Is Biography the One A.I.-Proof Genre?

New York Times

2 days ago

In our age of distraction, the arts appear to be responding in kind, shrinking and streamlining themselves to capture what they can of our withering attention spans. . Pop songs are down a full minute from the 1990s. Television seasons are getting shorter. Children's books, which averaged 190 pages in the 1930s, tap out at 60 pages today. Adult best sellers have lopped off about 50 pages in the last decade alone, and novels, in particular, seem ever sleeker and more straightforward, more dialogue-driven and less cognitively demanding, with smaller casts, a single story strand, a single point of view.
In the midst of such minimalism, at least one form bucks the trend. Biography continues to cut a billowing 19th-century profile, trailing its footnotes and family trees, tipping the scales at nearly 1,000 pages — fat, splendid and wholly implacable in the face of our diminishing stamina. Biography feels perennially robust and continues to sell steadily — this year's offerings include fresh assessments of the well-worn lives of Mark Twain, Paul Gauguin and Gertrude Stein, and even a biography of a biography: 'Ellmann's Joyce,' by Zachary Leader, an account of Richard Ellmann's life of James Joyce from 1959, long held to be the genre's gold standard. It was biography, according to Gertrude Stein, that truly fulfilled the novel's zeal for showing the full sweep of a life, and the genre has stayed faithful to its obsessive interest in character and its formation, the labyrinth of human motive, all those the crooked paths through which experience yields insight, insight shapes psychology and psychology ripens into fate.
But biography's stolid facade conceals a sensitive, turbulent history. Biography alters as we do, as our conceptions of motive evolve, as theories of personality float into fashion or fade away. It offers a snapshot of our working notions of selfhood, of what we hunger to assert and what we are not yet prepared to know.
What lay at the root of D.H. Lawrence's rages? His harsh upbringing? His scorn for inhibition? That little stowaway, Mycobacterium tuberculosis? Over the years, Lawrence's biographers have made cases for all three. Why did Sylvia Plath kill herself? Was it an act of despair, revenge or desperate agency? Every age seems to need, and produce, its own biographies — we reportedly have 15,000 books about Lincoln alone — not just as certain archives become available but as certain questions and approaches become possible.
Take the case of James Baldwin. The writer's estate has been fiercely protective of his correspondence, forbidding biographers from quoting even a word of it. In 2017, the archive was acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library, and the bulk of his letters, along with rarely viewed notes and manuscripts, were made public. In due time, new biographies have arrived, drawing from this material. Two will be published this year,: 'Baldwin: A Love Story,' by Nicholas Boggs, and 'James Baldwin: The Life Album,' by Magdalena J. Zaborowska. Both books stitch the story of his private life, long relegated to footnotes if not outright omitted. Both books capture Baldwin at unseen angles; neither concerns itself with offering a definitive portrait. 'I excavate the parts of your life that have been obscured by some readers, scholars, even your family,' Zaborowska writes, addressing Baldwin. 'I center your erotic and sexual love for men (and some women), your domestic life, and your authorship as forms of imaginative activism.'
The biography of today recoils from stuffing its subject into a straitjacket of interpretation, with all contradictions smoothly reconciled into a unified self. Instead we find an emphasis on the fragility and provisionality of identity, on performance, on motive being mysterious and many-tentacled. 'Baldwin seemed to be composed of carefully crafted personae, woven like armor,' Zaborowska writes. (Such tact in that 'seemed.') The veteran biographer Hermione Lee has said that she admires how her subjects, like Tom Stoppard, preserve their privacy, how they elude her. In 'The Power of Adrienne Rich' (2020), Hilary Holladay considers how Rich was elusive to herself — 'the absence of a fully knowable self was her deepest wound and great prod.' In Katherine Bucknell's biography, 'Christopher Isherwood Inside Out' (2024), we learn Isherwood was also consumed by this search 'for a singular self.' Candy Darling, one of the stars of Andy Warhol's Factory, was 'always acting,' Cynthia Carr reports in 'Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar' (2024). 'I don't know which role to play,' she once wrote in an unsent letter, which trails off. 'I would like to live with someone whom I could. …'
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