The Best is Wholly Partisan

As Raynor Heppenstall once observed, “every man’s written life is a literary fiction.” His total mystery, the mixture of what he seems and what he is, to which his acts and declarations stand in only a partial, and often red-herring relation, can be known only to God; anyone attempting to frame his biography is required to select, judge and speculate as much as a novelist. It therefore follows, contrary to our prevailing faith in Impartiality and Facts-Over-All, that the best biography will be the one in which the biographer is most exposed; in which his tastes, beliefs, and values are put on the table; and in which, because we can see the man who is telling us about the hero, we can better see the hero. Half a dozen recent biographies demonstrated this advantage so consistently that I almost wondered, when I had finished them, if I hadn’t better look for a tidy exception, to prove the rule.

Naked to Mine Enemies, by Charles W. Ferguson (Little, Brown, $6.00) is about Cardinal Wolsey. It is easy to read, and lays out its fairly dense fabric of detail in a professional manner. But the author is merely its editor. There is no attempt to interpret, evaluate, or tell us what kind of a man Wolsey really was. We end up knowing only who, where, when. Mr. Ferguson says he originally became interested in the Cardinal because of his statement, “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King. . . .” But his story never tells us if he agrees or disagrees, if he thinks the Cardinal meant what he said, or was only continuing to play downcenter on the Tudor stage he loved so much. The result is no focus, no image, no Cardinal.

RP

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Robert Phelps

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As Raynor Heppenstall once observed, “every man’s written life is a literary fiction.” His total mystery, the mixture of what he seems and what he is, to which his acts and declarations stand in only a partial, and often red-herring relation, can be known only to God; anyone attempting to frame his biography is required to select, judge and speculate as much as a novelist. It therefore follows, contrary to our prevailing faith in Impartiality and Facts-Over-All, that the best biography will be the one in which the biographer is most exposed; in which his tastes, beliefs, and values are put on the table; and in which, because we can see the man who is telling us about the hero, we can better see the hero. Half a dozen recent biographies demonstrated this advantage so consistently that I almost wondered, when I had finished them, if I hadn’t better look for a tidy exception, to prove the rule.

Naked to Mine Enemies, by Charles W. Ferguson (Little, Brown, $6.00) is about Cardinal Wolsey. It is easy to read, and lays out its fairly dense fabric of detail in a professional manner. But the author is merely its editor. There is no attempt to interpret, evaluate, or tell us what kind of a man Wolsey really was. We end up knowing only who, where, when. Mr. Ferguson says he originally became interested in the Cardinal because of his statement, “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King. . . .” But his story never tells us if he agrees or disagrees, if he thinks the Cardinal meant what he said, or was only continuing to play downcenter on the Tudor stage he loved so much. The result is no focus, no image, no Cardinal.