FACTS AND FICTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
137
drug dealers ruthlessly exploiting the wretched reader's addiction, pur–
veying unsavory, offensive, often downright disgusting information for
large sums of tainted money. The second category consists of bland,
officially approved, more or less ingratiating practitioners-often cash–
ing in on the ce lebrity of recent or still active politicians. These acade–
mic time-servers may be seen as history's butlers. Serious attention has
tended to concentrate on the third band of literary or artistic biogra–
phers, frequently categorized by writers working in more established
fields-especially novelists-as parasites feeding off other people's rich
growth, possessing no roots, no genuine creative power or originality of
their own, filching a spurious vitality from their subjects who find them–
selves chewed up and spat out when sucked dry.
This is pretty much the french view. Biography is enjoying a hectic,
not entirely convincing, and a lmost certainly brief flowering in France
at present. french biographers held their first conference the year before
last.
Le Nouvel Observateur
marked the occasion with a double-page
spread, explaining this regrettable surge of popularity as the inevitable
consequence of the even more regrettable-and equally temporary–
eclipse that has overtaken serious critical theory. That is to say, first the
Marxists, and now the Structuralists, have been mown down-leaving
the field free for lowly peasants (or biographical parasites) like me to
make illicit hay. "After the good times comes a period of cutbacks and
retrenchment," wrote
Le Nouvel Observateur,
adding a stern rider:
"biographies are beginning to spring up again like weeds on the smok–
ing ruins of Structuralism."
This quarrel goes back at least
to
the eighteenth century when philo–
sophical arguments pioneered by Rousseau and Voltaire took on a decid–
edly more pragmatic shape on the other side of the English Channel in
the hands of Samuel Johnson, and that first and greatest of all literary
parasites, his biographer, James Boswell. People today still react with civ–
ilized disdain in France to the empirical Anglo-Saxon approach. When
I
first started working there, I quickly learned never to mention the word
"biography." If people asked what I was doing, it saved trouble to men–
tion research without specifying what kind. It took me a while to under–
stand that, however hard they try and for a ll their innate politeness, the
French can never view biography as anything but the intellectual pits.
What they find equally hard
to
grasp is that any self-respecting author
can openly practice the trade without feeling ashamed.
They see biography as a typically Anglo-Saxon enterprise, based on a
primitive, even brutish obsession with the facts: an essentially clod-hop–
ping earth-bound activity with a dash of ancestral treachery thrown in;
