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I've been thinking about biography a lot lately; not only because I edited a couple with wildly divergent approaches and subjects this year, or because Michaelis'
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography was dissected in a recent issue of the
Journal, but because two biographies —Judith Thurman's
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, and Andrew Wilson's
Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith[1] — were simply the most entertaining prose books, fiction or non-fiction, I've read for leisure in recent memory.
It's one thing to describe a person's cultural/historical/scientific what-have-you impact, but when once you start considering the nigh-impossibility of communicating his or her thoughts and motivations, not to mention shaping something so lumpy and unmanageable as a lifetime into a narrative, you start watching for the methods biographers utilize in an attempt to do so.
(Tellingly, both of the books I just mentioned are subtitled "A Life," pointing to the fact that the authors are fully aware that the factor of interpretation, no matter how well supported by research, is a deterrent to the definitive-sounding use of "The.") A good biography —a well-crafted, factually accurate (with as many first-hand accounts as possible), engaging and insightful depiction of a person — is akin to a miracle.
Though it's now bordering on my favorite genre of non-fiction, I didn't like biography growing up, and the Edu-Manga series — which is exactly as unreadable as it looks, though I was hoping for the same kind of good-bad awesomeness as publisher DMP's
Project X - Nissin Cup Noodle — helped me understand exactly why.
Even as a kid, I didn't like crudely inspirational stories,[2] and that's all that's left after the Edu-Manga series sanitizes the lives of Anne Frank (written by Etsuo Suzuki and drawn by Yoko Miyawaki),[3] Helen Adams Keller (written by Sozo Yanagawa and drawn by Rie Yagi) and Albert Einstein (written by Isao Himuro and drawn by Kotaro Iwasaki). (In all fairness, my reading of the Edu-Manga series was mediated by my school-days exposure to the plays (and films)
The Miracle Worker and
The Diary of Anne Frank, and, while I was no great fan of these works in the first place, they're certainly more complex than the Edu-Manga.)[4]
The things that really tell you about a historical person — the things that make you remember them as a distinct individual, that make them pop up unexpectedly in your mind — are the bizarre but revealing details. If you were to randomly ask someone about what they know about Andrew Jackson, they'd probably mention a $20 bill[5]: I would say that Jackson, before he was president, plucked a piece of bone out an open, month-old compound fracture wound in his arm and mailed it, love-letter-style, to his wife. If you asked me what I conclude about him from that, I would say that 1. He was a badass of action-movie proportions. 2. He was romantic and/or creepy. 3.He was too pigheaded to listen to doctors.
I think that removing these kinds of details — by not even sprinkling a few into works made for children — is doing them a disservice. (The closest
Edumanga: Helen Adams Keller comes to it is when they show her bratty, but entirely realistic, reaction to her new baby sister.)
Although I don't know a lot about children, and of course children's tastes are as varied as adults', I do think it's a shame that it's a tendency in biographies created for them to treat possibly some of the most fascinating material out there as boring unless Astro Boy is included, and to send the message that the only people who make an impact are angelic, since often the flip side of the qualities that make them great make them deeply flawed, strange, and, well, interesting.
Now that graphic-novel biography for children is a growing genre in the U.S[6]. — the Center for Cartoon Studies ones look promising, such as John Porcellino's
Thoreau at Walden, and there are many more slated for publication — I hope the creators have the wisdom to depict these iconic people in a way that will make the intended audience remember them as vividly as I remember Andrew Jackson.
Oh, and Highsmith smuggled her pet snails in her bra.
Notes:
[1] Highsmith, by the way, wrote short biographies for comic books when she was just starting out.
[2] Is anyone not skeptical about the inherent goodness of people when you know what happened to the person who wrote the famous line about it?
[3] Never have I seen a perkier version of Anne Frank's story, which, as you might imagine, is something of a problem when her time in the concentration camp is represented. Of course, Frank edited herself while alive in the hopes of eventual publication, not to mention the cutting done by her father, the Pulitzer-winning playwrights' reworking of that, etc.
[4] The entire time I was reading the Helen Keller manga, I couldn't help but think of a story arc in Suzue Miuchi's (available for reading online) shoujo manga Glass Mask. In it, there's an arduous audition process for the role of Helen Keller in the play The Miracle Worker: finally, two talented method actresses both land the part (they alternate). Though this fictional story arc isn't really a biography of Helen Keller (although some of the plot points are inspired by Patty Duke, the actress most associated with the role), the way in which each actress is depicted as using a different physical metaphor for how Keller felt during the water-pump epiphany is a nice reminder that exact same story or words can change depending on the who is delivering them and how.
[5] It's so incredibly weird that he's on the $20, considering he opposed a national bank and paper money. I like to think that somebody in the U. S. Treasury was a sly practical joker.
[6] Unfortunately, an Amazon search pulled up quite a few depressing examples.
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
