of curriculum and scholarly publication – even though biography, ironically, has become one of the staples of university press publication, a recent phenomenon that will be addressed near the end of this essay. The consequence of this academic anathema on biography is that the core of the university’s mission – to promote knowledge within but also beyond the campus – has been significantly impeded. Even when colleges have had faculty members well known to the reading public, authors who appear in periodicals and newspapers and publish biographies with national and international distribution, their writings are often not considered scholarship and

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therefore are automatically excluded from consideration by colleagues who claim to be making original contributions to knowledge. A case in point is Lionel Trilling, who began teaching at Columbia University in 1932 and received his PhD from that school in 1939. By then, Trilling was a well-established critic and public intellectual. He had been publishing significant work in The Nation and The New Republic since 1930. In 1937, he became one of the original contributors to Partisan Review. In Diana Trilling’s memoir about her marriage, she notes drily that her husband’s dissertation, an intellectual biography of Matthew Arnold, was ‘found acceptable. Lionel’s doctoral committee gave no indication that the work in any way exceeded its expectations; praise had to await the book’s public reception’. As she also notes, the book easily found a good publisher, W.W. Norton, and that it received almost ‘universally favorable reviews’ that drew front-page attention in Times Literary Supplement and other major publications, including The New York Times.4 Trilling went on to become one of the premier critics of his age, and the author of works such as The Liberal Imagination, which continue to be read. Trilling has been the subject of several books and a biography of him is underway. A more powerful example of the disconnect between the world of scholarship and the world of knowledge as the rest of the world knows it, can hardly be imagined.5 One of Trilling’s dissertation committee members is supposed to have complimented him on his writing while saying ‘of course, it’s not scholarship’. A colleague in Baruch College’s English department said those very same words to me 50 years later when I joined the faculty. Many reasons could be given for this dismissal of biography, but I will provide only one, since this article is mainly concerned with how biographers have attempted to influence the academy and the modest results that have accrued in the continuing effort to establish a nexus between biography, the academy and the world at large. Most academics, by their training, and perhaps by their nature, are text-oriented.Words fixed on a page mesmerise professors. Anything that might destabilise the page, that disconnects the text from its scholarly reader and that then reattaches the text to the author and his world in a biographical narrative, is profoundly upsetting. For example, Melville biographer Hershel Parker recounts how Melville scholar Nicholas Delbanco fled Harvard’s Houghton Library archives, unwilling to accumulate the painstaking data that contributed so importantly to Parker’s biography. Parker has a word for the mentality of such men: archivophobic. ‘We have entered a period when very few academics do archival research’, he writes.6 ‘They hardly ever venture in the stacks and almost never explore the wider world’. Delbanco gets the details wrong in Melville: His World and Work, when discussing such matters as the novelist’s time in upstate New York. Mr. Parker corrects Mr. Delbanco: ‘Why he thought Melville would have written in the attic of the Lansingburgh house is beyond me’, he comments, ‘and I have been up there to check out that low dark space’. Biography occupies that ‘low dark space’ in the minds of most academics. In the late 1980s, during a meeting of New York University’s biography seminar – not a course but an informal gathering of biographers – an academic doing a biography of Marianne Moore was asked about what interviews he had conducted while

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researching the life of Marianne Moore. He replied in one sentence: ‘Interviews are so messy’.7 In short, he had not conducted any interviews. Biography, in other words, is not considered as the academy’s lifeline to the world. Biography’s very worldliness is troubling; its popularity reeks of journalism, not scholarship. Graduate students are routinely advised not to write dissertations in the form of biographies. Biographical narrative is thought to be antithetical to scholarly analysis. Gary Giddins, executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and Michael Gately, the center’s program director, note that CUNY (The City University of New York) graduate students are rarely able to write biographies for their dissertation requirement.8 What Giddins and others plan to do about this disrespect for biography will be canvassed anon, but it is worth noting first that enterprising students still do find a way to do graduate work in biography. Lesley Coffin, the author of Lew Ayres: Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector, writes that in 2012 she knew of only two schools which actually taught biography, one in Hawai‘i and one in New York City. The problem for a student of biography, she notes, goes beyond the academy: ‘Bookstores and publishers continue to fail to see a difference between the two [biography and autobiography], so even in basic classes on publishing or literature, students do not know the difference themselves. I’ve seen classes on ‘Life Writing and Biography’ which were essentially memoir writing classes. And there is no standard curriculum to base a class on biography on, despite most students having read biography for other class subjects’.9 Encountering the remarkable lack of theoretical literature when I decided to teach biography and unable to find an anthology in print to use as a required reading, and realising that no academic publisher would fund books that would have very few, if any, course adoptions, I decided to self-publish two of them.10 Similarly, at New York University, Coffin completed a master’s degree in ‘Biographical Studies, with a focus on film and star theory’. But she had to essentially create her own curriculum: ‘three independent studies with three different graduate professors just to get necessary practical experience, and 90-page thesis’. In effect, Coffin had to circumvent NYU institutional structure in order to even approximate what she wanted to do as a biographer:‘You essentially HAVE to go into biography as a backdoor historian. So depending on the subject, you have to study within that area (which has negatives and positives). But the problem with that is you are almost always writing theory in classes of those kinds, and the elements which are excellent for biography are dismissed as unimportant’. For example, if she had attempted to do her thesis on Lew Ayres the ‘personal materials would have been omitted, instead of folded into the biography with the theory and criticism. You are also lacking in the specific research skills needed for biography’.11 Another student, Oline Eaton, left the United States in order to find a graduate program that would accommodate her desire to write a biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She moved to London to attend King’s College, University of London, where she would not have to enroll in the course work that Coffin believes provides little benefit for budding biographers. Most of Eaton’s time is devoted to independent research.

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Even in England, with its strong tradition of literary and political biography, very few, if any, rigorous programs in the research and writing of biography exist. Consider, for example, the fate of Nigel Hamilton’s effort to establish the now defunct British Institute of Biography. In March 2000, he published an article arguing it was a national scandal that British universities offered no degrees in biography. He noted biographers were shunned for prying into the private lives of public figures but he believed that biography’s transgressive nature ought to be a fitting subject for advanced study. ‘We offer degrees in journalism, gender studies, sports history, management, the fine arts – so why not biography?’ he wondered. His own answer had to do with biography’s popularity, and the snobbery of academics who equated popularity with triviality.12 True enough, although novels are equally popular and yet are the subject of study in colleges and universities, not to mention the huge industry of popular culture study in the United States that has been institutionalised in many programs, and in national and regional organisations. Quite another reason may account for biography’s peripheral place in higher education. Hamilton reports that several prominent biographers – he mentions John Grigg and Humphrey Carpenter – ‘wanted nothing to do with the proposed institute’. They seemed to think that broadening the reach of biography into the academy might dilute the quality of their genre. And they may have a point. As Oline Eaton notes, biography tends to get folded into a more general term, ‘Life Writing’, which virtually destroys the idea of biography as an independent genre and a form of knowledge.13 Life Writing programs have proliferated in the United States, as well, but as Binne de Haan has written, the very notion of biography has been corrupted even in a journal titled Biography, founded by George Simson and Leon Edel at the University of Hawai‘i.14 The curriculum there continues to include courses in biography, but what example is set when a journal once devoted to the genre now contains articles, less than half of which are really about biography? American biographer James McGrath Morris, founder of the Biographers International Organization (BIO), recognised that biographers needed to create their own institution, an entity large enough to attract the attention of the press and the general reading public. Even more essential, perhaps, was his awareness that biographers had to unite – literally come together in annual conferences – to perpetuate their understanding of the genre and to learn from one another. Well over 200 biographers have done that for the past half-decade in BIO, which welcomes not only professional biographers but also those interested in becoming biographers. At the same time, by establishing awards for both prominent and first-time biographers, BIO has dramatically enhanced the public’s awareness and understanding of the important contribution biography has made to public discourse and education. BIO’S outreach to other organisations, like the Mayborn Non-fiction Literary Conference, is a promising, if still quite limited, effort to coordinate what might be called a perceptual reorientation of the place biography holds in both the public and academic consciousness. BIO has also had some success in outreach to public universities, especially to the Great Lives Program at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg,

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Virginia. This well established public lecture program draws audiences in the ­thousands and has become an important part of the intellectual community.15 Even so, the impact on the university curriculum of such programs has been negligible. Clearly, some other kind of model, building on the BIO-University of Mary Washington experience, seems in order if biography is going to penetrate the structure of higher education and, in turn, perhaps have an impact on the way the pursuit of knowledge is integrated in universities and colleges. Even though the arteries of higher education have hardened into disciplinary departments (notwithstanding all the talk about interdisciplinary studies), two institutions, the Biography Institute at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands (established in 2004) and the Leon Levy Center for Biography at The City University of New York (established in 2008), provide examples of efforts to incorporate biography as both a constituent of university curriculum and a form of knowledge outside of the academy that has a bearing on both scholarly work and the public’s education. The institute’s objectives, formulated in 2004, represent a degree of commitment to biography that is, as far as I know, unprecedented in Anglo-American academia: ‘to offer an infrastructure and specific support to graduate students doing biographical research’, and ‘to stimulate the development of theoretical perspectives on biography as an academic genre’.16 To this biographer the word ‘infrastructure’ is breathtaking. In my 40-year career in higher education biography has always been an ad-hoc business. The institute does precisely what a university should do; conduct research and offer education. This means that the Biography Institute provides courses in bachelor’s and master’s degree programs. The master’s course is called ‘Biographical Approach to History’ and is open to students of all disciplines. The classes have a theoretical character, attracting students from different disciplines, and are appreciated by students who wish to write a biography as a PhD thesis. Since establishing the institute in 2004, 10 PhD thesis biographies have been defended and published by trade market publishers. In this way the academic commitment to biography also fulfils the needs of general readership. These well-received biographies concern artists, politicians, writers, businessmen and war criminals.The theory of biography taught in the institute is international in scope and provided in English.17 Usually the biographies are dedicated to Dutch figures, but so far four foreign biographers (two Belgians and two Americans) also have defended their PhD thesis biographies at the Biography Institute. In Groningen a chair in biography was founded on 1 March 2007, held since then by Hans Renders, and on 1 March 2012 the Department of History and Theory of Biography was established. Not only is a course taught in the biographical approach to history, but a much more ambitious program is envisioned: for the next few years the institute ‘will study the theme of ‘journalism, publishing and social democracy on various levels, focusing on sources, narrative forms, and social-cultural contexts’. Art, entrepreneurship, education, politics, religion and technology, all figure into the equation of this broad based initiative.18 In 2014, eight PhD students were supervised at the Biography Institute, working on biographies and studies of biography.

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Four ‘external researchers’ currently working on biographies are also affiliated with the Institute. Some of the institute’s impressive outreach to historians and biographers is reflected in its well-received volume.19 The Biography Institute as an independent institute in the Faculty of Arts had ties with the journalism and history departments. Judging by my own experience in both English and journalism departments and as an academic administrator, I believe that the initiative for a similar institute housed in an American university would almost certainly be the result of a journalism department’s work. English professors have limited experience, if any, in working with foundations and other funding agencies. Journalists on the other hand – as is the case of my own department at Baruch College, The City University of New York (CUNY) – have brought in millions of dollars from alumni, foundations and news organisations. Journalists, as a matter of practice, have a range of contacts well beyond that of typical academics. An English department like the one at Baruch may have 60 or more full time faculty professors, but in terms of outreach the small eight-member journalism department easily outperforms those professors. The Anglo-American arena of higher education has become increasingly competitive for external funding as state governments in the US and the national government in the UK continue their decades-long retreat from funding public education. American college presidents are now fundraisers-in-chief, and biography is not on their agenda. As a result, the impetus for an institution like the Leon Levy Center in New York City, has to come from beyond – not as part of the university’s outreach but instead from those seeking some kind of niche for biography within a system that otherwise ignores when it does not disparage biography. In 2008, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York established the Leon Levy Center for Biography, funded by a $3.7 million gift from the Leon Levy Foundation. David Nasaw, a Graduate Center professor of history, and Nancy Milford, a distinguished lecturer at CUNY’s Hunter College, led the drive to make biography something more than, in Nasaw’s words, a ‘stepchild of the academy’. Nasaw, a distinguished biographer of Joseph Kennedy and other subjects, and Milford, renowned for her groundbreaking biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, having shared among themselves their understanding of the craft, wanted to ‘formalise’ the process, Milford told a reporter when the center became the subject of a New York Times article.20 This was no new idea, Nasaw noted, but one that he had been mulling over for ‘a gazillion years’. Such was the nature of biography’s lowly stature, however, that nothing came of this idea until – and this is crucial – Nancy Milford had a conversation with an old friend, Leon Levy’s widow, Shelby White. Nasaw wrote a grant proposal, and she was ‘immediately enthusiastic’, Mrs. Levy told the Times reporter. ‘It came from a love of biography and history and reading about other people’s lives. I guess I’m a snoop’. The last words are both light-hearted but also revealing – recalling Nigel Hamilton’s point about the transgressive nature of biography and the messiness that comes with it. Biography, as James Boswell and James Anthony Froude, two of the greatest biographers, attested is built on indiscretion, no matter how much certain

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biographers have attempted to ennoble it. Consequently, the genre, even when it is housed in a ‘center’, is likely to remain on the periphery of academia. And yet, in a sense, as in biography, it takes only one person – Mrs. Levy or Ambrose White Vernon – to pry open, if not fundamentally alter, the university agenda. In the case of the Leon Levy Center, this means funding each year the work of four biographers as well supporting the biographical research of two ­graduate students. Although the fellowships offered to biographers can be allotted to CUNY faculty, one mission of the center is to invite outsiders in order to foster ­cross-fertilisations between the ‘popularisation which apparently doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the facts of the life’ and ‘a rather dry academic endeavor’. In effect, the center is suggesting there need not be such a divide between popular and scholarly biographies, and that by discussing the craft, biographers both inside and outside of the academy will profit from one another. The advent of the Leon Levy Center, in fact, reflects what has already happened to academic biography since the pioneering efforts of Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann in the 1950s and 1960s. Before Edel and Ellmann, academic biographers wrote in the manner of Arthur Hobson Quinn, whose biography of Edgar Allan Poe is admirable for its scholarship and painstaking detail but also deplorable as work that at every turn defeats the narrative impulse.21 Both Edel and Ellmann established the demand that biographies be written in an accessible, graceful style with no sacrifice of scholarly standards. The Leon Levy Center promotes the work of biographers who have followed Edel and Ellmann’s pursuit of biography as a high profile genre capable of uniting diverse audiences and academia. Among the distinguished Leon Levy public lecturers are Richard Holmes, David Levering Lewis, Robert K. Massie, Hilary Spurling, Ron Chernow, Robert A. Caro and Stacy Schiff; and every year the Leon Levy Center sponsors a conference with panels such as ‘Telling Musical Lives’, ‘Biography and Literary Theory’,‘Biographers and History’,‘Varieties of Biography’, ‘Compromising Positions: Biography & Ethics’, ‘New Forms: Biography in the Twenty-first Century’, ‘Writing Women’s Lives’. And yet all these efforts have done little, so far, to actually integrate biography into the mainstream of the academic curriculum. Indeed, one distinguished biographer, John Matteson, was told by his CUNY colleague, an English professor, that his Pulitzer Prize was, after all, only a journalism award, implying, in effect, that the biographer was no scholar. Several biographers, including Gail Levin and Wayne Koestenbaum, have begun the arduous task of integrating biography into graduate study at the Leon Levy Center. At present, work in biography is mainly feasible in the Graduate Center’s Master of Liberal Studies program, but Giddins and Gately are making efforts to create a master’s degree in biography.They have seen, just recently, an increased interest in the literature of biography with growing course enrollments at the Graduate Center and in partnerships with other academic departments. Giddins and former Executor Director Brenda Wineapple have worked closely with budding biographers in classes and intense sessions in an effort to nurture a new generation of biographers and students of biography. These sessions reflect a painstaking, organic

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strategy that may eventually weaken, if not overturn, the barriers to ­biography in the university curriculum. Quite aside from barriers such as academic snobbery and institutional inertia, biography confronts a complex array of specialisations in higher education that make it difficult for biographers to cultivate a constituency. Biography is interdisciplinary and the biographer often has to do much on-the-job training in various fields in order to understand his or her subject. Academics who spends decades writing monographs cannot imagine how an intense but relatively brief immersion in a subject can possibly equip the biographer to write knowledgeably about a subject. But then the typical academic has no idea of the kind of obsessions that drive biographers and how learning takes place not only through books and documents but also through interviews and visits to the places where their subjects have worked. One observer, bewildered by my collection of diverse subjects, asked: ‘Are you thorough?’ She had spent a decade and more on one subject and could not imagine how a biographer could competently pivot from one subject to the next every three or four years. Only when a biographer can claim, as Gail Levin did of her biography of Edward Hopper, that it was 20 years in the making do the sceptics of biography, like John Updike, think of paying attention to the result.22 Who besides other biographers understand the professional biographer? Editors at trade houses and university presses are the likely answer because they are in the business of sifting through proposals for biographies, searching out what is new in them, assessing more than just the biographer’s qualifications and making bets on which biographer is likely not only to finish a project but to bring in an original piece of work. These editors understand far better than any dissertation committee or academic department what good writing and research is – not because the editors are experts, but because they know how to draw on experts to assess the merits of a proposed biography and these editors have a strong sense of the audience that biographies attract. Such editors are now routinely writing letters of recommendation for their trade book and university press authors for grants funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any scholar who referees for the NEH, as I have done, knows what powerful work biographers are turning out and how well they are writing about that work. And yet university presses, like all the other parts of academia, are focused on themselves and so there is no correlation between the increased publication of biography and the role biography plays in the university curriculum. When I asked an editor at a top tier university press if he knew what impact his publication of biographies had on tenure and promotion decisions, he answered he had no idea at all. Similarly, the head of a regional university press told me she thought the publication of biographies might have had some small impact on the careers of academics, but hers was only an impression. No data is available. Bear in mind that the university press publication of biography in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Of course academic publishers have always published a few biographies, but nothing like the explosion of publication in recent

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years since trade houses have begun to turn down literary biographies that once were prestige items. Perhaps it all began when Simon and Schuster rejected Brian Boyd’s two-volume biography of Vladimir Nabokov, prompting Boyd to turn to Princeton University Press, which make the book one of its lead titles.23 Now university presses routinely compete with trade houses for serious scholarly biographies which may also appeal to general audiences. Ken Cherry at University Press of Kentucky was a pioneer in the field of crossover biographies with trade and academic potential. Leila Salisbury, head of University Press of Mississippi, who worked with Cherry, notes that he ‘had done books on WWII and film, and through those scholars and contacts, he began doing the biographies as well. Like many acquisitions editors, he was also a buff and liked the fact that these books both got scholarship on the record and had appeal to a broader audience (as well as establishing a good niche area for the press)’.24 But Cherry met resistance: ‘He really was a good advocate for these projects and saw them as part of a legitimate scholarly list. (He had to go several rounds with the boards over the years on some of these books, but by the late 1990s a library dean appointee who was also deeply interested in film helped make the argument for the series and the list)’. Biography needs allies within the university structure. It would take some kind of consortial action on the part of librarians, department heads and university presses, to fundamentally change curriculum and bring biography into the academic lineup of courses, programs and degrees. As much as there is a need for such alliances, though, my own understanding as a biographer suggests that ultimately one individual can make the essential difference – someone who might take Ken Cherry’s efforts a step further and begin engaging in a dialogue between departments and administrations. A university press director might be that person, since publishing or perishing has become the sine qua non of the faculty member’s life, and reaching the general reader has now become part of the academic editor’s remit. Publishing is also the way colleges and universities like to tout their excellence and show how they are contributing to the comity and edification of the citizenry.The right individual can liberate biography from its low dark space in academia. Call it my ‘Faith in the Great Man (or Woman) Theory of Biography’.

Notes 1 This has been my own experience. I began my career at Wayne State University in a non-traditional Humanities Division of an adult education interdisciplinary program (University Studies/Weekend College) and then at Baruch College, The City University of New York, I moved on to appointments in Art (1987–95), English (1995–2007), and now Journalism (2007–). 2 Vernon’s academic approach to biography is discussed in Arthur M.Wilson, ‘The humanistic bases of biographical interpretation’, in English Institute Annual 1942, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. 3 When I asked Silverman to speak about the impact of his program, he had a one-word answer: ‘None’.

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4 Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993, pp. 316–18. 5 Trilling did, of course, become a prized professor at Columbia, but that was because he had become a prestige item. In 1936, two years before he completed his dissertation, Trilling had to fight to keep his job as an instructor. He was considered too radical because of his connection to the Marxist Partisan Review. As a Jew, he was also suspect, even though he later became the first tenured Jewish professor in the English department. 6 Hershel Parker, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012, pp. 221–2. 7 I witnessed this response. 8 Carl Rollyson interview with Gary Giddins and Program Director, Michael Gately, April 2, 2015. Peter Aigner, a Leon Levy dissertation fellow (2012–2013), is completing his PhD in history on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and he has a book contract with Simon & Schuster. Ilan Ehrlich, another Leon Levy dissertation fellow (2008–2009), published a political biography Eduardo Chibás:The Incorrigible Man of Cuban Politics, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. 9 Lesley Coffin, Lew Ayres: Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012 and Lesley Coffin, e-mail to Carl Rollyson (20 January 2015). 10 My two anthologies: Carl Rollyson, Biography Before Boswell, New York: iUniverse, 2005; Carl Rollyson, British Biography: A Reader, New York: iUniverse, 2005. 11 Lesley Coffin, e-mail to Carl Rollyson (20 January 2015). 12 Nigel Hamilton, ‘Wanted: cult of personality’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 10 March 2000. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 April 2015). 13 Oline Eaton, e-mail to Carl Rollyson (20 January 2015). 14 Binne de Haan, ‘The eclipse of biography in Life Writing’, in Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014, pp. 177–94. In the same volume, see Hans Renders, ‘Biography in academia and the critical frontier in Life Writing: Where biography shifts into Life Writing’, pp. 169-176. 15 See for the contents of this lecture program the website of University of Mary Washington. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 April 2015). 16 See the website and annual reports of the Biography Institute. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 April 2015). 17 See the edited volume Renders and De Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography. 18 Besides Theoretical Discussions of Biography edited volumes on obituaries, biography and psychology, political biography, entrepreneurial biography and (post)colonial biography have been published by the institute. For example: Hans Renders (ed.), Het leven van een doodsbericht: Necrologie en biografie, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2005 and Jacques Dane and Hans Renders (eds.), Biografie en psychologie, Amsterdam: Boom, 2007. 19 Renders and De Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography. 20 Motoko Rich, ‘New CUNY Center to focus on the art of the biography’, The New York Times, 23 February 2008. 21 Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, New York: D. Appleton Company, 1941. 22 John Updike, ‘Hopper’s polluted silence’, The New York Review of Books, 10 August 1995. 23 Carl Rollyson, Biography: A User’s Guide, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008, p. 198. 24 Leila Salisbury, e-mail to Carl Rollyson (10 April 2015).

16 FROM ACADEMIC HISTORIAN TO POPULAR BIOGRAPHER Musings on the practical poetics of biography Debby Applegate

Like nearly every biographer I have ever met, I never wanted this job. Then again, I never wanted to be a writer at all.What I wanted to be was a virtual time-traveler, who used books as time machines to move freely through history, soaking up unfamiliar atmospheres and trying on different manners and modes. Like many young people, I read biographies for the same reason I read historical fiction: because I found it easier to imagine these alternative worlds when I was seeing them through the eyes and experiences of an individual character. Historical conditions and causes were more vivid to me when a book employed a strong ‘focaliser’, to borrow a phrase from the narratologist Gérard Genette.1 I had no desire to be a biographer or a novelist, I just wanted to muck around in the past and that was the easiest way in. It was no surprise, then, to find myself enrolled in graduate school in pursuit of a PhD. In professional lineage, I am a pitch-perfect product of the 1990s, when the methods and concerns of ‘the new social history’ were still the bedrock of history departments, and the insights of ‘deconstruction’ were fast passing from radical critique into conventional wisdom, when most of my fellow graduate students had a well-thumbed photocopy of Clifford Geertz’s ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’.2 I do not recall anyone using the term ‘microhistory’, although that was undoubtedly the form many of us found most exciting. I would have called myself an aspiring cultural historian, although even that term had the ring of novelty. No one spoke of biography back then, even to disparage it.Yet it is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the entire enterprise of academic history-writing in the 1990s was conceived, more or less consciously, as a repudiation of that deathless bogeyman ‘The Great Man Biography’. We were the generation, to use the words of historian Nicole Eustace, that began to ‘adopt a social model that assumes that any and every social actor is embedded in a matrix of relationships based on myriad categories

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of identity and power, of which the three most commonly cited – race, class and ­gender – are but the beginning. No two subject positions are ever identical; yet each and every one that can be plotted tells us something more about the matrix within which all are situated’.3 I chose as my dissertation topic a figure I thought to be perfectly suited to this enterprise, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), once arguably America’s most famous, influential and controversial clergyman but now consigned to the dustbin of history. Henry was the middle son of one of the most prominent families of the nineteenth century. His father, Lyman Beecher, was a founding figure in the Second Great Awakening, a nationally renowned Congregational minister famous for promoting evangelical revivalism and the moral reform society movement. Driven by Lyman’s divine ambitions, ten of his 11 surviving children claimed the public stage as preachers, activists, educators, moral reformers, writers, editors or entertainers. Two of his children would climb the highest peaks of fame and accomplishment. Two of his children would commit suicide. Besides Henry the most prominent were his sisters, Catherine Beecher, a pioneer in female education and home economics, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the best-selling author of the anti-slavery blockbuster Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who was widely considered to be the most famous and influential woman in America. The Beechers yoked the Puritan legacy of a strong social conscience to a modern mastery of public opinion, considering it their duty to rile up and inspire their fellow citizens on nearly every topic under the sun. Each new controversy seemed only to enhance their singular reputation. As the theologian Leonard Bacon famously put it: ‘This country is inhabited by saints, sinners and Beechers’.4 As a child Henry’s blithe nature struggled mightily with his father’s Calvinist theology, demanding standards, and bitter battles with other theologians and sects. Henry’s career took off only when he began to subtly slip off his father’s orthodoxy and preach what the press dubbed his ‘Gospel of Love’, extolling the love and forgiveness of Jesus, instead of threatening the wrath of God. By the mid-1850s, his church in Brooklyn had become one of the first mega-churches and Henry was the nation’s most notorious gadfly. He offered his evolving and often ­contradictory – not to ­mention inflammatory – opinions on all the hot topics of the day including abolitionism, Transcendentalism, women’s rights, Darwinian evolution, labor unions, immigration, war, Reconstruction, the morality of ­novel-reading, ­theatre-going, divorce and luxury shopping, weighing in even on whether women should wear bloomers. Beecher self-consciously and joyously absorbed the Zeitgeist, interpreting it for anyone who would listen. He presented himself as an example, a provocateur and a consoler, while insisting that he was just like everyone else.  And the public took the bait. For three decades, his words and behavior, even his unspoken thoughts, were examined and debated not just for what they said about a man like him, but what they meant for Americans of all stripes. The public’s fascination exploded in 1874, when Beecher was accused of seducing a parishioner named Elizabeth Tilton. His sex scandal dominated the press for more than two years and was a heated topic of debate from the highest to the lowest rungs of society.

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For that reason, Beecher has lent himself to an impressive array of historical enterprises, including doctrinal histories of revivalism, ecclesiastical histories of the Presbyterian/Congregational divide, prosopographies of the anti-slavery movement, rhetorical studies of homiletics, literary histories of sentimentality, group biographies of the Beecher family, classic ‘myth and symbol’ monographs, a demographic community study of his Brooklyn congregation, a close reading of the texts produced by the sex scandal, a historical novel, a dozen or so hagiographic biographies, at least one muckraking biography, even a two-part New Yorker profile. With so many angles to synthesise, he seemed ripe for the immersive approach of microhistory, using deeply-contextualised close readings of historical artifacts and texts to explore and illuminate the cultures of people who have been mute or absent in the official historical records. True, he was not as obscure as, say, Carlo Ginzburg’s Menocchio, or Natalie Zemon Davis’ Martin Guerre and I suffered not from a paucity but a tsunami of source material, including letters, diaries, sermons, speeches, novels, poems, essays, jokes, editorials, memoirs, histories, telegrams, church registers, illustrations, photographs, advertisements, clothing, architecture and an array of ephemera.5 If anything, Beecher was the Zelig or Forrest Gump of nineteenth-century history, always standing just off to the side of the main action, cheering, carping, cajoling and ­sticking his finger into every cultural pie of the era. But for that reason, as a historical lens he struck me as a delightful balance between the ‘situative’ and ‘representative’. ‘He was one of those men’, as the journalist Edward Eggleston observed appreciatively, ‘who connect the past with the future, and make of themselves a bridge for the passage of multitudes’.6 This approach made for a perfectly serviceable dissertation, that used Beecher’s career to explore the origins of the curious American belief that middle-class status ‘could – and should – be based on personal sensibility rather than s­ocio-economic similiarity’.7 But when it came time to join the professoriate, I found that I preferred the company of the dead in their quiet archives to the prospect of full-time teaching. It was the late 1990s by then, when a dead, white, discredited Protestant minister was of low value in the academic marketplace. But beyond the ivory tower, America’s religious culture wars were the hot topic of the day and publishers were noting the resurgence of biographies on the bestseller lists. I wasn’t particularly ambitious to write for a general audience, and I can’t say I was motivated by idealism or profit (few occupations are less suited to wealth-creation than ­biography-writing). I just wanted to keep mucking around in the past without the interruption of students. It seemed to me that the Reverend Beecher ought to be worth something on the open market, at least enough to justify some more time in the archives. So I persuaded a literary agent and then a trade publisher to buy a proposal for a full-scale serious biography. In retrospect, our shared naiveté was staggering. For all my training in the tools of cultural history, I had no idea how to write a biography. Worse yet, I had no idea that my ignorance mattered. The first few chapters I gave to my editor were an ungainly, nearly incomprehensible mish-mash

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of facts and figures beginning with the birth of Henry’s grandparents. It is no ­hyperbole to call them an unmitigated disaster. I will draw the merciful veil of silence over the details. Suffice to say, with actual money and my nearly-stillborn career at stake, my only option was to start from scratch. I scoured the university libraries for help, devouring several centuries of essays on biography as a pursuit and a product. Some were stimulating, some arid, but there was almost nothing on the shelf that laid out the practical mechanics of how to compose a biography that was more than a chronology of events between cradle and grave. So, I was forced to fashion a sort of self-apprenticeship, to teach myself the goals, strengths and techniques of the genre. I made my way through my first book by trial and error, using my cobbled-together collection of examples, borrowed exercises and jerry-rigged postulations, to navigate the enormous task of fashioning an intellectually and emotionally compelling account out of the scattered detritus of a person’s life. Richard Holmes, paraphrasing W. Somerset Maugham, famously observed: ‘There are three rules for writing biography, but fortunately no one knows what they are’.8 Fortunate or not, the situation has improved in recent years. Since I first plunged so impulsively into the field, many fine books and essays have been published on the practical craft of biography-writing. Biography draws freely from the techniques and insights of cultural, intellectual, social, literary, political, economic and material history. But it is does more than synthesise, it has its own generic expectations and capabilities.There may not be rules, but it turns out there are rules of thumb. My self-taught lessons may no longer be so rare, but because they were so hard-won I offer them here, in the time-honored tradition of the biographer’s manifesto, or more aptly, this biographer’s rules of thumb. The primary strength of biography as a historical genre is its ability to depict the interplay of the intimate and the aggregate, or unique personal experience and broad historical trends. The biographer begins with the assumption that there is a dynamic, if often opaque or byzantine, connection between private experiences and public actions, between unspoken assumptions and institutional structures, between small, intimate decisions and impersonal, aggregate social forces. For this reason, both readers and historians often take up biography as a powerful way to explore the question of how much control individuals have over their identity, environment and personal outcomes. The central technique of biography as a historical genre is anthropomorphising or personifying; that is, the act of ascribing human features or personality to things inanimate. This does not mean that biography is mere allegory. Rather, this technique rests on the belief that all ideas, events, trends, systems – no matter how impersonal or abstract they may seem from a distance – are created, interpreted or experienced by actual human beings. So the biographer’s task is to find the ­characters – whether fully fleshed or fleetingly evoked – who manifest and give voice to the historical forces at work in your book. You are putting history figuratively, putting it ‘in the body’, as it was experienced by your subjects physically, emotionally and cognitively. This means, first

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and foremost, that you need to depict your characters with as much physical and ­psychological specificity as possible, so that the reader can perceive them in her mind’s eye. The hardest trick, in my experience, is developing the habit of conveying all of the book’s ‘information’ through the actual or implied point of view of your character’s deeds and words – in other words, dramatising the historical information rather than simply presenting it in the form of an explanation from a ­distant, omniscient narrator. Even when discussing sweeping events or transhistorical abstractions, you want to show the marks of human touch upon them. How, then, does the biographer ‘make an argument’? By transposing your ‘­argument’ into a ‘plot’, and your ‘thesis question’ into a ‘plot question’. In this, I draw loosely from arguments made by Mikhail Bakhtin, who strove to define the character and constitution of the novel as a genre.9 Bakhtin describes the novel as a collection of voices – in biography, the voices of real people – in which each voice represents, whether explicitly or implicitly, slices or strata of society, with each voice shaped by its specific historical experience and its shifting relations to all the other voices. The argument of your book is conveyed in the way you arrange the various voices or constituent forces in conversation with each other – clashing, persuading, silencing, ridiculing – allowing every character, every voice to make the best case for their own point of view. In Beecher’s case this meant, for example, conveying the ideological split between the Unitarians and Congregationalists in an account of how Henry’s first summer job as a school teacher ended abruptly when his Unitarian students tried to give him a beating one day after class. Or capturing the novelty of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas through Henry’s excited notes in the margins of Representative Men, marveling at Emerson’s iconoclasm, ‘As naked and impudent as a white house on the top of a hill without a tree or shrub about it’.10 Or tracing the evolution of anti-slavery sentiment in the North by showing how Henry’s own thoughts on slavery depended in large part on who was paying his salary and who was threatening to give him a good thrashing. The significance and richness of the characters should correlate with the significance of the ideas. Minor characters may represent minor motifs, but they too should be vividly sketched, so they can be used to reinforce themes, to allow for sharper contrasts, or to mark changes. In Beecher’s case this included not only his opinionated family, friends and foes, and many of the great ‘noticers’ of the era – famous figures like George Templeton Strong, Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain – but also scores of obscure voices drawn from the sources like diary entries, marginalia, anecdotes and personal correspondence sent from former slaves, poor apprentices, grateful freethinkers, outraged Confederates and lonely spinsters, among many others. When one is unlucky enough not to have specific characters to give voice to the ideas, artful biographers sometimes summon them in the manner a Greek chorus, or an implied group of people who share certain experiences or outlooks, slices of society who think along certain lines. These are the classic ‘they’ or ‘them’ of public opinion – the gossips, the cynics, the snobs, the hawks, the doves. For example, in

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my current project, a biography of Polly Adler, a famous brothel-keeper in Jazz Age New York, I must introduce the complex, multifarious debates over ‘modernism’ – a major preoccupation of many of her customers – while keeping them grounded in Adler’s world. And without allowing them to overwhelm the action and slow the pace of the story.Thus, I suspect I will end up with something like this: ‘In the years after World War I, there was much debate over what “modernism” really meant. For the poets and artists who dwelt in the garrets of Greenwich Village, modernism was the search for revolutionary new forms of personal expression. Among the psychoanalysts who treated Polly’s well-heeled clients, modernism was signalled by the rejection of the false tyrannies of rationality. For the Park Avenue captains of industry who reveled in the luxurious pleasures of Polly’s brothel, modernism meant using technology and organisation to maximise efficiency at every stage in the economic process. But for the average person on the street, modernism meant only one thing: a shocking willingness to talk openly about sex’. The most successful cross-over biographies tend to draw on traditional modes of plotting, in which conflicting desires – both internal and external, conscious and unconscious – are the engines of change.The biographer arranges the ‘­conversation’ to reveal the patterns of desires as they are shaped by upbringing, social context and personality, as they are pursued, thwarted, negotiated, fulfilled or abandoned over the course of a lifetime, more or less. What are then the advantages of biography? In contrast, say, to the techniques of ‘the new social history’ or ‘deconstruction’, which aim to defamiliarise our usual ways of understanding experience by shifting perspective – employing the wide-angle lens of statistical categories or the microscopic lens of intensely close reading – biography calls on the familiar skills of narrative comprehension, which are deeply imbedded and reasonably well honed in most readers. Recent advances in neurological research confirm what philosophers and critics have observed for hundreds of years: as a species humans are naturally equipped to perceive the world in ‘biographical time’ – the concept of birth, life, death or beginning, middle and end – as a way to make causal connections and ascribe meaning.11 Readers know how to take in, make sense of and retain large amounts of information through the rubric of a relatively unified individual encountering the world and evolving over time. So, for the historian who wants to make an argument for a complex web of causal connections – especially a web that links intimate decisions to sweeping events – you are playing to the strengths, cognitively-speaking, of the average reader. This gives you access to a sophisticated toolbox of persuasive techniques, one that incorporates, but also goes far beyond the tools of explanation, example and analysis. In particular, biography draws much of its pleasure and explanatory power from a process that critics, philosophers and psychologists have dubbed ‘cognitive perspective taking,’ an interpretive mode closely associated with empathy. The human brain seems designed to automatically share or mirror the emotions of others when we are exposed to them, whether we encounter them in person, images, verbal description or print. When we see someone suffer from a strong feeling, as Adam

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Smith famously put it: ‘By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degrees, is not altogether unlike them’.12 Of course, this sort of unbidden identification is a prime ingredient of suspenseful engagement, but it also serves a historiographical purpose. A good biography keeps a reader in a continual dynamic of historical exploration, shifting back and forth between what is familiar to myself – what I as a reader have experienced or assume of the world – and what is other, what is unique to the biographical subject and his or her cultural moment. The reader is both consciously and unconsciously constantly measuring the gap between her own perspective and that of the biographical subject. This is the visceral essence of historical understanding and the cornerstone of historical analysis in any form. That’s why specificity matters so much in a good biography.The sharper the figure is drawn, the sharper the contrasts and the more profound the connections and revelations in the reader’s mind. In an era when traditional assumptions about selfhood are being aggressively questioned – when we are increasingly aware of the instability of memory, the slippery, socially-constructed nature of identity and the often fraught relationship between the body and the self – I do not mean to suggest a retreat to the linear narratives and unified characters of traditional storytelling. It is an old axiom among biographers that ‘every life story can be endlessly retold and reinterpreted’, with as many interpretations as interpreters.13 And I believe it. Instead, I am, as ever, taking the position of the reader, of the aspiring time traveler. At its best, biography offers readers the vicarious thrill of a foreign life being experienced in real time – ­open-ended, without knowledge of the future or certainty of the past – and the rare pleasure of experiencing life as a coherent, meaning-filled, well-wrought work of art.

Notes 1 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. 2 Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight’, in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 412–53. 3 Nicole Eustace, ‘When fish walk on land: Social history in a postmodern world’, Journal of Social History 37, 2003, p. 77–92. 4 Leonard Bacon quoted by Milton Rugoff, The Beechers, New York: Harper and Row, 1981, p. xiii. 5 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 and Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1980. 6 Edward Eggleston, Beecher Memorial: Contemporaneous Tributes to the Memory of Henry Ward Beecher, Edward Bok (ed.), privately printed, 1887, p. 64.

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7 Debby Applegate, ‘Henry Ward Beecher and the “Great Middle Class”: Mass-marketed intimacy and middle-class identity’, in Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston (eds.) The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class, London: Routledge, 2013, p. 112. 8 Richard Holmes, ‘The proper study’?, in Peter France and William St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives:The Uses of Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 7. 9 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (ed.), trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 10 Henry Ward Beecher’s copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University. 11 Thomas Luckmann, ‘Remarks on personal identity: Inner, social and historical time’, in Anita Jacobson-Widding (ed.), Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural. A Symposium. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1983, pp. 67–91. 12 Adam Smith, Selected Philosophical Writings, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004, p. 11. 13 Holmes, ‘The proper study’?, p. 15.

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INDEX

Abel, Olivier xiii Ablaing van Giessenburg, W.J. d’ 139 Adams, John 20 Adler, Polly xi, 191 Agosta, Louis 41 Ainsworth, William Harrison 71 Alberts, Gerard 114 Allen, Geoff 153 Allen, Richard 10-11 Alt, Peter-André 86 Althusser, Louis 69 Anderson, Scott 20-1, 29 Andrade, Tonio 125, 128 Andrews, Dana xiv Angelou, Maya (pseudonym of Margueritte Johnson) 167, 169 Ankersmit, F.R. 60, 65-7, 107, 113-17 Annan, Noel 167 Annunzio, Gabriele d’ 92, 97-8, 102 Anscombe, G.E.M. 11 Antunes, Cátia 126-7 Apollinaire, Guillaume (pseudonym of W.A.W.A. Kostrowicki) 99 Applegate, Debby ix, xi, 9, 186-93 Aristotle (philosopher) 74 Armitage, David 120, 127 Arnold, Matthew 177 Arp, Hans 100 Assouline, Pierre 62 Aswegen, Henning van 154 Atkinson, Juliette 11 Aubrey, John 71 Auchinleck, Claude 23-4, 29-30

Aurell, Jaume 52, 67 Ayer, A.J. 70 Ayres, Lew 178, 185 Bach, J.S. 36 Backscheider, Paula R. 11, 28 Bacon, Leonard 187, 192 Bailyn, Bernard 126 Bair, Deirdre 86 Bakhtin, Mikhail 68, 76, 190, 193 Baljeu, Joost 95, 101-2 Ball, Hugo 91, 100-1 Balzac, Honoré (de) 69 Baneke, David 115 Barnett, Correlli 23-4, 29 Barthes, Roland 69-71, 76-7 Barton, Keith C. 138 Battista, Giovan 38 Bax, Maarten 161 Beales, Derek 31, 39 Beardsley, Monroe 77 Bechdel, Alison 168 Beecher, Catherine 187 Beecher Stowe, Harriet 187 Beecher, Henry Ward xi, 9, 187-90, 192-3 Beecher, Lyman 187 Beiler, Rosalind 128 Bell, Daniel 113 Benjamin, Walter 37 Berg, Jan Jaap van den 116 Berghahn,Volker 11, 138 Berk, Jan Marc 113, 117 Berlant, Lauren 168

Index  215

Bernstein, Richard J. 117 Beuningen, Coenraad van 123-4 Beyers Naudé, C.F. 148, 154 Biebouw, Hendrik 143 Bird, Kai 20 Birnie-Danzker, Jo-Anne 102 Blamey, Kathleen 41 Blanning, Tim C.W. 39 Blaug, Mark 116 Bledstein, Burton J. 193 Blerk, Bok van 142 Blom, Philipp 101 Blotkamp, Carel 102 Blumer, Herbert 41 Blussé, Leonard 126 Bockenberg, Pieter 134, 139 Bödeker, Hans E. 138 Boer, Frank de 161 Boer, Ronald de 161 Boersma, Wichard Sam ix Boettke, Peter 114 Bogardus, Everhardus 138 Bok, Edward 192 Bonnema, Sybren ix Booyens, Bun 145, 154 Boraine, Alex 148 Borges, Jorge Luis 41 Bornstein, Kate 169 Bosscher, Doeko 115 Boswell, James 75-6, 181 Botha, Louis 144 Botha, P.W. 151 Boulton, Matthew 76 Boumans, Marcel 114 Bourdieu, Pierre 72, 75, 77-8, 84-5, 87 Boyd, Brian 184 Boyer-Weinmann, Martine 66-7, 76, 78 Bozzoli, Belinda 155 Bradbury, Malcolm 15, 28 Braddick, M.J. 127 Branch, Taylor 22, 29 Brandenburg, Angenies 163 Braque, Georges 94, 102 Bratt, James D. 115 Braudel, Fernand 31-3, 39-40 Brecht, Bertolt 37 Brekus, Catherine ix Brennan, Walter xiv Breytenbach, Breyten 148, 150 Brink, André 151 Brink, Elsabe 155 Brink, Jan van den 107, 110, 114 Brøndsted, Johannes 125, 127 Brouwer, Jan Willem 115

Brownlow, Donald 29 Bru, Sacha 102 Bruijn, Enny de ix, xi, 129-40 Bruneau, Jean 102 Buisine, Alain 68, 76 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 71 Bundy, Colin 153 Burgess, Guy 29 Burke, Peter 51, 65, 138-9 Burnham, James 114 Bush, George W. xii Butter, Frank A.G. den 114 Byatt, A.S. 137, 140 Campert, Jan xiv Cannadine, David 39 Cantimori, Delio 37 Carloff, Henrich 8, 118-128 Carlos, Ann. M. 127 Caro, Robert 20-4, 29, 182 Carpenter, Humphrey 179 Casson, Catherine 121, 127 Casson, Mark 121, 127 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (pseudonym of L.-F. Destouches) 37 Certeau, Michel de 60, 67 Cervantes, Miguel de 41 César (Baldaccini) 74 Chappey, Jean-Luc 75, 78 Charles V (emperor) 31 Charmley, John 11, 16-18, 28 Chernick, Ilanit 152 Chernow, Ron 182 Cherry, Ken 184 Chibás, Eduardo 185 Chiesa, Giulio Cesare 38 Chivvis, C.S. 117 Christina (queen) 122, 127 Churchill, Winston xii, 24-6 Cillié, Piet 151, 156 Clarkson-Leach, Robert 29 Cleopatra (queen) 17 Clingman, Steven 150, 154-5 Clinton, Bill xii, 25 Cochrane, Lydia G. 41 Cocteau, Jean 99 Coetzer, P.W. 154 Coffin, Lesley 178, 185 Colander, David 116 Colijn, Hendrikus 115 Compagnon, Antoine 73, 77 Connell, Carol M. 111, 117 Cooper, Douglas 102 Corbin, Alain 52

216 Index

Couser, G.T. 171, 175 Coymans, Isaac 123, 128 Craigie, Jill xiv Cryer, Jon 160 Cuthbertson, Greg 155 Daaku, Kwame Yeboa 126-7 Daal, Johannes van 114 Dallek, Robert 20 Dane, Jacques 185 Danzig, Albert van 127 Darwin, Charles xiv Davies, Kenneth G, 126 Davis, John R. 126 Davis, Natalie Zemon 188, 192 Degenaar, Johan 151 Degenfeld, Ottonie 101 Delaunay, Robert 94 Delbanco, Nicholas 177 Deren, Maya (pseudonym of Eleanora Derenkowskaia) 169 Derks, Thea 161-2 Derrida, Jacques 72 Descartes, René 138-9 Diaz, José-Luis 78 Dierikx, Marc 62, 67 Dilthey, Wilhelm 7, 34-6, 40-1 Dingane (kaSenzangakhona Zulu) 144 Dion, Robert 78 Dlamini, Jacob 152, 156 Doesburg, Theo van (pseudonym of C.E.M Küpper) xi, 8, 91, 95-7, 99, 101-2 Doležel, Lubomír 61, 67 Dorman-Smith, Eric 24 Dorth, Dirck van 133 Dorth, Johan van 133 Dorth, Johanna van 133 Dorth, Maria van 133 Dorth, Reinier van 133 Dorth, Reyner van 8, 129, 132-7, 139-40 Dosse, François 67 Droysen, J.G. 73, 77 Dunk, H.W. von der 59, 66-7 Dunoyer de Ségonzac, André 97 Eaton, Oline 178-179 Eckel, Jan 86 Edel, Leon 63, 67, 173, 179, 182 Eggleston, Edward 188, 192 Ehrlich, Ilan 185 Einstein, Albert 21, 29, 166 Eley, Geoff 46, 52 Eliot, T.S. 39, 69 Elizabeth I (queen) xiv

Elizabeth II (queen) xiv Ellis, John 29 Ellmann, Richard 182 Elmwood,Victoria 168 Elphick, Richard 146, 154 Eltis, David 126 Elzas, B.D. 114 Emanuel, Susan 77 Emerson, Caryl 193 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 190, 193 Emons, Thijs 66 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 41 Epstein, William H. 11, 66, 75-6, 78 Erhard, Ludwig 112, 117 Etzemüller, Thomas 86 Eucken, Walter 109 Eustace, Nicole 186, 192 Evans, Richard 18-19 Everts, Natalie 126 Evrigenis, Ioannis D. 40 Faassen, Sjoerd van ix, xi, 8, 91-103 Faulkner, William xiv Febvre, Lucien 53, 65-6 Feindt, Gregor 67 Feis, Agnita 96-7 Felback, Ole 126 Fellman, Suzanna 65, 67 Ferguson, Niall 21, 29, 58, 66 Ferret, Olivier 75, 78 Fest, Joachim 19 Fetu (king) 122 Fetz, Bernhard 11, 65, 69, 76 Fischer, Abraham 148 Fischer, Bram 148, 150, 154-5 Fischer, Frank 108, 115 Fish, Stanley 70 Fitzgerald (family) 20, 29 Fitzgerald, Zelda 181 Flaubert, Gustave 94 Fleming, Robin 52 Flint, R.W. 102 Fokker, Anthony 62 Folca, K. 65 Fontijn, Jan 139 Foot, Michael xiv Ford, Gerald 74 Foster, Douglas 152 Foucault, Michel 69, 71, 76-7, 82, 86 Fourcade, Marion 104, 115 Fourier, J.-B. J. 70 France, Peter 11, 116, 140, 193 Franklin, Benjamin 21, 29 Fraye, André 97

Index  217

Frederik iii (king) 123, 128 Freedland, Jonathan 29 Fresnaye, Roger de la 97 Frijhoff, Willem 138, 140 Froude, J.A. 181 Fuchs, Miriam xii, 171, 175 Gaal, Louis van 161 Gaastra, Femme 126 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 131, 138 Gallagher, Catherine 77, 138 Gallucci, Carole C. 51 Gallucci, Margaret A. 51 Gallucci, Mary M. 51 Gandin, Greg 58, 66 Gaspey, Thomas 71 Gately, Michael 178, 182, 185 Gaulle, Charles de 111, 117 Geer, Louis de 122-3 Geertz, Clifford 186, 192 Gellhorn, Martha xiv Genette, Gérard 73-4, 77-8, 83, 86, 186, 192 Genovese, Eugene 146 Gevers, A.J. 140 Geyl, Pieter 67 Ghandi, Mahatma 141, 152 Giddens, Gary 178, 182, 185 Gide, André 92-3, 101 Gietman, Conrad 139-140 Giliomee, Hermann 146, 148, 150-1, 153-156 Gilmore, Leigh 168 Ginzburg, Carlo 28, 37-8, 41, 43, 52, 64, 67, 70, 73, 77, 125, 128, 188, 192 Giovanni, N.T. di 41 Gogh,Vincent van 95 Goldberg, Harvey 102 Goldhammer, Arthur 52 Goodwin, Doris Kearns 19-20, 29 Gosse, Edmund 71 Gram-Skjoldager, K. 113 Gramsci, Antonio 37 Granovetter, Mark 127 Greenblatt, Stephen 70, 77, 138 Greene, Graham 41 Gregory, Adrian 102 Greif, Avner 127 Grendi, Edoardo 37, 41 Grenonville, Mathurin de 3 Grigg, John 179 Grimm, Reinhold 86 Groenevelt, S. 139 Groenewald,Yolandi 153 Groote, Arent de 127

Grözinger, Albrecht 138 Grundlich, Albert 146, 154-5 Guerre, Martin 188, 192 Guirand (de Scevola), Lucien-Victor 97 Haan, Binne de xi, xiv, 3-11, 28, 39, 51-67, 102, 113-4, 127, 138, 140, 154, 165-71, 174-5, 179, 185 Habermas, Jürgen 117 Halbwachs, Maurice 67 Halevi, Leor 126 Halffman, Willem 114 Hall, John 40 Hall, Peter 116-117 Hamilton, Ian 17, 25, 28, 30 Hamilton, Nigel xii, 7, 10, 15-30, 52, 54, 65, 140, 171-2, 175, 179, 181, 185 Hanlo, Jan xiv Hari, Badr 161 Hariman, Robert 115 Harlan, David 66 Harmsma, Jonne xii, 3-11, 104-17 Hayek, Friedrich von 109, 114 Hazelhoff Roelfzema, Erik 164 Heertje, Arnold 114 Heever, C.M. van den 154 Heijer, Henk den 125-7 Heller, Walter W. 113 Hellman, Lillian xiv Hemecker, Wilhelm 11 Hennings, Emmy 100 Hentea, Marius 101 Hentschel,Volker 117 Hepburn, Audrey 163 Hepburn Ferrer, Sean 163 Herder, Johann Gottfried 34, 36, 40 Hermand, Jost 86 Hertzog, J.B.M. 145, 154 Hesford, A. Wendy 169 Hildebrand, Klaus 19 Hildebrand, Maria 100 Hillgruber, Andreas 19 Hitchcock, Alfred 167 Hitler, Adolf 18-19, 21-2, 94, 166 Hoberg, Annegret 93, 102 Hobsbawm, Eric 146 Hoetink, Carla 66 Hofman, J.H. 139 Hofmannsthal, Gertie von 101 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 92, 101 Hofmeyr, Isabel 153 Hollingdale, R.J. 65 Holmes, Richard 5, 11, 110, 116, 140, 182, 189, 193

218 Index

Holquist, Michael 76, 193 Holroyd, Michael 165, 174 Homberger, Eric 11, 16-18, 28 Horatius, Quintus 139 Horwitz, Steven 114 Houten, Carice van 161 Howes, Craig xii, 9, 165-175 Huelsenbeck, Richard 100 Hughes, Ted xiv, 27, 30 Hughes-Hallett, Lucie 102 Huigen, Siegfried 155 Huizinga, Johan 53, 56, 60, 65, 145 Hurley, Robert 86 Ialongo, Ernest 101 Iggers, Georg G. 65 Ipsen, Pernille 126 Irving, David 18-19 Isaacson, Walter 21, 29, 174 Iser, Wolfgang 70, 77 Ishiguro, Kazuo 168 Jaarsveld, F.A. van 144, 146, 154 Jacob, Max 99 Jacobson-Widding, Anita 193 James, Clayton 20 Jaco, Marcel 100 Jans, Jenneke 129, 132-3, 135-6, 139 Jaurés, Jean 92-3, 98, 102 Jauss, Hans Robert 70, 77 Jefferson, Ann 78 Jenkins, Keith 66 Jobs, Steve 21, 29, 174 Johnson, Lyndon 19-22, 29 Johnson, Samuel 75-76 Johnston, Robert D. 193 Jolink, Albert 117 Jolly, Margaretta 168, 171, 175 Jonker, Ed 116, 151 Jónsson, Halldór 44 Jost, John 112, 117 Joubert, Elsa 151 Justeseen, Ole 126, 128 Kadar, Marlene 66 Kakutani, Michiko 17, 28, 30 Kan, Wim 110 Kandinsky, Wassily 94-6, 102 Kannemeyer, John 151, 156 Kapp, Pieter 153-154 Keegan, John 18 Keener, John F. 66 Kelbley, Charles A. 40 Kelley, Kitty 161, 164 Kendall, Paul Murray 72, 77, 86

Kennedy (family) 20, 27, 29 Kennedy, Jacqueline 178 Kennedy, John F. xii, 20, 24-5, 27, 30 Kennedy, Jr., Joseph P. 24-5 Kennedy, Sr. Joseph P. 24-5, 181 Kennedy Lawford, Patricia 30 Kennedy Shriver, Eunice 30 Kennedy Smith, Jean 30 Kennedy, Ted 25, 30 Keren, Michael 116 Kershaw, Ian 19, 21, 24, 29 Keynes, John Maynard 15, 28, 105, 113-4, 116-17 Kieft, Ewoud 101-2 King, Larry 161 King, Jr., Martin Luther 22 Kingston, Maxine Hong 167-8 Kissinger, Henry 20-1, 29, 58, 66 Klein, Christian xiii, 7-8, 11, 79-87 Klep, Paul 66 Klerk, F.W. de 143-144, 151 Klompé, Marga 115 Knudsen, A.C.L. 113 Kock, Leon de 155 Koestenbaum, Wayne 182 Kok, Antony 96-97, 102 Koorts, Lindie xiii, 8, 29, 141-56 Koselleck, Reinhart 40 Kracauer, Siegfried 36-37, 41, 82, 84, 86 Krawatzek, Félix 67 Kretschmann, Carsten 86 Kris, Ernst 85, 87 Kristeller, Paul Oskar 41 Krog, Antjie 141-2, 150, 153, 155 Krüger, D.W. 145, 154 Kruger, Paul 144-5 Krugman, Paul 113, 117 Krul, Wessel 65 Kuijpers, Erika 138 Kupka, František 94 Küpper, C.E.M. see Doesburg, Theo van Kurz, Otto 85, 87 Kurzke, Hermann 86 Kustaa ii Adolf (king) 127 Kuyper, Abraham 108, 115 Lackey, Michael 66 Lamikiz, Xabier 127 Lamprecht, Karl 31 Landreth, Harry 116 Lappalainen, Mirkka 127 Laroche, Josepha 100 Lässig, Simone 3, 11, 86, 138 Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) 20-1, 29 Lee, Hermione 16, 28, 171, 175

Index  219

Leeds-Hurwitz, W. 87 Leeuw, Reinbert de 161-162 Leijona, Pohjolan 127 Lejeune, Philippe 77, 171 Lentsch, Justus 114 Lepore, Jill 48-49, 52 Lerous, Etienne 151, 156 Leroyer de Chantepie, Marie-Sophie 102 Levi, Giovanni 37-8, 41, 44-6, 51-2, 56, 66, 70 Levin, Gail 182-3 Levstik, Linda S. 138 Levy, Leon 181-2 Levy-White, Shelby 181-2 Lewis, David Levering 182 Lijphart, Arend 115 Lilti, Antoine xiii Lincoln, Abraham 20, 29, 62, 190 Lindblad, J. Thomas 126 Lindsay, Lisa A. 11, 116, 126 Lion, Claude François du 122-3, 127 Lipset, Seymour 116 Lipstadt, Deborah 19, 28-9 Llosa, Mario Vargas 41 Lloyd George, David 93 Loriga, Sabina ix, xiii, 7, 11, 31-41, 51-2, 65, 72-3, 77, 138 Lowe, David 114 Lowell, Anew xiv Lowenthal, David 66-7 Lownie, Andrew 29 Loyola, Ignatius of 70 Luckmann, Thomas 193 Lüdtke, Alf 44-6, 48, 51-2 Luther, Henning 138 Lyons, Laura 168 MacArthur, Douglas 20 MacCarthy, Desmond 63 Machlup, Fritz 111 Macke, August 102 Madelénat, Daniel 74, 76, 78 Maerlant, Jacob van 138 Magnússon, Sigurður Gylfi ix, xiii, 7, 42-52, 116 Mailer, Norman xiv Maine, Kas 147, 154 Makkreel, Rudolf A. 40-1 Malan, D.F. xiii, 29, 145, 148, 151-2, 154, 156 Malcolm, Janet 25-27, 30 Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) 168-9 Malec, Jennifer 152 Malevich, Kazimir 91, 94-5, 101-2 Mallarmé, Stéphane 69 Manchester, William 20

Manda, Sihle 152 Mandela, Nelson 141-4, 148-9, 153, 155 Mann, Heinrich 22-3, 29 Mann, Thomas 22-3, 29, 33, 93, 102 Manz, Stefan 126 Marais, A.H. 154 Marc, Franz 92-3, 102 Marinetti, Filippo 91-2, 95, 98, 101-2 Maritz, Gert 145, 154 Mark, Peter 126 Marks, Shula 154 Martini, Carlo 114 Mary (queen) 126 Massie, Robert K. 182 Matteson, John 182 Maychick, Diana 163 Mbeki, Thabo 148, 150 McCloskey, D. 116-7 McCooey, David 114 McCraw, T.K. 117 McCullough, David 20 McGann, Jerome 70, 77 McGreal, Chris 153 McLaughlin, Kathleen 40 McNeill, Laurie 168 Medema, Steven G. 114 Mehler, Daniela 67 Meinecke, Friedrich 40 Melville, Herman 177 Menocchio (Domenico Scandella) 37-8, 188 Mensema, A.J. 140 Mercier-Faivre, Anne-Marie 75, 78 Mgqolozana, Thando 152 Mierau, Konstantin xii, 66 Mierlo, Hans van 109 Mierzejewski, A.C. 117 Milford, Nancy 181 Milius, Lena 96-7 Miller, Joseph 5, 10-11, 116, 119, 125-6, 128 Milner, A. 154 Mímisson, Kristján 52 Mitchell, Timoty 114 Mondrian (Mondriaan), Piet 94, 96 Monk, Ray 11, 86 Monluçon, Anne-Marie 73, 77 Monroe, Marilyn (pseudonym of Norma Jeane Mortenson) xiv Montgomery, Bernard 22-4, 29-30 Moore, Marianne 177-178 Moorsel, Nelly van 96 Morgan, Chloe ix Morgan, Sue 66 Morrel, Robert 155 Morris, Edmund 17, 28 Morris, James McGrath 172-3, 175, 179

220 Index

Moses, Robert 20, 29 Moulin, Joanny xiv, 7, 11, 65, 68-78 Mout, M. 139 Mouton, Alex 151, 154-156 Moynihan, D.P. 185 Muir, Edward 51 Mulert tot Kranenburg, Lubbert 140 Mulisch, Harry 162 Muller, C.F.J. 153 Müller, Johannes 138 Munslow, Alun 66 Naber, Z. 116 Nabokov,Vladimir 184 Nadel, Ira Bruce 66, 75, 78 Nakov, Andrei B. 101 Napoleon (Bonaparte) 67 Nasaw, David 51, 181 Nelson, Robert H. 117 Nicolas, Stephen 127 Niekerk, Marlene van 151 Nierop, H.F.K. van 139 Nietzsche, Friedrich 35, 54, 58, 65-6 Nixon, Richard 20 Nolde, Emil (pseudonym of Emil Hansen) 98 Nolte, Ernst 19 Nora, Pierre 64, 67 Nørregård, Georg 125, 127 Nováky, György 126-8 Novarr, David 18, 28 Nünning, Ansgar 86 Nützenadel, Alexander 113 O’Brien, Justin 101 Oman, William H. 40 Onselen, Charles van 147, 154 Oostrom, Frits van 138-140 Oppenheimer, Robert 20 Ottevanger, Alied 102 Owensby, Jacob 41 Palmer, Richard E. 138 Pancras, Nicolas 123 Parke, Catherine N. 171, 175 Parker, Hershel 177, 185 Parkinson, Roger 29 Pascal, Blaise 79 Paul, Herman 66 Peeters, Evert 116 Pellauer, David 40 Pellerin, Daniel 40 Peltonen, Matti 120, 124, 127-8 Penzoldt, Ernst xiii Perlinge, Anders 11 Perotta, Tom 18, 28

Pestel, Friedemann 67 Petrarch, Francesco 138-9 Philip II (king) 53 Picasso, Pablo 94, 102 Pienaar, Schalk 151, 156 Plath, Sylvia xiv, 25, 27, 30 Plutarch (L. Mestrius Plutarchus) 27 Poe, Edgar Allan 182, 185 Poletti, Anna 168-9 Pollmann, Judith 138 Porter, Catherine 77 Porter, Robert 122, 125, 127-8 Porter, Roy 138 Possing, Birgitte 11, 113 Prassoloff, Annie 78 Preller, Gustav 144 Proust, Marcel 33, 59, 69, 71, 76-7, 94 Puchinger, George 115 Queneau, Raymond 39 Quinn, Arthur Hobson 182, 185 Rabie, Jan 151, 156 Rahikainen, Marjatta 65, 67 Rak, Julie 168, 170-1, 173-5 Ramakers, Jan 115 Ramses II (pharaoh) 53 Ranke, Leopold von 60-1, 144 Ratelband, Klaas 127 Ravensbergen, C. 139 Reagan, Nancy 17 Reagan, Ronald 17, 28 Reeves, Richard 20 Regard, Frédéric 69, 76, 78 Renders, Hans ix, xi-xii, xiv, 3-11, 28, 39, 51-2, 65-7, 78, 91-103, 113-4, 127, 138, 140, 154, 159-7, 169-171, 173-5, 180, 185 Retief, Piet 144 Reve, Karel van het 163 Revius, Jacob xi, 138 Rey, Koos de la 142, 144, 149, 153 Reynolds, Siân 39 Rhiel, Mary 28 Rhodes, Cecil John 141 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges 99 Rich, Motoko 185 Richardson, David 126 Ricœur, Paul xiii, 7, 32-33, 38, 40-1 Rinsema, Evert 96-7 Rinsema, Thijs 96-7 Rodi, Frithjof 40-1 Roever, Nicolaas de 128 Rollyson, Carl xiv, 9, 67, 164, 167, 172, 176-185

Index  221

Romein-Verschoor, Annie 163 Romein, Jan 145 Romney, Mitt 170 Roos, F. de 117 Roosevelt, Eleanor 20, 29 Roosevelt, Franklin D. xii, 20, 25-6, 30 Roosevelt, Theodore 17, 20, 29 Röpke, Wilhelm 109, 117 Rorty, Richard 69-70, 76-7 Rosenhaft, Eve 52 Rossini, Gioacchino 41 Rothman, M.E. 150-1 Rothschild, Emma 125, 128 Roux, J.H. Le 154 Rueff, Jacques 111, 117 Rugg, Linda Haverty 41 Ruggiero, Guide 43, 51 Rugoff, Milton 192 Runia, Eelco 66-7 RuPaul (Andre Charles) 169 Sade, D.A.F. de (marquis) 70 Sainte-Beuve, C.A. 69, 71, 75-6, 78 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine M.J.-B.R. de 17 Salha, Agathe 73, 77 Salinger, J.D. 17, 28 Salisbury, Leila 184-5 Salvatore, Nick ix Samuelson, Paul 105, 117 Sapire, Hilary 155 Saunders, Christopher 154 Saunders, Edward 63, 67 Saunders, Max 66, 78 Savinio, Alberto 41 Scanlon, John 40 Schaffer, Kay 168 Schaub, Jean-Frédéric xiii Scheuer, Helmut 86 Schiff, Hilda 67 Schiff, Stacy 17, 23, 29, 182 Schlaffer, Hannelore 4, 11 Schlender, Brent 21, 29 Schmidt, Leigh Eric ix Schnicke, Falko xiii, 86 Schöffer, I. 139 Scholtz, G.D. 145 Schrikker, Alicia 126 Schud, Willi 101 Schudson, Michael 115 Schulte Beerbühl, Margrit 126 Schumpeter, Joseph 117 Schweiger, Hannes 65, 76, 86 Scott, Walter 69 Sebastiani, Silvia xiii Sedibe, Glory 152

Sedlacek, Tomas 117 Severini, Gino 99 Sewell, Jr., William 43, 51 Shapin, Steven 30 Sherwin, Martin 20 Silva Horta, José da 126 Silva, F.R. da 125 Silverman, Kenneth 176, 184 Simiand, François 31 Simson, George 166-7, 169, 179 Sinatra, Frank 161 Sjögren, Hans 11 Skidelsky, Robert 15-17, 20-1, 24, 26-30, 105, 114, 117 Sloet, J.J.S. 139 Slotkin, Richard 66 Smit, Samuel 123 Smith, Adam 191-3 Smith, Ken 153-4 Smith, Roger 138 Smith, Sidonie 164, 168, 171, 175 Somerset Maugham, William 189 Sontag, Susan (pseudonym of Susan Rosenblatt) xiv Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 67 Spiegelman, Art 168 Spielberg, Steven 62 Spurling, Hilary 182 St. Clair, William 11, 116, 140, 193 Staverman, R. 139 Steegmuller, Francis 99 Steen, Jasper van der 138 Steyn, Jaap 151, 156 Steyn, Marthinus 144 Stigler, George 106, 114 Stock, Wiebke-Marie 100 Strachey, Lytton 15, 20, 24, 27, 71 Strauss, Richard 101 Strong, George Templeton 190 Stürmer, Michael 19 Suchoff, David 28 Suetonius, Gaius 27 Suphan, Bernard 40 Suttie, Mary-Lynn 155 Sutton, Angela 126 Sutton, Matthew Avery ix, 138 Szijártó, István M. xiv, 51-2 Taft, William Howard 20, 29 Taylor, A.J.P. 18 Tedeschi, Anne 52 Tedeschi, John 52 Templer, William 51 Tetzeli, Rick 21, 29 Thom, H.B. 145, 154

222 Index

Thompson, E.P. 146 Thorbecke, J.R. 115 Tilly, Charles 48, 52 Tilton, Elizabeth 187 Timterow, Gary 102 Tinbergen, Jan 105, 111, 117 Tolstoy, Lev 59, 66 Toor, F.W. van 139 Toit, Marijke du 155 Touati, François-Olivier 65 Tourneur, Cyril 73 Trapido, Stanley 154 Trebitsch, Michel 65 Tretyakov, Sergei 77 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 18 Tribe, Keith 40 Tridgell, Susan 86 Trilling, Diana 177, 185 Trilling, Lionel 177, 185 Trimçev, Rieke 67 Trivellato, Francesca 126 Truman, Harry 20 Tuchman, Gaye 117 Tucker, Aviezer 66 Turvey, Malcolm 10-11 Tutu, Desmond 142 Twain, Mark (pseudonym of S.L. Clemens) 190 Tzara, Tristan (pseudonym of Samuel Rosenstock) 91, 98, 100-1 Uitermark, P.J. 115 Updike, John 183, 185 Usselincx, Willem 127 Uyl, Joop den 115 Vandendriessche, Joris 116 Veenstra, Piet 162 Velde, Henk te 115 Verheijen, Bart 67 Vermaseren, B.A. 139 Vernon, Ambrose White 176, 182, 184 Verwoerd, Hendrik 144-5, 151 Viart, Dominique 72, 74, 77 Victoria (queen) xiv Villon, Jacques (pseudonym of Gaston Duchamp) 97 Vincent, Louise 155 Visser, Hans 116 Voltaire (pseudonym of F.-M. Arouet) 3, 6 Vorster, B.J. 151 Vossius, Gerardus 139 Vovelle, Michel 65 Vries, Fred de 142, 153 Vries, J. de 105 Vries, Tity de 116

Waal, Shaun de 155 Wadsworth, Edward 98 Walters, Barbara 161 Walton, Izaak 71 Walzer, Michael 150, 155 Wapshot, Nicholas 114 Warner, Philip 29 Warren, Austin 15, 28 Watson, Julia 164, 168, 171, 175 Weinberg, Steve 67 Weingart, Peter 114 Wel, Jacob van der 127 Wellek, René 15, 28 Wellmer, Albrecht 117 Wesseling, H.L. 67 West, Rebecca (pseudonym of C.I. Fairfield) xiv Wet, Christiaan de 144 Weze, Johanna van 133 White, Erdmute Wenzel 100-1 White, Hayden 55, 66, 70, 77, 83-4, 86 Whitlock, Gillian 168-9 Wilde, Oscar 168 Wilentz, Sean 51 Wilkinson, Norman 98 William iii (stadtholder and king) 123, 126 Wils, Kaat 116 Wilson, Arthur M. 184 Wilson, A.N. 21 Wimsatt, Jr., William Kurtz 77 Winckel, Jasper 123 Wineapple, Brenda 182 Winfrey, Oprah 161-2 Winkin,Y. 87 Winslow, Donald 169 Wirta, Kaarle xv, 8, 118-28 Wistar, Caspar 124, 128 Witteveen, Johan 114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 10-11 Wolde, Sjoerd A. ten 114 Wood Sweet, John 11, 116, 126 Woolf,Virginia 24, 33, 40 Wyk Louw, N.P. van 150-1, 156 Yagoda, Ben 171 Younge, Charlotte Mary 71 Zagt, Ab 161 Zijlstra, Jelle xii, 106-10, 112-17 Zimmermann, Christian von 86 Zuidema, J.R. 116 Zyl Slabbert, Frederik van 148, 150-1