Don'ts For Biographers

A Correspondence School Course for Those Who Would Write Histories of the Great

PHILIP GUEDALLA

I SUPPOSE that by now there must be a manual of almost everything. Trifles like bee-keeping and the fret-saw were mastered long ago. Great minds have tabulated nearly all that can be known of the saxophone, commercial correspondence, and the appreciation of the Best in Art. Anyone who realises what a shame it is to go on earning fifteen dollars a week when he might be an electrical expert can, it appears, become one by the simple acquisition of a $mall handbook which costs him nothing and will direct him promptly (and from motives of the purest benevolence) towards a Bright Future. Every other science and most of the arts are apparently available in equally portable forms. Any traveller may enjoy his journeys in total ignorance, if he travels with a copy of France at a Glance or Spain Without Pain. Only the other day I was fascinated by an offer in my favourite magazine to improve my English: I daresay it could be. "Many a man," it said with something of menace in its tone, "has been held down all his life and suffered untold embarrassment because of mistakes in English." Now, if it had only stopped to ask me, I should have said that not nearly enough of its countrymen and mine suffered this tragic fate. "Are You Ever Ashamed of Your English?" it bawled. And I suppose it was that vociferous enquiry which set me thinking of the historians. Because the eminent men whose trained intelligences (like my own) are directed to the writing of history arc admirable at the history but leave a good deal to be desired in the writing. When you point out to them a sentence that would be a disgrace to a railway time-table, they explain scornfully that literary adornment is a meretricious and superficial decoration, that there are several greater authorities in Germany who write still worse, and that history is a science, anyway.

BUT I have no intention at the moment of being drawn across the well-trodden morasses of that ancient controversy. Besides, this is not quite the place to renew the interminable debate whether history should be treated as an art or as an accident to a cardindex. That dog-fight may be resumed outside. Meanwhile, when I started on this ramble, I had a far more important errand in view. For I glowed with a high resolve to write just one more manual, to compose (like all the other great-souled experts) my free booklet. It should enable countless fellow-creatures, now toiling at uncongenial occupations on inadequate salaries, to become biographers in their own time, out of office hours, and without learning how. It will be seen, I hope, that I have studied the best models.

The scheme, it seems to me, is not untimely; since everybody who is not writing his own life (or hers) is busy writing someone else's. The field of history, as that uncharted wilderness is pleasantly described, has been invaded in our own time by a horde of lively amateurs —of novelists tired for the moment of misrepresenting life, of dramatists out of work, of all (or almost all) the Men that Won the War—and several of their wives. The normal denizens of that area revenge themselves by reviewing them acidly and explaining with posthumous particularity the defects of their method and the evident imperfection of their technique. But how much kinder to tell them all these things beforehand, to give them a correspondence course in biography.

Let me be kind.

STATED in a neat, tabular form, "these simple little rules and few" will be found sufficient to ensure a respectful hearing for any intending biographer. If his first effort docs not secure popular approval he has only to write another: the critics will then tell him, in accordance with their established custom, that it is not so good as his first, and that neglected work will begin to seem quite good by contrast.

Rule 1. If you really feel that you must write someone's life, cut out your own. I feel that this rule, to which my Course attaches the strongest importance, will cause deep disappointment among students. So many of our little contemporaries have found in the Autobiography an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people that we are all, it would seem, eager to write one. But need we?

I think not. If you took part in important events, they are too near to be written about with candour. If you did not, why bother to write at all? A diary is sometimes allowable, an autobiography almost never; because the autobiographer knows all the time that he is posing for the camera—and though we sometimes look our best with the click of the shutter in our ears, we never look like . . . well, like what we really look like. Particular attention should be given to this rule by ladies; and it is a matter for especial regret that my Course had not been instituted in time to discourage . . . shall we be delicate and say "Madame Reclamier"?

Rule 2. If you despise a man, let him alone and write about someone else. This rule may appear to contravene the most approved modern practice. But all students will be expected to adhere to it strictly; because of all forms of condescension, the most offensive by far is to patronize the dead. Your job, in biography, is to make a dead man come to life; and the flail and the stiletto are equally inappropriate for this purpose. So, for the matter of that, is a house-painter's brush full of whitewash or a tin of treacle. For many years these implements enjoyed the widest popularity for biographical purposes, and their free use has been successful in defacing the effigies of most popular historical figures. But there is no need to react from treacle into vitriol. It is fun to be feline. But most women know that cats rarely tell the truth. Truth, after all, is the end of all historical writing; and the biographer's first business (and, if it comes to that, his last) is really to present a truthful portrait, not simply to raise a titter with a more or less successful caricature.

Rule 3. For goodness' sake refrain from telling the reader all you know. This, as some of us have found from bitter experience, is one of the hardest of all rules to observe. For there are few temptations stronger than the impulse, which besets every man at the end of a long piece of work, to confide the impressive evidence of his industry to an awestruck public. That is why so many books are in three volumes. Besides, it is far easier to write three volumes than to put the essence of three volumes into one. The three-decker is at liberty to forge merrily ahead in cheerful indifference to the stern dictates of proportion; and he will never know the anguish of bidding a sad farewell to little facts that it has cost him so much to discover—only to fling them overboard. But I am more than ever convinced that the remarkable renascence of biography in our own time is mainly due to the supersession of threevolume rag-bags of biographical information by the more graceful proportions of onevolume works. People will always call three volumes a Standard Work; but they will positively read one volume.

Rule 4. Tell us what happened, not what was going to happen in a few years' time. The most annoying passages in any historical work are those in which the author exploits his unfair advantage of having been born a century later. We all recall the exasperating gambit— "He little knew that this policy was doomed to futility by . . ." or "Strangely unaware of the inevitable march of events, he . . ." The march of events is rarely inevitable, although historians have an awkward way of seizing on the particular accident that chanced to happen and enthroning it in a blaze of platitudes as the Inevitable. But their job is just to tell us how it happened and what it looked like while it was happening. Now, all of us who have lived through the last twelve years of European history know that history rarely looks like history while it is going on. Sometimes a moment has the unmistakable flavour of history. August, 1914, was one; November, 1918, was another; and perhaps, for Englishmen, May, 1926, was a third—if it was really, as it seems to be, our 1848. But for the most part history and the lives of historical characters are just successions of events; and the biographer docs well to present them without being intolerably wise after the event. The action of 1830 was sometimes wrong in the light of after-events; but just tell us if it was right by the light of 1830.

Rule 5. . . . But I desist. This preliminary announcement has gone quite far enough. It really must not spoil the market for my free booklet (with illustrations of biographers at work, the Young Biographer's Table-Outfit, and specimen profiles of Great Men). All that you need do is to fill in the coupon, which you will not find at the foot of this page, append your age and thumb-print, and let me have it. The free booklet will then be mailed to your last known address; and after that you can begin practice as a biographer. I daresay you will do it quite as well as some others have done before you.