Theoretical Discussions of Biography Approachesfrom History, Micro history, and Life Writing Revised and Augmented Edition Edited by Hans Renders Binne de Haan With a Foreword by Nigel Hamilton BRILL LEIDEN I BOSTON THE PEl CHAPTER 17 The Personal in the Political Biography Hans Renders better tJ the stor the pen gotten1 and dai ｬ ･ｴｲｳ ､ｩｧ A terminological misconception has been active for a long time: the 'literary biography' is not so much a life history with literary qualities as the biography of a literary figure. And therefore, similarly, the phrase 'political biography' is generally intended to designate the biography of a politician. The inappropriateness of this parallel usage is easily explicable: a literary biography, the biography of a writer in which hardly any attention is devoted to thtt subject's oeuvre is common, while a biography of a politician without extensive attention for his political ideas would be utterly absurd. That this is so has to do with the wide range of meaning of the word 'politics', but also with the status of the writer in our society. He or she is a star, loved and admired, while the politician is in the best case a hard-working, reliable servant. Much from the private life of a politician has political significance and political consequences, attributed to it by others, while the life of a writer is only relevant to the literature if he writes about it himself. The image of a politician is seen as a blueprint for his ideas. The hairstyle of a Dutch prime minister was adapted, one could say, to make his ideas and opinions seem to fit the time better. The life of a writer receives, in the media today, considerable attention, but no one would write about the sexual aberrations of a poet if he had not made them a theme of his poetry. The French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote on 2 February 1935 his socalled 'Instructions concernant rna biographie', urgent advice to his biographer Gilbert Maire who would publish a biography in that same year. 1 Bergson begins by saying that it would be unnecessary to involve his family in his biography, or even to mention them. 'Just say that I was born in Paris, rue Lamartine:2 Maire respected the 'Instructions' almost to the letter. If you read the subtitle of his biography, you already know enough: Mon maitre. Now, Maire would have been an obedient biographer without the instructions, but what was so interesting about Bergsons' letter was that he understood 1 Gilbert Maire, Bergson, man maitre (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1935). Bergsons 2 'Instructions' were written in February; Maire's book was printed on 30 September of that same year. Philippe Soulez and Frederic Worms, Bergson (Paris: Flammarion, 1997 ), p. z88. © KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2014 I DO! 10.1163/9789004274709_ 01 8 ｾ＠ ｾ＠ eve posthm while h where I constar letters 1 the lntf ablydu AcCfl about 1 on avi5 biograJJ vate i1lf in the I estabm ｳｩｦｴ･､ ｾ＠ institm of reJec accoun thin!!S i and e\1 supem vacy, rl not be be cans havell( politic:i Aim origina togeth 3 FTaiJ! p. THE PERSONAL IN THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY me: the 'literary the biography a.l biography' is rhe inappropriraphy, the biogto the subject's !Xt.ensive atten[) has to do with he status of the e the politician the private life tees, attributed literature if he lneprint for his te could say, to life of a writer 1e would write a theme of his ry 1935 his so- his biographer year.1 Bergson lily in his biogIe Lamartine.' 2 td the subtitle rt the instrucle understood 1935). Bergsons !ptember of that better than his biographer that a biography is not so much the story of a life but the story of a legacy. The legacy is an entity that begins to live with the death of the person whose biography is being written. He has to do with faded and forgotten personal papers -like school notebooks, letters, declarations, notebooks and daily minders - and the dream of every biographer: diaries. But also: the letters and diaries of others in which he appears and which, sooner or later, digitally or not, are associated with him. Nevertheless, the politician can more effectively influence his biography posthumously with his legacy than by any other means. The deceased perishes while his legacy grows. His colleagues, his friends, his family, the institutions where he worked all pass away, and they all leave a trace behind. The legacy constantly expands, and the commentary on it even more so. The collection of letters by Joop den Uyl, the late prime minister of the Netherlands, housed in the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam will grow considerably during the next twenty years, as his old friends and colleagues pass away, According to the French historian Franc;ois Dosse, who published a book about political biography in zoos, political biography's right to exist depends on a visible shift of attention from an individual to an ideological context. The biographer is required to provide a narrative of the transformation of the private individual into a public figure. 3 That may be true, but a biography serves in the first place to come to grips with the genesis of his hero's legacy. Who established the archive of the politician? Who has maintained it and possibly sifted through the material and transferred what remained of it to a public institution? Was the politician involved in the process? Did he preserve letters of rejection, from those he loved or wanted to work for? No one wants to be the accountant of his own disappointments, but to destroy the traces of such things is dangerous. Even non-public individuals can be recovered in hundreds and even thousands of records. Think about municipalities, taxes, doctors, supermarkets, sport clubs and internet-providers, and, equally sensitive to privacy, the library. That is not even considering the records of friends. Might it not be the case that politicians have written autobiographies in recent years because they know that in their legacy, at least in that part over which they have no control, an image might rise which they wish to correct? It is especially politicians who create that impression. Almost every working day, a biography appears in the Netherlands, those originally written in Dutch and those translated from another language taken together. This fact notwithstanding, one hears continuously the complaint 3 ｆｲ｡ｮ !88. 217 ｾ［ ｯｩ ｳ＠ Dosse, Le pari Biographique. Ecrire une vie (Paris: Editions la Decouverte, zoos), p. 346-354· RENDERS THE PERS ( that things are so much better in England, that so many more biographies appear. This calls for a critical look. The genre is so popular, in both England and the Netherlands, that more and more books called biographies enter the market that don't deserve the name. In England and the United States, whole bookcases are packed with biographies, but closer inspection reveals titles along the lines of Recipes Chosen by Britney Spears or Exercise Yourself to be Healthy and Slender Like Barbara Streisand placed without hesitation in the biography section, just like publications with subtitles 'biography of a village', 'biography of a river' and 'biography of a building'. In the Dutch book trade, similarly, a book dedicated to the memory of a popular singer is immediately labeled a biography, but it is equally true that of the 250 to 300 biographies published each year, a substantial portion are written by academics or at least satisfy the standards and expectations of academics. We only need to ｭｾｮｴｩｯ＠ the biographies of the Dutch ex-prime ministers Jo Cals, Hendrik Colijn and Willem Drees or of the American president Bill Clinton to realize that the claim that historians have rediscovered the biography is justified. Political history has been enriched thanks to these and other biographies of politicians. The biographer has to make clear that a person's private background has influenced his public achievements. If he fails to do that, he might as well not have written the biography. This position can easily be defended with a couple of examples. Social politics in the Netherlands has long oscillated between two extremes: the solidarity which citizens feel for their socio-economically weaker compatriots and the fear which those same citizens feel for communism. The champions of the middle-way have been, from the beginning, the social liberals. The journalist and politician Hendrik Goeman Borgesius was one of their most important representatives. His biographer allows Goeman Borgesius's personality to disappear as the book progresses. 4 He becomes a phantom behind his political ideas, and the biographer appears to be interested only in the distinction between his ideas and those which the socialists, Catholics, Protestants and ex-liberals advanced. That is a useful exercise, but deadly for a biography. The same is true for the biography of the Dutch politician and jurist Jan Donner written by Job de Ruiter (former Minister of Justice ). 5 The biographer says that Donner was a distinctive personality but his book is much more a summation of Donner's genuinely distinctive professional life - a link between his role as diligent father and husband and his career in political circles is never made. 1'l 218 In a varia socialist 1 annotatio phythere say. Histo views, buJ the prota (KVP: Cat Lambert i Interp1 James Ke feminism Hardie b. this expL more imJ So met placing it thing till Dutch p The hum standing years. Th severl!l q the nati by Wille socialisn A.A de j faction, 1 unfolde( 6 Lambe 7 Kennei TheTn 8 W.S. Hl 1970). 4 Bert Wartena, H Goeman Borgesius (1847-1917 ). Vader van de verzorgingsstaat. Een halve eeuw liberate en sociale politiek in Nederland (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2003). 5 Job de Ruiter,]an Donner; jurist. Een biografie (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom, 2003). Jonge. denlrht 1982, a RENDERS "' biographies ooth England ries enter the States, whole reveals titles Yourself to be tation in the of a village', 1 book trade, immediately • biographies ics or at least d to mention · Colijn and iize that the Political his>Oliticians. kground has tt as well not m.h a couple ·o extremes: aker compaL The chamliberals. The f their most ius's persona behind his 1 the distinc' Protestants a biography. tj anDonner ｾ ･ｲ＠ says that summation n his role as ver made. &n halve eeuw 003)· THE PERSONAL IN THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY 219 The Personal is Political In a variation on the adage that a novel is a made up biography, the former socialist politician Lambert Giebels described a biography as a novel with annotations. That sounds romantic, but it is well established that in a biography there has to be some intrigue, 'the hidden wound', Gustave Flaubert would say. Historians like to talk about their views, some of them about their social views, but that is still something different from exposing the hidden wound of the protagonist. The intrigue in the biography of the statesman Louis Beel (KVP: Catholic People's Party), for example, is, according to his biographer, Lambert Giebels, his escape from an unhappy marriage. 6 Interpretations like this are not without their risks. The British politician James Keir Hardie was criticized by his backbenchers for fighting harder for feminism than for socialism. His biographer Kenneth 0. Morgan wrote that Hardie had a secret relationship with the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. Does ' this explain the criticism or did Hardie genuinely believe that feminism was more important than socialism?7 Sometimes the personal perspective on a large theme reveals more than placing it in a grand context. The personal as the motor of the political is something that we encounter, among other places, in the many biographies of Dutch people who collaborated with the Nazis during the World War II. The human interest in collaborationist countrymen has enhanced our understanding of the political culture in the Netherlands during the inter-war years. Thanks to a few biographies we have been able, as it were, to distinguish several typologies of politicians from the period. By means of the biography of the national-socialist poet, journalist and publisher George Kettmann by Willem Huberts, we know how the 'early birds' of fascism and nationalsocialism in the Netherlands developed on the strength of what the historian A.A. de Jonge has called 'the small political crisis': the citizens' great dissatisfaction, their distrust of the way the government was functioning. 8 The crisis unfolded at the same time as the intellectuals were growing concerned about 6 Lambert Giebels, Bee4 van vazal tot onderkoning: biografie 1902-1977 (The Hague: sou, 1995). 7 Kenneth 0 . Morgan, 'Writing Political Biography', in: Eric Hornberger and john Charmley ed., The Troubled Face ofBiography (Basingstoke [etc.): Macmillan, 1988), p. 33-48. 8 W.S. Huberts, Schrijver tussen daad en gedachte. Leven en werk van George Kettmann]r. (18981970 ), met een bibliografie ('s-Gravenhage: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica, 1987 ); A.A. de Jonge, Crisis en critiek der democratie. Anti-democratische stromingen en de daarin levende denkbeelden over de staat in Nederland tussen de wereldoorlogen (Utrecht: HES Uitgevers, 1982, original1968). 220 RENDERS the dangers of national-socialism and communism. 9 Kettmann addressed himself to the small man who experienced the small crisis, converted to totalitarian thinking as early as 1931 and made a career for himself as journalist, writer and publisher. In all of these capacities, he felt an obligation to produce a commentary on what we have subsequently come to call the great political crisis. As a publisher he was responsible for the publication of, among other works, Mein Kampfby Adolf Hitler, who, as head of government, was friendly with Holland. The national-socialist Kettmann cannot be accused of opportunism because in 1931, as a direct result of his public position, few of his colleagues in the world of journalism, literature and publishing were willing to support him. The same can be said of Anton Mussert, the leader of the Dutch National-Socialist Movement (NSB ). It becomes clear in jan Meyers's biography Mussert, een politiek Leven that hardly anyone else was so convinced that he could and felt that he had to save the Netherlands as the hydraulic-engineer Anton Mussert. In 1931 he established the National-Socialist Movement and thanks to Meyers's biography we explain his political choices to a large extent on the basis of his private background.l0 His delusion that he had to play the part of a second Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (Dutch statesman who in 1609 agreed a truce with the Spanish oppressors of the Netherlands), as the biographer clearly demonstrates, was already distinctly present when he was a child, a student and an engineer. The Spitzbiirger Mussert spoke about big ideas, but he was driven by indignation about the way political institutions were functioning. In zoos, the biography was published of the Flemish nationalist August Borms, a collaborator during both World War I and II, although the collaboration deserved to be weighed differently in the two cases.11 In the Netherlands Borms is known especially because the writer Willem Elsschot once wrote a poem about him, after his execution in 1946. In Flanders, he is still famous and infamous as a symbol of extreme Flemish radicalism. His biographer, Christine van Everbroeck, has unraveled the Borms mystery and, with that having been done, little of it remains. Thanks to this biography, we know that while the Borms-cult may have grown to mythic proportions, the political influence that has been attributed to him was in fact not all that great. Flemish radicals and other sympathizers made a mascot of him to harass the opposition; his supporters knew 9 10 11 Koen Vossen, Vrij vissen in het Vondelpark. Kleine politieke partijen in Nederland 1918-1940 (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 2003), p. 163-197. Jan Meyers, Mussert, een politiek Leven (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 1984). Christine van Everbroeck, August Borms. Zijn Leven, zijn oorlogen, zijn dood. De biografie (Amsterdam/Antwerp: Meulenhoff/Manteau, zoos). THE PERSONAl that Borms sa inside prison 1 desire to play removes tlle 1 thewayBom sistic tendenc like political · given to tlle p concerning tJ I would li1 a narrative 1 figure - and 1 with a persa his political i REN DERS THE PERSONAL IN THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY ddressed to totalimrnalist, produce political 111g other ; friendly If opporf his colrilling to 1e Dutch iography I that he engineer ent and re extent play the that Borms saw himself too much as a messiah who preferred to live and work inside prison rather than outside. Deep down, he was never in fact driven by any desire to play a serious political role. The biographer's sober analysis of the facts removes the polish from the myth. Precisely by devoting so much attention to the way Borms was raised, to the conditions in which he lived and to his narcissistic tendencies, his biography gives us a deeper insight into his almost fairy-tale like political views. The biographies of politicians in which much attention is given to the personal are generally also those which provide the deepest insights concerning their politics. But that is a conclusion which is open to debate. I would like to take Dosse's position - the biographer is required to provide a narrative of the transformation of the private individual into a public figure - and turn it around: the biographer is required to provide the politician with a personal narrative, so that we can better understand the incubation of his political ideas. I in 1609 e biogras a child, leas, but ns were : August boration ls Borms a poem md infatinevan '!11 done, rms-cult ru been 1er sym:rs knew •bingrafie 221