A biography should be written from the outside. What can be established -- what the subject did, where she was, whom she saw, what she wrote and when -- constitutes the evidentiary material a reader can check and argue with. A life assembled from such material is a piece of history. The moment a biographer moves inside, and informs us that his subject experienced loneliness in the winter of that year or resentment towards her collaborator, he has abandoned the evidence, because feelings do not survive except where somebody has documented them. Furthermore, what was documented was written for a reader and shaped accordingly. The interior life is not being recovered; it is being supplied, by a writer whose materials for the purpose are his own. Readers accept this because interiority is what makes a biography read like a novel, and that is precisely the objection: the form has borrowed a technique from fiction and kept the authority of history. Nor is the difficulty eliminated by hedging. A biographer who writes that his subject may have felt abandoned has not diminished the strength of his claim. He has made the identical claim in a form that cannot be contradicted, and the reader remembers the abandonment and forgets the may.
[[PASSAGE B]]
The distinction between outside and inside will not withstand examination, because nothing on the outside signifies anything until it has been subjected to interpretation. To say that a subject saw a person is not yet to say anything. The biographer must determine whether the encounter was sought or endured, routine or exceptional, and that determination already constitutes an account of a state of mind. To characterise a letter as conciliatory, or a delay as a hesitation, is to perform interior work with exterior materials. A biography that refused to undertake any of it would not be austere but unreadable -- a chronology, and not even a dependable one, since the selection of which events to record is itself an interpretation. The real distinction is not between outside and inside but between the inferences a writer discloses and the inferences he conceals. A biographer who states that the letter reads to him as an apology, and furnishes the reader with the letter itself, has committed no impropriety. One who reports that his subject was contrite has concealed the identical step. The test is therefore not what a biographer claims to know but whether the reader is given what he would need in order to disagree. On that test a considerable quantity of austere external narrative fails, and a considerable quantity of frankly speculative writing passes. Austerity is a style, and a style is not a method; it guarantees nothing about what the reader is given to check.
