Raw Bones, Fire and Patience

By J.D. Reed

Talented new biographers are moving beyond scholarship

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one," observed Thomas Carlyle more than a century ago. The well-spent ones are still as scarce as first editions. But, thanks to a number of gifted and imaginative biographers, well-written lives are now a lot easier to find.

In the past few years, oversize, prize-winning stories of figures as varied as Somerset Maugham and Theodore Roosevelt, Isak Dinesen and Lyndon Johnson have sold briskly and drawn critical raves. The volumes have rescued the genre from charges that it was succumbing to the as-told-to stories of celebrities like Phil Donahue, such drugboilers as Albert Goldman's Elvis and George Plimpton and Jean Stein's Edie, essentially a snip-and-paste collage of interviews. Moreover, these new lives are not exclusively devoted to the scholarly examination of papers and letters. "Not long ago, most biographies were compiled by diligent researchers," says Michael Di Capua, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. But diligent was all they were. "Now it's rare for books like that to get published." Instead, the work is being done by artists who have extended their range far beyond the academic. In their debuts, Edmund Morris (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt) and Judith Thurman (Isak Dinesen) write with a verve that approaches the novelistic. And that, Di Capua concludes, is the reason for their success: "In the hands of a good writer, a life can offer the same kind of satisfaction that first-rate fiction does."

Justin Kaplan, 57, one of the best working biographers, was unhappy when he tried his hand at fiction in his Harvard days. "It was not covert or impersonal enough," recalls the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner for Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. But Kaplan's sharply observed lives possess an imaginative drive found in the best tales. Says Kaplan: "It's like a Dickens novel. You get a feeling of the society around the life. And a good narrative."

Kaplan's narratives, like William Manchester's in his monumental, novelistic American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur (1978), are logical, not chronological. Kaplan does not, for example, begin his recent Walt Whitman: A Life, with the poet's birth. Instead, the bard is introduced at age 65, broken and disabled by a stroke, buying his first house in seedy Camden, N.J. His brother George is angered by those "whorehouse" poems. Whitman responds, "I just did what I did because I did it--that's the whole secret." "You're as stubborn as hell," George says. "You are stubborner, Walt, than a load of bricks."

And with the bricks Kaplan begins to build his biographical structure. He believes that the choice of subject is one reason for his success. "The biographer," Kaplan observes, "is the equivalent of a good jockey. You can't win the race without a good horse."

Now researching a biography of Charlie Chaplin, the author is usually found in the comfortable Cambridge, Mass., home he shares with his wife, Novelist Anne Bernays. His study is littered with dolls, posters and memorabilia of "the Little Tramp." Why a film figure? Like Twain and Whitman, he believes "Chaplin rightly thought he was creating a new kind of language." The new languages need an interpreter: "You hope to be on the inside of your subject, but also hold a distance from him," Kaplan says. But sometimes it does not work that way. "I once dreamed that Walt Whitman was pursuing me with an ax for invading his privacy."

Ted Morgan regards the invasion of privacy as a sacred duty. The former reporter, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1961, is now noted for the objectivity of his portraits of the youthful Winston in Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry and of the aged Willie in Maugham. But they are edged with steel. Morgan, 50, feels that either love or hate is a dangerous conceit. Says he: "You have to be clinical, like a coroner dissecting a corpse." His scalpel reveals a Churchill swollen with hubris and a stingy Maugham pathologically concealing his homosexuality from the public. Morgan, like his colleagues, perceives his subjects in novelistic terms: "What I am looking for in a subject is a tragic life with many setbacks and recoveries, and with a transforming experience."

The biographer himself has been transformed. Morgan changed his name from Sanche de Gramont in 1977 when he became a U.S. citizen. The son of a diplomat had been raised as a hereditary count in one of France's oldest aristocratic families. A graduate of Yale, Morgan detailed his affection for the U.S. in Rowing Toward Eden (1981). Now at work on a one-volume life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Morgan says, "I think about him constantly. The subject is something that you can't get out of your head. They said that when William Manchester was working on MacArthur he started smoking a corncob pipe and walking on the heels of his feet. That didn't happen to me. But I did learn something from each of my subjects." The lessons, however, do not impinge on the time he takes for research: "You almost have to be an intelligence service that grades information on the quality of the source."

Poet Judith Thurman, 36, labored to form her first effort at biography, the scrupulous and elegant Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, along accepted Freudian lines. The author, so goes the convention, must interpret her subject psychologically for the reader. Thurman balked at the role of therapist. "Psychoanalyzing is absolutely useless," she recalls. "I was treating Dinesen as a case. I dropped that." Now she views her work as a love affair. "First it was the ecstasy, then total disillusionment, and finally came a deeper understanding and acceptance of the person." As sales and critiques have shown, the result was equally satisfying to readers. Concludes Thurman: "Apparently people are hungry for some real wisdom that they don't seem to be getting from fiction."

Like many of her contemporaries, Thurman prepared for the task with a concentration that amounted to fanaticism. She learned Danish and followed the tracks of Baroness Karen Blixen, who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen, through Europe, Africa and the U.S. In the Dinesen family's country house, she was allowed to stay the night: "Can you imagine what it was like, lying in bed with the scent of roses and the ticking of clocks in every room, and downstairs were all those papers and letters locked away?"

Each Monday, Thurman left her husband Jonathan David, a cinematograpner, in Manhattan to work 16-hour days in a Long Island cottage. There she subconsciously evoked a mood by wearing Dinesen's favorite perfume, Fracas. "It was eerie," she remembers. "The identification was very deep." Almost every line demonstrates an affection tempered by careful attention to detail. As Dinesen went into decline, Thurman reports, "she let down her guard, she relaxed her crooked smile, and her eyes--which she still carefully made up with kohl--seemed to stream with light. There was something almost inhuman about her fragility. . . She was, in fact, dying of malnutrition. After the asparagus season was over she lived exclusively on glasses of fruit and vegetable juice, ampules of gelee royale, oysters and dry biscuits."

The new Boswells are not always so enamored of their subjects. "I thought I was going to love Lyndon Johnson," says Journalist Robert Caro. "I knew he was going to be shrewd and tough and ruthless, but that was all right." Caro, 47, a former investigative reporter, should have known better. The Power Broker, his 1,200-page study of New York's urban-development and highway czar Robert Moses, so unsettled its subject that he issued a rebuttal to Caro's many allegations. Despite objections, the book won a Pulitzer Prize. In The Path to Power, the 882-page first of three volumes on L.B.J., Caro argues, not always convincingly, that the 36th President illegally ran a blind trust fund from the Oval Office and that his avarice and cunning were rooted in childhood. If, as Emerson wrote, "geniuses have the shortest biographies," Caro has envisioned an L.B.J. who was hardly a candidate for Mensa. With a probable 1,600 pages left to go, Caro has already concluded that Johnson lacked "any consistent ideology or principle, in fact, any moral foundation whatsoever." The book has come under considerable attack from critics, not all of them admirers of L.B.J. The opponents argue that the biographer has forced his subject into a mean-spirited characterization far too small to hold the real and complex Johnson. The Path to Power makes accusations but withholds proofs until the projected second volume, still years away. Moreover, it seems endlessly repetitive, as if Caro were a nervous lecturer who did not trust his audience.

Whatever the merits of the case, Caro's detective work must have worn out more than one pair of shoes. Caro and his wife Ina, a historian, actually moved to the remote Texas hill country of Johnson's youth. There he conducted many of the more than 700 interviews for his book. Even high school sweethearts and L.B.J.'s first campaign driver were included. At one point, Caro describes the young congressional aide's first view of the Capitol. The author felt it to be a symbol of what Washington represented to the youthful L.B.J. Caro had already located the seedy hotel where Johnson lived at the time, and he knew that the young man kept farm-boy hours. Caro walked Johnson's route at 5:30 a.m. and found that the sun rose just behind the Capitol dome, bathing it in a spectacular, almost mystical light. "You can imagine," he recalls, "what that vision must have meant to a boy from the hill country." It meant something to Caro as well. A life examined in such detail, he maintains, is a fit representative of history. Says he: "Biography, properly done, can illuminate an entire era."

Edmund Morris, 42, has also completed one volume of a three-part presidential study. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980, and Theodore Rex will appear within two years. Unlike Caro, Morris, who keeps residences on New York City's fashionable Central Park South and in Washington, D.C., is bully on his subject. "I got interested listening to Nixon's farewell speech to his staff," he says, "because he quoted T.R.'s elegy to his dying wife." The result was an unproduced screenplay, The Dude from New York City. Some four years later it became a biography of unusual grace and attracted fresh interest in the 26th President. Indeed, since Morris' 1979 book, David McGullough's popular Mornings on Horseback has captured the young T.R. in a vivid collection of vignettes.

While Caro explores every shred of evidence and exhausts every interview, Morris believes that biographers should keep out of places where they do not be long. Fascinated by T.R.'s courtship of his first wife, Alice Lee, detailed in the future President's diary, Morris nonetheless accepted Roosevelt's brief entry for the couple's wedding night: "Happiness is too sacred to write about." Although this may seem a bizarre attitude for a biographer, Morris is adamant: "If the subject doesn't want you in part of his life, you have no right to invade it. All the biographer needs is the ability to penetrate somebody's soul, honesty and a sense of drama."

A sense of place and pace helps. When Teddy believes that the wounded President McKinley will recover and his own plans for the presidency may never succeed, the young Vice President flees to an Adirondack mountaintop: "The clouds parted unexpectedly, sunshine poured down on his head, and for a few moments a world of trees and mountains and sparkling water lay all around him . . . below a ranger was approaching, running, clutching the yellow slip of a telegram. Instinctively, he knew the message the man was bringing."

With each volume, Morris and his fellow American biographers are proving the theory of their more celebrated colleague, Antonia Fraser. The author of four distinguished and popular works about such British historical figures as Cromwell and Mary, Queen of Scots, Lady Antonia maintains that her field is perhaps the only one in which the flawed can be overruled by the excellent and the cheap by the enduring. Says she: "Where biographies are concerned, the good will always drive out the bad." Morris is even more enthusiastic. "Biography is becoming the most important nonfiction form. I rejoice to see it coming back to where it belongs, in the hands of us amateurs."

Those amateurs have more than a love of their subjects. Judith Thurman views the practice as a form of alchemy. Describing the clear consomme made by Isak Dinesen's African cook, she writes, "You keep the spirit, but discard the rough ingredients: eggshells and raw bones. You then submit them to fire and patience. And the clarity comes at the end like a magic trick." The recipe stands as a metaphor for all well-written Lives.

--By J.D. Reed. Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by JANICE C. SIMPSON This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.