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If you look at it historically, you find some peculiar things, such as a
certain puritanism which tries to limit and license spectacles. That is, it
will have the religious spectacle as the only one you may look on, that
you may invest in. You use the term "adaptation ." Not adaptation in
the crass sense of accomodation, but somehow as recognizing that the
desire to be deceived is a part of human nature, and has to be dealt with.
And you are quite right, the Alexandrian age on the one hand, the
democratic age on the other, are the environments in which we live and
breathe and have a being, and, therefore, impose certa in conditions
which we must meet, which we Illust struggle with.
Conor Cruise O'Brien:
1 think this is a profound question, which trou–
bles me. I don't find an answer. I think we would need to open a whole
second phase of our discussions here. I hope it may provide the base for
that sometime in the future, but I wouldn't lik e to try a snap answer
right now.
Helena Lewis:
I chair a seminar on biography at the Harvard Humani–
ties Center. As biographers we are, alas, largely driven to use memoirs,
those terribly unreliable low orclers of truth. Is there any hope for us?
We do try so hard to approach some sort of reality, some sort of truth.
Conor Cruise O'Brien :
1 think it's quite true that none of the sources
taken by themselves are altogether reliable. But I think the historian, by
drawing on all the available relevant material, comparing it, challenging
it, seeing what the contradictions are, trying to find the base for them,
can find his way to something approaching a bit more closely to the
truth than any of the materials he is using, taken separately. But it's
quite a difficult task, and it can only get done with considerab le sensi–
tivity and discretion, which some, but not all, historians have shown.
Victor Kestenbaum:
This is directed to Mr. Martin. You say that the
task of the biographer is to judge and balance each kind of truth with
the other, and you refer to coherence/correspondence theories. Could
you tell us a little about the particular challenges you faced in writing a
biography of Dewey, not exactly a political personality, but what today
some people might regard as a public intellectual.
Jay Martin:
Jeffrey touched on one aspect of the excitement of doing
something like the biography of Dewey. There is only a small biography
of Dewey written by a person who had no access, twenty or more years
