Like a Burnished Throne, Like a Kick in the Head

Beware the biographer: the scuttler in the archives, the interviewer of relatives, the Monday morning quarterback, the renderer of judgements, the mad constructor of a monstrous facsimile made up of the detritus and the impressions and the letters and the paper trail his subject leaves behind. Beware the biographical urge: to spill out the secrets of the dead or nearly-dead, to act as if one is doing a noble task when what one is really doing is (as Janet Malcolm has pointed out) “listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail.” Beware the initial infatuation with the subject which slowly turns to hatred, to cruel pity, to contempt. Beware the biography itself, the dutiful trudge from cradle to grave, the excruciatingly uninteresting childhood and family tree sections, the affectless prose, the easy recourse to cliché. Beware the show-your-work type who itemizes every meal and hotel, every flight and fuck and flirtation, who devastates acres of pristine forest for their two, three, four volume epic, which will never be read save by the critics assigned to review it, and the later biographers intent on correcting the errors of their predecessor.