Reading Histories and Biographies Part One: Different Styles

I enjoy reading histories and biographies. I find pleasure in learning more about historical periods and peoples and sometime discovering parallels with events we are going through today.

For instance, in this age of remarkable women, I read in Elizabeth's Rival: The Tumultuous Tale of Lettice Knollys, the Countess of Leicester (2017) by Nicole Tallis that Knollys (1543-1634) married Queen Elizabeth I of England's favorite, the Earl of Leicester, and was the mother of the queen's later favorite, the Earl of Essex. She lost two husbands in royal service and saw her third husband and her son beheaded. But in that age of spies, intrigues, betrayals, and executions, she lived to be 91.

The more I read histories and biographies, the more I find that different writers approach their subjects in their own way based on their interests and experience and sometimes their lack of experience.

I experienced at least one example of this style issue. My wife was on the faculty of the Catholic University of America in the English department. She had a number of drama students in her Shakespeare classes. In 1986, she was invited by two of her students to attend a play they were in at the university's lab theatre. We both went, and afterwards the students came to her and thanked her for coming. But they said they had to rush off and take their turns sitting with Father Gilbert Hartke, the founder of the the university's drama department, who was in the hospital and very ill. Students and faculty had put up a schedule so that there would always be someone with him, holding his hand, so that he would not die alone. I admired this so much, and when the university press published a biography of Father Hartke I rushed to read it, hoping to learn more of what we had only heard about. But the book didn't mention this incident. A few years later, I met Bill Graham, Father Hartke's successor as the drama department's dean, at a university function and asked if he had read the biography. "Several times in draft," he said. I mentioned the absence of the hand-holding visits. He swallowed, looked around him, and then said, "I think the university wanted a different type of book, one that was more objective, less emotional." I've always honored the university's drama department in my heart for what it did, and I also learned that there can be many reasons why things are included in books and why they are not.

There are also different scholarly approaches. In literature studies, there is what is called new historicism, which basically means that rather than just reading the text of a poem or novel, the scholar can read the poem or novel against the events that were going on at the time. There are, for example, few historical facts about the playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), but scholars have researched the lives of his neighbors and colleagues, court decisions that influenced the day-to-day life of London and his home town of Stratford, and the big and small events of the day. This has influenced Shakespearean literary criticism as well as Shakespeare biographers And, of course, historians and biographers do similar things, especially when facts about a person's life are scare or spotty.

Sometimes the information historians and biographers provide by expanding their scope to include what can be called supporting players is amazing. The smallest event can appear critical to an individual's life. Other times the effect may be really speculative. I remember reading a biography of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer  (c.1342-1400). in which the author revealed that Chaucer had relatives and friends who were constables; he wrote that Chaucer must have spent hours talking to them about their experiences and incorporated what they told him into his writings. I asked my wife who had relatives who were with the NYPD if she had spent hours discussing their experiences with them, and she said, no. Maybe Chaucer did this, and maybe he didn't.

One problem biographers encounter is having to learn everything there is to know about their subject--whether a scientist, politician or actor--through letters, other documents and interviews and then understand what happened well enough to communicate about it. Misunderstandings can happen. I remember reading the 1983 biography Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times) by Lynne McTaggert, about President John F. Kennedy's sister who married a man who was not a member of the Catholic faith. For a Catholic family in 1946, that was a matter of great importance. After her husband's death, Kathleen, known as Kit, began an affair with a married man, who was also not a Catholic and who was in the process of divorcing his wife to marry Kit. This also was a matter of concern for her Catholic parents. Her mother and father indicated that her behavior had separated her from the rest of the Kennedy family, and Kit flew to France to meet her father, who was scheduled to travel there, to beg for his understanding. Her plane crashed, and she died. McTaggert wrote that Kathleen's mother Rose was convinced that her daughter was going to hell for her actions and that that is why she had cards printed asking people to pray for her daughter's soul. But memorial prayer cards are always printed by Catholic families when a loved one dies. The ones printed for Kathleen's brothers John and Robert are collectors items, and the fact that the Kennedys had them printed doesn't  mean that the they thought John and Robert's souls were going to go down rather than up. The existence of the Kit Kennedy prayer cards appears to have been misunderstood.

Copyright 2018 by John T. Aquino