Table of Contents
Initially, I would like to discuss three points. The first is the problem of dealing with a live subject and the question I pose here is ‘who owns the life?’ This is a question that also applies to dead subjects but it is of particular importance with living subjects. We should be aware of the fact that there are different stakeholders in any life or life story — at least three significant types of stakeholders. The second point I want to address briefly is the training of political biographers, and the third is to mount an argument for ‘short lives’ — less weight and more insight in biographies.
The question ‘who owns the life?’ seems self-evident initially. It does not really strike you until you start trying to unravel the story, but the difficulty with any biography, particularly of a prominent politician is the need to reconcile the subject’s own investment in their ‘life myth’. People who are somehow engaged in power and power relations to effect forms of social change are of course concerned with their image, they are concerned with posterity and they are concerned with public perceptions. Those are a set of concerns the biographer has to accept and be aware of. These ‘life myth’ concerns are also linked to the concerns of their family because you will find if your subject is within living memory or recently dead that the family, too, has an investment and there are certain things that the family do not want to tell. But then there are other stakeholders, including the ‘followers’, party members, political colleagues, members of cabinets (if they were cabinet ministers or a prime minister). Each of these have a particular version of the life that they would want to see supported. And, finally, I think the reason why many scholars start biographies is because we are also stakeholders. The subject of the biography may have had an impact on us and we may feel, as a consequence, that we have some right to explore or understand what made them do what they did, why they succeeded or why they failed. I started writing about Whitlam because, like many of the ‘baby boomer’ generation, he represented to me the great hope of change, and after his election I had gone overseas, thinking the country was in good hands, only to come back and think, ‘what happened?’, ‘why did it go wrong?’ So, that is an example of a different set of stakeholder interests.
Importantly, we need to recognise that those different interests are not going to coincide. They each have a different motive behind them, they lead to different clashes and different sorts of issues arise. Once you start writing the book, you become aware of these sorts of things and you are challenged to balance up these interests. You know the family has told you something, you know the political followers have told you something else. As a writer talking to a general audience, you will have different issues you are trying to unravel, to tell your story. These issues are particular to biography because you can never get inside someone else’s head. Hence, it always has to be a inductive process. It is not something where you can say: ‘I've got all the facts, so here it is’. In terms of political biography, those sorts of stakeholder issues — and I have mentioned three levels but you could probably think of others — are important because they connect the politics with the person. We are after all looking at these people because they had a public impact of some sort. They have exercised power or suffered from power, or driven policy.
The second thing I wanted to talk about is the issue of training, which is one of the most curious aspects about biography. I have had this curious career where I ended up writing a lot of critique of biography and then, every time I wrote an essay, I seemed to be asked by someone else to write another life. And so I developed a whole back catalogue of material on biography, biographical methodology and so on. Then, a couple of years ago, I was asked by the British Academy of Humanities to contribute an essay on the way biographers wrote about biography — and I had great fun doing it, but the main thing is that most biographers, up until recent times, write about biography only after they have written a biography. None of us was trained to be a biographer. In the course of writing a biography you become aware of the issues and, often at the end of the process, you then write a sort of anguished methodological essay about the problems. Then, of course, the next generation of biographers take absolutely no notice and they do the same thing over again. And when you actually look at these essays, they are all saying things that Lytton Strachey said in 1915. If you look at the preface to his Eminent Victorians, virtually all the methodological issues are raised there. I was struck again by this issue when I read Paul Strangio’s really interesting article about the problems of writing biography after his biography on Jim Cairns, Keeper of the Faith (2002) came out, and I then mapped it against these earlier essays.
We have this curious process where we do not train people to do biography. As Skidelsky, the great Keynes biographer, said, political biography is not something that has been seen as really quite kosher. I was forever getting people coming to me from History departments and Asian Studies departments asking me to supervise their MA or their PhD on biography because their department would not let them do it. I kept saying I know nothing about New Guinea or Indonesia or wherever but I nevertheless ended up supervising biographies in a range of fields that I knew nothing about simply because the students wanted to work on biography and they knew I was interested but their department could not see it as a proper enterprise. We do need to start thinking about trying to train people if they are going to engage in biographical work in a way that we would with any other history or politics project.
The third point I want to discuss is what is the key question we want to answer about a particular figure when we write these ‘short lives’. Increasingly I have taken up biographical essays in the context of other books. For instance, in my book on political advisers a long time ago, I used biographical essays in each chapter, as illustrative devices, which tell us about institutional change in an historical context and often they tell us exactly what we need to know. We should not write a biography of someone simply because they are there, say, they were a prime minister or were some sort of political figure. I think unless there is an interesting question to be answered, then pass through to the wicket-keeper. Political biography surely has to be about answering some sort of question about how politics works, how institutions work, how policy is made and focussing the inquiry on those sorts of questions by writing preferably ‘short lives’. And I think they also bring out the methodological issues very fast because you are challenged from the start to say: what is important about telling your story, rather than simply saying it was a calm and stormy night, mum gave birth in the middle of a storm … People said this man is marked for greatness … So my plea is for ‘short lives’ and some introspection.