LIBRARY NOTES
Geoffrey C. Ward
The Art of Biography Lecture Series
Thursday, September 1, 1994
Last summer I learned to my pleasure - and astonishment - that I had been given a writers' award from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. The only stipulation was that I affiliate myself with a "non-profit educational, cultural, or community organization" and develop a program that would reach out to the community at large.
In five minutes I had decided to ask The New York Society Library to work with me. No institution in New York has meant more to me and my work over the past dozen years or so. Whether working on the script for "Baseball," writing about the FDR or any of a hundred other people from history - even pursuing books about the nineteenth century British India for last year's book, Tiger Wallahs - I've found the Library's stacks indispensable. As a member, I was free to explore them on my won, a joy only rarely encountered anywhere else in the city now.
Library officials were enthusiastic. And so together this autumn, we begin a three-year series of talks and round-table discussions on biography, our aim being to let the public in on how biographers go about their work. Last year's furor over the Joe McGinnis book on Edward Kennedy and the courtroom battle between Janet Malcolm and Jeffrey Masson suggest that readers and critics - and biographers themselves - seem genuinely unsure, these days, just where this line should be drawn between legitimate biography and irresponsible exploitation.
What can a biographer claim to "know" about the subject's private thoughts? How does one assess evidence offered about the dead by living witnesses with axes to grind? How does one assess documentary evidence, for that matter? What is a biographer's responsibility to the truth - and whose truth is it anyway? What are the special challenges to be found in writing about living persons? About oneself or members of one's family? About people one admires enormously - or has come to loathe? And how can reliable biography be done on television, the medium from which, for better or worse, most Americans now get what little sense of the past they may retain?
We'll look at topics such as these, which inevitably perplex anyone who seeks to tell the truth of someone's life - and should concern anyone who reads or watches the results.
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