How To Do Biography is presented as a “sequel” to Biography: A Brief History (2007), with the same publisher. Hamilton’s text is accessible, even chatty in places, and his advice seems hard to fault, at least from the point of view of the hesitant novice – clearly the audience he has in mind. He takes us – Part I Getting Started – through a brief, basic training (definition, aims, target audience, research methods, conception and design), then illustrates his main points, at some length (Part II Composing a Life Story), with examples and long quotations from published biographies, before dipping briefly into the related genres of memoir and autobiography (Part III Variations on a Theme). One clearly senses the practising teacher behind the author here, and the chapters of the book read like a series of lectures from which the book may well have been derived.

Throughout, Hamilton’s conviction and enthusiasm for his subject are clear and make for a lively and refreshing read. He intended to produce a book that would be “readable”, “useful”, “practical” and “worthwhile”: on these four counts, he has achieved a good measure of success and, as is so often the case, the approachability of the style hides a considerable erudition. If the book sets out to be simple, it would be unfair to present it as simplistic and one is tempted to go along with Hamilton’s permanently inferred and occasionally voiced irritation with the intellectual snobberies which often greet vulgarization in any form: as he rightly points out, biography can still find it difficult to shake off charges of academic levity.

Hamilton’s main aim is to give his reader clear pointers as to what is necessary and what is acceptable when writing biography, and to combine this with underlining some of the more common pitfalls and risks attending the exercise. This works well in Part I, but in the second (and longest) section of the book, Hamilton elects to proceed by dint of examples taken from biographies already in print, in order to illustrate the points he is trying to make. But one does wonder if the illustration has not rather got in the way of the explanation and relegated it to a somewhat ancillary role. He is right, surely, to emphasise the difficulty in finding a potential publisher, to hammer home the need for sound preparatory work in the library and archive, to point up the crucial planning stage which will give an attractive “shape” to the work: to emphasise, above all, the patience and method – even courage –which must accompany the biographer all the way to the intricacies and frustrations of the publication process, and beyond, since the author’s relationship with his work takes on a new, and occasionally troublesome dimension at that point.
           But, if all of this is obviously apposite, is there such an overriding need for all the examples? One could say that so many successful, polished illustrations of how to do it might actually discourage our putative novices rather than energise them or buoy them up. There is no doubting the extent of Hamilton’s commitment or knowledge of his field: as well as quoting many contemporary biographers, he sends us back to Boswell and – especially – to Dr Johnson (evidently Hamilton’s nec plus ultra), and thence to antiquity, quoting or alluding to Xenophon, Tacitus, Suetonius and Plutarch. Might not Hamilton have achieved his aim by also/instead quoting a few more unsuccessful biographies? There is a sense in which, perhaps in spite of himself, Hamilton leaves the reader in awe of the biographical canon.

Another snag which Hamilton hits is his attempt to keep biography on an even keel between history and literature, such as the historical novel. In practice, Hamilton seems to err towards the latter on a number of occasions, emphasising the need for suspense, seduction and the search for an individual “voice” in order to produce “a work of true art” [120]. That said it is never entirely clear where Hamilton really feels biography belongs. And in underlining the need to “move” the reader, to keep the reader’s needs constantly in mind, Hamilton inevitably finds himself recognising the importance of the consumer-led biography, rather than the disinterested project which imposes itself by the sheer weight of its intellectual necessity… But this is no doubt an instance of the carping and fault-finding he is keen to criticise passim.

To be fair, Hamilton is at pains, particularly when addressing the question of memoirs and autobiography, to ward the reader firmly off sensationalism or going in search of any kind of salacious controversy. In addition, although he is reducing many of his observations so that they comply with a relatively conservative intellectual comfort zone, he none the less alludes several times to the writerly dimension of biography: the need not only for a certain amount of talent, but also for intellectual probity and moral integrity. Furthermore, he is keen to stress the sense in which the interest of biography as a genre lies not merely in its portrayal of the subject of the life in question, but also in what it tells us about the biographer. He suggests further that lives, well written, “speak, indirectly, to our own lives–the fundamental purpose of serious biography” [237].

Thus, if Hamilton’s own book illustrates the difficulty of striking a balance between commercial and scientific imperatives, it is also acutely conscious of the need to discuss the merits and demerits of public knowledge of private facts. The line beyond which one should not stray is very difficult to draw and, as Hamilton admits, is bound up with the very notion of what a democratic society should be. In addition to its declared objective – providing a useful mode d’emploi for aspiring biographers – the book reminds us, therefore, that biography is itself a fascinating constituent of any country’s/civilisation’s intellectual history. It both illustrates, and casts an anxious gaze towards, the contemporary political culture. In the end, by returning periodically to these themes, Hamilton, having shown its literary qualities, pulls biography back in the direction of social and cultural history.

How To Do Biography, written by one of America’s best-known biographers, is certainly an interesting book. Hamilton, perhaps, is trying to answer some of his own critics here. In the age-old argument about whether a given biography should hold up its subject as an example to be commemorated, admired and adored from a distance or, rather, get in close and shine a light on the subject’s most unseemly blemishes, Hamilton certainly seems to come down, for the present at least, on the side of the latter.

© 2009 Trevor Harris & GRAAT On-Line