Don't Confuse Biography With History

There they stand, all proud and plumply packaged, on the bookshop shelves. In most cases they're the first thing you see when walking through the door - the ideal present for those in a rush. Bought and given, displayed and read, these products gleam alluringly. All the bits hang together. But - to what end?

Biography is a pillar of English literature - as well as a buttress for English authors. Stuck for an idea, but stuck with a mortgage? Then why not try biography? Personality is the key to existence and its exploration the answer to your difficulty. There is always somebody's life waiting to be "done". The first biography has become what the first novel used to be - the exploration of one's own voice and the testing of the waters.

Meanwhile, those in other careers also walk the curious walk to the necropolis where bones can be disinterred and then made to dance. Politicians, from Duff Cooper on Talleyrand to Roy Jenkins on Gladstone, are particularly tempted. The satisfying symmetry of a life - birth, achievement and death - offers a convenient plan. So, follow that parabola right on down to the end of the line, and call your book a study of "life and times". For the illusion central to your conceit is that a period and a country, a collective movement as well as the dramatic moment, can be reduced to one will and one voice.

There's gold in them there lives because no other nation buys biography in the way the British do. Character, we've long since been persuaded, is destiny. Now the hunt is on for an official biographer of the Queen Mother as her diaries are carried away from Clarence House to the royal library at Windsor. And biographers eye each other to the sound of cash-registers and the distinct tinkling of a royal honour.

English literature is a collection of the quirky. From Falstaff through Tristram Shandy to Mrs Gamp it's the weird rule-breakers who appeal in all their broken-backed humanity. Our taste for biography, at its best, stands in the same tradition and the same love of the eccentric, the particular and the exceptional. Aubrey's Brief Lives set the pattern in the 17th century, in the 18th Boswell recreated a Johnson of tragic dimension and human depth.

But the life of the artist is a different thing from the political biography. What matters here is the ability to recreate the mentality behind the hand that held the pen, brushed the strokes or composed the notes. Those are solitary lives not social ones - and so it makes sense to concentrate on the one exceptional person, to try and explain why and how the work turned out the way it did. The successful biographers (Ackroyd on Dickens, Wilson on Tolstoy, Richardson on Picasso) are geniuses of empathy who can feel their way into a vision, a unique way of looking at the world.

But even at this high level there is often a philistine lurking within the biographer's breast and a reductivist claw aching for action. British biographers of the artist know their readers all too well. We like to giggle at the stories about the first Mrs TS Eliot, dressed to kill in a British Union of Fascists uniform when she was out stalking poor Tom.

The idea of the impersonality of the artist has had an awkward reception here. Its greatest exponents in our 20th-century literature were not English but an American and an Irishman. Eliot and Joyce were both priests of art who saw their sacraments as effective independently of the individual life in all its chaos. In Britain we rather think that the artist who emphasises the work in that way has something to hide in "real" life. And so biography becomes a substitute for understanding the artistic achievement, as well as a reason for evading it.

But it's the political biography which offers the biggest illusion. For something to be "history" it's not enough for it to be dead. And the fact that a biography deals with the past does not of itself make it "history". The word used by the Greeks for this kind of writing means an investigation of a particular kind. History is their invention. And their love of debate and argument survives in true history, which is the sound not of one voice but of the many.

When Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War, he wrote an account of a whole situation. He did not write a Life and Times of Pericles. He knew that it was the event that mattered, and the historical event is the convergence and the clash of many individual biographies. Write an account of the times from one person's perspective, whether you agree or disagree with that person, and you are no longer writing history. You abstract one strand from a complex web - and so you falsify.

The great biography can escape its own restrictions. In writing about de Gaulle Jean Lacouture transcended that austere monument and recreated a whole world of which even the general was but a part. But the "good biography" is really the equivalent of that other bit of pretend history so popular in Britain - the afternoon visit to the National Trust country house. It is a peepshow on the past - not the real thing.

taliesin.hywel@virgin.net