The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [110]
In 2008 the pattern was similar: biographies of Andrew Jackson, Dick Cheney, Samuel de Champlain, Condoleezza Rice, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife, not the contemporary actress); memoirs of an English childhood, an African childhood, an “appalling upbringing at the hands of … catastrophically unfit parents,”43 and a novelist’s memoir-response to the stillbirth of her first child.44
In short, biography today is not one thing—and never has been. The crossover between “popular” and “serious” in biographies is probably greater than in many other categories, since airport readers and other adults who choose books as a favorite entertainment option will often buy biographies—in hardcover—if they are attracted by the subject or have seen the book mentioned or blurbed in the media.
There are historian-biographers, literary biographers (which is to say, biographers of literary figures who address the author’s works as well as the life), celebrity biographers, and biographical memoirists whose personal memoirs include the narrative history of a parent, partner, or other central personage. (A classic hypothetical example is Bennett Cerf’s quip about a book that would be an automatic best seller, “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”)
Authorized biographies give the writer access to privileged materials but often also assume that the result will be laudatory. Music stars, actors, artists, humanitarians, sports heroes, and other public figures tend to be the subject of authorized biographies, with Pat Robertson, Cecil Beaton, Pope John Paul II, Konrad Adenauer, and Helen, the queen mother of Rumania, also among those whose representatives gave permission to their biographers, in some cases selecting them as fit repositories of information and potential praise.
A celebrity biographer like Donald Spoto researches and writes about the lives of film stars, movie directors, playwrights, saints, and glamorous people in the public eye: Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Diana, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Preston Sturges, Lotte Lenya, Tennessee Williams, Alan Bates, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kramer, St. Joan of Arc, St. Francis of Assisi. Others working in this genre include J. Randy Taraborrelli, chronicler of the lives of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Cher, Diana Ross, Janet Jackson, Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot—and Kitty Kelley, author of Jackie Oh!, and books on Nancy Reagan, the Bush dynasty, and Frank Sinatra. The subtitles of Kelley’s books on Sinatra and Mrs. Reagan frankly call them “unauthorized” biographies, a term that, while once presumably opprobrious, is now a guarantee of high-level gossip.
A literary biography, as we’ve noted, is the account of the life and work of a writer. This term seems as if it contains a misplaced modifier, since while the subject may be a poet, novelist, or playwright, this does not guarantee that the resulting book will be literary. The contrary is quite often the case, despite the idealized early examples of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and of the defining work in the genre, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
To a certain degree, these categories are self-evident. But we could make another kind of provisional distinction based upon the presentational nature (and thus the ideology) of the printed text—between those biographies that display the research that has gone into them with a proliferation of marked footnotes and endnotes, and those that hide the research process, providing either silent footnotes or, in some