Biographer's dilemma - to conceal or reveal

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Discretion is not the better part of biography, wrote the English biographer Lytton Strachey.

It is an observation which biographers have probably had fun debating since the term was coined - in 1683, says the Oxford English Dictionary - to describe the history of the lives of individual men, as a branch of literature.

The OED now has its own biography of sorts, published in 1998: The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words - which, as biography goes, had it all.

Whether discretion is or is not the better part of the biographer's art can rather depend on whether your subject is alive or dead.

There are, of course, those biographers of the ilk of Kitty Kelley, who drag the lives of the glamorous and influential kicking and screaming out of closets (mostly American, so we don't object too strenuously) - and damn the consequences.

A new New Zealand biography is the story of a woman whose life, put starkly, goes something like this: she grew up in poverty, was tainted by that poverty and, later, the stigma of a (wrong) diagnosis of mental illness; who is reclusive; writes difficult books; is not at all glamorous and who has never had a love affair with anyone who has had even a remote brush with celebrity.

Michael King's biography of the writer Janet Frame went into a second print run of 7500 last week, just one week after its initial release of 7500.

Having the last copies of the first edition has become a selling point at Unity Books in Auckland's High St.

Wrestling With the Angel is an authorised biography. Frame allowed King complete access to her published and unpublished papers and to "her recollection." There were two requests: Frame did not want the book to be a critical, literary biography and, while she spent hours talking to King with the tape-recorder running, she would not allow him to quote verbatim from any of those interview sessions.

It was a fair exchange, says King. "I had the freedom to ask her anything, to go through her papers, her private correspondence. I didn't even consider [the two conditions] concessions. They were a quid pro quo."

King practises a form of biography - he calls it "compassionate biography" - which would be unrecognisable to the Kitty Kelleys of the genre. Where at all possible, he shows the relevant sections of text to characters who are about to become public figures in somebody else's story.

Partly, he says, it's protection against error. But also, "It's partly good manners. You're making an enormous intrusion into somebody's life if you're writing about them when they are not people who have chosen to be in the public domain. They only turn up there because, by sheer chance, they happen to be associated with someone who happens to be famous - therefore I think I owe them that courtesy."

If there is a dispute about the biographer's judgment, King is always willing to discuss the issue. But, "You've got to persuade me that I'm wrong, and if you can't I will stick with the judgment made but I might, either in the text or in the footnotes, register your disagreements and I'm always prepared to do that."

Of course, for every fact or interpretation of the truth, there will be decisions made about what goes in - and what remains in a sealed vault for the next generation of biographers to come along. King will "retain concealment" in cases where the facts "are not things that affect the essential truth; they are details or they're colour, but the essential truth is still there."

It is his belief that it is legitimate to sometimes leave a gap, so as to not hurt people who have not chosen to be part of the story, especially in the case of the Frame biography which is the primary biography. That gap, he says, can be filled later - "when it doesn't matter" - by subsequent biographers.

The double bind, which he admits to, is that he cannot give examples of what he has left out to demonstrate the point.

"Doing so would undo the very good I think I'm doing by not revealing."

Lynley Hood, biographer of Sylvia Ashton Warner and Minnie Dean, whose next book will be on the Christchurch creche case, says that the biographer's prime responsibility is to be true to the story.

"I believe the biographer has a responsibility to record the words and deeds of those who behave honourably, and those who behave dishonourably. "I do not believe it is the writer's role to protect the mean, the self-deluded and the dishonest from having to face their flaws in print."

Which is not to suggest, she says, that the biographer opens the safe guarding unpleasant truths without much thought about the potential hurt a public airing might cause.

Both she and King have disguised identities. Occasionally, says King, people cannot be reconciled with the truth. In Wrestling with the Angel, he has disguised the identity of an Irishman who pursued the young Frame's affections while she was living in London. He is, King says, "prejudiced, dull, domineering and very unpleasant. None of that is his fault, however." He is also now a very old man living in a London suburb and why, asks King, "should he suddenly have the spotlight on him because of things that happened 40 or more years ago?"

In Hood's Sylvia! she gave the pseudonym Flora Mark to a woman who was "terribly shocked and upset about what I'd written about her relationship with Sylvia. I guess because I thought it was so different from the way she perceived it that I owed it to her to show her what I'd written. She was absolutely frantic with worry and wanted me to take it out, so I disguised her identity."

Hood sent "Mark" an advance copy of the biography with a note pointing out that hers was a relatively small part and hoping that she could live with it. She wrote back, Hood says, saying she'd loved the book and "What a fool I was to make such a fuss."

This, Hood says, "showed that even frail old ladies can cope with the truth - I don't think people should be spared." (Although there is, of course, no way of knowing what the woman's response would have been had her identity not been concealed.)

Where Hood's and King's philosophies of biography do coincide is in their belief that a good biography should do more than illuminate the life of its central character. Hood uses the analogy of a light shining through a single doorway which reveals a wider picture. King sees through a keyhole to wider cultural or historical issues. And the story seen through that door, through that keyhole, will be rewritten for successive generations according to current preoccupations.

For Richard Holmes, the English biographer of the Romantic poets, the biography is "an open door. It can be walked through again and again."

Of his 10 Commandments of the biographer, the last is this: "Thou shalt be humble ... [because] you can never know or write the last word about the human heart."