Customer Reviews

A Higher Form of Cannibalism?: Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography

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Carl Rollyson's A Higher Form Of Cannibalism? questions whether the enthusiasm over biography has in fact led to its downfall into bad taste. Carol Rollyson is himself a biographer, so is in the perfect position to provide an insider's perspective on the subject he knows best, offering chapters which use anecdotes and criticism to examine the foundations of biographical writing. His own practices as well as those of fellow biographers are put to the critical test in a lively survey of the relationships between scholarship, biography and popular culture.

This is an entertaining and informative book about the difficulties authors face when attempting a biography. The battles are chronicled between biographer and subject, and sometimes between biographer and book, and then between biographer and reviewer.

Conflicts? What is irrelevant and what is fair game? When sources conflict, which is to be believed? Does it matter whether the subject agrees or approves of what you print? What ethics apply?

Detailing his own experiences with subjects like Lillian Hellmann, Norman Mailer, Martha Gellhorn, and the late Susan Sontag, the author shows how the decisions are made, and the reasoning behind those decisions.

This is a handsome hardcover with easy-to-read print. There is a complete index, and his sources are given. Some of the books he discusses I now must find and buy, and the amplifying end notes are helpful in this regard. A five-star-book, and a pleasure to read and own.

In this vigorous and entertaining defense of the biographer's art, Rollyson freely admits to the immoral stance biographer's take towards their "victims" and staunchly defends the "warts and all" approach. Boswell and Samuel Johnson are brought into court as co-defendents, along with Kitty Kelly and a host of others. The author has no kind words to say for "critics and reviewers", clearly to him the vermin of the literary world, and feels much aggrieved by his unjust treatment at their hands.

While one may be less than convinced by his arguments, and be irritated by his frequent whining of being much put upon, his chatty tone, wealth of biographical lore and surprising revelations about the biographer's trade make this in the end a very worthwhile read.

"The truth is that biography remains invasive, however you dress it up."

Rollyson's book is so lucid, revealing, and entertaining that I have ordered it for my next course on biography (I have used two of Rollyson's shorter books, Documentary Film: A Primer and Reading Biography).

This book offers a nuts and bolts look at the challenges of writing biography. Rollyson discusses his own projects and those of his fellow biographers, going back as far as Johnson and Boswell and even touching on Plutarch. The discussion is always lively.

I expect students to enjoy particularly the moral and legal issues surrounding the author's chosen profession. There are other books on the market covering these specific topics, but I have yet to find anything as engaging as this work.

The brilliance of Rollyson's approach is easy to describe: he acknowledges the almost monstrous qualities of the "biografiend" ("there is something demonic about biography"), then goes about defending the monster (whose work can represent "a disciplined effort to suit our sensibility to another's, to move beyond the self"). The biographer comes out of it looking like a classic Universal movie monster of the 1930s, dangerous yet misunderstood.

That is as it should be, for both Dracula and the biographer offer their "victims" a kind of immortality--in exchange for a little blood.

Carl Rollyson's A Higher Form Of Cannibalism? questions whether the enthusiasm over biography has in fact led to its downfall into bad taste. Carol Rollyson is himself a biographer, so is in the perfect position to provide an insider's perspective on the subject he knows best, offering chapters which use anecdotes and criticism to examine the foundations of biographical writing. His own practices as well as those of fellow biographers are put to the critical test in a lively survey of the relationships between scholarship, biography and popular culture.