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It is my belief that a burning desire to write seriously and at length about the life of another is the product of enchantment.
Perhaps that is overstating the case a little. Still, from a purely subjective point of view, “enchantment” is hardly too strong a term for that intense, curious, insidious form of possession that besets writers smitten by what James Atlas, Saul Bellow's biographer, calls “the biographical impulse.”2 What the psychoanalyst points to as an example of transference, the newly mesmerized biographer experiences as the seductive bewitchment exerted by somebody else's life. Passion, for a biographer, means falling in love with another person's story.
That is probably because the impulse is a kind of seismic echo. In appropriating someone else's history and producing a narrative about it, one seizes hold of an external story that resonates with some inchoate psychic drama of one's own. Biographers, like novelists, are story junkies, and narrative—a linear story with a beginning, a middle, and a definite end—has the power to address and resolve, if only temporarily or obliquely, the ill-defined, intangible tale that lurks, often unacknowledged and unrecognized, in the writer's own soul.
Hence the spell—a tenacious, all-but-irresistible urge to capture someone else's literary, political, or other peregrinations in the tangible and gratifyingly conclusive form of a biography. Like love, the biographical passion owes little to whether the object of literary fixation arouses admiration, respect, or even much personal liking. Modern biography begins with the complex, ironic portraiture of Boswell, not with The Lives of the Saints; as a source of inspiration, admiration counts for a good deal less than those features of the life and personality that seem important—important, that is, to the biographer. For writers, as for many psychotherapists,