Latest news with #GertrudeStein
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Picture This: Always judge a book by its cover!
The Book Cover by Paul Dimond (Batsford £30, 176pp) As the old idiom states, we should never judge a book by its cover - and yet Paul Dimond's book collating Batsfords' most beautiful book covers strongly refutes this sentiment. Over 180 years, the publisher has produced some truly spectacular works of art and design to adorn their covers. If, like me, your choice of edition is based on how the cover will look on your bookshelf, this is the perfect collection for you. Filled with history and works from Gertrude Stein and Cecil Beaton this skillfully curated book is an insight both into the past and the world of publishing. It covers topics from cars and the countryside, to historical figures and haberdashery. If you are in any way interested in beautiful leather-bound hardbacks, picturesque watercolors or sharp photography this is the book for you.
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Novel About a Friendship So Fierce, It Feels Like Worship
LONELY CROWDS, by Stephanie Wambugu In a novella collected in Gertrude Stein's 1909 book 'Three Lives,' Melanctha, a young biracial woman in a segregated American coastal town, yearns for the kind of knowledge and life experience that social norms (and her controlling father) forbid. At 16, she meets the older, sexually progressive, alcoholic Jane Harden, who teaches Melanctha everything she knows — including the power of worship itself. 'There was nothing good or bad in doing, feeling, thinking or in talking, that Jane spared her,' Stein writes. 'Sometimes the lesson came almost too strong for Melanctha, but somehow she always managed to endure it and so slowly, but always with increasing strength and feeling, Melanctha began to really understand.' Reading 'Three Lives' in an undergraduate literature seminar at Bard College, Ruth, the narrator of Stephanie Wambugu's extraordinary first novel, 'Lonely Crowds,' finds herself so moved that she slams the book shut and hurls it across her dorm room, shaking. 'I followed this character on her search for wisdom and felt I had actually taken part in her endeavors in the way dreaming of falling is like falling,' she says. 'I understood what it meant to sit at Jane's feet and how quickly those long hours spent kneeling at her feet must've passed because I understood devotion.' Devotion — unquestioning, self-sacrificing, one-sided, sublime — is the overwhelming concern of this bildungsroman about two best friends from suburban Rhode Island making their way into adulthood and the art scene in 1990s New York City. The object of Ruth's is Maria, the only other Black girl in their Catholic school class, whom she first encounters in line to purchase school uniforms. Ruth sees a woman and child turned away by the shopkeeper for insufficient funds, and the girls make eye contact as Maria is shuffled away, her 'wide black eyes' utterly 'without shame.' For the 9-year-old protagonist, the only child of working-class immigrants — her strict Kenyan mother works as a secretary in a doctor's office and her dejected, disillusioned father struggles to hold down a job — it's infatuation at first sight. Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book Let us help you choose your next book Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Edinburgh Reporter
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025 – here is a mini list of just nine shows to see
This year's Fringe includes 3,352 shows and it's easy to be overwhelmed by the vast choice. Here, we've pinpointed just a handful of exciting shows to ensure you get the best experience out of the Fringe. Our best advice is to download the Fringe app and use it to book your tickets and keep yourself straight about what you have actually booked. Oh and enjoy the shows! Anatomy of Pain Directed by Aoife Parr, her autobiographical show is a scorching performance with an unflinching look at the 'broken' NHS from a young person's perspective as she struggles with an initially dismissed chronic condition. The journey aims to highlight experiences of the seriously ill and provoke serious conversation. theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall, 1–9 August The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein Edward Einhorn's play imaginatively explores the lives and relationship of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, against the backdrop of a surreal, fantasy Jewish wedding. The fast-paced farce, peppered with appearances from famous artists, offers a witty, if abstract, examination of a lesbian relationship in the early 20th century. Dram at Gilded Balloon Patter House, 30 July–25 August (excl. 6, 12, 19) PHOTO CREDIT – Richard Termine Oops Olivia Raine Atwood's side-splitting one-woman comedy offers a professional matchmaker's hilarious behind-the-scenes look at being a real-life Cupid. While detailing her experiences, the newly singleton will dish up tips on how to meet the love of your life. Ivy Studio at Greenside @ George Street, 1-23 August (excl. 10, 17) Girl Pop! A show-stopper of a romp of a fictional fractured Noughties girl pop band set for a one-off reunion. Director Sophie Cairns skillfully ties rumours, rivalries and egos amid a crackling setlist. Big Yin, Gilded Balloon Patterhouse, 30 July-25 August (excl 12, 19) Midnight in Nashville Fringe premiere of director Lee Papa's play of country singer Marcy Aurora's stab at redemption as she lays down tracks in an all-night recording session in a Nashville studio. Murder, prison, hard living all swirl in this fun, heartbreaking cocktail of live music and raw emotion. Playground 1 at ZOO Playground, 1-24 August (excl 11, 18) Adrienne: An American in Paris Kirsten Lewis brings alive the decadence and desire of the Roaring Twenties in a romantic, one-woman reverie. Inspired by the memories of Sylvia Beach and her bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, Adrienne is a dreamy, tender exploration of finding oneself. Greenside @ Riddles Court, 4-9, 12-16 August Vacuum Girl Writer-actor Erica Bitton presents a bold and immersive production that follows a single day of a New York restaurant worker who dissociates into a rich, internal fantasy life as her outer world becomes increasingly untenable. A high-wire act of innovative storytelling. Just the Cask Room at Just the Tonic at The Mash House, 31 July–24 August (excl 12) Bing!/A Mad, Mad Wonderland! Award-winning actor Jason Woods makes his Fringe debut with two solo shows. His solo Off-Broadway production, Bing!, is a razor–sharp comedy about family and fantasy amid blurred lines. In A Mad, Mad Wonderland! Woods embodies several characters in a zany, breakneck romp through a reimagined Wonderland. Forest Theatre at Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236), 1-23 Aug (excl 10, 17) Like this: Like Related
Sydney Morning Herald
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
As our attention spans shrink, one type of story holds its own
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 bestsellers 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 1000 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 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 Abraham 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 to quote even a word of it. In 2017, the archive was acquired by the Schomburg Centre 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. Loading Two will be published this year: Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs, and James Baldwin: The Life Album, by Magdalena J. Zaborowska. Each book stitches the story of his private life, long relegated to footnotes if not outright omitted. Each book captures 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 centre 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, such as playwright Tom Stoppard, preserve their privacy, how they elude her. In The Power of Adrienne Rich (2020), Hilary Holladay considers how the feminist poet was elusive to herself – 'the absence of a fully knowable self was her deepest wound and great prod'. In Katherine Bucknell's Christopher Isherwood Inside Out (2024), we learn that 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 … ' Recent lives of poet Sylvia Plath, TV producer Lorne Michaels, talk-show host Johnny Carson and psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, among others, revel in various perspectives and conflicting accounts. 'The celebration of Fanon as prophet fixes him in an essence as surely as his race does,' Adam Shatz writes in The Rebel's Clinic. 'It treats him as a man of answers, rather than questions, locked in a project of being, rather than becoming.' How does one depict this business of 'becoming'? It is a preoccupying formal concern of these biographies, an effort to allow subjects more spaciousness, to acknowledge that their lives and selves were as improvised as our own, that their choices were not ordained but made in a kind of innocence, in the precarious cradle of their own present tense. Biography is always trying to sidle closer to how the self understands itself, to wedge its way into where our real lives unfurl – insisting, sometimes unfashionably, on the importance of personality, of choice. Out of the dry heaps of letters and records, it wants to conjure the actual person, to send him striding upon the page. Here is writer Samuel Pepys, resurrected in the middle of the Great Fire of London, tearing out of his house to bury his precious parmesan cheese in the backyard for safekeeping. Here is Baldwin, reading at twilight in his mother's kitchen, the newest baby on his hip. 'By recreating the past we are calling on the same magic as our forebears did with stories of their ancestors round the fires under the night skies,' the biographer Michael Holroyd has written. 'The need to do this, to keep death in its place, lies deep in human nature, and the art of biography arises from that need.' If history sends us scattering like billiard balls, making a mockery of notions of free will, along comes the biographer to dust us off, one by one, and to take grave interest in our individual trajectories – staunchly, stubbornly hung up on the human. If history sends us scattering like billiard balls, making a mockery of notions of free will, along comes the biographer to dust us off. To be fair, biography resists narrative straitjackets of its own. The health of the genre owes much to its indifference to stated aims, set practices, established rules or professionalisation of any kind. Too motley to be a discipline, biography simply swallows every style and school in its path: history, psychology, literary criticism, detective fiction, self-help. Paradox is its essence. We categorise it as non-fiction, but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation. It elicits strong approbation, even moral horror, but its sternest critics (Sigmund Freud, novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, journalist Janet Malcolm) count among its most interesting practitioners. Biography, the impossible genre. It elevates and enshrines; it may mock and expose. Plutarch and Suetonius, among the progenitors of the form, wrote to praise famous men, if gently undermining them all the while – taking note of their comb-overs and questionable taste in robes. 'A chance remark or joke,' Plutarch wrote, 'may reveal far more of a man's character than the mere feat of winning battles.' From the Romans to the Victorians, life writing generally consigned itself to the public life and social self. Character was regarded as inborn, not made; childhood held little narrative interest. The biographer's obligation was to register the vividness of personality, not muck about backstage – Samuel Johnson, for example, as observed by James Boswell in his famously obsessive The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), holding forth at the tavern, sloshing around in his brilliance and beer, wandering off, 'shrivelled' wig askew. Where are you going, Dr Johnson? In 1909, Freud wrote to Carl Jung: 'The domain of biography, too, must become ours.' Biography discovered the nursery and the riot of adolescence, the lives and drives we conceal from one another and ourselves. 'A secret, at least tacit, life underlies the one we are thought to live,' Ellmann could now write – and the biographer's job became to call it forth. (We could now acknowledge that Johnson might have been en route to enjoy the attentions of writer and socialite Mrs Hester Thrale and her elegant assortment of whips.) Biography was contracted to produce the man behind the eminence – no more monuments! Greatness was no longer a prerequisite for the biography; ordinary lives – of the sisters and wives of genius, for example – began to be told with sympathy and admiration. And in the lives of genius, there was an attention to the routine, to the life of the body as well as mind. For Ellmann, it was crucial to tell the story of Joyce with the same warm, coarse candour Joyce brought to Ulysses, which enshrined the commonplace – of head lice and menstruation, marital boredom and pleasure. Ellmann skimps on theory in favour of scenes, showing Joyce lolling in bed until 11am, taking visits and gossiping with his tailor, rising only to practice the piano and put off his creditors. For Ellmann, all biographies give 'incomplete satisfaction,' because no life will yield all its secrets; what we respond to is the approach of the biographer – the detective work, the imaginative sympathy, the peculiar and obsessive preoccupation with the life of another. (A moment to honour the zealots of years past: the biographers who bought and lived in the same homes as their subjects, grew beards to match them or wore their jewellery, had affairs with their mistresses – such diligence! – or, in the case of one Norman Sherry, followed Graham Greene's path to Mexico and fell ill with dysentery in the same mountain village.) 'The effort to come close,' Ellmann puts it, 'to make out of apparently haphazard circumstances a plotted circle, to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves, is not frivolous. It may even be, for reader as for writer, an essential part of experience.' Loading Why is that? Why is watching someone else work in the dark, with incomplete information, such an integral part of our experience? The subterranean drama of the biography, as the critic and practitioner Janet Malcolm has written, is provided by the biographer's own motives and masks – the choices the biographer might make when confronted invariably with the gaps in the archives, the burned letters and lost diaries. How the biographer moves into the silences – filling them with speculation or outright claims, with their own desires, or, as we increasingly see, choosing to note and marvel at them. A biography is less a portrait than a record of an encounter. This 'effort to come close,' to apprehend, is what we track, what gives the life its pulse. Biography may be built on facts, but a fact, as Saul Bellow wrote, 'is a wire through which one sends a current'. Let us return, for a moment, to Zaborowska's account of Baldwin, as he pretended to sleep one day, daydreaming and watching his mother. He sees her lean out of the tenement window to gossip with a neighbour, who passes her something – a piece of black velvet covered with stars. 'That is a good idea,' he recalled his mother saying, thanking the woman. 'For years,' Baldwin later wrote, 'I thought that an 'idea' was a piece of black velvet.' Loading The 'plotted circle' that Ellmann envisions contains much more than mere data; it must make room for mishearing and contingency, for the fact that we reportedly spend 50 per cent of our waking hours, like Baldwin as he watched his mother, daydreaming. A biography cannot satisfy without conveying some flavour of the subject's most secret life, of his own private idiom. 'What did his imagination look like when he was young, and how was it battered and burnished as he grew older?' Katherine Rundell asks in her biography of John Donne, Super-Infinite. 'Did it protect him from sorrow and fury and resentment? (To spoil the suspense: it did not.) Did it allow him to write out the human problem in a way that we, following on four hundred years later, can still find urgent truth in it?' Today that 'human problem' is complicated by the arrival of nonhuman communication, nonhuman interlocutors, the algorithmic self. Where biography is a form built on the vagaries of human experience, artificial intelligence offers a form of knowledge stripped of experience. Trained on text, large language models such as Gemini and ChatGPT are a kind of knowledge predicated only on the nuances of language. Even the boosters of AI readily concede its poor grasp of character or human motive, which is notoriously coiled, cloudy, contradictory. To understand motive requires some sense of the raw matter of experience, of its quiddity, of the body's way of knowing and remembering. The bots scrape up those aspects of motive that make it into language, and big, blunt language at that: I hate, I want. AI knows only to enter through the front door; it cannot yet observe the true story happening elsewhere, always in a back room somewhere, between two women leaning out of their windows, passing between their hands a good idea. Biography, that strange transmission, has been a good, durable idea of its own. AI will teach us how to 'prompt' with increasing precision, but never to yearn with patient attention, never to relish the dark or adorn it with research and guesswork and gossip, to let our minds gallop after one another, the living and the dead.
The Age
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
As our attention spans shrink, one type of story holds its own
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 bestsellers 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 1000 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 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 Abraham 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 to quote even a word of it. In 2017, the archive was acquired by the Schomburg Centre 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. Loading Two will be published this year: Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs, and James Baldwin: The Life Album, by Magdalena J. Zaborowska. Each book stitches the story of his private life, long relegated to footnotes if not outright omitted. Each book captures 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 centre 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, such as playwright Tom Stoppard, preserve their privacy, how they elude her. In The Power of Adrienne Rich (2020), Hilary Holladay considers how the feminist poet was elusive to herself – 'the absence of a fully knowable self was her deepest wound and great prod'. In Katherine Bucknell's Christopher Isherwood Inside Out (2024), we learn that 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 … ' Recent lives of poet Sylvia Plath, TV producer Lorne Michaels, talk-show host Johnny Carson and psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, among others, revel in various perspectives and conflicting accounts. 'The celebration of Fanon as prophet fixes him in an essence as surely as his race does,' Adam Shatz writes in The Rebel's Clinic. 'It treats him as a man of answers, rather than questions, locked in a project of being, rather than becoming.' How does one depict this business of 'becoming'? It is a preoccupying formal concern of these biographies, an effort to allow subjects more spaciousness, to acknowledge that their lives and selves were as improvised as our own, that their choices were not ordained but made in a kind of innocence, in the precarious cradle of their own present tense. Biography is always trying to sidle closer to how the self understands itself, to wedge its way into where our real lives unfurl – insisting, sometimes unfashionably, on the importance of personality, of choice. Out of the dry heaps of letters and records, it wants to conjure the actual person, to send him striding upon the page. Here is writer Samuel Pepys, resurrected in the middle of the Great Fire of London, tearing out of his house to bury his precious parmesan cheese in the backyard for safekeeping. Here is Baldwin, reading at twilight in his mother's kitchen, the newest baby on his hip. 'By recreating the past we are calling on the same magic as our forebears did with stories of their ancestors round the fires under the night skies,' the biographer Michael Holroyd has written. 'The need to do this, to keep death in its place, lies deep in human nature, and the art of biography arises from that need.' If history sends us scattering like billiard balls, making a mockery of notions of free will, along comes the biographer to dust us off, one by one, and to take grave interest in our individual trajectories – staunchly, stubbornly hung up on the human. If history sends us scattering like billiard balls, making a mockery of notions of free will, along comes the biographer to dust us off. To be fair, biography resists narrative straitjackets of its own. The health of the genre owes much to its indifference to stated aims, set practices, established rules or professionalisation of any kind. Too motley to be a discipline, biography simply swallows every style and school in its path: history, psychology, literary criticism, detective fiction, self-help. Paradox is its essence. We categorise it as non-fiction, but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation. It elicits strong approbation, even moral horror, but its sternest critics (Sigmund Freud, novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, journalist Janet Malcolm) count among its most interesting practitioners. Biography, the impossible genre. It elevates and enshrines; it may mock and expose. Plutarch and Suetonius, among the progenitors of the form, wrote to praise famous men, if gently undermining them all the while – taking note of their comb-overs and questionable taste in robes. 'A chance remark or joke,' Plutarch wrote, 'may reveal far more of a man's character than the mere feat of winning battles.' From the Romans to the Victorians, life writing generally consigned itself to the public life and social self. Character was regarded as inborn, not made; childhood held little narrative interest. The biographer's obligation was to register the vividness of personality, not muck about backstage – Samuel Johnson, for example, as observed by James Boswell in his famously obsessive The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), holding forth at the tavern, sloshing around in his brilliance and beer, wandering off, 'shrivelled' wig askew. Where are you going, Dr Johnson? In 1909, Freud wrote to Carl Jung: 'The domain of biography, too, must become ours.' Biography discovered the nursery and the riot of adolescence, the lives and drives we conceal from one another and ourselves. 'A secret, at least tacit, life underlies the one we are thought to live,' Ellmann could now write – and the biographer's job became to call it forth. (We could now acknowledge that Johnson might have been en route to enjoy the attentions of writer and socialite Mrs Hester Thrale and her elegant assortment of whips.) Biography was contracted to produce the man behind the eminence – no more monuments! Greatness was no longer a prerequisite for the biography; ordinary lives – of the sisters and wives of genius, for example – began to be told with sympathy and admiration. And in the lives of genius, there was an attention to the routine, to the life of the body as well as mind. For Ellmann, it was crucial to tell the story of Joyce with the same warm, coarse candour Joyce brought to Ulysses, which enshrined the commonplace – of head lice and menstruation, marital boredom and pleasure. Ellmann skimps on theory in favour of scenes, showing Joyce lolling in bed until 11am, taking visits and gossiping with his tailor, rising only to practice the piano and put off his creditors. For Ellmann, all biographies give 'incomplete satisfaction,' because no life will yield all its secrets; what we respond to is the approach of the biographer – the detective work, the imaginative sympathy, the peculiar and obsessive preoccupation with the life of another. (A moment to honour the zealots of years past: the biographers who bought and lived in the same homes as their subjects, grew beards to match them or wore their jewellery, had affairs with their mistresses – such diligence! – or, in the case of one Norman Sherry, followed Graham Greene's path to Mexico and fell ill with dysentery in the same mountain village.) 'The effort to come close,' Ellmann puts it, 'to make out of apparently haphazard circumstances a plotted circle, to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves, is not frivolous. It may even be, for reader as for writer, an essential part of experience.' Loading Why is that? Why is watching someone else work in the dark, with incomplete information, such an integral part of our experience? The subterranean drama of the biography, as the critic and practitioner Janet Malcolm has written, is provided by the biographer's own motives and masks – the choices the biographer might make when confronted invariably with the gaps in the archives, the burned letters and lost diaries. How the biographer moves into the silences – filling them with speculation or outright claims, with their own desires, or, as we increasingly see, choosing to note and marvel at them. A biography is less a portrait than a record of an encounter. This 'effort to come close,' to apprehend, is what we track, what gives the life its pulse. Biography may be built on facts, but a fact, as Saul Bellow wrote, 'is a wire through which one sends a current'. Let us return, for a moment, to Zaborowska's account of Baldwin, as he pretended to sleep one day, daydreaming and watching his mother. He sees her lean out of the tenement window to gossip with a neighbour, who passes her something – a piece of black velvet covered with stars. 'That is a good idea,' he recalled his mother saying, thanking the woman. 'For years,' Baldwin later wrote, 'I thought that an 'idea' was a piece of black velvet.' Loading The 'plotted circle' that Ellmann envisions contains much more than mere data; it must make room for mishearing and contingency, for the fact that we reportedly spend 50 per cent of our waking hours, like Baldwin as he watched his mother, daydreaming. A biography cannot satisfy without conveying some flavour of the subject's most secret life, of his own private idiom. 'What did his imagination look like when he was young, and how was it battered and burnished as he grew older?' Katherine Rundell asks in her biography of John Donne, Super-Infinite. 'Did it protect him from sorrow and fury and resentment? (To spoil the suspense: it did not.) Did it allow him to write out the human problem in a way that we, following on four hundred years later, can still find urgent truth in it?' Today that 'human problem' is complicated by the arrival of nonhuman communication, nonhuman interlocutors, the algorithmic self. Where biography is a form built on the vagaries of human experience, artificial intelligence offers a form of knowledge stripped of experience. Trained on text, large language models such as Gemini and ChatGPT are a kind of knowledge predicated only on the nuances of language. Even the boosters of AI readily concede its poor grasp of character or human motive, which is notoriously coiled, cloudy, contradictory. To understand motive requires some sense of the raw matter of experience, of its quiddity, of the body's way of knowing and remembering. The bots scrape up those aspects of motive that make it into language, and big, blunt language at that: I hate, I want. AI knows only to enter through the front door; it cannot yet observe the true story happening elsewhere, always in a back room somewhere, between two women leaning out of their windows, passing between their hands a good idea. Biography, that strange transmission, has been a good, durable idea of its own. AI will teach us how to 'prompt' with increasing precision, but never to yearn with patient attention, never to relish the dark or adorn it with research and guesswork and gossip, to let our minds gallop after one another, the living and the dead.
