Expository Writing

by Mervin James Curl

The Problem

The primary object of expository biography is so to build up before the reader's eyes the figure of the hero, so to cast against the background of life the warm personality, so to recreate the lineaments and so to give perspective to the whole that the reader will know the hero, will be able to grasp his hand as a fellow human being with the game of life to play, and will be aware of the significance of the personality to his times and to the reader himself. To paint the man is the pleasurable adventure before the writer. Sir Christopher Wren bade us, if we wished a memorial of him, to "look around" upon the arches and the high dim places of his cathedral. So the writer of expository biography must plant himself in the deeds and desires of his hero, must gaze steadily into his eyes until he discovers the center of his being, and must then set down the words, which, if well enough chosen, wisely enough fitted, will outlast the toughest stone. It is in lack of true comprehension of the hero's life that so many expository biographies fail to inspire the reader, in the failure to remember that the writer is not merely "silently expressing old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times," but is trying to catch and record a living force, to live as long as men understand it and are moved by it.

The chief duty of the biographer, then, is to discover the life-problem of his hero, to understand it, to learn how the hero came by it, how he tried to solve it, and what its significance is. Now this is much more easily accomplished with the personalities who have closed their span of existence than with those whom we know still living, with their answer to their problem yet incomplete. Few of us have what Mary Lamb said she possessed, "a knack I know I have of looking into peoples' real character and never expecting them to act out of it—never expecting another to do as I would in the same case." All the facts of personality, the hints and gleams and shadows, bewilder us at times with our friends, and we regret the lack of perspective that reveals the central life-problem. But when we turn to Julius Cæsar, to Jeanne d'Arc, to George Washington, or to some humble dweller of past days, we can see the life whole, can discover the heredity, the natural endowment, the surroundings, the changing deeds and the shifting acquaintances and friends that determined for the hero what the life-problem should be. With the truly remarkable advantage, then, of this central conception, we can fall into cadence with the stride of our hero marching against his problem and can picture forth the struggle and its significance.

In every biography there is this problem. Your hero is at "that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least," as Stevenson called life, and the manner in which the hero perceives the "imperious desires and staggering consequences" will determine the flavor of his life. To turn to Stevenson himself we find a white-hot flame of romance cased in a feeble wraith of a body, the heart of the man daring all things, romping through life a deathless youth before the problem of adjustment between body and spirit. Or take the compounding of that tremendous figure, George Washington—adamant integrity, the zeal which, if unchecked, would often have brought the house tumbling about his ears, the endless capacity for indignation, and with these the patience that left men well-nigh dazed and the self-control that made him god-like. Set him in the midst of the hurly-burly of a young nation as doubtful of itself as youth, as eager, as impetuous, as contradictory, with the forces of the Old World pitted against it and with many traitors in its fold. Then conceive the problem of forming wise conjunction between vision and accomplishment, between desire and restraint, and the life of the man is at once unified, centered, illuminated, and made significant.

The same result follows searching to the heart of any hero, high or low, and failure thus to reach the heart causes the pallid uninteresting heaping of details that mean nothing to the reader. No architect can glorify the horizon with the silhouette of a cathedral, nor can he even give a meaning to his accumulation of stone and mosaic and mortar, if he heaps here a pile and there a pile, rears here a chapel, somewhere else as fancy directs lays out an aisle, with no central problem of relationship. Nor can you dignify your hero's nature with a mere basket collection of the flying chips of life—a deed here, a word there, a desire at another time. First, then, discover the problem that your hero faced in the relation of his character to itself and to its times.