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are all autobiographers, although the pretensions of their enterprise
won't allow them to admit it or even see it." Fish allows no room for
narrative interpretation and explanation; only simple facts about birth,
marriage, and death escape his subjectivism. The half-truth in his dog–
matic skepticism is that biographers are attracted to writing about their
subjects for reasons both explicit and implicit. But the poverty of Fish's
idea is pointed up by the success of Lawrence J. Friedman's biography
of Erik H. Erikson, which is a richly informative examination of a com–
plex person, always sensitive to his familial, professional, and political
contexts, and appropriately appreciative as well as critical of his work.
Friedman joined the early "psychohistory" movement but became
disenchanted when too many participants "failed dismally in their his–
torical judgments and their aesthetic sensibilities." He does not thrust
himself into the story, acknowledging only in a footnote that as "a red
diaper baby," who had tried as a student to sue the University of Cali–
fornia for suppressing communist speakers, he might be "too harsh" in
his criticism of Erikson's role in the loyalty-oath controversy in
1950
at
the University of California, because he opposed one oath on principle
as a form of "official truth" and resigned his full professorship in psy–
chology; yet he seems to have signed a somewhat similar one in order to
stay on for fifteen months in an institute affiliated to the psychology
department. Friedman also mentions prefatorially that a friend's delayed
recovery from a life-threatening illness influenced the shape of his story
by making him more aware of both triumphs and tragedies in Erikson's
and anyone's life. Perhaps that accounts for the relentless chronicling of
his physical decline in old age, which gives a sadder arc to the story than
it would otherwise have.
For historians like Lawrence
J.
Friedman (and myself), Erikson's
revisionism was congenial because he rejected Freudian "originology"
about childhood and was always concerned about the outer as well as
the inner life of his subjects. Beginning as a teacher of children, he came
increasingly to focus on later stages of life, where documentary evi–
dence is much more likely to be found, and his biographies centered on
"identity diffusion" in adolescence or on issues in adulthood about
"generativity" versus "self-absorption." The highwater mark of his
pertinence to historians was the
Daedalus
volume
Philosophers and
Kings: Studies in Leadership
(1970),
with its essays on such leaders as
Gandhi, de Gaulle, Bismarck, Newton, James Mill, and William James.
What little Erikson had to say about Jefferson, however, in his Jeffer–
son Lectures
(1973)
seemed dwarfed by "the monumental achievement
of Jeffersonian biography." Over half of the lectures were given over to
