Not all writers have to like their characters. It’s even so rare that when it happens in a novel, the critics take notice. The least of things in biographers. Some are so hostile towards their hero that one wonders what made them spend a few years living with him. What is expected of them? Just empathy. Three biographies recently published by us testify to this feeling which undermines any notion of neutrality, this scourge, this imposture, this illusion of which Wikipedia has made the alpha and omega of its charter: the Roth by Blake Bailey at Gallimard, the sontag by Benjamin Moser at Bourgois, the Kafka from Reiner Stach to Cherche Midi. The biographer’s empathy for his hero is its beating heart.
This nomadic concept is sufficiently vague, polymorphous, hackneyed for us to come back to it. Dictionaries agree to define it as a fusion allowing to feel what the other feels, to put oneself in their place, distinct from the compassion aroused by sympathy and identification with the character. The biographer stops there without going into the psychoanalytical and neuropsychological dimensions. “Why would an Oklahoma goy write the story of my life?” Philip Roth asked Blake Bailey, who replied immediately: “I told John Cheever’s well without being myself a bisexual alcoholic from a Puritan family.” And off we went for seven years of immersion in the “Rothlands”.
Empathy pushes the biographer to be complete about the sentimental and sexual life of his hero right down to his addictions and his ambiguities. Which was held up in their anticipation by jurors for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography when they crowned Moser’s work three years ago on Susan Sontag. Difficult with such a divisive personality, both admired and hated, the archetype of the American intellectual, philosopher and feminist, critic and writer, academic with star status. Fortunately, empathy did not lead to an abdication of critical thinking in Moser. He does not forgive him for his erratic judgments on a trip to Cuba, communist Vietnam or China during the Cultural Revolution. Like what, one can pass for the archetype of the personality involved in all the conflicts of his time while being devoid of political sense. It is surprising that his biographer was not dragged before the courts by some league of virtue for abusive cultural appropriation of the body and mind of a woman by a man.
“Empathy calms the pain of not knowing”
Empathy is for Reiner Stach “the sesame of the biographer”. Without it there is no salvation. In this paradox lies the secret of its success. With a key, always the same: empathy. It mitigates the violation of privacy. But in its fascinating prologue, a kind of “Critique of biographical reason” destined to become thears poetica of any well-born biographer, Reiner Stach warns that empathy is also “a methodological drug”; its use is complex, trapped. To understand Kafka, it is not enough to be damned neurotic yourself – even if that can help; temptation can lead to “blind identification”, which is fruitful only if we get out of it in time. “Empathy calms the pain of not knowing,” he writes. Because when you don’t know what happened at a particular moment in your life, you have to recognize it. All the same, what an extravagant utopia to believe oneself capable of living what it was like to be Roth, Sontag, Kafka in the past when one is Bailey, Moser, Stach today! Such a goal is impossible to achieve; it is precisely for this that the biographer must strive for it with all his might. What is there to gain? “A long look in passing”, hopes the explorer of the secret, intimate, private life of Kafka. And that’s already a lot.
Allow us to suggest a title for the future biographer of the Rolling Stones: Empathy for the Devil. Take yourself for the devil in order to better understand them. Unless he resolves to belong to common humanity and agrees with the injunction that Oscar Wilde addressed to all: “Be yourself, all the others are taken.”