TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042291/0422472.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 73

Pssst! Have You Heard the One About Augustus?


Good biographies take bad behavior for granted

By PAUL GRAY


    As a literary phenomenon, there is less to Nancy Reagan
than meets the eye. Kitty Kelley is hardly the only
slash-and-burn chronicler currently at work. Her smartest move
has been to choose living victims for her killer bios; speaking
ill of the dead (Albert Goldman on Elvis and John Lennon,
Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington on Pablo Picasso) is
profitable but a tad less sensational. And the instant renown
achieved by Kelley's Nancy does not really signal the end of
civilization as we have known it. Good, balanced, substantial
biographies about controversial figures continue to appear and
win notice. Last week Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, written
by two obscure authors, won a Pulitzer Prize.

    Still, these are undeniably salad days for people
interested in reading about scandal in high places. Never mind
that this has been true for roughly the past 3,000 years. What
of the adultery between a queen and a prince that launched a
10-year war and ruined a nation? The Iliad is the place to bone
up on that one. Then there was King David of Israel. One day,
while strolling on his rooftop, he spied a woman bathing and
summoned her (nudge, wink) to his royal presence. After
Bathsheba told him she had become pregnant, the King 1) tried
to trick her husband, a loyal if unimaginative soldier, into
sleeping with his wife and 2) when that failed, arranged for the
unwitting cuckold to be placed in optimum jeopardy during a
battle with the Ammonites. Shocking stuff, told with no holds
barred in the Old Testament.

    For random polymorphous perversity, it would be hard to
top The Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (born
circa A.D. 69). A classic capital insider, Suetonius served as
chief secretary to the Emperor Hadrian and wrote a number of
books that certainly sound like best sellers, most of them,
unfortunately, now lost. Connoisseurs of the carnal particularly
lament the disappearance of his Lives of Famous Whores. But The
Twelve Caesars still packs plenty of punch per sesterce:
Augustus as an elderly man, relentlessly deflowering virgins,
some of them procured for him by his wife; Tiberius training
young boys, whom he dubbed his "minnows," to nibble at him
lasciviously during his swims.

    So there is nothing new about biographies that portray the
bad or disreputable along with the good. Outrageous conduct
might incur punishment somewhere down the line, but that was an
important part of the story. Men could lead mighty armies, forge
tribes into nations and still behave like swine; women could
embody all the public virtues and pieties and then drop poison
into wine goblets or turn into manipulative she-devils in the
boudoir. Of course. What else is new?

    That tolerance, though, dwindled, thanks in large part to
the spread of Christianity in the West. The notion grew that
there were admirable lives (hagiographies) to be emulated and
horrible examples to avoid. The old curiosity remained, to be
sure; how else to explain the legends about Napoleon's sexual
capacities and the insatiability of Catherine the Great? But the
theological abyss between the saved and the damned strained the
pursuit of objective truth. In the 18th century, Dr. Samuel
Johnson, a devout Christian and a leading biographer of his age,
complained, "There are many who think it an act of piety to hide
the faults or failings of their friends, even when they can no
longer suffer by their detection; we therefore see whole ranks
of characters adorned with uniform panegyrick, and not to be
known from one another but by extrinsick and casual
circumstances."

    Among those paying attention was the young Scotsman James
Boswell, whose Life of Johnson (1791) remains the greatest
biography in the English language. Boswell revealed nothing
particularly scandalous about his subject; it remained for later
scholars to exhume hints suggesting Dr. Johnson's fondness for
being tied up and whipped. But the overwhelming intimacy of the
Life of Johnson -- its almost minute-by-minute portrait of a
volatile genius -- sent shock waves throughout the 19th century
and caused a number of noteworthy people to guard their privacy
and papers with increased diligence.

    What they feared was pretty much exactly what followed:
the exposing of personal foibles for public inspection. Lord
Byron became a celebrity because of his poetry and a reprobate
and rogue thanks to allegations about his sexual relations with
his half sister. Charles Dickens tried to disguise his
relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan, all for
naught, since suspicions about its true nature flourished then
and ever since. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians wickedly
and fastidiously punctured an era of hypocrisy, and the writings
of Sigmund Freud unleashed the psychological deluge.

    That tide is still running and with it the mistaken notion
that weaknesses not only constitute part of human nature but
absolutely define it. Suetonius would be amazed at the likes of
Kelley and at the prospect of biography as target shooting. When
the Roman noted in passing that Augustus had been accused of
effeminacy and of softening the hair on his legs by singeing
them with red-hot walnut shells, the information was presented
as simply another part of a complex mosaic of personality.
Nothing to get excited about or to stop the presses for. Nancy
Reagan should have been so lucky.