Samuel Johnson

In The Rambler, No. 60, Saturday, October 13, 1750, Samuel Johnson published a description of biography that has never been surpassed. He wrote about biography with a generosity and firmness that I have found lacking in other accounts of the genre. Biographers and their critics have treated the subject with defensiveness and hostility. Since Johnson, writing about biography has been an exercise in apologetics and in skepticism. As a practicing biographer, and as a scholar of biography, I read The Rambler, No. 60, as the only statement of first principles that evokes the genre's magnificent possibilities and that puts it at the center of the Enlightenment project. Because the modern world has subverted that project, Johnson's belief that biography provides access to universal truths has been suppressed. Johnson begins his brief for biography by observing that all joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an action of the imagination, that realises the event however fictitious, or approximates it however remote, by placing us for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate; so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motion would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves. I suppose Johnson is calling upon the faculty of empathy--the ability not only to sympathize with other human beings but to put ourselves in their places. To understand anything about others or about the world is to feel it, Johnson suggests--or at least to imagine that we feel it. The distinction between actuality and imagination is crucial--that is, there is a difference between what really happened and what we imagined happened, yet we cannot think or feel without exercising the "deception" of the imagination, [End Page 442] which is a conceit that we can be "excited by the same good or evil happening" to others as though it were happening to ourselves. In the lives of others, in other words, we read our own. Or as Johnson puts it, "we readily conform our minds" to the "parallel circumstances" and "kindred images" we find in the "narratives of the lives of particular persons." This is why he claims that "no species of writing" is "more worthy of cultivation than biography." Johnson's embrace of biography is startling to anyone who reads reviews of biography or is familiar with the literature about the genre. Biography is viewed, at best, as a second-rate form of writing. In the academy it is rarely viewed as scholarship; to the literary community it ranks well below the novel, for example, in importance; to the professional reviewer it is merely a story to be retold as if the reviewer wrote the biography; to organizers of writers' workshops, biography does not exist. Only general readers agree with Johnson, for year after year they continue to support the boom in biography, a boom that is clearly in evidence each week in The New York Times Book Review, which rarely reviews fewer than three biographies. Given the limited number of books reviewed in that influential organ, the predominance of biographies is remarkable. I suspect general readers would second Johnson's contention that no other species of writing "can be more delightful, or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition." Indeed, his words read like a recipe for attracting the general reader, or perhaps I should use Virginia Woolf's term, "the common reader." Her locution comes to mind when Johnson observes, "I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful." Every life, Johnson emphasizes, is bound by certain universals: "We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure." I have returned to Johnson again and again as I have written my biographies

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