Humility in persons of accomplishment can come across as spin or worse, an invitation to contradiction. In the manner of a Top Girl, which she is, Charlotte Gray served hers as a flat statement of facts. A successful biography, she said, is at best an imaginative recreation of a life, and not a mirror.
“All any biographer can hope for is that the character they piece together bears some resemblance to the actual person,” said the author of a long list of books about accomplished Canadians, including most recently, feminist politician Nelly McClung.
Gray’s reflections on the craft and art behind her life’s work were delivered as the 2009 Hugh MacLennan Memorial Lecture, presented at McGill University Thursday as part of Blue Met. The title of her lecture was Truth and Truthiness in Biography, truthiness being a relatively new word coined by American satirist Stephen Colbert to mean lies spoken with conviction. Or, to quote his website, “The quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.”
Here’s how a biographer works: first trip through the subject’s life and times, she looks for “the story,” the narrative arc that will keep the reader turning pages. Once established, then the facts are selected and nuanced to support the arc. A high point of any research quest is finding that “Rosebud moment,” the telling incident which seems to have shaped the subject’s life.
Gray had much of interest to say about the process and limits of biography, all of it adding up to an excellent pitch for the genre, especially for a celebrated book I’d long forgotten about and now intend to read: Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Published in 1918, it’s his masterpiece, into which he poured all his criticisms of the age, his loathing for war and hypocrisy, which he felt characterized the posture of public figures and society in general. Strachey’s definition of a biographer’s agenda as challenging the reigning myths about an individual or the social context had a huge impact on all who followed.
A stellar Blue Met moment: when you leave an event eager to read and with a title in mind.
