Potted lives — Emerson Write

An excursion into biography at speed…

Beamish Museum, County Durham (by Glen Bowman, at Wikimedia Commons)

Lately, a lot of my writing has been about other peoples’ lives: biographies for websites; paragraphs for books; obituaries for magazines; that page at the end of a pamphlet headed ‘Contributors’. It’s startling how often I have to juice other people’s lives and serve them up in a shot glass, and even more startling how formulaic and easy it starts to feel after a bit. It has become one of the things I enjoy most as well as one of the things I do most. But for all that, I do realise that what I’m doing has a pretty odd effect on the lives I’m describing, and probably on my own too, for that matter.

Of course, even full-length biography cannot do justice to someone’s complexities. The new(ish) academic focus on ‘life writing’ spends a good deal of time and energy explaining this problem. When you constrain a life into a book, or still worse, an article, subtleties vanish and errors have a tendency to be repeated and amplified (thank you, Wikipedia). By that, I mean factual errors, not the mistakes that we all make in our lives. But those are amplified too, and as smarter people than me have pointed out, there can be a ghoulish, intrusive side to biography. We want to know because we want to see the worst: the failings, the miseries, the gossip. We don’t want the subtleties. If you’d like to know how that might feel to the actual person at the centre of the fuss, try imagining your own potted life, all the times when, as you’re reading it, you would say ‘No, but it wasn’t like that,’ ‘No, but I didn’t…,’ ‘No, but…,’ ‘No! No! No!’

Life-writing in miniature, of the kind that I tend to do, is even worse at preserving nuance. Biography at pace is a kind of speed-dating, but where the other party is likely to be dead, or at the very least, to have no idea you’re writing about them. Their hopes, dreams, loves and disappointments are reduced to matching word limits, to honours received and jobs held, and I’m ashamed to say that the kind of treatment they get depends rather more on my energy on a particular morning than on anything they have managed (or failed) to achieve.

What does all this distillation do to the writer’s own sense of human value and achievement? I wonder whether professional obituary writers, who do what I am doing at greater length and with greater skill, begin to live their lives differently from the rest of us as more and more life details pass through their hands. What does it do to you to know the particular verbal forms in which work, love, war, loss are carefully packaged (where we are told that A ‘continues to practise medicine in areas of conflict’, or that, for B, ‘a difficult period followed, with spells of homelessness’)? How does it feel to treat people’s lives as though everything that happened was in preparation for an event or a phase that the person in question had almost certainly not predicted? I found out recently that there are some career guidance courses that encourage participants to shape their ambitions by imagining what the first line of their obituary will be. Wow. I suppose that’s one way to go about things, but it sounds exhausting. And, like a lot of ‘proper’ obituaries, it rather seems to miss the point.

The obituaries I actually like to read are usually the ones that don’t follow the ‘proper’ route at all. Most often, they are the ones written by friends, ones which open windows onto quiet (and often very funny) worlds. Perhaps we should lobby for a new movement in ‘life writing’, one where no award or honour or publication is mentioned until the very end (if then). One where we are allowed to start by explaining that ‘X had a love of jam that she admitted was unseemly in an adult’ or that ‘Y unfailingly made the friends who telephoned him feel better about things .’ People say that the devil is in the detail. That may be so, but for me, it’s the details that unlock a personality, that make me feel after I’ve read about someone that I understand a little about what it might have been like to meet them. But even if we know someone, it is far from easy to sum up their themness. As ever, Virginia Woolf puts it better than most of us could ever hope to manage. Asked to write a book about the life of her friend Roger Fry, she wrote in her diary about the ‘vast sparkling dust heap’ of his letters, ‘… but how to dig out? how to represent?’… ‘how can one cut loose from facts, when there they are contradicting my theories?’ At least those of us who pot up lives for a living can take comfort from one thing: writing our own obituary is the one deadline we can legitimately dodge.