About Early Biography

People seem to think that to find the truth of a person’s character you must look first at that person’s childhood: as it is in childhood that people are made what they will become.

The truest biography then must be like that of Augustine who started his Confessions with his birth and first infancy– telling how he would suck on the teat that was offered to him:

Thus there received me the comforts of woman’s milk. For neither my mother nor my nurses stored their own breasts for me; but Thou didst bestow the food of my infancy through them, according to Thine ordinance, whereby Thou distributest Thy riches through the hidden springs of all things. Thou also gavest me to desire no more than Thou gavest; and to my nurses willingly to give me what Thou gavest them. For they, with a heaven-taught affection, willingly gave me what they abounded with from Thee. For this my good from them, was good for them. Nor, indeed, from them was it, but through them; for from Thee, O God, are all good things, and from my God is all my health. This I since learned, Thou, through these Thy gifts, within me and without, proclaiming Thyself unto me. For then I knew but to suck; to repose in what pleased, and cry at what offended my flesh; nothing more.

And afterwards how he learned to smile, then talk and so on.

I was prompted to return to this thought when reading Jean Lacouture’s biography of de Gaulle, where in the author’s preface to the English translation he says with clear annoyance:

The Rebel, the first of three volumes of biography which I have devoted to General de Gaulle, appears here in its English edition with light cuts that disturb neither the balance nor the spirit of the original. Much to my regret the publishers have found it necessary to condense the subsequent volumes, The Politician and The Sovereign, into a single volume, The Ruler. This cannot but affect the sense, in view of the fact that the book concerns a personality as complex and “controversial” as Charles de Gaulle.

Now so as not to over-state my case here I should say that this first volume is by no means solely devoted to de Gaulle’s early life but still– I can’t help but observe in general an outsized interest in those parts of biographies for which, if they were the totality of a person’s life, no biography would have been written. And this is to me nowhere more apparent then in an almost salacious focus on childhood, both on the part of readers and authors.

As to why this irritates me so, it is not only that I, apparently, miss out on some of “the sense” as it were in the second volume of my de Gaulle (I would frankly probably not have minded if Lacouture hadn’t made such a point of it.) But more that I see this preoccupation with childhood as a manifestation of a pernicious misconception about human nature. That being– as hinted towards in the opening– that childhood is of singular importance to human development; and in particular to the determination of our personality and ‘world view’.

This error is distinctly modern, having its origins in the explosive popularity of Freudian Psychoanalysis in academia and more importantly in general culture last century. It is hard to imagine now, but at the time Freud’s theories were seen as a shocking and unexpected upending of how the world was to be understood. The Victorians place little importance on parenting, to the point that– for the upper classes– the raising of children was offloaded to nannies and boarding schools.

Interestingly Freud’s sudden abandonment of his previous neurotica theory and almost overnight conversion became the model for the eureka effect in scientific discovery. And just as the eureka effect in science serves as a type of secular translation of the experience of Damascene conversion, so childhood experience and ‘folk Freudianism’ came to fill a void left by “the ‘demon’ of clerical phantasy” (as Freud himself put it) in the explanation of personality.

That Psychoanalysis is false is now not controversial, but the idea that personal quirks can be traced back to childhood does seem to still shuffle along without it– much as in a zombie the body continues on without its brain (and is all the harder to kill for it!)

At this point the problem starts to overlap considerably with the more general ’nature vs. nurture’ debate. It suffices to say that I am quite convinced of the predominance of nature in the main. But I see also that this is not the place to try and change anyone’s mind on the matter.

I hope however that we might agree on this: there is something offensive in cutting large sections covering de Gaulle as President of France, but keeping in full the discussion of his school trip to the Black Forest at the age of 18.

Or at least that my next post will return to:

Those impostors then, whom they style Mathematicians …

to quote again from Augustine.