Four Biographies

I stumbled upon Vernon Smith's autobiographical notes on the official Nobel Prize site, which I highly recommend. It reminds me of my interest in intellectual biographies.

One can gain much understanding of a subject from biographies of its masters. For example, Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius still provides new insights to the great man's philosophy after several re-reads. As Monk, in New British Philosophy, remarks:

...the way I got into biography was that I became convinced that almost all of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics misunderstood it. It misunderstood it in a particular kind of way...It seemed to me that what was being missed was what you might call the spirit in which Wittgenstein wrote...It seemed to me that one way of getting across the spirit in which Wittgenstein wrote would be to describe the life and the work alongside each other, so that one could read his work informed by some understanding of how he was writing and what attitudes were informing it.

Another fine example of the genre is Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of Keynes, of which I especially enjoyed the first book, Hope Betrayed 1883-1920. Skidelsky treats Keynes's personal life with extra care and honesty, due to what Woolf called "the widow and the friends":

Suppose, for example, that the man of genius was immoral, ill-tempered, and threw the boots at the maid's head. The widow would say, "Still I loved him - he was the father of my children; and the public, who love his books, must on no account be disillusioned. Cover up; omit!" The biographer obeys. And thus the majority of Victorian biographies are like the wax figures now preserved in Westminster Abbey...effigies which have only a smooth likeness to the body in the coffin.

And Cambridge at the turn of the 20th Century never fails to fascinate me.

Biographies, of course, do not have to be heroic or academic - Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman! - Adventures of a Curious Character is filled with inspiring and funny anecdotes.

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Doris Lessing: "We must all be gratefully aware that we are living in a golden age of biography."