Patterns of Biography, or Reading about
Katharine Hepburn

December 22, 2006

In biographies a sort of kick start is often employed. The author begins the story with some colorful incident drawn from a point well into the career of the subject. In the case of Kate we begin with Hepburn boarding a boat for Europe with a female friend. The incident manages to highlight several themes that will recur throughout the biography: female companionship, arms-length relationship with fans, caginess with respect to private life, and an elite New York background. The kick start here and in other biographies is evidently designed to pull the reader into the biography.. and thus avoid the chronological demand to start at the dreary beginning when so-and-so's father was born in such-and-such a far away place. I am not sure how long this kick start has been common practice for biographers, but it is certainly well entrenched now.

William Mann, the author of Kate, goes one step further and begins each chapter with a miniature kick start. That is to say, he does not simply proceed through a designated period in chronological order, but selects a colorful incident and leads off each chapter with the incident.. and then settles into a straightforward recounting of events.

Mann is a sharp biographer, and his strength continues to be his ability to make sense of the various kinds of relationships, social and sexual, in which people are involved. He is always skeptical about public and normalizing versions of these relationships. It is interesting to watch him develop his themes and push them relentlessly.. this relentlessness is in fact my only quibble with the book. The following passage is an example:

Scotty's recollections allow for a deeper understanding of Tracy's story. Indeed, they show that Spencer fits the profile of Kate's other significant male relationships. Like Putnam and Ford, he found particular fulfillment from impassioned friendships with men, from his college years through adult life... Like Kate's other men, Spencer drank himself unconscious because she said he was "oversensitive" to life... [338]

It is easy to see there the pull toward a settled pattern. We find reference to a "profile" of Kate's men. Then two direct comparisons begun with "like." I often (but not always) buy what Mann is proposing.. but it is important to realize what is going on here. We are being offered several overarching patterns into which the particular details of Hepburn's experience can be fit. Once those patterns become set in our imagination then Mann has a handy tool for explaining relationships.. the details of which are largely unknown.

One can perhaps make a general statement about biographers in general: they are pulled between two extremes. The one side involves taking every detail as it comes and making sense of it without recourse to the other events.. this leads to an atomistic approach to biography. The other side is content to draw on patterns and repetitions that allow the details of a life to be drawn together.. this leads to a more interpretive biography. It strikes me that this is not simply an issue for biographers, but something that confronts all of us as we try to make sense of life. If we know ourselves well, then we recognize that we respond to life in well-trodden ways. We also know that sometimes we come to understand those past choices and head out in a new direction. A trap for the biographer who studies a life is to mistake the new direction for a well-trodden path..