SCENES FROM THE LIVES: THE SEDUCTIONS OF BIOGRAPHY

Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, September 7, 1997

Page: N34

Section: Books

Still, with that reservation, we enjoy enormously the biographer's art and labor, with gratitude for the glimpse of events and character and -- sometimes, even indirectly -- of the biographer's own mind, leanings, and prejudices, his or her own agonies and intentions.

One of the biographies I have enjoyed most is ``Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran'' (Houghton Mifflin, 1966), though it is actually a Boswellian memoir. Charles McMoran Wilson, later Lord Moran, was Winston Churchill's personal physician from 1940 until the statesman's death, in 1965. Moran, who had had a lucrative private practice between the wars, was unusual in that his service as an army doctor in France had elicited a lifelong fascination with the minds of men under stress, especially in war. (Which of course prepared him perfectly to be a war leader's Boswell.) His studies and reflections were published after World War II in ``The Anatomy of Courage: The Classic Study of the Soldier's Struggle Against Fear'' (a fascinating short work, still available from Avery Publishing Group, Wayne, N.J.).

There have of course been many biographies of Churchill, including the multivolume series begun by his son, Randolph, and completed by Martin Gilbert; the still-unfinished (will it ever be?) biography by William Manchester, ``The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill'' (Little, Brown), the first two volumes of which come up to 1940; and an able single-volume ``Churchill: The Unruly Giant'' by Norman Rose (Free Press, 1994). But Moran's book is truly Boswellian, full of small, quirky sidelights, bits of conversation, and a concentration on his employer's mind and body, in that order.

Moran was criticized for including a sad picture of Churchill's aged infirmity (his pathetic nonconversation with Aristotle Onassis on the shipping tycoon's yacht, for instance), but such could be expected of a physician. His views of Churchill's mind are more interesting. On the matter of courage and morale, he writes that Churchill ``has never given a thought to what was happening in the soldier's mind, he has not tried to share his fears. If a soldier does not do his duty, the P.M. says that he ought to be shot. It's as simple as that. When he dipped into the manuscript of my little book, The Anatomy of Courage, he said that the picture of what goes on in a soldier's head, as I had painted it, would discourage the young soldier; it might affect recruiting.''

Moran loved his master but was clear about his limitations and often shows the more minor key of his own outlook. When Churchill issued a silly triumphant statement (including the slogan ``Advance Britannia'') at Germany's surrender, his doctor writes in his diary, ``I asked [poet laureate] John Masefield what he thought. `I'd rather,' he answered, `have the honest utterance of Winston than than the false rhetoric of a lesser man. . . .' Lincoln, I argued, would have struck a deeper note. Masefield agreed; but added that he was a man of deep piety.'' One would never find such a delightful overheard dialogue, from the chorus as it were, in a standard biography.

Of the making of books about Abraham Lincoln there is no end, and one fine recent biography came in 1995 from David Herbert Donald of Harvard University: ``Lincoln'' (Simon & Schuster, $35; also now in paper). A great Lincoln scholar, Donald confined his attention to the man himself and the things he experienced directly. So there is little attention to battles, which Lincoln never saw, or to the larger social trends and events of the day. The book ends with the moment of Lincoln's death; there's no epilogue. Donald's much remarked-upon thesis is that Lincoln was essentially passive; he believed that most of life is controlled by an unseen Higher Power, and that he could at best cooperate with it. Donald's repair to the reputation of Lincoln's luckless father, Thomas, and his elevation of the status and achievements of his American ancestors were a revelation to me.

However fresh his research, though, even the admirable Donald does not outshine the classic 1952 ``Abraham Lincoln: A Biography'' by Benjamin P. Thomas (my copy is Modern Library, 1968). Thomas, who died in 1956, was an unabashed lover of Lincoln, which doubtless colored his vision, but he had a writing style that beautifully fit the man he wrote about. ``More and more,'' Thomas wrote in what could have been a description of his own style, ``his discourse took an axiomatic turn. Familiarity with Shakespeare and the Bible, proficiency in storytelling, a craving for exactitude, a talent for the quick association of ideas, a continued striving for literary excellence, all these were infusing his diction with a distinctive, hard-muscled grace.'' Another Thomas flourish: ``Lincoln's human dealings had given him fixity of purpose.'' A noble word, fixity.

A similar infatuation animates novelist Alan Judd's 1991 ``Ford Madox Ford'' (Harvard University Press), for which the book has been derogated by some. Judd covers the English novelist's long and full life, with all of its hundreds of books (notably ``The Good Soldier'' and the ``Parade's End'' quartet) and succession of women, and never holds his hero's weaknesses against him, his endless need for a fresh female face and his problems with truth-telling. And Judd's style is so beguiling as to make one wish more novelists were biographers. Here is one reflective paragraph:

``But it is not simply the fact that the past is past that limits us. As Ford showed, perhaps better than any, the heart of another is a dark forest. The people we think we know intimately may still surprise us, as we may surprise ourselves, and the biographer of the living really knows no more.''

This dauntedness in the biographer's mind saturates what so far I am finding (I'm only halfway though) one of the greatest biographies I have ever read: Hermione Lee's 893-page ``Virginia Woolf'' (Knopf, $39.95). At times the book is almost glacial. Partly this is caused by heavy quoting; Lee lets people speak for themselves as much as possible, and includes long excerpts from Woolf's fiction, seen as based upon this or that real-life character or experience. In contrast with Donald's ``Lincoln,'' here the whole social context is included: The first 150 pages of Lee's book is largely taken up by scene-setting and introductions, a thicket of names and faces, before a linear treatment of Virginia Stephen Woolf's life gets under way.

Lee, like Judd, is impressively conscious of the presumption of her undertaking. ``Biography,'' she writes, ``sets out to tell you that a life can be described, summed-up, packaged and sold. But Virginia Woolf spent most of her life saying that the idea of biography is -- to use a word she liked -- poppycock.'' She adds, ``I think I would have been afraid of meeting her. I am afraid of not being intelligent enough.'' With due respect to them, one cannot imagine David Donald or Benjamin Thomas writing such a sentence. This awareness of the pitfalls makes this to me an irresistible book. Lee's treatment of what she calls the ``sexual interference'' with Virginia Stephen by her half-brother, George Duckworth, is carefully confined to what is known about it, and every relevant caveat is given. She writes, ``the evidence has to be approached with care.'' This sentence could sum up the work as a whole. As with the matter of sexual abuse, Lee's chapter on Woolf's mental illness is a model of prodigious research and careful argument, yet she does not shrink from a strong conclusion, and never attacks other biographers by name:

``Virginia Woolf was a sane woman who had an illness. She was often a patient, but she was not a victim. She was not weak, or hysterical, or self-deluding, or guilty, or oppressed. On the contrary, she was a person of exceptional courage, intelligence, and stoicism, who made the best use she could, and came to the deepest understanding possible to her, of her own condition. She endured, periodically, great agony of mind and severe physical pain, with remarkably little self-pity.''

Lee achieves in this book, I believe, that which makes a great biography a great work of art: the feat of making a human being seem enormous in stature, yet still human in scale. That would seem logically to be impossible, but then ``the art of the possible'' is not really art.