Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [48]
Such biographers have a unique intimacy, and if in addition they are reasonably honest and perceptive, they can construct a life that those of us not acquainted with, or not contemporary with, our subject can never match. If the contemporary biographer is blessed with Boswell’s genius as reporter and writer, the result may be supreme. On the other hand, he may distort, consciously or unconsciously, through access to too much information, and produce a warehouse instead of a portrait. Lockhart’s work fills four thousand pages in nine volumes; Nicolay and Hay’s about the same in ten volumes. Unfortunately, in the matter of superabundance, the secondary biographer of today is not far behind.
The most immediate life is, of course, autobiography or diaries, letters and autobiographical memoirs. These are the primary stuff of history: the Confessions of St. Augustine and of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Pepys’s Diary; Ben Franklin’s Autobiography; the Memoirs of Saint-Simon; the letters of the Marquise de Sévigné; the journals of John Evelyn, Charles Greville, and the Goncourt brothers; the Apologia of Cardinal Newman; and, I suppose I must add, that acme of self-conscious enterprise, the Education of Henry Adams. Even when tendentious or lying, these works are invaluable, but they are in a different category than biography in the sense that concerns us here.
When one tries to think of who the great secondary biographers are, no peaks stand out like the primaries. There are, of course, the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who closely followed but were not acquainted with their subject. Although they tell us what we know of the life of Jesus, their motive was not so much biographical as propagandistic—a spreading of the gospel (which means good news) that the Messiah had come. Since then one may pick one’s own choice: Carlyle’s Cromwell, perhaps, Amy Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, Sam Morison’s Christopher Columbus, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale, Leon Edel’s Henry James, Justin Kaplan’s Mark Twain and Steffens. With apologies to them, however, I think the primary biographers still have the edge.
I shall never be among them because it seems to me that the historian—whether or not the biographer—needs distance. It has once or twice been proposed to me that I write a biography of my grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a man of great charm and accomplishment, but though I loved and revered him, I shrink from the very idea. Love and reverence are not the proper mood for a historian. I have written one short piece on a particular aspect of his life,* but I could never do more.
In the subjects I have used I am not personally involved. The nearest I came was in the course of working on the Stilwell papers, then housed in Mrs. Stilwell’s home in Carmel, when I became friendly with members of the family, who were, and are, very nice people and, I am happy to say, have remained my friends even after publication. Friendly relations, I have to acknowledge, inevitably exerted a certain unspoken restraint on writing anything nasty about the deceased General, had I been so inclined. However, I cannot think of anything I really toned down, except possibly the foul language to be found in Stilwell’s diary. Restraint in that case, however, was less concerned with the family’s sensibilities than with my own. Not having been brought up with four-letter words and explicit scatological images, I found it impossible to bring myself to repeat them, and yet to omit what I then took to be an indication of character