An Introvert’s Musings on Biographies
Is it too much to ask that a biography give us a vivid sense of what an eminent person was like? Apparently so. I ponder possible reasons for this oversight.
Since launching Introvert UpThink, I’ve read more than 25 biographies. I began each one eager to learn what made a famous person tick. What were they like in ordinary life – in public and among their intimate friends? Why did they do the unusual things they did? And why did they not do what others in their situation might have? More than half the time when I reached the midpoint of the biography or even its end I felt disappointed.
Page after page, what I read was what the famous person did – where they went, who they hung out with, what they accomplished when and so on. There was little or nothing in the way of how you would describe someone you know well to someone else about to meet them for the first time: He has the manners of a 20th-generation aristocrat, but he makes friends easily when he sneaks out back wherever he is to smoke a cigarette. Or: Like the empress of a small country, she ordered around waiters, relatives and even new friends. Or even just a snippet like this, written about an eighteenth-century ship captain: Anson, as usual, said little. I also found little about how the famous people saw themselves.
Strangely, in some instances I found articles about the same people in rigorously fact-checked magazines like The New Yorker that gave a much more vivid sense of their personality. So it wasn’t as if the descriptions I craved weren’t available. In the case of Marie Curie, on Wikipedia I came across the following account of meeting her in Paris written by the magazine editor who later arranged for Curie’s 1921 American tour:
“The door opened and I saw a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon. Her kind, patient, beautiful face had the detached expression of a scholar. Suddenly I felt like an intruder. My timidity exceeded her own. I had been a trained interrogator for 20 years, but I could not ask a single question of this gentle woman in a black cotton dress. I tried to explain that American women were interested in her great work, and found myself apologizing for intruding upon her precious time.”
One of the two biographies that I consulted contained not one descriptive passage as dramatic as that about Madame Curie.
Also strangely, biographies of both Georgia O’Keeffe and Marie Curie gave much more striking descriptions of their husbands than of O’Keeffe or Marie Curie themselves. Again, the oversight wasn’t due to a lack of contemporaneous information. Perhaps after spending years immersed in dusty archives and letters, the biographers didn’t realize that they were failing to convey an intimate sense of their subject in what they wrote. Mired in details, they neglected the more holistic view. Or it may have to do with the biographers’ concept of their task.
Perhaps these biographers consider someone’s actions in time the most important aspect of who they were – more pertinent than their beliefs, attitudes, general personality and how they chose to be when most relaxed. As an introvert, however, I’m just as interested, if not more so, in someone’s inner life. I love being given seeds of information that enable me to picture someone in my imagination as living and breathing. I’m also keen to know their “why” on key issues, much more than how they spent their summer vacation or who they argued with over Christmas.
For instance, was artist Georgia O’Keeffe talkative or taciturn, sweet or sarcastic with her friends? Why did the mother and brother of poet Marianne Moore refer to her as “he” to one another throughout her life, and what impact did that have on her? Why was it essential for Immanuel Kant to take a walk at precisely the same time every afternoon?
This curious void in many biographies parallels observations I’ve shared in other Introvert UpThink posts about reader reviews of novels. Some readers prefer stories that primarily unfold in actions and dialogue, hating long stretches of thoughts or descriptions from a character’s interior point of view. About a book crammed with the kind of insights that I crave, such readers complain “Nothing happens!” or “Too much boring nonsense.” These readers might be extroverts, for whom what’s most interesting about people takes place in plain sight, amongst other people. And when such readers write biographies about personages who accomplished great things, their books frustrate me.
It comes down to one’s concept of what makes a person interesting. Carl Jung, a patron saint for introverts, said when he was 83 years old: “I have had encounters with many famous men of my time – explorers, artists and writers, princes, financial magnates – but our meetings had little more significance for me than ships passing on the high seas, dipping their flags to one another.” For him – and I’m on his side even though I’ve never met princes, presidents or billionaires – the inner side of life was the more fascinating part.